The Round House

Chapter Seven

Angel One

Although he was often to be found at the corner of the house sitting on a chipped yellow kitchen chair, watching the road, this was not how Mooshum spent his day but merely a pause to rest his stringy old arms and legs. Mooshum eagerly wearied himself with an endless round of habitual activities that changed with the seasons. In autumn, of course, there were leaves to rake. They came from everywhere to settle on Mooshum’s patch of scrawny grass. He sometimes even plucked them off with his fingers and threw them in a barrel. It delighted him to burn them up. There was a short hiatus after the leaves and before the snow fell. During that time, Mooshum ate like a bear. His belly rounded and his cheeks puffed out. He was preparing for the great snows. He owned two shovels. A broad blue plastic rectangle that he used for the fluffy snow and a silver scoop with a sharp edge for snow that had packed or drifted. He also had an ice chipper, a hoelike instrument with a blade that ran straight down instead of curving over. He sharpened this one with a file until it was so keen it could easily slice off a toe.

Mooshum’s battle array stood ready in the back entry through October. When the first snow fell, he put on his galoshes. Clemence had glued sandpaper of the roughest grade to the bottoms. Every other night or so she changed the paper and let the boots dry on the radiator. Mooshum’s galoshes fit over his rabbit-fur-trimmed moccasins and insulated socks. He wore work pants lined with red flannel and a puffy, fluorescent orange parka that Clemence had given him so that he could be found if he got lost in the snow. Moosehide mitts lined with rabbit fur and a brilliant blue stocking cap with a wild pink pompom concluded this outfit. He went out every single day in his flamboyant gear and labored with incremental ferocity. He was antlike, he hardly seemed to be moving. Yet he shoveled trails to the garbage cans, cleared the snow not only from the walking paths around the house but completely off the driveway and away from the sides of the steps. He kept the snow scraped down to the ground and the concrete and never allowed it to accumulate. When there was no new snow and only the glare of ice, he hacked away with the lethal ice chipper. During the time when everything melted but the ground could not yet be prepared for the garden, he again ate constantly, putting back the flesh he’d lost to his winter war.

Spring and summer involved weeds that grew with vicious alacrity, pilfering animals, bugs, vicissitudes of weather. He used the push mower the way most his age would use a walker, but incidentally clipping the yard down to the nub. He tended a large vegetable garden with invisible zeal, rooting out quack grass, pigweed, and hauling bucket loads of water for the squash hills, again without ever seeming to move. He didn’t care much for the flower garden, but Clemence had a raspberry patch gone wild that mingled with a stand of Juneberry bushes. When the berries began to ripen, Mooshum rose at dawn to defend them. A living scarecrow, he sat in his yellow chair sipping his morning tea. To frighten off the birds, he’d also rigged up a clothesline of tin-can lids. He’d pierced the can tops with a hammer and nail and knotted them close enough to clatter in a breeze. He secured these jangling lines all about the garden, and I was always very careful to note where he hung them as the edges of the cans were sharp and a boy who bicycled through the yard too carelessly might have his throat cut.

By means of this ceaseless and seemingly quixotic activity, Mooshum stayed alive. When he was past the age of ninety years, cataracts were removed from his eyes and false teeth refitted to his shriveled gums. His ears were still keen. He heard so well that he was bothered by the periodic judder of Clemence’s sewing machine down the hall and by my uncle Edward’s habit of humming dirges while he corrected school papers. One morning in the June heat I rode to their house. He heard my bicycle while I was still on the main road, but then I’d clothespinned a playing card to a spoke. I liked the cheerful clatter and also the ace of diamonds was good luck. Anybody might have heard me, but no one would have been so happy at that moment to see me as Mooshum. For he had tangled himself in a large piece of bird netting that he had been attempting to throw over the highbush pembina berries, even though they were nowhere near ripe.

I leaned my bike against the house and untangled him. Then I folded the net back up. I asked him where my auntie was and why he’d been left alone, but he hushed me and said she was inside the house.

She don’t like me to use the net. The birds get tangled up and die in it, or lose their feet.

Indeed, from the folds of the net, at that moment, I picked out a tiny bird’s leg, its minute claw still clenched around a strand of plastic webbing. I undid it carefully and showed it to Mooshum, who peered at it and worked his mouth back and forth.

Let me hide that, he said.

I’m keeping it.

I put the claw in my pocket. I won’t tell Clemence. Maybe it’s got luck in it.

