Son Who Returns Read online

  Son Who Returns

  Gary Robinson

  © 2014 Gary Robinson

  Cover and interior design: Deirdre Nemmers

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever, except for brief quotations in reviews, without written permission from the publisher.

  7th Generation, an imprint of

  Book Publishing Company

  PO Box 99, Summertown, TN 38483

  888-260-8458

  bookpubco.com

  nativevoicesbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-939053-04-6

  19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  Printed in the United States

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Robinson, Gary.

  Son who returns / Gary Robinson.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-939053-04-6 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1-939053-06-0 (e-book) [1. Indian dance--North America--Fiction. 2. Dance--Fiction. 3. Powwows--Fiction. 4. Brothers--Fiction. 5. Chumash Indians--Fiction. 6. Crow Indians--Fiction. 7. Racially-mixed people--Fiction. 8. Indians of North America--California--Fiction. 9. California--Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R56577Son 2014

  [Fic]--dc23

  2013043003

  Book Publishing Company is a member of Green Press Initiative. We chose to print this title on paper with 100% postconsumer recycled content, processed without chlorine, which saved the following natural resources:

  • 20 trees

  • 638 pounds of solid waste

  • 9,542 gallons of water

  • 1,759 pounds of greenhouse gases

  • 9 million BTU of energy

  For more information on Green Press Initiative, visit www.greenpressinitiative.org. Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator. For more information visit www.papercalculator.org.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: Homesick

  Chapter 2: The Plan

  Chapter 3: Westward Ho!

  Chapter 4: My New Home

  Chapter 5: PowWOW!

  Chapter 6: The First Step

  Chapter 7: The Powwow Trail

  Chapter 8: The Son Who Returns

  Chapter 9: The Lesson on the Bus

  Chapter 10: Winter Break

  Chapter 11: A New Year

  Chapter 12: The Final Push

  Chapter 13: Adrian’s Last Words

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  I want to acknowledge a few people for their assistance in developing this book. First, I want to thank my friend Pete Crowheart. He has danced the Men’s Northern Traditional style for many years, and he provided valuable guidance regarding certain elements of the powwow parts of this story.

  Nakia Zavalla, director of the Santa Ynez Chumash Culture Department and a powwow dancer, reviewed the manuscript and gave me advice on both the Chumash historical and cultural aspects of the story, along with insights into the world of the powwow.

  Last but not least, Dolores Cross, a member of the Chumash Tribe and frequent consultant on Chumash issues, reviewed the manuscript and provided suggestions for improvement. Over the years, her efforts have brought important attention to the contributions of Maria Solares and her work with anthropologist J. P. Harrington.

  My thanks to these generous people for their time and advice. Kaqina’sh. (That’s “thanks” in the Samala Chumash language).

  Son Who Returns

  Gary Robinson

  Chapter 1

  Homesick

  Life can be so unfair. Especially if you have no friends. And the people in your neighborhood look at you like you’re an alien. And the kids at your school avoid you like the plague.

  All my friends were in San Diego, California, but now I was living in Dallas, Texas. How did that happen, you ask? I’ll tell you exactly how that happened.

  I used to live in San Diego. In fact, I lived there for most of my fifteen years. Mom told me that she and Dad had met in college there. They got married and then had me. Or they had me and then got married. I’m not sure which came first.

  However it happened, we were a happy family. That is, until Mom got sick with cancer and couldn’t be cured. She died when I was ten years old. It all happened so fast. I honestly don’t know why God allows awful things like this to happen to people.

  Anyway, it’s been five years, and I still miss her. I’m still not over losing her. I don’t think I ever will be.

  Dad seemed to get over it, though. Two years later, he got married to a woman he met through an Internet dating service. Her name was Eleanor. Dad called her Ellie. Whatever. I wasn’t going to be calling her “Mom.”

  Things were bad enough without my mother. But after Dad got married again, my life started going downhill even faster. Dad’s new wife, my stepmother, was so different from us. I’ve heard people say that opposites attract. Well, that must’ve been what happened here. She was white. We were brown. She was Protestant. We were Catholic. The list of differences was pretty long.

  Don’t get me wrong. My dad has always been a great dad. But ever since he remarried, things have gotten harder. First he lost his job. And then my stepmother threatened to leave him if he didn’t get another job to support her. They fought a lot. So, when Eleanor’s cousin in Texas offered Dad a job, he jumped at it. Anything to keep Eleanor happy.

  And that, in a nutshell, is how I got this way. Lonely, bored, and miserable in Texas.

  I had to do something to keep from going crazy. A couple of times a week I talked to one of my San Diego friends online when I was supposed to be doing homework.

  Dad had bought me a laptop computer for my fifteenth birthday in a lame attempt to cheer me up. It helped some, but not enough. Still, I was pretty grateful that some of my friends also had computers and we could instant message each other.

