Denver floated without motion in the dark. It could have been hours or days. All that existed in the darkness was a voice, a girl’s voice, singing sweet and steady through the night, and the stars which, now and then, shimmered into focus and faded. But the voice continued singing softly in a strange language. Arcturan, he thought. Maybe she’s Arcturan.
      He lay among the pieces of his memory and listened, wanting to talk, but unable to move his lips, his tongue, his mind in the direction of speech. The voice seemed far off in the night. He strained to hear the words, hoping to recognize something. It sounds so human, he thought. Just then, as though in answer, came a melody he recognized. And words. Swing low sweet chariot, the voice sang, comin’ for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.

      He sat on a hard wooden pew, holding Granny’s hand, listening to the preacher talk about eternal salvation and the importance of allowing Jesus into your heart. Denver didn’t believe in Jesus. He couldn’t accept a god of love and light. But he did believe in dark things. Shadows that devour and turn people into monsters with empty staring eyes. He believed in that. He had seen it himself. There, under the comet. Under that field of stars like this one.
      He wondered if all the stars had names and what the people who lived there called them. Granny Goat said you can never actually be from a place unless you know its real name. Such names can’t be spoken, but if a person were to take the trouble –and it’s no easy thing, Granny said, to find out the true name of a place– then that place will be with you forever, and you will always have a home.
      Denver missed Granny’s stories. Granny was his daddy’s mama. At least by Mama’s reckoning. That crazy old Indian lady, Mama called her. Denver spent many long afternoons and evenings with Granny Goat when he was little, playing on her kitchen floor, or digging in the garden where she grew squash and corn and things granny called medicine plants. They often went on long walks through the city or Forest Park. Granny would tell him about the plants and animals. Or the human people who lived in the neighborhood.
      Granny would never talk about his daddy, though. The few times he asked, her face would go all cold and hard and her eyes would stare straight ahead, and she would say nothing. So Denver stopped asking.
     One day when Denver was eight, Mama quit taking him to Granny Goat’s. Granny picked up and went back home to Oklahoma, said Mama, going to the happy hunting ground. Mama spat bitterly.
      Despite his torment and his anger toward her, Denver thought about his mama with tenderness. He thought about the night she had come to his bed and sobbed, my little Denver, my little boy. I’m so sorry.
      What are you sorry about Mama?
     Sorry I brought you into this lonely, stinking world.
      Don’t be lonely, Mama, Denver had said. I’m right here with you.
      Mama bawled like a baby until she fell asleep beside him, Denver stroking her hair and saying, it’ll be all right, Mama. Don’t be sad.
      But Denver didn’t know if it would really be all right. He didn’t know how to stop Mama from being so sad. From shooting that stuff into her arm. From clinging to those awful men who stared at him and at his mama with so much hatred in their eyes.
      He knew his daddy couldn’t have been like those men. His daddy must have been someone special. Mama and Granny just didn’t understand him, that’s all. Sometimes, in his imagination, his daddy would visit him. He would arrive in war paint, riding up on his pinto stallion. Sometimes it was a Jeep Cherokee. Other times he stole up on moccasined feet, Bowie knife in hand. But the stories he told himself always ended with Mama’s words. Forget him Denver, he’s a loser.

