The Round House

Chapter Eight

Hide and Q

My mother’s job was to know everybody’s secrets. The original census rolls taken in the area that became our reservation go back past 1879 and include a description of each family by tribe, often by clan, by occupation, by relationship, age, and original name in our language. Many people had adopted French or English names by that time, too, or had been baptized and received thereby the name of a Catholic saint. It was my mother’s task to parse the ever more complicated branching and interbranching tangle of each bloodline. Through the generations, we have become an impenetrable undergrowth of names and liaisons. At the tip of each branch of course the children are found, those newly enrolled by their parents, or often a single mother or father, with a named parent on the blank whose identity if known might shake the branches of the other trees. Children of incest, molestation, rape, adultery, fornication beyond reservation boundaries or within, children of white farmers, bankers, nuns, BIA superintendents, police, and priests. My mother kept her files locked in a safe. No one else knew the combination of the safe and there was now a backlog of tribal enrollment applications piled up at her office.



Special Agent Bjerke was in our kitchen the next morning to approach the problem of questioning my mother about the particular file.

Would it help if we had a woman? To talk? We can get a female agent to drive over from our Minneapolis office.

I don’t think so.

My father fiddled with the tray he’d fixed for my mother’s breakfast. There was an egg fried the way she’d liked, toast buttered just so, a dab of Clemence’s raspberry jam. He had already brought her coffee with cream and was encouraged that she’d sat up for him and had a sip.

I went upstairs with the tray and set it down on one of the chairs next to the bed. She had put down the coffee and was pretending to sleep—I could tell by the infinitesimal tension in her body and her fake deep breaths. Perhaps she knew that Soren Bjerke had returned, or perhaps my father had said something about the file already. She would feel betrayed by me. I didn’t know if she would ever forgive me, and I left her room wishing that I could go straight to Sonja and Whitey’s and pump gas in the hot sun or wash windshields or clean the scummy restroom. Anything but go back upstairs, into the bedroom. My father said it was important I be there so that she couldn’t deny it.

We’ll have to break through her denial, is how he put it, and I felt a miserable dread.

The three of us went upstairs. My father first, then Bjerke, me last. My father knocked before entering her room, and Bjerke, looking at his feet, waited outside with me. My father said something.

No!

She cried out and there was the crash of what I knew was the breakfast tray, a clatter of silverware skidding across the floor. My father opened the door. His face was glossy with sweat.

We’d best get this over with.

And so we entered and sat down in two folding chairs he’d pulled up next to her bed. He lowered himself, like a dog that knows it isn’t welcome, onto the end of the bed. My mother moved to the far edge of the mattress and lay hunched, her back to us, the pillow childishly held over her ears.

Geraldine, said my father in a low voice, Joe’s here with Bjerke. Please. Don’t let him see you this way.

What way? Her voice was a crow’s jeer. Crazy? He can take it. He’s seen it. But he’d rather be with his friends. Let him go, Bazil. Then I’ll talk to you.

Geraldine, he knows something. He’s told us something.

My mother crunched herself into a smaller ball.

Mrs. Coutts, said Bjerke, I apologize for bothering you again. I’d much rather solve this and let you alone, leave you in peace. But the fact is I need some additional information from you. Last night we learned from Joe that on the day you were attacked you received a telephone call. Joe thinks he remembers that this telephone call was upsetting to you. He says that after a short time you told him that you were going after a file and then you drove to your office. Is this true?

There was no movement or sound from my mother. Bjerke tried again. But she waited us out. She didn’t turn to us. She didn’t move. It seemed an hour that we sat in a suspense that quickly turned to disappointment and then to shame. My father finally lifted his hand and whispered, Enough. We backed out of the room and walked down the steps.

Late that afternoon, my father moved a card table into the bedroom. My mother did not react. Then he set up folding chairs at the table and I heard her furiously berating him and begging him to take it away. He came downstairs sweating again, and told me that every night at six o’clock I was to be home for dinner, which we’d bring upstairs and eat together. Like a family again, he said. We were starting this regimen now. I took a deep breath and carried up the tablecloth. Again, though my mother was angry, my father opened the shades and even a window, to let in a breeze. We brought a salad and a baked chicken up the stairs, plus the plates, glasses, silverware, and a pitcher of lemonade. Perhaps a drop of wine tomorrow night, to make something festive of it, Dad said without hope. He brought a bouquet of flowers he’d picked from the garden that she hadn’t seen yet. He put them in a small painted vase. I looked at the green sky on that vase, the willow, the muddy water and awkwardly painted rocks. I was to become overly familiar with this glazed scene during those dinners because I didn’t want to look at my mother, propped up staring wearily at us as if she’d just been shot, or rolled into a mummy pretending to be in the afterlife. My father tried to keep a conversation going every night, and when I had exhausted my meager store of the day’s doings, he forged on, a lone paddler on an endless lake of silence, or maybe rowing upstream. I am sure I saw him laboring on the muddy little river painted on the vase. After he’d spoken of the day’s small events one night, he said he’d had a very interesting talk with Father Travis Wozniak and that the priest had been there in Dealey Plaza on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Travis’s father had taken him into the city to see the Catholic president and his elegant first lady, who was wearing a suit the exact mute pink as the inside of a cat’s mouth. Travis and his father walked down Houston Street, crossed Elm, and decided that the best place to view the President would be there on the grassy slope just east of the Triple Underpass. They had a good view and watched the street expectantly. Just before the first motorcycle escorts appeared, someone’s black-and-white gundog ran out into the middle of the street and was quickly recalled by its owner. It often bothered Travis afterward to think that if only the dog had got loose at another time, perhaps just as the motorcade passed, messing up the precision and timing of things, or if it had thrown itself under the wheels of the presidential convertible in an act of sacrifice, or leapt into the President’s lap, what followed might not have happened. This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. It gave him the sensation that he was tottering on the tip of a flagpole. He was poised on circumstance. He said the feeling has grown stronger and more persistent, too, since the embassy bombing where he’d been injured.

Interesting, my father said. That priest. A flagpole sitter.

Father Travis had gone on describing how the motorcycles preceded the presidential convertible, and there was John F. Kennedy, looking straight ahead. Some women sitting on the grass had brought their lunch to eat and now stood up beside their sandwich boxes and wildly clapped and cheered. They drew the President’s attention, and he looked directly at them, and then smiled at Travis, who was dazzled and disoriented to see the portrait in the living room of every Catholic family come to life. The shots sounded like a car had backfired. The first lady stood up and Travis saw her scan the crowd. The car halted. Then more shots. She threw herself down and that was the last he saw, for his father threw him down, too, and covered him with his body. He was slammed into the ground so suddenly, and his father was so heavy, that he bit into the sod. Ever after, thinking of that day, he remembers the grit in his teeth. Soon his father felt the shift of the crowd and the two of them rose. Waves of confusion swirled, turned chaotic when the presidential car streaked forward. People ran back and forth, not certain which direction was safest, and subject to racing rumors. He saw a family of black people cast themselves onto the earth in grief. The speckled gundog was loose again; it trotted right and left, nose high, as if it were actually directing the crowd instead of being buffeted this way and that by surges of people in the grip of conflicting terrors and fascinations. Some tried to run back to the place they had last seen the President and others grappled with people they thought somehow responsible. People sank to their knees and were lost in prayer or shock. The gundog sniffed a fallen woman and then stood beside her, pointing gravely and motionlessly at the stuffed bird on her hat.

On another night, after I tried but at last grew stumped for conversation, my father remembered that of course an Ojibwe person’s clan meant everything at one time and no one didn’t have a clan, thus you knew your place in the world and your relationship to all other beings. The crane, the bear, the loon, the catfish, lynx, kingfisher, caribou, muskrat—all of these animals and others in various tribal divisions, including the eagle, the marten, the deer, the wolf—people were part of these clans and were thus governed by special relationships with one another and with the animals. This was in fact, said my father, the first system of Ojibwe law. The clan system punished and rewarded; it dictated marriages and regulated commerce; it told which animals a person could hunt and which to appease, which would have pity on the doodem or a fellow being of that clan, which would carry messages up to the Creator over to the spirit world, down through the layers of the earth or across the lodge to a sleeping relative. There were many instances right in our own family, in fact, as you well know, he said to the crease in the blankets that was my mother, your own great-aunt was saved by a turtle. As you remember, she was of the turtle, or the mikinaak, clan. At the age of ten she was put out to fast on a small island. There she stayed one early spring, four days and four nights with her face blackened, utterly defenseless, waiting for the spirits to become her friends and adopt her. On the fifth day when her parents did not return, she knew something was wrong. She broke the paste of saliva that sealed her thirsty mouth, drank lake water, and ate a patch of strawberries that had tormented her. She made a fire, for although she was not allowed to use it on her fast, she carried with her a flint and steel. Then she began to live on that island. She made a fish trap and lived off fish. The place was remote, but still she was surprised at how the time passed, one moon, two, and no one came to get her. She knew by then that something very bad had happened. She also knew that the fish would soon retreat to another part of the lake for the summer and she would starve. So she determined to swim to the mainland, twenty miles away. She set off on a fair morning with the wind at her back. For a long time the waves helped her along, and she swam well enough, even though she had been weakened by her meager diet. Then the wind changed and blew directly against her. Clouds lowered and she was lashed by a cold driving rain. Her arms and legs were heavy as swollen logs, she thought that she would die, and in her struggle called out for help. At that moment she felt something rise beneath her. It was a giant and a very old mishiikenh, one of those snapping turtles science tells us are unchanged for over 150 million years—a form of life frightful but perfect. This creature swam below her, breaking her way through the water, nudging her to the surface when her strength gave out, allowing her to cling to its shell when she was exhausted, until they came to shore. She waded out and turned to thank it. The turtle watched her silently, its eyes uncanny yellow stars, before it sank away. Then she found her brothers and sisters. It was true about the disaster. They had been laid low by the devastations of the great influenza—as with all pandemics this struck reservations hardest. Their parents were dead and there was no way to know where their sister had been left off, in addition to which people were afraid to catch the deadly illness and had moved away from them in haste so that they, too, the children, were living alone.

