LaRose

The Door

WHERE THE RESERVATION boundary invisibly bisected a stand of deep brush — chokecherry, popple, stunted oak — Landreaux waited. He said he was not drinking, and there was no sign later. Landreaux was a devout Catholic who also followed traditional ways, a man who would kill a deer, thank one god in English, and put down tobacco for another god in Ojibwe. He was married to a woman even more devout than he, and had five children, all of whom he tried to feed and keep decent. His neighbor, Peter Ravich, had a big farm cobbled together out of what used to be Indian allotments; he tilled the corn, soy, and hay fields on the western edge. He and Landreaux and their wives, who were half sisters, traded: eggs for ammo, rides to town, kids’ clothing, potatoes for flour — that sort of thing. Their children played together although they went to different schools. This was 1999 and Ravich had been talking about the millennium, how he was setting up alternate power sources, buying special software for his computer, stocking up on the basics; he had even filled an old gasoline tank buried by his utility shed. Ravich thought that something would happen, but not what did happen.

Landreaux had kept track of the buck all summer, waiting to take it, fat, until just after the corn was harvested. As always, he’d give a portion to Ravich. The buck had regular habits and had grown comfortable on its path. It would wait and watch through midafternoon. Then would venture out before dusk, crossing the reservation line to browse the margins of Ravich’s fields. Now it came, stepping down the path, pausing to take scent. Landreaux was downwind. The buck turned to peer out at Ravich’s cornfield, giving Landreaux a perfect shot. He was extremely adept, had started hunting small game with his grandfather at the age of seven. Landreaux took the shot with fluid confidence. When the buck popped away he realized he’d hit something else — there had been a blur the moment he squeezed the trigger. Only when he walked forward to investigate and looked down did he understand that he had killed his neighbor’s son.

Landreaux didn’t touch the boy’s body. He dropped his rifle and ran through the woods to the door of the Ravich house, a tan ranch with a picture window and a deck. When Nola opened the door and saw Landreaux trying to utter her son’s name, she went down on her knees and pointed upstairs, where he was — but wasn’t. She had just checked, found him gone, and was coming out to search for him when she heard the shot. She tried to stay on her hands and knees. Then she heard Landreaux on the phone, telling the dispatcher what had happened. He dropped the phone when she tried to bolt out the door. Landreaux got his arms around her. She lashed and clawed to get free and was still struggling when the tribal police and the emergency team arrived. She didn’t make it out the door, but soon she saw the paramedics sprinting across the field. The ambulance lurching slowly after, down the grassy tractor path to the woods.

She screamed some terrible things at Landreaux, things she could not remember. The tribal police were there. She knew them. Execute him! Execute the son of a bitch! she shouted. Once Peter arrived and talked to her, she understood — the medics had tried but it was over. Peter explained. His lips moved but she couldn’t hear the words. He was too calm, she thought, her mind ferocious, too calm. She wanted her husband to bludgeon Landreaux to death. She saw it clearly. Though she was a small, closed-up woman who had never done harm in her life, she wanted blood everlasting. Her ten-year-old daughter had been ill that morning, stayed home from school. Still feverish, she came down the stairs and crept into the room. Her mother disliked it when she and her brother made a mess, threw his toys in heaps, dumped them all out of the toy box. Quietly, the daughter took the toys out of the box and laid them here and there. Her mother saw them and knelt down suddenly, put the toys away. She spoke harshly to her daughter. Can you not make a mess? Is it in you to not make a mess? When the toys were back in she started screaming again. The daughter took the toys out. The mother slammed them into the toy box. Every time her mother crouched down and picked up the toys, the grown-ups looked away and talked loudly to cover her words.

The girl’s name was Maggie, after her great-aunt Maggie Peace. The girl had pale luminous skin and her hair was chestnut brown — it lay on her shoulders in a sly wave. Dusty’s hair had been a scorched blond, the same color as the deer. He’d been wearing a tan T-shirt and it was hunting season, although that wouldn’t have mattered on the side of the boundary where Landreaux had shot at the deer.

The acting tribal police chief, Zack Peace, and the county coroner, an eighty-two-year-old retired nurse named Georgie Mighty, were already overwhelmed. The day before, there had been a frontal collision at 2:30 a.m., just after the bars closed — none of the dead in either car were wearing seat belts. The state coroner was traveling in the area, and stopped at the reservation to expedite the paperwork. Zack had been struggling with this side of things when the call about Dusty came in. He paused to put his head on the desk before he called Georgie, who would persuade the coroner to stay a few more hours and examine the child so that the family could have an immediate funeral. Now Zack had to call Emmaline. As cousins, they’d grown up together. He was trying to hold his tears back. He was too young for his job, and anyway too good-hearted to be a tribal cop. He’d come over later on, he said. So Emmaline knew about it while her children were still at school. She’d come home to meet them.

Emmaline stepped to the door and watched her older children get off the bus. They walked toward the house with their heads down, hands flapping at the grasses as they crossed the ditch, and she knew they had also heard. Hollis, who’d lived with them since he was little, Snow, Josette, Willard. Nobody on the reservation gets a name like Willard and doesn’t pick up a nickname. So Willard was Coochy. Now her youngest boy was stumbling down to meet them, LaRose. He was the same age as Nola’s boy. They’d been pregnant at the same time, but Emmaline had gone to the Indian Health Service hospital. Three months had passed before she’d met Nola’s baby. But the two boys, cousins, had played together. Emmaline put out sandwiches, heated the meat soup.

What happens now? said Snow, quietly watching her.

Emmaline’s face was filling again with tears. Her forehead was raw. When she’d knelt to pray she’d found herself beating her head against the floor — and now fear was leaking out of her in every direction.

I don’t know, she said. I’m going down to tribal police and sit with your dad. It was such. .

Emmaline was going to say a terrible accident but she clapped her hands over her mouth and tears spurted down, wetting her collar, for what was there to say about what had happened — an unsayable thing — and Emmaline did not know how she or Landreaux or anyone, especially Nola, was going to go on living.

Minute by minute, a day passed, two. Zack came over, sat on the couch, running his hand over his brushy hair.

Watch him, he said. You gotta watch him, Emmaline.

At the time she thought he meant Landreaux was suicidal. She shook her head. Landreaux was devoted to his family and cared to the point of obsession about his clients. He was a physical therapy assistant, in training as a dialysis technician. He was also a personal care assistant trained and trusted by the Indian Health Service hospital. Emmaline phoned Landreaux’s clients. There were Ottie and his wife, Bap. When she called the sweet old man named Awan, a terminal patient, and told his daughter that Landreaux would not be coming, the daughter said she’d take off work and care for her dad until Landreaux was back. Her father loved playing cards with Landreaux. Yet there was in the daughter’s tone a note of tired unsurprise. Maybe Emmaline was paranoid — her nerves were buzzing — but she thought Awan’s daughter hesitated and then nearly said the same thing as Zack. You gotta watch him. Emmaline told herself it was because they loved Landreaux, but later on she knew that was only part of it.

There was the short investigation, the sleepless nights before Landreaux was released. Zack took the key from Emmaline and put the rifle in the trunk of the car. After Landreaux walked out of the tribal police headquarters, Emmaline went with him, straight to the priest.

Father Travis Wozniak held their hands and prayed. He didn’t think he would find the words, but they came. Of course words came. Incomprehensible, His judgments. Unsearchable, His ways. He’d had years of too much practice even before he became a priest. Father Travis had been a Marine. Or still was. BLT 1/8, 24th May. He had survived the barracks bombing in 1983, Beirut, Lebanon. The thick scars roping up his neck, twisting down in random loops, marked him on the outside and ran inside of him, too.

He closed his eyes, gripped their hands tighter. Went dizzy. He was sick of praying over the car accident victims, sick of adding buckle your seat belts to the end of every sermon, sick of so many other early deaths, ready himself to fall down on the floor. He wondered, as he did every day, how he could go on pretending to the people he loved. He tried to calm his heart. Weep with those who weep. Tears scored Emmaline’s cheeks. The two kept pushing tears impatiently off their faces as they talked. They needed towels. Father Travis had both tissues and a roll of paper towels. He tore off squares. Two days before, he had done the same for Peter, though not Nola, whose eyes had been dry with hate.

What should we do? Emmaline asked now. How can things go on?

Landreaux began muttering the rosary, eyes shut. Emmaline glanced at him, but took a rosary from Father Travis and kept going. Father Travis did not weep, but his redhead’s eyes were delicately pink, his lids lavender. The beads dangled in his grip. His hands were strong and callused because he moved rocks, hacked out brush, did general grounds work — it calmed him. There was a big woodpile behind the church now. He was forty-six — stuck — powerful, deeper, sadder. He taught martial arts, did Marine workouts with the God Squad teens. Or by himself. There were free weights behind the desk in a neatly graduated stack, and a bench behind the choirboy curtain. Landreaux sat silent after they finished. Father Travis had been through everything with Landreaux — the years sorting out boarding school, Kuwait, then wild years, through the drinking and after, straightening out through traditional healing, now this. In his life on the reservation, Father Travis had seen how some people would try their best but the worst would still happen. Landreaux reached over and gripped the priest’s arm. Emmaline held Landreaux. They murmured another round of Hail Marys together; the repetition quieted them again. In the pause before they left, Father Travis had the feeling that there was something they wanted to ask him.

Landreaux and Emmaline Iron came to the funeral, sat in the back pew, melted out the side door before the small white casket was carried down the aisle.

Emmaline was a branchy woman, lovely in her angularity. She was all sticks and elbows, knobby knees. She had a slightly crooked nose and striking, murky green, wolfish eyes. Her daughter Josette had her eyes; Snow, Coochy, and LaRose had their father’s, warm and brown. Emmaline’s hair and skin were light but she tanned instantly. Her husband, darker, gave her babies a richly toasted color. She was a passionate mother. Landreaux understood after the babies were born he would come second, but that, if he hung tough, one day he would again be first in her heart. Driving home after they saw the priest, she kept her hand on his leg, gripping him hard when he shook. In the driveway, he put the car in park but kept it idling. The shadowy light cut their faces.

I can’t go home yet, he said.

She cast her disturbing gaze on him. Landreaux thought of her at eighteen, Emmaline Peace, how in the beginning of their years that look of hers, if she grinned, meant they were going to go crazy together. He was six years older. They did some wild stuff then. It was confessed but not done with. They had this streak together, had to sober up in tandem. So she knew right now what was pulling him.

I can’t make you come inside the house, she said. I can’t keep you from what you’re going to do.

But she leaned over, took his face in her hands, and placed her forehead on his forehead. They closed their eyes as if their thoughts could be one thought. Then she got out of the car.

Landreaux drove off the reservation to Hoopdance, turned in at the drive-up liquor store window. He put the bagged bottle on the passenger’s seat. Drove the back roads until he saw no lights, pulled over, and cut the engine. He sat for about an hour with the bottle beside him, then he grabbed the bottle and walked into the icy field. The wind rattled around his head. He lay down. He tried to send the image of Dusty up into the heavens. He made fierce attempts to send himself back in time and die before he went into the woods. But each time he closed his eyes the boy was still ruined in the leaves. The earth was dry, the stars bursting up there. Planes and satellites winked over. The moon came up, burning whitely, and at last clouds moved in, covering everything.

After a few hours, he got up and drove home. A light shone dimly from their bedroom window. Emmaline was still awake, staring at the ceiling. When she heard the car crunch on dry gravel she closed her eyes, slept, woke before the children. She went outside and found him in the sweat lodge curled in tarps, the bottle still in its bag. He blinked at her.

Oh boy, she said, a handle of Old Crow. You were really going to blast off.

She put the bottle in the corner of the lodge, went in and got the children to the bus. Then she dressed LaRose and herself in warm clothing, took a sleeping bag out for her husband. As he warmed up, she and LaRose built a fire, threw tobacco from a special pouch into it, put grandfather rocks in it, made it hotter, hotter. They brought out the copper bucket and ladle, the other blankets and medicines, everything they needed. LaRose helped with all of this — he knew how to do things. He was Landreaux’s little man, his favorite child, though Landreaux was careful never to let anyone know about that. As LaRose squatted so seriously on his strong, skinny bowlegs, carefully lining up his parents’ pipes and his own little medicine bundle, Landreaux’s big face began slowly to collapse. He looked down, away, anywhere, struck heavily by what had befallen his thoughts. When Emmaline saw him looking that way, she got the bottle and poured it out on the ground between them. As the liquor spilled into the earth she sang an old song about a wolverine, Kwiingwa’aage, helping spirit of the desperately soused. When the bottle was empty, she looked up at Landreaux. She held his gaze, strange and vacant. Right about then, she had her own thoughts. She understood his thoughts. She stopped, stared sickly at the fire, at the earth. She whispered no. She tried to leave, but could not, and her face as she set back to work streaked over wetly.

THEY MADE THE fire hot, rolled in eight, four, eight rocks. It took them extra long to keep heating the rocks in the fire and also keep opening and shutting the flaps, the doors, and bringing in the rocks. But it was all they had to do. All they could do, anyway. Unless they got drunk, which they weren’t going to do now. They were past that, for the time being.

Emmaline had songs for bringing in the medicines, for inviting in the manidoog, aadizookaanag, the spirits. Landreaux had songs for the animals and winds who sat in each direction. When the air grew thick with steamy heat LaRose rolled away, lifted the edge of the tarp, and breathed cool air. He slept. The songs became his dreams. His parents sang to the beings they had invited to help them, and they sang to their ancestors — the ones so far back their names were lost. As for the ones whose names they remembered, the names that ended with iban for passed on, or in the spirit world, those were more complicated. Those were the reason both Landreaux and Emmaline were holding hands tightly, throwing their medicines onto the glowing rocks, then crying out with gulping cries.

No, said Emmaline. She growled and showed her teeth. I’ll kill you first. No.

He calmed her, talked to her, praying with her. Reassuring her. They had sundanced together. They talked about what they had heard when they fell into a trance. What they had seen while they fasted on a rock cliff. Their son had come out of the clouds asking why he had to wear another boy’s clothing. They had seen LaRose floating above the earth. He had put his hand upon their hearts and whispered, You will live. They knew what to make of these images now.

Gradually, Emmaline collapsed. The breath went out of her. She curled toward her son. They had resisted using the name LaRose until their last child was born. It was a name both innocent and powerful, and had belonged to the family’s healers. They had decided not to use it, but it was as though LaRose had come into the world with that name.

There had been a LaRose in each generation of Emmaline’s family for over a hundred years. Somewhere in that time their two families had diverged. Emmaline’s mother and grandmother were named LaRose. So the LaRoses of the generations were related to them both. They both knew the stories, the histories.

OUTSIDE AN ISOLATED Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink continued the incessant racket. She wanted trader’s milk, rum, a mixture of raw distilled spirits, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at the trader’s nerves, but Mackinnon wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a mysterious and violent family who were also powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their young daughter huddled with her in the greasy blanket, trying to hide herself. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound. He had fastened the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper.

Wolfred had left his family behind in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business — a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He missed her and he missed the books — he had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s Anabasis, which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions. He was just seventeen.

Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace, and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous.

Don’t go out there. I forbid you, said Mackinnon. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble.

The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness.

Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing screech was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon viciously kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well.

The rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, said Mackinnon.

Mink’s voice was horrid — intimate with filth — as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. Wolfred walked out, heading down to the river, where he kept a hole open in the ice. He could tell how bad it was and crossed himself. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, slumped in the corner underneath a new blanket, head down, so still she seemed dead.

I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said.

THAT NIGHT, LAROSE slept between his mother and his father. He remembered that night. He remembered the next night. He did not remember what happened in between.

They burned the rifle, buried the ammunition. The next day, they decided to take the same path the deer had taken. The land between the two houses was dense with wild raspberry in an area cleared by the fire of lightning that had struck an oak. The heat had moved beneath the bark of the tree, flowing from the twigs and branches down into the roots, until the tree could not contain it all and burst. The fire in the roots had killed the smaller trees in a circle but the rain had contained the fire after that. About a mile outside the mark of that tree, Emmaline’s mother had been raised. In the old time, people had protected the land by pulling up survey stakes. A surveying man had even gone missing. Although the lake at the center, deep and silent, had been dragged and searched, his body was never found. Many tribal descendants had inherited bits of land, but no one person had enough to put up a house. So the land stayed wild and fractionated, except for 160 acres, an original allotment owned by Emmaline’s mother, who had signed it over intact to her daughter. The woods were still considered uncanny. Few people besides Landreaux and Peter hunted there.

The trees were vivid, the sumac scarlet, the birch bright yellow. Sometimes Landreaux carried his son, sometimes he handed LaRose over to Emmaline. They didn’t speak or answer LaRose with words. They held him close, stroked his hair, kissed him with dry, trembling lips.

Nola saw them cross the yard with the boy.

What are they doing here, what, what, why are they, why are they bringing. .

She ran from the kitchen and shoved Peter in the chest. It had been a calm morning. But that was over now. She told him to make them get the hell off their property and he told her that he would. He stroked her shoulder. She pulled violently away. The black crack between them seemed to reach down forever now. He had not found the bottom yet. He was afraid of what was happening to her, but it wasn’t in him to be angry when he answered the door — anger was too small — besides, he and Landreaux were friends, better friends than the two half sisters, and the instinct of that friendship was still with him. Landreaux and Emmaline had their boy with them, completely unlike but like Dusty because of the way a five-year-old is — that inquisitiveness, that confidence, that trust.

Landreaux slowly set the boy down and asked if they could come in.

Don’t, said Nola.

But Peter opened the door. Immediately LaRose looked up at Peter, then peered eagerly into the front room.

Where’s Dusty?

Peter’s face was swollen, charged with exhaustion, but he managed to answer, Dusty’s not here anymore.

LaRose turned aside in disappointment, then he pointed to the toy box shoved into a corner and said, Can I play?

Nola had no words in her. She sat heavily and watched, first dull, then in fascination, as LaRose took out one toy after the next and played hard with it, serious, garbled, original, funny, obsessively involved with each object.

From up the stairs, forgotten, Maggie watched everything. Both boys had been born in early fall. Both mothers had kept them home, feeling they were too young for school. When the boys played together, Maggie had bossed them, made them play servant if she was a king or dogs if she was queen of the beasts. Now she didn’t know what to do. Not just in playing but in her regular life. They didn’t want her back in school yet. If she cried, her mother cried louder. If she didn’t cry, her mother said she was a coldhearted little animal. So she just watched LaRose from the carpeted steps while he played with Dusty’s toys.

As Maggie watched, her stare hardened. She gripped the spindles like jail bars. Dusty was not there to defend his toys, to share them only if he wanted, to be in charge of the pink-orange dinosaur, the favored flame-black Hot Wheels, the miniature monster trucks. She wanted to storm down and throw stuff everywhere. Kick LaRose. But she was already in trouble for teacher sassing and supposed to be locked in her room.

Landreaux and Emmaline Iron were still standing in the doorway. Nobody had asked them in.

What do you want? said Peter.

He always would have asked how he could help a visitor, but only Nola caught that this rudeness was how he expressed the jolts of electric sorrow and unlikeness of how he was feeling.

What do you want?

They answered simply.

Our son will be your son now.

Landreaux put the small suitcase on the floor. Emmaline was shredding apart. She put the other bag down in the entry and looked away.

They had to tell him what they meant, Our son will be your son, and tell him again.

Peter’s jaw fell, gaping and stricken.

No, he said, I’ve never heard of such a thing.

It’s the old way, said Landreaux. He said it very quickly, got the words out yet again. There was a lot more to their decision, but he could no longer speak.

Emmaline glanced at her half sister, whom she disliked. She stuffed back any sound, glanced up and saw Maggie crouched on the stairs. The girl’s angry doll face punched at her. I have to get out of here, she thought. She stepped forward with an abrupt jerk, placed her hand on her child’s head, kissed him. LaRose patted her face, deep in play.

Later, Mom, he said, copying his older brothers.

No, said Peter again, gesturing, no. This can’t be. Take. .

Then he looked at Nola and saw that her face had broken open. All the softness was flowing out. And the greed, too, a desperate grasping that leaned her windingly toward the child.

The Gate

ALONG TOWARD EVENING Nola made soup, laid out dinner on the table, all with great concentration. After each step in the routine, she went blank, had to call back her thoughts, find the bowls, butter, cut the bread. LaRose spooned up the soup with slow care. He buttered his own bread clumsily. He had good table manners, thought Nola. His presence was both comforting and unnerving. He was Dusty and the opposite of Dusty. Roils of confusion struck Peter. The shock, he thought. I’m still in shock. The boy drew him with his quiet self-possession, his curiosity, but when Peter felt himself responding he was pierced with a sense of disloyalty. He told himself Dusty wouldn’t care, couldn’t care. He also realized that Nola was allowing herself to be helped somehow, but whether it was that she accepted this unspeakable gift as beauty, or whether she believed the child’s absence over time would leak the lifeblood from Landreaux’s heart, he couldn’t tell.

You take him to the bathroom, Nola said.

Then. .

I know.

They looked at each other, searching. Both decided they couldn’t put him to sleep in Dusty’s bed. Besides that, twice LaRose had asked about his mother and accepted their explanations. The third time, however, he’d hung his head and cried, gasping. He’d never been away from his mother. There was his rending bewilderment. Maggie stroked his hair, gave him toys, distracted him. It seemed Maggie could soothe him. She slept in Grandma’s old carved double bed. Plenty of room. I can’t deal with her right now, said Nola. So Peter brought the suitcase and canvas bag of stuffed animals and toys into Maggie’s room. He told Maggie that she was having a sleepover. Peter helped LaRose brush his tiny milk teeth. The boy undressed himself and put on his pajamas. He was thinner than Dusty, tensile. His hair flopped down in a forelock, just a shade darker than Maggie’s. Peter helped him into bed. Maggie stood uncertainly. Her long white flannel nightgown hung like a bell around her ankles. She pulled back the blankets and got in. Peter kissed them both, murmured, turned out the lights. Closing the door, he felt like he was going crazy, but the grief was different. The grief was all mixed up.

LaRose squeezed the soft creaturelike doll he played with the way his older brother played with plastic superhero action figures. Emmaline had made the creature for him. The grubby fur was rubbed away in spots. One button eye had popped off. She’d pushed cattail fluff through the butt when it split and stitched it back together. Its red felt tongue was worn to a ribbon. At first, the shivers LaRose had been holding back were so delicate they hardly made it from his body. But soon he shook in wide, rolling waves, and tears came too. Maggie lay next to him in the bed, feeling his misery, which made her own misery stop her heart.

She rolled over and shoved LaRose off the edge of the mattress. He tumbled, dragging the bedspread with him. Maggie tugged it back and LaRose hiccuped on the floor.

What are you crying for, baby? she said.

LaRose began to sob, low and profound. Maggie felt blackness surge up in her.

You want Mom-mee? Mom-mee? She’s gone. She and your daddy left you here to be my brother like Dusty was. But I don’t want you.

As she said this Maggie felt the blackness turn to water. She crawled down to find LaRose. He was curled in a ball, in the corner, with his scroungy stuffed creature, silent. She touched his back. He was cold and stiff. She dragged out her camping bag and slipped it over them both. She curled around him, warming him.

I do want you, she whispered in fear.

Some years later this night became a memory for LaRose. He recalled it, cherished it, as the first night he spent with Maggie. He remembered the warm flannel and her body curled around his. He believed they became brother and sister with each other as they slept. He forgot she’d kicked him out of bed, forgot she’d spoken those words.

WOLFRED STARED AT the blanketed lump of girl. Mackinnon had always been honest, for a trader. Fair, for a trader, and showed no signs of moral corruption beyond the usual — selling rum to Indians was outlawed. Wolfred could not take in what had happened, so again he went fishing. When he came back with another stringer of whitefish, his mind was clear. He decided Mackinnon was a rescuer. He had saved the girl from Mink, and a slave’s fate elsewhere. Wolfred chopped some kindling and built a small cooking fire beside the post. He roasted the fish whole and Mackinnon ate them with last week’s tough bread. Tomorrow, Wolfred would bake. When he went back into the cabin the girl was exactly where she’d been before. She didn’t move or flinch. It appeared that Mackinnon hadn’t touched her.

Wolfred put a plate of bread and fish on the dirt floor where she could reach it. She devoured both and gasped for breath. He set a tankard of water near. She gulped it all down, her throat clucking like a baby’s as she drained the cup.

After Mackinnon had eaten, he crawled into his slat-and-bearskin bed, where his habit was to drink himself to sleep. Wolfred cleaned up the cabin. Then he heated a pail of water and crouched near the girl. He wet a rag and dabbed at her face. As the caked dirt came off, he discovered her features, one by one, and saw that they were very fine. Her lips were small and full. Her eyes hauntingly sweet. Her eyebrows perfectly flared. When her face was uncovered he stared at her in dismay. She was exquisite. Did Mackinnon know? And did he know that his kick had chipped one of the girl’s sharp teeth, left a blackening bruise on her flower-petal cheek?

Giimiikawaadiz, whispered Wolfred. He knew the words for how she looked.

Carefully, reaching into the corner of the cabin for what he needed, he mixed mud. He held her chin and with tender care dabbed the muck back into her face, blotting over the startling line of her brows, the perfect symmetry of eyes and nose, the devastating curve of her lips. She was a graceful child of eleven years.

THEY SLEPT ON the floor last night, said Nola. I told Maggie it had to stop. If you want the ground, I’ll ground you. She sassed me. Okay, I said. You’re grounded to your room. You won’t be going outside. He’s crying again. I don’t know what to do.

She flapped her fingers. Her face was pinched and gray, her body frail. She’d done well all week, but now it was the weekend, and Maggie home all day.

Let her out, said Peter.

Ohhh, she’s out already, wouldn’t mind me, said Nola, angry. She’s eating breakfast.

Why don’t you let them play together? They’ll be happy.

Peter and Nola had resolved always to uphold each other’s decisions where the children were concerned. But things were breaking down, thought Peter. A few minutes later, he caught Nola pushing Maggie’s head, almost into her bowl of oatmeal. Maggie resisted. When Nola saw Peter, she took her hand off Maggie’s neck as if nothing had happened.

Breathing hard, Maggie stared at the oatmeal. It was congealed and her mother didn’t let her have raisins or brown sugar because she might get a cavity. She looked up at her father. He sat down and while Nola’s back was turned he scooped most of her oatmeal into his bowl. He mimed eating. She lifted her spoon. He dipped his in first and put the oatmeal in his mouth, made a sad clown face. Maggie did the same. They rolled their eyes at Nola like anxious dogs. So did LaRose, though he didn’t know what was going on. Without turning around, Nola said to Peter, Stop that shit.

Peter gripped his spoon and stared hard at her back.

Peter thought his wife would begin to heal once this was resolved. He thought it was time to take LaRose home. But he wanted Nola to say so. Instead, she invented plans.

I’m going to make him a cake, she said, eyes blurring. With candles on it like a birthday cake. I’ll put them in over and over, and let him blow them out. He can have a hundred wishes.

She turned away. The doctor had given her a few Klonopin. She would drug herself on Christmas. I’ll make LaRose a cake every day, she thought, if he’ll only stop crying, if he’ll cling to me like Dusty did, if he’ll only be my son, the only son I will ever have. Some stubborn long-standing resentment had kept Nola from telling Peter that her periods had stopped shortly after Dusty, and the doctor couldn’t tell her why. Peter hadn’t noticed the change, but then, she had always been secretive about her body. Emmaline was the only person she had told. How breathtaking that she had entrusted that secret to Emmaline! Her heart clenched. It was, thought Nola, the reason LaRose was brought to her. Emmaline understood.