You need some luck?

We put the net away in the garage and walked to the back door. The day was heating up and it was almost time for Mooshum to take his morning nap.

Yes, I need luck, I said to Mooshum. You know how things are. My father had grounded me for three days after I biked off without leaving a note. I’d been at home with my mother all that time. And there was still that ghost I’d never had a chance to figure out. I wanted to ask Mooshum what it meant.

Mooshum’s eyes watered but not from pity. The sun was beginning to glare. He needed the Ray-Ban sunglasses that Uncle Whitey had given him for his last birthday. He took out a balled-up and faded bandanna and touched the rag to his cheekbones. Strings of hair hung around his face.

There’s better ways of getting luck than from a bird’s leg, he said.

We went inside. My aunt, who was dressed to go out and clean the church, in a set of high heels, a ruffled white shirt, and tight, streaky jeans, immediately put a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the table.

I wanted to laugh and ask how she was going to clean church in heels, but she saw me looking at them and said, I take them off, wrap my feet in rags, and polish the floor.

What’s this? Mooshum pursed his mouth in displeasure.

The same medicine tea you drink every single day, Daddy.

Everyone around Mooshum was taking credit for his longevity, and the fact that he still had his wits about him. Or what passed for wits, Clemence said when he angered her. His next birthday was coming up and Mooshum claimed he would be 112. Clemence was focused especially hard on keeping him alive so that he could enjoy his party. She was making big preparations.

Pour me summa that cold slough water, Mooshum said to me as we sat.

Daddy! This peps you up.

I don’t need no more pep. I need a place to put my pep.

How about Grandma Ignatia? I wanted to get him going.

She’s all dried out.

She’s younger than you, said Clemence in a frosty voice. You old buggers think you’re made for young women. That’s what’s wrong with you.

That’s what’s keeping me alive! That and my hair.

Mooshum touched the long, slick, scrawny white mane he’d been growing for years. Clemence kept trying to braid or tie Mooshum’s hair back, but he preferred to let it course in matted strings down the sides of his face.

Oh yai. He took a big gulp of tea. If Louis Riel had let Dumont ambush the militia back then, I’d be a retired prime minister. Clemence here might be governing our Indian nation instead of wiping the priest’s floor. She’d have no time to make me drink these endless buckets of twig juice. The stuff runs right through me, my boy. Oops! Ha-ha. That’s what I’ll say when I shit my pants. Oops!

Don’t you dare, said Clemence. Stay with him till I get back and make sure he gets to the toilet, him. She said she’d be back by noon or one.

I nodded and drank the tea. It had the sharp taste of bark. With Clemence gone, we could get down to business. I needed to find out about the ghost, first of all. Then I needed luck. I asked Mooshum about the ghost and described it. I told him that the same ghost had come to Randall.

It’s not a ghost, then, Mooshum said.

What is it, then?

Someone’s throwing their spirit at you. Somebody that you’ll see.

Could it be the man?

What man?

I took a breath. Who hurt my mother.

Mooshum nodded and sat motionless, frowning.

No, probably not, he said at last. When somebody throws their spirit at you they don’t even know it, but they mean to help. For weeks mon père dreamed that horse trampled him. Twice, I saw the angel that came to take my Junesse. Be careful.

Then help me get my luck, I said. How should I start?

You go to your doodem first, Mooshum answered. Find the ajijaak.

My father and his father were ceremonially taken into the crane clan, or Ajijaak. They were supposed to be leaders and have good voices, but beyond that I’d been given no special knowledge. I told this to Mooshum.

That’s okay. You just go straight to your doodem and watch. It will show you the luck, Joe.

He drank the tea, made a face. Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young. I helped him stand up and with his eyes shut he was willing to be led to the cot in the living room where he dozed in the daytime, right beside the picture window. It was placed so that when he woke up he could gaze at the hot eternal sky.

When Clemence came back, I left the house and biked to a slough outside of town. It was shallow all along the edges, and I’d seen a heron there last time I went. All the herons and cranes and other shorebirds were my doodemag, my luck. There was a dock of gray boards, some missing. I lay down on the warm wood and the sun went right into my bones. I saw no herons at first. Then I realized the piece of reedy shore I was staring at had a heron hidden in its pattern. I watched that bird stand. Motionless. Then, quick as genius, it had a small fish, which it carefully snapped down its gullet. The heron went back to standing still, this time on one leg. I was getting impatient for the luck to show itself.

