FRIDAY

It started somewhere along the Kansas Turnpike. I can’t say when, but by the time I climbed into my dad’s truck, I was Native again. We met at the Matfield Green service area, marked by a water tower visible for miles like a silver-headed pin on a map. With Interstate 35 flanking either side, Matfield Green sits two hours and twenty minutes from Kansas City. My stepfather usually chaperoned. I felt my mother letting go around Emporia. 

Summer, 1998. Obeying the court, my mother shuttled my siblings and I deep into the Flint Hills every ninety days to see our father. This sector of the United States was once called the Great American Desert. There was no greatness in the flickering toll booths, gravelly surface lots or peeling billboards demanding we REPENT. Between home in Kansas City, Missouri and our destination in Ark City, Kansas was nothing but wind.

This, like all things, is temporary. The arrangement will fall apart. We were already seeing less of each other. All it needs is time. It was an open secret, which ceased to exist the second we got out of mom’s Hyundai. Each visitation offered her the chance to gauge whether dad really wished to see his children, and if so, how badly? Meanwhile, we were waiting to learn whether her grudge really was about us, or the thrill of keeping score.

Some rules: We don’t make comparisons, we never complain, and we do not expect in one world what we get in the other. 

***

My sixteen-year-old sister got to sit up front. I didn’t envy her, unlike my brother. The grumpy seventh grader sat behind our father, fetching him a Bud from the cooler between us when asked. They called him dad. He went back to prison before I could read, so I am timid around this man I do not know. He drives an extended cab Ford with Indian blankets for seat covers and twin shotguns mounted in the rear windshield. He is dark and towering with long black hair and calloused hands from working oil refineries, the killing floor, his sleek Takamini guitar. He is twice an ex-husband and an ex-con. In my first memories of him, he shines in all-orange. 

He lit a Marlboro and flung the lighter between the windshield and the dashboard. “Your fucking mother.” 

Air stiffened around our middles. My sister straightened up. My brother froze. The frustrated driver rolled his window down a little. Wind screamed over 104.5 The Fox.  

“I ask for one thing. One fucking thing. You’re my kids too, aren’t you? I pay out the ass in child support, don’t I? But what does she care? I’m just your dad.” 

I didn’t know how badly I needed him to say that. I knew he was my dad. But hearing him say it, if even to the cabin at large, warmed me to him. At least he claimed us. 

Us Native people, we are always making up for lost time. This weekend was intended to right a wrong. Our mother kept the three of us home from the summer powwow. We felt him struggle to contain his anger, barely buttoned back like his gut. The powwows we attended were vibrant, special, independent of time itself. I wanted to go. It was the only place I saw my father in full regalia, and my sister once she was old enough to dance in contests. 

My mother didn’t ask me if I wanted to dance. She asked if I wanted to be stuck there with drunk people. At eight years old, I could recount my dad getting drunk more than once, how loud and unpredictable he became. Of course I said no.

“See, Rick?” she told my dad. “He doesn’t want to go.”

“We’re here now,” I said to cheer him up. My brother reached over the cooler and grabbed my arm so fast, it scared me. I blinked at his shaking head. He put a finger to his lips: shh. 

Dad sighed through his nose. “Yup. You’re here now.” 

The sun hit the ground and burst like an overripe peach, syrupy flesh painting half the sky. We exited the turnpike and entered a silent grid of state highways and county roads. The cooler sloshed as we crossed a pair of railroad tracks. Dad smoked his cigarette and flicked it. Embers flew past my brother’s window. My sister stared dead ahead all the while like she was busy inventing the horizon. 

The further we got from our mother, the more I missed her. I couldn’t say why. She shook me off when I hugged her. “Get off me,” she said playfully, although her nails were serious. The top of my head already reached her shoulders. My hair was about as long as she could stand it. You look like your father. You all do. But all of you have my nose. I rubbed my nose as though she could feel it.

The moon smiled over the empty road. I felt sleep coming on. I looked over at the stranger with his hand on the wheel and wondered, Are you like me? Under the stars on Highway 77, I lay my head on the cooler and fell asleep facing the soft digital glow of the radio. 

SATURDAY

Sizzling home fries, the smell of bacon; pancakes browning in dad’s cast-iron skillet. We hurried to the table and found scrambled eggs folded with stringy cheddar, toast wedges slicked with butter, a pot of white sausage gravy and basket of hot biscuits. He thought of everything. Grape jelly? Check. Sticky old bottle of Aunt Jemima’s? Check. No one did breakfast like our dad.

