The Round House

Chapter Eleven

The Child

At the oak tree, we turned and looked down. Lark was lying on his back, the golf clubs neatly waiting in their cart. His putter cast down at his heels. He hadn’t moved. Beside me, Cappy dropped to his knees. He leaned over until his forehead touched the earth and put his arms over his head like a child in a tornado drill. After a while, he lifted his head and shook it. We wrapped the rifle back up in its bag, and set it aside as we tried to restore the ground where it had been buried. Cappy used a branch to brush up the grass I had trampled.

Nobody’s home at my place, said Cappy. We gotta hide this. He had the rifle.

We waited until a passing car was out of sight before we crossed the road. Now the rain was misting down. When we got to Cappy’s, we went straight to the kitchen tap. We washed our hands, put water on our faces, and drank glass after glass of water.

I should have thought of where to hide it, I said. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this.

I don’t know why I didn’t either, said Cappy.

He went and rummaged around on the junk-laden coffee table until he came up with a set of keys. Doe had taken his car to work and Randall had gone off in his pickup, but Randall also had the red beater Olds that Cappy tinkered with. It had a black driver’s-side door and a cracked windshield. We went out, put the rifle in the trunk, and got into the front.

The starter’s bad, said Cappy.

It groaned the first time he turned it over. He gave it a spurt of gas. It died.

You gotta sneak up on it, Cappy said. While I’m psyching out this car, you think of where we’re going.

I know where we’re going.

He tried again. It nearly caught.

Where are we going?

To Linda’s. To the old Wishkob homestead.

We sat back, looking out at the shed through the two halves of the windshield.

That makes weird sense, said Cappy. Suddenly, he leaned forward, cranked the key hard, and pumped the gas pedal.

Engage, he said. The engine roared.

The rain was coming down like sixty now. Cappy opened his window and craned his neck to peer out as he drove. The windshield wiper worked on the passenger side, but not the driver’s side. He drove slowly and sedately as an old man. The Wishkob land was at the other end of the reservation in the dunelike brown hills of grass that were mostly good for grazing. It was a nice old place with plantings of lilac and a few twisted oak, battered shrubs that could stand the heavy wind. On the way there we’d passed maybe two cars and there was nobody to see us turn into Linda’s drive—the place was isolated. Cappy eased the car into Park and kept it idling because he didn’t know if it would start again. We got out and walked around the house to decide where. Linda’s old dog set up an asthmatic barking inside the house. We ended up pulling off a piece of the tan latticework tacked to the underside of Linda’s front porch. I crawled in and shoved the gun as far back as I could. We used a tire iron to pound the lattice back in place, then we noticed all the lattice was gone on the other side where the dog liked to sleep. We got back in the car and pulled out. We didn’t talk. Cappy paused the car to let me out on the road to my house. On the upper road leading out of town, we saw the tribal police car driving east, toward the golf course, lights going. No siren.

He’s dead for sure, said Cappy.

Otherwise, they’d rocket.

Their sirens would be going off.

We sat in the idling car. The rain was hardly a sprinkle now.

You saved my ass, brother.

Not really. You would have shot that—

Cappy stopped. Around here we don’t speak badly of the dead and he caught himself.

He would’ve died though, I said. You didn’t kill him. This is not on you.

Sure. Okay.

We were speaking without emotion. Like we were talking of other people. Or as if what we did had just happened on television. But I was choking up. Cappy swiped at his face with the heel of his palm.

We can’t talk about it after this, he said.

Affirmative.

Isn’t that how your dad says people get caught? Bragging to their friends?

They get drunk, whatever.

I feel like getting drunk, Cappy said.

With what?

The car’s idle faltered and Cappy pressed tenderly on the gas pedal.

I don’t know. Randall’s on the wagon.

I could make it up with Whitey, I said.

Yeah? Cappy glanced at me.

I nodded at him and looked away.

After you bring the car back . . .

Right.

Meet me at the gas station. I’ll go talk to him.

I got out. I stood away from the car, then reached out and hit my palm on the window. Cappy drove off and I walked slowly over to the gas station, past the old BIA school and the community center, past the one stop sign and past Clemence and Edward’s house. Over the highway and down the weedy ditch and back up. By the time I got there, the rain had completely dried off except for some random dark patches on the gravel or cement. Whitey stood in the doorway of the garage wiping his hands on the greasy rag. He watched me for a moment and then faded back into the darkness. Came out dangling two cold open bottles of grape Crush. I walked up to him and took a bottle. His receiver was crackling police signals. I took a gulp of pop and it nearly came back up.

Your stomach must be turned over, said Whitey. You need a slice a bread.

He got me some white bread from the cooler and after I ate a slice I felt better. We sat down in the lawn chairs in the shadow the garage cast, where Sonja and LaRose had sat what seemed a very long time ago.

Remember when I was little, I asked, you used to give me a swig now and then?

Your mom sure hated that, said Whitey. Hungry? Fancy a rez steak sandwich?

Not yet, I said. I sipped the grape pop.

This time it went down good, said Whitey. He was looking at me closely. He opened his mouth a couple of times before he spoke.

Someone dusted Lark, he said. On the golf course. Made a mess of him like a kid shooting at a hay bale. Then one clean head shot.

I tried to sit very still, but couldn’t. I jumped up and ran around back. I just got there in time. Whitey didn’t follow me. He was helping a customer when I came back. My knees were weak as water and I needed the lawn chair.

I’m switchin’ you to ginger ale, my boy. He went into the store and came out with a warm can.

This ain’t been in the cooler and it should go easy on your gut.

I think I got the summer flu.

The summer flu, he agreed. It’s going around. Your friends catch it too?

I don’t know. I haven’t seen ’em.

Whitey nodded and sat down beside me.

I been listening to the squawk-box. Whoever did it left no traces, he said. There’s nothing to go on. Nobody seen it. Nobody seen nothin’. Then it rained so hard. You’ll be getting over this flu quickly. Still, maybe you should take a lay-down, Joe. There’s a little cot in the office. Sonja used to nap there, and she will again. She’s coming home, Joe. I tell you?

Did she call you? I asked, hating him.

Damn right, she called me. Gonna be different now, she said, her game. But I don’t care. I don’t care. Whatever you think—he looked away from me carefully—I’m stone in love with that old girl. You understand? She’s coming back to me, Joe.

I walked in and lay down on the cot for a good half hour. It didn’t smell like Sonja. I was glad because I couldn’t have taken that. When I got up and went back out, Cappy still had not shown up.

I could maybe eat that sandwich now, Uncle.

Whitey went to the cooler and took out the baloney, cheese, and bread. There was a head of iceberg lettuce in there and he carefully tore off three pale green leaves and placed them on the meat before closing the sandwich.

Lettuce? I asked.

I’m on a health kick, me.

