9This is a continuation of a "Pocahontas" fanfiction piece written in 1999! John Smith is himself, and Pocahontas is "Jeanie".
Scene 1: "Encounter"
000
"Excuse me, Miss. Wait, please!"
The words reached the young Native woman's ears, but they sounded far away even though she could sense their speaker was close. They reached Jeanie's ears with a degree of difficulty that was still new and a pain in the ass to adjust to. As if she were underwater with an ear plugged with cotton. Nearly a full two months since the bomb blast, Jeanie was finally realizing her right ear would never regain its function. Just like the audiologist kept saying, she thought. Well, fuck. I like concerts. Her right ear now had a scar running down it and that side of her face had been bloodied and scraped up, though superficial scrapes had long healed. Where a bloody gash had been on her forehead was now just the fading remnant of a deep blood-bruise, and the keep-on-giving gift of sudden sensitivity to light and noise from that concussion.
Right now in Diner 96, the voice entreating her to wait was male, and while Jeanie herself tried to ignore the scars and bruises by trying not to be sensitive about them, she knew that men liked to look at pretty things. So she hastily flicked some of her long, dark hair over her right ear. As she turned around, she wished that she'd cut bangs, so that her glossy dark hair could bounce against her shoulders in its length but also sweep across to hide the healing bruise on her forehead.
Jeanie had been hanging mountain jackets, those heavily lined parkas with detachable warmth layers and a million pockets for all your wilderness experience doodads. They were EarthOutfitters' most popular item, designed for subzero temperatures and high elevations, and came with an equally high price tag. She had been humming to herself as she hung each jacket carefully on a sturdy hanger, making sure to smooth the shoulders, pat them to fluff the quilting, and to drape the price tags so they wouldn't tangle the jackets' many attached tags boasting its ability to shed rain, retain warmth, repel dirt, absorb sweat, and transform into an emergency life jacket with the pull of some toggles if you found yourself suddenly stuck in rushing whitewater rapids.
EarthOutfitters was full of customers that day and Jeanie had been working all morning; of all days, it was so inconvenient that the girl who should've been hanging jackets decided to be a no-show. Jeanie had jumped at the chance for overtime and extra pay. That day was the store's three-year anniversary blowout sale, and Lewis Whitehorn was going to be so pleased at the profit. EarthOutfitters would probably be able to open that second manufacturing plant, this time across the country on Ute land. Lewis would also be pleased that red, white, and black customers didn't see racial division or the ugly fight for Native rights that had morphed into something out of control; they only saw a great store that filled niche demand for outdoor and camping gear. There was a development meeting next Monday for a community food sustainability and home gardening section. It had been Jeanie's idea, and she'd been proud when Lewis had called the Chicago store from his home in Michigan on Huron lands, to tell her he'd chosen her idea from the pile. Lewis was scheduled to come to Chicago. Things were going great. They would be even better when Lewis got here, and pretty soon she would have enough money to send some back to the peaceful resistance movement she and some friends back in Lawton, Oklahoma, had started. Her stomach tightened at the thought. Her father would blow a gasket if he found out; maybe even disown her. Or worse.
Suddenly, Chaska, Lewis' assistant manager, hurried over to Jeanie as she pulled the last few jackets from the box. He probably needed her help at the register, it was so crowded today.
But now at this moment in Diner 96, as Jeanie turned toward the man who was calling, she wondered for a moment if she had truly heard him, with her hearing the way it was and her thoughts wandering. The man even had the impertinence to touch her arm. Turning too fast, her equilibrium was knocked; she felt that slosh rushing through her wrecked right ear, in the hollow where the eardrum had been. It washed over her in a dizzying tide. She closed her eyes and when her equilibrium returned, she found herself gazing into the man's startlingly green eyes.
"I'm a federal agent. I need to speak with you," he was saying or so she thought he was, but he didn't look like one. He wasn't wearing combat boots or an agency jacket.