There are many stories of children who were forced to live alone, my father went on, including those stories from antiquity in which infants were nursed by wolves. But there are also stories told from the earliest histories of western civilization of humans rescued by animals. One of my favorites was related by Herodotus and concerns Arion of Methymna, the famous harp player and inventor of the dithyrambic measure. This Arion got a notion to travel to Corinth and hired a boat sailed by Corinthians, his own people, whom he thought trustworthy, which just goes to show about your own people, said my father, as the Corinthians were not long out to sea when they decided to throw Arion overboard and seize his wealth. When he learned what was to happen, Arion persuaded them to first allow him to assume his full musician’s costume and to play and sing before his death. The sailors were happy to hear the best harpist in the world and withdrew while Arion dressed himself, took up his harp, and then stood on the deck and chanted the Orthian. When he was finished, as promised, he flung himself into the sea. The Corinthians sailed away. Arion was saved by a dolphin, which took him on its back to Taenarum. A small bronze figure was made of Arion with his harp, aboard a dolphin, and offerings were made to it in those times. The dolphin was moved by Arion’s music—that’s how I take it anyway, my father said. I imagine the dolphin swimming alongside the ship—it heard the music and was devastated, as anyone would be imagining the emotion Arion must have put into his final song. And yet the sailors, though clearly music lovers, as they were happy to postpone Arion’s death and listen, did not hesitate. They did not turn and retrieve him but divided up his money and sailed on. One could argue that this was a much worse sin against art than drowning, say, a painter, a sculptor, a poet, certainly a novelist. Each left behind their works even in the most ancient of days. But a musician of those times took his art to the grave. Of course the destruction of a contemporary musician, too, would be a lesser crime as there are always plenty of recordings, except in the case of our Ojibwe and Metis fiddle players. The traditional player, like your uncle Shamengwa, believed that he owed his music to the wind, and that like the wind his music partook of infinite changeability. A recording would cause his song to become finite. Thus, Uncle was against recorded music. He banned all recording devices in his presence, yet in his later years a few people managed to copy his songs as tape recorders were made small enough to conceal. But I have heard and Whitey confirms that when Shamengwa died those tapes mysteriously disintegrated or were erased, and so there is no recording of Shamengwa’s playing, which is as he wished. Only those who learned from him in some way replicate his music, but it has become their own, too, which is the only way for music to remain alive. I am afraid, said my father that night, to my mother’s stiffened back. The sharp bones of her shoulders pressed against the draped sheet. I’m going to have to leave tomorrow, he said. My mother did not move. She had not spoken one word since we’d begun to eat our dinners with her.

I am going back down to Bismarck tomorrow, my father said. I want to meet with Gabir. He will not decline this. But I have to keep him connected. And it’s good to see my old friend. We’re going to get our ducks lined up even though there isn’t anyone to prosecute yet. But there will be, I am sure of that. We are finding things out little by little and when you are ready to tell us about the file and the telephone call we will certainly know more, I feel certain of it, Geraldine, and there will be justice. And that will help, I think. That will help you even though you seem to believe now that it won’t help you, that nothing will help you, even the tremendous love in this room. So yes, tomorrow, we won’t have dinner in your room and you can rest. I can’t ask Joe to wait you out like this, to make conversation with the walls and furniture, although it is surprising where a person’s thoughts go. While I’m in Bismarck, I’ll see the governor, too; we’ll have lunch and a conversation. Last time he told me that he’d attended the governors’ conference. While there, he spoke with Yeltow, you know, he’s still the governor of South Dakota. He found out that he is trying to adopt a child.

What?

My mother spoke.

What?

My father leaned forward pointing like that gundog, motionless.

What? she spoke again. What child?

An Indian child, my father said, trying to keep his voice normal.

He rattled on.

And so of course the governor of our state, who well understands from our conversations the reasons we have for limiting adoptions by non-Indian parents via the Indian Child Welfare Act, attempted to explain this piece of legislation to Curtis Yeltow, who was very frustrated at the difficulty of adopting this child.

What child?

She turned in the bedclothes, a skeletal wraith, her eyes deeply fixed on my father’s face.

What child? What tribe?

Well, actually—

My father tried to keep the shock and agitation out of his voice.

—to be honest, the tribal background of this child hasn’t been established. The governor of course is well known for his bigoted treatment of Indians—an image he is trying in his own way to mitigate. You know he does these public relations stunts like sponsoring Indian schoolchildren, or giving out positions in the Capitol, aides, to promising Indian high-school students. But his adoption scheme blew up in his face. He had his lawyer present his case to a state judge, who is attempting to pass the matter into tribal hands, as is proper. All present agree that the child looks Indian and the governor says that she—

She?

She is Lakota or Dakota or Nakota or anyway Sioux, as the governor says. But she could be any tribe. Also that her mother—

Where’s her mother?

She has disappeared.

My mother raised herself in bed. Clutching the sheet around her, groping forward in her flowered cotton gown, she gave a weird howl that clapped down my spine. The she actually got out of bed. She swayed and gripped my arm when I stood to help her. She began to retch. Her puke was startling, bright green. She cried out again and then crept back into the bed and lay motionless.

My father didn’t move except to lay a towel on the floor, and so I sat there in stillness too. All of a sudden my mother raised her hands and waved and pushed this way and that as if she was struggling with the air. Her arms moved with disconcerting violence, punching, blocking, pushing. She kicked and twisted.

It’s over, Geraldine, my father said, terrified, trying to hush her. It’s all right now. You’re safe.

She slowed and then stopped. She turned to my father, staring out of the covers as out of a cave. Her eyes were black, black in her gray face. She spoke in a low, harsh voice that grew large between my ears.

I was raped, Bazil.

My father did not move, did not take her hand or comfort her now in any way. He seemed frozen.

There is no evidence of what he did. None. My mother’s voice was a croak.

My father bent near. There is, though. We went straight to the hospital. And there is your own memory. And there are other things. We have—

I remember everything.

Tell me.

My father did not look at me because his gaze was locked with my mother’s gaze. I think if he’d let go she would have collapsed forever into silence. I shrank back and tried to be invisible. I didn’t want to be there, but I knew if I moved I’d snap the pull between them.

There was a call. It was Mayla. I only knew her by her family. She’s hardly ever been here. Just a girl, so young! She’d begun the enrollment process for her child. The father.

The father.

She’d listed him, my mother whispered.

Do you remember his name?

My mother’s mouth dropped open, her eyes unfocused.

Keep going, dear. Keep going. What happened next?

Mayla asked to meet me at the round house. She had no car. She said her life depended on it, so I went there.

My father drew a sharp breath.

I drove into that weedy lot, parked the car. I started out. He tackled me as I was walking up the hill. Took the keys. Then he pulled out a sack. He dragged it over my head so fast. It was a light rosy material, loose, maybe a pillowcase. But it went down so far, past my shoulders, I couldn’t see. He tied my hands behind me. Tried to get me to tell him where the file was and I said there’s no file. I don’t know what file he’s talking about. He turned me around and marched me . . . held my shoulder. Step over this, go that way, he said. He took me somewhere.

Where? said my father.

Somewhere.

Can you say anything about where?

Somewhere. That’s where it happened. He kept the sack on me. And he raped me. Somewhere.

Did you go uphill or downhill?

I don’t know, Bazil.

Through the woods? Did leaves brush you?

I don’t know.

What about the ground—gravel? brush? Was there a barbed-wire fence?

My mother screamed in a hoarse voice until her lungs emptied and there was silence.

Three classes of land meet there, my father said. His voice pulled tight with fear. Tribal trust, state, and fee. That’s why I’m asking.

Get out of the courtroom, get the damn hell out, my mother said. I don’t know.

All right, said my father. All right, keep going.

Afterward, after. He dragged me up to the round house. It took a while to get there. Was he marching me around? I was sick. I don’t remember. At the round house he untied me and pulled off the sack and it was . . . it was a pillowcase, a plain pink one. That was when I saw her. Just a girl. And her baby playing in the dust. The baby put her hands up into the light falling through the chinks in the pole logs. The baby had just learned to crawl, her arms gave out, but she made it to her mother. She was an Indian, she was an Indian girl, and I’d got the call from her. She’d come in on Friday and filed the papers. A quiet girl with such a pretty smile, pretty teeth, pink lipstick. Her hair was cut so nice. She wore a knit dress, pale purple. White shoes. And the baby was with her. I played with that baby in my office. So that’s who made the call that day. Her. Mayla Wolfskin.

I need that file, she said. My life depends on that file, she said.

She was thrown on the ground. Her hands were taped up behind her. The baby crawled over the dirt floor. She was wearing a ruffled yellow dress and her eyes, so tender. Like Mayla’s eyes. Big, brown eyes. Wide open. She saw everything and she was confused but she wasn’t crying because her mother was right there so she thought things were all right. But he had Mayla tied up, taped up. Mayla and I looked at each other. She didn’t blink just kept moving her eyes to the baby, then me, back to the baby. I knew she was saying to me I should take care of her baby. I nodded to her. Then he came in and he took off his pants, just kicked them off. He wore slacks. Every word sticks with me, every single word he said. The way he said things, in a dead voice, then cheerful, then dead again. Then amused. He said, I am really one sick f*ck. I suppose I am one of those people who just hates Indians generally and especially for they were at odds with my folks way back but especially my feeling is that Indian women are—what he called us, I don’t want to say. He screamed at Mayla and said he loved her, yet she had another man’s baby, she did this to him. But he still wanted her. He still needed her. She had put him in this awkward position, he said, of loving her. You should be crated up and thrown in the lake for what you’ve done to my emotions! He said we have no standing under the law for a good reason and yet have continued to diminish the white man and to take his honor. I could be rich, but I’d rather have shown you, both of you, what you really are. I won’t get caught, he said. I’ve been boning up on law. Funny. Laugh. He nudged me with his shoe. I know as much law as a judge. Know any judges? I have no fear. Things are the wrong way around, he said. But here in this place I make things the right way around for me. The strong should rule the weak. Instead of the weak the strong! It is the weak who pull down the strong. But I won’t get caught.

I suppose I should have sent you down with your car, he suddenly turned on Mayla. But, honey, I couldn’t. I just felt so sorry for you and my heart split wide open. That’s love, huh? Love. I couldn’t do it. But I have to, you know. All your f*cking shit’s in your car. You don’t need anything where you’re going. I’m sorry! I’m sorry! He struck Mayla, and struck me, and struck her again and again and turned her over. You want to tell me where the money is? The money he gave you? Oh, you do? Oh, you do now? Where? He ripped the tape away. She couldn’t talk, then she gasped out, My car.