Because her half sister understood her so well, Nola would turn from her, afraid of her, and harden herself against Emmaline.

PETER FINALLY WENT over to find Landreaux. He could have walked, it was just a half mile. West, there was Hoopdance. East and north, reservation and reservation town. South, the dying little community of Pluto, which still had a school. That’s where Maggie went and where they would send LaRose if this situation lasted. Pulling into the Irons’ empty driveway, Peter cut the engine. The little gray house was completely dark. A half-constructed plywood and buffalo-board platform sagged off the side. The tarps were pulled away from the bent poles of the sweat lodge out back. There was a bird feeder made from a milk jug, a full box of canning jars in the driveway, and a few toys scattered in the yard. The dog that hung around was gone. The Irons had probably gone to visit relatives in Canada, or to the local guy, a medicine man, Randall, for a family ceremony. He knew from his friendship with Landreaux that their people would put them through religious rituals. What they were called, he could not remember. Peter was only vaguely interested in the traditional things Landreaux did. They’d fished and hunted together. Peter knew how careful Landreaux was and it seemed impossible that he could have made such an error. Peter left his car in the driveway and walked out behind Landreaux’s house, into the woods.

He followed a path that would take him to the spot where Dusty had died. On the way there, he saw that dog — short-haired with a rusty tinge to its coat. It was still, as if waiting for him. The head was sensitive, a lighter buff. Its ears flared up as it came out of the brush. The dog studied him. Peter stopped, startled at its composure and how it measured him. The dog vanished when he took a step. There was no sound, as if the woods had lightly absorbed the animal.

An overnight blast of wind, a short quick rain, had taken down most of the leaves. They lay brilliant on the ground, layer on layer of shattering color. The morning light struck the white birch to near incandescence. As he passed through a stand of bur oak, the air darkened. At last he stood where Landreaux had stood, straight across from where the buck must have stopped. Directly between them was the climbing tree Maggie had told him about. Peter had no idea his children had been playing so deep in the woods and so far from the house. But the tree with its low crotch and curved limbs was irresistible. One limb was blasted. He walked up and ran his hand along the shafted needle-sharp spikes of wood. Then the patch of ground below the tree limb knocked him to his knees. He put his hand on the place. All around, the ground was trampled and torn. Peter lay on his back. Looking up, he worked it out that just before he died Dusty had climbed the tree — he had been sitting on a limb. He’d seen the great buck. Startled, he’d fallen just as Landreaux shot. Peter had read Landreaux’s statement and everything he said matched.

Now he lay down on the place where Dusty’s life had flowed into the earth, closed his eyes, listened to the sound of the woods around him. He heard a chickadee, a faraway nuthatch, a crow ragged in the distance. He heard his own voice, crying out. Then the hum and tick of twigs, leaves. Rush of pine needles. The scent of sweetgrass, tobacco, kinnikinnick, offerings. Landreaux had been there, too.

LANDREAUX WAS AT present doing what he did every couple of weeks. He was helping Emmaline’s mother. Before she was his mother-in-law, she had been his favorite teacher. In fact, she had saved him the way she always saved people. She was not on his client list, but he helped her anyway. He arrived at her apartment in the Elders Lodge, a rangy brick building shaped like a thunderbird — you could see the shape looking down from an airplane. Emmaline’s mother lived in the tail. Nobody called her grandma, kookum, or auntie. Her first name was LaRose, but nobody called her that either. They called her by her teacher name, Mrs. Peace.

Generations of students had loved her as a teacher and were aware of no vice, yet Mrs. Peace claimed that she wasn’t entirely wholesome. She had a checkered past, she liked to say, though she had at last remained faithful to the memory of Emmaline’s father, Billy Peace. It was reverently said that she had tried to throw herself into his grave. He had actually been cremated, but no one remembered. Billy Peace was also Nola’s father. Nobody really knew how many wives had married Billy, or what had gone on in that cultish compound of his decades ago. Billy’s children and now grandchildren kept turning up and were usually added to the tribal rolls.

Mrs. Peace had been a sad-looking, pretty woman with long flossy brown hair. She had long flossy white hair now and was still pretty but looked happy. She didn’t cut and curl her hair like most of her friends, but wore it in a thin braid, sometimes a bun. Every day she wore a different pair of beaded earrings. She made up the patterns herself — today sky blue with orange centers. She had taken up this hobby, and the smoking of cigarillos, after she left off teaching and moved back to the reservation. She rarely smoked a cigarillo now. She said beading had helped her quit. Her stand-up magnifying glass was placed just so on the table, for her vision was poor. When she looked up at Landreaux, her thick eyeglasses gave her a bewildered otherworldliness, adding to her aura.

Landreaux entered as she nodded him in, hugged him. They stood wordlessly in the embrace, then stepped back. Mrs. Peace held out her hands, palms up.

He took his boots off by the door. She was boiling water for tea. Landreaux waved the stethoscope and blood pressure cuff at her, but she told him to put that stuff away. She felt fine. The lodge owned a carpet-shampooing machine, and half her apartment, covered deeply in an ash-blond fiber, needed Landreaux’s care. For the moment, he left the machine and jug of soap parked outside the door. Though she still had an occasional attack, LaRose’s enigmatic pain had nearly vanished after the death of Billy Peace. Neuralgia, full-body migraine, osteoporosis, spinal problems, lupus, sciatica, bone cancer, phantom limb syndrome though she had her limbs — these diagnoses had come and gone. Her medical file was a foot high. She knew, of course, why the pains had left her at that time, rarely returning. Billy had been cruel, self-loving, and clever. His love had been a burden no different from hate. Sometimes his ironies still sneaked at her from the spirit world. People thought she had been faithful to his memory because she had abjectly adored Billy Peace. She let them say what they wanted. Actually, he had taught her what she needed to know about men. She needed no further instruction.

Landreaux, who as a man believed the tragic lovelorn-teacher story, was solicitous, convinced that she presented a brave face to the world. Today he saw with concern that her face was crashed out, blank, and she was trying to make herself comfortable in her reclining chair. Perhaps she was having an episode because of what he had done.

Don’t even worry about me, she said. This will take a long time to work out, eh? You’re a good boy to come over here and help me at a time like this.

I can’t just sit around, he said, and tried to coax her into an opiate or two.

It makes me loopy.

She peered at him through her bottle-glass-thick lenses, her eyes swimming.

Are you looking forward to having your carpet shampooed? he asked, hearing what he said as ridiculous or maybe pathetic. But she made his awkwardness okay.

It’s amazing what a kick I get out of that, she answered. You go ahead.

He drank the tea and brought in the machine.

Landreaux moved the reclining chair, magazine rack, television, and television stand off the carpet. He put water into the tank, mixed the soap into the water, and began. The machine made purring, bubbling sounds. He moved it back and forth. The sound was low and mesmerizing. Sure enough, Mrs. Peace closed her eyes, beatific, smiling. When he was done, her eyes flipped open and she got up to bustle around the edges of the wet carpet. He put the machine away and sat down to eat the Juneberry coffee cake she’d put out for him. Then she answered a phone call and said that she had to help Elka with her eyedrops. Her slippered feet slapped away down the hall.

When the door shut, Landreaux went into the bathroom. He checked her medicine cabinet as he always did, to make sure that her medications were filled and up-to-date. She was almost out of two, so Landreaux put the bottles on the table. When she came back, he said that he’d go down to the hospital pharmacy and refill them.

Before you go, she said, here. Take a look.

LaRose opened her closet. She had certificates, brittle school reports, clippings of poems, stacks of ancient letters in there, seeking after the first LaRose. Emmaline called her the historical society. At least her photographs were all in albums now, organized by Snow. Mrs. Peace took a big, black, battered round tin from a low shelf. The top was painted with three faded roses. People gave her things with roses on them because of her name, and perhaps the same had been true of her mother, because this tin was quite old. Mrs. Peace kept odd-sized papers in this tin — aphorisms, and newspapers, pictures, stories of dogs, papers in her own writing. The sight of her penmanship, the swirls of her name, filled Landreaux with memories of Emmaline as a girl.

Look at what? he said.

She handed him the poem — a copy of the poem “Invictus.” Generations of her students had memorized it.

Keep it, she said.

I still know it by heart. This is the foul clutch of circumstance, all right, he said.

Fell clutch, she said.

He looked at a piece of grainy Big Chief tablet paper. It was filled with his writing but he did not remember having written it. I will not run away was written on it over and over.

I made you write ten pages just like it, but I only kept this one, she said.

She put her fine-boned little hand on his shoulder. Warmth spread instantly from her fingers.

I will not run away, he said. They sat together holding hands on the couch.

Before he left, Landreaux gave Mrs. Peace the two plastic bottles, and she read the numbers off into the pharmacy telephone line. She gave Landreaux the bottles to put back in the medicine cabinet. These weren’t the ones he cared about, she knew. It was true, also, that he hadn’t taken any of those other ones for a while. Unlike many of her friends, she kept careful count of the pills in her bottles. Old people were such an easy source.

Landreaux needed the pickup to haul tipi poles, hay bales. He needed it for dump runs or just to be a man. But he made Emmaline drive the pickup to work because it was safer, and he took the magic Corolla — the car that would not die. They had inherited the Corolla when Emmaline’s mother moved into the nursing home. Beyond the suggested upkeep, which Landreaux himself could do, the car never broke down. Compared with the other cars he’d had in his life, this car seemed mystically dependable. It was a drab gray color and the seats were worn, the padding crushed. Landreaux couldn’t push the driver’s seat back far enough to accommodate his long legs, but he liked driving it. Especially after the first snowfall, when he put on the snow tires, he took pleasure in growling around on the back roads to visit his clients.

Ottie Plume, a foot lost to diabetes, lived with his wife, Baptiste, a few miles out of town on a coveted section of the lake. Bap didn’t want her husband in the rehab, so Landreaux came over there to do physical therapy, shower, toilet, count pills, give shots, feed, trim nose and ear hair, clip nails, massage Ottie, and swap bits of gossip with the two. He also drove Ottie to dialysis and stayed with him while he got recirculated.

Bap opened the door when Landreaux tapped.

I didn’ know if you’d show up, she said.

Life stops for nothing, even what I done, said Landreaux, and his saying it like that, taking it on, calmed Bap. She called into the other room.

He showed up, Ottie!

She stayed, though she’d ordinarily have left to do her own things while Landreaux worked with Ottie. Landreaux knew they’d been discussing him and that Bap was staying so she could tell her relatives how Landreaux behaved. What signs he showed. Emmaline said it would be tough going back to work. The story would be around him for the rest of his life. He would live in the story. He couldn’t change it. Even LaRose won’t change it, she said.

But Landreaux knew that wasn’t exactly true. LaRose had already changed the story.

Oh, I’m glad you’re here, said Ottie. His brown-gold cherub face, round and worn by suffering, brightened. Once a powerful wrestler, Ottie hadn’t quite softened. His pounds went on sleek, like seal fat. Most people in his family had died more quickly of diabetes’ complications.

I was saying to Bap, life don’t quit.

It don’t quit until it does, said Ottie. I managed a shit on my own the other day. Nearly fell off the fucken stool.

Jeez, Ottie, said Bap.

Let’s get it done, said Landreaux, wheeling Ottie down the short hall.

The tribe had sprung for a disability bathroom and Ottie had a shower chair. After Landreaux helped Ottie into the chair, he scrubbed Ottie’s back and hosed him off. The door opened a crack. Bap’s arm came through with a set of clean clothes. When they came out to the kitchen, there were blueberry pancakes with fake maple syrup, cooked up with powdered commodity eggs. Landreaux could taste the familiar flat chemically dry eggish quality and the aspartame over the maple. It was good.

So how’s everybody dealing? Bap sat back from the table. She was a small, husky woman who still kept up the fiction that she was jealous as hell of other women, had to keep them from pursuing Ottie. She wore makeup all the time for Ottie. Eye shadow a different color for each day of the week. It was Purple Tuesday. She pulled her hair back in a scrunchie and sprayed her bangs in a massive pout over her plucked-skinny eyebrows. Her nails were lacquered an innocent pink. One finger tapped her lips.

Maybe I shouldn’t say nothing. Keep my trap shut?

Nah, said Landreaux.

Emmaline was her cousin.

You’re family, he said.

Emmaline’s real strong, said Bap.

Real strong, said Landreaux. His head began to buzz. I wanna establish a fund, you know? When they get better, when our families get more healed.

Bap and Ottie nodded warily, as if they might be asked to contribute.

Everybody makes a fund up now, said Bap.

Me, said Ottie, I know this is a sad time. But when I go, I want my fund to be a high-heels fund for reservation ladies. I sure like it when Bappy dresses up for me and does her thing. I’d like to see a few more ladies make that click sound when they walk. Drives me fucken wild.

Bap took Ottie’s hand in hers.

You don’t need no fund, babydoll. You ain’t gonna die.

Except piece by piece, said Ottie.

Hate diabetes, said Landreaux.

We gotta get him ready for his appointment, said Bap. You gotta test his sugar.

Already done, said Ottie.

Landreaux didn’t say he’d tested Ottie’s sugar when he smelled the pancakes, knowing the carbs would spike Ottie’s blood up no matter how much fake sweetener Bap threw at the problem. They were liable to hallucinate on that aspartame shit, he sometimes thought. He and Ottie were in the car, wheelchair folded in the trunk, before Landreaux realized he’d escaped without really answering Bap’s question about how they were dealing. Ottie had deflected that line of inquiry with his high-heels death fund.

Thanks, he said to Ottie.

For what?

I didn’t know what to say to Bap. How we’re doing. We’re still in that phase where we wake up, remember, wanna go back to sleep.

I spose you won’t never hunt no more.

Burnt my gun. Well, what much of it that would burn.

That don’t do nobody no good, said Ottie. Now who is gonna get your children the protein they need to grow big and strong?

We’ll set snares, said Landreaux. Fry some waboose.

That would be on my diet, said Ottie. I’ll trade you some a them pills you like.

Landreaux didn’t answer.

But I’ll miss your deer meat, Ottie went on. I guess it ain’t something you get over, though. You keep on going through it.

Over and over, said Landreaux. Maybe trade you later. I don’t need that stuff.

But he did, ever so bad.

THE HOT BAR at Whitey’s gas station sold deep-fried wings, gizzards, drummies, pizza, and Hot Pockets. Romeo Puyat saw Landreaux drive by the gas station and park out back in the weeds. Romeo was a skinny man with close-set, piercing eyes and a wounded, hunching walk. His right arm was always held close to his body because it had been broken in so many places that it was pinned together. His right leg too. Still, he could move quickly. Thinking that Landreaux would stay inside and eat his lunch, Romeo grabbed the siphon hose and his bright-red fire-code-approved plastic container. He lurched, crooked but efficient, over to Landreaux’s car and set up his equipment. Romeo was adept from frequent practice and soon had the gasoline flowing from Landreaux’s gas tank, through the rubber tubing, into his container.

Landreaux walked out of the store carrying a small grease-proof cardboard box. His eyes flicked when he saw Romeo, but he did not acknowledge his old classmate. The reasons for hating each other went back to their childhood’s brutal end. The two had stopped talking back in boarding school. And then there was the time Romeo had tried to murder Landreaux in his sleep. That was in their early twenties, and it just happened that Landreaux had been in possession of a lot of money that one night. As the money was the main corrupting influence, Romeo was hurt that Landreaux still mistrusted him over the botched knifing. These days, at least, Romeo wasn’t after his old schoolmate’s life.

Romeo had accepted, at least in theory, how Landreaux had stolen his first love, Emmaline, who maybe hadn’t liked Romeo anyway. Romeo was grudgingly okay with how Landreaux and Emmaline had unquestioningly taken in, and admirably looked after, his surprise son, Hollis. Romeo told himself that they got a good deal in that boy, because Hollis was A-number-one. Still, he had to admit there was a lot of upkeep involved there. These days, anyway, the main thing was that Romeo just wanted Landreaux to share and share alike. As a personal caregiver well-known at the hospital, surely Landreaux had lots of access to prescription painkillers. Why not make his old friend a little happier? Take away his agonies? Yes, Romeo had his own prescription, but it just was not OxyContin and sometimes he had to sell his lesser stuff to pay for the really good stuff. Like Fentanyl. He had been trying to buy a patch somewhere.

Landreaux walked over to his car.

Well, well, well, said Romeo, glancing down at the gas flowing through the tubing. Long time no see.

Landreaux was touched, in a sad way, to find his old schoolmate stealing his gas. He had long ago decided that whatever Romeo or anyone else did to him resulting from his hell days he had coming. So he said nothing, except I gotta go. My mozzarella sticks are getting cold.

Mozzarella sticks, said Romeo, with a look of distaste.

For the kids, said Landreaux.

Oooooh, said Romeo, as if he’d heard something wise and surprising. He jerked back his head, frowned in concentration, and gently removed the tubing.

Got something for me, old niiji? He fussily tapped the tubing against the inside of the tank. Then he screwed the pressure-lock lid back on the red plastic jug and replaced the gas cap on Landreaux’s car. He smacked the cover closed.

No, said Landreaux.

Well, my work here is done, said Romeo.

Picking up the red gas can, he gave a jaunty, irritating hand salute and stepped into the road that would take him back to his car and empty tank.

Give my regards to Emmaline, he yelled over his shoulder.

Landreaux gave him a sharp sidelong glance, put the mozzarella sticks on the hood of his car. As he got in, the way Romeo had saluted started him remembering. There was plenty to recall, but the knife Romeo had stuck in his forearm, then his bicep, left a visible scar. Amazing that in his sleep Landreaux had rolled over and reached up to scratch his nose as Romeo struck. Wandering back in thought, Landreaux forgot the carton on top of his car and drove by Romeo, who was filling his tank with the siphoned gas. As Landreaux rounded the corner, the mozzarella sticks flew off the roof at such an angle that they slid onto the hood of Romeo’s car. When his tank was no longer empty, Romeo reached for the box, took out a mozzarella stick. He took only one bite — they had gone cool and rubbery already. He drove to the Hot Bar and complained.

I’ll heat them up for you, said the girl behind the counter.

I’d rather get my money back, said Romeo.

AFTER THE FIRST weeks, LaRose tried to stop crying, around Nola at least. Maggie told him the facts again, why he was there. His parents had told him, but he still didn’t get it. He had to hear it again and again.

You don’t even know what dead means, said Maggie.

You don’t move, said LaRose.

You don’t breathe, said Maggie.

Breathing’s moving!

Here, said Maggie, let’s go outside and I’ll kill something to show you.

What would you kill?

They looked out the window.

That dog, said Maggie, pointing.

It was at the edge of the yard, just lazing in the sun. It was the dog LaRose’s family fed. He didn’t say that he recognized it, but he did say, You must be mean. Nobody just goes and kills a dog for nothing.

Your dad went and killed my brother for nothing, said Maggie.

On accident.

Same difference, said Maggie.

LaRose got tears in his eyes and then Maggie did too. She was overcome by a restless wretchedness. Dusty had come to her in a dream and showed her a stuffed dog that looked, she now remembered, just like that orange dog out there. She turned back to check on the dog, but it was gone. She had a thought. She could get something from LaRose. Get him to help her.

Okay, little dork.

Don’t call me that.

I won’t call you dork if you change my mom from evil, like she is now, into nice. If you can do that? I think they would make a TV show about you.

What should I do?

To make her nice?

LaRose nodded. Maggie told him to ask if she needed a foot rub, but LaRose looked confused.

Do anything she tells you to do, Maggie directed. And eat her cakes. Also, hugs.

LaRose waited for Nola to tell him to do something. Later on that day, Nola said that LaRose should call her, Nola, mother.

Okay, Mother.

Give me a hug?

He did that too.

Nola smoothed back his hair, looked into his eyes, and her face ballooned up and went red, like she might roar.

What’s your favorite food? she asked.

Cake?

She said she would make him lots of cakes. When LaRose put his arms around her neck he could feel her bones jutting up under her skin.

You’re boney, he said to Nola.

You can feel my skeleton, Nola said.

Are you a Halloween lady? he asked carefully.

No, she said, I’m not. My mother was a witch. I don’t want to be my mother.

LaRose laid his head on her chest to make sure her heart was beating. Her collarbone jutted against his temple.

Boney, he thought. She’s boney. He’d heard his father tease his mother. You’re getting boney! He’d heard his grandmother say this about his sister Snow. You don’t want to be so boney, like your mother.

He’d landed in a world of boney women. Even Maggie was boney with her gangly legs. He hadn’t said it, though. Nor had he said that Maggie called her mother evil. Something stopped him. He didn’t know why he just didn’t say everything in his mind anymore. It was like his mouth had a little strainer that only let through pleasant words.

LAROSE SAW HIS real mother in the grocery store. He ran to Emmaline and they melted together. Romeo happened to witness this incident. He stood in the meat-case radiance, swaying, clasped his basket to his chest. Across his face there passed an expression that did not belong to the dangerous scumbag he considered himself now. Romeo caught himself, narrowed his eyes, and pretended to examine the tubes of cheap hamburger.

It was good that LaRose was with Peter, who didn’t interfere. For a while Emmaline held on to her child, smelling his hair. She looked at Peter, and when he nodded she let LaRose hang on to the cart for a ride. She walked the store with him, talking. It was like being heart-dead and then heart-alive, but she couldn’t shop forever. Peter helped her carry groceries out and then she brought LaRose to the Ravich car. LaRose got in without crying, buckled himself into the backseat. His wordless bravery choked her. As they drove away, he waved at Emmaline. He seemed to float from her on a raft of frail sticks. Or was that a dream? Every morning, she floated to consciousness on that same disintegrating raft. Many times each day, she questioned what they had done.

After seeing LaRose, she couldn’t go home. She thought that she might see her mother, but instead found that she was drawn to the church. She then thought that she might pray there, for peace. But instead she walked around back of the church. She thought that she might find Father Travis, but he wasn’t in any of the church offices or at the rectory — a simple boxy house. She started to feel uncomfortable, tracking him down this way. Then she saw him at a distance, working a little Bobcat by the lake, building a walkway. He was wearing a droopy brown stocking hat pulled down behind his ears. The hat made his ears stick out. It should have made him look ridiculous. But it was hard to make Father Travis look ridiculous. He had wind-toughened skin, lightly freckled, the classic red-blond’s sun-shy complexion. His cheekbones were planar, almost brutal, and he had a chiseled movie-star chin. Just as his looks had begun to grate on people, he’d gotten older, which made him easier to bear. Also, scars flamed down his throat. Father Travis’s eyes could be warm if he smiled, the lines around them starred pleasantly outward. His eyes could also go the other way — somber, colorless, maybe dangerous — but of course he was no longer an earthly soldier.

He shut the Cat down when he saw Emmaline and got off. She was used to seeing him in a cassock. Father Travis wore cassocks most of the time because he liked the convenience. He could put them on over T-shirts and work pants. The old people liked to see him in one, and after The Matrix the young people liked it too. But right now he wore old jeans, plaid flannel shirt, a brown canvas jacket.

Emmaline smiled at him, surprised.

He glanced around the yards, checking to see if anybody was watching. It was that — the checking — he thought later, that gave it all away. His heart was hidden from his thoughts for days, until he remembered glancing over Emmaline’s shoulder to make sure no one was watching.

They shoved their hands in their pockets and walked the fitness trail that he was making through the woods. They passed the push-up rail, the chin-up bar, before she could say anything.

I didn’t want to give LaRose to them, she said.

Why did you?

The sun glowing in green lake water on a bright day — her eyes were that color.

It seemed the only way, she said. She’s my sister, after all. I thought she would let me see him, spend time. But no. So I want him back. I just saw him. He’s going to think that I don’t love him.

Father Travis was still surprised by what they had done. He thought back to their visit just after Landreaux was released — they had wanted to tell him something. He had heard of these types of adoptions in years past, when disease or killings broke some families, left others whole. It was an old form of justice. It was a story, and stories got to him. A story was the reason he had become a priest, and a story was why he’d not yet walked off the job. In the evenings, between action movies, Father Travis parsed out the New Testament.

Mary gave her child to the world, he almost said, looking at Emmaline. It all made sense for she was wearing a sky blue parka. The hood was missing the fur band, so it capped her head in a way that reminded him of pictures of the Blessed Virgin. Her hair, parted in the middle, flowed back under the blue material in smooth wings.

You tried to do a good thing, said Father Travis. LaRose will understand that. He will come back to you.

Emmaline stopped and looked closely at him.

You sure?

I’m sure, he said, then couldn’t help himself. Neither life, nor angels, nor principalities nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, not height, nor depth, nor any other creature will separate you.

Emmaline looked at him like he was crazy.

It’s a Bible quote.

He looked down at the scraped path. Quoting Romans like a pompous ass. .

LaRose is young, she said, her hungry eyes blurring. They forget if you’re not with them every day.

Nobody could forget you, thought Father Travis. The blurted thought unnerved him; he made himself speak sensibly.

Look, you can retrieve LaRose at any time. Just say you want him back. Peter and Nola have to listen. If not, you can go to Social Services. You are his mother.

Social Services, she said. Huh. Ever heard of rez omerta?

Father Travis abruptly laughed.

Besides, I am Social Services. The crisis school is all a social service. I’d have to get in touch with myself.

What’s wrong with that? said Father Travis.

She shook her head, looked away as she spoke.

You mean I didn’t see it coming? Didn’t know it would be this difficult? Can’t understand why this is unbearable when there is history and tradition, all that, behind what we did?

She rubbed her face with her hands as if to erase something else.

Yes, I wasn’t exactly in touch with myself. Also, there’s Nola. She gets mad at Maggie, I think. What if she treats LaRose that way?

Father Travis was silent. He still heard individual confessions and knew about Nola’s temper.

As they walked back to her car, a sensation he didn’t recognize kept him from offering the usual offhand comment, to seal things off. He stayed silent because he didn’t want to ruin the confiding way she had spoken to him. Emmaline got in the car. Then she pulled her hood back and rolled down her window. She looked up into his face. Her longing for her son was so naked that he seemed to feel it pressing into him. He closed his eyes.

When his eyes were shut, Emmaline saw, he was an ordinary man with weather-raked skin and chapped lips.

She looked away and started up the car. Her tragic thoughts shifted as she drove off, and she remembered laughing until her stomach cramped as Josette and Snow discussed the priest.

He can’t help his eyes, one of them said.

His sex-toy-robot eyes.

Josette and Snow had a thing about male robot/cyborg movie characters. They had an ancient Radio Shack VCR-TV in their room, and picked up old movies for it at yard sales and discount bins. Their collection included Westworld, RoboCop, The Black Hole. They rifled through video sale bins hoping for their favorite, Blade Runner. They’d made drawings of robots and cyborgs — smooth, perfect, doomed for feeling something, maybe like Father Travis.

He’s got replicant eyes!

No shit, Father Travis could be a replicant. Batty!

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, they intoned together. Attack ships off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

Their voices dropped to exhausted rasps.

All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain. Time to die.

They lolled their heads over and Emmaline had cried out, Quit this! She frowned now. Like any mother, it made her uneasy to see her children feign death.

The Iron girls. Snow, Josette. The Iron Maidens. They were junior high volleyball queens, sister BFFs, heart-soul confidantes to each other and advice givers to their brothers. They were tight with their mom, loose with their dad. With their grandma they got bead-happy and could sew for hours. Snow was going to be the tall, intense one who had trouble concentrating on her schoolwork and whom boys only liked as a friend. She was in eighth grade. Josette was going to be the smart one who despaired about her weight but magnetized clumsy desire among boys whom she liked only as friends. She was in grade seven.

Landreaux dropped his daughters in Hoopdance to shop and drove back to take Ottie to dialysis. The girls went straight to the one drugstore. They walked in with a puff of snowy cold. A store clerk with flat dyed red hair and glasses on a chain asked if she could help them.

