A Woman’s Life, in 10 Scenes

The first time Celeste understood the word “black” was when she saw him idling by his horse outside the race track.

People thought that out in the desert, everything must be pitch black at night. But the sky she knew was a lucid dark blue, all lit up by the moon which, not having any other competition, was impudently bright. Even on cloudy nights Celeste and her friends walked around in the range illumined only by the flickering ember of their cigarettes. Like little red stars fallen to Earth for bad behavior. There was nothing black in the desert.

But he—where to begin? There was his horse, long-legged and skinny like all the Reservation horses but armored in a lustrous black coat and daubs of red paint. It stepped in place and tossed its mane back in a gesture of pride and anger. Other riders about to race would have been terrified by such a restless horse. But he kept calmly stretching, keeping one leg straight while side-lunging deep into the other. His hair was braided into two long ropes down to his elbows, and their soft, black ends grazed the blooming dust every time he lunged lower and brought his crotch almost to the ground. Only when the horse unfurled its lips and whinnied in a desperate cry for attention did he turn around. He lay a hand on the horse’s face without a word, and it soon stopped pacing and whipping its head. It was not quite the usual love and devotion with which horse people communicate with their beasts, nor was it discipline. It was something else altogether that quieted the bronco down. When Celeste’s girl cousin told her the man was one Tommy Wolf, a Yakama, she instantly saw a black wolf that does things for its own reasons that not even other wolves can identify.

Celeste was not just an average girl, to tell the truth. Her parents and most of her teachers expected her to graduate and even go to college. She tried harder at school than she let on, and got more As than her friends knew. Celeste was a girl who once wrote an essay about a book about Frida Kahlo even though she’d never read that particular book. But there were so few books in Warm Springs anyway that it could hardly be her fault, and if there had been that book anywhere near her, she would have read it. In fact, she wanted so much to have read the book that she felt as though she’d done it, which was how she got to writing that essay. When it was actually finished, however, she felt a little ill.

Celeste played it cool in front of her friends, who had known her from the age of diapers only as Cece. Cece, a girl who could split a bottle of gin in an hour and climb quietly through her bedroom window like a coyote. Everyone else—people who didn’t know her very well, sarcastic neighbors, and boys secretly in love with her—called her Miss Warm Springs, although she wasn’t even eligible to compete at age 17. Her mother had held the title once and it was assumed that she’d carry on the family honor. That was one of the reasons people said the Thompsons were a bit uppity. Another thing was that her father was thought to be wealthier than he deserved to be. For these reasons the adult members of the Thompson family tried to keep some distance between them and their neighbors. But Celeste made friends with whomever she wanted, being the smartest and the prettiest girl in the Reservation by anyone’s estimation. She was not the kind of girl who got easily scared, even by wolves.

After the race, the sun came down hard and fast over the horizon like a hot tonsil. Celeste was waiting for her cousin outside the gates when Tommy Wolf came out, leading his horse with one hand and fist-bumping his holder with the other. He had won, just as she’d predicted, and he was in that cloudlike euphoria of winners where only other winners were granted admission. He didn’t turn around to look at her, even though she was glowing rose and violet in the twilight. Just as she’d predicted.

Warm Springs Reservation was formed by the Treaty of 1855 whereby the Wascos and the Warm Springs tribes (the Tenino and the Tygh) ceded 10 million acres of land to the U.S. government in exchange for $150,000 and 578,000 acres for their exclusive use. Historical economists say that the Indians were compensated for the 9,422,000 acres at roughly $0.99 per acre in today’s terms. They also point out that it is a common misconception that these were Indian ancestral lands. “The place you have mentioned, I have not seen. There is no Indians or whites there yet, and that is the reason I say I know nothing about that country,” the Wasco chief Joseph Mark said at the time, plaintive in a very understated way. The Wascos were once a prosperous river tribe that controlled the commerce in mid-Columbia River. When they arrived at their new Reservation, they found canyons and plateaus clad in red soil and rabbitbrush that was good for naught except bands of wild horses.

