There There: Part III: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (2) Summary & Analysis

Opal works as a mail carrier, and every time she gets into her mail truck, she can’t stop herself from looking at her wizened reflection in the rearview mirror and considering all the things she’s seen throughout the years. She remembers one time, soon after she’d adopted Orvil and his brothers, Orvil became spooked by his own reflection in a department store, and began to worry that he was a copy of himself.

Opal never allows her mail route to become routine or automatic—a highly superstitious woman, she pays attention to every detail of her day, and is sure never to step on a crack in the sidewalk. She delivers mail on the odd side of the street first, believing in the luck of even numbers.

As Opal looks back on her life during her long days delivering mail, she finds herself full of regrets—not regrets about things she’s done, but regrets that the things that have happened to her and her family have happened at all. When things get too heavy, she listens to music to or audiobooks to distract herself from her memories.

Yesterday, a message from Orvil stating that he’d pulled spider legs out of a lump in his leg rattled Opal. Though the message affected her, it didn’t surprise her—spiders figure largely in her family’s lore. Her mother, Vicky, had never let Opal or Jacquie kill spiders when they were young, stating that “spiders carry miles of web in their bodies, miles of story, miles of potential home and trap.” In this way, Vicky had said, spiders were just like humans.

Several weeks ago, during one of her routine checks of all the boys’ smartphones, Opal found a video Orvil took of himself powwow dancing in his room. She was shocked to see how good he was—and the fact that he was wearing regalia given to Opal herself by an old friend named Lucas, whom she met while living in a group home. Opal and Lucas loved one another, but Lucas abandoned her to live in Los Angeles; she only saw him once before his death, nearly two decades later, when he came to her to ask for an interview for a film he was making about Urban Indians, and gave her his old regalia.

Last night at dinner, Opal did not tell Orvil or the other boys about the time when she, as a young woman, pulled spider legs out of a bump in her own leg—the legs emerged the Sunday afternoon before she and Jacquie left the home of Ronald, the man their mother had left them with after dying. Opal never said anything about the spider legs, not wanting to upset Jacquie, who was pregnant with a child she’d soon give up for adoption.

Ronald had been walking past the girls’ rooms at night, and Opal had taken to keeping a bat next to her in bed where she’d once held Two Shoes. One night, when Ronald came into the room while he thought Opal was sleeping and began grabbing Jacquie’s legs, trying to drag her from the room, Opal cracked him over the head with the bat, knocked him unconscious, and pulled her sister out of the house while the sound of the Indian Head test pattern blared on the TV screen in the living room.

The girls went to a shelter, and Opal constantly feared that she’d killed Ronald and would be in trouble. But as days and months passed and nothing happened, Jacquie and Opal grew estranged, and soon Jacquie disappeared. Opal began growing close with Lucas, and she eventually told him what had happened at Ronald’s; he agreed to take her back to the house to get some answers. After waiting for two hours across the street form Ronald’s house, Opal at last saw him pull up in his truck. Upon seeing him, she thought of the word Veho—a Cheyenne word meaning “spider and trickster and white man.”

Now, on her mail route, Opal gets lost in thought and doesn’t notice when she approaches the yard of a house in which a large, angry-looking pitbull without a collar is baring its teeth at her. Opal is stunned with fear, but the dog’s owner calls out to it from down the street, and it flinches and cowers. Opal feels badly for the dog, but hurries into her mail truck and drives along.