No thanks, said Josette, and you don’t need to follow us around either. We have money and we’re not going to steal.

The woman pulled her chin down into her neck and kept this odd posture as she turned away and walked to the cash register.

You didn’t have to say that, said Snow.

Maybe I’m too defensive, said Josette, fake-meek. Attached to the drugstore was a gift shop full of decorative flowers and knickknacks, which their mother did not like. But they did. They went through and admired all the ceramic snow babies, the glitter fronds, the stones cut with words. Dream. Love. Live.

Why not Throw? said Josette. How come they don’t have one that just says, Throw?

You don’t get inspiration, do you, said Snow.

That’s not inspiration, that’s mawkish.

Ooooo! Snow licked her finger and made a mark in the air. Vocab word.

They went back to the other section. There was a small selection of windshield scrapers and emergency flashlights, maybe for their dad.

Better things at the hardware store, said Josette.

Let’s test perfumes for Mom.

No, lotion.

You get that. I’ll get perfume.

All of the good perfumes were locked up under the glass counter with the eyeglass lady’s hands resting on it.

Shit, now we’ll have to deal with her, said Josette.

I’m the good one, said Snow. I’ll do the talking.

Josette rolled her eyes and made an oops face.

Snow walked up to the clerk and smiled. How are you today? Snow used a bright inflection. We’re looking for a really nice Christmas present for our mother. Our mom is so special. Snow sighed. She works so hard! What do you suggest?

The woman’s stabbing glare bounced off Josette, who was bent over the glass, scanning. The woman’s hand hovered among the jewel-bright boxes, spray bottles, and plucked up a tester of Jean Naté.

Too white-bread, said Josette.

Snow pointed at Jovan Musk.

That doesn’t smell like Mom. She’s more, I don’t know, clear.

Maybe Charlie, or Blue Jeans?

So casual, though.

They meditated, frowning, on the array.

I wanna get something special. I have my job money, said Snow to the counter lady. Maybe something from a designer or movie star.

The woman displayed a box. White Diamonds. Elizabeth Taylor.

America’s number one fragrance, said the woman, reverent.

Who’s Elizabeth Taylor? asked Josette.

Duh, Cleopatra?

They’d both pondered the cover of the VHS at the video rental.

Plus friends with Michael Jackson?

Oh yeah. Josette sniffed the spray nozzle. Fancy. I like this.

Enjoli, in a hot-pink box, decorated with an embossed golden flower.

But Mom’s not this spicy. I mean, she smells good.

It would clash with Dad’s Old Spice.

So would the Wild Musk?

Maybe Wind Song.

Grandma wears that.

The woman behind the counter brought out an elegant box hiding behind the others. It was a lavendery pinkish box, one of those expensive indeterminate colors. A blackish gray band. The bottle fit firmly in hand, a band of embossed diamond shapes, neatly swirled glass. Eau Sauvage. The woman sprayed a little on a Kleenex, waved the tissue in front of their noses. Waited. The smell was green and dry. Faintly licorice. Maybe a hint of cloud. A trace of fresh-cut wood? Crushed grass. A rare herb in a rare forest. Nothing dark, nothing hungry. Something else, too.

Most people think this one smells too plain, the lady said. It’s not like any other perfume. Nobody buys it. We only have this one bottle.

Snow watched Josette, her eyes wide. Josette breathed the scent in again.

I wish things could be that way, said Snow.

So pure, said Josette, putting down the bottle. Must be pricey.

It’s a bit expensive, yes, said the woman. She seemed embarrassed by the amount. I just work here. It’s not my store, she said.

Yeah, said Snow. It’s kinda too much. I was saving. But, well.

It can be for a man or a woman. Eww Savage.

Eau Sauvage, said Josette, with an exaggerated French accent. We gotta have it. She turned to Snow, eyes sparking.

Smell!

This is it, said Snow.

Josette had an old-lady-type money pouch hidden deep in her purse. She took it out. Snow hugged her passionately.

Then right there, in front of the counterwoman, they began to cry because they both knew: the trace was there. The cologne also smelled like LaRose’s clean hair on a cold autumn day when he came in and Emmaline would bend over him.

Oh, you smell good, she used to say. You smell like outside.

Leaving the drugstore, Josette and Snow talked about the outside smell and decided they were psychic with each other like in a witch coven.

Or maybe our people had these powers before the whiteman came.

Yeah, said Snow, and we lived five hundred years.

I actually heard someone say that.

Me too. And we could change the weather.

I believe that one.

Great, said Snow. Let’s do it now.

I shoulda been named Summer, said Josette. All you can do is make it snow.

It was blustery. They were walking toward the place they would meet their father. He had agreed to pick them up after he got Ottie settled back home. They were going to sit in the Subway, maybe split a twelve-inch turkey with American cheese, on whole wheat, for their complexions, with lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and sweet onion sauce dressing. For sure they would. They were hungrier than usual and had enough money left for the turkey sub if they just drank water.

It’s better for us, said Josette, who loved Sprite.

They showed us in health class, said Snow mournfully. Just a can a day you get diabetes.

Landreaux never bought soda because he didn’t want his kids to lose their feet. When he put it like that, they’d squint as if in pain, Yeah, Dad. They drank forbidden pop at Whitey’s. Now, waiting for their father, they stared down at their sub sandwich wrappers and looked amazed.

I ate that so fast.

How’d that happen? Josette burped.

Gross. Now what?

We’re broke so we sip our healthful waters.

And wait for Dad.

They met each other’s eyes. Nobody at school had been very mean. Everybody in their school had something awful happen someplace in their family. Everybody just got sad for everybody, usually, or said tough shit, or if you were a girl maybe you gave a card. There were no cards for what had happened. But one of her girlfriends had beaded Snow a pair of earrings and she knew it was to say what there were no words to say. There were no words to say to their father, either. At least no words they wanted to say. In the car, maybe they’d be silent. Maybe they’d ask about Ottie or Awan or another client. Maybe they’d say something general about schoolwork. They’d avoid true feelings because it could go real deep real sudden with their father. He would get into that seriously real mode like when he did a ceremony. Where you let thoughts and feelings buried inside you come out into the circle so other people could pray and sing to help you. But, the girls agreed, they weren’t into having that kind of energy leak out of their dad when things were going on like normal. So when he drove up in the Corolla they eye-spoke. Josette would ride shotgun because she was good at keeping him on topics like haircuts, car batteries, winterizing the windows of the house with Saran wrap. And if it seemed like he might veer south, she could always ask him to tell her again what was wrong with drinking pop.

Y2K KEPT PETER occupied now and when he was preparing he could think of something other than Dusty. On the way to Fleet Farm, he berated himself for not having bought live chickens last spring. He’d been planning on turning one of the old outbuildings into a chicken coop. Nola had even agreed although she was generally against having animals. He’d never gotten organized about the chickens, although the dog, he’d fed the dog he had seen in the woods. Maybe part cattle dog. It would have guarded the house, Peter thought. It would have saved Dusty, maybe. He knew that was irrational, but he bought dog food anyway. Peter also purchased seven bags of parched corn and a windup flashlight. He drove home and brought his new purchases down to the room in the basement where he’d already stored six sealed ten-gallon drums of whole wheat flour, powdered milk, oil, dried lentils, beans, jerky. He’d bought and stocked a freezer, which he’d hooked up to a generator. He’d bought a backup generator. He bought a wood-burning stove and every day he chopped wood for an hour after work. That kept his mind focused, just like the priest. He and Father Travis were chopping themselves calm, miles apart, stacking heartache. Peter had a water filter, but to make sure, he bought another water filter. Last year, he’d had a new well put in, hooked to yet another backup generator. He had prebought shoes enough for two years of growing children’s sizes. Dried apples, pears, apricots, prunes, cranberries. More water in five-gallon plastic jugs. Extra blankets. And then the guns — a gun case and locks. He kept his guns loaded because otherwise he saw no point. Twice he’d shot coyotes off the porch. Once a deer. He’d missed a cougar. The key was taped to the top of the seven-foot case. He was obsessive about testing that the case was locked. Boxes of ammunition. A trunk of flares. Cake mixes, sugar, cigarettes, whiskey, vodka, rum. He could trade it for things they would need — surely there was something he’d forgotten.

Actually, he’d forgotten what high interest his credit card charged. He was working extra hours now just to pay the minimum. Every time he found himself putting another sack of pancake mix or a shovel on the credit card, he told himself that after Y2K the credit card companies would be so messed up by confusing 2000 with 1900 that chances were his statements would get lost. The credit card companies would vanish, the banking system, crippled, would go back to swapping gold bricks. There would be no telephones, televisions, energy companies, no automobiles except old beaters without computerized engines, no gas pumps, no air traffic, no satellites. He would communicate by radio. He’d had an amateur’s license for years. Already, at night all December, he had tense conversations with his contacts all around the world. Every morning, he woke and jotted down another item on his list. On the weekends, he took Maggie and LaRose with him to purchase a ream of paper, a case of envelopes. Pencils and pens. Stamps. Would there be an old-fashioned ground mail system? Probably, his contacts said. The storage room was jammed. Nola didn’t notice because she was busy cooking those damn cakes.

Those chickens could have lived for months on the stale cakes, Peter thought. Nola smoothed rich frosting over sheet cakes, layer cakes, Bundt cakes, then carefully decorated each with LaRose’s or Maggie’s name. Even the children had now stopped eating them. He’d rescued the cakes and stored them in the unheated garage. When the local high school was renovated, he’d salvaged things he could use. It almost made him smile to look at the row of tin lockers and realize that behind each numbered door, on the narrow top shelf, there rested a pastel cake.

THE PARENTS DIDN’T want it, but Christmas came for both families. Nola woke a week before the twenty-fifth, picturing her heart as a lump of lead. It lay so heavy in her chest that she could feel it, feebly thumping, reasonlessly going when she wasn’t interested in its efforts. But Christmas. She turned over in bed and nudged Peter — she resented that he could sleep at all.

A tree, she said. Today’s the day. We have to decorate a Christmas tree.

Peter opened his eyes, his bright, dear, blue eyes that never would belong to another child. The boy had come out true to both of them, the best of each of their features, mixed, they had marveled. The framed photographs were still arranged across the top of the dresser. Dusty still ran in the sun, posed as Spider-Man, played in a wading pool with Maggie, stood with them all in front of last year’s Christmas tree. Nola found comfort in the pictures but closed her eyes now so that she would not see the likeness in Peter. To distract herself, she started humming, switched thoughts to her daughter. The thought of Maggie was complicated, sometimes alive with love. Sometimes heart-thumping fury. Maggie looked like her tough, impervious Polish grandmother or like her wild and devious Chippewa auntie. Those slant gold eyes that went black in her head when she was angry. That kind little startling crooked grin.

Nola’s gentle humming was encouraging to Peter. It was a thing she used to do. He reached out and stroked her fingers. Maybe?

I can’t, she said. Still, he kept asking either outright or with a touch.

I’ll take the kids out.

He had a chain saw, he had three chain saws. They were all big brute chain saws overqualified for cutting Christmas trees. All he needed was a handsaw.

In fact, he said, sitting up in the chilly room, the handsaw with the red handle. We’ll each take turns sawing down the perfect tree. He pictured it and he was surprised that it was even possible. But it was possible for him to get out of bed and do this thing that he’d done last year with a boy who had worn Maggie’s hot-pink Disney Princess parka because his parka was in the wash. Dusty’d had so much confidence. When Maggie mocked him by calling him her little sister, he struck a Gaston pose and made Maggie laugh. She used to have a laugh like little bells.

It had changed, Peter thought. Her laugh had become a jeer, a bark, a series of angry shouts, an outburst. She laughed now when things were sad, not funny.

OUT IN THE woods, in the scant snow and from a distance, Landreaux saw the three examining small spruce trees. He retreated. He had been checking snares, not looking for a tree. But when he saw them he remembered.

Well, said Emmaline, yes. We should.

I want a tree with white lights, said Snow.

Let’s get out the colored lights, said Josette. White’s too blah.

I like uniformity, said Snow. Everything else in this house is mixed up.

Hey, said Emmaline.

No offense, Mom, but a tree with solid white lights. It would be pretty.

Let’s cut two trees then, said Emmaline.

Really? You mean really?

Little ones.

By the end of the day two small trees were set up in a corner of the living room, one decorated by each sister. For the first time, Emmaline didn’t make the slightest effort — the sisters were competitive. They made ornaments from sequins, ribbons, powwow regalia bling, and LaRose’s Play-Doh. They had never wrapped presents in wrapping paper. They used magazines, colored newspaper, shopping bags. At some point, though, everything stopped and the girls started crying. Coochy rolled his eyes and glared, then stalked out. Hollis made a strategic exit to the boys’ room. Landreaux went to work early, and Emmaline was left stirring a pot of stew. Because of LaRose.

This exact thing had happened every week or so since Landreaux and Emmaline had explained to the other children what they had done.

In the boys’ bedroom, Hollis plugged in his blow-up air mattress and turned the dial to inflate. For a minute or two, the high-pitched whine blocked out their voices. When the mattress was plump and comfortable, he lay back and shut his eyes.

Nothing. There was silence.

Hollis knew that his own dad, Romeo, had dropped him off with Emmaline and Landreaux sometime around Christmas. He’d been five, maybe six, like LaRose. He’d slept in one of the bunks for a while, but liked the blow-up better. He also knew that he’d been born in some sort of house, not a hospital. His memories of his first years were a jumble of sleeping under tables with people’s feet, or better, in a dog bed with a dog, or with some other kids one winter, all wearing their parkas in the bed. There was a salty skin-dirt smell, overlaid with sour weed and clumped hair, that still closed his throat. The smell was on some people, some kids, and he’d back away from it. He took a shower now every day. He washed his clothes. Liked the smell of ironing. The girls teased him, but they liked it too. Being clean wasn’t something he took for granted, or having his own bed. So, no, he didn’t get involved with this LaRose issue. For safety, he just eased away. But they started up again. He could hear them.

So will you give me away if you kill somebody, Mom?

That was Josette shouting.

Snow stepped forward and slapped Josette, who slapped her back. Emmaline dropped the spoon and slapped them both — she had never slapped her child, or any child, before that moment. It happened so quickly — like a scene choreographed by the Three Stooges, which was what saved it. Emmaline started crying, Josette started crying, then Snow. The three of them clung together.

I want to cut off my hand, wept Emmaline. I never slapped you girls before.

We should each cut our hands off, wailed Snow.

Then making frybread two of us will have to stand together, you know, like each use our remaining hand, pat, pat. Josette and Snow demonstrated.

Pat, pat, how pitiful, cry-laughed Emmaline.

Slowly, one by one, they came back to the stew pot that Emmaline kept on sadly stirring. Hollis had dozed off, a short nap. Coochy had wrapped small things that he had stolen months ago from each of his sisters in order to give them something on Christmas. He placed the packages in the branches. Landreaux came home with two black Hefty bags full of mittens and hats, boots, jackets, all new. Father Travis had picked them out from the mission store before anybody else had been through the donations. Hollis came out of the bedroom and helped haul the bags to the house and sort the gifts. He tried to be jovial but couldn’t. It was in his blood to give off feelings of holiday suspicion, instead of cheer, but that gave the girls reason to pick on him.

Quit making booda, the girls said to Hollis. Get your Christmas game face on and don’t tell LaRose there’s no Santa Claus.

If you see him, said Josette.

Snow slumped.

I’ll find him, said Hollis. He didn’t want to get involved but the words came out. I’ll tell him that Santa’s coming.

Hollis was not exactly handsome. His nose was big. Yet he was bitter and moody, so maybe more attractive than someone truly handsome. His hair was cut so it swept too neatly across his forehead.

He smoothed his hair to the side with the palm of his hand.

Rock it old school, said Josette when she caught him smoothing his hair that way.

She gave him her raised eyebrow, an accidental gesture that made him stare at her in fascination as she turned away.

The girls had decided to bring out the Eau Sauvage for their mom last. They did not trust Hollis or Willard, or even their dad, not to shatter the bottle with their feet. It was like that to live with guys. They just stepped on things, even gifts. Ojibwe girls, traditionally and now throwback traditionally, were taught from a young age not to step over things, especially boy things. Grandma’s friend Ignatia Thunder, their traditional go-to elder, had told them all that their power might short out the boys’ power. It was sexist, Josette said, another way to control the female. Snow semi-agreed. Emmaline went poker-faced. Maybe the Iron women weren’t a hundred percent with the rule, but they still couldn’t get themselves to forget about it.

The girls had bought weird gadgets for their brothers and dad. For the first time ever, Josette and Snow had bought colored tissue. They carefully arranged the boxes wrapped in transparent red paper. They put the box for their mother on a shelf. The glossy bow they’d bought for it shed red glitter on their hands.

What do we do with the presents for LaRose? said Snow.

They pushed aside the stuff on the big table — their beading, the jar lids of screws, the newspapers, schoolbooks — and began to eat their bowls of stew. Josette wanted to go over to the Ravich house and give the presents to LaRose. Snow said she couldn’t stand Aunt Nola because she was picky. Coochy just hung his head down and ate. Hollis looked at him and ducked his head down too. Emmaline watched them until they turned to her.

Did you make LaRose his moccasins? Coochy asked. He had been the youngest until LaRose. There was a note in his voice of something like panic, and his eyes were glossy with tears.

Every year Emmaline made each of them new moccasins out of smoked moosehide, lined with blanket scraps; sometimes the ankles were trimmed with rabbit fur. She did this while visiting her mother, or at home, while watching her favorite TV shows or sitting with her children at the table to make certain they finished their homework. She was very good at it and people bought special orders from her. Her moccasins sometimes fetched two or three hundred dollars. The family was proud of her work and only wore their moccasins inside the house. Even Hollis wore them — his feet cute with beadwork, not cool. They each had a box of moccasins — one pair for every year.

I made them, said Emmaline.

SHE MADE LAROSE his moccasins, Landreaux told his friend Randall, who ran sweat lodges and taught Ojibwe culture, history, and deer skinning in the tribal high school. Randall had been given ceremonies by elders he’d sought out and studied with — medicine people. Landreaux had demons, he said. Demons did not scare Randall, but he respected them.

It must have been something that happened to me when I was a kid but I can’t remember, Landreaux said.

That’s what everybody thinks, said Randall. Like if you suddenly remember what happened, you kill the demon. But it’s a whole hell of a lot more complicated.

Going up against demons was Randall’s work. Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

They had heated up and carried in the rocks and now the two were sitting in the lodge wearing only baggy surfer shorts. Landreaux got the tarp down and sealed them inside. Randall dropped pinches of tobacco, sage, cedar, and powdered bear root on the livid stones. When the air was sharp with fragrance, he splashed on four ladles of water and the hot steam poured painfully into their lungs. After they prayed, Randall opened the lodge door, got the pitchfork, and brought in ten more rocks.

Okay, we’re gonna go for broke, he said. Get your towel up so you don’t blister. He closed the door and Landreaux lost track of the number of ladles Randall poured. He went dizzy and put the towel across his face, then dizzier, and lay down. Randall said a long invocation to the spirits in Anishinaabemowin, which Landreaux vaguely understood. Then Randall said, Ginitam, because Landreaux was supposed to speak. But all Landreaux could think of to say was, My family hates me for giving away LaRose.

Randall thought on this.

You did right, he said at last. They’ll come to know. You remember what all the elders said? They knew the history. Who killed the mother of the first one, Mink, and what she could do. Then her daughter, her granddaughter, the next one, and Emmaline’s mom. Evil tried to catch them all. They fought demons, outwitted them, flew. Randall talked about how people think what medicine people did in the past is magic. But it was not magic. Beyond ordinary understanding now, but not magic.

LaRose can do these things too, said Randall. He has it in him. He’s stronger than you think. Remember you thought they said he was a mirage?

Gave him the name, Mirage. I know.

That’s right.

Mirage knew how to dream the whereabouts of animals, how to leave his body during a trance and visit distant relatives. A trader named George Nelson had known others who could do this and had written about it back in the eighteenth century.

Landreaux spoke haltingly. What if the elders are just a bunch of regular old people no smarter than any of us, what if. .

They are regular old people, said Randall. But they’re people who learned off their old people, right? Like here, we had the starvation year when most of our old people gave up their food. That generation died for us, eh? So we go north. Accept their words if they feel right.

But maybe they don’t know?

Quit asking dumb questions. You’ll bust your brain if you think like that. Let me ask you something. What was that boy Dusty like anyway?

Don’t ask me that.

He ain’t a footnote to your agony, bro. What was he like? Who knew that boy the best, of your family?

Landreaux finally answered.

LaRose.

So what did LaRose know about him?

Funny kid. Played adventures. The two of them had a pack of toys they made into cartoon characters. They were hilarious if you listened in on what they made up. Dusty. .

Yeah, say his name, but use the spirit world marker. Use iban.

Dusty-iban liked to draw. He was good at drawing. We got some drawings he made for us.

Of what?

Horse. Dog. Spider-Man.

Landreaux was crying steadily in gulping sobs. Randall let that go on for a while.

Don’t you cry no more. Unless it’s for that kid. Don’t you cry no more for your own pain. You put that cry energy into your family. Into doing good for Dusty-iban’s family. When I hear you cry, I hear you cry for what you did, but you quit that now. Were you high when you shot him?

The medicine crackled. No.

Were you high?

No.

Were you high?

No.

We let our people get away with shit. We shouldn’t. That’s why I ask. Randall was quiet for a long time.

You’re a good hunter. You take your shot careful, said Randall. Everybody knows you are careful and every year you bring down your supply. So I hadda ask.

Okay, said Landreaux.

I ain’t totally convinced.

Okay, said Landreaux.

You off the booze?

Yes, said Landreaux.

Pills?

Yeah.

Okay. You gotta take on faith you did right with LaRose.

What about Emmaline, though? said Landreaux.

Nola is her sister.

Half sister, said Landreaux.

There are no half sisters, said Randall.

Emmaline doesn’t like her sister.

She say that?

I can tell. And Nola can’t stand Emmaline. So we don’t get to see LaRose. Guess we assumed she’d bring him over; the boys used to play and all that.

Give them time to work it out, said Randall. Door! Oh, I forgot we ain’t got no doorman. Door! I’m calling myself. Randall threw the tarp aside. Then he brought in more rocks and dropped them off the end of his pitchfork.

So many? Landreaux was already melted.

Haha, said Randall. Let’s party. I’m gonna boil you alive.

Still, even after being poached like a frog by Randall, there was no peace. Landreaux felt worse and worse. He mourned LaRose’s stringy arms hugging him, blamed himself for making LaRose his secret, favorite child. He began taking Coochy places, everywhere, keeping the one son close. Coochy was earnest, a cloudy boy, and he took things hard. Inside, he was deeply jolted. But he was so quiet nobody knew that.

Why so quiet? Landreaux asked, once.

Why talk when Josette’s always talking?

He had a point.

Emmaline still thought about what Father Travis had said. If she wanted to, yes, she could take her son back. She wouldn’t go through the system. With social work files, always sprouting forms in triplicate, anything could happen. But always, instead of taking that step, pushing things that far, Emmaline thought of Nola’s loss, her husband’s responsibility for Dusty’s death, and she did something else. In the last few months she’d scraped bits of money for LaRose into a savings account. At other times she stitched her love into a quilt that she brought to the Ravich house. Emmaline gave the quilt to Nola, who thanked her at the door, folded up the blanket, and put it on the highest shelf of a closet. Also, every couple of weeks, Emmaline couldn’t help herself from making the special soup and frybread that her son favored. She put it on Nola’s doorstep or even into Nola’s hands, hoping that LaRose would taste her love in it. Nola tossed it out. Just before Christmas, Emmaline came back with the moccasins. Left them wrapped with LaRose’s name on them. Nola put the moccasins in a plastic box. Stuffed into that container they waited, and Nola feared them, for their woodsmoke scent held the power of creation.

On those occasions she brought offerings, Emmaline saw that her half sister knew who was in charge. When Nola opened the door, her smile was pasted on lopsided. Sometimes before accepting the food, Nola’s hands clasped and unclasped in distress. Nola’s scrupulous thank-you covered a desperation that made Emmaline turn away. In the car, she put her hand in her pocket and touched a slip of paper upon which she had written You can take him back.

One day, just before Christmas without LaRose, after dropping off the food, she couldn’t leave. Emmaline got out of the pickup and went back to the house. Maybe talk to Nola? Glimpse LaRose? She knocked, but Nola didn’t answer. Emmaline knocked harder, then so hard her knuckles stung. She knew that Nola was somewhere in the house with her son, pretending that the knocks were not Emmaline.

Inside the house, LaRose heard his mother’s voice and knew the smell of that soup which he wouldn’t taste. Nola just kept reading Where the Wild Things Are over and over, until the knocking went away. Nola’s voice was hoarse and thin.

And it was still hot, Nola said, and closed the book. Shall I read it again?

Okay, said LaRose in a tiny voice. A fuzzy wash of draining sadness covered him. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.

Is there a bitch gene? said Emmaline, walking in the door after standing outside the Ravich house, knocking.

Snow gave Josette a look and Josette said, Did my mother really say that?

Because if there is, Emmaline went on, my sister got it from her mother, who was renowned as a prime bitch.

The girls stared at Emmaline, frowning in an effort to reject their mother’s talking this way.

Marn was her name. She killed her husband and got away with it. Of course, he was the leader of a cult.

Whoa.

The girls put their hands up.

Crazy talk, Mom, said Josette.

It’s true, though, said Emmaline.

Okay, Mom, but may we remind you that you’re talking about our grandfather? Josette and Snow nodded vigorously.

What you’re saying, Mom, is way too weird. I mean a bitch is one thing, but killing your husband is out of whack. We don’t want that.

So you don’t want truth. What do you want? said Emmaline.

We want our life to get normal, duh, said Josette.

Uneventful, except for good things, said Snow.

Melodrama? That detracts.

Vocabulary words!

The girls smacked hands.

Fine, said Emmaline. I acquiesce.

MACKINNON SPOKE TO the girl in her language, and she hid her muddy face.

All I did was ask her name, he said, throwing up his hands. She refuses to tell me her name. Give her some work to do, Roberts. I can’t stand that lump in the corner.

Wolfred made her help him chop wood. But her movements displayed the fluid grace of her limbs. He showed her how to bake bread. But the firelight reflected up into her face and the heat melted away some of the mud. He reapplied it and tried to teach her to write. She formed the letters easily. But writing displayed her hand, marvelously formed. Finally — she suggested it herself — the girl went off to set snares. She made herself well enough understood. She planned to buy herself back from Mackinnon by selling the furs. He hadn’t paid that much for her. It would not take long, she said.

All this time, because she understood exactly why Wolfred had replaced the grime on her face, she slouched and grimaced, tousled her hair and smeared her features. And she picked up another written letter every day, then words, phrases. She began to sprinkle them in her talk.

For a wild savage, she was certainly intelligent, thought Wolfred. Pretty soon she’s going to take my job. Haha. There was nobody to joke with but himself.

FATHER TRAVIS ANSWERED the telephone, tipped back his chair. When he heard the name of the new bishop of the diocese, he said nothing.

No surprise.

The new bishop, Florian Soreno, would take a hard-line stance toward all the hot-button issues — this was a red state. Father Travis worked in a blue zone. Reservations were blue dots or blots, voting Democrat. The only Republican he could think of, beside himself, was Romeo Puyat. With a new bishop, Father Travis might get a Dominican with a liberation-theology bent because this bishop might want to punish such a priest by sending him to a reservation. Or perhaps a new order would take over entirely — there were so many fundamentalist orders springing up. He rather liked SSPX. Society of Saint Pius the Tenth. He missed Latin Mass and they were big on keeping the Tridentine Mass going. However, the other issues, abortion for instance, left him cold. His father had taught him that women’s business is women’s business. There was yet another possibility — church authorities still played the shell game with their pederast priests.