Okay, I said, where’s the luck?

With a flare of long, pointed wings, it vaulted into the air and flapped to the other side of the lake, where the round house was, as well as the cliff and drop-off, a place we liked to swim. The prevailing winds drove waves, junk, and scudding foam to this side of the lake. I turned around, disappointed, edged up over one of the missing boards, and looked down into the shadow of the dock through the clear water of the lake. There were usually baby perch, water skimmers, tadpoles, and maybe even a turtle to watch. This time a child’s face stared up at me. Startling, but I knew it was a doll right off, a plastic doll sunk wide-eyed into the lake. Smirking like it had a secret, blue eyes with bits of sparkle in the iris catching points of sun. I jumped up, wheeled around, then kneeled back down for a better look. It occurred to me that if there was a toy there might be a real child attached to it, and that child might be wedged underneath the dock. A cloud passed over the sun. I thought of going after Cappy, but finally I got too curious and looked down again, peering through gaps between the boards. There was just the doll. A girl baby doll floating calmly along the lake bottom wearing a blue checked dress, puffy panties, and that naughty smile. As soon as I’d truly made sure there was no real child to go with it, I fished out the doll and shook it so the water trickled out the seam where the head met the molded plastic body. I wrenched the head off the doll to dump out the rest of the water, and there was my luck. Right there. The doll was packed with money.

I pushed the head back on the doll. I looked around. All was quiet. Nobody in sight. I took off the head and examined it more closely. The doll’s head was stuffed with neatly rolled-up bills. I was thinking one-dollar bills. A hundred, maybe two. My pack was hanging behind my bike seat. I threw the doll in and pedaled toward the gas station. As I rode along I thought about my luck—there was a feeling of guilt attached. I assumed that the person who’d hidden the money in the doll was a girl, maybe even somebody that I knew. She had saved up her whole life, bills scavenged here and there, little job money, birthday money, dollars from drunk uncles. Everything she had was in that doll and she had lost it. I thought that my luck was probably temporary. There would be a pitiful ad tacked up somewhere or even in the newspaper, a hopeless message describing this doll and asking to have it back.

When I got to the gas station, I propped my bike up by the door and put the doll underneath my shirt. Sonja was taking care of a customer. I looked at the bulletin board. There were ads for bull semen and wolf puppies, offers to sell blown-out stereo equipment, hopeful snapshots and descriptions of quarter horses, pintos, and used cars. No doll. The customer finally left. I was still cradling the doll underneath my shirt.

What’cha got there? Sonja asked.

Something I have to show you in private.

I’ve heard that one before.

Sonja laughed and I went red.

C’mon, in here.

We went behind the counter to the tiny closet she called her office. There was a small metal desk, chair, cot, and lamp squeezed in. I took the doll from beneath my shirt.

Weird, said Sonja.

I took the head off.

Holy f*ck.

Sonja shut the closet door. She used her long pink nails to tug the roll of bills from the neck. Then she uncurled a couple. They were hundred-dollar bills. Sonja rolled the bills back up, tightly, jammed them into the doll, and put the head back on. She went out, shutting the door behind her, and got three plastic bags. Then she came back in and rolled the doll into one of the bags and wrapped another bag around that one, then used the third bag as the carrier. She was looking down at me in the dim office. Her eyes were round and their blue was dark as rain.

Those bills are wet.

The doll was in the lake.

Anybody see you fish it out? Anybody see you with the doll?

No.

Sonja took the canvas deposit pouch out of a drawer. I knew about the pouch because she took the money to the bank twice a day. A sign at the register said, “No Money on the Premises!” Another next to it read, “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.” That the camera was fake was a big secret. Sonja got out the tan aluminum cash box that locked with a little key. She thought a moment, then she took a stack of white business envelopes out of a drawer and put them in the tin box.

Where’s your dad?

Home.

Sonja dialed the home number and said, Mind if I take Joe with me doing errands? We’ll be back late afternoon.

Where are we going? I asked.

To my house, first.

We took the doll in the plastic bag, the deposit pouch, and the tan box to the car. Sonja kissed Whitey as we passed and told him that she was making the deposit and was going to buy me some clothes and stuff. The implication was that she was doing for me the things that my mother would have done if she was able to get up and out.

Sure, said Whitey, waving us off.