He would have killed her then, I think so, but the baby moved. The baby cried out and blinked, looked into his eyes without understanding. Ah, he said, well isn’t that. Isn’t that.

Don’t talk no more. I don’t want to hear it, he said to Mayla. You are still money in the bank, he said to the baby. I am taking you back with me . . . unless you, dirt. He rose and kicked me and went over and kicked her so hard she wheezed. Then he bent over and looked into my face. He said to me, I’m sorry. I might be having an episode. I’m not really a bad person. I didn’t hurt you, did I? He picked up the baby and said to the baby in a baby voice, I don’t know what to do with the evidence. Silly me. Maybe I should burn the evidence. You know, they’re just evidence. He put her down gently. He uncapped the gas can. While he had his back turned and was pouring the gas on Mayla, I grabbed his pants and put them between my legs and I urinated on them, that’s what I did. I did! Because I’d seen him light his cigarette and put the matches back into his pocket. I was surprised that he didn’t notice that the pants were wet with urine, but he was absorbed in what he meant to do. Shaking too. He was saying, Oh no, oh no. He poured more gasoline over her and splashed gas on me, too, but not the baby. Then, then, when he couldn’t start the fire with the matches from his pants pocket he turned and gave the baby a heavy look. She began to cry and we—Mayla and I—lay perfectly still as he went to comfort the baby. He said, Sshhh, sshhh. I have another book of matches, a lighter even, down the hill. And you, he shook me and said into my face, you, if you move an inch I will kill this baby and if you move an inch I will kill Mayla. You are going to die but if you say one word even one word up in heaven after you are dead I will kill them both.



I poured myself a bowl of cornflakes and a glass of milk. I put half the milk on the cereal, sprinkled sugar on the cereal, and ate it. I filled the bowl with cereal a second time and drank the sweet milk from the bottom of the bowl and finished off the glass. I dipped a wide-mouth jar into the bag of dog food in the entry, filled Pearl’s bowl, and gave her fresh water. Pearl stood by me as I spray-soaked the garden and the flower beds. Then I got on my bike and went to work. I saw my father before I left. He had stayed in the bedroom with my mother. He’d sat up next to her all night. I asked him about the file, and he told me that my mother wouldn’t talk about it. She needed to know the baby was safe. Mayla was safe.

What do you think’s in that file? I asked.

Something to work with.

And Mayla Wolfskin? What about her?

She went to school down in South Dakota, said my father. And she’s related to your mother’s friend LaRose. Maybe that’s why your mother won’t see LaRose—she’s afraid of breaking down, of saying something.

That’s not what I meant. What about Mayla Wolfskin, Dad? Is she alive?

That’s the question.

What do you think?

I think not, he said softly, looking down at the floor.

I looked down at the floor, too, at the swirls of cream in the gray of the linoleum. And the darker gray and the small black spots a vertigo surprise once you noticed. I perused that floor, memorizing the randomness.

Why would he kill her? Dad?

He put his head to the side, shook his head, stepped forward, and put his arms around me. He held me there, not speaking. Then he let me go and walked away.

When I got to Whitey and Sonja’s station I parked my bike beside the door, where I could see it, then I started my chores. Whitey had a short-wave receiver that picked up signals all around the area. It was always crackling on and burping garbled messages in the vicinity of the garage. Sometimes, he turned it off and pumped out music. I picked up all of the candy wrappers, cigarette butts, loser pull tabs, and other trash that had accumulated in the gravel gas station yard and the weeds down to the road. I got the hose and watered yet another tractor-tire flower bed, this one painted yellow, ringed with silvery sage leaves and red-hot poker flowers, same as I had planted for my mother.

Whitey pumped gas when customers came, checked oil, and gossiped. I washed the car windows. Sonja had bought a Bunn coffeemaker and Whitey had built two wooden booths in the eastern corner of the store. Sonja’s first cup of coffee was a dime and the refills were free, so the booths were always filled with people. Clemence baked for the store every few days and there was banana bread, coffee cake, oatmeal cookies in a jar. Every day at lunchtime, Whitey asked if I wanted a rez steak sandwich and then he made us baloney-whitebread-mayo sandwiches. In the afternoon, Whitey took his break and when he came back Sonja left to go home and take a nap. They’d both work until seven p.m. They were saving payroll for the first couple of years, just to start with. Later on, they planned on hiring a full-timer and staying open until nine. I was paid a dollar an hour, ice cream, soda, milk, and cookies off the bottom of the jar.

When I got home, my father was waiting for me.

How was work?

It was good.

My father looked at his knuckles, flexed his hand, frowned. He started talking to his hand, which was a thing that he did when he didn’t want to be saying what he had to say.

I had to take your mother down to Minot this morning. To the hospital. They’ll keep her a couple of days. I’m going back down tomorrow.

I asked if I could go, but he said there was nothing I could do.

She just has to rest.

She sleeps all the time.

I know. He paused, then finally looked at me, a relief. She knows who it was, he said. Of course, but she still won’t tell me, Joe. She has to overcome his threats.

Do you have an idea?

I can’t say, you know that.

But I should know. Is he from around here, Dad?

It would fit . . . but he won’t show up here. He knows he’ll get caught. There will be someone for your mother to identify, he said, pretty soon. Not soon enough. She’s going to be better once that begins. I feel certain she’ll remember where, too—where it happened. The shock of telling. But then some resolution.

What about Mayla Wolfskin? Did he keep her with him? And that baby? Was that the baby that the governor was trying to adopt?

My father’s face told me yes. But what he said was, I wish you hadn’t heard all that was said, Joe. But I couldn’t stop your mother. I was afraid she might stop talking.

I nodded. All day my mother’s words had seeped up through the surface of all I did, like a dark oil.

In her right mind, she never would have described all that happened in front of you.

I had to know. It’s good I know, I said.

But it was a poison in me. I was just beginning to feel that.

I’ve got to go back down there tomorrow, said my father. Do you want to stay with Aunt Clemence or Uncle Whitey?

I’ll stay with Whitey and Sonja. That way they can bring me to work.

Next day after work, I rode back to the old place with Sonja and Whitey. We had Pearl with us. Clemence was going to check in on the house and water the garden, so everything was locked up and I didn’t have to go there for a while. And that made me happy. Soon we’d have Mooshum’s birthday. Everyone would come for that. I’d see my cousins. But for now, staying with Sonja and Whitey seemed like a vacation to me. Things could be normal. At their house, I would sleep on the couch and watch television. There were different sorts of food that Whitey cooked because he’d been a professional cook; there was the wine or beer at every dinner and the drinks after dinner and music. Noise. I didn’t know how bad I’d needed noise.

We got into Whitey’s Silverado and he immediately punched the button on the tape deck. The Rolling Stones boiled up from his subwoofers and we drove with the windows rolled down and the wind rushing in until we took the turnoff onto gravel. Then we drove the rest of the way with the windows up against the dust. We were in a pod of noise—us three shouting over the air fan and throbbing bass. Everything was funny with Whitey—well, as I knew, funny for about four hours, funny for six beers or three shots—but for that time we laughed over the day’s doings and transactions. Cappy’s aunts were so savey that they’d only put a dollar’s worth of gas in the car at a time. It cost that much gas anyway to come and go. They each took free coffee every time. A young student from the university had come to study Grandma Thunder. She was taking her for rides every day—first Grandma would do her errands and visit her friends and family. Then sometimes she’d let the girl take out her notebook and write down a teaching. She was having a great old time.

I asked Whitey about Curtis Yeltow and he said, you wouldn’t believe the things that old boy has done and got away with. Smashed into a freight train, drunk, and lived. Used the prairie nigger word for Indians. Thought it was funny. Had a mistress in Dead Eye. Bought gold and stored it in the basement of the governor’s mansion. And guns? He is a gun lover slash freak. Collects war shields. Indian beadwork. Pays homage to the noble savage but tried to store nuclear waste on sacred Lakota earth. Said the Sun Dance was a form of devil worship. That’s Yeltow. Oh, and he’s all tanned up. Vain about his looks.

We got to the house and Whitey went inside to get dinner going while Sonja and I did the horse chores. As we shoveled out the barn, music blasted from the open windows of the house and we could hear the TV babbling, too. So there was noise while we put the hay out and lightly grained the horses, and noise if we took out the mower, and noise from the dogs anyway as they greeted us joyously and barked to remind us to fill their dishes with food.

Sonja kept the horses in the barn at night and she checked the dogs for ticks and looked at their gums, eyes, and foot pads critically.

What you been up to today? she asked each dog. She’d scold. Not the burr patch again. You smell like you ate shit. Who the hell you let bite at your pretty tail, Chain? I’m gonna whip you if you leave this yard, you know that.

Sonja spoke the same way to the horses as she put them in their stalls, and then Whitey came out and gave her a cold beer. There was a place right outside where the pasture sloped west and the grass turned golden at sunset. Two lawn chairs were set up there, and they added one for me. I drank an orange soda and they had a beer or two more and now the music came from Whitey’s boom box, set out on the steps. Then the mosquitoes whined out in attack formation and we went inside.

Whitey had traded gas for fresh walleye that day, and he’d cleaned the fish already. The fillets were in the refrigerator, soaking in a pie plate of milk. He’d whipped up a foamy beer batter. There was coleslaw made with horseradish. They always had dessert. Sonja insisted on dessert, said Whitey.

She’s got a sweet tooth. Have you ever heard of raspberry fool? I made it for her from a recipe once. Or mayonnaise cake? You can’t taste the mayonnaise. But she likes chocolate. She’s crazy for chocolate. If I dipped my dick in chocolate she’d never let me alone.

He got looser, of course, as the night went on, said things, and eventually Sonja put him to bed.

After he was tucked in, Sonja came out and fixed up the couch for me. The couch was old and smelled of cigarettes. It was upholstered in scratchy brown stuff scattered through with tired orange nubs. Sonja tucked a sheet across the cushions and gave me a plaid sleeping bag with a broken zipper. She turned the television on, the lights out, and then she curled up on the other end of the couch. We watched TV together for an hour or even two. We talked about the money, whispered about it because of Whitey. Sonja made me swear again and again that I had not—would not—tell anybody.