He handed over the sandwich and made one for himself. Then he gave me that one too.

Your friend’s here.

Cappy came in the door and I handed him a sandwich.

The three of us went back outside and ate sitting in the lawn chairs.

Uncle, I said, we could use a little something.

He ate his whole sandwich. I don’t wonder, he said when it was gone. But if you tell Geraldine or Doe, it is my saggy old red ass on the line here. Plus any future supply of stuff for you. And you have to drink it out back behind the station in those shade trees where I can keep on my eye on the botha youse.

We’ll abide by your conditions, said Cappy in a formal tone. His face was expressionless.

Handle the trade, said Whitey. There was no one in sight. He went back to open the safe, where he kept his booze. He brought out half a quart of Four Roses and pointed it toward the trees. Cappy took the bottle and put it underneath his shirt. A customer pulled up. Whitey waved and walked over to the car.

Does he know?

I think so, I said. I puked when he told me about Lark.

I puked riding over here, said Cappy.

It’s just the summer flu, I said.

Is that a medical opinion, Joe?

We looked at each other and tried to smile, but instead our mouths dropped open. Our faces fell into our real expressions.

What are we? asked Cappy. What are we now?

I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

Let’s sterilize our insides.

Right on.

Beneath the trees there were four or five cement blocks, a litter of crushed cans, a circle of ash. We sat down on the blocks and opened the bottle. Cappy took a cautious drink, then handed it to me. I took a fiery mouthful and let it trickle down. The burning mellowed as the stuff reached inside of me, loosening my chest with a slow warmth and easing my gut. After the next sip I felt better. Everything looked amber. I took my first deep breath.

Oh, I said, bowing my head and passing the bottle back to Cappy. Oh, oh, oh.

Yes? said Cappy.

Oh.

He drank more deeply. I picked up a branch and scraped the bits of charred wood and speckled gravel away from the ash, destroying the circle. Cappy watched the movements of my branch and I kept moving the branch until we’d finished the bottle. Then we lay down in the weeds.

Brother, I said, what made you come to the overlook?

I was always there, said Cappy. Every morning. I always had your back.

I thought so, I said. And then we slept.

After we woke up, Whitey made us rinse out our mouths, gargle with mouthwash, and eat another sandwich.

Gimme your shirt, Joe, he said. Leave it here. Touch the bottle again. You, too, Cappy.

I gave him my shirt and walked home. Cappy coasted beside me. We did not feel particularly drunk. We did not feel anything. But we wove from side to side on the road, unable to keep on a straight course. We thought that Angus and Zack would be looking for us.

We should all four be hanging out all the time, now, together, said Cappy.

We’ll keep training for cross-country in the morning.

That’s right.

Pearl came out from beneath her bush and walked with me up to the house. Before I went in the door, I played with her and made myself laugh. I took her inside with me because I was afraid that my parents would be sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me, as indeed they were. When I opened the door and saw them, I bent over and rubbed Pearl’s neck and talked to her. I stood up to greet them and let the smile drop off my face.

What? I said.

Whitey’s booze had settled inside of me by then, separating me from who I was, say, when I’d dug those seedlings out of the foundation, when I had wept outside my mother’s bedroom door, when I had watched the angel, my doodem, cross the sun-grazed walls of my bedroom. I knelt down with my arm around Pearl’s neck and disregarded my parents’ endless stare. I stayed across the room hoping that they would not smell me, but I felt my mother look at my father.

Where were you? asked my mother.

Running.

All day?

At Whitey’s, too.

Some small thing eased between them.

Doing what?

Just hanging around. Whitey fed us lunch. Me and Cappy.

They wanted to believe me so much that I saw they’d make every effort to believe. All I had to do was stay plausible. Not break. Not puke.

Sit down, son, said my father. But although I drew a step closer, I did not take a chair. He told me Lark was dead. I let all my feelings cross my face.

That’s good, I finally said.

Joe, said my father, his hand on his chin, his eyes on me, the weight intolerable. Joe, do you know anything, even the slightest thing, about this?

This? This what?

He was murdered, Joe.

But I’d used the word before. I’d hardened myself. I’d used it with Cappy and I’d used it in my head. I had prepared to answer this question and to answer it the way the old Joe from before this summer would answer. I spoke childishly, in a sudden fury of excitement that wasn’t fake.

Dead? I wanted him dead, okay? In my thoughts. If you’re telling me he’s murdered, then I’m happy. He deserved it. Mom is free now. You’re free. The guy who killed him should get a medal.

All right, my father said. Enough. He pushed back his chair. My mother’s eyes did not leave my face. She was intent on believing anything I said. But she shuddered all over, suddenly. A ripple passed over her body. The shock of it reached me.

She sees the murderer in me, I thought.

Dizzy, I reached down for Pearl, but she had crept to my father’s leg. I sat back up.

I won’t lie. I’m glad he’s dead. Can I go now?

I walked past them and continued until I reached the stairs. I carefully took the steps. As I went up, drawn in my weariness as if by a rope, I felt their eyes on me. I recalled this happening before at some time and me watching. I was halfway to my room before I remembered my mother climbing to that place of loneliness from which we feared she never would descend.

No, I thought, as I crept into my bed, I’ve got Cappy and the others. I’ve done what I had to do. There is no going back. And whatever happens, I can take.



I was down. I was sick for real now, with the summer flu, just as I had pretended. Whitey vouched for us. When first Vince Madwesin, then another tribal police officer, then finally Agent Bjerke, pressed him, Whitey gave up that we’d gotten into his booze stash and passed out behind the station. He showed them our hideout in the weeds, the bottle, which was fingerprinted, and my shirt. My mother identified it as the one she’d washed for me to wear that day. But the rifle. Doe’s 30.06. I was running a fever of alternating sweats and chills and my sheets were sodden. While I was ill, I watched the golden light pass across my walls. I could feel nothing, but my thoughts ran wild. Always I kept going back to the day I dug the trees out of the foundation of our house. How tough those roots had clung. Maybe they had pulled out the blocks that held our house up. And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas. Dad’s case law, the Cohen, and then that hot dish. I’d think of the black noodles. The noodles became a carcass—the human, the buffalo, the body subject to the laws. I’d wonder how my mother got her spirit to return to her body, and if it had returned, and if mine was fleeing now because of what I’d done. Would I become a wiindigoo? Infected by Lark? And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring. I hadn’t been touched yet. Thinking finally exhausted me. I turned over, away from the light, and slept.

Dad, I said, once, when he came into the room. Does Linda know? Is she okay?

He’d brought me a glass of Whitey’s cure—warm ginger ale.

I don’t know, he said. She won’t pick up her telephone. She’s not at work.