Our mother would never. We usually ate cereal. Her first meal of the day consisted of black coffee and a Misty Menthol Light 120, sometimes with a cup of unsweetened Grape Nuts. She liked French toast, but only at night.

My mother Cindy was dad’s second wife. I know nothing about his first marriage except, “It was the seventies.” Cindy left my dad while he was still incarcerated. Then, shortly after his release, she married her divorce caseworker. John was one of those Wichita businessmen leftover from the eighties, owner of a Mercury Grand Marquis and fingers thick as the cigars he chewed, not smoked. But he was generous at first, having moved us into his trailer, and he liked Bob Seger. Cindy couldn’t be happier with her new, white husband. 

Dad also remarried quickly. At first pass, Anita didn’t seem all that different from Cindy: white and petite with big hair and little oval readers. Anita had a daughter a year older than me and I hated her. She was always breaking rules and saying I made her do it. Anita of course never believed me. I told my dad the truth but it only caused a fight that went nowhere. I was powerless and Sienna knew it, laughing every time her mother spanked me. I did not want my parents to get back together. I only wished Anita would go away, and take her daughter with her. 

The best excuse to disappear was camping at Fall River. Like my father nowadays, it avoids his hometown of El Dorado, Kansas entirely. Snaking through cicada-laden farmland, Fall River loops back on itself throughout its course. It enters the Verdigris on its way to the Arkansas, which flows past Tulsa and Little Rock before meeting the Mississippi and eventually, the Gulf of Mexico. 

My dad is part of the river and vice versa. He grew up there, safe from the ritual exorcisms his white foster mother put him and his twin brother Randy through. Every month or so, Elva and elite members of her congregation all kicked, spit and screamed at the Potawatomi boys. The prayers in tongues bounced around the Pentecostal church she owned for hours. It turned my uncle cruel and left my father hurt and angry, though none of it could reach him at the river. His only priorities were himself, his children, and what we needed from the water and the land. 

“I’m glad I get to share this place with you guys,” he’d tell us. Dad always got mushy after a few beers around the fire. “I hope you get to bring your kids here one day.” 

We are the third generation of Warrens to camp at this particular bend. My late grandfather, husband to the woman who tortured their children, had earned permission to camp and fish on the property. He knew what Elva was doing to their sons. He didn’t stop her. Still, my father spoke of him fondly. I was too young, too free of sin to fathom forgiving the unforgivable. Perhaps his dad took him here to say, I’m sorry; I may not always be able to protect you, but I can give you shelter. 

“We will, Dad,” promised my brother or sister. I think I just blinked at him, unable to squint so far ahead. Not that I had to worry. The river would be there forever. 

***

He taught us how to bait a hook, start a fire, fry a fish. In the fields, when his shotgun swung like a turret at some pheasants he scared up, I ducked the barrel because I saw it coming.

“Good job, Jakey,” he’d say, whether he made the shot or not. 

This presence of mind was a tax you paid to rejoin this world. You recognize it as something in and for itself, of which you are a small part. You reap its beauty and rewards while acknowledging the risks. It means forcing the hook all the way through your flesh because yanking it out hurts more, knowing that copperheads lurk in the brush where your hands go digging for kindling, that you never grab a live catfish in the middle or its venomous barbs will spur you. So you respect the hook and the snake and the river, how each can support or turn on you. 

Jeremy and dad were hunters, inclined to this environment in ways that didn’t come naturally to me. I watched them show off, punching notches in trees with their hatchet-throwing skills. Jeremy cut sticks into spears and staked them through the bodies of fish they reeled in together. My brother would take after our dad in these and other ways. 

Rachel, you had to go find. I was not allowed to go searching on my own. Whereas Jeremy carved a place for himself, Rachel sought hers out, knowing it was already there. Sometimes you saw her upstream, filling her sketchbook under partial shade. Other times she climbed the wooded hillside away from camp and spent the whole afternoon reading. One of my favorite things she did was bend twigs into perfect hoops, string webs of fishing line across them and adorn them with feathers, shells, beads, lures and sinkers. She hung them in the branches near our tent to catch our dreams. My sister preferred to be alone, sometimes for a while, but she always returned thinking of us.

