Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

I’d breathed it in through my nose, because sleepwalkers are goal oriented, not concerned with details or consequences.

To sleepwalk is to be inhabited, yes, but not by something else, so much. What you’re inhabited by, what’s kicking one foot in front of the other, it’s yourself. It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t think it’s under any real compulsion to, finally. If anything, being inhabited by yourself like that, what it tells you is that there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out. But it can only get that done when your defenses are down. When you’re sleeping.

My father was neither a throwback nor a fallback. He didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the stories, and didn’t care that he didn’t. Once or twice a year, he’d sign on to fight whatever fire was happening, but it wasn’t to protect any ancestral land. It was because when you signed on, they issued you these green wool pants.

When you grow up in Indian country, the TV tells you how to be Indian. And it starts with bows and arrows and headbands. They’re the exciting part of your heritage. They’re also the thing you can always find at the gift shop.

Who wouldn’t want to step into a fancydancer outfit?

The bustles, the armbands, the beadwork, the cool knee-high moccasins—and the facepaint. It makes you look like the assassin-aliens in space movies. With your face black and white like that, you automatically slit your eyes like a gunfighter, like you’re staring America down across the centuries.

That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

My father, my dad, he could have been the best fancydancer of us all. And that’s how I recognized him that first night, crossing from the living room through the kitchen. His boots, his bustle. His fancydancer outline. In death, he had become what he never could in life.

You can leave the reservation, but your income level will still land you in a reservation house, won’t it?

They’re questions a nine-year-old would ask, I know, not a sixth-grader, but I think when you’re talking about your dad, you kind of go back in years—the more you become a kid, the more he gets to be the dad, right?

When he died, they didn’t find him right off. The tribal cops, I mean. But everybody knew where he was. Probably some kids from my own class had even snuck out to see him, dragged by their older brothers and sisters, meaning they knew my dad was dead before I did.

Now I was going to a school with a higher graduation rate, and there weren’t as many fights. Also, there weren’t dogs smiling at us around every corner, or faces we knew in cars driving by, or the snow coming off the mountains the same way, but it was supposed to all be worth it in the end.

“What have you been reading?” she asked. Our questions were going right past each other, as usual.

if both your feet fell asleep and you walked around anyway, you could accidentally step into some other world.

I had the leg of one of Dino’s superhero action figures between his teeth. In the Western movies, they always use a belt or a wallet in the mouth. It’s never for a seizure, it’s usually for a bullet, but the principle’s the same, I figured.

This is something all Indians think, I think: that, yeah, we got colonized, yeah, we got all our lands stolen, yeah yeah yeah, all that usual stuff. But still, inside us, hiding—no, hibernating, waiting, curled up, is some Crazy Horse kind of fighter. Some killer who’s smart and wily and wears a secret medicine shirt that actually works.

Just, if you say this to anybody, you kill that Crazy Horse you’re hiding inside. So, you walk around with this knowledge that he’s there if you ever need him. But, also, you try not to need him.

“He’s a fancydancer now,” I said. “You should see him.”

I realized then that she didn’t miss him like I did.

I squatted there and said, quiet because ghosts hear everything anyway, “Dad?” I bet every Indian kid who’s lost a dad, he does this at some point. I don’t know why it’s special to Indians. But I think it is.

If you can delay pain, you delay it, don’t you? Even when it’s inevitable. Especially when there’s teeth involved.

You can’t rub a bruise off, no matter how hot the water is.

“I’m all right,” I told her. This is the lie, when you’re twelve. And all the other years, too.

Indians, we don’t have guardian angels—if we did, they’d have been whispering to us pretty hard when some certain ships bobbed up on the horizon—but we do have helpers. I think usually it’s supposed to be an animal. Maybe when you need more, though, maybe then you get a person.

Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different. It’s a promise every Indian kid makes at some point. You mean it when you say it, though. You mean it so hard.

And then the sheriff’s deputy would come for me like he’d always known he’d have to someday, and Mom would take off with me in the Buick, just driving straight across the pasture, for the mountains, for the memory of mountains, both her hands on the steering wheel, and this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever.

I think this is where a lot of Indian stories usually end, with the moon or a deer or a star coming down, making everything whole again. Those stories were all a long time ago, though. That was before we all grew up.

What finally killed Mom, it wasn’t her lungs. It was just being sixty-three years old, and nearly a whole state away from all the girls she was in first and second grade with. If she’d had someone to talk with about the old days, I think she’d have maybe made it a few more years.

The first time I looked at myself in a full-length hotel mirror, I felt lake water was rising in my throat. You can dance that away, though. You can lower your head, raise your knees, close your eyes, and the world just goes away.

In movies, after you beat the bad guy, the monster, then all the injuries it inflicted, they heal right up. That’s not how it works in the real world.