Page 7 of Love Is a War Song

“Who are Red and Davey?” I asked to break the silence, staring at the feathers hanging from the rearview mirror.

I had no idea what kind of feathers they were, but they were black-and-white striped.

There were three in total wrapped together in a piece of dark brown leather that looked aged and worn with four different-colored beads, black, white, yellow, and red, all stacked on top of one another.

It had been only a few minutes, but I was so far out of my comfort zone, and after eating the PowerBar I did feel a little bad for calling my non-cousin and certainly-not-a-fan ride a “dirty cowboy.”

“Your grandma’s other workers,” he said, looking straight at the road. I guess I really offended him.

“Thanks for the PowerBar,” I said as I started picking at a hangnail on my pinky finger.

He grunted in response, again not looking at me.

I tried to plow on. “I’m sorry I called you a dirty cowboy, it’s just that I had such a hard day—”

“As you screamed in the parking lot,” he said, cutting me off. We were stopped at a red light waiting to turn left.

I opened my mouth, taking a breath to start a conversation when he turned on the radio. An old country song filled the cab. The baritone of the man was low and mellow as his voice crooned in my ear until he reached for a high note in the chorus. It was nice. I’d never heard the song before.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“You don’t know Garth Brooks?” Lucas asked me, finally turning to look at me, bewildered.

“Umm no, not this song. What is it?” I spent plenty of time at karaoke bars. I knew “Friends in Low Places” thanks to many drunken people screaming out that song over the years, but that was the extent of my Garth Brooks knowledge.

“?‘The Dance.’?” Lucas stared at me and all I had in response was my blank expression. “It’s his most famous song. You really have never heard it before?”

“No.”

“Unbelievable,” he muttered to himself, and started driving along the street heading to the highway.

“We are heading east on the 64? What is the 64, is that like a freeway?”

“ The 64? It’s a highway. Is that how you Californians talk? We don’t say ‘the’ before any highway, interstate, freeway, or road for that matter.”

“Oh, like the Facebook movie! ‘Drop the “the,” it’s cleaner.’?” I laughed at my joke.

Lucas turned to look at me like I was weird.

“Twenty minutes made it seem like the ranch was really close and in the city. And we just say ‘the 101’ or ‘the 10.’ I never thought it was weird,” I added to defend my original question before I went back to picking my hangnail.

“Broken Arrow is close, just outside of Tulsa. It’s more rural.” That was all Lucas said before he turned up the volume on the radio and I got the hint that the conversation was over.

Driving on highway 64 in Oklahoma was a lot different than in Los Angeles.

There was no traffic and the houses and churches in the city started to spread out farther apart from each other until we drove past many open fields of land.

Everything was so green, and some places had grass that looked almost as tall as me as we zipped by.

The song on the radio faded into a commercial and Lucas quickly turned the tuner to another station. I heard the hand drums first, then my voice and the million harmonies I recorded starting to blare through the speakers.

I was shocked. Truthfully, I have never had my own car and never listened to the radio.

I would listen to my iPod back in the day and now I stream everything on my phone.

So, hearing myself play on the radio was extremely rare.

I had only ever heard myself on the radio once when I was first told the song I was featured on would be premiering on the Ryan Seacrest show years ago.

We turned and looked at each other at the same time. His expression could be described only as a cringe, like he was experiencing secondhand embarrassment listening to my song. A chart-topping song. He was feral.

Lucas punched the volume knob, and the radio was silenced. He turned me off!

“How rude!”

“Listening to that is rude. It’s an assault to my ears.”

“An assault to your ears? I can’t believe you just said that to my face.”

“It’s better than behind your back. Haven’t you had enough of that lately?”

How did this cowboy who lived on a ranch in the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma, know so much?

“You seem to know a lot about me for someone who isn’t a fan.

Are you an obsessed hater? Is that what this is?

You know I have come across a lot of you over the years and to look me up that much to keep track of what I’m doing to hate or make fun of me makes you a fan.

In the words of Cardi B, ‘It benefits me.’?” I huffed a breath, threw myself back into the seat, and crossed my arms. I couldn’t believe I had to share air with this arrogant man.

“Let’s get one thing straight, lady. I am not obsessed. This damn song has been playing everywhere for weeks—gas stations, the supermarket, Dollar Tree, even Walmart! I can’t avoid this dumb song, and I have tried, trust me. This isn’t music.”

“Oh, and some cowboy in bumfuck Oklahoma is an expert on what is music? There are instruments, melodies, chords, harmonies, a sick beat, and a hook that people love to sing at the top of their lungs. It’s music.”

“Just because it can be defined as music doesn’t make it music ,” Lucas said as he tapped his fist to his heart.

“You can’t feel what you are singing in here.

You’re singing nonsense, pandering to white people.

” He punched the volume button again and my chorus blasted through the cab.

“What does this part even mean?!” He threw one hand to the speaker as if he could motion to the individual music notes coming out.

This guy was nuts. I have read critical reviews of my work.

I get hate comments on my Instagram and Twitter, but I had never had to sit in the small, confined cab of a truck with no means of escape with a handsome stranger who dragged me and my music for filth.

Everything online, the hate mail, and then the bus were nothing compared to this.

This was the innermost ring of hell, and I could do nothing but wait for my song to end.

Still, he looked over at me, expecting an answer.

Two could play this game.

“Well, Mozart, these lyrics are metaphors for sex. I’m shocked by all your ranting about music and feeling it in your heart, that the meaning went over your head.”