Getting rid of the last one had been difficult.

He himself might be reassigned, or he might suddenly have a priest here with more authority and seniority to whom he must answer. He might get a swamper for a housemate — a sick priest in the slump of a long depression. Or a whole sack of nuns might be assigned to the convent suddenly, where now it was run by an oblate group of laypersons and used as a retreat and conference center.

Or, sometimes, nothing happened. He could always hope. He looked up at the cracked plaster ceiling of his office. There was a pale-blue line on the ceiling, scraped of carpenter’s chalk. That color. It was as if she had opened a blue door in his mind.

Father Travis pulled on his coat and walked into the brilliant, dry snow. It was the time of hallowed peace. He loved Christmas and Midnight Mass. The glow of candles spiritualized the features of people who drove him nuts. Let us lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light, he would say in his sermon. And then there was that blue door. There was no shame in it, no sense that he was violating his or Landreaux’s or her vows or anything else. He could be happy in his thoughts, couldn’t he? In spite of Matthew? Not his favorite gospel. White wings rustled. He glanced around, filled with an odd joy. Brightness falls from the air.

NOLA MADE THEIR Christmas lavish, but it didn’t help. The lead sinker in her chest was leaking molten lead into her veins, slowly stopping her circulation. Her feet and hands were bone cold. She shivered in layers of fleece, sat next to the woodstove, and drank hot tea all day. Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture. She could loosen her limbs only by holding LaRose in her lap every afternoon until he slept. He napped hard and sweetness flowed into Nola. She didn’t move except to rock him back to sleep if he stirred. When he woke, she was reluctant to let him go. Then she pushed herself along and pretended around the children that she was really there instead of in the ground. She could not pretend so well with Peter, but he was obsessed the week after Christmas with what would happen on New Year’s Eve. He’d planned it all out. When the night came, he put his plan into action.

December 31, 1999. Peter stuffed enough wood into the living room bins to keep the stove going all night — he was certain that their computer-regulated electric power would fail. He filled jugs for drinking water, and pails for flushing the toilets, then turned off the water just in case the pipes froze. He made beds downstairs in the living room, where the woodstove would give off a comfortable heat. He’d bought high-loft sub-zero sleeping bags, thinking that they might have to use them all winter. In hope, he’d bought a double bag for himself and Nola. And he’d bought thick foam pads. He spread all of this attractive bedding out on the floor, and the children brought down their pillows. LaRose cradled his action creature. There was food, the battery-powered radio, the computer to watch go crazy at midnight, and card games. Nola made popcorn and she laughed at everything LaRose did. She seemed delighted, and she was, because if the world did end this would all be over. She would not have to keep pretending to get better. Any chaos that happened wouldn’t be her fault. Peter and Maggie played Go Fish, Crazy Eights, Hearts, and in a hushed, excited voice, Nola read book after book to LaRose.

Eventually, the children wormed into their puffy silken sleeping bags and fell asleep. Peter lighted candles, brought out a bottle of sparkling wine, built up the fire. He poured the amber froth slowly down the side of Nola’s champagne flute, then his own. They raised their glasses in silence. Nola pushed her hair, the slack blond curls, off her face. As they drank they looked into each other’s eyes and saw the strangers who now inhabited the bodies that had together made their son.

I wonder who you are now, Nola said.

It’s just me, said Peter, the same old me.

No it’s not. We’ll never be the same.

All right. Peter drank deeply. We’ll never be the same. That doesn’t mean we change, you know, how we are with each other. I still love you.

His words hung out there in the stillness.

I still love you, too, she said at last, forcing conviction into her voice, sipping at her wine, then suddenly draining it. More! Nola held out her glass, laughing. After all, what does it matter if we’re the same or not? It’s the end of the world! Let’s toast the end of the world.

Her face was bright and hot. She flashed her pretty, good-luck, crookedy smile. Her teeth were small and pearly. He’d always said her smile blasted happiness into a room — and it was true that when she got excited she was infectious, as cool people are when they suddenly let go. They carry others by the force of surprise. Peter filled her glass and then motioned up the stairs. She rose exalted from the sleeping bag, tousled, barefooted. They climbed the stairs together, and in their bedroom locked the door. They made love with an urgency sweet at first. But as they twined deeper they jolted down into a mean-walled, sour place.

She seemed to be trying to choke him. Her thumbs were at the base of his throat, pressing. He swiped away her arms but her hands sneaked back as claws and clenched his ass. That hurt, but so what because she slammed him into her and he drove himself until he stopped thinking. She slid out from under his chest. He let her get on top of him but then remembered — she looked frail but she could slap like a motherfucker. She knocked tears into his eyes. He caught her arms at the wrist, turned her over, forced her to kneel. When he started again, she said, Wait, you’re hurting me.

He let her go and she rolled out a foot, heel first. Tried to end things with a dirty kick, but missed. The next day there’d be a hot bruise on his thigh. Maybe he was too rough after that, except the whole time as she fought him she was coming, and coming, furiously mute, then weeping as he slowed down and finally left her.

I shouldn’t have done that, Peter whispered after a while. Are you okay? he asked when she didn’t answer. The black silence fizzed in the room. Aw, he said, okay, I’m sorry it got like that but not sorry because you were there, too, I felt it. I love you so much and maybe it could happen, we could have another baby, Nola, we haven’t talked about that and it wouldn’t replace Dusty and it wouldn’t replace LaRose and I love him too, it wouldn’t change what happened but a baby might make you feel, something, something that might help, even happy.

I’m cold, said Nola. I hate your guts.

He said nothing. After a while she dropped her head on his chest and soon her breath came, slow and even. He left her upstairs once she fell asleep. Downstairs, he pulled the covers tenderly up the throats of the sleeping children. Something made him look up. The rusty dog was on the porch watching through the sliding glass doors. To let the dog in was so simple — on this night of nights. He opened the door. The dog entered, quivering with attention. His rosy upright ears drooped slightly, but strained to undertake the meaning of his admittance.

You. . said Peter. He couldn’t talk to this dog like a regular dog.

You aren’t a regular dog, are you. You must be hungry. We had chicken, but no bones for you.

He looked down at the dog, who sat expectantly, as if he were trained.

The bones splinter, said Peter to the dog, who cocked its head, an alarming gesture of understanding.

You could choke, said Peter.

The dog’s brown eyes were riveted on Peter’s hands as he pulled meat from the chicken carcass. When Peter put down the pan of scraps, the dog lunged forward moaning with joy and bolted the food in three heavy gulps. After, the dog went straight to the children. He stood over Maggie, then LaRose, utterly still, except that his nose worked, obtaining what would seem to us a supernatural knowledge of all the children had done, eaten, touched, in past weeks. Satisfied, tail beating the air, the dog toured restlessly all around the room and sniffed every object as though to memorize its essence. When he was finished with his inventory, the dog trod out a bed for himself at the children’s feet. It was made of all kinds of other dogs — a tawny head, delicate paws, a roan coat, dark patches where eyebrows would be on a person. Peter scratched its back. The dog beamed, then made a sound that conveyed great pleasure, an unusual clucking sound, and fell asleep, stinking gently in the luscious warmth. Peter adjusted the children’s sleeping bags again and turned away. Then, like a hungry man who has waited for his meal, he poured himself a glass of whiskey and sat down before the computer. It was almost midnight. He sat through midnight. For hours afterward he kept meandering about in cyberspace. A few digital clocks in France read 1900. Circuits in a few places faltered and flickered. There was no panic. At some point, he put his head down and must have passed out. Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.

The Passage

THE DAUGHTER OF Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs.

The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles only seemed to give the drooling dog strength and he knew exactly how to pin her quickly, make her helpless.

The birds were silent. Snow was falling off the trees that day. She had scrubbed her body red with snow. She threw off everything and lay naked in the snow asking to be dead. She tried not to move, but the cold stabbed ice into her heart and she began to suffer intensely. A person from the other world came. The being was pale blue without definite form. It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makazinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens and you shall live.

THIS DOG REEKS, said Nola.

I’m going to wash him some more, said Peter. He’s kind of got a natural smell.

The dog eyed Nola adoringly, bowed to her twice, then stretched its nose tentatively toward her knee.

Don’t, said Nola to the dog. She glared into its questing eyes, and the dog sat back on its haunches, struck with wonder.

You stink, said Nola again.

The dog pantingly grinned, alive to her every word.

It had wandered outside and fought. Peter had heard other dogs yapping and howling in the woods. Some years in winter the dogs from the reservation formed packs, chased and slow-killed deer. He’d shot them down on his own land. This dog had come back with a nick in its nose, a torn tail, and an injured eye.

That one eye is going to be permanently bloodred, she pointed out.

This dog loves life, he said. I’m going to tie him up, though. Keep him in the yard.

Going to neuter him?

Peter didn’t answer.

He might have eaten a lit firecracker, see? One whole side of his lip is swollen up!

Well, he’s got a story. He’s come from somewhere, said Peter, rubbing the dog all over so it grunted with pleasure. The dog’s eyes shut in bliss; its torn lip showed sharp teeth. Peter laughed. This dog will snarl forever but his eyes are joyous, he said. Even the red one.

We’re not keeping him, Nola said.

We have to, said Peter.

Nola stiffened and left the room. The dog’s eyes followed, weak with loss.

Rolfing the dog’s ears and neck, Peter whispered, Hey, you know something! I know you know something. What you gonna tell me?

As he rubbed the dog, Peter’s thoughts drifted. His mind relaxed, and so he wasn’t upset by the words that formed in the flow of ease.

I saw Dusty that day, said the dog in Peter’s mind. I carry a piece of his soul in me.

Peter put his big windburned forehead on the dog’s forehead.

I’m not crazy, am I?

No, said the dog. These are things a normal man might think.

IN THE MIDDLE of February a south wind blew through and thawed down the snow, warmly rattled the doors and windows. Landreaux was out in his shirtsleeves pumping gas into the Corolla and didn’t notice that Peter was pulled up to Whitey’s store. When Peter came out carrying a couple of dripping cold six-packs — there they were. Landreaux turned away, frowned at the quickly rising numbers on the readout.

I know. Peter was suddenly next to him. It cost me thirty to fill the tank.

The two hadn’t spoken since Landreaux brought his son to the Ravich house. Landreaux nodded and said something neutral.

Nola took the kids to Minot, said Peter. They’re staying over. I’m batching it tonight.

He asked if Landreaux wanted to drop by.

Sure, said Landreaux, not thinking of the beer but then thinking of it as he drove the ten miles to the edge of the reservation and past, to the Ravich house. He still thought of getting drunk every day, but he’d gotten used to the thought and stood outside of it. The tires crackled in the Ravich driveway. Snow thinly frosted the clipped evergreens planted at the foundation of the house. At the sight of the still windows a choking panic grabbed Landreaux, and he almost drove away. But there was Peter in the doorway, gesturing.

Landreaux slowly got out of the car and Peter waved him through the door. The dog that their family had been feeding was standing behind Peter. It recognized Landreaux and turned away after a resonant glance. Even with the dog living there now, the house smelled of nothing. Nola would light a scentless scent-sucking candle if she whiffed an odor. Her house never smelled of people’s habits. It never smelled of stale clothing, old food, or even what she was freshly cooking because she ran a hood fan that sucked the smells right up through the roof. But nothing has a smell too, and Landreaux remembered.

He left his shoes at the door, walked across the carpeted living room, sat with Peter among the polished antiques. The living room was set off from the kitchen by a long island-type counter. Without remembering, or maybe remembering too well, Peter went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He cracked a cold beer. Sitting at the table now, he invited Landreaux to do the same. He did. Landreaux didn’t see himself from the outside the way he normally witnessed his thoughts. Somehow he’d slipped around his thoughts in that moment, and as he sat down he also took a drink. When he did that, his porous brain sponged up the action, and then at a cellular level, the substance.

Thanks, said Peter, looking at the table.

Thanks, said Landreaux, looking at the can.

They allowed a swell of emotion to envelop them. Started talking about things in general, about the people Landreaux worked for and the crisis boarding school where Emmaline was the sort of director who also ended up teaching classes, about the farm and Peter’s jobs selling lumber and at Cenex, extra jobs that Peter had taken to clear up bills, but would probably keep in order to afford to farm. They finished one beer and started on another. Four or five and Landreaux would start to feel the slide; there would be no going back. He tried to sip this one calmly but the non-present presence of his son was balling up inside him, ringing in his head. The first swell of emotion had been an ache of fellow feeling. That was quickly sliding away with the second beer. Landreaux put his broad hand up, touched his cheek. His face was pitted not with old acne scars but from a case of chicken pox that had nearly blinded him as a child. He tried to veer from what was developing between them.

Have to make sure he gets that new vaccination covers chicken pox, said Landreaux. That’s what did this.

Peter’s gaze was fixed on Landreaux’s face. Nola’s periodic furies damped down his anger. He defused her with his calm. Any irritation of his would ignite her bleak fury. So the sudden, tremendous pain below his ribs was confusing. He didn’t recognize it or want to recognize it.

Chicken pox, huh?

Yeah.

Thought you’d been sprayed in the face with buckshot, you know, by some asshole with a shotgun.

Peter was surprised to hear what came out of his mouth. Unnerved, he jumped up, let the dog out, and ripped another beer from the plastic rings. He decided he was glad he had spoken. Why not. How would Landreaux take it?

With a deep, blue dive. Taking the words down with him. Holding his breath as he went. Landreaux shut his eyes. Held his hand out. Peter slapped a can into his palm. He stood there leaking aggression. Landreaux’s eyes flew open. He jumped up and swiftly brought the can to Peter’s temple — not much of a weapon — but Peter wasn’t there. He’d dropped and hit Landreaux in a tackle, tried to pin him, but Landreaux got his knees up and Peter had to lean in to throw a punch, which gave Landreaux a chance to put a headlock on him, roll him, so it went. They smashed the table over, stood up on either side of it, mouths hanging open, eyes locked in shame, panting.

Okay, said Peter, forget the beer.

Outside, the dog was barking.

You know about me, Landreaux said.

Yeah, said Peter, righting the table. Fuck it.

Landreaux pulled a chair around and sat down, put his head in his hands.

Go ahead. Beat the fuck out of me, he said.

I wish.

The pain was still balled up in Peter but now more familiar. I could make you into a dirty drunk. I could ambush and blow you away. I could get you somehow but it wouldn’t do the thing I want. Dusty. I dream about him every night.

Even with LaRose here?

I do, and I feel guilty, I mean, I love your boy.

Landreaux relaxed at that your boy. He looked at Peter.

I’d give my life to get Dusty back for you, said Landreaux. LaRose is my life. I did the best that I could do.

They righted the chair, the table, and sat again, nodding, but they didn’t drink another beer. Peter put his hand across his face, tipped his chair back, then came back down and looked straight at Landreaux.

As far as that goes, he said carefully, some questions need to be asked.

Let’s ask the questions later, said Landreaux.

He dropped his gaze, pushing slowly away. He was disoriented, suddenly heavy with despair. He’d been waiting for something legal. Legal adoption. He got up and walked out the door. He needed to wait some more.

MRS. PEACE SMILED at the rug. The carpet still smelled like a sweet chemical bouquet. Floating in her gray velveteen recliner, with flowers blooming at her feet. She held the tin on her lap. Almost half a year had gone by without an attack, but her enemy had sneaked in. Billy inhabited her like a wave. She fought him off. The Fentanyl was at its strongest now. Agony that had squeezed her worn old body from heart to gut was releasing her, reluctantly. It didn’t like to let her go. But there, free. Her body blossomed with each easier breath. From her clear paneled doors, Mrs. Peace could see across the snow-swept yard, past a gnarled apple tree and tangled fence line, down the long swoop of field, to the cemetery.

People had started putting sun-powered lawn ornaments alongside the other mementos they left on loved ones’ graves. She and Emmaline had staked quite a few lanterns into the ground in August. A daughter who at birth had almost killed her was down there. Her mother was down there. There was a white stone, fadingly scratched. There were so many relatives and friends down the long hill, people she loved. In an hour the homes of the dead would begin glowing milkily beneath the snow.

Pain relinquished her to dreamy ease. Her mother came to visit, walking up the hill in that old fatally thin coat. She didn’t have to knock on the door, she just came through and sat down, kicking off her galoshes, very nice galoshes trimmed with plush. Curling up on the couch with the peppermint pink afghan, she said, All is calm, all is bright.

I know, said Mrs. Peace. But that yarn was supposed to be a duller and more soothing shade of pink. I misjudged the effect.

At Fort Totten boarding school, I had a dress this color in a white and blue calico print. Well, it wasn’t the dress, which was gray like all the dresses. Just the sash. We sometimes got to wear a sash or a scrap of color in our hair. Special occasions only. After all, it was military. From a military post to an industrial military school.

I still think of you every day, said Mrs. Peace. I just have these few pictures, but I memorized your pictures. I looked at you a lot.

Her mother shivered in the afghan.

Can you turn up the heat?

Here, just watch!

LaRose had a can-snatcher, an elongated grasping tool. She used it to turn the dial on the wall. Her mother cried out with pleasure.

Pretty soon that’s going to feel so good!

I’ll make you tea.

They don’t let us have tea. We had milk. Porridge and blue milk. What’s left when all the cream is skimmed off, eh? We drank that. The bell rang. It was always the bells. All we did was to the bells. Pretty soon you started hearing them all the time.

I still hear them.

Bang around in your head, eh?

Like a feast day.

Goodness, my girl. I feel that heat coming on. The cold sinks into my bones down there, like always. That first year, they took away my blanket, my little warm rabbit blanket. They took away my fur-lined makazinan. My traditional dress and all. My little shell earrings, necklace. My doll. She’s still down there in that souvenir case, eh? They sold things our family sent along with us for souvenirs. Traded them. You wonder.

What they did!

I know! With all the braids they cut off, boys’ and girls’, across the years.

There was hundreds of children from all over as far as Fort Berthold, so hundreds and hundreds of braids those first years. Where did the braids go?

Into our mattresses? We slept on our hair, you think?

Or if they burned our hair you would remember the smell.

But with our hair off, we lost our power and we died.

Look at this picture, said Mrs. Peace. Rows and rows of children in stiff clothing glowered before a large brick building.

Look at those little children. Those children sacrificed for the rest of us, my view. Tamed in itchy clothes.

These kind of pictures are famous. They used them to show we could become human.

The government? They were going for extermination then. That Wizard of Oz man, yes? You have his clipping.

LaRose drew out bits and scraps of paper, newsprint.

Here.

THE ABERDEEN SATURDAY PIONEER, 1888

BY FRANK BAUM

. . the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are Masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit is broken, their manhood effaced, better that they die than live as the miserable wretches they are.

1891

BY FRANK BAUM

. . our only safety depends upon the total extermination of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untameable creatures from the face of the earth.

Oh well, said Mrs. Peace, here we are. It’s a wonder.

This ain’t Oz, said her mother.

Looks like Oz down in your graveyard. All those green glowy lights.

No poppies there in winter.

I’ve got better stuff in here.

Mrs. Peace rummaged around. Under all of the papers and mementos in the rose tin, she kept her Fentanyl patches — white with green lettering, in translucent pouches. She was extremely careful with their use. She was supposed to keep ahead of the pain, but she didn’t like to get too cloudy. She let the pain crank her up until she could think of nothing else. Her patches gave the medicine out in a slowly timed release. The amount she took now would have killed her years ago.

Exterminate or educate.

Just take the pain away, she said.

It was good we became teachers so we could love those kids.

There was good teachers, there was bad teachers. Can’t solve that loneliness.

It sets deep in a person.

Goes down the generations, they say. Takes four generations.

Maybe finally worked itself out with the boy.

LaRose.

Could be he’s finally okay.

It’s possible.

The recliner went plushier. The air dripped with sound. Watery streams of soft noise rushed along her sides. She put out her arms. Her mother took her hands. They drifted. This is how she visited with her mother, who had died of tuberculosis like her mother and grandmother. It was a disease of infinite cruelty that made a mother pass it to her children before she died. Mrs. Peace had not died of her mother’s tuberculosis. She had been in the sanitarium in 1952, the year isoniazid and its various iterations astonishingly cured the incurable.

I was sure that I would die like you. So I tried not to get attached to anything or anyone. You are numb for years, she said to her mother, then you begin to feel. At first it is a sickening thing. To feel seems like having a disease. But you get used to sensations over time.

You were saved for a reason, eh?

Those kids, said Mrs. Peace. To knit with them, make them powwow clothes, bring them up dancing. Have our little tea parties where I put just a little coffee in their mugs of milk.

Do you ever see them now?

From time to time, the ones that lived. Landreaux, of course. And that Romeo comes around. I hear about lots of others. Successful. Not.

The two bobbed in space, still holding hands, and her mother cried out, Even I want to give you all the love I never could! I hated to die and leave you. How good that we can be together now!

NOLA DRAGGED MAGGIE to Holy Mass. While kneeling, Maggie slumped, resting her buttocks impudently on the edge of the pew. Her mother elbowed her, and Maggie slid out of reach. The sly movement triggered Nola and she struck out. In one motion, she backhanded Maggie and clawed her back into place. She’d moved with such swift assurance that Maggie gaped and plunked down. Nobody else around them seemed to notice, though Father Travis’s eye flicked as he walked up to the pulpit.

Father Travis had long ago stopped giving sermons. He just told stories. Today he told how Saint Francis preached to the birds, the fish, the faithful rabbit, and then was called in to rescue an Italian village from a ravenous wolf.

Father Travis walked out into the middle of the aisle and acted out the meeting between Saint Francis and the wolf. He described the Wolf of Gubbio, monstrous large and enthusiastic about eating people. When Saint Francis arrived at the village, he followed the wolf’s tracks into the woods and then confronted the wolf. This wolf had never been challenged, and was surprised that Saint Francis was not afraid. The wolf listened to Saint Francis and agreed to stop marauding the village. The wolf sealed its promise by placing its paw in St. Francis’s hand.

When a person speaks calmly and exudes peace, even a wolf may listen, said Father Travis.

Maggie thought, Yeah, but sometimes you have to bite.

Saint Francis brought the wolf back to the people of Gubbio and extracted mutual promises. They would feed the wolf. Every day it could make the rounds of the houses and receive a handout. In return, it would stop attacking people. Again, the wolf put its paw in Saint Francis’s hand, this time in front of the villagers. The wolf swore an oath by rolling over on its back and then bounding up on its hind legs and howling. So there was peace. The wolf died of old age. The people of Gubbio buried it beneath a tombstone and mourned its passing.

Maggie held her fury back because she wanted to hear the story, but when Father Travis finished, she moved away again, this time safely out of her mother’s reach.

People only listened to the wolf because it ate them. Maggie was certain.

EVERYONE KNEW THE stray rez dog who’d lived in the woods was Peter’s dog now. But the dog slipped off his dog run and made a polite visit to Landreaux’s place one afternoon. So when Landreaux had to go take his shift at the housing complex, where Awan waited for attention, he coaxed the dog into the back of his car, intending to drop him off at the Ravich house.

Landreaux meant to leave the dog at the door, that’s all. But Peter answered, and after he took the dog back he abruptly spoke.

We should finish that conversation.

I’m late, said Landreaux.

Won’t take long, said Peter. Can you come in? Five minutes?

Landreaux hunched his shoulders, made to kick off his boots at the door.

Nah, don’t worry, said Peter.

Landreaux sat down at the table, touched the edge. He didn’t want to speak, to bring up the thing he dreaded. He could feel the tension bubbling up inside, the quickened pump of his heart.

The agreement, whatever we call it, Peter started.

Landreaux just nodded, staring at his fingers.

The question is, said Peter.

Landreaux’s heart just quit.

The question is, said Peter. What’s it doing to him?

Landreaux’s heart started beating again.

What’s it doing to him, he weakly said.

He’s sad, said Peter. Missing his family. Can’t understand. You’re right there down the road. I catch his face in the rearview when we pass. He’s so quiet, just looking at his old house.

This was all Peter could stand to tell. About the muffled crying, nothing. About LaRose beating his head with his hands, nothing. About his secret questions whispered only to Peter, Where is my real mom?, he couldn’t tell.

Landreaux took in what Peter did say, then spoke. Feel like I used him to take it off me. Traditional ways. Fuck. This isn’t the old days. But then again there was reason in it. I wanted to. .

Landreaux trailed off. Help, thought Peter.

I think it does. I know it does. Help. As long as we’re with LaRose we’re thinking about him, and we love him. He’s a decent boy, Landreaux, you’ve raised him right. Him being with us helps Nola. Helps Maggie. It does help. . but what’s it doing to him? I mean, he’s holding Nola together. Big job. Meanwhile this is probably tearing Emmaline apart.

Oh, said Landreaux, she hides it.

Nola doesn’t hide it, said Peter. You can see it everywhere. He gestured, jerky with anxiety, around the area — living, dining, kitchen. Both men dropped into their own thoughts. An itchy claustrophobic feeling had been gathering in Landreaux. This feeling was stirred up whenever he entered a house or building that was aggressively neat. He had already felt that here — life consumed by order. Also in Landreaux’s past there were the buzzers, bed checks, whistles, bells, divided trays, measured days of boarding school. There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.

I can’t move anything, said Peter. She puts it back. She’s got a mental tape measure. She can tell when anything is changed in the slightest. Believe me, she knew we tipped the table over.

Landreaux nodded.

I’d like to. . switch that off in her, said Peter.

Then felt disloyal. After all, Nola had moved into the Ravich house, fairly new, but also filled with things that his parents and grandparents had owned. Her meticulous care of these objects comforted him.

I mean if she could just let go sometimes, he added.

You’d like her to be happy again, said Landreaux.

Happy? Peter said the word because it was an odd, archaic word. She gets mad at Maggie, that’s the worst, but really, she’s done nothing but try. She’s a good mother. At first I tried to bring LaRose back to you guys. I thought what you did was all wrong, thought she would get better without him. Then I realized if I brought him back, that would kill her.

Landreaux thought of Emmaline wretchedly bent over in the sweat lodge.

Still, it’s LaRose, said Peter. His breath rasped. His heart sounded in his ears. He knew what he was going to say would make Nola cry in that shrill animal keening way she went out to the barn to do, after the kids were sleeping, hoping she could not be heard. It’s LaRose, said Peter. We have to think of him. We should share him. We should, you know, make things easier between us all.

Oh, said Landreaux.

As if the lid had lifted off his brain he blazed with shock and light. He couldn’t speak. Weakness assailed him and he put his head down on the table. Peter looked down on his parted hair, the long tail of it, the loose power of Landreaux’s folded arms. A sinuous contempt gripped him and he thought of the rapture he would feel for an hour, maybe two hours, after he brought down his ax on Landreaux’s head. Indeed, he’d named his woodpile for his friend, and the mental image was the cause of its growing size. If not for LaRose, he thought, if not for LaRose. Then the picture of the boy’s grief covered his thinking.

After Landreaux had left, Peter lay on the living room carpet, staring at the ceiling fan. Hands on his forehead, stomach whirling with the blades. He wasn’t a man to make friends, and it was hard, this thing with Landreaux. Peter was six foot two, powerful because he worked the farm, but weak, too, in the ankles, in the knees, in the wrists and neck. Wherever one part of his body met up with another part, it hurt. Still, it was his method to suck it up. High school coaches had taught him that. This was his family’s farm before the family died off, except for one now Floridian brother he’d bought out. Peter’s family were Russian-German immigrants, there long enough to have picked buffalo bones off the land.

