Quarter Moon

From her pleated tartans to vibrant weavings, Percy Moon is the personification of Irish-American proud. But the shocking discovery of her Hupa Indian blood and father's secret son unravels her world. Relocated to the reservation, Percy's paramedic father's drug dealing ignites his addiction and fuels their estrangement. Her industrious production of handicrafts, she hopes, will support a search for her mother, but the dream is stymied by dead ends. When her father's murder leads to her brother's disappearance, she abruptly comes face-to-face with her churlish mother. Percy is turned away but in rejection sees an opportunity to repair the sibling relationship. Through soul-searing struggles to define herself, she learns that character is not a gift of DNA, but the result of moment-by-moment choice.

An excerpt:

A few weeks shy of my 21st birthday, after eighteen months of silence, Turner called to ask if I wouldn't drive him to the bus station, as he had transferred his scholarship to the University of California at Santa Cruz. His bus would depart in four hours, he said, sorry for the late notice, but couldn't we visit for old times' sake before he left the area? My heart pumping as if I'd just run uphill through a forest of Dorothy's famed evil apple trees, I managed to squeak out, "Of course."

Thirty minutes later, in the dim light of my hall, standing between my friend and his exit, I could see traces of the Hupa boy I met in his fishing skivvies, a boy who was then intent on becoming my friend. Now his intent was to leave. To let myself want him would hurt us both, but passion rarely cedes to wisdom. I stroked his baby smooth face. I kissed his velvety lips.

To my amazement, he kissed back.

I wanted to want to stop, even wanted him to stop. But neither of us stopped.

We kissed with unfurling desire. Kisses to the lips became open-mouthed probes of one another's soul. Soon we were naked, our flesh and lust fully exposed. We let escape our pent-up passion and made love on the hall floor.

Afterward, my eyes drinking in his satisfied gaze, I pressed my breasts to his torso then rested my chin on his sternum.

He moved a tress of my unruly hair and kissed my forehead. I inched my lips toward his, but he strained his head away and said, "No. I have a bus to catch."

"There will be another."

He gently pulled me off his body, and propped himself up on one elbow. "You are beautiful, sexy, talented, and you know I'd be proud to be with you, but we have made our choices and that means this never happened."

"What -?"

"I'm going to marry Raven."

"When?"

"After we graduate."

Somehow I had expected they'd get married, but hadn't prepared for it and certainly hadn't planned to be told while smelling of sex and sitting next to the naked groom-to-be. Instead of angry, though, I felt all kinds of dirty.

"That's not a congratulatory face, Percy."

"I'm not able to manufacture congrats just yet; I'm still working on denial."

He brought his face close, rubbed my forehead with his, and whispered, "I will cherish this day for as long as I live. I know I'm not the right man for you, but that won't stop me from loving you the rest of my life." With that he pressed his lips against mine and drove his tongue into my mouth.

We made love again, this time with the bittersweetness of finality.




He left me his Pinto.




After a long hot shower and even longer cryfest, I managed to pull myself together enough to arrive on time for my hostess job, but more than once had to retreat to the kitchen to splash cool water on my face. Halfway through my miserable shift, CJ called me into his office.

He sat behind his paper-strewn desk. "I haven't seen you this upset since Turner moved out. What's up?"

He searched my still-puffy visage. This was not a conversation I intended to have. Not with CJ; not with anyone. I smoothed my slinky black hostess dress and stared at my red stilettos.

"If you don't want to tell me, that's fine. But can I say something?"

I pushed curls away from my mug.

"I have seen you blossom from an oddly charming girl in tartan skirts to an accident-causing, strikingly gorgeous lady. In the four years since we met over broken dishes, you have become independent, a savvy business woman and a valuable help -."

There came an imposing knock on the door. CJ and I turned toward the noise.

He said, "Yes?"

A Humboldt County Sheriff deputy stepped inside the office, looked at me and asked, "Are you Miss Percy Moon?"

"I am."

He shifted his gaze to CJ. "Could I speak with Miss Moon alone?"

I rounded the desk and positioned myself between the deputy and my boss. "He stays."

"Ma'am, it's about your dad."

"Yes?"

The deputy looked at his clipboard. "And step mom, I guess."

"Go on," I said.

"Yes, ma'am, you sure it's all right if he stays?"

"What is it, please?"