This was, of course, completely intentional on the part of the U.S. government. They had worked hard to give the Indians the least desirable land in Oregon, and for a while it looked like they’d succeeded. But what the whites completely missed at the time was that there were two springs in Warm Springs: an ice-cold and clear one that fed into the Deschutes River, itself a tributary of the Columbia; and another diabolically hot and healing one where you could bathe comfortably even in the middle of a high-desert blizzard. The use of the cold spring was shared equally by the community in this arid land. But the right to the hot spring, which was primarily valued for its sacred uses, was divided between Chief Joseph Mark and respective chiefs of the Warm Springs and the Paiutes. The lines of the other two chiefs soon died out so the oldest heir of Chief Mark became the sole controller of the hot spring by 1905. This did not bother the rest of the Indians as long as the Chief’s heir continued to allow them to bathe. Then in 1965, Flora Mark—the last of Chief Mark’s bloodline—married one Randy Thompson, thereby handing over the hot-spring rights to another name.

By this time, the electric company from Portland had dammed up the Deschutes at a few key places so that the salmon could no longer swim up to their nesting spots. To make their chances even worse, the company eventually installed hydroelectric turbines to generate power that was ferried all the way to the city. That must have meant money, although most people never saw any—all they knew was that the salmon were gone. It was widely and wisely speculated that the whites would come after the hot spring next, and its sole owner would die a very wealthy man. This was how Flora and Randy’s son, Randy Jr., became the object of collective enmity, other than the fact that he married the prettiest woman in the Reservation, the former Miss Warm Springs.

Celeste’s cousin had a friend who lived in Walla Walla, who invited them to the relay after-party at someone’s house. It was in the middle of a hay field just outside town, the kind of place you recognize by the crunching of the gravel driveway and dogs barking in the distance. There was a fire going in an oil drum in front of the house. Around its warmth, guys were clutching beer cans and girls were rocking their bodies to the boombox half-hidden by the long blond grass. This was familiar to Celeste, but she nonetheless felt intimidated by the fact that most of them looked older than her. Her cousin, who possessed a worldliness belying her 18 years, strode up to the ice box and fished out two cans of hard lemonade. Almost as soon as they took their first sip, some huge guy swooped in to cage her cousin in a bear hug. His arms were thicker than Celeste’s thighs and his t-shirt looked like its sleeves had been violently eaten by a fanged animal, contributing to his ursine aura. The cousin laughed; this was the friend whose party this was. I have to catch up with him, the cousin whispered. Go see if Tommy Wolf is here, she added with a wink.

She had already scanned the group around the fire immediately upon arrival and not found him. There were some more guys sitting on plastic lawn chairs on the porch; they gawked at her as she went through the open front door. It was hot inside with the smell of beer and sweat, with that particular excitement of bodies—the way, especially when one is young, the mass of other people’s bodies in a room can offer a world of possibilities. Celeste took a gulp of her lemonade, told herself to play it cool. There were riders here, the guys still wearing bandanas and war paint and long socks with cut-off denim shorts. Girls were fanned around them, giggling and bumping into the guys and acting drunker than they were. A short girl with tiny shorts and waist-length hair was burrowing her head into a rider’s chest. He had black braids and the hand that he raised to lightly embrace the short girl was uncharacteristically calm. It was the same gesture he’d used to quiet his horse. Celeste’s heart dropped to the floor so hard that she was half afraid other people could hear it. She was certain they could at least sense it, because he looked at her just then. He unwound himself from the short girl. Turned and looked at her again, a little bit longer this time. Celeste gulped down her hard lemonade. Third time their eyes met, he disentangled himself from the circle and walked toward her. There was a bit of idleness in his approach too, just as when he was stretching before the race. Not fast, but focused.

It was rather unjust that Eva Thompson had a reputation for being uppity because she worked at five different jobs just to get by. She sewed; made beaded bags and ornaments for the sole souvenir shop in town; baked huckleberry pies for the stall by Hwy 26 that Randy ran; worked behind the cash register at the local grocery; and did accounting for the anti-drug association. But people still said she “gave airs.” Such as, the decades-old 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica that she’d bought from a traveling salesman as a young bride (foreseeing that her future children will need better books to read than what the Reservation school could offer). Such as, her insistence on painting her nails and blow-drying her hair. It was not exactly said, but universally felt, that Eva acted like someone destined for a better place. Randy told their daughter Celeste that Eva “had an artistic side.”