I’m scared as shit. You should be too. Keep your eyes open. Don’t slip up, Joe.

Then we’d talk about what I should do with the money. Sonja made me promise I would go to college. She said she’d wanted her daughter, Murphy, to go. She’d named her baby Murphy because it could never be a stripper name. But her daughter had changed her name to London. If I could go back in time, said Sonja, I never would have left my daughter with my own mother when I was working. My mother had a bad influence on her granddaughter, if you can believe that.

Sonja liked the talk shows, the old movies. Sometimes I fell asleep while we were watching, but before I did I tried to suspend myself for as long as possible between sleep and wakefulness. A door might open momentarily into a dream, but instantly I’d shift back to the couch. Her soft weight on the far cushion. The warmth of her that I could feel if I edged the bare soles of my feet from under the sleeping bag, which became my favorite thing to sleep under because it disguised my hard-on.

Every night, Sonja gave me a pillow off her bed. The pillow smelled of apricot shampoo and also a dusky undertone—some private erotic decay like the inside of a wilted flower. I buried my face to breathe it in. I dozed, dreamed, returning to the flickering TV light. The laugh track, turned low. Sonja tranced in a blue haze, drinking cold water now. Outside, the seething of summer insects. The dogs occasionally rousing to bark once or twice at a deer far across the pasture. And Whitey, thankfully, snoring it off behind the bedroom door. The third or fourth night, when I was passing in and out of heaven, Sonja cupped my heel in her palm and squeezed it. She began absently to rub my instep and a bolt of blind pleasure shot through me too sudden to contain. I came with a gurgle of surprise and she dropped my foot. A moment later, I heard a snap and sneaked a look at her. She was eating a pretzel.

Whitey loved kamikaze pulps. He had a wall of shelves built just the right height for grocery-store samurai romances, ninja attack plots, spy thrillers, Louis L’Amours, sci-fi, Conan. He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback. As I ate beside him, he read selections aloud, murmuring, her lithe haunches quivered with a predatory anticipation as she fixed on his position in the moonless light bereft of soul and decided exactly how to snap his spine . . . Ragna’s dagger-sharp eyeteeth glinted in the reflected beams of the headlights . . . knowing his life would end as soon as his eyes met that implacable obsidian gaze . . . If he was deeply engaged in a plot, he kept reading as Sonja set down a platter of bacon and a pan of her one breakfast specialty—a mixture of grated potatoes, eggs, diced peppers, and ham, laid out in a baking pan and broiled until the cheddar cheese topping bubbled up and toasted. She called it breakfast casserole. Right after we ate, Whitey marked his page and put the book down. Sonja quickly scrubbed up the dishes, we jumped in the pickup, drove to the gas station, and unlocked the pumps. We opened at seven a.m. There was always someone waiting for gas.

That day, a couple of things happened that were not good. The first thing was Sonja’s stud earrings, which Whitey said he’d never seen before.

You have too seen them. She flashed a flirty smile.

The earrings sparkled in the dim kitchen. She had on yellow rubber gloves and she was vigorously scouring the broiler pan before we took off for work.

They’re rhinestones, she said.

Nice rhinestones, said Whitey. He gave an underhanded glance. Then he looked at her boldly, meanly, while she was not looking at him. Her blue jeans also looked brand-new and clung to her in a way that made me think of Whitey’s book, haunches quivering in deadly etc. We got in the truck. Whitey didn’t turn on the music. Halfway to town, Sonja reached over to switch on the tape player and Whitey smacked her hand off the controls. I was sitting in the jump seat behind them. It happened right in front of me.

It’s okay, said Sonja to me, over her shoulder. Whitey’s feeling low. He’s hungover.

Whitey’s jaw was still set in that mean way. He stared straight ahead.

Yeah, he said. Hungover. Not the kind of hungover you’re thinking of.

Whitey had a jailhouse spit—so sleek, so accurate. Like he’d gone a period of his life with nothing to do but spit. He jumped out of the car, slammed the door, spat, hit a can, ping, and walked away even though there was someone waiting at the gas pump. Sonja just moved over, parked, and unlocked the station. She gave me the keys to the pumps without looking outside and told me I should handle that car. This was the second bad thing.

I’d seen this person, he was familiar, but I didn’t know him. All of his features were neat and regular, but he was not good-looking. He was a brown-haired, sunk-eyed white man with a slack but powerful build, a big man in neat clothing—a white shirt, brown belted pants, leather lace-up shoes. His longish hair was combed back evenly behind his ears so you could see the tracks in it. His ears were oddly small and neat, coiled against his head. His lips were thin, dark red, like he had a fever. When he smiled, I saw his teeth were white and even, like a denture commercial.

I went over to wait on him.

Fill ’er up, he said.

I unlocked the gas tanks and pumped gas. I washed his windows and then asked if he wanted his oil checked. His car was dusty. It was an old Dodge.

Nah. His voice was genial. He began counting fives from a wad of bills. He handed over three of them. My car was thirsty, he said. I drove all night. Say, how are you?

Sometimes grown-ups recognize a kid and talk as if they know you, but they really know your parents or uncle or were somebody’s teacher. It is confusing, plus he was a customer. So I was polite and said I was fine, thanks.

Oh, that’s good, he said. I hear that you’re a real good kid.

I took him in, now, put him together. A good kid? Second white man to say that this summer. My thought was, This could wreck me.

You know—he looked at me hard—I wish I had a kid like you. I don’t have any children.

Gee, too bad, I said like I meant the opposite. Now I was put off. I still couldn’t place him.

He sighed. Thanks. I don’t know. I suppose it’s luck, starting a good family and all. Having a loving family. It’s pretty nice. Gives you an advantage in life. Even an Indian boy like you can have a good family and get that sort of start, I guess. And maybe it will let you draw even with a white kid of your own age, you know? Who doesn’t have a loving family.

I turned to walk off.

Oh, I’ve said too much. Come back here! He tried to give me another five. I kept walking. He looked down and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed and caught. Well, that’s me, he called. Always saying too much. But! He slapped the side of the car. Say what you will, you’re the judge’s son.

I whirled around.

My twin sister had a loving Indian family and they stuck by her when times were hard.

Then he drove off, and because of what Linda had told me, I knew I had spoken with Linden Lark.

I decided that I wanted to quit and go home now. I was mad at Whitey. I’d pumped gas for the enemy. Sonja bothered me too. She came out of the station, chewing gum. As her jaws worked, those earrings twitched and flashed. She’d spun her hair up in a flossy cone held with clips of hot pink enamel. Those jeans fit her like paint. The morning seemed to last forever. I had to stay because Whitey was gone. Then around eleven he returned and I realized he’d had a beer or maybe two. Sonja pretended, insultingly, as though she didn’t notice his silence as he came and went.

At noon Sonja made us the sandwiches out of bread and meat from the cooler, so there wasn’t any joking about how good our rez steak was or if I wanted mine well-done. She just handed me the sandwich and a can of grape Shasta. Later on she gave Whitey’s sandwich to me. His had lettuce on it but I ate it anyway as I watched him changing a tire for LaRose. My mother, Clemence, and LaRose had been inseparable once upon a time. In Mom’s little photo album there were pictures of them in school shots at their boarding school. Mom always talked about going to school with them. LaRose figured in her stories. But when it came to the present, they didn’t visit often, and when they did, it was always just the two of them talking intensely, away from other people. You would have thought they had some secret, except that this had been going on for years. Sometimes Clemence joined in, and again they always went off, the three of them, and nobody else.

LaRose was always there and not there. Even when she looked right at you and spoke, it seemed her thoughts were elsewhere, elusive. LaRose had had so many husbands that nobody kept track of her last name anymore. She had started out a Migwan. She was a skinny, fine-boned, birdlike woman who smoked brown cigarillos and wore her silky black hair in a glistening beaded flower clip. Sonja had come out to stand by LaRose, so there we were. Three pop drinkers watching a sweaty Indian Elvis try to loosen up a set of rusted lug nuts. He strained. His neck bulged, his arms inflated. His gut was padded by those nightly beers, but his arms and chest were still powerful. He sank his weight on the wrench. Nothing. He knelt back on his feet. Even the dust was hot that day. He smacked the wrench in his palm and then he stood up suddenly and winged it into the weeds. Again, he gave Sonja that crafty look.

Don’t gimme snake eyes, you bastard, she said, just because you can’t turn a damn screw.

LaRose raised her curved eyebrows and turned her back on the two of them.

C’mon, she said to me. I need another pack of smokes.

She put her hand on my back, an auntielike gesture. She steered me forward. We went into the store and were alone together. She reached behind the counter for what she needed. I didn’t care how elusive LaRose was, I’d question her. I asked her if she was related to Mayla Wolfskin.

She’s my cousin, lots younger than me, said LaRose. Her dad was Crow Creek.

Did you grow up with her?

LaRose lazily lit a cigarillo and snapped out the match with exaggerated wrist swipes.

What’s going on?

I just want to know.

You a FBI, Joe? I told that white guy with the dirty eyeglasses that Mayla went to boarding school in South Dakota, then was going on to Haskell. There was this program where they took the smartest ones to have a special job in the government, something like that. Gave a stipend of money, everything. Mayla got in the papers—my aunt clipped the article. Chosen for an internship. She looked so nice. Wearing a white headband, jumper she probably made in Home Ec, knee socks. I know that much. She worked for that one governor, you know. He did all those bad things. Nothing stuck to him.

Sonja walked inside and sold LaRose the cigarillos she was already smoking. I looked outside and saw that Whitey was headed for the Dead Custer.

Ah, shit, said Sonja. That’s no good.

LaRose said, My tire.

I’ll fix it.

She smiled at me—the reflection of a smile. She had a sad calm face that never really lighted up. Her delicate silken brown skin had fine lines if you were close enough to smell her signature rose powder. A silver tooth glinted when she smoked.

Have a go at it, my boy.

I wanted to ask her more about Mayla, but not with Sonja around. First I went and found the wrench in the weeds. When I came back, I saw that the women had brought lawn chairs and set them up in a crack of shade next to the building. They were sipping cream sodas.

Go ahead! Sonja waved. Smoke drifted from her fingers. I’ll take care of customers, if we get any.

I stared at the lug nuts. Then I got up and went into Whitey’s garage and got the ratchet.

Oooh, said LaRose when I brought that out.

