The Way

The one good thing about the ride to school is that I can have a little privacy. No one ever sits with me on the bus. It’s a new bus with lots of room in it. All the buses in the district are new because of the casino. It has pumped so much money into the community as a whole-not just the Koacook Tribe-that they don’t have to make do with a fleet of aging and overcrowded yellow clunkers like the perennially backfiring rusty cattle cars they called buses back at my last school. They only had a dozen buses for the whole junior high, and they packed them like cattle cars, chugging from one trailer park to the next. I had to get up an hour and a half before school because the bus ride was so long.

That wasn’t as hard for me as it was for some kids. Mom always got me up early. “My grampa told me you have to greet the new day along with the first songs of the birds,” she would say back then. But these days she finds herself going to bed just as I am getting up. The newest hires at the casino get stuck with the graveyard shifts and the hours no one else wants. This week hers are from 8 P.M. until 5 A.M.

“My morning bird songs are now lullabies,” she said this morning. I smiled back at her, as if it really was a funny joke and not another example of how upside-down our lives have become since Dad decided to make his life as an over-the road trucker separate from ours.

A year before we moved here, Dad started looking off into the distance whenever he was home. He and Mom stopped making eye contact. I read their body language like it was an open book. Even though I wanted to scream when he said it, it didn’t surprise me when he said he’d signed on for more long-haul assignments. Trucking lettuce from the San Fernando Valley to Boston. Turning around for another four-day run and not ever coming home. Not when Mom and me were living up near Green Bay. Not even down here to the Koacook Rez-even though we’re just an hour’s drive from Beantown.

It doesn’t feel much like a family now that it’s just Mom and me. The only relatives I know now are from Mom’s stories about them.

I wish I’d known Mom’s grampa. Just from the stories she’s told me that he passed on to her, he must have been really cool. But he died of diabetes way before I was born. So did my grandparents on both sides of my family. Well, not exactly. Actually only one of them died of diabetes, and one of my grandmothers lived to see me as a toddler. Grandfather LeBeau was taken by cancer, and Grand mother LeBeau died in a car accident. Mom’s dad, Grampa Wadzo, was, we assume, a casualty of that long-ago war that was fought in Vietnam.

Did you notice that I said that we assumed Grandfather Wadzo died in Vietnam? He went MIA during the withdrawal of American troops in 1972 and was never found. Mom was born three months after he disappeared, and Grama Wadzo was only eighteen years old. She’d married him while he was home on leave. She must have loved him, though, because she just kept waiting for him to return, and she never got married again.