Because of this, no one was surprised when Eva declared her wish to learn to code. She drove out to Madras with Randy and brought home a new computer like a prized puppy. Every night, she sat in front of the computer (installed on one end of their long dining table) and an open copy of Coding for Dummies, occasionally checking her work against a YouTube tutorial. Sometimes Randy gave her shoulder rubs and Celeste offered her tea, whispering words of encouragement as though she were running a marathon and they were her coaches.

Mostly, however, they left her alone. Randy, for one, was busy dealing with a company called Vesuvius that wanted to talk to him about the hot spring. He had the invigorating feeling that he’d been waiting—preparing—for this moment all his life. He thought that he would intone a dignified “No,” the whites would beg and implore, he would never waver, and then they would be sent packing with their tails between their legs. But then things got complicated.

“We understand your concerns, Mr. Thompson. Especially in light of the historic exploitation of your people’s land and resources. Please understand that you have our fullest sympathies and support,” said the director of business development. He was neither young nor old, with black-rimmed glasses, carefully side-parted hair, and a red-and-black plaid shirt that was supposed to be rustic but couldn’t be bought anywhere outside a city.

“Not sure if you drove up the Deschutes, Mr. Chapman,” Randy said, and the man squealed, just call me Dax!

“Okay, Dax. Not sure if you saw that dam there, but after that was built we stopped having any salmon runs for fifty years. With the fish ladder they’ve returned, but they still have a hard time coming all the way up. Our people have been eating salmon for ten thousand years, you understand? We gave that up for what—power in Portland? Any time we open ourselves up to you folks this is what ends up happening. It’s the Indians that get the short shrift.”

Dax nodded with the solemn air of someone whose grandparents have just passed away. “I hear you, Mr. Thompson,” he said breathily. “Please know I have the deepest respect for your way of life… I absolutely love nature… I go hiking, mountain biking, and rock climbing every chance I get…” Dax cleared his throat.

“But you should know, Vesuvius is what’s good for the planet. We’ve developed the world’s first-ever scalable technology for a geothermal energy plant that is—we believe—the key to mitigating climate change. Clean, pure energy with zero carbon emissions. 100% renewable. And with profit share in perpetuity. This is… Something bigger than indigenous or white or POC. This is about the future of Earth!”

After Dax left, Randy sat still on the aging sectional permanently indented in the shape of the family’s bodies. Here was Eva’s bottom on the chaise longue. Here was Celeste’s nook where she liked to read. Suddenly its dilapidated state came into his eyes like never before; that sectional had belonged to his parents, for god sakes. The money that they were offering would be enough to buy thousands of new sofas. They’d never have to work again, him and Eva and Celeste, and even Celeste’s children. In perpetuity.

“Celeste!” Randy called out and his daughter came out from her room, rubbing her eyes with an air of exhaustion. “I’m going to the river to count the fish. Wanna come?”

Counting the salmon and steelheads was something Celeste had done with her father ever since she was little. As usual, she stood by the river bank and looked for the fish carcasses bobbing in the current. Their spawned and spent bodies looked like logs of silver against the darkly flowing water. The pearly remains didn’t look sad to Celeste, however. They had succeeded in coming home. Just one out of a thousand brothers and sisters made it back to the stream of their birth. Even when the water became too hot and too low year after year, even over dams, turbines, and run-offs, they insisted on fulfilling their life’s purpose. They seemed to be saying, Some day when the rivers dry up, we will dry up too—but not until then. Not yet.

So the more dead fish were found, the happier she was. Only when she saw the eye of a half-rotten, fuschia male Chinook did she look away in queasiness. Although she made a principled attempt to remain indifferent, the nausea was a constant reminder of that July day. The sun and dust and horses. Fire in the oil drum, his hands on her body. Their surprising warmth and gentleness. For a while he had texted her every day, then every other day, then once a week, until she lost all sense of the brief, dizzying happiness of wanting and being wanted. Still, she wasn’t angry. She believed that he would drive down to see her from White Swan if he knew how she was struggling on his account. But he hadn’t mentioned meeting up again and she was too proud to use her secret to force him.