When he is feeling well, Peter throws LaRose and Maggie in the air. Falling, they catch the smile on his cool, Slavic face. He rises at 5:00 a.m. and goes to bed at midnight. He works those other jobs, plus the farm, yet there is so much left over. Nola, he met in Fargo. They both went to NDSU and it was a surprise they’d never run into each other in small-town Pluto — a raw little place with a few old buildings, a struggling grocery, some gift shops, a Cenex, and a new Bank of the West. Peter’s family had farmed outside of town and Nola’s mother, Marn, had lived there as a child — they sometimes visited the land she had leased out. Once things became too difficult after Billy Peace died, she had moved with the kids to Fargo. Made them go by their second names because of certain people.

From the beginning, Peter was crazy about Nola. She was tensile and finely made. Her hair was dirty blond, though she bleached it brighter. It turned brownish in the winter if she let it go, exactly his shade. Her face was cheerleader-cute and dainty, but her eyes were slant and calculating. She was elusive, sliding away into her thoughts. No matter how much energy he expended he couldn’t catch her. He couldn’t even find her when she was right in front of him. Sometimes her merciless dark eyes gave nothing back. Her face shut. She was a blank wall, fresh painted. He groped to find a secret hinge. It sprung sometimes in bed and she was alive to him with radiant warmth, her face rosy and gentle, her eyes merry with affection. That was real, wasn’t it? He couldn’t tell anymore.

How would he give her the news? The plan that he and Landreaux had agreed upon. Sharing the upbringing of LaRose — a casual arrangement month by month that the men would set up, it being too loaded otherwise. He would tell her carefully. He would tell her in the barn. Then Nola could react however. Peter had become adept at maintaining an inner equilibrium during the screaming, shouting, foul shouting, rage, sorrow, misery, fury, whimper-weeping, fear, frothing, foaming, singing, praying, and then the ordinary harrowing peace that followed.

Sometimes now in the ordinary peace they made love. It wasn’t mean like the first time. He was not forgiven, but he was accepted. As an asshole, maybe, but one who would not hurt her again. Okay, slug me, he had told her every time she was on top. No thanks, she always said, it will make us even. Their love was quiet, maybe tender, maybe odd or maybe fake. She hummed while she sucked his cock. But now she hummed actual tunes. The next day he’d remember the melody as sly and mocking, though he couldn’t name the words. Her glow of sweet responsive warmth sank into him like radiation. Sometimes it strengthened him. Sometimes he felt it poisoning his bones.

After he and Landreaux spoke of raising LaRose together, it was as if she knew. Nola came to Peter deliciously needy. Afterward, she nestled against him, pushing him around to get comfortable. No way he was going to tell her then. Maybe in the morning, he thought. After Maggie went to school.

You dove, he said. He stroked her shoulder all one way, like feathers.

A mean dove. Who will peck out your heart, she said.

That would hurt.

I can’t help myself. Will you stay with me, she said, suddenly, if I go crazy?

There was desolation in her voice, so he tried to joke.

Well, you already are crazy.

He felt tears on his chest. Oh, he’d gone too far.

In a good way. I love your crazy!

How come you’re not crazy?

I am, inside.

No, you’re not. You’re not crazy. How can you not go crazy? We lost him. How can you not go crazy? Don’t you fucking care?

Her voice rose sharper, louder.

You don’t fucking care! You cold bitch, you Nazi. You don’t care!

Hey, he said, holding her. Both of us can’t go crazy. At the same time, anyway. Let’s take turns.

She went silent, then abruptly laughed.

Bitch. Nazi.

She laughed harder. Her laughing slipped a bolt in Peter, and then they were both laughing in a sick way, both unhinged again with the same first anguish, both weeping into each other’s hair, snot dripping in the sheets.

You’re still my dove, he said, later on. I’ll never stop loving you.

But she terrified him, freezing his love, and he could hear the death of certainty in what he said. The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.

Later still, waking in the dark, he put his hand on her skin, sleepily wishing his strange old wish, that he could dissolve into her, be her, that they could be one creature rocking in the dark.

Yes, wearily, as he drifted again toward sleep. All this and he still had to give her the news tomorrow. Not in the house where LaRose could hear, but out in the barn. It might drive her dangerously past crazy, at first, to share LaRose, but it had to be. He couldn’t bear the weird indecency of what he felt they were doing to the child.

Nola was fine when he told her and fine for days after. She’d expected it. She was all right, until she saw the mouse, not that she was afraid of it. But when you saw one, that meant ten thousand had already invaded. It was in the entryway to the garage. She cornered and tried to stomp it, but the mouse popped from under her shoe. That steamed her up. She was not alone at the house that day but Maggie and LaRose were out in the yard. She had just made sure. They were not allowed to leave the yard and knew she would check on them every fifteen minutes. Nola stood in the little mudroom between the house and the garage. She rarely went into the garage — it was Peter’s place, his workshop. She hardly drove anywhere, but when she did he moved the car out for her. Since he’d taken the extra jobs, he did not spend much time out in the garage.

She entered and was hit immediately, loathsomely, with the sour fug of mice. She backed out, stood in the entry gulping fresh air, then swallowed a giant breath, flipped the lights on, and walked back in. There was a swirling sound, a sense of invisible motion. Tiny black mouseshit seeds covered Peter’s workbench. The bucket of rags. She ran back out to the entryway, breathed, saved another deep breath, and walked in again. Maybe there was grain in the bottom of the bucket. Something had drawn them. Maybe he’d left some of his prep food unsealed. But everything looked fairly neat because he wasn’t a man to make a mess, thank god, even in his own space. She opened the first of the bank of lockers that he used to stash his tall tools — the long-handled clippers, his ax, spades, and the small shovels. What she saw made her forget she was holding her breath.

On the locker’s top shelf, there was a cardboard gilt cake plate, lots of mouseshit, and birthday candles, nibbled. Same thing in the next locker, the next and next, except in one there was her good yellow Tupperware container. She had missed that container. The mice hadn’t gotten to the cake inside, although a few squares that Peter had eaten out of duty were missing. She’d lightly tinted the frosting yellow, like the container, and made some flowers out of purple icing. It wasn’t a complicated cake. It had the children’s names on it. She pulled it out and held it for a while. Then she lifted out a light, dry piece, touched her tongue to it, and took a bite. It tasted of nothing. She stood cradling the yellow container on the curve of her left arm, and ate the rest of the cake, the flowers, the names, even the black-tipped candles that discouraged the mice. She licked her finger and pressed up the crumbs. When the yellow container was entirely clean, she walked back into the kitchen and washed it in hot, soapy water. The sugar would jangle her nerves, she thought, but it didn’t. It slowed her heart. A dopey, fuzzy wash of pleasure covered her and she nearly blanked out before she made it to the couch.

Maggie and LaRose came inside an hour later, hungry, wondering why she hadn’t checked on them, and found her lying on her back, looking severe, like she was dead. Her mouth was slightly open. Maggie put her fingers near to check for breath.

Maggie made a funny skulking gesture, and LaRose ducked his head and tiptoed away. They removed two spoons from the cutlery drawer. Then Maggie pulled the door of the freezer open and silently removed a carton of strawberry Blue Bunny. They eased out the door and ran to their hideout in the barn — a warm corner where they could flick on Peter’s space heater. There they ate the ice cream. Afterward, they buried the box, the spoons too, out back in the fresh snow. They were passionate about ice cream.

ROMEO PUYAT ENTERED the Dead Custer and saw the priest sitting on a barstool. Father Travis was the only priest in reservation history who actively went out and trawled the dive bars. He seemed to enjoy performing as an actual fisher of men. He’d sit next to a gasping walleye and even buy him or her a beer to set the hook. He liked to catch real fish, too. His tactics there were the same. You got to catch them in the weeds, he said. To the weak I became weak, that I might gain the weak. I became all things to all men, that I might save all. If Father Travis had a tattoo it would be the words of the apostle Paul. He had nearly become a drunk to catch the drunks, too, but that was over. He now ran fierce AA meetings in the church basement.

Although Father Travis had never quite submerged into heavy drinking, ten years ago he’d seen where things were going — that lonely beer turning to a six-pack and soon the addition of whiskey shots to render him unconscious. He was surprised at how hard it was to quit, so he had some sympathy, but he hid it and was ruthless with his drunks. Even ruthlessly prayerful. If someone fell off the wagon or got unruly in the Dead Custer, he would take that person outside to pray. Romeo Puyat had prayed twice, hard, face against the wall where Father Travis had slammed him, before they’d become friends. Father Travis had already spotted him and said hello.

There was coffee. Virgil served in the morning, but besides the coffee no hard liquor, only beer. Romeo sourly accepted a sour cup of the weak, lukewarm stuff.

MAKADE MASHKIKI WAABOO, a scrawled sign on the pump carafe.

Black medicine water, said Romeo. Howah. So you watch the news last night? He and Father Travis were both CNN junkies. Father Travis was stirring into his own cup a long stream of hazelnut cream powder from a cardboard carton.

What brings you down here? Father Travis took a careful sip as if the coffee were actually hot.

I heard McCain on Leap Day, said Romeo. He told the televangelists to fuck a dead sheep, uh, not in so many words. Then what he said about pandering to the agents of intolerance? Falwell? Robertson? My man, said Romeo, punching air.

Romeo had a caved, tubercular-looking chest, scrawny arms, a vulturine head, and perpetually stoked-up eyes. His hair had started falling out and his ponytail was a limp string. He flipped the string behind him with the flat of his hand, as though it were a lush rope. The day was bright. He had hoped to start the morning with beer to dim the sunshine, but of course he couldn’t do that in front of his sponsor.

I’ve been following that story, said Father Travis.

Waiting for our maverick to make his move.

So what are you up to?

I’m on my way to work, said Romeo.

That’s a new one, said Father Travis.

Romeo glanced over at Virgil, who was wiping down the other end of the bar, not watching. Another customer, on the other side of Father Travis, asked the priest a question. While his back was turned, Romeo rummaged in the Styrofoam cup that customers paid into for the coffee. It was labeled 25 cents. The cup was over halfway full of change, mainly quarters. Romeo took a dollar from his pocket as if to change it. He then transferred all the change in handfuls from the cup into his pocket. He put the dollar in the cup and set it on the counter. Father Travis turned back to Romeo and said, I never see you at Mass.

Exhaustion, said Romeo.

Oh? Where you working now?

Same place. Here and there. Substitute sanitation engineering. Maintenance, you know.

Maintenance could mean anything. He could be maintaining a healthy supply of substance. Father Travis took the long view with Romeo. He was working on him, dropping tiny stones into the pond.

Romeo was wearing a lurid purple mock turtleneck and a black zip hoodie printed with tiny skulls that matched the tiny skulls tattooed around his neck.

Like the work?

There’s a glass bottom to it, said Romeo, shaking his head. I can see the fish down there eating the shit. They’re the bottom-feeders. You know me, right? Romeo smiled. His tiny brown teeth ached but he poured some sugar into the coffee and watched the oily stuff swirl around a red plastic stirring stick.

Yeah, I know you, said Father Travis.

Then you know I don’t travel with the top of the food chain. I don’t eat top shelf. Bottom-feeder, like I said. I can’t talk to the high-class Indians around here. Like Landreaux. He twirls the pipe and all, thinks he’s a medicine man like Randall. That’s how they get the women. With that old Indian medicine. Emmaline’s witched, you know. He gave his usual two-finger salute as he got up to leave, and asked.

Did you hear what Landreaux said about you?

Don’t try that alkie trick on me, said Father Travis, laughing.

If you don’t want to know. . Romeo playacted hurt. Never mind.

Romeo lunged out the door, pocket sagging from the weight of the change. He crossed the street to Whitey’s Hot Bar, and emptied his pocket of the coffee change. He came out four dollars ahead.

Slice a sausage pizza, donut, Mountain Dew, he said to Snow behind the counter. How’s your dad?

THE ONE PSYCHOLOGIST for a hundred miles around was so besieged that she lived on Xanax and knocked herself out every night with vodka shots. Her calendar was full for a year. People who couldn’t get on it went to Mass instead, and afterward visited Father Travis in the parish office.

I’m scared, said Nola, picking at her pale rose nail polish.

Father Travis had a Pre-Cana class in half an hour. His desk was heavy oak, from the old parochial school. His legs were stretched out long underneath. Instead of a desk chair, he sat in a fold-out camping chair with a mesh cup holder — it held his insulated thermos coffee cup; it used to be just right for a beer. Sunlight filled the south windows. The papers on his desk were dazzling. The light reflected up; his pale eyes shimmered.

Mrs. Ravich, said Father Travis gently, don’t be afraid. The worst has happened. And now you’ve been given two children to cherish. LaRose and Maggie.

We are sharing him now. I mean LaRose. If they take him back I’m scared, scared of what I’ll do.

Do?

To myself, said Nola softly. She looked up in appeal, mistily. There was something disturbing in her doll-sweet prettiness.

Father Travis shifted slightly back in his chair. The snake of the livid purple scar slid up his neck.

He was careful with Nola. Kept her on the other side of his desk. Kept the door open. Pretended he didn’t quite understand that she gave off the wrong vibe.

Or if he noticed, as he noticed, a detail that might stab his sleep. Like the shadow of her black bra lurking underneath the thin cotton of her shirt.

Are you planning to harm yourself? Father Travis asked, blunt but kind, trying to stay neutral.

She backpedaled, pouted out her lips, manufactured a startled look. Her gaze flickered away as she realized the priest might call Peter.

That’s not what I meant?

Father Travis took a drink of coffee. He stared at her from under his brows. He couldn’t tell how much of what she said was bullshit. Suicide to him seemed an affront to his friends who had died in Beirut. They had wanted to live, made the most of their lives, died for nothing — except he hadn’t. So maybe he was still on this earth to honor 241 lost destinies. This thought hardened his emotions. His fist clenched and unclenched.

Let’s talk about Maggie.

What about her?

Father Travis frowned steadily and Nola dropped her eyes like a sullen girl.

She seems to be adjusting. They all are. I am the only one not adjusting. I came to talk about myself.

Okay, let’s talk about you as the mother of Maggie. If you in any way are self-destructive, you’ll take her down with you, Nola. Do you get that?

Nola cocked her head. She looked ready to stick out her tongue. This was going horribly, horribly, the priest treating her like an appendage to her family. Like a nothing. Not listening.

I don’t really want to talk about her, Father Travis!

Why?

She’s oppositional. Nola’s face worked. Suddenly she began to cry, groping for a tissue. Father Travis pushed the roll of towels at her. She choked on her tears; they became too real. It could be that Maggie was the key to her unhappiness, her inability to process the grief. She’s a little bitch, Nola whispered into the paper towel.

Father Travis heard.

Nola shook the tears from her eyes and cleared her face. I’m sorry, Father. Maybe things should feel normal. Maybe I should be doing normal things. I should get used to the way things are. Accept and accept. Stop thinking about Dusty.

Father Travis got up and walked around the desk.

It’s normal to think about Dusty, he said.

He stood behind her and spoke at the fluffy top of her head. It was perhaps here that he should have held back, waited. But Nola’s fake flirtatiousness felt like mockery.

It’s not normal to do what you did at Mass, he said. You struck Maggie.

She turned hotly. I did not!

Father Travis stared her down, but it was difficult. Her prettiness was a deflecting foil. She was tougher than his AA crowd.

If Peter comes to me about your treatment of Maggie, if Maggie comes herself, if anybody from the Iron family, or a teacher, anyone, comes to me about it? I’ll go to Social Services.

You really would do that?

Nola spoke sobbingly, but her face tightened in rage. She bolted up with such a slick, sudden movement that her breast bobbed into Father Travis’s fingers. He flinched as if scorched.

Nola stepped backward, her wide eyes marveling.

I don’t think you meant what you just said, about Social Services, Father Travis. I’m going to pretend you didn’t touch my bosom. Nola dimpled, eyes hard.

He looked at her and did something he was later ashamed of. He laughed. Bosom? He shooed her out, breaking into guffaws.

Hey Stan! he yelled into the hallway. The church janitor turned, broom in hand. Listen! Mrs. Ravich is going to pretend I tried to cop a feel.

Yeah, okay, Stan said, and kept sweeping.

You’re not the first who tried that, said Father Travis when she turned to him, furious, injured. You should know I don’t touch anybody like that. I am not one of those kinds of priests.

She began to weep for real, then tottered away from him bowlegged in her high heels.

LANDREAUX AND EMMALINE’S house contained the original cabin from 1846, built in desperation as snow fell on their ancestors. It satisfied them both to know that if the layers of drywall and plaster were torn away from the walls, they would find the interior pole and mud walls. The entire first family — babies, mothers, uncles, children, aunts, grandparents — had passed around tuberculosis, diphtheria, sorrow, endless tea, hilarious and sacred, dirty, magical stories. They had lived and died in what was now the living room, and there had always been a LaRose.

After a time, an extension had been built onto the original cabin. Those log huts had become one house during the 1920s, when Emmaline’s grandfather had bought board lumber, sided the house, then shingled it under one roof. During the fifties a lean-to built alongside the house was insulated and became a set of bedrooms. Up until the 1970s, they had used an outhouse, hauled water, washed with a wringer washer, tubs, a washboard. The bathroom and a tiny laundry room completed the house.

During the next ten years, Emmaline had lived there with her mother. When there were too many children and Emmaline had her degree, Mrs. Peace had moved into the Elders Lodge. From her small bedroom, where Emmaline and Landreaux now slept, a door led into the bathroom. Josette and Snow took long baths there and did their complex beauty routines, sending their brothers to the old outhouse when they banged on the door.

The kitchen and living room, the oldest parts of the house, still bore the fifties wallpaper. It rippled under layers of paint — first dark green, then light green, then a blue-gray color chosen by Snow. It was never approved of by Josette, so she got her way with the bargain wallpaper in their shared bedroom — bouquets of lavender flowers tied up with floating white ribbons. Nobody had ever thought about the paint in the boys’ room — it was ancient red papered over with ripped posters of Ninja Turtles, Sitting Bull, Batman, Tupac, Chief Little Shell, Destiny’s Child, and The Sixth Sense.

Back during the eighties the entire house had levitated. Jacked up, set on top of a cinder-block foundation, it was freed of creeping rot and damp. It became a real house then, with a narrow crawl space under. When Emmaline married Landreaux, he built a small deck to formalize the front entrance — a landing big enough for two lawn chairs and a flowerpot that sprouted grass. Once this was accomplished, the house looked suddenly like many houses and Landreaux imagined the two of them getting old there, sitting on that deck, watching the occasional car pass through a rift in the trees beside the road, waiting for their children, then their grandchildren, to exit the school bus and climb toward the house through the grassy wildflowered ditch, across the strip of beat-down weeds, or now, in winter, up the plowed frozen gravel.

It will be all right. We will get old here together after all.

This was Landreaux’s thought the first time Peter dropped off LaRose. They would be together through spring and summer into the dog days, when the house heated through, and the old logs deep inside gave off the earthen scent of loam.

Landreaux opened the door and LaRose ran straight past him, clutching his stuffed creature, shouting for his mom. Landreaux turned back to wave good-bye, but Peter had quickly swung back out onto the road. Landreaux closed the aluminum storm door and then pushed the wooden door shut behind it. To see LaRose and Emmaline fly together would hurt, so he bent over by the mud rug and took a long time pairing up the scattered shoes and setting them in lines. When he finally came to them, his long arms dangling, they were talking about how to use the potato peeler.

LaRose sat down at the table by the window, in feeble winter sunlight. The edges of the storm window were thick with frost. Steam had frozen in gray fuzz upon the sides and sills. He peeled the potato skin away from himself, bit by skimpy bit, onto a plastic plate. Emmaline shook chunks of meat in a bag with flour, then pinched up each chunk and dropped it carefully into hot grease. The cast-iron skillet was smooth and light from fifty years of hard use. Her mother had left it.

Landreaux sat across the table and opened out the rest of the newspaper. The rustling it made caused him to notice his hands were lightly trembling.

Snow and Josette pushed through the door first. Willard and Hollis were hauling all of the gym bags. Everything scattered into piles at the door. The girls ran to LaRose and grabbed him, knelt by the kitchen chair dramatically weeping. The older boys slapped LaRose’s palm.

We saved your bunk for you, man, said Hollis.

Yeah, I tried to sleep there and he slammed me off onto the floor, said Coochy. It’s all yours now.

He’s sleeping here! Here in his own house! Josette moaned.

You knew that, said Snow.

LaRose smoothed their hair as they competition-wept.

Mii’iw, said Landreaux.

The sisters sniffed and looked redeemed, like a light had been restored inside of them. They were so happy they didn’t know how to show it without seeming fake. The girls sat down to do the carrots.

You’re cutting too fat.

No, I’m not. Look at the potatoes.

Proportion, Josette.

Don’t be oblique.

They had acquired a list of SAT words from a teacher who liked them both. Most teachers liked them because they studied. They were relieved to finish out their volleyball season. The games were an hour, two hours away. They took all night. So did Hollis’s and Willard’s basketball games. Landreaux and Emmaline took turns driving them because the bus added on the hours. Besides, they made their children study in the car in the backseat with a flashlight. How did they know to do this? They had learned from Emmaline’s mother. This sort of devotion was not from Landreaux’s side. His parents had been alcoholics with short lives.

ROMEO PUYAT REALLY did have a job — in fact, several jobs. His intermittent sub-assistant maintenance position at the tribal college kept his bottom-feeder jobs viable. He did a lot of reading at the tribal college between carpet shampoos and window polishes. He was hoping to move to another venue, like the tribal hospital, but people kept those jobs forever. Anyway, his official job fed his second jobs the way a big fish feeds a school of little fish — with waste and wasted food.

Romeo’s second jobs, though unofficial, maybe even volunteer, were lucrative and multi-aspected. For one thing, he picked up and disposed of the hazardous waste usually contained in medication bottles and prescribed by the Indian Health Service doctors. Nobody had hired or invited him to do this — but it had become a part of his way of life. When cleaning at his venue, he went to great lengths to hang around each classroom as long as possible in order to check for medications that might have mistakenly been left in handbags. On a volunteer basis, he even removed the hazardous waste that accumulated outside the other buildings, especially when he visited the hospital. To the casual eye it might look as if he was trawling for cigarette butts. But although it was a fact that he could rely on finding a lightly smoked cigarette outside certain doorways (tossed out in haste from the smoke-free environment), his mission was more far-reaching. Part of his job was, in fact, more in the line of clandestine work. Someone at the bar, maybe it was the priest, had even referred to Romeo once as the reservation’s information specialist. He thought that true. He was a spy, but a freelancer. Nobody ran him, he ran his one-man operation for his own benefit.

He had his methods. He came by lots of important information by busying himself around the tribal college coffeepot, or by standing outside the doors of teacher coffee rooms, or just sitting in the social areas acting invisible. On a rare occasion or two, he had been ignored as he weeded the grassy scarp in the shadow of the on-call ambulance crew. They knew everything about every catastrophe that happened, things that never made it out into the public. Romeo had heard about deaths where a suicide was covered up so the corpse could be blessed and buried by the church. He’d found out about botched abortions and suspicious deaths of newborns that looked almost like SIDS. He knew how people overdosed, on what, and how hard the crew fought to bring them back. When it was time to let them go. All this information kicked around in his head. It was good to know these things. In fact, Romeo had decided that information, long of reach, devastating, and, as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power. So there was that.

Also, Romeo went through trash. Pharmacy trash was his specialty. The trash was usually shredded and the Dumpsters locked, but Romeo had a certain pharmacy employee who “belonged” to him as the result of information. Every few days he could spirit away a couple of bags and stuff them into the trunk of his car.

Romeo occupied a condemned disability apartment in the condemned tribal housing complex nicknamed Green Acres — built unfortunately over toxic landfill that leaked green gas. Romeo was immune to the noxious air that seeped up between the cracks in the linoleum. Mold, also, black or red, never bothered him. If smells got strong, he would lift new car fresheners from Whitey’s — mango was his favorite. His apartment decor was centered around a fake year-round Christmas tree. The foil tree was decorated with the mango car fresheners. His walls displayed photographs tacked into the softened drywall. There was a television, a mini-fridge, a boom box, a mattress, two grubby polyester sleeping bags, and a beautiful handmade diamond willow lamp with a broken shade like a tipped hat.

In the light from his lamp, on a captain’s chair torn from a wrecked van, Romeo went through the contents of the bags. All he could wish for was there on paper — discarded printouts, labels, prescription script, pharmacist’s notes — that his information-bought informant had failed to shred. Within these piles, he found what drugs everybody in the entire community was on and which, for their mighty highs, could be pilfered by close relatives. It was there that Romeo found out who was going to die and who would live, who was crazier than he was, or by omission, sane and blessed with health. He kept track of his calculations on a scratch pad — drug, dosage, refill dates, how the patient should take the medicine. Though never in any case in Romeo’s file did the doctor recommend that a patient crush to powder and inhale a single medication, that was often his preferred method of delivery.

Tonight, the words palliative care appeared again. He kept anything with those words in a special paper-clipped pile. Also discarded in the bag was a bonus feature. His favorite section — the tribal newspaper’s obituary page. He matched several enticing prescriptions to one of the names, then noted the funeral would be tomorrow.

At 9:45 the next morning, Romeo stopped at the grocery, invested in a pound of stew meat, and then drove to church. He parked at the edge of the lot next to a pickup with a gas cap that could be easily pried up with a screwdriver. He sat in his car until everyone had entered the church, then quickly siphoned into his own car more than enough gas to carry him to the home of the deceased and back again. It was six miles out, and he got there within fifteen minutes.

Romeo pulled up next to the house, went right up to the front door, knocked. The big outside dogs were barking wildly, but he threw down a few bits of meat for them to argue over. The little inside dogs barked in the house entry. Nobody else answered and it was a cheap key lockset from Walmart. He pried the worn bolt gently from the frame with his flat-head screwdriver, entered, threw down a few more pieces of stew meat. The dogs wagged their tails and followed him straight to the bedroom. The TV tray table beside the bed held a few amber plastic bottles, which he examined. He took one. There was a bedside table with a half-open drawer. Bingo. Three more bottles, one entirely full. In the bathroom, he went carefully through the medicine cabinet, examining each medication with a frown. He smiled at one and shook it, pocketed three more. No need to be greedy. It was 10:30 now. He fixed the lock so it wouldn’t fall off and left. And there was still half a pound of meat in his pocket.

Back at the funeral by 10:55, he rolled the prescriptions in a plastic bag and stashed them under the backseat. The meat too. He took a small dose of Darvocet and entered the church silently. Everyone was focused up front, on the gathered pallbearers. As they carried out the body, he put his hand on his heart. To save gas, he hitched a ride to the cemetery.

After the sad burial, everybody cried in relief. Romeo rode back to the church and followed the mourners downstairs to the funeral lunch. There, he ate his fill. He drank weak coffee and talked to his relatives and their relatives. He stayed to the end of things, drank more coffee, ate sheet cake, took home leftovers stacked precariously on paper plates. He accepted with a sad little nod the program featuring the picture of a man who was smiling into the camera and holding an engraved plaque that must have honored him. Once back in his apartment, Romeo used the stiff paper to neaten and fix his first two lines.

Where to, my man? he said to the universe.