I’ve got to get to her, I thought. And then I slept hard again until late the next morning. When I woke from that sleep everything was clear. I had no fever, no sickness at all. I was hungry. I got up and took a shower. Put fresh clothes on and came downstairs. The trees at the edge of the yard swayed and the leaves showed their dull silvery undersides. I ran myself a glass of tap water and stood at the kitchen window. My mother was outside, kneeling in the dirt of the garden with a colander, picking the bush beans that my father and I had planted late. She dropped down and crawled the row on all fours sometimes. Sat back on her heels. She gave the colander a little jounce, to settle the beans. That’s why I did it, I thought. And I was satisfied right then. So she could give her colander a shake. She didn’t have to look behind her, or fear he would sneak up on her. She could pick her bush beans all day and nobody was going to bother her.

I poured out a bowl of cereal and added milk. I ate it slowly. The cereal felt good going down. I rinsed my bowl and went outside.

My mother got up and walked over to me. She put her stained palm on my forehead.

Your fever’s gone.

I’m fine now!

You should take it easy, just stay home and read or . . .

I won’t do much, I said. It’s just that school starts up in two weeks. I don’t want to waste any of my last days.

I guess they would sure go to waste if you stayed home with me. She wasn’t angry, but she didn’t smile.

I didn’t mean it that way, I said. I’ll come back early.

Her eyes, one sadder than the other with its sinking squint, moved softly over me. She pushed back my hair. I looked over her shoulder and saw an empty pickle jar sitting on the kitchen step. I froze. The jar. I’d left the jar on the hill.

What’s that?

She turned around. Vince Madwesin came by. He gave me the jar and said to wash it out. He said he likes my home-canned pickles. I guess it’s a hint. She looked back at me, closely, but I didn’t change my expression.

I am worried over you, Joe.

It was a moment I still linger on in my thoughts. Her standing before me in the riot of growth. The warm earth smell of her hands, a slick of perspiration on her neck, her searching eyes.

Whitey said you boys got drunk.

It was an experiment, I said, and the results came back negative. I wasted good vacation being sick, Mom. I think my drinking days are done.

She laughed in relief and the laugh stuck in her throat. She said she loved me and I mumbled back at her. I looked down at my feet.

Are you okay now? I asked, low.

Oh sure, my boy. I’m really good; I’m back to myself. Everything is fine now, fine. She tried to persuade me.

At least he’s dead, Mom. He paid, whatever else.

I wanted to add that he did not die easy, that he knew what he was getting killed for, that he saw who was killing him. But then I’d have to say it was me.

I couldn’t look at her and got on my bike. I rode away with her silent gaze heavy on my back.

First, I rode over to the post office. There was a chance I might run into Dad if it was lunchtime, so I wanted to slip in before noon and see if Linda was working. She was not. Margaret Nanapush, the grandma of the Margaret in my class at school, the girl at the powwow I turned out to marry, told me that Linda was using up some sick leave. As far as Mrs. Nanapush knew, she was at home. So I went there.

I was weak enough to feel that ride as endless. Out on that edge of the reservation, the wind cuts hard. I pedaled against its flow for a good hour before I came to Linda’s road, and then finally swerved into her driveway. Linda’s car was parked in a wooden carport. She drove, surprising to say, a cute blue Mustang. I remembered that she’d said she enjoyed taking to the road. I leaned my bike against her porch. I am winded, I said out loud, and wished Cappy was there to laugh at my bad joke. I dragged myself to the door and knocked, rattling the loose screen in its aluminum frame. She appeared behind it.

Joe! You snuck up on me!

She touched the screen, frowning at it. Shook it.

I’ve gotta fix this. Come in, Joe.

Her dog started barking, too late. He ran up the hill from a field below the sloping ledge of yard where the house sat. By the time he reached the house he was wheezing—a stumpy old black dog with a whitened face.

Buster, smile, said Linda. He lolled out his tongue, grinning and panting in a comical way. I thought of how I’d heard people looked like their dogs. It was true. Linda let him in with me.

I suppose we shouldn’t be laughing, considering what happened, she said as she led me into her kitchen. Sit down, Joe. What can I get you? She listed everything she had. Every kind of drink and sandwich possibility. I didn’t stop her. Finally, Linda said she was fond of a fried egg sandwich with horseradish mayonnaise, and that if I picked that one she’d make it for the both of us. I said that sounded good. While she was frying up the eggs, she told me I could look around and so I wandered into the living room and took in the odd order of her place. At my house, although we kept it neat enough, there were always piles of papers and other interesting stuff here and there. Or books that had gotten off the shelves. Not everything was put away immediately. There might be a jacket draped over a chair. Our shoes weren’t lined up by the door. Linda’s house was extremely neat in the usual way, but also in a way that disoriented me until I figured it out. Everything had a double, though not an identical. Her bookshelf had two books by each author, not the same book, though sometimes a hardback with its companion paperback. They were mostly historical romances. She had chosen collections of objects to display, also two by two. Glass figurines of Disney characters on her end tables, paired in different colors, circled the lamps on which she’d glued fake leaves sorted by the same principle. There were swamp-willow baskets hanging on the wall behind the television. Each held nearly the same arrangement of dried grasses and empty seedpods. She also had a gabled Victorian dollhouse that only a grown-up could have owned. I was afraid to look inside but did, and sure enough every room was completely furnished down to toothpick-fine candles and in the bathroom two infinitesimal toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste. I had the creeps and we hadn’t even talked. She called me back into the kitchen and I went in, tongue-tied. We sat down at her table, which was old and made of scarred wood. At least it was the only table. There was not another almost like it. She had covered it with a bright cloth and set out plates and glasses. She poured some iced tea. The bread was toasted crisp. There was an extra plate. I pointed at it.

What’s it for?

Doe told me in that sweat lodge, Joe, that since I had a double spirit around me I should just welcome it. I set up my house for two people, see, even the little people. And when I eat I always set out an extra plate and I put a bit of the food I’m eating on it.

There was a crust of bread on the plate.

Spirits don’t eat much?

Not this one, said Linda comfortably.

And suddenly it all seemed okay by me. I was hungry the way you get after an illness. Suddenly ravenous.

Linda munched away, beaming at me, then at the sandwich. She put the eggy bread down almost lovingly and addressed it.

Is it a sin to enjoy you when my own twin brother is lying dead in a morgue? I don’t know, but you sure taste good.

I gulped. The other sandwich made a lump in my throat.

Wash it down with some tea?

She poured a bit more into my glass from a plastic pitcher bobbing with cut lemons and ice.

I didn’t take off work to mourn, you know me better than that, she said. I took off work for other reasons. I had sick leave coming so I thought, hey, I’ll use this time to straighten a few things out.

What things? I thought of her neatly duplicate living room, but then I knew she meant her thoughts.

I’ll tell you, said Linda, if you’ll tell me why you came here.

I put down my sandwich, wishing I had eaten it all before we got to this.