Her father shouted, “Thirty-two!” He looked revitalized and happy. When they got home, he told Eva what had happened with Vesuvius and that he was going to refuse their offer.

“You know I support you, honey,” Eva said, looking up from the computer screen. Then she added, “Did you know about this thing called Bitcoin?”

Randy hadn’t heard of Bitcoin. So it fell on Eva to explain from the beginning that there were these things called “cryptocurrency” that were essentially “bits of long, unique code” that were so indecipherable as to be worth money—in fact, lots of money. There were coders, really smart people all over the world, who were “mining” these bits of code like gold coins from the digital ether. That’s what they did for a living. And one of them, whom she met in an online forum for self-taught coding students, offered her a special deal on some of his Bitcoins because he valued her academic fervor, the way she was trying to rise above. At her age, no less.

This didn’t make sense to Randy from the very beginning, but he asked hopefully, “What kind of a deal?”

“I bought 100 Bitcoins for $10,000,” Eva said with pride. Randy groaned, and Celeste crossed and uncrossed her arms. “Eva, that’s Celeste’s college fund. Everything we’ve saved. Are you out of your mind?”

Eva laughed, and at that moment her face had the radiance of a former beauty queen. “Honey, you’re upset because you just don’t get it! The thing about Bitcoin is that the prices go up, up, and up. By the time we have to pay Celeste’s deposit, we’ll sell it for five times what I paid. Just watch!”

“Okay, then what is it that you bought, exactly?” Randy connected his words together with difficulty. Eva went swiftly to the family safe and brought back 10 sheets of paper. Celeste took the first sheet, which said this:

10 Bitcoins, National Australia Bank

<aspoijac92835709qpjsfdaonaklnsdlty18u23u50q9jajsmzljdf8qqiw05utojspoajosdfjaposjoziz==1390234h?/0293588!>

“Mom, I don’t know,” Celeste said.

“This is the code!” Eva shouted, a bit more impatiently this time.

“This doesn’t look real, Eva,” Randy dragged a hand down the length of his face. His cheek stretched like putty under his palm. “How did you pay for this? Maybe we can get the money back.”

“I wired it… William said he’s in Australia!” Eva insisted, but her face was turning white. The next morning at 9 am sharp, Randy walked into the bank in Madras with the sheets of Bitcoin in his hand. The branch manager looked at them carefully and brought over his associates to his corner office. Soon they called the police, while Randy asked again and again, since they had the account number that had received the funds, couldn’t they just simply reverse the transaction? They did trace the account, not to Australia but to Kerala, and it was completely withdrawn and closed already. The bank said that since Eva had willingly made the wire transfer, this was not a “fraud” but a “scam,” an important distinction which unfortunately put her outside the protection of insurance. The police said that if this had happened domestically, it would be a different matter, but pursuing overseas criminals was nearly impossible.

Her mother stayed in bed for a week, moaning and twisting fistfuls of her sheets. But on the seventh day, she got up, took a shower, and started rolling the dough for the huckleberry pie. As a way of explanation to Celeste, she only said that it was like she was enchanted. She thought it was a lovely dream but when she woke up, it turned out to be a nightmare. Before long, her mother was back to her usual self; the only difference was that she no longer painted her nails.

Most people would have thought that in light of the Bitcoin incident, it made sense to take the offer from Vesuvius—at the very least for Celeste’s sake. One door closed, but another remained open; Celeste could still become one of the few seniors to go to college that year. But Randy interpreted the signs completely the opposite way, that outsiders cannot be trusted and that vying for quick money always brings ruins. So he called Dax Chapman and refused the offer, certain that his neighbors and relatives would appreciate his moral fortitude. But when the word got out about Vesuvius, they were angry that Randy didn’t sell the rights and share the profit with the rest of the tribal members. They said he was holding out for a higher bidder when he knew what good that money could do in the Reservation. Selfish, they said. Greedy.