Good choice, said Sonja.

I got the right-sized socket to fit the wrench on the old nut. I poured all of my strength down on the handle. But it didn’t budge. From behind me I heard Cappy, Zack, and Angus take the jump on their bikes and land by the pumps in a swirl of grit.

I turned around. Sweat was dripping off me.

What’cha got? asked Cappy.

They ignored LaRose and, more elaborately, Sonja. They came up to stand around the flat.

Rusted out, man.

They each tried the ratchet. Zack even balanced on the handle and gently bounced, but the nut seemed soldered on. Cappy asked for Sonja’s lighter, applied flame. That didn’t work either.

You got WD-40?

I showed Cappy where it was on Whitey’s tool bench. Cappy squirted a tiny bit around the base and rubbed dust on the nut and inside the socket. He fit the wrench on, tighter.

Step on it again, he said to Angus.

This time it gave, and we left the car jacked up while we rolled the tire into the garage. Whitey had a stock tank set up in there to find the holes in tires, and he was good at putting in a seal, but of course he was over at the Dead Custer.

I came out and looked at Sonja.

Maybe you should get him, she said, looking away, and I noticed that she’d taken out her stud earrings.

We got Whitey out after only three beers. LaRose got her tire fixed. We had a sudden rush and then everything quieted down. We closed the place and got into the truck. Neither of them touched the tape deck. We rode back silently but Sonja and Whitey just seemed tired now, all done in by the heat. At home, things went as usual—I helped Sonja with the chores. We ate, nobody saying much. Whitey drank, morose, but Sonja stuck to 7Up. I fell asleep on the couch with a fan blowing on me and Sonja’s hair swirling gently around her profile in the sapphire light.

There was a crash. The lights were out and there was no moon. Everything was black but the fan still stirred the air around me. In the bedroom, low vehemence. Steady grating of Whitey’s voice. A heavy thud. Sonja.

Quit that, Whitey.

He give ’em to you?

There’s no he. It’s just you, baby. Lemme go. The crack of a slap, a cry. Don’t. Please. Joe’s out there.

Doan f*cking care.

Now he was calling her names one after another.

I got up and went to the door. My blood pulsed and swam. The poison that was wasting in me thrilled along my nerves. I thought I’d kill Whitey. I was not afraid.

Whitey!

There was silence.

Come out and fight me!

I tried to remember what he’d taught me about blocking punches, keeping my elbows in, chin down. He finally opened the door and I jumped back with my dukes up. Sonja had put the lamp on. Whitey was wearing yellow boxer shorts patterned with hot red chili peppers. His fifties hairdo hung off his forehead in strings. He put up his hands to slick it back and I punched him in the gut. The punch reverberated up my arm. My hand went numb. I broke it, I thought, and was exhilarated. I swung at him again but he pinned my arms and said, Oh shit, oh shit. Joe. Me and Sonja. This is just between us, Joe. Stay out of it. You ever hear of cheating? Sonja’s cheating. Some prick gave her diamond earrings—

Rhinestone, she interjected.

I know diamonds when I see ’em.

He let me go and stepped away. He tried to reclaim some dignity. He put his hands up.

I won’t touch her, see? Even though some prick she’s stringing along bought her diamond earrings. I won’t touch her. But she is dirty. His eyes rolled toward her, red with weeping now. Dirty. Someone else, Joe . . .

But I knew that wasn’t true. I knew where those earrings came from.

I gave ’em to her, Whitey, I said.

You did? He swayed. He’d had a bottle in the room. How come you gave her earrings?

It was her birthday.

A year ago.

A*shole, what’s it to you! I found those studs in the bathroom at the gas station. And you’re right. They aren’t rhinestones. I think they are genuine cubic zirconiums.

Okay, Joe, he said. Fancy talk.

He looked tearfully at Sonja. Propped himself against the door. Then he frowned at me. A*shole, what’s it to you! he muttered. Some way to talk to your uncle. You crossed a line, boy. He held out the hand with the bottle and pointed his middle finger at me.

You. Crossed. A. Line.

Well, she’s my aunt, I said. So I can give her a birthday present. A*shole.

He killed the bottle, threw it behind him, swelled big, and leaned forward. You got it coming, little man!

There was a splintering crack, and he sagged, his arms clutching his head. Sonja kicked him out of the doorway onto the living room floor and said, Step around him. Watch the glass. You come in here, Joe.

Then she locked the door behind me.

Get in, she said, pointing at the bed. Go straight to sleep. I’m sitting up.

She sat down in the rocking chair and put the neck of the broken bottle carefully on the side table at her elbow. I got into the bed between the sheets. The pillow smelled like Whitey’s tart hair gel and I pushed it away and lay on my arm. Sonja turned the light off and I stared into the lightless air.

He could be dead out there, I said.

No, he ain’t. That was an empty. ’Sides, I know just how hard to hit him.

Bet he says that about you, too.

She didn’t answer.

Why’d you say that? she said. Why’d you say you gave me them earrings?

Because I did.

Oh, the money.

I’m not stupid.

She was quiet. Then I heard her crying softly.

I wanted something nice, Joe.

See what happened?

Yeah.

It’s like you said. Don’t touch the money. And where’d you put the earrings?

I threw them out.

No you didn’t. Those are diamonds.

But she didn’t answer. She just kept rocking.



The next morning Sonja and I left early. I didn’t see Whitey.

He’s gonna walk it off in the woods, said Sonja. Don’t worry. He’ll be good for a long time now. But maybe you better stay with Clemence tonight.

We rode to town, no music. I watched the ditches out the side window.

Let me off right now, I said as we passed by Clemence’s and our turnoff. Because I quit.

Oh, honey, no, she said. But she pulled over and stopped the car. Her hair was up in a ponytail, a green bow tied around it. She wore a flashy green track suit with white piping, and spongy shoes. That day she had painted her lips a deep carmine red. I must have given her a very long tragic look because she said, Oh, honey, no, again. I was thinking something of this sort: that deep red of her lips, if it were printed on me, kissed on me, would become a burning solidified blood that would brand itself into my flesh and leave a black seared brand shaped like the lips of a woman. I felt sorry for myself. I still loved her, worse than ever, even though she had betrayed me. Her blue eyes had a devious sheen.

Come on, she said. I’m onna need help. Please?

But I got out of the car and walked up the road.

The back kitchen door was open. I walked in and called out.

Auntie C?

She came up from the cellar with a jar of Juneberry jam and said she thought I had a job.

I quit.

That’s lazy. You get back there.

I shook my head and wouldn’t look at her.

Oh. They at it again? Whitey’s back at it?

Yeah.

You stay here then. You can sleep in Joseph’s old room—the sewing room now, but anyway. Mooshum’s in Evey’s room. I set up a cot for him there. He won’t sleep on Evey’s soft bed.

That day I helped Clemence out. She kept a nice garden like my mother used to and her snap peas were in already. Uncle Edward was working on his backyard pond, trying to get the drainage and flowage just right, measuring mosquito larvae, and I helped him too. Whitey dropped my bike off, but I never went out and saw him. We ate fried venison with mustard and browned onions. Their television was as usual in the repair shop sixty miles away and I was sleepy. Mooshum tottered off to Evey’s room and I went to Joseph’s. But when I opened the door to the room and saw the sewing machine wedged in next to the bed and the folded stacks of fabric and the wall board covered with hundreds of spools of bright thread, when I saw the quilt pieces and the shoe box labeled Zippers and the same heart-shaped pincushion only Mom’s was dusty green, I thought of my father entering our sewing room every night and how the loneliness had seeped from under the door of the sewing room then spread across the hall and tried to get to my bedroom. I said to Clemence, You think it would bother Mooshum if I bunked with him?

He talks in his sleep.

I don’t care.

Clemence opened Evey’s door and asked if Mooshum minded, but already he was lightly snoring. Clemence said it was fine, so I shut myself in the room. I shed my clothes and crawled into my grown-up cousin’s bed, which was plush and saggy and smelled of dust. Mooshum’s snore was a very old man’s hypnotizing purr. I fell immediately asleep. Sometime right after moonrise, for there was light in the room, I woke. Mooshum was talking all right, so I rolled over and stuck a pillow over my head. I dozed off, but something he said hooked me in, and little by little, like a fish reeled up out of the dark, I began to surface. Mooshum was not just talking in the random disconnected way people do, blurting out scraps of dream language. He was telling a story.


Akii

At first she was just an ordinary woman, said Mooshum, good at a number of things—weaving nets, snaring rabbits, skinning out and tanning hides. She liked the liver of the deer. Her name was Akiikwe, Earth Woman, and like her namesake she was solid. She had heavy bones and a short, thick neck. Her husband, Mirage, appeared and disappeared. He looked at other woman. She had caught him many times but stayed with him. He was a resolute hunter in spite of his ways and the two of them were good at surviving. They could always get food for their children, and even extra meat would come their way, for she especially, Akii, could make out in dreams where to find the animals. She had a shrewd heart and an endless stare, with which she kept her children in line. Akii and her husband were never stingy, and as I say they were always very good at finding food even in the dead of winter—that is, until the year they forced us into our boundary. The reservation year.

A few had broken soil like the white man, and put some seeds in the ground, but a real farm takes many years to build until it keeps you alive in winter. We hunted all the animals before the Moon of Little Spirit and there wasn’t even a rabbit left. The government agent had promised supplies to tide us over for the loss of our territory, but these never came through. We left our boundaries and ranged back up into Canada, but the caribou were long gone, there were no beaver left, no muskrats even. The children cried and an old man boiled strips of his moosehide pants for them to chew on.

During this time, every day, Akii went out and she always came back with some small tidbit. She chopped an ice hole and with great effort she and her husband kept it open day and night, so they fished there until she hooked a fish that said to her, My people are going to sleep now and you shall starve. Sure enough, she could not get another fish after that. She saw Mirage looking at her strangely, and she looked strangely back at him. He kept the children behind him as they slept and the axe with him in his blanket. He was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. Some people in these hungry times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat. That’s what was happening, her husband decided. He imagined that her eyes were starting to glow in the dark. The thing to do was you had to kill that person right away. But not before you had agreement in the matter. You couldn’t do it alone. There was a certain way the killing of a wiindigoo must be done.

