Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

there’s a real you squirming down inside you, trying all through the day to pull up to the surface, look out.

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.

I think she was saying that if my dad would have just applied the same energy and forethought to his regalia and his routine as he did to what trouble there was to get in once the sun came down, there would have been no stopping him. That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

In death, he had become what he never could in life.

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?

I even checked the vacuum cleaner bag, even though we hardly ever used the vacuum because the smell from the belts always made us have to eat our fish sticks outside.

I don’t claim to be smart or good or right or any of that. My name’s “Junior,” after all. I’m my father’s son.

I’m not saying she was the perfect mom, but she would always pick us over whatever else there was.

“Your father never did laundry,” she finally said. “I don’t think he would come back from the afterlife to run a load of whites.”

I’d seen coyotes go after a rabbit, when they didn’t have anything better to kill. They don’t just dig a bit and give up, they excavate until they find a beating heart.

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

When you come back from the dead, you’re a spirit, you’re nothing, just some leftover intention, some unassociated memory.

It was funny: from inside, they were cracks of light, but out here, they were cracks of darkness. I imagined Dad watching us from that crack. His boys, his sons. We were going to make it, I told him. We were all right.

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

You never tell your mom anything that might worry her. Moms have enough to worry about already.

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. Maybe then your father gets special permission to come back, so long as he stays hidden.

Except I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was the man of the house, at least until Dad got solid enough for Mom and Dino to see him too.

It was my dad. I was killing him again, wasn’t I?

Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different.

This is what it’s like to kill everything your father could have been, if only the world hadn’t found him, done its thing to him.

I’m not a champion, can’t make a living off what I win, but I get around enough, and there’s always odd jobs.

Once, years ago, in the old-time Indian days, a father died, but then he came back. He was different when he came back, he was hungry, he was selfish, but that’s just because he already had all that inside him when he died, I know. It’s because he carried it with him into the lake that night.