Even Celeste’s longtime friends acted cold around her in a way that suggested they had turned their backs on all the Thompsons. When the few remaining sympathizers invited her to their parties, it didn’t go unnoticed that she’d stopped accepting drinks or cigarettes. She learned it’s easier to stay home to avoid getting questioned. For the first time in her life, Celeste didn’t have anyone to talk to, so much so that she caught and stopped herself a few times from talking to it. That’s when she abandoned her principled resistance and texted Tommy, and he drove three hours from White Swan to see her.

Their first meeting since the relay day was at Reused Cafe. Celeste waited in one of the four Formica booths surrounded by racks of used clothes, baby stuff, DVDs, and gently broken furniture. Her eyes leapt up when he came in. The same long, black braids. The same intentional walk. When she stood up to hug him, he caught her in his arms and gently lowered her down as if she would break otherwise. This made her so happy that her eyes became hot and red.

“Tommy,” she said. That was all she could say in the moment.

“Yes, Celeste,” he reached across the table and grabbed both of her hands. “I’m going to get a coffee. Can I get you anything?”

By the time Tommy came back with their drinks, Celeste was feeling hopeful. Maybe this was how it was supposed to be, getting taken care of. He watched her as she took a big sip of her latte.

“How are you feeling?” He asked. “Is everything…okay?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been to the doctor,” she said.

“Then… Are you sure?” Tommy bit his lips. “Maybe—”

“I took two tests,” Celeste said. She’d also missed her periods and threw up all her meals, but she didn’t mention this. Tommy nodded and stared at his hands, interlaced together on the table.

“So, what do you want to do?” He asked. His coffee was turning cold untouched, she noticed. What did she want? Did she still have a chance at going to college? Or a chance at Miss Warm Springs? What would happen if she kept it? She would become fat and ugly, and Tommy would lose interest in her. Her parents and teachers would be so disappointed. Maybe this ignominy would put the final nail on the coffin of the Thompson family.

“I don’t know. What do you think?” She said. Tommy sighed.

“I was going to tell you. I’m moving to Portland,” he said, eyes downcast. “You know there’s nothing in White Swan for me.”

“What about your horses?” Celeste asked, and the way he sighed made her regret her question immediately.

“I’ve sold them already,” Tommy said quietly. “It’s for the best. Sometimes in life…” He smiled in lieu of finishing his thought, but Celeste was glad he left it unsaid.

“So I’ll be in Portland, looking for a job. It will be hard for me to look after you. Do you know what I mean?”

“Are you saying I should get it taken care of?” Celeste’s voice quivered. Tommy took her hands again in his own.

“No, that’s not what I meant. We still have some time to think about all this, right? Maybe I’ll get a job quickly in Portland, and who knows…” Tommy’s voice dissipated but she knew he was trying. Maybe he’d get a job soon and ask her to join him; maybe she would also look for a job while waiting for the baby to be born. Now she realized she’d always called it “baby” in her head without meaning to. The next thing she thought of, with no rhyme or reason, was a coffee table, which she thought was important to have in a grown-up apartment. It made her feel a little proud that she had foreknowledge of these things, which Tommy would have no notion of now but would appreciate in time.

A month passed after the meeting in which Celeste patiently waited for Tommy to send word. A call, a text, a smoke signal. There was nothing. As another month passed, Celeste found it increasingly hard to squeeze into her normal clothes. In a fit of anxiety, she confided to her girl cousin what had happened. She, in turn, reached out to her Walla Walla friend, who was close with all the horse-relay crowd in Yakama. Evidently, Tommy was working at a gas station in Portland, somewhere near Burnside—according to a friend who had visited. This was deemed a good enough lead that Celeste decided to skip school one Friday and drive up there.

