Natalie Diaz

When my brother died I worried there wasn’t enough time to deliver the one hundred invitations I’d scribbled while on the phone with the mortuary: Because of the short notice no need to rsvp. Unfortunately the firemen couldn’t come. (I had hoped they’d give free rides on the truck.) They did agree to drive by the house once with the lights on— It was a party after all. I put Mom and Dad in charge of balloons, let them blow as many years of my brother’s name, jails, twenty-dollar bills, midnight phone calls, fistfights, and er visits as they could let go of. The scarlet balloons zigzagged along the ceiling like they’d been filled with helium. Mom blew up so many that she fell asleep. She slept for ten years— she missed the whole party. My brothers and sisters were giddy, shredding his stained T-shirts and raggedy pants, throwing them up into the air like confetti. When the clowns came in a few balloons slipped out the front door. They seemed to know where they were going and shrank to a fistful of red grins at the end of our cul-de-sac. The clowns played toy bugles until the air was scented with rotten raspberries. They pulled scarves from Mom’s ear—she slept through it. I baked my brother’s favorite cake (chocolate, white frosting). When I counted there were ninety-nine of us in the kitchen. We all stuck our fingers in the mixing bowl. A few stray dogs came to the window. I heard their stomachs and mouths growling over the mariachi band playing in the bathroom. (There was no room in the hallway because of the magician.) The mariachis complained about the bathtub acoustics. I told the dogs,No more cake here, and shut the window. The fire truck came by with the sirens on. The dogs ran away. I sliced the cake into ninety-nine pieces. I wrapped all the electronic equipment in the house, taped pink bows and glittery ribbons to them— remote controls, the Polaroid, stereo, Shop-Vac, even the motor to Dad’s work truck—everything my brother had taken apart and put back together doing his crystal meth tricks—he’d always been a magician of sorts. Two mutants came to the door. One looked almost human. They wanted to know if my brother had willed them the pots and pans and spoons stacked in his basement bedroom. They said they missed my brother’s cooking and did we have any cake.No more cake here, I told them. Well, what’s in the piñata? they asked. I told them God was and they ran into the desert, barefoot. I gave Dad his slice and put Mom’s in the freezer. I brought up the pots and pans and spoons (really, my brother was a horrible cook), banged them together like a New Year’s Day celebration. My brother finally showed up asking why he hadn’t been invited and who baked the cake. He told me I shouldn’t smile, that this whole party was shit because I’d imagined it all. The worst part he said was he was still alive. The worst part he said was he wasn’t even dead. I think he’s right, but maybe the worst part is that I’m still imagining the party, maybe the worst part is that I can still taste the cake.

He was calling in the bulls from the street. They came like a dark river — a blur of chest and hoof — everything moving, under, splinter — hooked their horns through the walls. Light hummed the holes like yellow jackets. My mouth was a nest torn empty. Then, he was at the table. Then, in the pig’s jaws — he was not hungry. He was stop. He was bad apple. He was choking. So I punched my fists against his stomach. Mars flew out and broke open or bloomed — how many small red eyes shut in that husk? He said,Look. Look. And they did. He said,Lift up your shirt. And I did. He slid his fork beneath my ribs — Yes, he sang.A Jesus side wound. It wouldn’t stop bleeding. He reached inside and turned on the lamp — I never knew I was also a lamp — until the light fell out of me, dripped down my thigh, flew up in me, caught in my throat like a canary. Canaries really means dogs, he said. He put on his shoes. You started this with your mouth, he pointed. Where are you going? I asked. To ride the Ferris wheel, he answered, and climbed inside me like a window.

He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. O God, he said.O God. He wants to kill me, Mom.

Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag. He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it, peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood. He took a step back and gestured toward it with his arms and open palms — It’s the ark, he said. You mean Noah’s ark? I asked. What other ark is there? he answered. Read the inscription, he told me, it tells what’s going to happen at the end. What end? I wanted to know. He laughed,What do you mean, “what end”? The end end. Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled. His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters. He held the jagged piece of wood so gently. I had forgotten my brother could be gentle. He set it on the table the way people on television set things when they’re afraid those things might blow-up or go-off — he set it right next to my empty coffee cup. It was no ark — it was the broken end of a picture frame with a floral design carved into its surface. He put his head in his hands — I shouldn’t show you this — God, why did I show her this? It’s ancient — O, God, this is so old. Fine, I gave in,Where did you get it? The girl, he said.O, the girl. What girl? I asked. You’ll wish you never knew, he told me. I watched him drag his wrecked fingers over the chipped flower-work of the wood — You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it — no matter how many books you’ve read. He was wrong. I could take the ark. I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers. The way they almost glittered. It was the animals — the animals I could not take — they came up the walkway into my house, cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips, marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother, tails snaking across my feet before disappearing like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls, reaching out for him — wildebeests, pigs, the oryxes with their black matching horns, javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat. So many kinds of creature. I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it, but my brother stopped me — This is serious, he said. You have to understand. It can save you. So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that, and two-by-two the fantastical beasts parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles, built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup before floating it away from the table. My brother — teeming with shadows — a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk, lifting his ark high in the air.

