The storyteller, p.1
The Storyteller, page 1
For Ian, Holden, Jimin, and Rango
“Go ask Alice / I think she’ll know.”
—Jefferson Airplane
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
1 A Town Called Poisonberry
2 ANXIETY
3 The Weirdos
4 The Magic Guitar
5 Grandma Moses
6 Yona Middle School
7 The Nunnehi
8 An Old Buzzard
9 The Strange Armadillo
10 Brush Up Your Shakespeare
11 Mina Minoma, the Most Pulchritudinous Fortune-Teller in the Land
12 Coyote’s Message
13 Bela Lugosi Is Dead
14 The Raven Mockers
15 Jean-Pierre, the Opera-Singing Frog
16 Alice’s Message
17 Spiders from Mars
18 A Visit
19 Yellow Butterflies
Author’s Note
Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
I have dreams that Moon and I came here from the past.
In these dreams, my sister, Moon, and I come from a different time period, over two hundred years ago, when we lived in the south before our tribe was removed and forced west by President Andrew Jackson.
And here we are now, in real life, where we live in this desert town in New Mexico called Poisonberry. It’s called Poisonberry because there are nasty, bloodred poisonous berries growing all around town. Their shrubs are covered in thorns and grow quickly, sprouting through the cracks in the streets, twisting around houses and buildings, and growing as high as ten feet. Exterminators wearing protective masks and chemical-resistant, baggy clothes have sprayed them, cut them down, destroyed them, but their juice emits a vapor in the air that spreads and makes them multiply even worse.
The weather made it this way. All the rain over the past ten years, even here in the desert, made things grow that have never grown before. My dad says the earth deals with trauma just like people do. The earth remembers how we’ve treated it for thousands and thousands of years, and now it reacts to the trauma: We have tempestuous seasons, strong rains, high winds, furious storms. The flooding is getting worse. The tornadoes are rolling farther across the country.
Moon and I have lived here in Poisonberry our whole lives. In my dreams, soldiers made us walk until we fell down somewhere in the middle of the desert. In real life, my grandma has told us stories about how our ancestors were removed from their homes. As far back as I can remember, she’s always told us stories because we’ve had to deal with one of the hardest things ever, a tragedy.
When Moon and I were little, our mom disappeared.
Native women go missing all over the country. Nobody seems to be doing much about it. In my mom’s case, the sheriff and the police have given up trying to find her. But it’s not just her. My friend Sheila has an aunt who is missing. A few other Native kids at my school have relatives who are missing. It’s been going on way too long.
I wish I had memories of my mom, but I was just a baby when she vanished. Moon vaguely remembers sitting on her lap, being rocked, listening to her hum. My dad doesn’t like to talk about it too much, because it’s so painful, but once, he told us that she read and sang to us every night. I wish I remembered that. My memories, instead, involve our dad crying in the house, on their anniversary or on holidays. Our grandma still cries sometimes, too.
So the way it all happened, our mom disappeared and nobody could find her. She was in class at nursing school and didn’t come home. Two days after she disappeared, her car was found a few miles away, and she wasn’t inside it.
We don’t really understand what happened. I wanted my dreams to be true so I could have the power to step through time. I wanted to go back to the past and see her and tell her to stay home from class that night.
It’s hard to understand sadness, and how someone can just disappear.
In my dreams, our mom and dad came from the past as well. We live together with our Cherokee ancestors. We are all together, the four of us, and we’re happy.
* * *
A teacher once told me I daydream a lot and create pretend scenarios in my mind, which is fine, but the teacher thought I couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what wasn’t. I know the difference. I know life is life and history is history. But still, I can’t help but think of what my life would have been like, back in history. My Cherokee ancestors spent their days hunting for food, skinning deer or elk, and cooking it. They ate under the night sky and listened to elders tell stories or sing. Then everything changed when President Jackson ordered his soldiers to remove the Cherokees from their land, west to Oklahoma, where generations later my mom and dad grew up.
I wish I could go back to the past and fight those soldiers or find a way to trick them. I sometimes pretend I’ve time-traveled from two hundred years ago and I’m living in this strange world. Once, across the street from the mall, I walked up to the drive-through window of a fast-food restaurant and tried to order a cheeseburger. The guy working there stuck his head out the window and said, “Ya gotta come inside to order on foot.” He wore a rumpled paper hat and his eyeglasses were at an angle. I could see the sweat glistening on his forehead.
“I need lunch,” I told him. “You cook meat?”
“What are you talking about?” he whined.
Cars were honking at me. I turned and stared at them, a line of automobiles. A man got out of his car and put his hands on his hips.
“Ya gotta come inside to order,” the hat guy kept saying from the window. “This lane is for cars.”
Another time, at a parade downtown, when I pretended to be from the past, there was a white man dressed as an Indian Chief mascot walking by. I mean, he was wearing a headdress and everything, which is disrespectful to Native culture. I picked up the first thing I could find—a rock about the size of a baseball—and charged him, hitting him in the arm with the rock until the guy got really mad and started yelling at me and pushing me away.