My siblings hurt for our father’s respect. Rachel was barely a teenager when dad taught her how to fire a shotgun. She returned from the milo fields with a sack of fresh kills and the beginnings of a huge purple bruise across her shoulder. The injury from the recoiling butt of his Remington was, in her words, a “badge of honor.” 

Jeremy took his bruises from our father directly. In two summers, my brother will get kicked out because John doesn’t allow criminals under his roof. Rick will be three times divorced and living in the bottle by then. Our mother, who knew too well how dad got when he drank, let him go anyway. Father and son will come out of this with stories that sometimes differ wildly. For instance, Jeremy says dad once threw him down the basement steps. Dad swears he doesn’t remember that at all. 

I remember skimming the river’s surface, watching water striders breaststroke in the sun. 

“Jacob!” He hollered again. 

It came from upstream, my full name. I ran in the direction of his voice. Dad was spraying us down with bug repellent. With a strong campfire, it warded off mosquitos that descended at sunset. 

I rolled up my sleeves but my brother said, Just take your shirt off. My chest was smooth like dad’s except scrawny and shades lighter. I look “more Native” after a few turns in the sun, like Rachel did, because she suntanned often. My ritual sunburns began Memorial Day weekend. Each semester started with me resembling my father, but by winter break, I looked more like my mom. 

“Damn, son. You need your color back.”  

***

I just wanted to sit with my dad. He’d set up downstream on the opposite bank with a line bobbing in the water. My sister sat under a birch tree nearby reading a Dean Koontz novel. Rocks piled up at this hairpin turn, squeezing all that river up and over top it. The invisible current bowled me over quicker than I could shout. My head hit the bottom. My ears flooded, muffling all sound. I tried to scream but instead of air, I got river. 

Then I tumbled off the shoals into a cold green expanse. The current should’ve slowed in this deep, wide channel but the river kept dragging, dragging me along. I thrashed, grabbing nothing. Was anyone watching? Did anybody see? 

I heard something crash into the water, then splashing. An arm wrapped around my ribcage and pulled me aside. I saw blue sky but could not breathe it. The arm dropped me on the silty shore, and I expected to see my dad once I finished vomiting. 

Instead it was my brother eclipsing the sun, and he looked pissed. 

“Are you fuckin’ stupid?” Jeremy yelled.

No? I have perfect cursive. 

“Look,” he said, pointing at the water.

Through tentacles of wet black hair, I saw why he was upset, and why I couldn’t get out. Not far away was a grey, sucking whirlpool. Twigs clawed at the eye, unable to escape. Who knows how deep it went.

I dripped my way back to our tent, stripped off my stinky river shorts, and crawled into my sleeping bag. The interminable firmness of the ground made me feel held. Less and less light filtered through the blue nylon canopy. Around dinnertime, my dad walked up from the campfire. 

“Jakey?” 

I remember suddenly feeling resentful. Why hadn’t it been him? Why did Jeremy shout at me on the riverbank? I thought you saved something because you loved it.

Dad unzipped the tent and peeked in. “Hey.”

I rolled onto my side away from him. 

“Come on, Jake. I know you were scared. But look, you’re okay.”

I wouldn’t look at him. Who was he trying to fool? 

“Fine. See if I give a shit.” He zipped the flap and left, twigs cracking as he walked to the fire.

Who knows. Maybe he felt bad, or maybe he wished he’d been the one to save me. I can’t say. Maybe I just wanted to sleep in my own bed. 

I pictured my mother safe in her recliner watching M*A*S*H and wondered if she missed me. I’m leaning towards no. She knew exactly what she was missing. The cottonwood outside bristled in the breeze. A mosquito landed on my arm and started feeding. 

SUNDAY

Neither of my parents came to Christianity of their own accord. Both were dragged into it, especially in my dad’s case. But my mother held onto her convictions, even after the church shunned her for my father’s infidelities. Until then, much to Grandma Elva’s delight, Cindy made sure we assembled for God every weekend. My fondest memories of church are my earliest, when music bore no message, only sound and rhythm (“Clap, Jakey, clap!”).

I displayed musical capabilities from an early age and so did my dad. Elva pounced on the opportunity to force him into her church’s Sunday band. Convinced she was instilling messages of Jesus’ salvation, Elva had no idea he was letting it in one ear and out the other. But the breathwork, syncopation, and golden ear required to carry a tune, that could stay. I like to think he grafted those priorities onto me. Before the church could do its dirty work, dad sat me at our old upright piano. A melody issued from his hands and I responded in harmony, and that was our first conversation. 