Sonja always made certain that I buckled myself in and rode safe. She had an old Buick sedan that Whitey kept running, and she was a careful driver, though she smoked, flicking the ashes into a messy little pull-out ashtray. The rest of the car was vacuumed spotless. We rode out of town and turned down the road to the old place, past the horses in the pasture, who looked up at us and started forward. They must have known the sound of the car. The dogs were standing at the house, waiting. They were Pearl’s sisters—Ball and Chain. Both were black with burning yellow eyes and patches of cottontail brown here and there in their ruffs and tails. The male dog, Big Brother, had run off about a month before.

Whitey had put a stairway and deck on the front of the house. It was made of treated lumber that hadn’t lost its sick green color yet. The house was a floaty blue. Sonja said she’d painted it that blue because of the name of the color: Lost in Space. The trim was spanking white but the aluminum storm door and solid-core interior door were old and battered. Inside, the house was cool and dim. It smelled of Pine-Sol and lemon polish, cigarettes and stale fried fish. There were four small rooms. The bedroom had a saggy double bed topped with a flowered comforter, and the window looked out on the sloping pasture and the horses. The pinto and the Appaloosa had come close to the wire at the edge of the yard. Spook whinnied, a love sound. I followed Sonja into the bedroom, where she opened her closet. Perfume wafted out. She turned around with a clothes iron in her hand and plugged it into the wall beside the ironing board. The board was set right before the window, where she could watch the horses.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, took the doll’s head off, and gave Sonja bill after bill. She carefully ironed each one flat and dry, testing the bottom of the iron often with her finger. They were all hundreds. At first we put five bills carefully in each envelope, and folded down the flap but didn’t seal it, and put the envelope on the bed. Then we got low on envelopes and put ten bills in each one. Then twenty. Sonja gave me a tweezers and I fished the last bills out of the wrists and ankles of the doll. Sonja used a flashlight to peer down the doll’s neck. At last, I put the head back on.

Put it back in the bag, said Sonja.

She wiped her wrist across her forehead and upper lip. Her face was covered with beads of sweat although the heat hadn’t reached inside the house yet.

She flapped her arms up and down, patted her armpits.

Phew. Go out in the kitchen and get me some water. I gotta change my shirt.

I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The well on the place sucked up sweet water. Sonja always kept a jug of it cold. I poured water into a Pabst Blue Ribbon glass—they collected beer glasses—and drank it down. Then I filled it back up for Sonja. I guess I wanted her to drink out of the same glass as me, though I really wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how much money might be in the envelopes. I went back in and Sonja had a fresh shirt on—pink and gray stripes that pulled wide across her chest. The shirt had a stiff white collar and a buttoned tab. She drank the water.

Whew, she said.

We put the envelopes into the cash bag and put the bag in the aluminum box. Sonja went to the bathroom and brushed her hair and so on. She didn’t entirely shut the door and I sat there in the kitchen looking at the bathroom wall. When she came out she had on fresh lipstick, a pink that exactly matched her fingernails and the stripes on her shirt. We went out to the car. Sonja took the doll with her in the plastic bag. She locked it in the trunk.

We’re going to open a bunch of college savings accounts for you, said Sonja.

First we drove to Hoopdance and were ushered past the teller to talk with a bank manager in back. Sonja said that she was opening an account for me, a savings account, and we both signed printed cards while the woman typed out the passbook in my name with Sonja as a co-signer. Sonja handed over three of the envelopes, and the woman opening the account gave her a sharp look.

They sold his land, Sonja shrugged.

The woman counted out the money and typed it into the passbook. She put the passbook into a little plastic envelope and gave it pointedly to me.

I walked out with the passbook, and we drove to the other bank in Hoopdance, where we did the same thing. Only this time Sonja mentioned a big bingo win.

I’ll say, said the bank manager.

We kept going, drove to Argus. At one bank she said I had inherited money from my senile uncle. At another she mentioned a racehorse. Then she went back to the bingo win. It took all afternoon, us driving through the new grass pastures and crops just beginning to show. At a roadside rest stop, Sonja stopped and opened the trunk. She took out the doll in its plastic bags and dropped it in a trash can. After that, we stopped in the next town and got take-out hamburgers and french fries. Sonja wouldn’t let me drink a Coke but had some idea that orange soda was better for me. I didn’t care. I was so happy to be in a car where Sonja had to watch the road and I could glance at her breasts straining at those stripes before I looked up at her face. Every time I talked to her, I looked at her breasts. I kept the cash box on my lap and stopped thinking about the money, actually, as money. But at last when we had deposited it all and were driving toward home I went through each of the passbooks and added the numbers up in my head. I told Sonja there was over forty thousand dollars.