Mirage got some men together, and persuaded them that Akii was becoming very powerful and would soon go out of control. She had cut her arm for her baby to drink the blood, so that baby might go wiindigoo too. She stared as if she might pounce on her children and followed their every movement. And then, when they tried to tie her up, she struggled. It took six men to do it, and they came out the worse for their work—bitten and gouged. Another woman took the children away so they would not see what was to happen. But one, the oldest boy, was left. The only person who could kill a wiindigoo was someone in the blood family. If her husband killed her, Akiikwe’s people might take revenge. It could have been a sister or a brother, but they refused. So the boy was given a knife and told to kill his mother. He was twelve years old. The men would hold her. He should cut her neck. The boy began to weep, but he was told that he must do it anyway. His name was Nanapush. The men urged him to kill his mother, tried to buck up his courage. But he got angry. He stuck the knife into one of the men who was holding his mother. But the man had on a skin coat and the wound wasn’t very deep.

Ah, said his mother, you are a good son. You will not kill me. You’re the only one I will not eat! Then she struggled so powerfully that she broke away from all of the men. But they wrestled her down.

He knew, Nanapush, that she had just threatened to eat those men because she was being tormented. She was a good mother to her children and had taught them how to live. Now the men brought her back tied in cords. Her husband bound her to a tree and left her there to freeze or starve. She screamed and fought the straps, but then grew quiet. They thought she must be getting weak so they left her alone that night. But the chinook wind came through and the air turned mild. She ate the snow. There must have been some good in the snow, because with her strong fingers she undid the knots and untied the cords. She began to walk away. Her son crawled from the tent and decided to go with her, but they were followed and overtaken when they reached the lake. Again, the men tied her up.

Now Mirage enlarged the very hole Akii had fished, where the ice was thinner. The men decided to put her down into the water, all of them, so no one had to take the blame. They strengthened those bindings and this time they attached a rock to her feet. Then they stuffed her down the hole into the freezing water. When she did not come up, they walked away, except her son, who wouldn’t go with them. He sat on the ice there and sang her death song. As his father passed him, the boy asked for his gun and said that he would shoot his mother if she came out.

Maybe at that moment his father wasn’t thinking straight, because he gave his gun to Nanapush.

Once the men were out of sight, Akii crashed her head from the hole. She had managed to kick free of the rock, and breathed the air that sits just beneath the surface of the ice. Nanapush helped her out of the water and put his blanket on her. Then they went into the woods and walked until they were too weak to walk anymore. The mother had her flint and striker in a pocket next to her skin. They made a fire and a shelter. Akii told her son that while she was underwater the fish spoke to her and said he felt sorry for her, and that she should have a hunting song. She sang this song to her son. It was a buffalo song. Why a buffalo song? Because the fish missed the buffalo. When the buffalo came to the lakes and rivers on hot summer days, they shed their tasty fat ticks for the fish to eat, and their dung drew other insects that the fish liked too. They wished the buffalo would come back. They asked me where the buffalo had gone, said Akii. I couldn’t tell them. The boy learned the song, but said he wondered if it was useless. Nobody had seen a buffalo for years.

The two slept that night. They slept and slept. When they woke, they were so weak that they thought it would be easier to die. But Nanapush had some wire for a snare. He crawled out and set that snare a few feet away from their little shelter.

If a rabbit is snared, it will tell me where the animals are, said Akii.

They went to sleep again. When they woke, there was a rabbit struggling in the snare. The mother crept to the rabbit and listened to what it said. Then she crept back to her son with the rabbit.

The rabbit gave itself to you, she said. You must eat it and throw every single one of its bones out into the snow, so it can live again.

Nanapush roasted the rabbit, ate it. Three times he asked his mother to take some, but she refused. She hid her face in the blanket so he would not see her face.

Go now, she said. I heard the same song from the rabbit. The buffalo used to churn up the earth so the grass would grow better for the rabbits to eat. All the animals miss the buffalo, but they miss the real Anishinaabeg too. Take the gun and travel straight into the west. A buffalo has come back from over that horizon. The old woman waits for you. If you return and I am dead, do not cry. You have been a very good son to me.

So Nanapush went out.



Mooshum stopped talking. I heard his bed creak, and then the light, even rattle of his snoring. I was disappointed and thought of shaking him awake to find out the end of the story. But at last I fell asleep too. When I woke, I wondered again what had happened. Mooshum was in the kitchen, sipping at the soupy maple-syrup-flavored oatmeal he loved in the morning. I asked Mooshum who this Nanapush was, the boy he spoke of in the story. But he gave me another answer entirely.

Nanapush? Mooshum gave a dry, little creaky laugh.

An old man prone to madness! Like me, only worse. He should have been weeded out. In the face of danger, he was sure to act like an idiot. When self-discipline was called for, greed won out with Nanapush. He was aged early on by absurdities and lies. Old Nanapush, as they called him, or akiwenziish. Sometimes the old reprobate worked miracles through gross and disgusting behavior. People went to him, though secretly, for healings. As it happened, when I was a young man I myself brought him blankets, tobacco, and acquired from him secrets on how to please my first wife, whose eyes had begun to stray. Junesse was slightly older than me, and in bed she craved patience from a man that only comes with age. What should I do? I begged the old man. Tell me!

Baashkizigan! Baashkizigan! said Nanapush. Don’t be shy. Take your time with the next, and if another stand comes on think about paddling across the lake against a stiff wind and don’t stop until you’ve beached your canoe.

And so I kept my woman and came to respect the old man. He acted crazy to sort his friends from his enemies. But he spoke the truth.

What about his mother? I asked. What about the woman no man could kill? When she sent him for the buffalo. What happened?

What caca are you talking about, my boy?

Your story.

What story?

The one you told me last night.

Last night? I told no story. I slept the whole night through. I slept good.

Okay then, I thought. I’m going to have to wait for him to fall asleep good and hard again. Maybe this time I’ll hear the end.

So I waited the next night, trying to keep awake. But I was tired and kept dropping off. I slept for a good while. Then in my dreams I heard the sound of a light sticklike gnashing, and woke to find Mooshum sitting up again. He’d forgotten to take out his dentures and they were loose. He was clacking his teeth together, not speaking, as he sometimes did when he was very angry. But at last the teeth fell out of his mouth and he found words.



Ah, those first reservation years, when they squeezed us! Down to only a few square miles. We starved while the cows of settlers lived fat off the fenced grass of our old hunting grounds. In those first years our white father with the big belly ate ten ducks for dinner and didn’t even send us the feet. Those were bad years. Nanapush saw his people starve and die out, then his mother was attacked as wiindigoo but the men could not kill her. They were nowhere. Dying. But now in his starved condition the rabbit gave him some strength, so he resolved to go after that buffalo. He took up his mother’s hatchet and his father’s gun.

As he dragged himself along, mile after mile, Nanapush sang the buffalo song although it made him cry. It broke his heart. He remembered how when he was a small boy the buffalo had filled the world. Once, when he was little, the hunters came down to the river. Nanapush climbed a tree to look back where the buffalo came from. They covered the earth at that time. They were endless. He had seen that glory. Where had they gone?

Some old men said the buffalo disappeared into a hole in the earth. Other people had seen white men shoot thousands off a train car, and leave them to rot. At any rate, they existed no longer. Still, as Nanapush stumbled along, mile by mile, he sang the buffalo song. He thought there must be a reason. And at last, he looked down. He saw buffalo tracks! He found it hard to believe. Hunger makes you see things. But after following these tracks for some time, he saw this was indeed a buffalo. An old cow as crazy and decrepit as Nanapush himself would become, and me, and all survivors of those years, the last of so many.

The cold deepened steadily. Nanapush trudged on, following the buffalo’s tracks as it staggered into and out of a rough wooded area of brush and heavy cover in which, thought Nanapush, it would surely take shelter. But it did not. It moved out onto a violently flat plain where the wind blew against them both with killing force. Nanapush knew he would have to shoot the cow at once. He gathered every bit of will from his starving body and pushed on, but the buffalo stayed ahead, moving easier than he could against the snow.

Nanapush sang the buffalo song at the top of his lungs, driving onward. And at last, in that white bitterness, the buffalo heard his song. It stopped to listen. Turned toward him. Now the two were perhaps twenty feet apart. Nanapush could see that the creature was mainly a hide draped loosely over rickety bones. Yet she’d been immense and in her brown eyes there was a depth of sorrow that shook Nanapush even in his desperation.

Old Buffalo Woman, I hate to kill you, said Nanapush, for you have managed to live by wit and courage, even though your people are destroyed. You must have made yourself invisible. But then again, as you are the only hope for my family, perhaps you were waiting for me.

Nanapush sang the song again because he knew the buffalo was waiting to hear it. When he finished, she allowed him to aim point-blank at her heart. The old woman toppled over still watching Nanapush in that emotional way, and Nanapush fell beside her, spent. After a few minutes passed, he roused himself and plunged his knife into the underbelly. A gust of blood-fragrant steam stirred him to life and he worked quickly, wrenching away the guts, cleaning out the rib cavity. As he worked, he chewed on raw slices of heart and liver. Still, his hands shook and his legs kept giving out. He knew he wasn’t thinking clearly. Then the snow came down. He was caught in the blind howl.

Hunters on the plains can survive a deadly storm by making a shelter of buffalo hide skinned straight off, but it is dangerous to go inside the animal. Everybody knows that. Yet in his delirium, blinded and drawn by its warmth, Nanapush crawled into the carcass. Once there, he swooned at the sudden comfort. With his belly full and the warmth pressing around him, he passed out. And while unconscious, he became a buffalo. This buffalo adopted Nanapush and told him all she knew.

Of course, once the storm had passed, Nanapush found that he was frozen against the buffalo’s ribs. He was held fast by solid blood. Nanapush had dragged in his rifle and kept it where he could shoot, so he managed to blast himself an air hole, though he was deafened for days by the explosion. He could not get his gun to work again. He poked the barrel out the air hole to keep it from freezing over, and waited. To keep up his spirits, he began to sing.