  “Last weekend’s storm brought in some killer waves,” my friend Chuck messaged me. “We surfed Black’s Beach. You should’ve been there.”

  “Don’t rub it in,” I replied.

  “Here, let me show you the video clip we shot,” he offered.

  He played back the video, which showed up in the lower corner of the computer window. I could see my friends Chuck, Daniel, and Michael in their wet suits on their surfboards in the water.

  “Who shot this?” I asked.

  “Brandon,” Chuck said. “He got a new waterproof video camera for Christmas. Now watch this part.”

  As the wave crested, Michael crouched low on his board, shot ahead of the other two surfers, hooked a sharp right, and zipped along parallel to the wave for a while.

  “Sick!” I exclaimed. “Man, you guys have all the fun!”

  Seeing that video clip made me miss California even more.

  “I’ve got to figure out a way to get back out there,” I said. “Are you taking good care of my board?”

  “Dude, don’t even question it,” Chuck replied. “It’s tip-top. Ready when you are.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Guess I’d better start doing my homework.”

  “Later, dude,” Chuck said.

  “Over and out,” I replied.

  I closed down the chat window and opened my online homework page. Let the fun begin.

  But I couldn’t really focus on homework. My mind kept wandering back to California. Back to my life as a young kid. I knew I had to have a serious talk with Dad.

  The following night we had meatloaf, peas, and potatoes for the umpteenth time. Eleanor was big on the basics: meat, vegetable, starch, and iced tea. You had to have iced tea if you lived in Texas. I was about to barf on the basics.

  After dinner I told Dad I needed to speak to him alone. So we
went into his little home office. Sometimes he worked from our house, so he had a computer system set up in there. And he’d brought home other stuff he needed for his job.

  “What is it, Mark?” Dad asked, after sitting down at his desk.

  I took a deep breath and jumped in.

  “You know I’m still miserable here, don’t you?” I said. “You do know that?”

  “Yeah, I know, buddy,” he said sympathetically. “But I don’t know what else to do about it. You don’t really seem to be making much of an effort to fit in.”

  “You don’t know the half of what I put up with at school,” I complained. “For some reason these kids don’t seem to think brown people should be in their class, and I’m four kinds of brown.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating a little,” Dad answered. “The people at my job don’t seem to care that I’m a darker-skinned. Or that my parents were Mexican and Filipino.”

  “That’s great,” I said. “I’m happy for you. But the kids of the people you work with—the kids I go to school with—aren’t like that. They act like it’s still the 1950s around here.”

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “Let me go back to California. Maybe I could live with one of my friends for a while. Their parents all like me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Dad said. “I don’t care how much the parents like you. None of them would allow you to move in, even if I would.”

  “But—!”

  “But nothing,” Dad said firmly. “End of conversation.”

  He pushed away from his desk and headed out of the office. At the door, he turned back to me.

  “You’re just going to have to try a little harder to make friends and fit in,” he advised. “You’re stuck here unless you can come up with a better plan.”

  With that, he left the room. And he left me thinking. A better plan, he said. Okay, I thought to myself, I’ll get right on it.

  For the next two days I carried on a dialogue in my head. I’d come up with an idea for a plan to get back to California, and then I’d throw it out. Sometimes I was surprised at how lame my ideas could be.

  But then, I was also surprised by my flashes of brilliance. An idea came to me that was nothing short of genius. At least in my mind.

  Chapter 2

  The Plan

  My real mother was half Chumash Indian and half Crow Indian. That’s what made me four kinds of brown: Mexican, Filipino, Chumash, and Crow. I don’t know why anyone would say Indians are red; they never look like that to me.

  Almost every summer of my young life I spent a month with my mother’s mother, my Nana. She lived on the Chumash reservation in central California, near the small town of Santa Ynez. I only vaguely remember some of the things Mom told me about our Chumash culture and history.

  The tiny reservation was smaller than most golf courses. I have to say it was beautiful there in that valley. A row of mountains ran along one side. Oak trees, vineyards, ranches, and orchards spread out for miles. And a river ran through it, stretching from the mountains to the ocean about twenty miles away.

  And that ocean meant there were beaches. And where there were beaches, there was surfing.

  I hadn’t been back to see Nana in three or four years. A visit was long overdue. You get where I was going with this, right? I presented my brilliant idea to my father the following night.

  “Dad, I need to spend some time with Nana,” I said innocently. “What if I went out and stayed with her for a while this summer like I used to? I’m sure she’d appreciate a visit.”

  Dad thought about that idea for a minute.

  “I bet you’re pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you?” Dad responded finally. “Is this the first part of your long-range plan?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked with my best innocent face.

  “You’ll spend part of the summer with Nana,” Dad explained. “Then at the end of the visit, you’ll tell me you don’t want to come back to Texas. You’ll say you want to stay there and go to school.”

  “Wow, I hadn’t thought of that,” I replied. I hoped the surprised look on my face was convincing. “What a great idea!”