"Well, ma'am, last night Delores Moon shot and killed Porter Jack Moon then turned the pistol on herself."

"Dead?"

"Yes ma'am, both dead."

I must have fainted, for the next thing I knew, CJ's arms supported me. He maneuvered me into his chair.

The deputy asked, "Ma'am, you all right?"

I held tight to the chair's arm rests, took a series of shallow breaths then asked, "Were there witnesses? Does my brother know?"

The deputy cleared his throat. "Uh, ma'am, that's the other thing. He's missing."




The Fatherless

Patrice Gordon learned early to square her shoulders for life's blows. She's tough. She has to be; she and her older sister are white teenagers abandoned in a shack on an Indian reservation. A top student, Patrice sees college as her only way off the rez, but scholarships are more rare than jobs. She must fight for both. Along the way she struggles with drug dealers, kidnappings, misgivings from both sides of the racial divide, missionaries whom she doesn't trust and a drunken pot grower she does. Through these battles she learns about fear, intimidation, pride and prejudice. . . and that saving someone's life will require more than you think you have.

The Fatherless is based on the author's experience growing up white on an Indian reservation.

An excerpt:

Maybe it amused God to give a strong girl like me to a man like my father. I wouldn't say The Almighty had made a mistake, but plenty of times I wondered when His plan would make sense.

The summer of 1973 my father thought he'd out maneuvered everyone: we sneaked away from Evanston, Illinois, and arrived at California's largest Indian reservation, the still-wild heritage lands of the Hupa and Yurok people. Located just outside Redwood National Park, most of the reservation had no electricity or telephone service, a fact that convinced Dad we could get lost and stay lost on the rez.

Maybe if he'd been a third-week sophomore at Hoopa High like me, he'd have noticed that everybody talked about the new white family.

Not that I much cared; at fifteen I'd grown used to life as scandal's child. Anyway, I kept to myself as much as possible, at school, at home, on the school bus. Solitude gave me time to think about escape.

Our cabin sat two hours downriver by bus from the high school. Downriver is the local term for the Yurok portion of the reservation, the part that followed the Klamath River to the sea.

I mostly daydreamed during the ride home. One day the squeal of overheated brakes brought me out of my thoughts in time to see a loaded log truck heading our way on the one-lane highway. I glanced two rows back at my older sister Kelli, one of two other kids on our sawn-off bus. She didn't seem to notice the close call. We both knew better than to scream. On the reservation a white girl had to be tough.

I studied the bus driver through the overhead mirror. She handled the bumpy strip of asphalt like it was a slot-car track, unconcerned that she might steer too wide and end up in the river. She barely slowed as we roared past the eighteen-wheeler.

Relieved, I eased back in my seat. My slim body would have registered every jostle of the bus even if my rear didn't have welts courtesy of Dad's board of education. Instead of wincing, I grabbed the hem of the Goodwill dress he had made me wear and stuck my pencil through a section of lace, ripping it. It didn't matter if we got the dress free: nobody wore dresses on the reservation.

The Yurok boy with whom we shared our two-hour journey to and from school, or at least the Hoopa Valley, for I'd yet to see him in class, observed my small act of defiance and narrowed his eyes. I didn't know his name. In two weeks of greeting him with a 'good morning', he hadn't acknowledged my existence, so it surprised me when he scooted to the aisle end of his seat and chuckled.

"What?" I asked.

"Skipper gonna wear Barbie's clothes, she oughta get her a set of falsies."

Kelli snickered. I glared at her, and she hid her amused green eyes under a hand. She'd had no need of padded bras since seventh grade, a fact I'd informed her many times, which left her no room to comment on my case of arrested development.

I returned my gaze to the boy whose elbows protruded from holes in his Big Ben work shirt. "Thank you. May I consult you for further fashion advice?"

"Anytime, Skipper."

"Name's Patrice Gordon. Yours?"

"Skipper can call me Ken." He used his sneaker-clad feet to push himself to the far side of his bus seat. He turned toward Kelli and winked.

My sister, the flame-haired flirt with the hour-glass build, lit her freckled faced with a wide smile.

I smoothed my short-cropped black mop, and tucked my books under an arm, relieved to note we'd arrived at our stop. Before the bus came to a halt I heard Nanny goat's urgent plea for help and rushed to the stairwell, hands pressed against the doors. A few more lurches and I could step off the orange-yellow death trap. In minutes, I'd be safely up the hill tending the needs of my three-goat herd, my favorite part of the day.