After the storm passed, his mother came out to find him. She had saved herself by knocking a porcupine out of a tree. She’d killed it with great tenderness, and singed the quills into its flesh so she got the benefit of every part. She’d started looking for her son when the snow stopped. She even made a toboggan and dragged it along in case he’d been hurt or, in the best case, shot an animal. Soon she spotted the dark, shaggy shape swept half bare of snow. She ran, the toboggan bumping along behind, but when she reached the buffalo, her knees gave in fright, she was so surprised to hear it singing the song she’d learned from the fish. Then her mind cleared and she laughed. She knew immediately how her foolish son had trapped himself. So it was, Akii hacked Nanapush out of the buffalo, laced him onto the toboggan, and hauled him to the woods. There she built a brush shelter and a fire to thaw him out. Then with the toboggan they went back many times and transported every bit of the buffalo back to their family and relatives.

When the men were given meat by the woman they had tried to kill, and the son who had protected her, they were ashamed. She was generous, but took her children and did not go back to her husband.

Many people were saved by that old woman buffalo, who gave herself to Nanapush and his unkillable mother. Nanapush himself said that whenever he was sad over the losses that came over and over through his life, his old grandmother buffalo would speak to him and comfort him. This buffalo knew what had happened to Nanapush’s mother. She said wiindigoo justice must be pursued with great care. A place should be built so that people could do things in a good way. She said many things, taught Nanapush, so that, as he lived on, Nanapush was to become wise in his idiocy.



Mooshum fell straight back, gave a great sigh, and began his soft rattling snore. I dropped off too, as suddenly as Nanapush inside the buffalo, and when I woke I had forgotten Mooshum’s story—although I remembered it later on in the day, when my father came to get me, because he said the word carcass. He was very pale and elated, and he was speaking to Uncle Edward, saying, They’ve got his damned carcass in custody. At that moment, I remembered Mooshum’s story entirely, vivid as a dream, and simultaneously knew they’d caught my mother’s rapist.

Who is he? Who? I asked my father as we walked up our road.

Soon enough, he said.

At home, my mother was up and about, cleaning, darting around the house with a spidery quickness. Then gasping in a chair, collapsed, leaving jobs started or half done. She got up again, no more than a stick figure. She rushed back and forth, refrigerator to stove to freezer. After her long retreat, this flashing energy was upsetting. She’d gone from zero to a hundred miles an hour and that seemed wrong, although my father seemed pleased and busied himself finishing her projects. They didn’t notice me at all, so I left.

Now that they had the carcass in custody, now that something was being done, I felt a lightness. I felt like I could go back just to being thirteen and live my summer. I was glad I’d quit the station. I skimmed along the road.

Cappy’s house, surrounded too by unfinished projects, stood about three miles east of the Hoopdance golf course. The golf course cut into the reservation, which was an issue between the town and the tribal council yet to be resolved. Did the tribal council have the right to lease tribal land to a golf course that extended off the reservation and gave most of its profits to non-Indians? And who was responsible if a golfer was struck by lightning? If this issue had come before my father, I was not aware of it, but everybody thought that Indians should get to golf there for free—which of course they couldn’t. Sometimes Cappy and I biked over there to look for lost golf balls, which we planned to sell back to the golfers. When I got to Cappy’s and suggested this, though, he said he wanted to do something else but he didn’t know what. I didn’t know what either. So we biked to Zack’s and Angus was there and the four of us were together.

The lake beach closest to town had a church on it—or to be more accurate, the church blocked access. The church owned the road to the beach and kept up a cattle gate that could be locked. After the gates, there were signs—no alcohol, no trespassing, no anything. At the Catholic beach there was a faded-out statue of the Virgin Mary surrounded by rocks. She was draped with rosaries, one of which belonged to Angus’s aunt. Because of that rosary, I believe we felt we had the right to be there. Of course, as the Catholic church was given the land in a time of our desperation, the very time when Nanapush shot the buffalo, it was true that we not only had a right but owned the land, the church, the statue, the lake, even Father Travis Wozniak’s little house. We owned the graveyard that stretched up the hill behind it and the lovely old oak woods pressing in on those graves. But own or not own the whole outfit, once we got there by brazenly riding up the hill, jumping the cattle guard, and racing for the beach, we encountered Youth Encounter Christ—YEC.

As we rode past, they were sitting cross-legged in a circle on the far side of the mowed grass. I could see at a glance they were a mixture of reservation kids, many I knew, and strangers who were probably summer volunteers from Catholic high schools or colleges. I’d seen these volunteers traveling in packs, in their bright orange T-shirts with black sacred heart images printed on the chest. Most people who would talk to them were converted already, which must have been a disappointment. Anyway, we slid past and left our bikes down by the dock. We bushwhacked around a corner to another slice of beach that was more private.

Let’s hide our pants, said Angus, in case one of them shows up to steal our clothes. Clothes stealers did not exactly show up, but after we’d been in the water skinny-dipping, horsing around for half an hour, we did get two visitors. One was a tall, stoop-chested dirty blond guy, older, probably in college, with the worst zits you ever saw. The other, well, she was the opposite of him. She was I guess you’d say a dream. Which was what we called her afterward. Dream Girl. Caramel skin. Soft wide eyes of velvet brown. Straight brown fall of hair held back by cute headband. Shorts. Shapey. Breasts that delicately pushed at her ugly orange sacred heart T-shirt. I was relaxing on my back looking at the sky when all of this happened. I turned over and saw my friends were gone. They’d moved closer in to shore and were standing in waist-high water, chopping at the wavelets with their hands. Cappy was slicking back his hair as he talked and suddenly I noticed that he looked much older and stronger than Zack or Angus or me. I swam in, stood up beside my friends.

So I’m gonna ask you again to leave, said pimple guy.

And I’m gonna ask you again how come, said Cappy.

Once again, just to be clear—the YEC guy paused and lifted his first finger and pointed at heaven, a gesture which Angus copied ever after that day. This beach is reserved for church-authorized activities, said YEC. I’m asking you politely to leave.

Naw, said Cappy. We don’t wanna go. He squirted water up through his closed fist in a jet. He was squinting lazily at Dream Girl. She hadn’t said anything. But her eyes were on Cappy.

What do you think? He nodded at her. Do you think we should go?

Dream Girl said in a clear voice, I think you should go.

Okay, said Cappy, if you say so. And he walked out of the water.

I looked sideways at Cappy as he strode past. His dick hung heavy between his legs. There was a scream. It was from the guy.

Go back!

Then pimple boy rushed forward to grapple Cappy back into the water. Cappy pushed him off and Dream Girl walked away, but she took a good look back. Cappy kicked the God Squadder’s legs out from under him, reached around with a wrestler’s move, and started dunking him. He didn’t dunk him hard, no worse than we did fooling around, but the guy screamed again and Cappy quit.

Hey, man, Cappy held onto his shoulder. The pimple guy puked in the lake and we moved away from him. I’m sorry, man, said Cappy. He reached out to pat the orange back, but the guy’s face went a terrible dead purple and we could hear his back teeth grind.

He’s shittin’ mad or something, Cappy said. And just like that the guy flipped over and began thrashing wildly and jerking his head and he would have drowned right there if we hadn’t grabbed him and carried him up onshore. We laid him out. I was the only one with socks. I rolled one up and stuck it in his mouth. We took turns holding the guy, talking to him, and at the same time getting dressed, quick. He quit seizuring and I removed the sock. We sent Angus up to get Father Travis.

While Angus was gone and the guy was breathing okay but still out of it, Cappy said, What do we do now? Think fast, Number One.

Join the YEC, I said.

Yeah, said Zack. Seek out new life-forms. The YEC, a rosary-based primitive people . . .

I get it, Cappy said. We convert. This guy converted us.

Yeah right, said pimple guy, half opening his eyes. He passed out and puked again. We turned him sideways so he wouldn’t choke, and he sputtered awake.

We’re cool now, man, said Cappy. You showed us the way. We felt a sparkle come down over us.

It happened, I said. The sparkle.

Jesus saves, said Zack, and then he repeated these words over and over in a soft but rising chant that seemed to galvanize the skinny guy, whose name we learned was Neal, into rising with us and putting up a wobbling hand with ours to feel the spirit. Moving forward with the spirit upon us we advanced from the bush, fully dressed, in a little cluster around dripping Neal, calling out whatever Zack did. Holy Spirit is right on! Right on upon us. Hallelujah. Praise the Christ Form. Praise His Rez Erection. Holy Mother’s Milk. Lamb of Goodness Sakes. Holy Fruity Womb! Zack was a rotten Catholic. Father Travis had left the squad on some urgent business of the moment and was just now hurrying back with Angus. His cassock swirled around his striding thighs. But too late. All he saw was us surrounded by a pack of orange Ts, hugging, weeping, throwing up our hands. All he could do when Cappy fell upon him crying, Thank you, thank you, Jesus, was pat Cappy’s back hard enough to make him grunt, and eye me like a trapped hawk. I knew better than to meet Father Travis’s eyes after that one look. I turned away and bumped up against Dream Girl, who was standing at the edge of things, with the truth and Cappy walking from the water in her thoughts. I saw those things on her face. And I saw there was no conflict. Which is as much as to say that she was in love.

Her name was Zelia and she’d traveled all the way over from Helena, Montana, to convert the Indians, none of whom lived in tipis and many of whom had skin lighter than her own, and this confused her.

Zack asked why she didn’t stay in Montana and convert those Indians over there.

What Indians? she asked.

Oh them, said Cappy quickly. They’re all Mormons and Witnesses and so on already, those Montana Indians. Nobody goes near them. You should keep on converting over here. Lots of pagans here.

Oh, said Zelia. Well, we don’t trespass on other missions so much, anyway.

She was Mexican, from a very close family. They’d been against her mission work to a danger zone, she said, but she got her way eventually.

Actually, you’re an Indian too, I told her. She looked offended, so I said, Maybe you’re a noble Mayan.

You’re probably an Aztec, said Cappy. This was later in the afternoon. We had signed on for the last two days of Father Travis’s summer program so that we could see Dream Girl. She and Cappy were starting to flirt.

Yes, I think you are Aztec. Cappy eyed her half mockingly. You’d reach right into a man’s chest and rip out his heart.

She looked away, but she smiled.

Zack put his fist out and pumped it with a squishing noise. Padump. Padump. But neither of them looked at him. The three of us knew we had no hope. Cappy was the only one. But we still wanted to be near her and hoped that she would try converting us for real.

At home, my mother’s energy had faded only slightly. She had two streaks of color on her face. I realized she’d smeared on rouge. She was taking iron pills and other pills. There were six bottles of stuff right inside the kitchen cabinet. She had made Juneberry pancakes for dinner. Mom and Dad sat skeptically and listened as I told all about how I had joined Youth Encounter Christ, or YEC, and was due up at the church tomorrow.