Wait, said Linda. As if she’d read my mind, she said that we should eat first and talk later. She apologized for being a bad hostess. Then she lifted her food in her chubby little hands, the sharp nails newly shellacked, and gave me such a look—it was a merry twinkle but at the same time it suggested insanity. I ate slowly, but eventually I had to take the final bite.

Linda patted her lips with her paper napkin and folded it into squares.

The golf course, she said. You pumped me for information. She wagged her finger at me. Two and two makes three. However, I have decided that you are too young to have accomplished this. Maybe you’re not, but I’ve decided you are. My theory is you gave the information about Linden golfing to someone older. But someone nearsighted, not your father. Your father is a very good shot.

He is?

This was of course a big surprise to me.

Everybody knows that. He brought down anything he aimed at as a young man. Kids don’t know their parents’ history. What did you come here for?

Can I trust you?

If you have to ask me that? No.

I was stuck. That mad sparkle came back and lighted up her tiny round eyes. She seemed about to explode with laughter. Instead, she leaned toward me and peered around as if the walls were bugged, then she whispered.

I would do anything in the world for your family. I am devoted to you guys. Though you’ve been using me, Joe, and you want something from me now. What is it?

Right then, I thought I was going to ask about the rifle. Instead, I heard myself ask the question I knew had no answer.

Why, Linda? Why did he do it?

I caught her off guard. Her eyes bulged and filled. But she answered. She answered like she thought it was so obvious I wouldn’t need to ask.

He hated your family, I mean, your father mostly. But Whitey and Sonja too. His thinking was all crooked, Joe. He hated your father but he was afraid of him. Still, he wouldn’t have come for Geraldine except for he became a monster when it came to Mayla. By filling out that form in Geraldine’s office, Mayla had named old Yeltow as father of her child—meaning she got pregnant while she worked for him. A high-school girl. From that old lech, excuse me, she got a car to travel home with, and payoff money not to talk, but she still insisted on enrolling her baby. Linden worked for the governor, but he was always jealous, always possessive, sick, smitten to death with Mayla. He wanted to run away with her on that money, and here she won’t share. Won’t go with him. Probably hates him, scared of him. Tries to get Geraldine to help her—so now both of them know the truth. All this eats at him. He idolized Yeltow. Maybe he thought if he had that file he’d save Yeltow. Or maybe he’d blackmail Yeltow. I could see him doing either. And of course your mother wouldn’t give him that file. But why he did this to your mother had more to do with a man who set loose his monster. Not everybody’s got a monster, and most who do keep it locked up. But I saw the monster in my brother way back in the hospital and it made me deathly ill. I knew that someday he would let it loose. It would lurch out with part of me inside. Yes. I was part of the monster too. I gave and gave, but know what? It was still hungry. Know why? Because no matter how much it ate, it couldn’t get the right thing. There was always something it needed. Something missing in his mother, too. I’ll tell you what it was: me. My powerful spirit. Me! His mother couldn’t face what she did to her baby, but even more: that what she did could not destroy me. Still, Linda brooded, she could call me after telling the doctor to let me die. All those years later. Call me and say, Hello, it’s your mother.

I was silent.

And he could not let go, she said at last. Because he came back and he came back like he wanted his monster killed, though another reason has occurred to me also.

What’s that?

He was nervous about Mayla. I just know she’s somewhere on the reservation. He had to keep checking on her, make sure she wasn’t found.

Do you think she’s alive?

No.

After a while, dread stole into me. I asked, Am I like him?

No, she said. This’ll get to you. Or whoever, I mean. This could wreck you. Don’t let it wreck you, Joe. What could you do? Or whoever do?

She shrugged. But me, that’s another story. It’s me who is not so different, Joe. It’s me who should have shot him with Albert’s old twelve-gauge. Though if Linden had his druthers, I think he’d rather have got shot with the deer rifle.

Yeah, it’s about that rifle, I said.

The rifle.

It’s under your porch. Can you hide it? Get it off the reservation?

She grinned at me in a way fit to burst and I thought crazy, but then she bit her lip modestly and blinked.

Buster found it already, Joe. He knows when anything new enters his territory. I thought he was interested in a skunk. Then I looked underneath and saw the edge of that black Hefty bag.

She saw my shock.

Don’t worry, Joe. Want to know where I’ve been on my sick leave? To Pierre, to my brother Cedric’s. He got his training down in Fort Benning, Georgia, and sure knew how to disassemble that rifle. We threw a couple of pieces in the Missouri. I drove back here in a zigzag I can’t even remember, down back roads, and ditched the rest of it in sloughs. She held up her empty palms and said, Tell whoever did it to rest easy. Her eyes clouded, her look gentled.

Your mom? How is she?

She was out in the garden, picking bush beans. She said she was fine, but I mean she said it over and over so I’d believe her.

I’ll come see her. I want you to give her this.

Linda took something from her pocket and held her fist over my hand. When she opened it a small black screw fell out.

Tell her she can keep this in her jewelry box. Or bury it. Whatever she likes.

I put the screw in my pocket.

Halfway home, blown along all the way back with the usual frozen foil-wrapped brick of banana bread numbing my armpit, I realized of course that the screw in my pocket was part of the rifle. Steadied by the wind, I didn’t have to pause or use my handlebars. I fished it out and winged it into the ditch.



This time it was Angus’s bottle of Captain Jack’s stolen from his mother’s boyfriend with a handful of Valium pills and a grocery bag halfway filled with cans of cold Blatz.

We were drinking at the edge of the construction site. After the lazy bulldozers and the Bobcats stopped moving the same dirt piles around, the place was ours. Some days they left our bike tracks alone, other days they obliterated our work. We had no idea what was going to be built. There was always the same amount of dirt.

A federal project, said Zack.

Cappy tipped the beer down with a pill, lay back, and stared up into the leaves. The light was turning gold.

This here is my favorite time of day, he said. He took a small wallet-size school photo of Zelia from his cowboy shirt pocket and held it to his forehead.

Ssshhh, they’re communicating, Angus said.

I miss you too, baby, said Cappy after a few moments. He put the photo back in his pocket, pressed down the pearl snaps, and patted his heart.

It’s a beautiful love, I said. I turned on my side and leaned into the earth and threw up a little. I buried the puke with dirt. Nobody noticed. I mumbled, I wouldn’t mind a beautiful love.

Cappy handed me a pamphlet. Her last letter, man. It was about the Rapture. This was in it. Cappy smiled upward.

I looked at the pamphlet steadily, reading the words several times to get their meaning

Rapture, yeah man, said Zack.

Not that kind of rapture, said Cappy. It’s a mass liftoff. There’s only a certain number of people who can go. They don’t apparently take Catholics so Zelia’s family is thinking of converting before the Tribulation. She wants me to convert along with them so we get raptured up together.

Stairway to heaven, laughed Zack.