Not long after that, my dad took me to a behavior specialist, and it turns out I’m introverted and daydreamy and sad a lot, and it can be hard for me to look people directly in the eyes when they talk to me. I like to do things most other kids don’t care about, like making long lists of my favorite songs or movies or sitting in my room and talking to my poster of Michael Jordan.
The behavior specialist prescribed a type of medication that I take every day and said I can ask for extra time to do homework and extra test time if I need it. I guess the medication helps me feel better, but I don’t really know because it’s hard for me to remember what I was like before. It turns out there are lots of kids like me, but I don’t know any of them—at least not at Yona Middle School.
My therapist, Kari, says I have anxiety, which can make school and life harder in many ways. She says everyone has anxiety at some point in their lives and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have trouble making friends, although I have a few good friends at school who don’t tease me. I also miss my mom a lot, and I tell Kari about that, too. Kari’s nice about it, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing it was my mom I was talking to, not her.
Moon has a much easier time than I do at school and around other kids. My grandma says the day after our mom disappeared, Moon stayed in her room all day and wouldn’t come out. She never even talked that day. Dad kept banging on the door for her to unlock it and let him in, but she wouldn’t. He had to go outside around to the window and force it open, only to find her hiding under her bed with her stuffed animals.
Our dad has never been good about talking about our mom being gone. He’s not too good at talking to us about anything serious, to be honest. He means well; he just has a hard time expressing his feelings. He doesn’t think I notice this, but I do.
According to my grandma, this wasn’t always the case. “It’s normal to be afraid and sad,” my dad told Moon in a soft voice once he got into her room that first night, as she crawled from underneath the bed. “We’re all sad about your mom being gone. I want her to come back, too. We have to learn to accept what we are given in this world.”
Unsure of what to say next, he hugged her and left the room.
Weeks passed without a trace of our mom. Months passed, and then a year. We all became numb from crying, Grandma told me later. I think you can only cry so much before your body gives up and you feel like all you can do is sleep. I don’t like to think about our mom dying, or being kidnapped, but here we are, still without her. Here we are, ten whole years after our mom disappeared, still trying to figure out where she is.
As I said, the police gave up on the case a long time ago, which makes me mad.
My history teacher says there are thousands of Native women who go missing every year. Where do they go? Some live, some die, but Moon and I don’t want to lose hope. We wonder whether she’s alive or dead even though our dad gave up his hope when the police considered the case cold.
I haven’t tried to talk to Dad about it in a long time. The last time I tried, I saw the tears gather in his eyes.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said.
Still, he must wonder, too.
I wonder all the time.
I’m in sixth grade, and Moon is in eighth. That doesn’t sound like much, two years apart, but in middle school it’s a huge difference. There are some boys in eighth grade who can shave. I’ve seen guys taller than my dad. There’s even one guy who flunked a couple of years and has his driver’s license. He pulls into the school parking lot in his low-slung Oldsmobile, windows down and cranking AC/DC. I swear, the guy might be twenty. He’s terrifying. Meanwhile, most of us sixth-grade boys are still trying not to let our voices crack.
Moon doesn’t acknowledge me much at school. Even though we’re close, at school I’m still just a sixth grader.
Moon and I have been seeing Kari for a few years. At first, we talked to her once a week, but now it’s every other week. Kari talks to each of us alone, not together. I like her. Anxiety is a word I learned from her. You don’t have to have a huge mental health issue to see a therapist. Anyone who is feeling sad or afraid can talk to a therapist. Kari is interested in listening to me, I can tell. She isn’t pretending to listen the way a lot of adults do. She actually listens, and asks me questions about what I like, how school is going—those sorts of things. One of the first times I talked to her, she told me to visualize my anxiety.
“Think of it as an animal outside of your body,” she said. “Look. What do you see?”
I pictured a coyote, because my grandma used to tell me stories about coyotes, plus I like coyotes.
“That coyote is your anxiety,” Kari said. “Whenever you start feeling worried, picture the coyote and then talk to it. Look at it and let it know you welcome it. You should know it won’t hurt you. Your anxiety is your friend, not something to be afraid of. Do you understand?”
I nodded. I told her I understood, but I didn’t, and I was still hurting.
When you have ANXIETY, every thought can lead to a catastrophe. For example, here are some other thoughts that came from my ANXIETY:
All the other kids will think I’m dumb.
The teachers won’t like me.
A teacher will call on me for an answer I won’t know.
People will laugh at me.
Someone will beat me up or say something to embarrass me in front of everyone.
I might get sick and throw up in the hallway in front of everyone.
Or on the bus. Or in the classroom.
I really did throw up in the classroom once. Right in the middle of music class. It came out of nowhere. We were all standing and singing and mumbling while old Mrs. Vodka played the piano—then suddenly, I leaned forward and hurled. The class fell silent. Andre Malone, standing next to me, fell back into his chair, laughing.