None of us liked church. But if dad could smile and tuck in his shirt for the Lord, so could we. Besides, it wasn’t God we had to impress, but Anita. We were to reflect well on her. I remember Anita as the kind of mom that kept a disposable camera in her purse. If Instagram existed in 1998, she’d have been all over it. I remember being arranged for a portrait in front of her church with Sienna and other kids. It was stiflingly humid and Anita had stuck me in the sun. I didn’t feel like smiling. I didn’t want to be in her pictures. All that pretending, and for what? 

Sienna yanked on my hair. “You’re slouching, and call her Mom.” 

Now my dad, he can act. It’s how he survived childhood, prison, and his unfortunate marriage to a woman from the same denomination as Elva—my mother. Even so, I detected something off in his movements. Today I would call them rehearsed. He stood on cue, hands reaching for the flaky white ceiling like all the others, and he kept his eyes on the preacher. At face value, he looked like any other churchgoer, but from where I stood, I could see how exhausted he was. In microsecond flashes I saw the real him, the Native in repose who just wanted to get this over with. 

Anita’s fervent worship on the other hand looked so dramatic, all I could do at my age was laugh. Years later, when I audition for school plays, I will list church as my first theatrical experience. Speaking for the congregation, the preacher called on Jesus, pleading for His strength, but I heard string. I pictured white cords unspooling from everybody’s palms, running right through the ceiling towards Heaven.

***

A stillness gripped the house, barely concealed by the intermittent hum of central air. Anita was not there. Neither were Rachel and Jeremy. It was late afternoon. Dad had been drinking in front of the TV since we got home from church. 

I hoped someone, anyone, would come back soon. 

Sienna’s bedroom walls were pink. I remember plastic half-naked dolls in a plastic bin on top of a purple, plastic tea table. She was busy comparing tiny high heels for the doll in her lap. I thought my Barbie looked pretty and asked my step-sister if she liked the outfit I chose (she did not). 

What was my dad yelling at? It wasn’t football season. A NASCAR race, maybe. Some people get so worked up. We closed her bedroom door so we wouldn’t hear him cursing. 

I can’t explain what happened next. Maybe she and I were playing too loudly. Perhaps he had heard the same CD all weekend. Soon I noticed: I could no longer hear my dad cursing.

With the crack of splintering wood, the door burst open.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

The roar of his voice was so thunderous, I jumped behind and underneath Sienna’s twin bed. She didn’t move. He grabbed whatever he could and hurled it across the room. The purple plastic tea table collided with the wall. I heard it break in two. Barbies hit the ground in contorted heaps among their shoes and accessories. Sienna went airborne, apologizing, screaming. It didn’t matter what you said or how you said it. There’s no reasoning with a tornado. 

I crawled out from under the bed. The overhead light was out. Either it broke or he switched it off as he left. Sienna wouldn’t let me touch her. Outside her window, the sun was going down. Yellow squares crept along the wall. It would be dark soon. 

***

Drunk men fired whoops and mortars into the night sky. They soared high as if attempting to escape Earth’s gravity, but the pull was too strong so they simply blew up. Their echoes boomed across the Plains, showering the ground with American sparks. 

Anita encouraged dad to make plans with his kids for July 4th, and he did. He drove us to a family friend’s way out in Eureka. A long day of swimming around in their above-ground pool couldn’t tire me. When the fireworks died and other kids were getting sleepy, I was wide awake wanting more. Only diehard drunks hung around until the end, loud, clumsy adults that tripped over their own kids trying to wake them. 

I was asleep on the floor with the family dog. 

“Jakey. Wake up.” 

Dad picked me up and put my head to his shoulder. Budweiser foulness spilled from his face. He carried me into the minutes before dawn, stopping at his Ford. Rachel and Jeremy waited in the backseat, heads propped against the windows. They’d probably been drinking too. Dad set me in the front and quietly drove us back to Ark City. Keeping one hand on the wheel, he brushed my hair aside, tender and instinctive, like it was something he did every day. 

***

“What the fuck?”

My dad’s bad words woke me. I sat up, looked at my siblings and him. All three were staring at the same thing. Headlights flooded a vacant driveway. Anita’s car wasn’t there. 

He got out of the truck and we followed. Dead summer grass crunched underfoot. The smell of gunpowder hugged the ground like fog. Dad opened the front door, flipped a lightswitch, and froze.

“What the fuck?”