Raptured as one, I said. As one. My brain had started on a repeating loop and I had to force my mouth to stop saying everything I thought fifty times.

I don’t think you’ll make it, you two, said Angus dreamily. You guys can’t get in now with that mortal stain.

It was like an icicle jabbed into my thoughts. The subject hadn’t come up with the four of us. We hadn’t spoken of Lark’s death. The cold spread. My brain was clear, but the rest of me was just too comfortable. Cappy handled the moment and melted the fear out of me as usual.

Starboy, said Cappy, holding out his hand. Angus clasped it in a brother shake. The truth is, none of us will get there. They only take you stone-cold sober.

All your life? said Angus.

All your life, Starboy, said Cappy. You cannot slip even one time.

Ah, said Angus, we’re screwed. My whole family is screwed. No rapture.

We don’t need no rapture, Zack said. We got confession. Tell your sins to Father and you’re wiped clean.

I did that, said Cappy. Father tried to clock me.

We all laughed and talked for a while about Cappy’s run. Then we fell silent and watched the flickering leaves.

Zelia probably confessed at home, Cappy said after a while. Zelia probably got wiped clean.

Unless she got pregnant. I hadn’t meant to say a thing like that, but I could not stop the Star Wars quote: Luke, at that speed do you think you’ll be able to pull out in time?

If only I hadn’t, said Cappy. If only she was. We would have to get married then.

You’re thirteen, I remembered.

Zelia said so were Romeo and Juliet.

I hate that movie, said Zack.

Angus was asleep, his breath whining evenly as a cicada.

Food. My voice again. But the others were sleeping. I stood up after a time because someone was moaning. It was Cappy. He was weeping, heartbroken, then frightened, shouting Please, no, in his sleep. I shook his arm and he passed on to some other dream. I watched over him until he seemed more peaceful. I left them sleeping there and wobbled home on my bike, but when I got into the yard the space under Pearl’s bush looked so comfortable that I crept into the dark leaves with her and slept until the sun faded. I woke up, alert, and walked in the kitchen door.

Joe? Where you been? Mom called from the other room. I felt that she had been waiting for me the whole time.

I grabbed a glass and poured some milk and drank it fast.

Out biking around, I said.

You missed dinner. I can warm up some spaghetti.

But I was already eating it cold, straight from the refrigerator. Mom came in and shooed me aside.

At least can you put it on a plate? Joe, have you been smoking? You stink like cigarettes.

The other guys were.

Same old line I gave my folks.

I like spaghetti cold.

She made me a dish and begged me not to smoke.

I won’t anymore, I promise.

She sat down watching me eat.

There’s something I wanted to tell you this morning, Joe. You called out in your sleep last night. You yelled.

I did?

I got up and I went to your door. You were talking to Cappy.

What’d I say?

I couldn’t make out what you said. But you called Cappy’s name twice.

I kept eating. He’s my best buddy, Mom. He’s like a brother to me.

I thought about him crying in his sleep out at the construction site and put my fork down. I wanted to leave our house, find Cappy again. I felt that I should not have left him sleeping. The crack of light beneath my father’s door widened and he came out and sat down at the table with us. He had stopped drinking coffee from dawn till dusk and on into the night. My mother gave him a glass of water. He was neatly shaven, never in his bathrobe anymore. He kept reduced hours at work.

I started today, Joe.

Started what? I was still distracted. If I called Cappy’s house, maybe he could get a ride over here and stay the night. We’d be together in the dark. My father kept on talking.

I started my walking regimen, around the high-school track. I made it a half mile. I’ll be going every day. You’ll be out running too. I guess you’ll lap me a few times.

My mother reached out and took his hand. He smoothed his hand over her fingers and touched her wedding ring.

She won’t let me go alone, he said, looking at her. Oh, Geraldine!

They were both thinner and the lines along the side of their mouths had deepened. But the knifelike mark between my mother’s eyebrows was gone now. I had stopped them from living in the fear cloud. I should have felt happy watching them across the table, but instead I was angered by their ignorance. Like I was the grown-up and the two of them holding hands were the oblivious children. They had no idea what I had gone through for them. Or Cappy. Me and Cappy. I stubbed my foot sullenly against the table leg.

Something’s fighting in me, Joe, my father said.

My foot stopped kicking.

Maybe you’ll understand if I talk to you about it?

Okay, I said, though I was jumping out of my skin. I didn’t want to listen.

I feel relief at Lark’s death, my father said. Just like you said when you first heard, I feel that way too. Your mother is safe from him, he will not show up in the grocery store or at Whitey’s. We can go on now, can’t we?

Yeah, I said. I tried to get up, but he spoke.

Yet the question of who killed Lark must be asked. There was no justice for your mother, his victim, or for Mayla, and yet justice exists.

Unevenly applied, Dad. But he got what he deserved. My voice was flat. My heart sickly pounding.

My mother had dropped my father’s hand. She did not want to listen to us argue.

I feel that way too, said my father. Bjerke will interview us tomorrow—it’s routine. But nothing is routine. He’ll want to know where each of us was when Lark was killed. Here is my fight, Joe. I ask myself in this situation, as one sworn to uphold the law in every case, what I would do if I had any information that could lead to the identity of the killer. Last time I talked to your mother about this, I wasn’t sure what I would do.

I looked at Mom and her lips were pressed together in a straight dark line.

But I’ve decided that I would do nothing. I would offer up no information. Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. It was no lynching. There was no question of his guilt. He may have even wanted to get caught and punished. We can’t know his mind. Lark’s killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma. It threads that unfair maze of land title law by which Lark could not be prosecuted. His death was the exit. I would say nothing, do nothing, to muddy the resolution. Yet—

My father stopped and tried to give me that old look he used to fix on me, and others, from the bench. I could feel it, but I would not meet his gaze.

—yet, he said gently, this too is an abandonment of my own responsibility. That person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life. As I did not kill Lark, but wanted to, I must at least protect the person who took on that task. And I would, even to the extent of attempting to argue a legal precedent.

What?

Traditional precedent. It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

I felt my mother’s attention on me keenly.

I just wanted you to know that, my father prodded.

Lots of people had it in for Lark, I said.

I looked from one of my parents to the other. Behind them in the next room the shelves of old books stood mellow in the dip of shadow at twilight. The scuffed brown leather. Meditations. Plato. The Iliad. Shakespeare in sober dark red and the essays of Montaigne. Then below, a matching Great Books collection they subscribed to by mail. There was a free Book of Mormon from a passing LDS missionary. There was William Warren, Basil Johnston, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, and everything by Vine Deloria Jr. There were the novels they read together—fat paperbacks thumbed and stacked. I looked at the books as if they could help us. But we had moved way far past books now into the stories Mooshum told in his sleep. There were no quotations in my father’s repertoire for where we were, and it was beyond me at the time to think of Mooshum’s sleeptalking as a reading of traditional case law.