woven plaque basket with sunflower design, Hopi, Arizona, before 1935 from an American Indian basketry exhibit in Portsmouth, Virginia The Arizona highway sailed across the desert— a gray battleship drawing a black wake, halting at the foot of the orange mesa, unwilling to go around. Hopi men and women—brown, and small, and claylike —peered down from their tabletops at yellow tractors, water trucks, and white men blistered with sun—red as fire ants—towing sunscreen-slathered wives in glinting Airstream trailers in caravans behind them. Elders knew these bia roads were bad medicine—knew too that young men listen less and less, and these young Hopi men needed work, hence set aside their tools, blocks of cottonwood root and half-finished Koshari the clown katsinas, then signed on with the Department of Transportation, were hired to stab drills deep into the earth’s thick red flesh on First Mesa, drive giant sparking blades across the mesas’ faces, run the drill bits so deep they smoked, bearding all the Hopi men in white—Bad spirits, said the Elders— The blades caught fire, burned out—Ma’saw is angry, the Elders said. New blades were flown in by helicopter. While Elders dreamed their arms and legs had been cleaved off and their torsos were flung over the edge of a dinner table, the young Hopi men went back to work cutting the land into large chunks of rust. Nobody noticed at first—not the white workers, not the Indian workers—but in the mounds of dismantled mesa, among the clods and piles of sand, lay the small gray bowls of babies’ skulls. Not until they climbed to the bottom did they see the silvered bones glinting from the freshly sliced dirt-and-rock wall— a mausoleum mosaic, a sick tapestry: the tiny remains roused from death’s dusty cradle, cut in half, cracked, wrapped in time-tattered scraps of blankets. Let’s call it a day, the white foreman said. That night, all the Indian workers got sad-drunk—got sick —while Elders sank to their kivas in prayer. Next morning, as dawn festered on the horizon, state workers scaled the mesas, knocked at the doors of pueblos that had them, hollered into those without them, demanding the Hopi men come back to work—then begging them— then buying them whiskey—begging again—finally sending their white wives up the dangerous trail etched into the steep sides to buy baskets from Hopi wives and grandmothers as a sign of treaty. When that didn’t work, the state workers called the Indians lazy, sent their sunhat-wearing wives back up to buy more baskets— katsinas too—then called the Hopis good-for-nothings, before begging them back once more. We’ll try again in the morning, the foreman said. But the Indian workers never returned— The bia s and dot s calls to work went unanswered, as the fevered Hopis stayed huddled inside. The small bones half-buried in the crevices of mesa— in the once-holy darkness of silent earth and always-night— smiled or sighed beneath the moonlight, while white women in Airstream trailers wrote letters home praising their husbands’ patience, describing the lazy savages: such squalor in their stone and plaster homes—cobs of corn stacked floor to ceiling against crumbling walls—their devilish ceremonies and the barbaric way they buried their babies, oh, and those beautiful, beautiful baskets.

Angels don’t come to the reservation. Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things. Coyotes, too. They all mean the same thing— death. And death eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel fly through this valley ever. Gabriel? Never heard of him. Know a guy named Gabe though— he came through here one powwow and stayed, typical Indian. Sure he had wings, jailbird that he was. He flies around in stolen cars. Wherever he stops, kids grow like gourds from women’s bellies. Like I said, no Indian I’ve ever heard of has ever been or seen an angel. Maybe in a Christmas pageant or something— Nazarene church holds one every December, organized by Pastor John’s wife. It’s no wonder Pastor John’s son is the angel—everyone knows angels are white. Quit bothering with angels, I say. They’re no good for Indians. Remember what happened last time some white god came floating across the ocean? Truth is, there may be angels, but if there are angels up there, living on clouds or sitting on thrones across the sea wearing velvet robes and golden rings, drinking whiskey from silver cups, we’re better off if they stay rich and fat and ugly and ’xactly where they are—in their own distant heavens. You better hope you never see angels on the rez. If you do, they’ll be marching you off to Zion or Oklahoma, or some other hell they’ve mapped out for us.