Romeo sniffed up the lines and fell back in the captain’s chair. Away he traveled safe in the backseat, comfy in the shaved gray plush. His companions, the photographs on his wall, smiled into the faces of lost photographers. Some were school photos, one was of Emmaline and her mother, his beloved teacher, Mrs. Peace. There was Landreaux and two other boys — both dead now. A smudged picture of Star hoisting a beer. Hollis, several photographs from grade school, one from high school, one of the two of them together. Romeo and Hollis. Much cherished. There was a long ago clipped yellowed newspaper wedding picture of Emmaline and someone with Landreaux’s body and a scratched-out face. Also, there were people whose names he’d forgotten. Romeo now lifted off. Floated up through the popcorn ceiling and the black mold. Up through the asphalt shingles flapping on the roof. On the other side of the reservation town his fellow traveler, Mrs. Peace, passed him in space. She laid her hand on his shoulder, the way she’d done to boys in school. He ducked, though she had never struck him. He always ducked when someone gestured too quickly. Reflex.

Hello, beauty

NOLA CAME TO weekday Mass and sat down in Father Travis’s office afterward, waiting for him. He was often detained in the hallway. Sure enough, Nola heard someone talking now. Father Travis was listening, dropping in an occasional question. The two voices were figuring out some repair detail on the basement wall. Or maybe the windows. Cold was threading in, then spring would bring seepage, mud, snakes. There had always been snakes around and sometimes inside the church. Several places in the area and on the Plains, into Manitoba, were like that. The snakes had ancient nests deep in the rocks where they massed every spring and could not be driven out.

Nola had never been afraid of snakes. She drew them to her. Here was one now — a gentle garter snake striped yellow with a red line at the mouth. Hello, beauty. The snake curved soundlessly under a shelf of books and pamphlets, then stopped, tasting the air. I might as well talk to you, thought Nola. He’s not coming and I don’t think he wants to see me. Thinks I’m weak. I’m alone with this, anyway. I don’t like where my thoughts go but I can’t argue them down all of the time, can I? Maggie will be all right, after, she’ll just flourish away. LaRose will be so relieved. Peter is becoming love-hate for me, you know? He’s getting on my last nerve. I know I shouldn’t sleep so much. Who would notice an old green chair? Snakes notice. You, or the one in my iris bed when I was putting them to sleep, the irises. When you’re thinking of not being here, everything becomes so fevered, fervent? And the sun comes in. Strikes in. To be alive for that, just to see it striking through a window in the afternoon. A warm light falling on my shoes. And the steam comes on, hissing in the pipes. That sound’s a comfort. Maybe I’m not seeing properly. No, there is not a snake underneath that shelf, it’s just a piece of dark nylon rope.

Nola!

I’m just waiting here. I thought you’d maybe have time.

Father Travis stood in the doorway. It was disturbing that she’d showed up after she’d tried to blackmail him, he thought. You’d think she’d have better sense. Meaning she might be serious about suicide. He should stop comparing normal people to lost Marines. And he should never have laughed.

I’m leaving the door open, see? Don’t pop your breast at me again, okay?

I won’t, Nola said.

How are you?

Better, not better.

Father Travis sighed and tore off a piece of paper toweling, slid it across the top of his desk. Nola reached out, caught it up, and put it to her face.

I don’t like where my thoughts go, she sorrowed.

I’ve heard everything, said Father Travis.

I thought that piece of rope underneath your shelf was a snake.

They both looked; there was nothing.

Probably there was a snake, said Father Travis. They like the steam pipes.

Of course they do. She smiled. I don’t know why I thought it was a rope.

Father Travis waited for her to say more. The steam pipes clanged and hissed.

A rope, he said. Why?

I have no idea.

Because you have a plan?

She nodded, mutely.

A plan to hang yourself?

She froze, then babbled. Don’t tell, please. They’ll take him away. Maggie already hates me. I don’t blame her but I hate myself worse. I am a very, very bad mother. I let Dusty go outside, didn’t watch him. I sent him up to bed because he was naughty, fingerprints on everything. He climbed up, got a candy bar. He loves, loved, chocolate. Maggie put him up to it. She was sick that day, or anyway she was pretending. And she put him up to being naughty and I sent him up to bed. But he sneaked out.

Do you blame Maggie?

No.

You sure?

Maybe I did at first, when I was crazier. But no. I am a bad mother, yes, but if I permanently blamed her that would be, I don’t know, that would be a disaster, right?

Yes.

Nola studied the palms of her hands, open on her lap.

To blame yourself, that would also be disaster.

Her head swirled and yellow spots blazed in space. She lay her forehead carefully on the desk.

I yelled, Father Travis. I yelled at him so loud he cried.

After Nola left, Father Travis stared at the desk phone. She had a plan, but telling about Dusty’s last day had seemed to lift a burden. She seemed reasonable, denying the possibility that she might hurt herself now. Begged him not to tell Peter, not to add this to his burden. He’d crack, she said. Father Travis didn’t doubt that. But there would be no piecing him together if his wife killed herself. He lifted the receiver out of the cradle. But then he put it back. Such an air of relief surrounded her as she walked away — she was wearing white runners. Her step was springy. She had promised to talk to him if these thoughts came over her again.

WOLFRED HACKED OFF a piece of weasel-gnawed moose. He carried it into the cabin, put it in a pot heaped with snow. He built up the fire just right and hung the pot to boil. He had learned from the girl to harvest red-gold berries, withered a bit in winter, which gave meat a slightly skunky but pleasant flavor. She had taught him how to make tea from leathery swamp leaves. She had shown him rock lichen, edible but bland. The day was half gone.

Mashkiig, the girl’s father, walked in, lean and fearsome, with two slinking minions. He glanced at the girl, then looked away. He traded his furs for rum and guns. Mackinnon told him to get drunk far from the trading post. The day he’d killed the girl’s uncles, Mashkiig had stabbed everyone else in his vicinity. He’d slit Mink’s nose and ears. Now he tried to claim the girl, then to buy her, but Mackinnon wouldn’t take back any of the guns.

After Mashkiig left, Mackinnon and Wolfred each took a piss, hauled some wood in, then locked the inside shutters, and loaded their weapons. About a week later, they heard that he’d killed Mink. The girl put her head down and wept.

Wolfred was a clerk of greater value than he knew. He cooked well and could make bread from practically nothing. He’d kept his father’s yeast going halfway across North America, and he was always seeking new sources of provender. He was using up the milled flour that Mackinnon had brought to trade. The Indians hadn’t got a taste for it yet. Wolfred had ground wild rice to powder and added it to the stuff they had. Last summer he had mounded up clay and hollowed it out into an earthen oven. That’s where he baked his weekly loaves. As the loaves were browning, Mackinnon came outside. The scent of the bread so moved him, there in the dark of winter, that he opened a keg of wine. They’d had six kegs and were down to five. Mackinnon had packed the good wine in himself, over innumerable portages. Ordinarily, he partook of the undiluted stuff the bois de brule humped in to supply and resupply the Indians. Now he and Wolfred drank together, sitting on two stumps by the heated oven and a leaping fire.

Outside the circle of warmth, the snow squeaked and the stars pulsed in the impenetrable heavens. The girl sat between them, not drinking. She thought her own burdensome thoughts. From time to time, both of the men looked at her profile in the firelight. Her dirty face was brushed with raw gold. As the wine was drunk, the bread was baked. Reverently, they removed the loaves and put them, hot, inside their coats. The girl opened her blanket to accept a loaf from Wolfred. As he gave it to her, he realized that her dress was torn down the middle. He looked into her eyes and her eyes slid to Mackinnon. Then she ducked her head and held the dress together with her elbow while she accepted the loaf.

Inside, they sat on small stumps, around a bigger stump, to eat. The cabin had been built many years ago, around the large stump so that it could serve as a table.

Wolfred looked so searchingly at Mackinnon that the trader finally said, What?

Mackinnon had a flaccid bladder belly, crab legs, a snoose-stained beard, pig-mad red eyes, red sprouts of dandered hair, wormish lips, pitchy teeth, breath that knocked you sideways, and nose hairs that dripped snot on and spoiled Wolfred’s perfectly inked numbers. Mackinnon was also a dead shot, and hell with his claw hammer. Wolfred had seen him use it on one of the very minions who’d shadowed Mashkiig that day. He was dangerous. Yet. Wolfred chewed and stared. He was seized with sharp emotion. For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable.

The Crossbeams

JUNE. BETWEEN THE two houses, maybe six billion wood ticks hatched and began their sticky, hopeful, doomed search. In that patch of woods, there was perhaps a wood tick for every human being on earth. Josette said this to Snow because she knew her sister was deeply repulsed by wood ticks. No matter how meticulously Snow checked, washed, shook out her clothing, and avoided the woods, she would get wood ticks. She drew them worse than anyone. Because of the ticks, she said she couldn’t wait to live in some big tickless city.

You’d miss your little friends, said Josette. Her jeans were too tight and it was hot. She snapped open the waist and flapped her arms.

They were going over to fetch LaRose. The first heat brought ticks swarming out of their hatch nests. They filled the grass and flung themselves off leaves and twigs toward the supersensory scent of mammals. Walking the path, Snow felt one in her hair and snatched it out.

I’m going back, she said. I’ll take the road even if Mom sees me.

That’s just a baby tick, Josette scoffed. Hey, I’m not taking that dust-ball road. It’s twice as long. If you leave me to get LaRose by myself, dude, you can’t have my turn with the walkman.

The Sony Walkman was their joy, their baby — a sleek metallic CD player for the few CDs they owned: the soundtrack to Romeo + Juliet, Ricky Martin, Dr. Dre, Black Lodge Singers. They had to share it and were strict about scheduling their days and hours. Josette had been sent to bring LaRose back to their house. She didn’t want to go alone and had bribed Snow with all of tomorrow’s hours.

Okay. Snow bent like a dark birch, took off her long-sleeved shirt, and draped it over her head, huddled underneath.

I should have worn my hoodie.

It’s so weird to see you not wearing your hoodie. I mean, Shane’s hoodie.

It was his wrestling team hoodie, which he’d given to Snow in order to show how serious he was about her. But then.

I’m just off him today, Snow said.

Josette knew that Snow’s boyfriend had found a different girlfriend, but she didn’t say so. It made her furious. She wanted to punch Shane in the liver. But when she said things like that to Snow it upset her. Snow said violence gagged her.

I just hate having to work there now, said Snow.

They both worked more regularly now at Whitey’s. They were the youngest, but Old Whitey and his stepdaughter, London, ran it and they liked how the girls gave their all to the job. Every time Snow worked, handsome Shane came in and bought Gatorade and microwave burritos.

See why we like robot guys? Always so much better than real guys. If Shane was only a mech. He’d do my bidding.

Haha, what would you command him?

Just be nice, you know?

I know. Don’t worry. I’ll bust his ass.

Snow must have been deeply upset because she said thanks in Ojibwe, miigwech, which sort of meant this is a real thank-you. Josette was moved.

There was the house. They paused in the brush and regarded the angry neatness of its yard. There were planted flowers, bunched and glowing. A small hedge fiercely trimmed.

La vida loca, said Josette.

I know, it’s so sad.

She tries so hard to be okay, said Josette. I kind of get it. And I like her flowers.

Me too. But she scares me.

You go first.

No, you.

Okay, but you talk to her.

No, I can’t. I’ll bust out.

Nola had developed an unnerving force field. The vibrational aura flowed with her to the door and pulsed toward the girls when she opened it — not wide, just a crack — and said, Oh, it’s you. Vibrations flowed out when she spoke, and sealed the door like plastic wrap when Nola closed it softly in the girls’ faces. When she opened the door again, she did it so slowly that the ions were only slightly disarranged. With his backpack on, LaRose popped through. The aura was sucked back in and the three of them ran across the lawn.

After the first time, Nola had stopped herself from watching out the window. She grabbed her headphones and walked straight through the house, out the sliding double glass doors, out onto the deck and down its four steps, across the yard to the shed with its crossbeams that worried Peter. She opened the doors, topped up the tank of the riding lawn mower, then got on and adjusted the walkman clipped to her belt. Peter had given her some very strange music for Christmas. It was soothing and yet disturbing, pipes and echoey voices chanting, ethereal soprano solos, wordless and mysterious voices, melodies that swirled, collapsed, revived in some ruthless disorienting key. She could listen to this music indefinitely as she cut the grass over and over on the riding lawn mower.

Eventually she parked, got off, and went into the house. She went up to her room, leaned on the closet door, stared into the clothing. Except for her one purple dress, she had four of everything, in neutral colors, and she wore only these things. Four jackets, four pants, four skirts, four jeans, four shirts, four panty hose. Four of everything for dress-up, and four for everyday. But she had lots of pretty underwear that she bought from a catalog.

At first, she was only going to change her underwear. Her belly was tight. A push-up bra of scratchy maroon lace. A tiny white bikini. Then she stood there and laid out the eggshell white shirt, the whiter pants, upon the bed. She took the brown heels out of their box. Laid the gray jacket, tailored, with no collar, around the eggshell shirt. The whole outfit was assembled there as though by an undertaker. Too businessy to be dead in, she thought, and took away the white pants and replaced them with a short, flaring skirt. I’ll have to think again, she decided. She tapped her lips and opened the closet.

Wild Things

THE TWO GIRLS and LaRose between them walked back through the woods. Snow did not forget about the ticks but just gave up, she was so happy. They had their little brother back for a few days now and the light was pure green, cool, the sun hot only outside the trees, on the road. Halfway there, LaRose stopped and said to them, Can we go? They knew he meant to the tree. Nobody knew how he knew about the tree, but he did know and often he insisted on going there when the girls came to get him. They didn’t mind so much. They never told their parents. It was easy to get to and in a moment they stood before Dusty’s climbing tree, the branch, and the space of ground beneath, where dead flowers, tobacco ties, loose sage, and two small rain-beaten stuffed animals — a monkey and a lion — were arranged. LaRose put his backpack down and took out Where the Wild Things Are. He gave it to Josette and said, Read it. She read it out loud. After her voice stopped, they stood in the resounding sweetness of birdcall.

What was that about? said Josette.

LaRose took back the book. He turned it to his pack with a little frown.

I think it was his favorite, said LaRose. Because she reads it to me all the time.

Snow and Josette put their hands over their hearts and mouthed the words for sad, for sweet. They each took LaRose by a hand and kept walking.

I am so over that book, LaRose said loudly.

The girls batted their eyes at each other to keep their laughs inside.

Maybe you should leave that book for him, said Snow.

Put it with his stuffed monkey and stuff.

I can’t, said LaRose. She would search.

Well, said Josette, okay, but she wouldn’t find it. So she’d give up, right?

No, said LaRose. She would never give up. She might go out to the barn and scream like a banshee.

Ooo, said Snow. What’s a banshee?

It’s a boney old woman with long teeth that crawls around graves and screams when someone dies.

Holeee, said Josette.

Creep me out! said Snow. Where’d you get that?

Maggie told me. She’s got a collection of pictures from books and things that she keeps underneath her bed. All scary.

She keeps scary junk underneath her bed?

Josette and Snow looked at each other.

Whoa, for badass.

Where’s she get that crazy shit?

Don’t say that to LaRose.

She rips pages out of library books at school, said LaRose.

Little man, said Josette. Don’t let her bother you.

I’m used to her, said LaRose. I’m used to everything now.

The girls just held his hands and didn’t talk after that.

Before they took LaRose to the Ravich house last fall, Landreaux and Emmaline had spoken his name. It was the name given to each LaRose. Mirage. Ombanitemagad. The original name of Mink’s daughter. That name would protect him from the unknown, from what had been let loose with the accident. Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort, which is why LaRose was sent.

EMMALINE PEACE. A+ English student. Thought she’d like to teach literature. Got her teacher’s certificate, taught high school, and only got high on weekends. She decided she was better with little kids than teenagers because the teenagers were too much like her, and she was right. Any authority she had literally went up in smoke the night she was enjoying skunky fine weed at a party and a couple of her students entered the room.

After the momentously drunk days with Landreaux, she received an offer. Funding for a degree in administration because the tribe was taking control of the school system from the top down. Emmaline went back to graduate school, grew up. Returning with her expedited degree, she got excited about a newly funded pilot program — an on-reservation boarding school for crisis kids.

People didn’t want to think about boarding schools — the era of forced assimilation was supposed to be over. But then again, kids from chaotic families didn’t get to school, or get sleep, or real food, or homework help. And they’d never get out of the chaos — whatever brand of chaos, from addictions to depression to failing health — unless they got to school. To succeed in school, kids had to attend regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly, and study regularly. Maybe the boarding schools of the earliest days had stripped away culture from the vulnerable, had left adults with little understanding of how to give love or parent, but what now? Kids needed some intervention, but not the wrenching away of foster families and outside adoptions. A crisis intervention, giving parents time to get on track. The radical part was that, unlike historical boarding schools, this one would be located on the reservation. Pre-K through grade 4. After that, kids could board but go to regular school. This new/old sort of boarding school, equipped to pick up the parenting roles for families that went through cycles of failure and recovery, became Emmaline’s mission.

Two double-wide trailers for classrooms. Renovated BIA family group housing with houseparents, teachers, teacher’s aides, all supposedly trained in child psychology or working on their own teaching licenses. At first she was the assistant director, which meant she helped collect data, strategize, order supplies, lead meetings, organize funding, construct endless progress reports, plans, plus a host of functions that weren’t in her job description. Heartbreak mitigation. That was not described. Her heartbreak. Kids’ heartbreak. Parents’ heartbreak. Also: mop puke, replace paper towels, lock and unlock doors, rock sobbing hurt little boys until their fury slept, play Crazy Eights with little girls while they told how their mom had stabbed their dad, or vice versa, make muffins with the moms who were getting straight, raise hell with the moms who weren’t. She didn’t deal with the dads. Left that to the director. Then she became the director.

She tried not to bring the day home, but it did come. In her zeal for stability and calm, it came home. In her need for dependable household structure, it came home. In her frequent failure to hold structure, her episodes of neatness and relapse, her struggle to find balance, it came home. In her need for privacy, when she made her own sweat lodge and just sat inside, steaming the sorrow out, it came home. In her coping strategies — smudge the dysfunction off with burning sage, surround the bed with eagle feathers, drink, once a week, two glasses of the best wine she could afford, alone — it came home. In her attempts to rebuild what she had so carefully constructed before — the Irons as a strong family, as good people — it came home. She had understood that the only way was through LaRose, but she could not bear it.

Now, knowing that she’d see him, that again there was a place for her as a mother, she swept through her days in an excited bubbling way nobody ever saw with her. Her jerky, angular movements eased into grace. Her eyes rested on her paperwork without comprehension or worry. Even the ends of her hair hung slack, relaxed, not skinned back into a tail or poked up in a beaded clip.

Emmaline left her back-of-the-trailer office and drove home carefully. She hadn’t picked LaRose up from Nola because Peter had asked Landreaux not to send her, or for him to go either. He knew Nola would have a hard time with either parent. Peter had heart pangs when he remembered how LaRose had run to his mother at the grocery, electrified by the sight of her, dropping everything to gallop at her headlong. That’s why the sisters or the brothers were dispatched. Now Josette and Snow were in their room, door locked, checking each other for ticks. Snow continually whimpered and sometimes danced around screaming. On the living room floor, LaRose was wrestling with Hollis. He had him down and was holding his fist in Hollis’s face demanding he give up.

Hollis beat his arm on the floor.

He’s got you by the balls, said Coochy, sitting back on the couch. He was eating a cold piece of bannock.

Don’t say that to him!

Wanna take me on? said LaRose, swaggering.

Hollis was laughing. He destroyed my ass.

Don’t say that to him, Josette said, coming out of the bedroom.

How many?

Like, twenty. She freaked. She’ll be taking one of her forever showers now.

Emmaline drove up and LaRose heard her car. He slammed out of the house and ran across the cindery yard. Emmaline got out just in time to catch LaRose as he jumped into her arms. He was still small enough to ride her hips, her arms hugging his waist. He molded to her, then leaned back and told her all about the secret fort in the lilac bush, a new action figure, the church preschool where Nola took him. But not Maggie. He didn’t talk about Maggie. He felt in some vague way that he should not have told his sisters about the banshee. There was always something like that, something not okay, and he always tried to avoid it. But sometimes he wouldn’t know what it was until he said it, like with the long-toothed boney thing that screamed for the dead. Other things that Maggie told him in their lilac-bush hideout he knew right away not to tell because she said so. She said: Never tell I told you this—your dad was really aiming for my little brother, your dad’s a killer, your dad murdered my little brother, I’ll show you the place, my brother’s blood soaked into the ground, the worms came up, the buzzards landed, you could go crazy if you stood there, at night his ghost would choke you, nothing grows there now or will ever grow there, though just that afternoon LaRose had seen to his relief that things were growing all over.

BIINDIGEG!

Here’s my boy!

The apartment was filled with the friends of Mrs. Peace, all excited to see LaRose. He was a favorite.

Here’s the boy who likes us, said Sam Eagleboy. The boy who wants the stories. You raised this boy good, Emmaline.

Sam was a thin man with beautiful upswept lines around his eyes and mouth, as if he was smiling even when he was serious. There was nothing wrong with him except he was old. He wore a brown checkered shirt, neatly tucked. An agate bolo tie, jeans held up by a belt of cracked amber leather. On his slim feet, running shoes. Sam put in miles walking the halls and grounds. Malvern Sangrait, a mean little washtub of a woman, glowered from her permanently squinted left eye and gave a suspicious little huff. She leaned forward on her walker. She was wearing eyeliner and Meow Girl red lipstick.

So you got your boy back, she said to Emmaline. Her hair was pulled to one side with a purple plastic barrette. He’s skinny, ooh. They didn’t feed him good.

He’s just growing, said Emmaline. And she smiled. She was smiling all the time.

Mrs. Peace passed around paper plates and napkins, then frybread and chokecherry jelly. There was coffee. Powdered orange drink for LaRose. Everybody ate except Sam Eagleboy, who did not eat the whiteman’s food. Though he did drink coffee.

You could use some whiteman food, said Malvern. You’re all boney.

Boney where it counts, said Ignatia Thunder, who wheeled an oxygen tank nonchalantly around with her. She laughed so hard she had to dial up her nozzle.

So they say, said Malvern. I ain’t seen it.

Her face was sly.

Yet, said Ignatia. Turn on your bedside lamp. You never know.

Hey, said Emmaline. She nicked her head at LaRose.

Malvern touched her barrette and twitched her pouting red lips from side to side, glancing at Ignatia. She raised her thatchy gray eyebrows. They didn’t match her blue-black hair. She ate some bread in tiny bites, drank some coffee. Sam spoke to LaRose in Ojibwe. He was teaching him words for the plates and dishes. He told how to make a spirit dish and how the spirits appreciated when a person noticed them. How the spirits were there in things, all things, and would talk with the Ojibwe. How they came in dreams, and also in the ordinary world, and how LaRose should tell his mom when he encountered them. He pursed his lips toward Emmaline.

Malvern jutted her lower lip out and stared at Sam, then shook her head and popped her eyes at Ignatia.

Oh, he talks a good one, she said, sure enough. Then he goes on his night prowls. Tapping on the ladies’ doors.

Let him be, laughed Ignatia. He can’t do no harm where we can watch him. Let him talk to this here gwiiwisens. This boy should get teachings. He wants to learn. He wants the story. Besides that, we know Sam’s only got an eye for you.

Pah, said Malvern. You think?

FATHER TRAVIS COULD not exhaust himself, although he drove his body with unrelenting ardor along the outdoor fitness trail. The push-up station, poles bolted between the short logs, was unsatisfactory. He’d left the popple bark on the poles because it helped him grip. That wasn’t it. The irritating fact was the ground was uneven or the pieces of log weren’t exactly the same size — though he’d carefully measured. It was impossible to do a push-up correctly. He finally compromised by switching sides twice to work both arms the same. The instructions he’d lettered neatly on a board gave no hint of this solution.

He jogged the short distance to the next station, and had done two hundred sit-ups on the heavy rubber mat when he noticed that he was surrounded by used condoms. They drooped among the leaves and lay shriveling into the weeds or mowed to shreds. Kids. They’d gum up the mowing machine! He did a hundred more sit-ups, fed by outrage, and when he calmed down felt ridiculous. No, condoms wouldn’t gum up a lawn mower. He proceeded to the chin-up bar. After the chin-up bar there was the step-up, which he did until his legs wobbled. He didn’t just stagger on, though, but did lunges until the madness of the jump-rope spot. He’d brought his rope so he could whirl in place, switching up, backwards, forward, until his lungs burned and then burned some more. How nice if he could sink an old-fashioned well pump right here! The sulphur-laden rez water containing all the minerals and iron a body needs. That water would be cold, and he’d find it sweet.

He loved it here. He loved his people. They were his people, weren’t they? They drove him nuts, but he was inspired by their generosity. And they laughed so much. He hadn’t known funny before. So with or without his savior, or his sanity, he wanted to stay. He had made another sit-up station, for reverse sit-ups, again with a decomposing rubber mat, but not decorated by a single condom. Well, it was too far into the bush. After the horror movies these kids watched they were all scared of the woods — Indians. Millennial Indians. Nobody had vandalized his outdoor heavy bag ’cause that was too far into the woods as well. He beat the wood ticks off the bag with a host of vicious side kicks. It had taken a world of groin pain to free that adhered scar tissue. But he could now lift his leg as high as his brain. Haha, God, he said when he walked with God. You saved me for a reason — so that I could develop my crazy showgirl kick.

Sometimes he didn’t feel the shift occur; he was just back there sliding from his sleeping bag, then flying. The sentries guarding the former office building where the Marines were barracked had been expecting a water truck. Instead a yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck sped straight past and the bomb it carried detonated in the lobby. The building went up into the air in pieces and then the pieces, with Marines in them, rearranged as they came down. Father Travis felt the dream flying, the down slamming, but not the slashing and tearing of his body. The black whirling energy became black crushing silence. Then the screaming started. It wasn’t until he tried to get to the others that he realized he couldn’t move. That’s when he started screaming too, not for help, but Get off me, because he understood that he was the meat in a steel and concrete sandwich and could feel the rubble shifting. Dust in. Dust out. Scream the dust out. Take a breath of dust. Scream again. Then voices. We got one. Get off that slab. He’s in there. We need a crane.

A skinny, shirtless, tattooed Marine slipped in next to Travis and then somehow he lifted things — the beam — and pushed — the slab — and bore him out to other arms. Father Travis knew exactly who that man was. He’d spoken to him on the phone. Vast strength had entered the slim man as he was rescuing his friends, the way it did with mothers rescuing their babies. They’d talked about that. They kept in touch, but he didn’t get together with the other guys and the families of the dead. He didn’t go to Camp Lejeune or the memorial reunions. He feared the black energy and how he could not control his breathing once the shift occurred.

Father Travis switched the jump rope along his thighs, then started it whirling. He was living out Newton’s Third Law — for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Time was the variable. Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life. Or was it the other way around? He thought of Emmaline.

THE GREEN CHAIR had rested in the barn for two months and nobody noticed that it was gone from the kitchen. Nola was ready to say that she was going to restore it, if Peter asked. But it was just a green wooden chair, and who cared? Yet this painted chair was key. It would be the last solid thing her feet touched. She’d push off and kick the backrest down. But the part where she strangled, not good, she was not ready, she was afraid of that when she put her hands around her neck and squeezed. The feeling made her gag and she went wooden and cold until she thought maybe she would get the release she needed if she killed Landreaux instead of herself. Sure, she might go to jail. Maybe for a long time even. She’d plead guilty, but who would not understand? Even Maggie would understand, perhaps even approve. Peter would understand — part of him would envy her, in fact. Only LaRose wouldn’t get it. He’d lose out. She saw his face, devastated, crumpling, pasted over Dusty’s face, devastated, crumpling.

Boxed in, she thought.

Then she had another thought — their tradition worked. Dazzling act. How could she or Peter harm the father of the son they’d been given? She closed her eyes and felt the heavy warmth of LaRose as she rocked him to sleep, legs dangling over her legs, breath steaming a passage to the crater of her heart.