The house was absolutely empty. Everything that was inside when we left, along with Anita and Sienna, was gone. Rugs, couches, tables, chairs, photos and decorations; the breakfast table, the TV dad was cursing at, Sienna’s bed and Barbies; the rest of dad’s blankets as well as his stereo and one of his rifles; every plate, bowl and saucer, fork, knife and spoon, his cast-iron skillet; all taken. All she left was the washer and dryer. 

My father didn’t speak. We found him in his bedroom, the only spot of color against the stark white walls. He gathered Indian blankets from his truck and those are what we slept on. I had trouble sleeping though. She even grabbed the curtains. 

It would take me years to spot the irony. Anita left my dad on Independence Day. 

***

Whatever we did, however it went, weekends with our dad ended the exact same way. He made sure we hit the road no later than 4 PM to get ahead of having to feed us dinner. It was a 90-minute drive to Matfield Green, radio blaring, Free Fallin’, This Kiss. We passed familiar signs for strangely named towns: Towanda, Udall, Rock. In the end, our mother’s grey Hyundai came into focus. 

The sight of her compact foreign car made me restless. Nothing had felt particularly strange until then. As the distance between my mother and I shrank to a close, I could not wait to get out of this man’s truck. I’m sure it hurt him, watching me run to her, then circle back for a half-hearted hug. It didn’t cross my mind, the utter emptiness awaiting him at home. We stood at the apogees of our lives, where they touched yet dared not overlap. My mother was white, my father Native, but only us kids, both and neither, inhabited this lone impossible middle. Like always, dad stood by his truck as his children were taken away. I watched him get smaller and smaller through my mom’s unarmed rear windshield until he disappeared from view.

My uncle Randy was murdered later that summer. Killed in a bar fight. His killer(s) dumped him in the Arkansas River. A fisherman found his body a week later. Humiliated, Elva asked the cops to drop the investigation. My father never forgave her for that, not even on her deathbed in 2008.

I’m not sure when we stopped visiting, only that one day, we had. That’s how insignificant our mother made spending time with him. I would never deprive her of her hard-earned right to hate him. He cracked her orbital bone on Super Bowl Sunday 1985, when she was seven months pregnant with my brother. “That’s just one,” she liked to say. What my father did is inexcusable, but she insisted we hate him on her behalf, even if it cost us. 

I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen him since Christmas 2009. In 1999, we rang in the New Millennium together, and I spent a few weekends with him as a teenager. I’m not saying we should’ve lived with dad. Rachel and Jeremy sure wouldn’t. Jeremy won’t speak to him, much like his own kids don’t speak to Jeremy, who is doubly divorced and living with our mother. It’s funny; she let John kick him out. Now John is gone and Jeremy will live with her the rest of her life. Rachel is doing better, two years sober and drawing again, about to regain custody of her daughter. I have her pastel rendering of the milo field we hunted with dad. Dad has gotten older since I first offered him a stay at my apartment in San Francisco. 

***

Chief among my wastes of time on Earth so far is chasing permission to be Native. I was gay before I knew what ‘gay’ meant, though I’d been Native far longer. The one voice doubting my sexuality was my own mother’s wishful thinking. Almost everyone else however questioned whether I was actually Potawatomi, so much that I began doubting it too. At age 23, I came out to my father over the phone. All he had to ask me was if I was happy, safe, and loved. And I was. I am. But I had something to ask in return. Despite the pain, the years of forgetting, separation, and the color of my skin, did my father see me as Potawatomi? 

His pause felt heavy with surprise. “Of course I do. You’re my kid, Jake.”

I did not know how badly I needed to hear him say that. At last, he claimed me. 

Sometimes, instead of Matfield Green, mom and John met us in El Dorado, dad’s hometown. Ours too once. None of us spoke, each absorbed in their murky reminiscence. John drove quietly, the radio tuned to 104.5 The Fox until we lost it in the static of the Flint Hills. I reviewed the weekend as he steered mom’s Hyundai (say “Hun-day” to sound like my mother) onto the turnpike. The roadway was built on a berm across El Dorado Lake, interspaced with bridges for the passage of boats. While valuable, the reservoir has hidden dangers. Rather than fell the tree stands of the Walnut River Valley, dam engineers left them behind, figuring the flood would take them. Over fifty years later they’re still there, bloated limbs mere inches beneath the surface. They will not relinquish their hold on the land, those underwater ghosts, unrelenting.