Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

I was twelve the first time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room.

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.

The day I found something, that would mean that my nighttime ramblings, they had purpose. Otherwise, I was just broken, right? Otherwise, I was just a toy waking up in the night, bumping into walls.

You can leave the reservation, but your income level will still land you in a reservation house, won’t it? I’d heard my mom say this on the phone once, and it had stuck to the inside of my head in a way I knew I was going to be looking over at that part of the inside of my skull for the rest of my life, probably.

They’ve both got skirts that never last the winter, though, and the sidings are pretty much the same, and if you end up with one of each, you can kind of rub them together like puffy Cheetos and make a bigger, more complicated house.

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.

Had my dad reached down with his fingertips to touch the back of his oldest son, because that was the most he could do? I reached my hand as far around as I could. Another thing I’d learned at school, it was “canteen kiss.” It’s when you drink after a girl you like, or she drinks after you. This was like that, I guess.

Mom swore she’d not had a drop of anything while carrying him, but still, and lately more and worse, he was kind of . . . It was like there was something in his head not quite making a complete connection. Like the way he wasn’t learning his numbers or his letters when, by the third grade, he definitely should have. The school had him on some special learning plan already, but there was talk of special classes now, and special teachers that talk so soft and nice it’s terrifying, like they’re about to eat you.

I sat down on the propane tank and ate my lunch three hours early and watched the skirt of the house for a response. For a finger reaching through. For an eye, watching out. For an older version of me, here to save us.

It’s the injury that opens the door, I knew. The corruption.

Dad was back because he loved us, yes. But it was also because I believed in him.

In between throws, I found myself always watching the dark cracks between the house skirts. It was funny: from inside, they were cracks of light, but out here, they were cracks of darkness.

Minutes after she’d gone back inside to get Dino started in his bed process, it hit me, what she was saying—no, what she was asking: What if that sheriff’s deputy came over for dinner one night? Or to drag a harrows across all the packed dirt, so maybe something could grow up from it?

Dad—my years-dead father—he was leaned over Dino, had maybe been listening to his heart or whispering into his mouth. His fingertips were to either side of Dino’s sleeping shape, and he had one knee on the bed, one foot on the ground. And he was looking across the room like an animal, right into my soul. His eyes shone, not with light but with a kind of wet darkness. The mouth too—no, the lips. And curling up from them was smoke. From the cigarettes and ashes I’d funneled behind the skirt.

That fifth time I pulled the trigger, the last shot? It was the most on-purpose of any of them.

Even if he wasn’t dead or a ghost, he would still be our dad, wouldn’t he? What could a sixth-grader and a third-grader and a mom do against a dad? When they’re drinking, you can slip away, hide. But the only thing Dad was going to be drunk on, it was us.

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.

It’s a different kind of waking up when there’s still the ghost of a sound in the small bones of your ear. It was the floor in the living room, creaking. It meant Dad was solid now. That he had weight to give, and be careful of. Maybe he was just now realizing it too.

“When you died,” I told him, like I’d been saving up since I was four, “I was all crying. You probably know. But it wasn’t for you. I was crying because Mom was crying. I was crying because of your sisters. I couldn’t even remember what you looked like, until the wake.” No response.

If he was solid enough to creak, to breathe, then maybe this was the last night, then. Maybe this was the night he drank Dino dry, left him open-eyed and dead in his bed, another tragedy at the poverty line.

Mom would collapse into herself a hundred times a day, wouldn’t be able to work any shifts for a year, for two, and I would walk down to the bus stop with a two-by-four, and I wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left of any of them down there. 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. And it would be Dad killing us.

What was supposed to happen, it was me striding right past him into the kitchen, and dunking that superhero into the dishwater Mom had left for the pans to soak in. He’d drowned once, my father. I was going to drown him again. He was going to stand there in the living room and spit up white, bubbly water, and he was going to fall to his knees, reach out for me to stop. But I wouldn’t.

It flapped open and he held on to both sides for a moment, long enough for me to see that his eyes weren’t shiny black anymore. The pupils or irises or whatever were still too big, bigger than human, what you’d probably need for living in the dead space under a house, but there was some white at the edges now too. It was how I could tell he was looking at me. It was how I could see everything he wanted to do to me. I ran ahead, my arms already straightened, and pushed him the rest of the way out, then stood there, my chest heaving. He didn’t fall up into the sky. There wasn’t any rule about that, evidently. He could be outside or he could be inside. Because he was solid now, though, that meant gravity could pull on him.

And then it hit me: the same way that, when sleepwalking, I was kind of inhabiting myself, that’s what I was doing here. Just, now I was inhabiting someone else.

Park had been hunting a moose. Now I was hunting Park.

Right now, the four-year-old me was twenty miles south, dying from pneumonia—maybe from how cold it was where this me was standing right now. There are rules, I know. Not knowing them doesn’t mean they don’t apply to you.

This was the Dad that Mom had known. That she had loved. That she had thought was going to last forever. He was still young. Stupid too, you could tell just from the way his eyes were, you could tell from his loopy grin, but he would get better. He would figure this all out. He would come home, wouldn’t he? All his sisters told my mom he would. She just had to wait.

I don’t know what he thought, finally. I don’t know what he knew. Just that I had to save Dino. No matter how much it hurt.

For the truck, Junior was just going to deal out a beating, a shaming. To keep Dino safe, I was going to have to wade farther out. That’s why nobody ever got sent up for it. This is why Junior never told anybody about this—even whoever his girlfriend had been eight years ago. Because he didn’t know about it. He didn’t know the why of it. He was sleepwalking.

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.

Like all animals, they went for the soft pieces first—the gut, the tongue—and when Dad’s porcupine-quill bustle was in the way, one of them grabbed it in its jaws, pulled it away. Instead of coming untied, it peeled from the muscle. The regalia wasn’t ornament, it was part of him. It was what he’d been growing.

He really could have been anything. What he was, though, it was dead. Again.

At which point she was sweeping forward to gather us in her arms, in her robe, in her hair, and 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.

He remembers me, too. After his third grade, nothing really changed for him. Just, it’s the rest of us who kept changing. But he still sees me as the twelve-year-old I was, I think. The one who fought the monster for him. For all of us.

I can see the old walls rising around us. I can see the shadow of the roof, the way it was. When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home. Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess. There’s more dark hallways than I knew. Rooms I thought I’d never have to enter. But I will. For him, for Collin, I’ll walk in and pull the door shut behind me, never come back out.