Black And White Thinking

Same Walk, Different Shoes

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

I dreamt of the wilderness again, the river, the way the wetlands sing in the morning light.  I’m awake, making coffee the way I like it, not like Jackson used to, scorching the granules, always too hot, how many times did I tell him.  I love that I can make it my way now, no one telling me it doesn’t matter.  It does.  We could never agree on anything.  I’ve put on my maroon suit.  I want the attorney to take me seriously, he won a case like this before, so he can advise me, and I want him to think I care.  Which I do, except I’m standing at the kitchen window of my apartment and the sun’s already scorching the sidewalk outside and I’m drinking my coffee and I’m thinking of my client and the casino he wants to build and how the cars in the parking lot, and the bright lights outside, and slots and tables inside will frighten away the otters and flatten the bulrushes and how the wide open beautiful sky will be empty of hawks if we win, and how if I’d known I would never have taken the case.

I went out there last week, thirty-seven point three acres of marsh and swamp, a river running through it that’s supposed to be the boundary, that’s what the state says, and I didn’t realise there’d be mallards and coots and cranes and vultures, I swear I saw a beaver though my client says I couldn’t have.  Native Americans are of the land, everybody knows that, but he didn’t tell me what was there. Why wouldn’t he do that? If I hadn’t been out to see it I wouldn’t have known. But I went out to the reservation and measured the boundary, the one my client says is the right one, and the one the state say is theirs, and the mallards flew and the trout splashed and lifted rainbow bodies to the light and dragon flies swooped low and I crouched in galoshes and saw frogs and almost sank in mud and thought they can’t really want to lose all this for the sake of money, maybe it’s a trick. I campaigned for Native American rights when I was in college, so.

That’s what I’m going to say to Mr Washington, the attorney who knows about this stuff. I don’t like to say I’m in over my head, but he’s agreed to meet with me. I mean, I’m no one for the state, but everyone wants to protect the wilderness, don’t they? I wash up my coffee cup.  I adjust my suit jacket and straighten the skirt. The sun beats down on the sidewalk and in my head the wilderness sparkles and river splashes and though I’m alone now, though Jackson isn’t here to say otherwise, I know I’m right.  

In the waiting room of the attorney’s office I put on my heels, they’re the same colour as my suit that Jackson used to say was like I’d squashed a bug and a berry and poured wine on top; he’d say it was purple and I’d say it’s maroon Jackson. Get it right. He never thought anything mattered. He was like the river bending this way and that. He thought it was okay for his son to eat sweets in the living room and leave smears all over the rug, he thought it was okay not to teach him to say please and thank you, he was always saying, pumpkin, loosen up.  How could I live with that.  I’m a kind and considerate person.  I’m very flexible, I’ll always try to accommodate but there are some things which – I put my sneakers in my hold all and smile at the receptionist. She’s told me I won’t have to wait long. I figured law was a way of doing what was right and paying rent. I guess I’m old to be starting a new career, thirty-five and I should have known what I was doing by now, my dad sure did, he told me I’d be wasting my time getting married, he said that guy? when I brought Jackson home. He was right. I feel at home in the law.  I should have done it straight out of high school. 

Mr Washington’s office is made of plywood, that’s how it feels, cheap and flimsy, the walls are an apple-green white that’s kind of sick-making. On the windowsill, smooth as silk grey rocks piled in diminishing size have a spout of water running through them, emerging like a lazy fountain at the top, water that’s got all day. I feel like Ally McBeal. It was my dad’s favourite show.

“Carol.” I hold out my hand but he doesn’t get up or shake it.

He says, “What have you got,” as if I’ve been there already an hour.

“It’s inconclusive,” I hand him a piece of paper, it’s from the state records but the boundaries have been drawn by old ink marking reservation territory, and the pen line is as thick as the river.  Mr Washington has too much hair for a man of his age.  It’s thick like an iceberg or a wave caught in action. He takes the xerox that I made in the office of the county clerk, the building on Main Street that looked like it’d been there five minutes but was probably as old as the reservation itself.

He studies the map. There isn’t much else to see. Who owns what. The state drew the line and they say it’s this side of the river, not that, and no you can’t build a casino. The state wants to protect the wilderness which is weird because usually it’s the reservation Indians who want to do that, isn’t it?  I say this to him.  He hands the paper back.

“You got the deeds?” 

I hand them over, too.  I hate inconclusive.  There’s always a right and a wrong. 

“And what are you thinking, Carol?”