Youth Encounter? My father narrowed his eyes. You quit Whitey’s to join a youth encounter group?

I quit Whitey’s because he pasted Sonja.

My mother went rigid.

All right, said my father quickly. What do you encounter?

We dramatize life situations. Like if we are offered drugs. We imagine that Jesus is there to step between, say, Angus and the drug dealer. Or me and the dealer, say, not that it happens.

That’s right, said my father, you’re beer drinkers, as I remember. Does Jesus snatch the cans from your paws? Empty them on the ground?

That’s what we’re supposed to visualize.

Interesting, said my mother. Her voice was neutral, formal, neither caustic nor falsely enthusiastic. I’d thought she was the same mother only with a hollow face, jutting elbows, spiky legs. But I was beginning to notice that she was someone different from the before-mother. The one I thought of as my real mother. I had believed that my real mother would emerge at some point. I would get my before mom back. But now it entered my head that this might not happen. The damned carcass had stolen from her. Some warm part of her was gone and might not return. This new formidable woman would take getting to know, and I was thirteen. I didn’t have the time.

The second day at Youth Encounter Christ was better than the first—we got our T-shirts that morning and put them right on over our clothes, patting the thorn-encircled sacred hearts printed over our own hearts. We went down to the lake and started lip-synching the songs everyone else in the group knew. Neal was our best friend now. The other kids from the reservation, real devout ones whose parents were deacons and pie makers for the funerals, had told Neal that the four of us were the worst bunch in school, which wasn’t even true. They were just trying to help Neal feel impressed with himself as from the beginning he had confessed low self-esteem. Unfortunately for us and for our chances of long-term salvation, Youth Encounter Christ was only a two-week camp. We had been converted with only a day left. So we were in wrap-up sessions. And since they were wrapping up the insights gained over the two weeks, we didn’t have much to contribute.

One girl whose sister we knew, Ruby Smoke, stated that she had been delivered of a serpent. I felt Zack shaking beside me, and I elbowed him hard. Angus knew the score and murmured praise, but Cappy said, What kind of snake was it, in a deadpan voice, and Father Travis bent forward, giving him a sideways stare.

Ruby was a big girl with short, sprayed hair, streaked with dry red, and hoop earrings. Lots of makeup. Her boyfriend, Toast, I don’t recall his real name, nobody did, was there too—very skinny with basketball shorts and a sad slump. He looked over at Cappy not with malice, and said, None of your business. A serpent is a serpent.

Cappy put his hands up, Just asking, man! He fixed his eyes on the ground.

But since you’re interested, said Ruby, it was a humungous serpent, brownish, with crisscross lines. And its eyes were golden and it had a wedge head like a rattlesnake.

A pit viper, I said. You were delivered of a pit viper.

Father Travis looked ominous, but Ruby looked pleased.

It’s okay, Father, she said. Joe’s uncle is a science teacher.

In fact, I went on, encouraged, it sounds to me like you were delivered of the fer-de-lance, which is hands down the deadliest snake in the world. If it bites your hand they chop off your arm. That’s the treatment. Or you could have been delivered of the bushmaster, which can get to ten feet and waits to ambush its prey and can take down a cow. You can’t see it when the fer-de-lance strikes, it moves at lightning speed.

Everyone nodded in excitement at Ruby and someone said, Way to go, Ruby. She looked proud of herself. Then Father Travis spoke: Sometimes things happen very quickly, like that, which is why in this encounter group we work to prepare you for those lightning-fast moments. Those moments aren’t temptation, really. You react on instinct. Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep. You’re tempted then. That’s why we learn strategies to keep ourselves occupied, to pray. But a quick-acting poison, that’s different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you’ve ever imagined.

I sat rooted, struck into an odd panic by his words.

We caught hands all around and put our heads down and prayed the Hail Mary, which you don’t have to be a Catholic to know on this reservation as people mutter it at all hours in the grocery store or bars or school hallways. We did ten, mentioning the fruit of thy womb every time, a phrase that Zack found unbearable and couldn’t even say for fear he’d laugh. The day went on pretty much like that—confessions, pep talks, tears, drama-praying. Creepy moments when we had to stare into each other’s eyes. I say creepy because I had to stare into Toast’s eyes, which were burnt holes, unreadable and belonging to a guy, so what was the point anyway. Cappy got to lock eyes with Zelia. This was supposed to be a soul-to-soul encounter. A spiritual thing. But Cappy said he got the worst hard-on of his life.



The flittering energy that had possessed my mother was burnt out and she was resting—but on the couch, not locked in her room. After I got home, my father invited me to sit alongside him on an old rusted kitchen chair next to the garden. The evening was cool and the air stirred the scrub box elder bordering the yard. The big cottonwood clattered by the garage. My father tipped his head back to catch the slow-setting sun on his face.

I had asked him about the damned carcass, and he was trying to think of what to say.

Who is it?

My father shook his head.

The thing is, my father said, the thing is. He was choosing his words very carefully. There will be an arraignment where the judge will decide whether he can be charged. But even now we may be pushing the envelope. The defense attorney is filing a motion for his release. Gabir is hanging in there, but he doesn’t have a case. Most rape cases don’t get this far but we have Gabir. There’s talk by the defense of suing the BIA. Even though we know he did it. Even though everything matches up.

Who is it? Why can’t they just hang him?

My father put his head in his hands, and I said I was sorry.

No, he said, broodingly. I wish I could hang him. Believe me. I imagine myself the hanging judge in an old western; I’d happily deliver the sentence. But beyond playing cowboy in my thoughts, there is traditional Anishinaabe justice. We would have sat down to decide his fate. Our present system though. . . .

She doesn’t know where it happened, I said.

My father tipped his chin down. There is nowhere to stand. No clear jurisdiction, no accurate description of where the crime occurred. He turned over a scrap of paper and drew a circle on it, tapped his pencil on the circle. He made a map.

Here’s the round house. Just behind it, you have the Smoker allotment, which is now so fractionated nobody can get much use out of it. Then a strip that was sold—fee land. The round house is on the far edge of tribal trust, where our court has jurisdiction, though of course not over a white man. So federal law applies. Down to the lake, that is also tribal trust. But just to one side, a corner of that is state park, where state law applies. On the other side of that pasture, more woods, we have an extension of round house land.

Okay, I said, looking at the drawing. Fine. Why can’t she make up a place?

My father turned his head and gazed at me. The skin beneath his eyes was purple-gray. His cheeks were loose folds.

I can’t ask her to do that. So the problem remains. Lark committed the crime. On what land? Was it tribal land? fee land? white property? state? We can’t prosecute if we don’t know which laws apply.

If it happened anyplace else . . .

Sure, but it happened here.

You knew this ever since Mom talked about it.

So did you, my father said.



Since my mother had broken her silence in my presence and set in motion all that followed, I had insisted to my father that he tell me what was happening. And to some extent he did, although not all of it by any means. For instance, he said nothing about dogs. The day after we spoke, a search-and-rescue outfit came to our reservation. From Montana, is what Zack heard.

We were riding aimlessly around, doing wheelies in the dust, circling the big gravelly yard near the hospital, jumping over stray clumps of alfalfa and jewelweed. It was Saturday and Zelia, along with the other leaders of the camp, was on a final bus trip to the Peace Garden. After their leadership workshop they would all leave. The workshop lasted three days and Cappy was being Worf.

He made his Klingon challenge to me, Heghlu meh qaq jajvam, tried to skid into a 360, and bit the dust.

This is a good day to die! he yelled.

F*ck yes! I yelled.

Angus was best at imitating Data. Please continue this petty bickering, he said. It is most intriguing. He raised his finger.

At that moment, Zack rode up and told us what was happening down by the lake with the search-and-rescue teams and the police and the vans towing commandeered fishing boats. By the time we got to the lake, we could see them, the dogs and their handlers in four aluminum boats with outboard motors that couldn’t have been more than fifteen hp. The dogs were different breeds; there was a golden one, a runty one that looked like a cross between Pearl and Angus’s scabby rez mutt, a sleek black Lab, and a German shepherd.

They’re looking for a car that went down, said Zack. At least I know that much.

I knew it was Mayla’s car. From what Mom had said, I knew that her attacker had sent it to the bottom of the lake. I also knew they were looking for Mayla. I couldn’t help imagining ways that he could have weighted her body and somehow got her back into that car. I didn’t want to think of these things, but my mind kept these awful thoughts going. We watched the searchers all day, the dogs choosing the air above the water, and their people watching every move they made. It was a slow business. They moved across the water, calm, methodical, laying an invisible grid down on the lake bottom. They worked until dark, then quit and set up their own tents and mess camp right near the shore.

The next day, we were there early and got closer, in fact spectacularly close. We didn’t mean to. We left our bikes and crept toward the camp unnoticed—there was a new bustle of energy there. Some purpose had been established and we saw it when two wet-suited divers went out in one of the boats and lowered themselves into the drop-off we all knew about. There was a steep bank and where it met the shore it was well-known that the water went to an immediate depth of what we grew up thinking was a hundred feet, but turned out to be twenty. There was a cliff above it, where we lodged ourselves and watched through the day. We were hungry, thirsty, and talking about sneaking away, when a tow truck rumbled down the rutted road. It backed down as close to the water as the searchers could safely wave it. We stayed hidden in the brush and were there when the car, a maroon Chevy Nova, was winched up the bank streaming weeds and water. We expected of course to see a body, and Angus whispered to be ready—we’d get nightmares. He’d seen his drowned uncle. But there was no body in the car. We were peering through weeds, but perched directly where we had a perfect view of the car’s interior. We saw the sludgy water wash through and away. The windows were all cranked down. The doors were soon opened. Nobody, nothing, I thought at first, except there was one thing.

One thing that sent through me a shock that registered as a surface prickle and then went deeper, all that day, all evening, then that night, until I saw it again the moment I was falling asleep and started awake.

In the back window of the car there was a jumble of toys—some plastic, a mashed-up stuffed bear maybe, all were washed together so you couldn’t quite distinguish what each of them was except for a scrap of cloth, a piece of blue-and-white checked fabric that matched the outfit on the doll stuffed with money.