It was a full-size baby doll, she said.

How come we couldn’t keep out at least one bill? I asked. Once I thought about it, I was disappointed.

Okay, said Sonja. Here’s the thing. Wherever that money came from? They are gonna want it back. They will kill to get it back, you know what I’m saying?

I shouldn’t tell anybody. Duh.

But can you do that? I’ve never known a guy who could keep a secret.

I can.

Even from your dad?

Sure.

Even from Cappy?

She heard me hesitate before I answered.

They’d whale on him too, she said. Maybe kill him. So you zip it and keep it zipped. On your mother’s life.

She knew what she was saying. She knew without looking that tears started in my eyes. I blinked.

Okay, I swear.

We have to bury the passbooks.

We turned down a dirt road and drove until we came to the tree that people call the hanging tree, a huge oak. The sun was in its branches. There were prayer flags, strips of cloth. Red, blue, green, white, the old-time Anishinaabe colors of the directions, according to Randall. Some cloths were faded, some new. This was the tree where those ancestors were hanged. None of the killers ever went on trial. I could see the land of their descendants, already full of row crops. Sonja took the ice scraper out of her glove compartment and we put the passbooks in the cash box. She pushed the key into her front jeans pocket.

Remember the day.

It was June 17.

We traced down the sun to a point on the horizon and then walked in a straight line from where the sun would set, fifty paces back into the woods. It took us what seemed like forever to scrape out a deep hole for the box, using just that ice scraper. But we got the box in and covered it up and fit the divots back on top and scattered them with leaves.

Invisible, I said.

We need to wash our hands, said Sonja.

There was some water in the ditch. We used that.

I get it about not telling anybody, I said as we drove home. But I want shoes like Cappy’s.

Sonja glanced over at me and almost caught me looking at the side of her breast.

Yeah, she said. And how would you explain where you’d got the money to buy them?

I’d say I had a job at the gas station.

She grinned. You want one?

Pleasure flooded into me so that I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t realized until then how much I wanted out of my house and how much I wanted to be working somewhere I could see and talk to other people, just random people coming through, people who weren’t dying right before your eyes. It frightened me to suddenly think that way.

Hell, yes! I said.

You don’t swear on the job, said Sonja. You’re representing something.

Okay. We drove for a few miles. I asked what I was representing.

Reservation-based free market enterprise. People are watching us.

Who’s watching us?

White people. I mean, resentful ones. You know? Like those Larks who owned Vinland. He’s been here, but he’s nice to me. Like, he’s not so bad.

Linden?

Yeah, that one.

You should watch out for him, I said.

She laughed. Whitey hates his guts. When I’m nice to him, he gets so jealous.

How come you wanna make Whitey jealous?

All of a sudden, I was jealous too. She laughed again and said that Whitey needed to get put in his place.

He thinks he owns me.

Oh.

I was awkward, but she suddenly glanced at me, sharp, with a naughty smirk like the one on that doll’s face. Then she looked away, still smiling with manic glee.

Yeah. Thinks he owns me. But he’ll find out he don’t, huh? Am I right?



Soren Bjerke, special agent for the FBI, was an impassive lanky Swede with wheat-colored skin and hair, a raw skinny nose, and big ears. You couldn’t really see his eyes behind his glasses—they were always smudged, I think on purpose. He had a droopy houndlike face and a modest little smile. He made few movements. There was a way he had of keeping perfectly still and watchful that reminded me of the ajijaak. His knobby hands were quiet on the kitchen table when I walked in. I stood in the doorway. My father was carrying two mugs of coffee to the table. I could tell I’d interrupted some cloud of concentration between them. My legs went weak with relief because I understood Bjerke’s visit was not about me.