I sprinted across the paved road ahead of Kelli.

"Blaaaaaahhhh!" Nanny's constant call made her desperation unmistakable.

I hiked my dress, ran up the dirt road to our property and found Nanny at the turn below our cabin. Someone had tethered the goat to a small alder near the creek downhill from our place.

Years of trickling water had created a twenty-foot embankment. Nanny had slipped off the cliff. She dangled like an earring, bleating her head off.

"Hold on Nanny, I'll get you." Where was everybody? How could they stand this racket? Did I have to do everything around here?

I climbed the steep clay bank, shouldered the seventy-pound goat and pushed her to safety then scrambled up and over the ledge.

Nanny coughed. Her neck had swollen around her collar.

"You're a tough old goat." I scratched her behind an ear.

Nanny trotted ahead of me toward the little spring below our place. When she got there, she turned to watch, as if more concerned for me than I was for her.

I said, "You and me, old girl," and patted her backside.

"Goat-trice! Goat-trice, where are you?"

Kelli. It sounded like she called from the porch. Her tone said something was up.

"Come on, Nanny." With the goat in tow, I made my way through the brush toward the scrappy cabin we Gordons called home.

Our first night on the property, we'd pitched army surplus tents under a big fir tree. It rained that night and didn't stop until days later when Dad had slapped together the cabin from materials he'd 'borrowed' from abandoned shacks.

"Goat-trice!" Kelli stood in the doorway, next to the broken kerosene refrigerator we kept on the porch.

The name's Patrice," I muttered, more to myself than my sister. Kelli and Dad called me Goatrice because they said I spent so much time with goats I'd begun to smell like them.

"You'd better change," she said, her voice strained.
I looked at my dress, which told of my goat rescue in red clay streaks.

"Better hope it's not ruined."

"Come on, Nanny," I said, ignoring Kelli's tone. I hurried across the little meadow and the dirt road to Nanny's field. My herd secure, I ran back toward the cabin.

Kelli met me at the clothesline Dad had strung between two madrone trees.

"Nobody's home." She threw the words at me like so much ammunition.

"So?"

"So, what do we do about dinner?"

"Make it?"

Kelli's foot wiggled, and I knew she wasn't amused. "I mean," she said with a thin voice, "should we start dinner now, or wait until they come home?"

"I wouldn't know." I pushed past her, intent on changing my clothes. "I haul water. You do the cooking."

Kelli threw a pair of buckets at me. "Don't forget these, Goatrice!"

The empty water buckets landed at my feet. Without a word or a look back, I slipped my fingers around the metal handles and went on my way.

My chores were putting out fresh feed and water for the livestock --which included a few chickens-- and hauling water from the creek. Lots of water. Six people and their unfortunate farm animals consumed a lot of water. Or maybe it seemed that way because I had to haul most of it up the hill. The water chore required four trips to the creek in the evening and two in the morning.

When I made my final trip up from the creek with the evening water I noticed how quiet the forest had become. Deadly silent. Like when a predator lurked, and all the animals became still and whatever poor beast didn't pay attention ended up dinner. The law of the wild: better them than me. Dad called it survival of the fittest.

Carefully setting down the water buckets, I turned and listened. Before me was the splash of the creek against rocks. I tilted my head until my ear pointed toward the noise, turned slowly; the Klamath River's low groans came in as if I'd been tuning a radio. I heard truck gears grind down on the blacktop, and listened as the driver headed toward Pecwan, the village at the end of the road.

I caught a sniff of something rancid and drew a few careful breaths to determine the smell's origin. Up the creek, I guessed; took another whiff, heard a low grunt.

"Eeee-yaw! Eeee-yaw!" I yelled and spun. When my body faced the creek again, I took off toward the stream, waving my hands like a wild woman. A startled bear took off through the underbrush. I read in a display at Chicago's Field Museum that bears are near-sighted and afraid of humans, but discovered it was true on the Hoopa Indian Reservation.

Still had the bounce of victory in my step when I entered the cabin with water.

"What was that?" Kelli sized me up. She sat in Dad's chair, facing the door.

"Nothing." No point in telling her that I scared off a bear.

"Heard you yell."

"Just goofing." I made a silly face. She'd believe that; she always said I failed to act my age.