It feels like a test. I shift my weight onto my left foot. My heels are killing me.

“I’m thinking the boundary is the river.”

He looks kind of blankly at me.

I shift my weight again. “And so in this case, the state means to protect the wilderness.”

“How do you know motive?”

“They’re contesting the boundary, right, so they’re trying to stop the development.”

“Maybe they’re trying to stop progress.”

“Of gambling?”

“Of Native American business.”

I can’t help it.  I look around for a chair. Mr Washington doesn’t move, and I really want to take my suit jacket off.  It’s hot in that plywood office.  I feel like I’m dying of thirst to the sound of a desk toy fountain. It sends patterns over the ceiling as the sun beats down. Mr Washington blows his nose, puts his kerchief away in his pocket, leans down to a bottom drawer and the next thing I know he’s handing me a file.

“You don't know where, or how, you found this.”

The trickling water and the sun and my shoes and now this file in my hands as if it really is Ally McBeal and he’s putting on his glasses like it’s time for me to go.

I can’t take my jacket off now because I’m sweating.  The file has a piece of paper in it stapled to another map. It’s dated eighteen seventy-two. I don’t know where he got it. It must have sat in dusty old filing cabinets since they made the reservation. It’s a photocopy, so somewhere, there must be an original. Or someone destroyed it. It shows the deeds of the reservation go way beyond the river and into the next county. It shows how the state have crept, year upon year upon decade upon the land that they decided should be reserved for the Native Americans who said you could as good as own the sky when the idea of ownership landed on their lap with the white man’s diseases and guns. I remember learning that in school.  I remember telling my dad that I wanted to fight for minority rights and him saying good girl.

I drive home and all the way the skies darken and the air rumbles with the coming of a storm. I can see the vultures wheeling in my mind over the bulrushes, and I can hear the green frogs croaking their mating call, I can feel the wind through the long grass on the riverbanks and I want to put out my hand but all I can touch is the glass of the old Chevy I managed to hang on to when Jackson left, and all I can see is downtown with its ugliness of sidewalks and trash wheeling into gutters, and all I can hear is the scream of brakes in the afterwork sky and there’s no sunset. Mr Washington said sometimes, Carol, it’s not as black and white as you think and I said but the wilderness and he didn’t say anything in return. He just tapped his nail on his desk as if I was missing something.  He knew my dad.  They used to work together.  So that means he must have known my mum, too.

If I bury the file the state will win, but the river and the wetlands will remain. There’ll be no development, my client will have to build his casino elsewhere but I’m thinking maybe all this is just to push the state back and redraw the boundary line where it was supposed to be; he can’t really want to put up a development because that doesn’t make any sense to my – this is how I go to sleep, this thinking going round and round my head, spread out alone in my double bed, and I remember, as I’m drifting off, this: I’m with my mum. We’re at the hospital. She’s holding my hand. She says things don’t always make sense and I can’t believe she’s right. If you’re a Native American, you preserve the land. If you love someone, you don’t die.

I dream I’m by the river. I take off my shoes and now I’m in the stream of it and my maroon suit is leaking colour into the water, I see the dark red-purple of it flowing away from me, I feel its force like it will buckle my knees. The bulrushes bow and sway in the storm that gathers, there’s lightening and the crash-snap of trees breaking, there’s a voice, no one owns the land and the gale is whipping my hair over my face. I see my client walking away on the other side, the side that isn’t theirs but I know it is.  I see progress, the bulldozers and bricks, I see the hawks flying to find another nest, I see my mother standing with me in the water. It rushes my ears, goes over my head, it pounds my eyes and I’m crying, my knuckles against my temples, digging in. I’m crying and breathing and I can see my mother and bright lights and she’s whispering no one knows anything. And I want to stop the river but I can’t. And I want to understand but I don’t. And I want everything to be clear but it isn’t.

The storm last night brought down a tree in my street. There are guys out there with chainsaws. The radio says there are trees down all over the city, the roads are blocked, I rang the office, I said I can work from home today. And when I make my coffee I think about how Jackson used to not care if he scalded it, and when I take my cup into the living room, I think about how his son used to smear chocolate hands on the rug, and how Jackson used to say you’re so fixed, and how he got to shouting it. And I think what I owe the wilderness, and I think what I owe my client, and I think what the state thinks it doesn’t owe anyone and what it thinks it has the right to do and has done for hundreds of years, and I think of how my dad sat on the floor of his condo after the funeral saying she wasn’t supposed to die but she did, and how we don’t know anything, how none of us know anything.