He hadn’t answered any of Celeste’s messages in weeks. But when she texted that she was on her way to Portland, he wrote back immediately saying he will meet her. Around 8 pm, when his shift ended. Right now he was busy at work. Where? She asked simply to avoid taking too much time away from him. No response. Celeste turned her eyes back to the open window where the plains rolled on in silence. The sagebrushes with their yellow-blooming fingertips were holding aloft a dense November fog. Hidden by the atmosphere, at a place due east from Celeste’s car, the hot spring was gushing out into the open, its steaming waters once again forgotten. The sky was an undulating gray from horizon to horizon. There was nothing; there was everything.

She kept driving along Hwy 26 until the high desert turned to a dry juniper forest, then a rainforest of Doug firs and cedars. The trees were replaced by country stores and then strip malls and eventually, an unbroken stretch of tattoo shops, supermarkets, restaurants, theaters, hospitals, and especially gas stations. There seemed to be one every other block. In Warm Springs, there had been only one.

Where is your gas station? She texted him. No response. It was still only 5 pm. Even at this point she hadn’t realized what she’d have to endure, because she was wondering how she might spend the next few hours until their appointed time. It even occurred to her that she might be able to catch a movie or eat something, after first finding his gas station. No response. But when she got to Burnside, she found out that it was a very long street that ran through the entire city with seemingly thousands of gas stations around it. After stopping at ten gas stations and asking if a Tommy Wolf worked there, she parked the car and decided to walk.

The sun had set hours ago. No response. It astonished her to see how dark it was all around; the streaming lights made the rest of the world—the in-between places—look even darker. Every step she took drew her into the shadows, yet she felt powerless to do anything else. It got windier and colder. No response. She realized she was standing on a bridge. Even its rusty red steel looked sable on a moonless night. But that was not when she realized the true meaning of the word “black.” It was when she stared down on the lapping river below that she saw clearly the blackest things in the world—the human heart and the watery depths in which the fish floated and the watery depths inside her where a human heart was beating in complete darkness. She felt a strong yearning to bob along in the current like a silver log. She would be embedded into the black, he would have to remember her then. The railing only came up to her waist, and she leaned out into the night. Just before she let herself go, her phone vibrated in her pocket. Not Tommy. Eva.

“Where are you, honey?” Her mother’s voice said. “I ran into your teacher at the market and she asked if you were sick today…”

Celeste didn’t know where to begin. They would not understand.

“Mom… I don’t know where I am,” she said, and the terror and sadness she’d dammed up inside came to break her down all at once.

“Can you come get me?” She said through sobs, holding onto the rails. I’m so sorry baby. Baby I’m sorry.

“We’re in the car now,” Eva replied. There was a sound of her directing something to Randy, car doors opening and slamming. “We’re coming to get you.”

No matter where in the world.

Frida Kahlo, born Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderón, (July 6, 1907, Coyoacán, Mexico—July 13, 1954, Coyoacán), was a Mexican painter best known for her searing self-portraits exploring themes of identity, the female body, sexuality, and death. Kahlo was also known for her stormy relationship with artist Diego Rivera (married 1929, divorced 1939, remarried 1940). Kahlo’s father was a German of Hungarian descent and her mother was a Mexican of Spanish and Native American descent. In 1925 Kahlo was hit by a bus, which so seriously injured her that she underwent more than 30 operations over the course of her life. During her recovery, Kahlo taught herself painting by drawing all over her full-body cast. Although she passionately loved Rivera, their marriage was not a happy one. Both sides carried on numerous affairs (he notably with her younger sister Cristina and she with both men and women). Kahlo appeared to have transcended the many betrayals of her philandering husband: “Perhaps it is expected that I should lament about how I have suffered living with a man like Diego. But I do not think that the banks of a river suffer because they let the river flow, nor does the earth suffer because of the rains, nor does the atom suffer for letting its energy escape. To my way of thinking, everything has its natural compensation.” But inwardly she continued to struggle even while gaining international celebrity as an artist, a Socialist, and a bohemian. Further casting shadows were her miscarriages, after which she painted some of her most harrowing and powerful works. Kahlo did not sell many paintings in her lifetime; the most money she ever made from her work was through The Two Fridas, which was acquired by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City for around $1,000. She had only one solo exhibition in Mexico in her lifetime, in 1953, just a year before her death at the age of 47.