“Oh, the metaphors are so simple a thirteen-year-old boy could have written them. I asked what does this mean? What is this song about? You have these hand drums, and some pretty vocals, but what does this song mean?”

“Pretty vocals—hah! I knew you were a fan. It’s a club track, man. People dance and sing and have fun. Not everything is a sad song about dancing.”

“Garth Brooks isn’t singing a sad song about dancing!” Lucas was incensed and I laughed in his face. Was Garth Brooks his dad with how protective he was over the man?

“I just listened to half his song, and it was about a dance he was going to miss.”

“Okay, Miss Metaphor, the dance means a love that is over and how he wouldn’t change a thing and then later he would never choose to change his memories, because if he forgot the pain, he would forget the love too.”

“I didn’t get to hear the whole song!” Now I was shouting. “I can interpret lyrics as well as write them, jerkface!”

“Can you? I just heard you sing the words ‘we out here huntin’ and gatherin’.’?” He actually took both hands off the wheel to air quote the lyrics back to me. “And did you just call me jerkface?”

“Yeah, I did and I’ll do it again. I didn’t write this song, jerkface.”

“Who did?” he asked as he changed lanes, preparing to exit the highway.

“Hans Nilsson and Leif Gunnarsson.”

Lucas gave me another bewildered look.

“They wrote three number one singles for Britney and two for Madonna.” I looked down at my hands; my pinky was bleeding from where I tugged the hangnail off in anger.

“Two middle-aged Swedish men wrote a song about being a Native American woman in America? What the actual fuck?”

Was it ideal? No. I would have loved the opportunity to pitch a few of the songs I have written to work with these talented songwriters, but the label told me I couldn’t. That was just the way this business was.

“You know, Lucas whatever the hell your last name is, I don’t like you.”

“The feeling is mutual, lady.”

“Stop calling me lady!” I turned to look out the window as we drove down a paved road lined with elm trees. It was actually really beautiful. I would have liked it better if I wasn’t arguing with someone I met not even a half hour ago.

“Sorry, is ‘princess’ better?”

“What’s your problem? I didn’t ask you to pick me up and I’ve never done anything to you.” I threw my hands in the air. If I were a religious person, I would be praying for patience.

“Do you have any idea what your song is doing for the women in our community?”

“I hope it’s empowering them to embrace themselves and have fun. Are you a Native American woman, Lucas?”

“Of course not, but I’ve grown up in the community.

I was raised by a Native woman and am close to Lottie, who has done so much for everyone.

So, yeah, it’s a fun and catchy song, but slithering around in a tan-hide bikini wearing a headdress keeps perpetuating the same overly sexualized image Hollywood keeps force-feeding us. ”

“Are you slut-shaming me now? I would argue that me allowing myself to feel beautiful and sexy is taking back that narrative. Do you think that maybe we were making fun of that Indian Princess image we always see? How many Native pop singers do you know of?”

“We have a lot of great local singers, princess.” He slowed down to make a right onto a dirt road; it was bumpy with a few big puddles from a recent rain.

“I’m sure there are, but how many are known on a national scale? International? We can’t change the whole industry by forcing our way in and making demands. We have to give the people the image they are used to and once we are in, then we can start to make changes.”

“Did your team feed you that lie? What changes have you made? Everyone hates you.”

My puffed-up, self-righteous chest completely deflated, because he was right. I did exactly what my producers and label executives wanted, down to the last feather on the bonnet. And now the internet wanted change, and they wanted to throw me out with the trash too.

“As far as the entire world is concerned, I don’t belong here,” I said quietly.

“You’re Lottie’s granddaughter. Of course you belong here—if you want to. That’s for you to decide, not the world.”

His last comment stunned me. I had only ever had my mother, so this concept of choosing to belong to a family left me feeling as off-kilter as this uneven dirt road.

We continued to drive in silence, my body swaying with each dip in the road.

There were horses grazing in the fields, and then I saw it. My grandmother’s house.

It was an old white colonial-style ranch house. This was what my mother kept from me.

Lucas pulled into the drive next to a black Lincoln Town Car. I looked at the front door and watched in confusion as a disheveled man in a gray suit carrying an old beat-up briefcase ran down the front steps.

“You have thirty days, Lottie!” he shouted as he got to his car.

“You stay off my property and email like a civilized person!” A middle-aged woman wearing denim coveralls, a bright yellow bandanna around her neck, and a mess of graying hair coming out of a scrunchy at the side of her head yelled as she cocked a shotgun and aimed it for Suit Man.

Holy shit.

“Lucas! She has a gun!” I hunched down below the window.

“Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” he tried to reassure me.

Boom! A shot fired and the small hairs on my arms rose.

“Shit! I told Red to hide the ammo.” Lucas crouched down too. We were both too scared to look up, but we heard the Town Car skid on the gravel as it hightailed it out of there.

I was safer back at the bus station. How was this my life now?

“Safe to come out!” The woman started banging on my passenger window. I peeked up through my arms. She had the shotgun resting on her shoulder like a freaking Continental soldier. No way in hell was I getting out of this truck.

“Lucas, take me back to the train station.”

“Uh, you got money?” he asked while sitting up from his crouched position, straightening his dusty T-shirt.

“No, do you? I’ll pay you back plus five hundred dollars for the inconvenience.”

He whistled. “I don’t have money, but you should get out and meet your grandma. She isn’t a patient woman.”

I stole another look and she was standing right there, in the same spot, watching me with an arched eyebrow. She was testing me.

I took a deep breath and opened the truck door.