  “You can drop the act,” Dad said. “You forget that I was a teenager once myself.”

  I let out a big sigh. My cover had been blown.

  “But, I’ll think about it,” he added.

  That perked me right up.

  “You will?”

  “I’ll even call your Nana to see what she thinks of the idea,” Dad offered.

  “Awesome!”

  This was exciting news.

  “I know things have been tough on you,” Dad admitted. “I do want you to be happy.”

  He hugged me.

  “Now go do your homework,” he said, and I turned to go.

  “And don’t spend too much time chatting with your California friends online,” he instructed.

  “You know about that?”

  “Of course I do,” he said sternly. “I know everything,” he added with a smile.

  I logged in to instant messaging to see who was already online. Michael was there.

  “If this works, maybe you guys can come up to Chumash,” I told Michael online. “We can surf near Santa Barbara, or my grandma might let me come down for a visit.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” he replied with excitement. “I’ll let the guys know you might be nearby this summer. Are you sure your grandmother will go for it?”

  “Are you kidding? She loves to hang out with all of her grandkids. I lost track of how many of us there are. Twelve or thirteen, maybe. And a few great grandkids too.”

  Michael was amazed at the size of that part of my family. I really hadn’t thought about it much, because all I’d ever known was my big family. I thought everyone had a family like mine.

  After I signed off, I opened the calendar on my computer. It was now April, and school would be out the second week of June. I could stick around until after Father’s Day and then head west. That should work.

  I stopped myself right there. Nothing was worse than getting all excited about big plans that never saw the light of day. I didn’t want to set myself up for a huge disappointment.

  I put the calendar away and tried to focus on the here and now. Homework. That was what I was supposed to be doing. I concentrated on that with a great deal of difficulty.

  I didn’t want to seem too pushy with Dad, so I didn’t try to get an answer from him for a couple of days. I tried to play it cool. I tried to make Dad think I didn’t care about it that much.

  When the weekend came, I helped around the yard doing chores. It was spring, and stuff was starting to grow. Dad was planting herbs and vegetables in his garden, like he does every year. I mowed the lawn and trimmed some bushes. I even dug up a few weeds. I was working hard. I think I overdid it.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Dad advised. “Slow down or you’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Okay,” I replied, as I threw a pile of weeds into the wheelbarrow.

  I paused to take a breath. Then I let it out.

  “When are you going to give me your answer about this summer?” I blurted. “I’ve been waiting for days!”

  “Oh, that,” Dad said in a joking way. “I’d almost forgotten all about it.”

  “Really?”

  “No, not really,” he answered. “I just wanted to see how long you could hold out before exploding.” He laughed. “You lasted longer than I expected.”

  He continued to smile and not tell me his answer.

  “Okay, enough is enough,” I said, totally frustrated. “Out with it!”

  “I’ll tell you over a glass of iced tea,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. We sat down on the front porch, where a tray holding a pitcher of tea and two glasses waited for us. I guess Eleanor had put it there when I wasn’t looking.

  “I talked to Nana,” Dad said as he poured tea in our glasses. “Of course, she’s all excited about the possibi
lity of you coming out for the summer.”

  “Great!” I said as I took my first gulp.

  “And I talked to Eleanor about you staying out there to start high school,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. I resented Dad talking to her about anything having to do with me. “She doesn’t have any say over what I do. She’s not my mother.”

  “Actually, she does have some say about what goes on in your life,” Dad said. “She has ever since she and I got married.”

  “What? That’s not right.”

  I was more than a little mad about this.

  “Even though she’s not your mother, she is a woman,” Dad explained. “Men often need input from women to help them make decisions about their kids. Women see things differently.”

  I felt defeated. I hung my head. My stepmother had done nothing but ruin things for me up to this point. Why would that stop now? I waited for the bad news.

  “She said I should let you do it,” Dad continued. “I wasn’t so sure myself. But she talked me into it.”

  I looked up at him. He was smiling.

  “Are you kidding me right now, or are you serious?”

  “I’m totally serious. You can spend part of the summer with Nana.”

  I jumped for joy. Literally. I leaped off the porch, and while I was in the air, I might have screamed, “Wahoo,” or something ridiculous like that. I landed in the grass and rolled over on my back. The sky above me was a deep blue.

  Dad walked over and looked down at me.

  “And, depending on how things go,” he continued, “you might be able to stay with her through high school.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. This was too good to be true. Just then, Eleanor stepped out on the porch.

  “Did you tell him?” she asked my dad.

  “Yep,” he answered. “Mark flipped out, and here he lies.”

  I stood up and looked at Eleanor with fresh eyes. Maybe she wasn’t the wicked witch sent to earth to ruin my life.

  “Thanks,” I said in a quiet voice.

  “You’re absolutely welcome,” she said with a smile and a nod. Then she went back inside.