“Go to the restroom,” Mrs. Vodka told me. She was an old woman with blue hair and glasses. I remember her look of horror and disgust. As I hurried out of the room, I heard her telling the class in her gravelly voice, “It’s fine. We all throw up, kids. Even my husband threw up on our wedding night, fifty years ago. Now someone go fetch the janitor.”
I ran all the way down the hall to the bathroom.
Standing there over the sink, all sorts of thoughts raced in my mind: My life is over. Everyone will now know me as the boy who threw up in class. From this day forward I shall be known as Barf Boy. I’ll have to transfer schools or maybe even countries. Maybe I could move to Paris or Spain or Tokyo. Hawaii! Anywhere but here.
I pictured the headline on the front page of the school paper:
Ziggy Echota Vomits in Music Class
The Vomit Will Haunt Him the Rest of His Life
The good news is that it wasn’t nearly as disastrous as I’d expected. In fact, nobody even talked about it, as far as I knew. Even Andre Malone never brought it up again. But that’s what ANXIETY does to you. Catastrophic thoughts race through my mind, and all I ever want to do is stay in my bedroom.
When you start feeling that afraid of everything, it’s hard to enjoy anything.
Luckily, at home, my anxiety isn’t so bad. It also eases up when I’m playing basketball. Basketball is my favorite sport. Sometimes, Moon and I play basketball in the driveway. I’m not on the team at school because I’m not good enough. The coach lets me be manager, which means I get to assist him with keeping track of statistics and get water and towels for the players. Everyone on the team likes me. I have an OKC Thunder basketball and also posters of Michael Jordan and Kevin Durant in my bedroom. I play basketball on the plastic goal in my room way better than I do in the driveway, but when Moon and I play outside, she helps me a lot. She played until sixth grade, when she became a cheerleader. She’s way better than me at a lot of things. I love her a lot. Every now and then I fart on her, and she wrestles me and pins me down.
“You’re gross!” she says.
Some nights we lie in the backyard, gaze up at the stars, and wonder where our mom is. Even after all this time, while I know Moon and our dad have given up hope, I still bring up the possibility that she’s alive.
“I wonder what Mom’s doing right now,” I say.
“She’s probably helping someone,” Moon says.
I think about that. “You think it’s possible Mom returned to the past? And if so, why would she return there without us or Dad?”
“You can’t go back to the past,” Moon says. “Nobody can go back and change things.”
“I bet Mom could.”
“Well,” Moon says, “if she went to the past, she’s needed there. Someone needs her help.”
“She wouldn’t abandon us.”
“Mom loved helping people. She was in school to be a nurse. If it was possible to go back to the past, she would go back and help sick people.”
“You’re saying she’ll come back?”
“No,” she says, “I’m not saying that. I’m saying she liked helping people.”
I consider this. Whenever I need to think, I have to pace around, so I get up and walk over to the wooden fence in the back of our yard, where a long vine of berries twists over the fence and spills into our yard. I take a handful of berries, eat a few, then walk back over to Moon and sit back down.
“Yum,” she says, taking a few from my hand.
We can eat the poisonous berries all the time without getting sick or dying. We’ve become sort of oddballs around here, as if we’ve developed an immunity most people don’t have. When we were little, our dad caught Moon eating the berries in our backyard. He ran outside and forced the berries out of her hands and mouth until he and she had red juice smeared all over their hands.
But it didn’t poison Moon. It didn’t even make her sick.
Dad rushed her to the emergency room, and it turned out she was fine. He was shocked. “Are you sure?” Dad said to Dr. Woolfe. “She ate a bunch of them. Maybe they were a different kind of berry?”
“There are no other berries in this town,” Dr. Woolfe said.
To be safe, he sent Moon’s blood tests to Dr. Gray in Ruidoso, who sent them to Dr. Poole in Albuquerque, who sent them to Dr. Speer in Santa Fe, who sent them back to Dr. Woolfe in Poisonberry with all their test results:
NORMAL
Normal? I guess it’s part of what makes us so unique and not of this world. For a while I thought we were ghosts or aliens.
“What are you thinking about?” Moon asks me, taking another berry from my hand.
“I’m thinking about Mom going back to the past, two hundred years ago. Maybe just before the Trail of Tears happened.”
“I bet if Mom lived back then, she would’ve helped someone on the Trail who was sick or dying.”
Moon is so much smarter than I am. She’s probably the smartest person I know—even smarter than our dad. We take care of each other. Dad works a lot, and we cook dinners and do laundry. Moon understands things I don’t, about love and forgiveness, like when someone at school makes me mad, she’s always telling me how they might have it worse at home, and it all makes sense.
Moon wipes her hands on her jeans and says, “We better head inside.”
When I was eight, I was so fascinated by traveling back to the past, I actually tried going back once. I roamed off into the woods and got lost. Luckily, a neighbor found me before it got dark, but I remember being afraid. I didn’t know what I was looking for. I was just calling out for our mom.
“Look,” Moon says, pointing up at the sky. “See those stars? What do you think?”