000
John Smith, federal agent, had two competing thoughts as he watched, clearly alarmed, the girl close her eyes and press slender fingers to the right side of her face, which was framed by strong dark brows and a great mass of straight black hair that bounced against her shoulders and was brushed to a high gloss. An identical thought chased the one he'd had just a short time ago: merciful God, she was beautiful. The second one: was she alright? She seemed shaky. His thoughts overwhelmed him and he found that he could not say anything else. He ought to be explaining by now why he had stopped her.
The young woman still appeared lost in some haze of pain, and one of her companions was already shredding him with her sharp tongue. "Leave us alone, you filthy colonizer. You Destroyer. Don't sneak up on her like that. Her hearing is damaged from a recent bomb blast, probably laid out by you and your slimy federal friends and made to look like—" The young woman now speaking sported a sleeve of bright tattoos and had a short hairstyle with razor-precision edges and blunt bangs; her dark eyes glittered like hard obsidian and the maroon beret perched on her head completed the sort of guerrilla/fighter chic aesthetic. She wouldn't look out of place if you plucked her out of Diner 96 and plopped her down amid a South American communist Youth Brigade. Jeanie opened her mouth to speak, but this other young Native woman kept a protective arm on Jeanie's shoulder, squeezing to silence her, as she started up a new string of insults.
Destroyer. Colonizer. Fed. Fibbie.
OK, John thought, maybe three of those are true. Two are absolutely: I am an FBI agent leading a combined task force of A.C.T. and FBI to root out and stop AWS, the Alliance Warriors Society, and any of its offshoots in this insane new undeclared civil war between Natives and everyone else. So I'm a Fed and a Fibbie, but I'm not a colonizer. Sure, my forebears came to this country, but ... aren't we all Americans? And that last one: But am I a destroyer?
He listened to the tatted-up Native girl's venomous speech, which was delivered softly so that those around them in the diner wouldn't be startled by any altercation. But the girl called Jeanie, whose arm this girl held, had her soulful dark eyes fixed on John with mortification in them. She shifted nervously in scuffed brown leather boots and looked ready to shut her friend up.
John felt something stir in him. He had seen plenty of action in this undeclared war. But now, he was seeing something else, something he couldn't define.
000
It seemed surreal now, this conflict that had escalated into third-world violence as the backdrop to this diner that was a beloved neutral zone, a weapon-free no-man's-land where all people in the city could gather. So the young women in their jeans and T's who had just tossed the wrappers from their food in the trash—one of whom he wanted to speak to and who stood silently in horror, and another who was calling him all kinds of names—seemed to be phantoms, almost imaginary to John for a moment. They could have been phantoms from a time when Native Americans lived quietly—with several massive grudges—but quietly, in poverty, forgotten on reservations as the rest of America progressed. But these girls were here now in front of him and he had brazenly touched one on the arm, addressed her.
A phantom this Jeanie was not, just as tall and slender as she had been that day, lying on the floor amid crumbled sheetrock and smoke. She came up to about his shoulder, like John had absently speculated that day as he'd crouched over her to see if she was breathing. Tall and gorgeous, with that glossy hair and those eyes that were rimmed in black liner and heavy mascara, the flush of embarrassment a natural blush across her cheeks. Her skin was smooth, tawny, and might go a deep toffee shade in the sun for a true sun-kissed golden sheen. Full lips, cheap silver earrings, a small turquoise pendant around her neck. No tattoos that John could see, unlike her companion who was a patchwork of art. This girl, Jeanie, carried herself with the grace of a dancer in a loose white T-shirt that was cut to expose one tawny shoulder and a red bra, with jeans that hugged, and those boots must have been a favorite pair for how worn they were. The laces on one were snapped and frayed. Jeanie nervously rubbed the toe of one boot on the polished checker-pattern floor of the diner, fussed at the hem of her shirt with her fingers.
"That's enough, Tsia," Jeanie finally spoke, pronouncing the other girl's name as "chee." Tsia shut up then, mouth hanging open in shock.
When Jeanie turned her gaze on John, it was full of that same calm, that eerie grace, that something he'd seen when he first spotted her in the corner booth with her eyes full of joy, laughter still on her lips. That something that told him, she is not your enemy.