Tinkerbell on Walkabout by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

Tinkerbell on Walkabout
    “Take varm clothes, Gina,” Mom says. “Is cold at night.”
She’s said the same thing in
the same moose-and-squirrel accent since I was twelve and going off to summer
camp.
    “Mom,” I say, “it’s May.”
    “Sveater veather,” she says, pulls the aforementioned
garment out of my dresser, and lays it atop my duffel.
    It’s the bulkiest sweater I own, bright red, and makes me
look like a big, fuzzy chili pepper. It also takes up half the duffel, but it
was her gift to me. Need I say more?
    We have this conversation every time I leave home for more
than a day and I always leave with extra sweaters, extra sox, vitamins of all
kinds and—
    “You have your obereg ?”
    This literally means “protector” in The Mother’s Tongue and, like the sweater and vitamins, is something Mom will
not let me leave home without. Not that she’d admit to being superstitious. But with a PhD in Russian folklore,
a fascination with arcana, and a vast collection of materia magica from
all over the world, she views packing an amulet as a practical consideration.
Better safe than sorry, after all.
    I reach into my jeans pocket and retrieve the obereg du jour —the smallest of
a set of nesting matryoshka dolls that have spent some time under the
altar at Our Lady of Kazan.
    “See? I’m all obereg- ed up.”
    “Good,” she says. “Don’t vorget to say goodbye to Edmund.”
    I never forget to say goodbye to Dad, who never says word
one about sweaters, vitamins, or amulets. My down-to-earth Japanese-American
father only ever asks: “Did you pack your sidearm?”
    I sometimes think people with dysfunctional families have it
easy. Okay, not really. My odd but stubbornly functional family is what got me
through my teens, my epic washout from the police academy, my broken
engagement, my ex-fiancé’s trial for attempted murder, and my current meanders.
They don’t seem to mind that at twenty-four I’m still trying to decide what I
want to be when I grow up.
    Now, as I speed my Harley northeast on Interstate 80 toward
the picture postcard capitol of Northern California, I reflect that I have
always and only wanted to be a cop. I still do, notwithstanding I’ve proven I’m
not cop material.
    I’ve toyed
with the idea of becoming a P.I., but I have reservations. Not because the work
is hard and dangerous—no problem, I have an obereg for every
occasion—but I mean, honestly, how seriously would you take a detective who’s five-foot-one and weighs ninety
pounds in a soggy trench coat?
    Hence, I am heading upstate for a Gold Country walkabout,
thanks to my high school buddy, July Petersen, who insists I come up and check
out the California Forestry Department.
    Gina Miyoko, Forest R-r-ranger. Right.
    The drive takes three hours and I reach Grass Valley
depressed and strung out on Starbucks. No fewer than three large men—also
mounted on Harleys—observed that my hog is “a lot of bike for a little girl.”
That’s one chauvinist pig-dog per hour.
    July lives with her parents. This is not because she’s a
deadbeat, but because she likes living with them. July’s parents are nearly as
odd as my own. As evidence of this, I offer the fact that she has a brother
named March and a sister named October. One wonders what would have happened if
March had been a twin. Or had been born in May or June.
    July is a cop—California Highway Patrol. She is also my
hero, and has been since high school when she assumed the full time job of
protecting our little quartet of social misfits. We were misfits for reasons of
stature: Rose Martinez was too chubby; July was too tall and buff; Lee Preston
and I were too small. We were the Spratts, Mutt ’n’ Jeff, Abbott and Costello,
Laurel and Hardy—all rolled into one much-maligned group.
    None of us dated much, including July, notwithstanding she
was statuesque and blonde. In the years since, she hadn’t sprouted any
significant others, so I am understandably floored