ROMEO HELD ON to his first love, but generally did not like women, especially when they got older and turned into scabby vultures. They could tear a man to pieces with their biting talk. Always, he tried to placate them. Always, he tried to bring them gifts. In his work, Romeo often came across pockets of reservation conference swag — extra T-shirts, mouse pads, soft-foam-grip hand exercisers, mini-flashlights, pens and pencils, water bottles, even pristine fleece throws embossed with acronyms and symbols. His special stash of these objects was contained in his giant wheelchair-accessible bathroom.

He had been sunk in dire depression since Super Tuesday. George Bush had nailed the door shut on his man. McCain was out. Romeo had bad feelings about the race now. At the last AA meeting he’d confided to the group that Bush reminded him of all the things he hated worst about himself: weasel eyes, greed, self-pity, fake machismo. In this nation of self-haters, Bush could win. Everyone looked blank except Father Travis, who’d hung his arm for half a second around Romeo’s shoulders, bro-like, afterward. Romeo was moved. The priest was not a hugger. Still, he walked away and decided to put into action a plan for getting regularly wasted until the election was over.

Today he picked out several gift ideas from a large black garbage bag he’d cleaned up with after a tribal college conference. There were the flexy-turtle hand exercisers — but those ladies’ claws were strong enough already, he decided. He threw back some bookmarks, gimme hats, cheap eco bags already fraying apart. The leftover T-shirts were always small and he had XL ladies to appease. Except for dear old Mrs. Peace. She was better than the others, tiny, not so mean. He took one small 5K Diabetes Walk T-shirt, yellow, for her. He found a couple of fleece throws. He examined, but rejected, frog-shaped zipper pulls. Nobody wanted them because they looked too real. He rolled up a fleece throw and left for the lodge.

Not that he always got into their rooms. Not everyone let him in their door. Some people were suspicious of him at the Elders Lodge, like Mrs. Peace. She’d even had a chain put on her door because he’d once foolishly insisted on entry when she wasn’t in favor of it. Romeo drove up to the lodge. As he walked into the main hallway, he saw Mrs. Peace. As soon as she saw him, she slippered along in her quick and mouselike way, large eyes peeping at him as she made a swift turn into her apartment and clicked the door emphatically shut.

And she used to be my favorite teacher, thought Romeo, sad. She was everybody’s favorite teacher. She took me home. She fed me from her table.

No longer. And she rarely accepted his gifts. But there was always his aunt, or mother, or foster mother, Star. He was bringing Star the prize — the purple fleece throw that said Sobriety Powwow 1999 in one corner. Nice throws had been left over at the giveaway because of relapse behavior. Romeo knocked on Star’s door, remembering the prescriptions she had for severe arthritis. She opened the door, her little smile glinting.

It’s peckerhead! she yelled to her other visitors.

Oh, him, said Malvern Sangrait to Mrs. Webid. Let’s have a look at him. Skinny, but you never know.

For me? Star took the purple fleece. Very cozy.

The women sat at the kitchen table, looking avidly at Romeo. Their eyes were bright and roved over him, but stopped so pointedly that he glanced down, a reflex. Sure enough.

Twenty cows got out the barn door, Mrs. Webid shrieked.

Romeo tugged. His zipper stuck.

The old ladies began to count out loud. They reached thirty before he managed to violently wrest it all the way shut. Watch out! Weweni! Be careful!

Way-weeny, cackled Malvern.

Be careful so its head don’t get stuck! Ow! It’s trying to peek at us!

The women pretended to shield their eyes.

There was a little tap and his schoolteacher entered. Mrs. Peace’s feet slapped gently to another chair and she joined the three other women and Romeo at the table. Her coffee cup was still sitting where she’d left it.

Aren’t you asking Romeo to sit himself down?

Sit down, sit down!

Why do you look confused?

His brains are down there, in his ass. Maybe he doesn’t want to crush his thoughts.

Star poured a cup of coffee out for him and pushed a Ball jar full of sugar his way.

There he goes. He’s going to sit. He had to tie his pecker in a knot first, said Mrs. Webid. His thing was trying to get out.

Oh my, gasped Mrs. Peace. She didn’t join in their lewd talk, but her eyes pooled with delight. The ladies stared harder now at Romeo.

He was a puny boy, said Star, he’s just got a little pinkie-doodle in his pants. It was something else he had in his pocket this time.

Perhaps some other little “gift” he scrounged up, said Malvern. Maybe one of his free Maglites — with the dead batteries.

Dead batteries! Mrs. Webid’s face crinkled up. Her cheeks puffed mightily, but she couldn’t contain herself and started to wheeze with happiness.

Have you charged up your batteries lately?

Juiced ’em up?

Mrs. Peace suddenly broke into a startling musical chortle, and Romeo excused himself.

Take your time, take your time, Malvern said. Give those batteries a good hard crank!

Ah, they screamed with merriment.

Romeo closed the door and locked it, turned on the water, pissed, and flushed. In the noisy rush from the faucet he eased open the medicine cabinet. Disappointing. He took one bottle even though the label said, Insert into rectum. There was another painkilling item that did not break down when crushed, but could only be swallowed. It was full, though, and there was a duplicate bottle. Hardly be missed. He combed his watery hands through his hair, retied his skinny ponytail, made sure his zipper was shut, and came out.

It was so nice to see you, my boy, Star said immediately. Nice you visit your old auntie. Please close my door carefully on your way out, eh?

He did shut the door as he quickly left, which caused a burst of hilarity. It should have roused his suspicions, maybe, but they were always like that.

That night, at home, he decided to sell the rectals in a different bottle, but took a triple dose of the pills that didn’t crush. He took them with a full glass of water, as recommended, and waited. Nothing happened so he took one more. Perhaps half an hour passed. He looked at the date on the bottle, then peered closer and held the bottle in the light of the cockeyed lamp. One label had been carefully pasted over another label. He couldn’t scratch the second label off though he tried with his longest fingernail, tried with a razor blade, and then realized with a twisting rush of his guts that the contents of the bottle were effective in the place the old ladies said his brains were located.

God! The pain was sickening. He loped, slung over his stomach, to the door of the disability bathroom. Crashed through. The toilet still had a decent flush and that night he gave it hard use. The cramps were nails driven deep into his lower abdomen. Those ladies must have rocks in their bowels, he thought. How could they stand it? Even a fraction of a dose would have done the trick. He didn’t sleep. Dawn found him raving, exhausted, dehydrated, famished, gutted, unable to go to work. But no, it wasn’t over. Other feelings surfaced. His skin began to prickle and burn. His nose grew giant and his feet seemed far away. There was an abnormally disgusting taste in his mouth, then his penis turned rock hard and would not go down even if he thought of frog-shaped zipper pulls.

All day, blankets nailed over windows, Romeo lay in his pile of sleeping bags experiencing bouts of sickness, disorientation, and sexual excitement simultaneous with explosive gas. CNN wavered and sparked. Ann Kellan, one of his favorite reporters, was doing a comforting story about the language of elephants. When you hear these calls, you know there’s going to be a mating event, said Ann. Male bull elephants trumpeted. The competition was on. Trunks blared. Romeo’s penis throbbed. He flicked off the volume. He lay still underneath his sleeping bag. He didn’t dare move for fear of disrupting the weak equilibrium he’d gained below the waist.

Maybe the old ladies were right — his brains were in his ass and now it was cleared out — for he found himself thinking with uncommon clarity. Thinking with strange focus. Considering where he’d sell and how much he’d reap for the pills he’d stashed, even counting it all up in his head and deciding what he would do with the money. He thought of his aunt, who’d raised him at the edge of her household, Aunt Star. In spite of her evil trick, he would buy groceries for her. Clean her place up so it didn’t stink. He thought of ordinary and extraordinary things. Should he live this way? He asked himself that. Should he be subject to the cruel pecking of the buzzards at the Elders Lodge? How could he rise? How could he gain respect? Should he run for office? Which office? If he was on the tribal council he would immediately declare it against tribal law to store psychotropic laxative erection pills in a painkilling drug container. He spent the most time, though, reviewing bits, sorting words, scanning possibilities. Information. What certain knowledge might get him. He considered all aspects of what gossip gave him what sorts of power. He made up his mind to go deeper, investigate, maybe put up a bulletin board of clues like his Law & Order hero, Lennie Briscoe. He’d put everything together.

WOLFRED SORTED THROUGH the options: they could run away, but Mackinnon would not only pursue but pay Mashkiig to get them first. They could stick together at all times so Wolfred could watch over her, but that would make it obvious that Wolfred knew and they would lose the element of surprise. Xenophon had lain awake in the night, asking himself this question: What age am I waiting for to come to myself? This age, Wolfred thought. Because they had to kill Mackinnon of course. Really, it was the first thing Wolfred thought of doing, and the only way. To feel better about it, however, he had examined the options.

How to do it?

Shooting him was out. There might be justice. Killing him by ax, hatchet, knife, or rock, or tying him up and stuffing him under the ice, was also risky that way. As he lay in the faltering dark imagining each scenario, Wolfred remembered how he’d walked the woods with her. She knew everything there was to eat in the woods. She probably knew everything there was not to eat as well. She probably knew poisons.

Alone with her the next day, he saw she’d managed to sew her dress together with a length of sinew. He pointed to the dress, pointed in the general direction of Mackinnon, then proceeded to mime out picking something, cooking it, Mackinnon eating it, holding his belly and pitching over dead. It made her laugh behind her hand. He convinced her that it was not a joke and she began to wash her hands in the air, biting her lip, darting glances all around, as though even the needles on the pines knew what they were planning. Then she signaled him to follow.

She searched the woods until she found scraggly stalks that drooped with black shriveled berries. She put a bit of cloth on her hand, picked the berries, and tied them in the cloth. Then she searched out a stand of oaks, again covered her hand, and plunged it into the snow near a cracked-off stump rotted down to almost nothing. Eventually, from beneath the snow, she pulled out some dark-gray strands that might once have been mushrooms.

That night Wolfred used the breast meat of six partridges, the tenders of three rabbits, a shriveled potato, and the girl’s offering to make a highly salted and strongly flavored stew. He unplugged a keg of high wine, and made sure Mackinnon drained it well down before he ate. The stew did not seem to affect him. They all went to their corners, and Mackinnon kept on drinking the way he usually did until the fire burned out.

In the middle of the night, his thrashing, grunting, and squeals of pain woke them. Wolfred lighted a lantern. Mackinnon’s entire head had turned purple and swollen to a grotesque size. His eyes had vanished in the bloated flesh. His tongue, a mottled fish, bulged from what must have been his mouth. He seemed to be trying to throw himself out of his body. He cast himself violently at the log walls, into the fireplace, upon the mounds of furs and blankets, rattling guns off their wooden hooks. Ammunition, ribbons, and hawks’ bells rained off their shelves. His belly popped from his vest, round and hard as a boulder. His hands and feet filled like bladders. Wolfred had never witnessed anything remotely as terrifying, but had the presence of mind not to club Mackinnon or in any way molest his monstrous presence. As for the girl, she seemed pleased at his condition, though she did not smile.

Trying to disregard the chaotic death occurring to his left, now to his right, now underfoot, Wolfred prepared to leave. He grabbed snowshoes and two packs, moving clumsily. In the packs he put his books, two fire steels, ammunition, bannock he had made in advance. He doubled up two blankets, another to cut for leggings, and outfitted himself and the girl with four knives apiece. He took two guns, wadding, and a large flask of gunpowder. He took salt, tobacco, Mackinnon’s precious coffee, and dried meat. He did not take overmuch coin, though he knew which hollowed log hid the trader’s tiny stash, a gold watch, and a wedding ring, which Mackinnon rarely wore.

Mackinnon’s puffed mitts of hands fretted at his clothing and the threads burst. As Wolfred and the girl slipped out, they could hear him fighting the poison, his breath coming in sonorous gasps. He could barely draw air past his swelled tongue into his gigantic purpled head. Yet he managed to call feebly out to them.

My children! Why are you leaving me?

From the other side of the door they could hear his legs drumming on the packed earth floor. They could hear his fat paws wildly pattering for water on the empty wooden bucket.

Almond Joy

SEPTEMBER AGAIN. OVER the course of the day it became oppressively hot. Not a leaf stirred. It was the first day of school and by the time the class let out, Maggie and LaRose were drooping. When they got on the bus, trees started whipping around. Hot grit flew through the air. By the time they jumped off at their stop, big fat drops were smacking down. Nola and the dog met them with a flimsy red umbrella that nearly flew out of her fist. They struggled inside and just as they shut the door lightning pulsed around the edges of the yard and half a second later there were slams of thunder.

Inside, before the dog could shake himself, Nola rubbed him hard with an old towel she kept by the door. The dog trembled with excitement, but was unafraid. He fixed Nola with a calculating gaze, then jumped onto the couch, trying his luck. She had taught him the rules for everything — no begging, no jumping on people, no chewing anything but chew toys, no shitting in the yard, only at the edge of the yard, no puking or drooling in the house, if he could help it. She even taught him not to eat until she said eat. The only thing she was inconsistent about was the couch. Sometimes she ordered him off, sometimes she allowed him on. Sometimes she even let him get close to her. He had to read her mood to find out if he would be allowed onto the hallowed green poly-filled pillows. Now the signs were good. He curled silently between Nola and Maggie, and allowed his weight incrementally to sink against them. Gradually, his brows unknit. Moving by centimeters, he managed to rest his head near Nola’s thigh.

Rain surged down in sheets and waves, pounding on the roof like people trying to get in. This scared Maggie but not LaRose. His father had put an eagle feather up in the lodge for him and talked to the Animikiig; he had explained to the thunder beings where LaRose lived so that they wouldn’t shoot lightning and hit him or anyone else in that house.

Nothing’s gonna happen, LaRose said to Maggie. He put his hand on her cheek. Maggie stopped jittering when LaRose touched her cheek. LaRose knew she loved when he was fearless. It was a burden for her always to be the fearless one. Because of what Maggie had said about his father killing Dusty, he didn’t tell her why they were safe.

Maggie clung to him while Nola made their sandwiches and poured their milk. LaRose watched the rain ripple back and forth.

Let’s eat back here, Nola said, nodding at the couch.

The dog raised his head at the proximity of food to cloth but tried to conceal his shock.

They sat with their food and looked out the window from against an inner wall. Sometimes the house vibrated with sound. Maggie quailed deeper into the cushions and pressed against the dog. When LaRose looked up at Nola, she made a funny face, a confusing face, a face LaRose hadn’t seen before. Nola’s eyes went shiny as she looked back at the streaming glass doors. She seemed mesmerized by the branches violently whipping. The face she’d made at him had been a smile.

At school, in LaRose’s combined K–1 class, there was a bigger, older first grader named Dougie Veddar. He throttled kids and gave them what he called the Dutch Rub — grinding his knuckles into their skulls. Twisting their ears. He turned his attention to hating LaRose. Tripped him, pushed him, called him Rosy Red Ass.

Can I borrow your pencil? Dougie asked LaRose during class. When LaRose gave him the pencil, Dougie snapped off the end and handed it back. LaRose sharpened the pencil.

Can I borrow your pencil? Dougie asked when LaRose sat down.

No, said LaRose.

Dougie made a sad face and raised his hand.

Mrs. Heaper, Mrs. Heaper! LaRose won’t let me borrow his pencil!

You have your own pencil, Douglas, said Mrs. Heaper.

Dougie grabbed LaRose’s sharpened pencil when Mrs. Heaper wasn’t looking, and drove it into LaRose’s arm so hard the tip broke off under the skin. Dougie laughed and said he’d given LaRose a shot. That night, LaRose showed his shoulder to Maggie, the pencil tip driven deep.

Her face swelled up. Her lips tightened. Her golden eyes went black.

When she was six years old, her teachers started calling Maggie “a piece of work.” But after her brother died, her work came together. She revved up the other kids by picking friends, rejecting those who displeased her, pitting them against each other for her favor. Although she didn’t exactly talk back to the teachers, there was sarcasm in the elaborate politeness she showed.

Yes, Miss Behring, she would say, and in a whisper only the other children heard, Yes, Miss Boring.

She rolled her eyes, made spasmodic faces, behind her teachers’ backs. They never caught her when she periodically dropped a BB from her jeans pocket and it rolled around and around on the unlevel floor. It made a high, thin, zinging sound that kept everyone in suspense. She kept it up, flicking a BB out every few days until Miss Behring searched everyone’s pockets. Maggie’s were empty like the others. She told nobody what she’d done so that nobody could rat her out. She was a disciplined piece of work.

Maggie had a list.

Dougie Veddar was now on it.

Recess came. He ran thumpingly around thinking he was safe, with his blond crew cut and rabbity teeth. Maggie was friends with an older girl, Sareah, who was fast and tough. The two girls closed casually in on Dougie and herded him away from the other boys.

Wanna share?

Maggie waved a candy bar from her lunch. He came around the playground tree. Sareah stepped behind him and pinned back his arms. Maggie had worn her hard-soled shoes for this. She reared back and kicked him between the legs. Then as he doubled over she stuffed back his shriek with the candy bar.

Don’t touch my brother, she said in that scary-nice way she had, her eyes turning gold with satisfaction. Please?

Sareah dropped Dougie and they ambled off, talking. I mean, what’s he gonna do? Go whine? Two girls dropped me. Kicked my nuts off. He’s gonna lay there, maybe puke. I dunno. They puke in movies when you kick their nuts off. Let’s go see if there’s chocolate milk left.

They paused to watch the action before they ducked into the lunchroom.

Maggie had made sure LaRose was on the other side of the tree, that he saw what happened. But she told him to be running past and just watch out of the corner of his eye. He should disappear immediately to the other side of the playground. LaRose saw it as he ran past them and then pulled himself high into the monkey bars. He sat on top, pretending to pay attention to the children around him, but watching as the girls sauntered slowly back inside.

There was a stir of energy. The teachers ran past. They were running toward Dougie; some kid said in awe, He’s blue, he’s blue. The teacher hefted Dougie. Heimliched Dougie. Two teachers held him upside down by the legs and shook him. Finally, a scream from Dougie, Whoa, whoa, whoa. Relief and cynicism settled once more over the teachers as they threw playground sand on a puddle of Almond Joy.

Maggie now slept in Dusty’s old room, and LaRose had a bunk bed, new. It was red metal and the bottom was a double. Just right for sleepovers, said Nola. When she said that, LaRose looked away from her. He knew that she meant other kids from school while his first thought was sisters and brothers. Anyway, some nights Maggie would come sleep with him. She’d sneak away before morning because her mother had made a rule about them not sleeping in the same bed anymore.

Dougie won’t bother you now, Maggie said. Lemme see your arm.

Maggie put on LaRose’s bedside lamp and studied the arm.

Does it hurt? She touched the spot.

Not no more.

Not anymore, LaRose. You have to say not anymore.

LaRose didn’t say it. Maggie looked at his arm from many angles.

I think it looks cool, she decided. It’s a tattoo. I want one.

She went over to LaRose’s backpack, took out his pencil bag. There was a sharpener on top of his dresser. Maggie sharpened a pencil with great care.

Okay, you’re gonna stick me like Veddar stuck you. Same place. It will be like we’re getting engaged or something.

LaRose was almost six.

I’m only almost six, he said.

Age doesn’t matter.

I mean, I’m scared to stab you.

You mean you’d cry. Maggie studied him sharply.

LaRose nodded.

Okay, watch.

Maggie gripped the needle-sharp pencil like an ice pick. She peered at LaRose’s tattoo and licked her lips. She made a light mark on her arm the same place as his. Then she lifted her hand, drove the pencil into her arm. The tip came off. She threw the pencil across the room and fell onto the bed, kicking, holding her arm, biting the pillow to smother her noises.

After a while she sat up. There was some blood on her hand but the graphite tip stuck in her arm blocked most of it.

That hurt more than I thought it would, she said, wide-eyed, looking into LaRose’s eyes. Now I’m glad Veddar almost died.

Huh?

He choked on that candy bar. I smashed it down his throat. It went down the wrong pipe. He turned blue as a dead person. Even maybe he was dead until Mr. Oberjerk lifted him up by the ankles and shook out Veddar’s puke. You saw it all, right?

LaRose nodded.

So now you know what revenge looks like.

Maggie was apt to say things like that, not only from reading her mother’s discarded gothic romance novels. Peter worried about her when she asked — she still asked — exactly what had happened to Dusty. Specifically, his body. Was he bones? Was he jelly? Was he dust? Air? Was she breathing him into her lungs? Was she eating something grown from his hair? Were his molecules in everything? And why do you still have your guns? she asked. I hate them. You should get rid of them. I’ll never touch one. That, at least, made sense.

Peter worried about her when she kept checking out a book from the library called Dark Creatures. He was relieved when she stopped checking it out. Disturbed when the librarian called to tell him it was mutilated. He worried over how Maggie snatched snakes from the woodpile and let them twine up her arms, how she tamed spiders then casually smashed them. How she opened a neighbor’s brooding chicken egg before it hatched to see how the thing inside was coming along. How she took the dead chick home to bury and dug it up every day to see how the world digested it. There were days when the dog ignored Maggie, even walked away from her, as if he didn’t trust her. These things worried Peter.

Nola, however, was reassured by her daughter’s compulsion to tear aside the plastic wrap that divides the universes. It was only natural, thought Nola, to live in both. When you could see one world from the other world, the world for instance of the living from the world of the dead, there was a certain comfort. It relaxed Nola to imagine herself in a casket. She dreamed variations on her look much the way, during high school, she’d mentally put together the perfect outfit. The jeans, the tailed shirt, the funny socks, the shoes, heart necklace, hair sprayed up or falling loose. Of course, she couldn’t wear those clothes, so out-of-date, when dead. Or maybe yes. . what a hoot! When all the steps leading to Nola’s death were assembled, her anxiety faded. On the other hand, a blue buzz took hold of her when she went past her death and imagined everyone, everything, going on as before, only without Nola. All of this made her feel so guilty, though. She rarely allowed herself. It was like when she ate the whole stale cake and the sugar put her straight to sleep.

After she ate the cake that time, everything went still. The evening was deep and pure. The lights went out and Peter wrapped a soft woolen blanket around her. In darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself — as in a very exclusive privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.

ON SNOWSHOES OF ash wood and sinew, Wolfred and the girl made their way south. They would be easy to follow. Wolfred’s story was that they’d decided to travel toward Grand Portage, for help. They had left Mackinnon ill in the cabin with plenty of supplies. If they got lost, wandered, found themselves even farther south, chances were nobody would know or care who Mackinnon was. And so they trekked, making good time, and made their camp at night. The girl tested the currents of the air with her face and hands, then showed Wolfred where to build a lean-to, how to place it just so, how to find dry wood in snow, snapping dead branches out of trees, and where to pile it so that they could easily keep the fire going all night and direct its heat their way. They slept peacefully, curled in their separate blankets, and woke to the wintertime scolding of chickadees.

The girl tuned up the fire, they ate, and were back on the way south when suddenly they heard the awful gasping voice of Mackinnon behind them. He was blundering toward them, cracking twigs, calling out for them, Wait, my children, wait a moment, do not abandon me!

They started forward in terror and loped through the snow. A dog drew near them, one of the trading post’s pathetic curs; it ran alongside them, bounding effortfully through the snow. They thought at first that Mackinnon had sent it to find them, but then the girl stopped and looked hard at the dog. It whined to her. She nodded and pointed the way through the trees to a frozen river, where they would move along more quickly. On the river ice they slid along with a dreamlike velocity. The girl gave the dog a piece of bannock from her pocket, and that night, when they made camp, she set her snares out all around them. She built their fire and the lean-to so that they had to pass through a narrow space between two trees. Here, too, she set a snare. Its loop was large enough for a man’s head, even a horribly swollen one. They fed themselves and the dog, and slept with their knives out, packs and snowshoes close by.

Near morning, when the fire was down to coals, Wolfred woke. He heard Mackinnon’s rasping breath very close. The dog barked. The girl got up and signaled that Wolfred should fasten on his snowshoes and gather their packs and blankets. As the light came up, Wolfred saw that the sinew snare set for Mackinnon was jigging, pulled tight. The dog worried and tore at some invisible shape. The girl showed Wolfred how to climb over the lean-to another way, and made him understand that he should check the snares she’d set, fetch anything they’d caught, and not forget to remove the sinews so she could reset them at their next camp.

Mackinnon’s breathing resounded through the clearing around the fire. As Wolfred left, he saw that the girl was preparing a stick with pine pitch and birchbark. She set it alight. He saw her thrust the flaring stick at the air again, and again. There were muffled grunts of pain. Wolfred was so frightened that he had trouble finding all the snares, and he had to cut the sinew that had choked a frozen rabbit. The girl finished the job and they slid back down to the river with the dog. Behind them, unearthly caterwauls began. Quickly they sped off. To Wolfred’s relief, the girl smiled and skimmed forward, calm, full of confidence. Yet she was still a child.

MISS BEHRING HEARD.

Maggie, please come to the front of the class, she said.

Maggie had poked her head into her desk for a straw sip of apple juice. She had a little box of it for emergencies. She stuck it under her shirt, in her waistband. Humbly, with shy obedience, Maggie walked down the row of desks, dragging her feet for drama.

Right now!

Yes, Miss Behring.

Or is it Miss Boring? asked Miss Behring.

What, Miss Behring?

Maggie! You will walk to the corner and stand there with your face to the wall.

The children tittered with excitement. Maggie turned and smiled, too nice. They stopped. She walked to the corner and stood there, next to the watercooler, with her face to the wall.

Now you will see what boredom is really like! exclaimed her teacher, who was right behind her.

This time the children really did laugh. Maggie tried to turn around again, but Miss Behring was still there. The teacher held her head with flat patty-cake hands at either temple. Maggie’s stomach boiled. She had told LaRose that when someone made her stomach boil she always got them. Miss Behring took her hands away from Maggie’s head and began a lesson on fractions. Maggie stood there, thinking. After a time, she asked.

Please, Miss Behring, can I go to the bathroom?

You went at recess, said Miss Behring, and smoothly continued with ⅛ + ⁴/⁸.

Maggie jiggled.

Miss Behring, Miss Behring! I need to go anyway.

No, Miss Behring said.

Maggie allowed the lesson to continue. But silently she plucked a paper cup from the stack next to the watercooler. She waited.

Miss Behring, please, she said at last. Her voice was strained. I had to go so bad I peed in a cup.

What?

Maggie turned around and held out the cup of apple juice.

May I please empty this?

Miss Behring shut her mouth. Her eyes darted around like trapped flies. She pointed at the door. Then she sat down at her desk staring at some papers.

Maggie carefully bore the brimming cup down the aisle, every eye in the classroom on her. Miss Behring put her head in her hands. Maggie turned and made sure her teacher wasn’t watching. She grinned at her classmates. Then she drained the cup, and slammed out the door. She paused outside a moment to enjoy the shrieking gabble and Miss Behring’s storm of useless threats. When she came back, she sat down as though nothing had happened. Miss Behring didn’t send her back to the corner. She seemed to be making notes. Maggie had been hoping she would cry.

Making people cry was one of Maggie’s specialties, so she would have enjoyed her teacher’s distress. As for herself, she could luxuriate in tears, she could almost command them into her eyes. She was training herself.

ONE SUNDAY WHEN Nola was at Mass, it occurred to Peter that he might go over to Landreaux’s house. He took Maggie along. It wasn’t that he missed LaRose. It was the friendship — it was all he had. His brother down in Florida was someone to visit maybe, someday. Landreaux and Emmaline’s family were his closest people.

What are we doing? asked Maggie as they drove up.