So if you hear anything, Joe, said my father.

If I hear anything, yeah, Dad. He’d gotten my attention. There was some relief for me, even, in what he said. But my father was also wrong, and about one thing in particular. He’d said I was now safe, but I was not exactly safe from Lark. Neither was Cappy. Every night he came after us in dreams.



We are back at the golf course in the moment I locked eyes with Lark. That terrible contact. Then the gunshot. At that moment, we exchange selves. Lark is in my body, watching. I am in his body, dying. Cappy runs up the hill with Joe and the gun, but he doesn’t know Joe contains the soul of Lark. Dying on the golf course, I know that Lark is going to kill Cappy when they reach the overlook. I try to call out and warn Cappy, but I feel my life bleed out of me into the clipped grass.

I either have that dream, or one where I see the backyard ghost again. The same ghost Randall saw in the sweat lodge—his sour gaze and rigid mouth. Only this time, like with Randall, the ghost is leaning over me, talking to me through a veil of darkness, backlit, his white hair shining. And I know he’s the police.



As always I woke shouting Cappy’s name. To muffle sound, I’d stuffed a towel at the base of my door. I peered out in the fresh light hoping no one had heard me. I listened. It sounded like Mom and Dad had gone downstairs already, or gone out. I lay back in the covers. The air was cool but I was sweating and still full of adrenaline. My heart was jumping. I rubbed my hand on my chest to calm it and tried to slow down my breathing. Each dream was more real every time it occurred, like it was wearing a track into my brain.

I need medicine, I said out loud, meaning Ojibwe medicine. Old-time medicine people knew how to handle dreams, that’s what Mooshum had said. But his spirit was far away now, trying to shed the body in the cot by the window. The only other medicine person I knew was Grandma Thunder. Maybe we could ask her what to do. Not tell her details, of course, or reveal what had happened. Just get advice about these dreams. Bugger Pourier, of all people, stepped into my thoughts right then. Probably because the last time I’d thought of Grandma Thunder, I sent him to her, and right before that Bugger had stolen my bike. Something about a dream.

I sat up. He’d wanted to see if something he saw was a dream. My own dream’s reality, which always clung to me, and Bugger’s intent drunken fixation fused. What had he seen? I had worked on Bugger’s hunger and turned him around so I could get back my bicycle. But I’d never asked him what he saw. I got up and got dressed, ate some breakfast, and went out. To look for Bugger you looked behind places, starting with the Dead Custer. I searched all morning and asked everyone I met, but no one knew. I finally went to the post office. That was where I should have gone first, it turned out. I didn’t think of it, as poor Bugger hadn’t had an address.

He’s in the hospital, said Linda. Isn’t he? she called back to Mrs. Nanapush, sorting letters.

He busted his foot stealing a case of beer. Dropped it on his foot. So now he’s laid up and his sisters say it’s a blessing in disguise—could dry him out.

I rode over to the hospital to visit Bugger. He was in a room with three other men. His foot was in a cast and rigged for traction, though I wondered if that was necessary for his foot to heal or meant to tie him to the bed.

My boy! He was glad to see me. Did you bring me a drop?

No, I said.

His avid face fell into a pout.

I came to ask you something.

Not even a little flower arrangement, he grumped. Or a pancake.

You want a pancake?

I been seeing pancakes. Whiskey. Spiders. Pancakes. Lizards. Pancakes are the only good thing I see. But they just feed an old man the damn oatmeal. Coffee and oatmeal. It’s a plain breakfast.

Not even toast? I asked.

I could have it if I wanted, but I keep asking for pancakes. Bugger looked at me fiercely. I am holding out for pancakes!

I have to ask you something.

Ask away then. I’ll give you the answer for a pancake.

Okay.

And whiskey. He leaned forward secretively. Bring me a drop, but don’t let those others know about it. Keep the bottle in your shirt.

All right.

Bugger sat back, ready, his face expectant.

Remember when you took my bike?

His face turned blank. I spoke slowly, pausing after each sentence for him to nod.

You were sitting outside Mighty Al’s. You saw my bike. You got on my bike and started riding. I came out and asked where you were going. You said you wanted to check and see if something was a dream.

Bugger’s face lighted up.

Remember now?

No.

I reset the scene five or six times before Bugger’s mind finally turned back and began to riffle through the recent past. He held very still and concentrated now, so hard I could almost hear the gears grind. As his thoughts collected, his expression changed, but so gradually that it was only after I’d looked away impatiently and then looked back that I noticed he was petrified. He stared at something between us on the bedcover. I thought he was having a hallucination, not of the pancakes, which would have filled him with joy, but some sort of reptile or insect. But then his look changed to pity and he gasped, Poor girl!

What girl?

Poor girl.

He began to sob in dry wrenches. He kept crying about her. He mumbled about construction and I knew. She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her. I couldn’t help the picture from forming. Us jumping our bikes, flying back and forth, and her below. I stood up, jolted. I knew, down to the core of me, that he had seen Mayla Wolfskin. He had seen her dead body. If we hadn’t killed Lark, he’d have gone to jail for life anyway. I spun around thinking I should go to the police, then stopped. I could not let the police know I was even thinking this way. I had to get off their radar entirely, with Cappy, disappear. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even I didn’t want to know what I knew. The best thing for me to do was forget. And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream.

I needed to find Cappy. Not to tell him. I never would tell him. I’d never tell anyone. There was in me as I rode toward the Lafournaises a disconnect so profound I could think of nothing but obliteration. I would somehow find the means to get drunk. The world would take on that amber tone. Things would soften to brown as if in old photographs. I would be safe.

Zack and Angus were hanging out in the grocery store parking lot. Their bikes were there, and Cappy’s too, but they were sitting in Zack’s older cousin’s car. They got out when they saw me, and told me that Cappy had gone into the post office to see if there was a letter.

He should’ve come out by now, said Zack.

I went to get Cappy and finally found him out back of the building, sitting on a busted chair where the post office employees took smoke breaks in the summer. His hair was flung down over his face. He was smoking and didn’t look at me when I stood next to him. Just held out a piece of paper.

You will cease and desist from any contact with our daughter. My wife found the package of letters Zelia was hiding. You should have to consider that in this case we may persecute you to the full axtent of the law.

Also currently Zelia is being punished and also in short order we will be changing residence. You have stolen our daughter’s innocence and wracked our life.

Cappy’s arms and legs were splayed out, limp and despairing. His face was the color of ashes and there was a cloud of smoke around his head. I sat down beside him on a cardboard box. There was nothing to say about anything at all. I put my head in my hands.

Yeah, said Cappy wildly. F*ck yeah. Punish her? I bet they’re keeping her locked up until they move. So she can’t go over to the post office. Wrack their lives! I’ll wrack their lives? By loving their daughter with a true love?