That Bjerke was here anyway went back to Ex Parte Crow Dog and then the Major Crimes Act of 1885. That was when the federal government first intervened in the decisions Indians made among themselves regarding restitution and punishment. The reasons for Bjerke’s presence continued on through that rotten year for Indians, 1953, when Congress not only decided to try Termination out on us but passed Public Law 280, which gave certain states criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian lands within their borders. If there was one law that could be repealed or amended for Indians to this day, that would be Public Law 280. But on our particular reservation Bjerke’s presence was a statement of our toothless sovereignty. You have read this far and you know that I’m writing this story at a removal of time, from that summer in 1988, when my mother refused to come down the stairs and refused to talk to Soren Bjerke. She had lashed out at me and terrified my father. She had floated off, so that we didn’t know how to retrieve her. I’ve read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return. And yet, quite honestly, at that moment in 1988, as I looked at my father and Bjerke at our kitchen table, my brain was still stuffed with money like the head of that trashed doll with manufactured mischief in her eyes.

I walked past Bjerke into the living room but then I didn’t want to walk upstairs. I didn’t want to walk past my mother’s shut door. I didn’t want to know that she was lying in there, breathing in there, and with her constant suffering sucking all the juice out of the excitement of the money. But because I did not want to walk past my mother’s door, I turned and went back to the kitchen. I was hungry. I stood in the doorway fidgeting until the men again stopped talking.

Maybe you want a glass of milk, said my father. Get yourself a glass of milk and sit down. Your aunt made a cake for us. A small round chocolate cake, neatly iced, was set on the counter. My father waved me to it. I carefully cut four pieces and put them on saucers with a fork beside. I brought three of the pieces to the table. I poured myself a glass of milk.

I’ll take that up to your mother later on, said my father, nodding at the last piece of cake.

So I sat down with the men. And I realized I had made a mistake. Now that I was sitting in their proximity, the truth would pull at me. Not the gas can truth. But when they seemed to wait for me to speak, I threw that out, nervously, asking if it could be evidence.

Yes, said Bjerke. His no-flinch gaze pierced the scum on his eyeglasses. We’ll do an affidavit. All in time. If we have a case.

Yes, sir. Well, I gathered my courage, maybe we should do it now. Before I forget.

Is he the forgetful type? asked Bjerke.

No, said my father.

Still, I ended up talking into a little tape recorder and signing a paper. After that, there were some politely well-meant questions about what I was up to that summer and how tall I was growing and which sports I’d go out for in junior high school. Wrestling, I said. They struggled to not look skeptical. Or maybe cross-country? That seemed more believable. I could tell that both men were glad to have me there but also fending off some large morose silence of confusion between them that probably stemmed, now that I think back to that day and that hour, to their impasse. They were out of ideas and had no suspects and no sure leads and no help at all from my mother, who now insisted that the event itself had passed from her mind. The money was still pushing at me to talk, to reveal.

There’s something, I said.

I put down my fork and looked at my empty plate. I wanted another piece, this time with ice cream. At the same time, I had a sick sense of what I was about to do and thought that I might never eat again.

Something? said my father. Bjerke wiped his lips.

There was a file, I said.

Bjerke put down his napkin. My father peered at me over the rims of his eyeglasses.

Joe and I went through the files, he said to Bjerke, by way of explaining my unexpected remark. We pulled the possible court cases where someone might have—

Not that kind of file, I said.

The two of them nodded at me patiently. Then I saw my father realize there was something he did not know in what I was about to say. He lowered his head and stared at me. That gilded octopus ticked on the wall. I took a deep breath, and when I spoke I whispered in a childish way that I immediately found shameful but which riveted them.

Please don’t tell Mom I said this. Please?

Joe, said my father. He took off his glasses and set them on the table.

Please?

Joe.

All right. That afternoon when Mom went to the office there was a phone call. When she put the phone down, I could tell she was upset. Then about an hour afterward she said she was going after a file. A week ago, I remembered about the file. So I asked her if they found the file. She said there was no file. She said that I should never mention a file. But there was a file. She went after it. That file is why this happened.

I stopped talking and my mouth hung open. We stared at one another like three dummies with crumbs on our chins.

That is not all, said my father suddenly. That is not all you know.

He leaned over the table in that way he had. He loomed, he seemed to grow. I thought about the money first, of course, but I was not about to give that up and anyway to speak about it now would also implicate Sonja, and I would never betray her. I tried to shrug it off.

That’s it, I said. Nothing else. But he just loomed. So I gave up a lesser secret, which is often the way we satisfy someone who knows, and knows that he knows, as my father did then.

All right.

Bjerke leaned forward too. I pushed my chair back, a little wildly.

Take it easy, said my dad. Just tell what you know.