—from Encyclopedia Britannica

Nothing is black—really nothing.

—The Diary of Frida Kahlo

10.

The late July sun was igniting the skin of her thighs on the stands, the rippling backs of horses, the slightly sweet-smelling sand. Her eyes followed one rider only, ever since seeing him for the first time that morning. His starting mount was a shining chestnut mare with lightning bolts painted on its rump. In a single effortless movement, he leapt onto her bare back. No saddles or stirrups were allowed in an Indian horse relay. The announcer introduced each rider and his team, and when Tommy Wolf of Yakama Nation was called, Celeste cheered wildly. The other horses paced in place but not this chestnut mare—she was dead still and calm like her rider, the perfect first horse to start the relay.

The flag went up and all the horses bolted as one. Tommy’s chestnut instantly stretched her impossibly long, strong legs at a frightening speed. And in the lead, there is team Black Wolf representing Yakama Nation in the black and red, followed by Thunderbird from the Crow Tribe in Montana! The announcer shouted. But it is too early to tell. Just now coming to the end of the first mile… Here they are for the first exchange! The mugger has to literally get mugged by the horse arriving at full gallop and the holder has to give away the next horse without a hitch. This is where the winners and the losers are made!

Tommy rounded the oval in the lead but as he jumped off the first horse and ran to the next one, Thunderbird went whooshing past and almost knocked him to the ground. Tommy’s second horse was a piebald wearing a wolfish mask. It reared up almost vertically while Tommy clung to his back with his thighs. Black Wolf having a hard time there as Thunderbird takes the lead and Sioux Strong sneaks in at second place! Celeste clutched the edges of her seat and groaned. And Mountain River in the lime green takes the opportunity to get in third place. Black Wolf of Yakama Nation now starting second lap in fourth place! This unpredictability and danger is really the beauty of the Indian horse relay, right Bryan?

Tommy finally got his piebald under control. His face was set in stone—but he was now whipping his horse like he hadn’t done in the first lap. The piebald roared forward, overtaking Mountain River within seconds. Its legs were just as long as the chestnut’s, but it had a broader chest and neck that propelled its weight onward like a torpedo. The third and final mile coming up for these warriors. Thunderbird is in the lead for the last exchange. AND we have a collision! Sioux Strong ramming straight into his own next horse! The mugger and the holder are desperately trying to gain control of both horses. That’s going to be hard to recover from! Now there’s Black Wolf coming in for the last mile!

Tommy barely slowed his piebald before leaping off and alighting onto the bare back of his last horse, the black bronco. With no urging or hesitation the bronco shot forward like a scream. Wow, now that was a beautiful exchange! Black Wolf trying to make up for lost time and pulling into second place, just behind Thunderbird.

In a way it looked like the black bronco was simply floating and the earth was moving beneath its feet. Celeste realized that the horse had been angry earlier because it was forbidden to run. Now it was flooded with happiness in every part of its horse brain and horse body. Thunderbird and Black Wolf are now running exactly side by side. Thunderbird on the inside, Black Wolf on the outside. If you’re watching this on the big screen it’s hard to appreciate just. How. Fast. These. Horses are going! They are galloping full throttle, ladies and gentlemen. This is the last half mile and both teams are tired. It is now a battle of wills.

Celeste screamed, then the whole crowd stood up on their feet and drowned her out.

HOLY COW, Bryan! Black Wolf pulling ahead in the last quarter mile! Where is this energy coming from?!

Thunderbird looked to the side and ferociously whipped his horse, but it was utterly spent by now. Tommy and his black horse looked unfazed, like they would soar to the ends of the earth.

Aaaaand Black Wolf representing Yakama Nation in Washington wins the race! Ladies and gentlemen, our new champion!

Celeste was shaking from seeing something that wasn’t a sport or even art—this was something that simply was. Which was enough to make everything else disappear. How could she ever go back to not knowing this?

Tommy took his whip in his teeth and raised both his arms above his head as his horse still galloped on. His long black braids streamed behind him. Beyond the finish line, beyond the race track, they kept flying to stop the world from moving.