Look at me, brother, he begged.

I did.

Look at me. He threw his hair back, tapped the tips of his fingers on his chest. Would I wreck her life? The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will. Our bodies, too. So f*cking what? Every bit of what we did was made in heaven. The Creator is goodness, brother. In his mysterious mercy he gave me Zelia. The gift of our love—I can’t throw it back in the face of the Creator, can I?

No.

That’s what her parents are asking me to do. But I won’t do it. I will not throw our love back in God’s face. It will exist for all time whether or not her parents can see that. Nothing they do can get between us.

Okay.

Yeah, said Cappy. His hair flopped down again. He set fire to the letter with the burning coal of his cigarette. Watched it catch, flare, and burn to the tip of his fingers. He dropped the scrap and the flimsy films of burnt paper floated down around his feet.

I’m going home to get that bus money, said Cappy. And then I’m gassing up Randall’s car. I’ll come and get you at your house.

Where are we going?

I can’t sit still, Joe. I can’t stay here. And I know there will be no rest for me until I see her.



We left Zack and Angus drinking pop in Zack’s cousin’s car and went home. My place was empty. I filled a backpack with a change of clothes and all the money I had, which came to $78.00. I still had some from Sonja, and I’d never spent the cash Whitey paid me for the week I’d worked—he’d overpaid me, maybe to try and keep my mouth shut. I took a jacket. Because I was still waiting for Cappy, and because in spite of what I’d done I was still the kind of person who thought ahead and made lunch, I put together a dozen peanut butter pickle sandwiches. I ate one and drank some milk. He still did not come. I remembered how hard it was to start Randall’s car. Engage, I thought. Pearl followed me around. I went into my father’s office. I tried the desk drawer my father had been locking for a while now, and it caught, but he hadn’t quite turned the key all the way and I jiggled it open. In the drawer was a manila file folder. It was filled with greasy Xeroxes. There was the copy of a tribal enrollment form. On the form it said Mayla Wolfskin. She was listed as seventeen years old and the mother of a child named Tanya. Curtis W. Yeltow was listed as the father, just as Linda had said. I closed the file and put it back in the drawer. I managed to turn the lock with a paper clip so it would seem that the drawer had not been opened; what that mattered anyway, I don’t know. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to talk to Bjerke. I took a sheet of writing paper from a leather box. My father kept a cup of sharpened pencils on his desk. I took one and wrote my parents that I was going on a camping trip. They should not worry, I’d be with Cappy and I was sorry for the short notice. I said that we’d be gone for three or four days. I’d call them. I imagined writing: ask Bugger Pourier about his dream. But I didn’t. There was some noise outside. Pearl barked. It was Angus and Zack. They wanted to know why we’d ditched them and so I told them about the letter, and about how Cappy was going to get Randall’s car.

I’ve got something, Angus said.

He showed me an ID. It was a driver’s license, which his cousin had pretended to lose and got another one. He’d sold the ID to Angus although the picture didn’t look like him at all.

Don’t you think it looks like Cappy though? He could buy for us.

It looks like him enough, I said. Right about then Cappy drove up and we all got into the idling car. I sat in front and Zack and Angus took the back.

Where we going? asked Zack.

Montana, Cappy said.

The two in back laughed, but I looked out the window, at Pearl. She wouldn’t take her eyes off me.



I know there’s lots of world over and above Highway 5, but when you’re driving on it—four boys in one car and it’s so peaceful, so empty for mile after mile, when the radio stations cut out and there’s just static and the sound of your voices, and wind when you put your arm out to rest it on the hood—it seems you are balanced. Skimming along the rim of the universe. We had half a tank when we left home and we filled it up again twice before we got across the line to Plentywood. We dropped down there and edged along the bottom of Fort Peck to Wolf Point. Cappy turned the wheel over to me, and we sat there idling outside a liquor store while he bought a fifth and a case and another fifth. Zack had brought his guitar. He sang cry in your beer C&W, one after the next, making us laugh every time. And we kept going, the talk passing this way and that, turning funny and then ridiculous as Cappy made his plan to spring Zelia from her house at the return address in Helena—still far off.

Zack and Angus got nervous at a gas station and called home. That’s when Zack got his ear scorched off. He slunk back to the car, looked over at me, said, Oops! We ate the sandwiches. We ate beef jerky, spicy sausages, bags of chips, and cans of nuts from the gas stations. We guzzled water at a rest stop and the car died. We had to push it to a downhill slope, take it out of gear, and jump in while it rolled. The engine turned over and we war-whooped, high and fine. Zack and Angus passed out in back, leaning on each other and snoring. Cappy and I started talking and kept on driving west through the long dusk. The sun burned forever and stayed balanced on the horizon for an age, then flared red from below that dark line for another eternity. So it seemed that time stopped. We rolled effortlessly in a dream.

I told Cappy about the file I found in my father’s desk drawer. I told him everything on the enrollment form. I told him about the governor of South Dakota.

So that’s where the money came from, he said.

For sure. She was one of those smart high-school girls who get picked to bring coffee and file papers. Get their pictures in the news, especially a pretty Indian with the governor’s arm around her shoulder. LaRose told me. Linda knew it too. That’s where Yeltow got to her. And Lark, he kept the secret, but he was jealous. Thought he owned her.

The governor gave her money to keep her mouth shut. Start a new life?

She put the cash in her little girl’s doll to keep it safe.

Safe from Lark.

I told Cappy that I’d seen that doll’s outfit in the car as it came out of the lake, that the doll must have floated out of that opened window and washed onto the opposite shore.

After this, I think, said Cappy, it will all come out. There’s still that file with his name on it. So why not? She was jailbait, Mayla.

He’ll go down for sure, I said then.

But Yeltow never did.

The silence of wind around us, the car cutting through the night along the Milk River, where Mooshum had once hunted, driven out farther and farther into the west, where Nanapush had seen buffalo straight back to the horizon, and then the next year not a single one. And after that Mooshum’s family had turned back and taken land on the reservation. He’d met Nanapush there and together they had built the round house, the sleeping woman, the unkillable mother, the old lady buffalo. They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.

Hinsdale went by. Sleeping Buffalo, too. Malta. We’d turn south far ahead at Havre. We’d traced our route on the gas station map.

Let’s keep going, said Cappy. I feel good. Let’s drive all night.

Make it so.

We laughed and Cappy slowed the car down and idled it while I ran around the front end, jumped in, started driving. The air was cool and green with sage. The lights hit coyote eyes slipping along the ditches, in and out of fence lines. Cappy balled up my jacket under his head, leaned on the window, and slept. I kept driving on until at last I got tired and switched off again with Cappy. This time Zack and Angus climbed in front to keep Cappy awake. I crawled in back. There was an old horse blanket that smelled of dust. I laid my head down and put the belt on because the buckle was cutting into my hip. As I dozed back there, listening to the three up in front talk and laugh, I had that same drifting sense of peace I got in my parents’ car. The guys passed the bottle back and I drank deep, to put myself out. I slipped away easily. I slept without dreaming even as the car hurtled off the road, flipped, rolled, threw its doors wide, and came to rest in an unplowed field.

