J is for Jacket
By
Roy hated having to do this.
No matter how many times it happened, he hated having to get things out of
another man’s locker. It meant that that man was hurt and could not do it
himself, and he hated it when one of his co-workers was hurt.
This was the first time that he had had to do this for his new partner John
Gage. Johnny and he had been working together for about four months now, and
they worked well together. Sure, Johnny could be a little annoying, but he
was a good paramedic and a good rescue man. Truth be told, he might be a better
rescue man that Roy.
Roy grabbed Johnny’s clothes that were neatly folded in the bottom of his
locker, his shoes belt and various other items. Roy stopped suddenly as he
reached to take Johnny’s jacket off of its hanger, his mind going back to
the conversation that had lead to his being here getting these things.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Roy,” John began hesitantly, “Um, they will be letting me out tomorrow morning
probably, so… would you mind get my things out of my locker and bring them
over for me? Make sure you get my jacket, and don’t laugh about it either!”
“Sure, Junior,” Roy said. “You saved my skin, it’s the least I can do.” Less
that two hours ago they had been called to a structure fire. In the course
of fighting the fire, john and Roy had been doing a sweep, which they found
out late would have been unnecessary, when Johnny notice a beam giving way
above Roy, with out thinking Johnny had shoved Roy out of the was a taken
a glancing blow off his helmet. Although Johnny’s helmet had helped, he still
had a mild concussion and Doctor Brackett wanted to keep him over night. Why
would I laugh at his clothes? They can’t be any worse than Chet’s. “I’ll bring
them by after I get off shift tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here,” John said with a faint grin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Roy still didn’t understand why he would laugh at this jacket. It was handmade
of rough-out leather, if he was not mistaken. Turning it around so that he
could see the back, Roy found it beautifully designed in Native American symbols,
the most prevalent being a stallion and a hawk that filled most of the center
of the back. Roy knew that Johnny was of Indian decent, but until now he had
not been all that curious, the only references that had been made to it, were
in Chet’s annoying chatter.
Roy carefully folded the jacket and added it to the bag with Johnny’s other
clothes. He was starting to become more curious about this man that was now
his partner. A man that talked a mile a minute about the present and the future,
but never the past.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I got your stuff,” Rou announced as he entered Johnny’s room.
“Great! Brackett said that I could leave as soon as the paper work gets done,”
Johnny replied as he reached for the bag of his things. “Think you could run
me over to the station so that I can get my car?”
“Sure,” Roy paused a second before he continued. “That jacket of your is really
something. Where did you get it?”
Johnny stopped buttoning his shirt and looked up at Roy. Before he answered,
he picked up the jacket and laid it on the bed so that Roy could see the back
of it plainly. “My mom made it.” Passing his hand overt he back he continued,
“I know that most people expect Indian decorating to be done with beads, but
in reality most isn’t. This is done with dyed porcupine quills and a few beads.
It’s more flexible that way and it lasts longer. She made this for my Dad
when I was about ten. She gave it to him for his birthday.” Johnny took a
deep breath, and began to stuff his shirt into his waist band as he finished,
“They were killed in a car accident two weeks later. It was the only thing
I got to bring to L.A. when I moved.”
“Sorry, Johnny. I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Actually, you are the first person that hasn’t laughed as soon as they saw
that jacket,” Johnny replied with a grin. “Most people think I wear it for
show. They don’t bother to ask where it came from. Thanks for that, Partner.”
“Hey, Johnny, here’s you release forms,” Dixie said as she breezed in. “Hey!
That’s gorgeous. Where you get it?” Dixie stopped to stroke the fine work
on the back to the jacket.
Johnny smile at Roy, then answered, “My mom made it a long time ago, Dix.
I have tried to take care of it. It has been modified a little since she made
it, but would you guess that it was going of fourteen years old?”
“No, I would have thought that it was fairly new,” Dixie replied surprised
by the garments age. “Modified how? Did the seams come out or something?”
With the age of the jacket it would not have been a surprise.
“Ah, no. Actually I modifies the writings on the back.”
“Writing?” By this time Roy had joined them in looking at the jacket. This
surprised him, for he had seen nothing that looked like writing in the design.
The confusion of Roy’s face prompted Johnny to explain. “My people have what
is called a pictorial language. Our words are represented as small pictures.
It makes writing some what impractical, but since it has been that way for
many hundreds of years, we feel no reason to change it. Anyway as far as this
goes,” Johnny pointed to the jacket and explained. “The Stallion was the symbol
of my mother family and the hawk was the symbol of my father family. This,”
John pointed to a arc of symbols above the two main figures, “is one of the
legend of the tribe, giving the beginnings of the two families. The symbols
at the bottom as a listing of my family going back six generations. I added
my own name to the end of the list.”
“Why didn’t your mother put you on the list when she made it?” Dixie asked.
It seemed strange to her that a mother would leave her son of a family tree,
of sorts.
“Well… you see, In our culture you are given a name at birth, you must earn
the right to use it or change it by earning the right to use another. I was
granted to the right to use my Tribal name when I entered the L.A. fire academy.”
“Oh, wel, here you go,” Dixie walked John and Roy out to the car before asking
the question that she and Roy both wanted an answer to.
“Johnny, what is your Tribal name?”
Johnny smiled as he pulled the jacket back to show them the last symbol on
the bottom row. “When I was born, my grandfather immediately called me ‘Firewalker’.”
