Mapping the Interior

by Stephen Graham Jones

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?

What I’d also done, just on the chance this was key, was deadfoot it into the living room. It was something I’d learned at my new school, listening in: if both your feet fell asleep and you walked around anyway, you could accidentally step into some other world.

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.

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

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

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.

When he looked up, he even said my name: “Junior.” Then he said it three more times, softer and softer: “Junior Junior Junior.” Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last.

It’s for leaving us. It’s for coming back.

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.