I had the sense of a vast and violent motion. Before I could grasp its significance, all was still. I nearly fell back asleep thinking we had stopped. But I opened my eyes just to see where we were and the air was black. I called for Cappy, but there was no answer. There was the distant sound of distress, not weeping, but a laborious panting. I unbuckled myself and crept out the open door. The sounds came from Zack and Angus, tangled together, moving on the ground, then staggering up and falling. My brain clicked on. I searched the car—empty. One headlight flickered. I climbed out and made a widening circle around the car, but Cappy seemed to have vanished. He left for help, I thought in relief as I stepped along slowly. There was only the light of stars, and the car’s one beam; parts of the ground were so black they were like pits reaching down into the earth. For one disoriented moment, I thought I stood at the entrance to a mine shaft, and I feared that Cappy had been flung in. But it was only shadow. The deepest shadow I have ever known. I went down on my hands and knees and crawled into the shadow. I felt my way through invisible grass. The wind came up and blew my friends’ cries away from me. The sounds I made, too, when I found Cappy, were taken into the boom of air.



I sat in the police station, attached to the chair. Zack and Angus were in the Havre hospital. They’d taken Cappy someplace else to fix him up for Doe and Randall. The ghost had brought me here. I had seen him in the field as I held Cappy—my ghost had bent over me, backlit by the flashlight he held cocked over his shoulder, silver haloed, looking at me with a sour contempt. He shook me lightly. His lips had moved but the only words I could make out were Let go and I would not. I slept and woke in the chair. I must have eaten, drunk water, too. None of it do I remember. Except that again and again I looked at the round black stone that Cappy had given me, the thunderbird egg. And there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose from the chair, I’d gotten old along with them. I was broken and fragile. My shoes were lost in the accident. I walked between them, stumbled. My mother took my hand. When we got to the car, she opened the back door and crawled in. There was a pillow and the same old quilt. I sat in the front with my father. He started the engine. We pulled out just like that and started driving home.

In all those miles, in all those hours, in all that air rushing by and sky coming at us, blending into the next horizon, then the one after that, in all that time there was nothing to be said. I cannot remember speaking and I cannot remember my mother or my father speaking. I knew that they knew everything. The sentence was to endure. Nobody shed tears and there was no anger. My mother or my father drove, gripping the wheel with neutral concentration. I don’t remember that they even looked at me or I at them after the shock of that first moment when we all realized we were old. I do remember, though, the familiar sight of the roadside café just before we would cross the reservation line. On every one of my childhood trips that place was always a stop for ice cream, coffee and a newspaper, pie. It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.





Afterword

This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists. “Maze of Injustice,” a 2009 report by Amnesty International, included the following statistics: 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted. In 2010, then North Dakota senator Byron Dorgan sponsored the Tribal Law and Order Act. In signing the act into law, President Barack Obama called the situation “an assault on our national conscience.” The organizations highlighted in boldface below are working to restore sovereign justice and ensure safety for Native women.

Thank you to the many people who advised me as I wrote this book: Betty Laverdure, former tribal judge, Turtle Mountain Reservation; Paul Day, Gitchi Makwa, former tribal judge, Mille Lacs, and executive director of Anishinabe Legal Services; Betty Day, wisdom keeper and doulah; Peter Meyers, Psy.D., forensic psychologist; Terri Yellowhammer, former child welfare consultant for the state of Minnesota, and technical assistance specialist and associate judge for White Earth Ojibwe; N. Bruce Duthu, Dartmouth College, author of American Indians and the Law; the members of Professor Duthu’s Native American Law and Literature class; the Montgomery Fellow Program at Dartmouth College, and Richard Stammelman; Philomena Kebec, staff attorney for the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians; Tore Mowatt Larssen, attorney; Lucy Rain Simpson, Indian Law Resource Center; Ralph David Erdrich, R.N., Indian Health Service, Sisseton, South Dakota; Angela Erdrich, M.D., Indian Health Board, Minneapolis; Sandeep Patel, M.D., Indian Health Service, Belcourt, North Dakota; Walter R. Echo-hawk, author of In the Courts of the Conqueror: The Ten Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided; Suzanne Koepplinger, executive director of Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center, who gave me the report she coauthored with Alexandra “Sandi” Pierce, “Shattered Hearts: The Commercial and Sexual Exploitation of American Indian Women and Girls in Minnesota”; Darrell Emmel, TNG consultant; my copy editor, Trent Duffy; Terry Karten, my editor at HarperCollins; Brenda J. Child, historian and chair of the American Indian Studies Department at the University of Minnesota; Lisa Brunner, executive director of Sacred Spirits First Nation Coalition; and Carly Bad Heart Bull, attorney. Additional thanks are due to Memegwesi; chi-miigwech to Professor John Borrows, whose most recent book, Drawing Out Law: A Spirit’s Guide, helped greatly in my understanding the process of wiindigoo law, as did Hadley Louise Friedland’s 2010 thesis “The Wetiko (Windigo) Legal Principles: Responding to Harmful People in Cree, Anishinabek and Saulteaux Societies.”

My cousin Darrell Gourneau, who died in 2011, gave his eagle feather, his songs, and his hunting stories. His mother, my aunt Dolores Gourneau, gave me his quilt for my writing chair.

Finally, thank you to everyone who got me through 2010–2011: first of all, to my daughter Persia, for her many thoughtful readings of this manuscript, her honest, valuable suggestions, and her loving care for me especially during the uncertain weeks of my diagnosis. Everyone rallied wonderfully during my treatment for breast cancer: thanks to Drs. Margit M. Bretzke, Patsa Sullivan, Stuart Bloom, and Judith Walker for matter-of-factly saving my life. My daughter Pallas advocated for me, drove me to treatments, and provided her own treatment—Battlestar Galactica, music, and food with mysterious powers of restoration. She kept the family together. Aza fought her own difficult battle and won it for us all with her art. She was also a consultant on the manuscript and a close, discriminating reader. Nenaa’ikiizhikok brought laughter and courage. Dan stayed the center of gravity for us all with his patience and good heart.

The events in this book are loosely based on so many different cases, reports, and stories that the outcome is pure fiction. This book is not meant to portray anyone alive or dead and, as always, any mistakes in the Ojibwe language are mine and do not reflect on my patient teachers.





About the Author

Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and the author of thirteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, short stories, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel Love Medicine won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse was a finalist for the National Book Award. Most recently, The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore.

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