     “Get lost, nerdface,” taunted Jason Stiller, spitting on the ground at Denver’s feet. Becca Johnson snickered.
      “You heard him, loser,” yelled one of the other boys. “Get the fuck out of here.”
      Eyes down and tongue restrained, Denver turned and walked away. If he said anything, they would beat the crap out of him.
     “Hey, brown boy,” they called after him, “you one of them illegal Mexicans?”
     “I think he’s an Injun. They kicked him off the Rez for being a nerdface.”
     “What a loser.”
     “Yeah. Bet he’s still a virgin. Why don’t you help him out, Becca? I hear them Injuns got big wankers.”
     Becca sneered. “Even Rachel Moore wouldn’t do it with that loser.”
     “Yeah, and she spreads ‘em for dog weenies.”
     Cruel laughter followed him down the street.
     Another long, miserable walk to school. If he went to school that late May morning. But somehow Mama’s tirades about skipping lost their power when he faced the kids. Get out of here, loser. Get the fuck out of here.
     If only they knew how much he wanted to get out of here.
     For most of that morning he walked through neighborhood streets, along the steep hillside above the old shipyards, down the Willamette River, all the way to Cathedral Park and St. Johns Bridge. As he began the long trek across the bridge, rage and sadness gripped him, and he wailed with all his strength until he reached the center of the bridge, and sobbing, looked down into the cold water. It would be easy to climb the rail. To fly away from here.
     Denver stood in the center of the bridge for a long time. Then he heard a raven squawk. He looked up to see it light on the bridge a few yards away. Then a second one arrived. They chattered at one another for a moment before flying off toward the forest on the far side of the river. Memory flooded in. Forest Park. Granny Goat. The dear people. The bear people. The raven people.
     Pulled along by a mysterious, invisible strand, Denver was drawn across the bridge and into the forest. He stepped carefully around the faerie circles and hobbit mounds as he pursued the bickering birds. He soon lost sight of them, but the forest held him in its spell. He followed its meandering paths into dense woods, which grew darker with each step, until it seemed like night under the forest canopy. Finally, he came to a tiny sunlit clearing. There on an old log, sat a small, bent-over figure. He thought he recognized the old elf. The face. The wrinkles. The long gray braid of hair. He squinted in the sun.
     “Granny Goat?”
     “Denver? My how you’ve grown, boy.”�
     ”What are you doing here, Granny?”
     “Wanted to say hello to unisi.”
     “I’ve missed you, Granny.”
     “I know you have, child. I wish I could stay.”
     “Can’t I go with you, Granny? I don’t want to go back there. To that place”
     “It’s not time, Denver. Here. I have something for you.” Granny Goat handed him an object wrapped in a piece of worn, tan leather. Cradling it in his hand, he opened the package carefully. Inside rested small, shiny crystal.
     “This stone can protect you,” said Granny. “It’s very powerful. But you must treat it with respect and hide it away in a safe, dark place. When it is time, I will teach you the words you must say to give it nourishment. Otherwise, the Uk’tena will never sleep. Denver, you are Tsalagi. You walk like a brave now.”
     The crystal seemed to glow with a strange, hypnotic quality, and Denver’s eyes froze on its icy iridescence. Finally, he wrapped it in its leather covering and stuck it in his pocket. When he looked up, Granny Goat was gone.
     As he stepped off the bridge above Cathedral Park, the sun was halfway down the sky. He hadn’t meant to stay so late. Now, that thing would be waiting for him. Waiting for the sun to go down.
     He ran down North Willamette Boulevard, along the river’s edge. Past large Victorian houses with gates and manicured lawns. Past after-work traffic from the factories and warehouses on Swan Island. Faces stared at him from behind bugstained windshields and from living room porticos. But they didn’t really exist, these faces. On the side streets, where the real people lived, he could hear voices. He could nearly see them in their yards. Out mowing lawns and eating hot dogs in the warm, almost-summer air. He turned east and zigzagged through familiar neighborhoods, relieved to find kids on bicycles, dogs barking, a woman tending her garden.
     Finally, his heart slowed and his breath caught up with him.
     Until he remembered Mama. And how angry she would be. When he arrived home at sunset, frightened and exhausted, he crept quietly through the back door, slipping into his room, unseen. Mama should have whopped him good, but she never did. Maybe he was too big for that now.
     Or maybe she hadn’t even noticed he was gone.

     Denver felt his eyes moisten, a tear run down his face. He lay still in the darkness and cried. It’s good to cry, said Granny Goat. Gets all the bitter poison out that builds up in you. Don’t let anyone tell you, you shouldn’t cry.
     When the last tear was dry, he thought about how alone he was. How the world was empty except for his memories and that strange, sad voice singing in the night. He lay there for eons thinking about Granny and Mama and listening to that voice, until the song softened and soothed like a lullaby, the alien words almost comprehensible. Ha-mama, ha-mama, udahaleyi, hilunna, hilunna.
     Go to sleep, it seemed to say. Go to sleep.
     And so he slept.
     In a dream he lay on a hard bed in a cold room that smelled of clean linen and rubbing alcohol. A heavy fog shrouded him. Figures in white. Shadows. Whispers. A distant foghorn. Repeating itself over and over. Like the slow steady ticking of a clock. Like a clock in a jar of molasses. Or time on the event horizon. Just before everything. Went. Backward. Mama weeping quietly.
     “…go home and get some sleep, ma’am,”� a voice drifted from the darkness.
     When Denver opened his eyes again, he saw the stars very clearly. More clearly than he ever remembered seeing them before. He recognized the familiar lights of the August sky, the Great Bear with its Big Dipper, the curve of its handle pointing to the south, toward the Virgin, toward Arcturus, a bright orange glow beneath Ariadne’s crown. The beautiful Ariadne, who helped Theseus slay the Minotaur.