The Lakota in the circle began to throw things in the fire as part of their ritual. I kept my gaze on their flames. The closer I looked, the more appalled I was: the objects tossed in the pit were, I was sure of it now, turkey nuggets from the casino’s Thanksgiving lunch. The Indians were throwing streams of them into the fire: fat, crispy nuggets. It was, of course, their way of rejecting the hypocritical American festivity with its false display of brotherly love between Pilgrims and Native Americans. They were punishing my family for celebrating Thanksgiving and eating McDonald’s-style fast food on their reservation. In my mind we had wronged them terribly and there was no turning back. This was it.
I felt a sharp pain in my lower back as if a dog snout made of steel was sniffing me out, pushing away my panties. I pulled Alo’s arm to get his attention and only then noticed the dog snout was actually his hand. He had unbuttoned my pants and gotten past my underwear. His fingers were inside my ass.
“What are you doing?” I asked. “Don’t you see they are burning the turkey nuggets?”
He laughed. “I know…damn turkey nuggets.”
I tried to thrust him away, but he stumbled on his side and pushed me further down on the ground.
“Just relax.”
“My family is so fucked up! I can’t believe we ate those nuggets!”
“We all ate the nuggets. We’re all fucked up,” Alo said, trying to reason with me.
He was on top of me now. I began to cry, not so much because of his fingers in my ass but because I suddenly remembered reading that McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets were a puree of chopped chicken beaks and bones mixed with a pinkish coloring substance, deep-fried in grease. We had sinned against the tribe with our imperialist appetite for fried turkey. What would my Roman schoolmates think?
“It was so wrong to eat those nuggets. On Thanksgiving! On an Indian reservation!” I finally cried. The panic was getting worse. Alo pushed farther inside me and told me to stop thinking about the nuggets and to think about the moon instead. It was so beautiful, just like me. He started kissing my neck.
“Surrender,” the voice inside my head said. “Surrender or it will be worse.”
“You’re so hot,” Alo whispered sloppily.
I closed my eyes and let myself go on the grass. The sound of drums reverberated in my ears and the fire inside me started to die down. Alo unzipped his pants, keeping his fingers in my ass, and took out his penis. Even though it was freezing cold, his penis stood boldly in the prairie wind. He pulled down my jeans and pushed his way inside me. Surrender or it will be worse, I kept thinking. And we started to fuck.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked, frustrated by my dryness and the friction between our cold bodies. I was. He said I was a lot of work and then pushed harder. I felt the lower part of my body spring from the ground. It undulated over the Lakota fire in the field and hinged there, warming up over the flames. The drumming created a soothing spongelike protection that guarded my insides. Everything turned into a rubbery, senseless composite of two people making love. I was full of him. His flesh expanded inside my crevices, but it was okay because I didn’t feel anything. My body wasn’t with him. It danced in the field under the full moon. I could see my bare feet touch the ground and bounce on the dirt. My legs moved to the right rhythm, my hips swayed into the fire. The flames made everything numb.
A fastidious tremor pulsed somewhere beneath me as the drugs started to fade. It was my ass. It had been rammed. I heard my grandmother’s voice repeating her words of wisdom, “Watch out for hemorrhoids. They can creep up on you if you let the jets in your anus.”
And then I passed out.
In a dream I saw escalators descending toward an underground train. They were long and steep and covered in packaged turkey. Yellow turkey breasts, red beaks, and fluffy body parts scattered about. It was a turkey-filled descent into the underworld. The passengers were being asked to be courageous.
“Be strong!” the engineer screamed from his perch in the locomotive. “Be strong in the face of packaged turkey!”
The challenge, I realized, was to not interact with turkeys. No matter how many pieces of meat I found along the way, I knew my mission was to get on the train. I stayed focused. Didn’t even look at the dead birds until I reached the cars. I leaped through the closing doors and squeezed in just in time. I did it. I had been strong in the face of packaged turkey and when I looked back at the red beaks and fluffy parts amassed on the moving escalators, I knew I was safe.
—
I woke up in a damp bed in a house with plastic walls and linoleum floors to the smell of fried bacon. I had no clothes on. I slid into a T-shirt and pretended not to notice. I told myself it was normal. I always slept naked. When I went downstairs a woman in Daisy Dukes was frying sausages and pancakes on a stove. On a stool next to her was a greasy plate piled with layers of bacon. She looked up at me and smiled.
“Ah, the French girl!”
“I’m Italian.”
“Oh, I love Italy. I’ve never been but I love the food.”
I wanted to make small talk, but words would not come out. Never mind, I thought. I had other priorities.
“Where am I?”
Alo came into the kitchen wearing a pair of dirty overalls. He’d been out chopping wood. I smiled at him because he looked familiar. The woman in the Daisy Dukes wiggled her butt at him, teasingly. He walked behind her and gave her a hug. They kissed on the lips.
I shuddered thinking about my underground train. Where did it take me? I tried to remember the woman’s face. Was she with us on the field? Did I lose my virginity to two people at once? I forced my mind to stop asking questions.
“Good morning, Ma, smells good,” Alo said.
He smacked the woman’s behind jokingly as she pulled away from him with an excited shrill.
“Watch it, I’m frying!”
I glared at them.
“You’re…Alo’s…”
The woman turned toward me, rolling her eyes to the sky.
“Yeah, I had him when I was fifteen,” she replied, not realizing it wasn’t the narrow age difference I found perplexing but the fact they’d just kissed on the lips for a long enough amount of time to be awkward. A pot of coffee rested on the kitchen table next to the fried bacon.
“Have a seat! You guys probably need some coffee…you were up late.” She giggled, eyeing us.
She grabbed the bacon and made plates for us. She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on her son’s lap. Her tank top rode up, revealing her butt crack and two dimples on her lower back. She had a Tasmanian devil tattooed over her right hip. I sat on the other side of the table, looking at them, not knowing what to say, where to start. Alo did not glance at me. I could not eat, but I needed a way out, so I stared out the window: pine trees and great boulders. We were in a parking lot in the middle of some kind of rock formation. Outside, children with dirty mouths played with broken tractors in front of prefabricated trailer homes. How could I get out of there?
The mother sipped on, staring at me inquisitively with blinking eyes.
Silence.