That day we went out to the round house and found the gas can, well, we found something else there too. Across the fence line, down by the lakeshore. There was a cooler and a pile of clothes. We didn’t touch the clothes.

What about the cooler? asked Bjerke.

Well, I believe we opened that.

What was in it? asked my father.

Beer cans.

I was about to say they were empty and then I looked at my father and knew that a denial was beneath me and a lie would embarrass both of us in front of Bjerke.

Two six-packs, I said.

Bjerke and my father looked at each other, nodded, and sat back in their chairs.

Just like that I ratted out my friends in order to hide the fact of the money. I sat stunned at how quickly it had happened. I was also shocked at how perfectly my admission covered up the forty thousand dollars I had just secured that very day with Sonja’s help. Or under Sonja’s direction. It was me helping Sonja, after all. She was the one who’d had the idea. She was the one who hadn’t gone to my father or to the police. She was an adult and so theoretically she was responsible for what had happened that day. I could always take refuge in that, I thought, and that I had this idea surprised and then humiliated me so that, sitting there before my father and Bjerke, I began to sweat and I felt my heart quicken and my throat seize tight.

I jumped up.

I gotta go!

Did he smell like beer? I heard my father ask.

No, said Bjerke.

I locked myself in the bathroom and could hear them talking out there. If there’d been a window easy to open I might have jumped out and run. I put my hands under the water and muttered words and very deliberately did not look into the mirror.

When I came back out and slunk to the table, I saw a slip of paper next to my empty cake plate and milk glass.

Read it, said my father.

I sat down. It was a citation, though just on scrap paper. Underage drinking. It mentioned juvenile detention.

Should I cite your friends too?

I drank both six-packs. I paused. Over time.

Where would we find the cans? asked Bjerke.

They’re gone. Crushed up. Thrown out. They were Hamm’s.

Bjerke didn’t seem to think the brand was remarkable. He didn’t even jot this down.

That area was under surveillance, he said. We knew about the cooler and the clothes, but they don’t belong to the attacker. Bugger Pourier came home from Minneapolis to see his dying mother. She kicked him out, as usual, and he moved in down there. We were hoping he’d come get his beer. But I guess you drank it first.

He said this in a remote but somehow sympathetic tone and I felt my head begin to swim with the sudden drain of adrenaline. I stood up again and backed away with the paper warning in my hands.

I’m sorry, sir. They were Hamm’s. We thought . . .

I kept backing up until I reached the doorway and then I turned around. Leaden, I climbed the stairs. I went past my mother’s door without looking in on her. I went into my own room and shut the door. My parents’ bedroom took up the front of the upstairs and had three windows that normally let in the first sunlight of morning. The bathroom and sewing room took up small spaces on either side of the stairway. My room at the back of the house caught the long gold of sunset and in summer especially it was comforting to lie in my bed and watch the radiant shadows climb the walls. My walls were painted a soft yellow. My mother had painted the walls while she was pregnant and always said she’d chosen the color because it would be right for either a girl or boy, but that halfway through the painting she knew I was a boy. She knew because each time she worked in the room a crane flew by the window, my father’s doodem, as I have said. Her own clan was the turtle. My father insisted that she had arranged for the snapping turtles she’d hooked on their first date to scare him into asking her to marry him without delay. I only learned later that they’d caught the very snapper whose shell my mother’s first boyfriend had carved with their initials. That boy had perished, Clemence had told me. The turtle’s message had been about mortality. How my father should act with swiftness in the face of death. As the light crept down the sides of the walls, turning the yellow paint to a deeper bronze, I thought about the awful doll and the money. I thought about Sonja’s left breast and right breast, which after continual surreptitious observation I had concluded were slightly different, and I wondered if I’d ever know exactly how. I thought about my father sitting in the welling gloom downstairs, and my mother in the black bedroom with the shades drawn against tomorrow’s sunrise. There was that hush on the reservation that falls between the summer dusk and dark, before the pickup trucks drag between the bars, the dance hall, and the drive-up liquor window. Sounds were muted—a horse neighed over the trees. There was a short, angry bawl way off as a child was dragged in from outdoors. There was the drone of a faraway motor chugging down from the church on the hill. My mother hadn’t ever realized that cranes are very predictable and cease their hunting at a certain hour and return to their roosts. Now the crane my mother used to watch, or its offspring, flapped slowly past my window. That evening it cast the image not of itself but of an angel on my wall. I watched this shadow. Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.