Just visiting, he said.

Landreaux had already come to the door, and they went in.

LaRose was sitting on top of Coochy pretend-punching. He looked up in surprise. Peter looked down in surprise. LaRose never roughhoused or fake-punched at their home.

Is it time? LaRose asked.

No, said Peter, I’m not coming to get you. Me and Maggie were just rattling around at home, so we thought we’d visit you guys.

Hey! Landreaux’s big face went wider and his soft smile came out. He shook Peter’s hand, whirling with apprehension, but maybe pleasure. I just made coffee.

They sat down at the kitchen table, and Maggie went straight to Snow and Josette’s bedroom. She could smell the nail polish.

Maggie! C’mere. Snow was painting each of her nails with a white undercoat and painting black spirals alternating with black checkerboards. Josette was applying a set of stick-on nails with toxic glue. She sat waiting for them to dry, moving only her face, blinking and rolling her eyes to the music plugged into her head.

Can you do mine?

What you want, Maggie?

Purple? And white skulls on them.

Geez, I can’t make skulls. Snow laughed. Something easy. She took from her plastic case a tiny jar of purple polish and shook it, rattling the bead. Maggie loved the sound of that.

Maybe just dots?

I can do that.

They became absorbed in the intricacy of the undercoats, the first color, clear coat, second color, clear top coat. They held their breaths as Snow filed and then painted Maggie’s fingernails. While each coat dried Snow and Maggie talked.

How come you guys are visiting? You never visit.

I think my dad was lonesome. Mom’s at Mass.

It’s good, better that you guys came over. We used to play! Makes it less weird, huh?

Yeah, I mean, sometimes I think. . Maggie frowned, then brightened. There could be a whole revenge plot going between our families. But now I don’t think there ever will.

Snow was startled.

’Cause why. . ’cause we guys all love LaRose?

Huh-huh. Me and him, we stabbed ourselves to be brother and sister.

Holeee, what?

With pencils. To give a blue dot. Maggie pulled her sweater down.

Can I see? Oooo. Look, Josette. Right on her arm. LaRose and Maggie tattooed themselves to be a family.

LaRose got stabbed by a kid at school. I took care of the kid. Then I stabbed myself so we could be engaged, at first. But I didn’t know what engagement meant.

Yeah, gross. He’s your brother, so. .

Keep your fingers still now, said Snow. Put them back on the newspaper.

I like this, said Maggie, almost shy with delight. She stretched her hand out for her purple polka-dotted fingernails to catch the light.

What do you mean you took care of it? said Josette. You beat that kid up?

He had to be revived, said Maggie in a modest way.

For real?

Did you get in trouble?

Not that time. If I do get in trouble, I can handle it.

Josette nodded at Snow. She can do the time, ayyyy. She’s looking out for our baby brother, no shit, she’s for real.

If we were all a family it would be much better, Maggie said. You guys could sleep over.

Noooo, Josette smiled. Just that we’re too old.

We could have the same tattoos then, Maggie said. I know how to give them.

Whoa, hold on! The girls collapsed, laughing.

I just sharpen up a pencil real fine, then pow. She made a quick stabbing motion with a pen.

Assassin! said Snow.

Coochy stuck his head in the door and made a girly face. Your dad says it’s time to go.

The girls held their arms out for hugs.

Kiss, kiss, one on each cheek, like we’re in the mafia.

WOLFRED ASKED THE girl to tell him her name. He asked in words, he asked in signs, but she wouldn’t speak. Each time they stopped, he asked. But though she smiled at him, and understood exactly what he wanted, she wouldn’t tell her name. She looked into the distance. Near morning, after they had soundly slept, she knelt near the fire to blow it back to life. All of a sudden, she went still and stared into the trees. She jutted her chin forward, then pulled back her hair and narrowed her eyes. Wolfred followed her gaze and saw it, too. Mackinnon’s head, rolling laboriously over the snow, its hair on fire, brightly twitching, flames cheerfully flickering. Sometimes it banged into a tree and whimpered. Sometimes it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of neck, or its comically paddling ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its awkward, interminable progress.

The Pain Chart

MRS. PEACE POINTED to the sweating, crying grimace face on the illustrated list the nurse put in front of her. It was a pain chart.

Real bad, huh?

I have a lot of pain, Mrs. Peace said, a lot of pain. And I was doing so good with no attacks! Now I don’t even remember where I put my patches. I thought they were right here, in the bottom of my papers. In my tin.

Where does it hurt? asked the nurse on duty that afternoon.

Here, here, and here. And my head.

This will help you.

That’s a shot?

And your usual, your patch. Remember, you have to guard these things. We can keep them locked up in the safe, at the desk.

I’ll just keep one, for emergency.

Good, okay. But remember not to let anybody else take them, use them. They are a hundred times stronger than morphine, right? Morphine.

That’s what it takes.

Now you’ll sleep.

I’d rather stay here, in my recliner. She’ll come and visit me.

Who?

My mother.

Oh, I see.

You’re smiling. I see your smile. But it is true, she will come. After all these years, they finally let her visit me.

I wrote our name everywhere, said LaRose to her mother. LaRose and LaRose and LaRose going on forever. I was proud of my penmanship, and careful with every letter. I wrote my name in hidden places they would never see. I wrote my name for all of us. I made my name perfect, the letters curved in Palmer A+. Once, I carved my name in wood so that it could never be erased. Even if they painted over the letters you could still read it. LaRose.

Faintly, in the girls’ dormitory at Fort Totten. On the top of a wooden door, the underside of chairs, on the shelves of the basement storage room where I was locked up once for sassing. Number 2 lead government-issue BIA pencil, in a notebook, stored now in the National Archives in Kansas City. On a mopboard, inside a cupboard, on top of a closet door in Stephan. Underneath a desk at Marty, and a chalkboard rail. Scratched into a brick grown over with grass at the old powerhouse in Wahpeton. Chamberlain. Flandreau. Fort Totten and Fort Totten. We left our name in those schools and others, all the way back to the first school, Carlisle. For the history of LaRose is tied up in those schools. Yes, we wrote our name in places it would never be found until the building itself was torn down or burned so that all the sorrows and strivings those walls held went up in flames, and the smoke drifted home.

DOUGIE VEDDAR HAD an older brother, and his brother had friends. They weren’t in the same K–6 school but in the junior high, which was connected to the high school. Tyler Veddar, Curtains Peace, Brad Morrissey, and Jason “Buggy” Wildstrand tried to call themselves the Fearsome Four. Until later, it never caught on, except as a joke. At present, they were skinny, soft, and hadn’t got their growth. Mainly they played video games and fooled around with Curtains’s guitars, left to him by his brother. They had a songbook but didn’t know what the markings meant or how to tune their instruments. Their noise was good, they thought. Dougie told his brother how Maggie had tried murder on him. Tyler told his friends and they kept their eyes out for the right chance to get her. Nothing happened. After school, she always took the bus. And then because she got a part as a singing mushroom in the play and stayed after, she had to be picked up.

One day they lucked out because her mother was late.

Maggie was walking in a circle, fuming, kicking up leaves. It was cold, clammy, wet outside. She didn’t like it. Tyler came by and said in a nice voice, You okay? He was that much older she didn’t recognize him.

No, said Maggie. My mom’s late.

We live over there. He pointed at the garage where they hung out. Me and my bros. You wanna come hang out until your mom gets here? You can see from the side window.

I dunno, Maggie said.

My mom’s there.

Okay.

She followed him to the garage and they went inside. There were Tyler’s friends. They stood around awkwardly, then Tyler said, Wanna sit on the couch? As soon as Maggie sat down, she knew this was bad. They jammed in beside her, pinning her, and Tyler said, You tried to kill Dougie. Then he and the other boys started putting their hands all over her. Their fingers went straight to her non-breasts and poked into her Tuesday panties. They dog-piled her, their grubby paws pinching, prodding, prying her apart. She had a fainting feeling, like she was weak and drained of all her strength. A floating grief came over her like a soft veil. Her head buzzed. But the fingers moved still harder and a hot burn hit her gut. She shrieked. When Tyler tried to cover her mouth, she bit down on his finger until she tasted blood. Buggy pushed her back in the cushions and she screamed louder, slammed her knees into his crotch so hard he yipped and howled like a puppy. Curtains tried to keep a hold but her thumbs went out and jabbed his eyeballs. He fell back, yelling he was blinded, and she jumped toward a guitar, swung it up against Brad’s face. She knocked him against the wall. He curled his arms around his head.

Buggy was curled in a corner, bawling. Brad was wheezing. They were all in trauma.

Boys? Boys? You hungry? The mother out the back door.

Naaah! called Tyler.

The boys, except for Buggy, still curled on the floor, stood panting, staring at one another, in a circle.

Finally Tyler said, Fuck, that was amazing. Hey, Maggie, we need a front man. We need a girl. Wanna join our band?

Join? Maggie tossed her hair, inching backward. Straightened her clothes. Adrenaline was wearing off and common fright was telling her to find the door.

We’ll tell if you don’t join, said Tyler.

She stepped to the door, opened it. Rage whirled around her like a burning hula hoop.

Tell? Tell? Go ahead. You know Landreaux who killed my brother? Well, he’s my stepfather now. He’ll hunt every one of you down. He’ll shoot your heads off. Bye.

Maggie ran back to the corner where she was supposed to meet her mother. The car was pulling up.

Sorry I was late, honey. Did you get bored?

Shut up, said Maggie.

Shut up? Shut up? Is that any way. .

Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Maggie shrieked.

She ran straight into the house, into her room. Slammed the door. After a while she sneaked out to go to the bathroom. Then in the hallway LaRose came up behind her.

Quit following me around, brat, Maggie said.

Her head felt funny, like what those boys did sucked her brains out. Their touching hands were gross and left germs of stupidness. She wanted to wash and wash.

Little asshole. She nearly slapped LaRose.

But she couldn’t hold on to the bitchiness. LaRose was so frustrating, melting her with nothing particular except he never hurt anything. It got dark early, so Maggie and LaRose went downstairs to see if there was food. They ate some ice cream.

Maggie poured a can of Dad’s beer into the dog’s water bowl. He walked over and sniffed it suspiciously, but the smell was good. He lapped it up. She poured him another. He liked that one too. Then he got a smashed look on his face, walked head-on into the closed glass doors, and fell over. LaRose slid open the doors and helped the dog outside.

Poor stupid dog, said Maggie.

The dog walked in circles and fell off the deck. LaRose sat down in the cold grass with him and cradled its head in his lap. The dog was panting, his eyes were glassy, but his snarl could have been a smile. Maggie sat shivering on a deck chair looking down at them.

The dog whimpered, a drunk dog whimper.

You need coffee, said LaRose. The dog didn’t move; slobber dripped until the dog’s breath bubbled all over LaRose’s hands and legs.

Maggie watched, admiring LaRose because of the way he let the dog slobber on him. And he was always like that. There was the way he always captured spiders, never squashed them, calmed hens before they had to be killed, saved bats, observed but never drowned hills of ants, brought stunned birds to life.

Nola said her Catholic grace before dinner. A thought nagged at Maggie. She looked at LaRose, who was studying his food. He was like that monk in the brown robe, Francis. The animals came to LaRose and laid themselves down at his feet. They were drawn to him, knowing they would be saved.

This thought was erased by the way her mother chewed. Actually, it was everything about the way her mother ate. She was already furious with her mother for being late. For putting her life in danger from those maggots. Maggie tried to turn away, to pretend her mother did not exist. But she couldn’t help watch. Nola poked her fork into one green bean, then raised it to her mouth. Sometimes Nola would look around the table to see if anyone else in the family was eating a green bean at the exact same time. At this moment, she was alone with her bean. Nola caught her daughter’s look of contempt. Surprised, she opened her mouth, bared her lips, and snatched the green bean off the fork with her teeth.

Maggie whipped her head back. How could she? How on this fucking earth? The teeth, the teeth, scraping the fork. The metal-on-enamel click. Maggie felt a sodden roar rising. She stared down at her plate, at the green beans, and tried to counsel her hatred to get behind her, like Satan, as hunky old Father Travis had suggested when Nola dragged her to confession that one time.

She took a deep breath. She picked up one green bean with her fingers. Nobody noticed. It took six hand-plucked green beans, a casual, Hey, hey Mom! Then a provocative mad flare of her eyes as she chomped green beans off her fingers, then the freakish grin that always got a rise.

Nola sat back, her fork half raised. She emitted a blistering wave of force.

This is how you eat a bean, Maggie, she said. Then she lifted the fork, bared her lips, scraped the bean off the fork with her teeth.

Maggie looked straight at her and mouthed words that only Nola, only her mother, could see: You are disgusting.

What’s happening? cried Peter, feeling the soundless screech, missing the lip sync.

The dog dry-heaved in the corner.

LaRose took the bowl and scooped the last of the green beans onto his plate. He ate them fast. He glanced over, worried, but the dog had quietly passed out.

Nola’s face darkened. She was panting hard now, with the shut ups adding to the you are disgusting. Maggie leaned her chair back, satisfied. She excused herself and sauntered up the stairs. Nola’s eyes followed her daughter, sour death rays. She had raised a monster whom she hated with all the black oils of her heart but whom she also loved with a deadly confused despair. Quietly, sinking back into her chair, she experimentally ate a green bean off the end of her fork. Neither Peter nor LaRose seemed to notice. So it wasn’t her? She was not disgusting? A tear dropped on her plate.

Peter saw another tear plunk. Are you okay?

Somebody told me today? said LaRose.

Peter put his arm around Nola, just held her. He was getting good at that.

Told you what?

They said, Your mother’s beautiful.

Nola smiled a wan, bewildered smile.

Before he’d spoken, LaRose had made sure Maggie was shut in her room. This was so awkward for him always to be caught between the two — he had confided in Josette. She had told him it was awkward. She told him that for one thing, Maggie had some kind of grief disorder, probably, that made her act out. It’s us who should adopt her, said Snow. We love her, but she’s hard. Also there were communication problems at her house. Josette said it was very common at her age, the mother-daughter thing. She and Snow and their mom were lucky because Emmaline had given birth young and also she was kind of a ding like the two of them and not trying to be so goody-goody and above them. Whatever works, do it, Josette said, but I feel sorry for you because it is awkward.

Maggie slipped into his room that night. She had been lying in her room — cooling off after another hot, hot shower. She had started to cry, alone. It was okay alone. But she still cut off the crying as quickly as she could, to toughen herself. She was a wolf, a wounded wolf. She’d sink her teeth in those boys’ throats. Her thoughts returned to how the animals were drawn to LaRose. She would trust her paw to his boy hand.

Move over, she whispered, and popped under his quilt.

Her hot feet on his shins.

I gotta ask you something. Her nose was still plugged by the unwilled crying. Her face was swollen. But his skin cooled the soles of her feet.

Please, LaRose. Don’t laugh. I’m gonna ask you something serious.

Okay.

What would you do if boys jumped me, if they touched me and stuff, all over, in a bad way.

I would make them die, said LaRose.

Do you think you could?

I would figure it out.

Could a saint kill for love?

Saints have superpowers, said LaRose.

Do you think you’re a saint?

No.

I think you are, said Maggie.

She rolled over, stared at the crack of dim light underneath the door. It was a cool night. The warmth of him suffused the bed. The itchy, dirty, cooty-fingered film on her skin dispersed. The roiling craziness her mother caused with her chewing habits dissipated. Everything bad was drawn into the gentle magnetism of the bedsheets. She began to drift.

LaRose stroked the ends of her hair on the pillow beside him.

I am a broken animal, she whispered.

IT WAS GOING to snow, first snow of the season, Romeo could smell it. He could always smell that gritty freshness before it happened, before the weatherpeople turned the snow to drama on his television. He plunged outside, across the lumps of torn earth, and took the road to town. Sure enough, as he rollingly walked, flakes began and he had the impression, maybe it was the drug he’d taken, that he was all of a sudden stuck. He was in a globe, frozen on a tiny treadmill in a little scene of a man walking to the Dead Custer, forever, through falling bits of white paper or maybe some snowlike chemical that would sift down over and over as a child turned his world upside down in its hands. He liked this idea so well that he had to remind himself it wasn’t true. The motionless motion was so transfixing, and his thoughts — his thoughts were centered.

Landreaux happened to drive through this tableau, oblivious as always, but the snow swirled in his wake and got Romeo’s thoughts back on his old favorite, revenge. Landreaux believed he was outside of Romeo’s reach and interest. But no, he wasn’t. Landreaux was so full of himself, so high on himself that even now he did not remember those old days of theirs. Far back when they were young boys hardly older than LaRose. That’s how far back and deep it went, invisible most times like a splinter to the bone. Then surfacing or piercing Romeo from the inside like those terrible fake pills the old vultures had tricked down him.

Bits of snow melted in Romeo’s filmy hair. It was just a fluke, maybe, but he’d got himself put on to a substitute maintenance list at the hospital. Be still my heart! So many prescription bottles, so little time. Because his habits had already become invisible to the ambulance crew, he overheard a sentence that he’d copied out on scratch paper. Never touched the carotid. He’d palmed a box of colored tacks and fixed the paper to the wall. Working out connections. It would be the first of many clues to what had really happened on the day Landreaux killed Dusty.

Lennie Briscoe, the weary hound, and Romeo, his weasel sidekick, would assemble the truth.

In the clarity of thinking that he enjoyed after Landreaux’s car passed, Romeo thought about how people with information spoke quietly, in code. He was learning to decipher what they said. Sometimes he had to make an educated guess. But he knew they were possessed of crucial knowledge.

To get the truth, I must become truth. Or at least appear truth-worthy, he decided.

Therefore, Romeo cleaned himself up. He applied for a real full-time at the hospital. Slim chance. And the paperwork always made him sweat. But there, at the hospital, he thought maybe he could be important again. The other people on maintenance were respected community members. Some of them even drove the ambulance, and all of them were trusted. Sterling Chance really was, for instance, sterling. As head of maintenance, he listened to Romeo answer interview questions with a calm and perceptive gaze.

Self-contained, thought Romeo. He admired Sterling Chance. For the first time since, well, since Mrs. Peace was his teacher, Romeo truly wanted something other than reliable pathways to oblivion. He wanted this job. Not just a measly part-time intermittent job, but a full-time job. True, his motives were sketchy. Drugs and vengeance. But why quibble with a budding work ethic? There was no question that this job would make his old drug sources look pathetic. Never again would he have to suffer the indignation of crisscrossing side effects. And information? If he did get information on this job, it would be information he would keep until he really needed it — sad information. But information so rare and shocking that maybe, perhaps, you could use it to blackmail a person for life. Which was a satisfying thought when you’d previously failed to kill that person.

FIGHTING OFF, OUTWITTING, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog traveled. They wore out their snowshoes. The girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and stuffed them inside with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.

The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, only lifting his head, eyes shut, to sip water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.

He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.

All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl winding her hand in a strip of blanket to grip the handle of the ax, then heating its edge red hot. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. Every so often, silence, then the mad cacophony again. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog, or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Very much surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.

It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life.

He must have heard wrong. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition until, at last, the concatenations ebbed to a mere throb of color. The drum corrected some interior rhythm; a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.

Again, that night, he heard the battle outside. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, once she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woolen turban. Toward night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned.

You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing.

Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body, grasping her hand, he was not afraid to lift off the ground. They traveled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast no cold could reach them. Below, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body he was not to leave again until he had completed half a century of hard, bone-break, work.

Two days later, they entered from deep wilderness a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the bends of a river. Along a street of beaten snow several wooden houses were neatly rooted in a dreamlike row. They were so like the houses Wolfred had left behind out east, that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He thought he was in home country, and walked up to the door of the largest house. His knock was answered, but not until he explained himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a whiteman.

She and her family, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him.

When you grow up, he said.

She smiled and nodded.

He asked her name.

She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower.

The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school that had recently been established for Indians only. It was located out in territory that had become the state of Michigan, and the girl could travel there, too, if she wanted to become educated. Only, as she had no family, she would become indentured to the place. Although she did not understand what that meant, she agreed to it.

At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her. But it never did. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But it never did. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now — Indian. As in, Do not speak Indian, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, Inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening.

The other children smelled like old people, but she got used to it. Soon she did too. Her wool dress and corset pinched, and the woolen underwear itched like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she must eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else.

She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things — forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world.

She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, placed her soul back into her body, and told her that she would live.

Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held your foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll.

WOLFRED TOLD THE story of Mackinnon’s sudden illness and how he and the girl had plunged into the wilderness seeking help, which was dispatched. The Indians had already found Mackinnon scattered outside the trading post, and they reported that in his fever he’d sought cold snow, died there, and been torn apart by dogs. His head? Wolfred wanted to ask, but fear stopped his tongue. Wolfred was authorized to take up Mackinnon’s position, and so he left the settlement and traveled north. He left Mackinnon’s gold watch, wedding ring, and money in their hiding place. He did well at the post, though the heart of the trade had moved on. Sometimes at night perhaps he heard Mackinnon’s hoarse breath. Sometimes he whiffed the rank odor that used to swell from Mackinnon’s feet when he removed his boots. Wolfred kept beautifully detailed books of transactions. Often, he wrote to the girl in Michigan, My Flower, Chère LaRose. He was influenced by French and Metis descendants of the voyageurs he came to know. They tried to persuade him to forget her. He did not, at any rate, take a wife. Although he helped himself liberally to women’s charms, there was no forgetting her.

He kept writing letters so that she would remember her promise. He wrote of their experiences, for as they had traveled he had marveled at her skills and authority. Wolfred spent longer periods of time living with, hunting with, speaking with, and sharing ceremonies with her people. They gave him medicine to get rid of Mackinnon, which seemed to work. He stopped hearing the breath rasp at night, stopped smelling the feet. He was turning into an Indian while she was turning into a white woman. But how could he know.

THE DAY DID come, the death day. One year had passed already. Landreaux and Emmaline had no idea how the Ravich family would spend that day. LaRose was with the Iron family, as Peter had planned. They did what they could the night before, gathering the children for a pipe ceremony in the living room, and everyone talked. They passed the sacred pipe, one to another. The children turned the pipe to each direction when it came to them. They were careful. They knew to handle the pipe. Hollis said that because LaRose went over to the Raviches he saved them. Willard said he missed LaRose. Josette said both things her brothers said were true, and that she was glad he’d brought Maggie closer. Snow said LaRose had saved both families. He was a little healer. Emmaline could not speak. Landreaux said nothing, but a demonic sadness in him grew and grew.

On the very day of it, Landreaux found that he could not get out of bed. All strength and will had left his body. A black weight of sleep pressed down. The boys came to the door of their parents’ little bedroom right off the kitchen. Dad, they said. Dad?

He heard their feet shuffle at the foot of the bed. Then the girls came in. They touched his hair, his hands. He kept his eyes shut. When they left, tears leaked down the lines along his mouth, down his neck, and pooled along his collarbone. The heat of his body dried them. He was unusually hot, he found. To his joy, he had a fever. He was really ill. After the older children left on the school bus, Emmaline sat beside him.

She thought of lying down beside him, but something had gone out of her. She searched her heart, and found only weary calculation of the difficulties that his misery would make for her that day.

I have to go to work, she said. LaRose is here. Can you take him to school in an hour?

Yeah, the aspirin will kick in, said Landreaux. I’ll be okay.

Emmaline sat with him, stroked the hair back from his forehead. LaRose was eating oatmeal with raisins, leaving the raisins for last.

You’re sure you can do it?

I’m sure. I’ll just stay quiet here half an hour. Then I’ll get up.

He heard her tell LaRose good-bye, heard the door shut, the motor growling as she left the house.

Infinite Ride

THE BUCK KNEW, Landreaux thought. Of course it knew. Last year it knew. Landreaux had been watching, with his gun sometimes and sometimes not. Many times he had found that the buck was also watching him. He would stop, feeling its gaze on the back of his head, and turn to see it motionless, its eyes deep and liquid. If he had listened, or understood, or cared to know what he understood, he would never have hunted that buck. Never. He would have known the animal was trying to tell him something of the gravest importance. The deer was no ordinary creature, but a bridge to another world. A place where Landreaux would never stop seeing his friend’s son in the leaves, never stop strange thoughts from visiting at the most inopportune moments.

How to explain that shot? He’d wish himself out of existence to take it or not take it over again. But the harder, the best, the only thing to do was to stay alive. Stay with the consequences, with his family. Take on the shame although its rank weight smothered him.

Sometimes he was afraid he’d crack and say suddenly that he’d been drinking that day, even though that was wrong. It was maybe worse. He’d not been thinking. He hadn’t waited, or maybe he’d been waiting so long for the buck that the actual moment seemed an afterthought. But it was a moment of stupidity, really, wasn’t it? Still, to Landreaux his crucial lack of attention at that moment was as bad as being drunk. Not a soul understood it was as bad, except Dusty. He knew, of course, or his spirit knew. He had told Landreaux in a dream.

Afterward, Zack Peace had given Landreaux that Breathalyzer test. He’d done it, routinely, after Landreaux had been taken in. Zack had glanced at the readout, then turned and looked steadily at Landreaux. People always suspected those who worked with terminal patients of taking their drugs. But he had been clean for weeks. Clean. He’d sworn off that anodyne. The number was normal, but there was something about Landreaux, his reactions, alternating between raving fits and calm, his burp of laughter, once. Maybe high? But there was no sign of substance on him. And anyway, Zack knew that in the aftermath of an event like this, nothing seemed normal. Everyone was whacked-out on horror and adrenaline. He had looked up to Landreaux from childhood and he was Emmaline’s favorite cousin. Zack included the negative test in his report, which would help exonerate Landreaux. Yet, he was troubled. They hadn’t spoken of it since. They hadn’t spoken at all.

Today, on this day, Landreaux had to tell someone the truth. His head was ringing. He was sick of hiding it. In the past year he’d realized that there wasn’t a right person. There were, of course, two people who were safe to tell, who could share the weight. Yet he did not want to lose Father Travis’s respect. He didn’t want to see Emmaline’s face after he released those words. So that left nobody. Zack, who knew, wouldn’t speak to him. He had to tell, and that is when LaRose came into the room.

Daddy. LaRose sat down on the bed. Get up!

I’m sick today.

LaRose felt Landreaux’s forehead, just like a grown-up, and made his father smile.

Little doctor, do I have a fever?

You need a sweat lodge, said LaRose, because he wanted to make all of the preparations.

Okay, said Landreaux, let’s do it. We’ll have a sweat lodge, just us two. You can skip a day of kindergarten, I guess, for a sweat lodge. Yeah?

Sure I can.

But first I gotta tell you something.

LaRose waited.

This is a secret, a big secret. We have to swear it is our secret, okay?

LaRose grew very serious. They shook hands four times.

Okay, I’m trusting you.

LaRose opened his eyes wide at his father and did not blink.

I wasn’t, ah, right in my head the day I killed Dusty. I didn’t mean to, but I don’t know, maybe my aim was off. The point is, I was clumsy that day.

LaRose frowned and his father’s heart stabbed.

Did you see Dusty there? LaRose asked. Did you see the dog?

What dog? said Landreaux.

Dusty fell from a tree branch, said LaRose. I saw the place. One night in my dream I saw the whole thing. Dusty followed the dog into the woods. The dog saw you. Ask the dog.

Landreaux’s brain began to hurt.

You always had a good aim before. My other Dad said so.

Peter.

Yeah. He said you would have hit the buck.

That’s true, said Landreaux. The buck is still there. I’ve seen it roaming in the woods.

Dusty told me you shot him on accident, said LaRose.

Landreaux opened his arms to his son, and LaRose crept close to lie against his chest. They breathed together. LaRose loosened, took a big sigh, fell asleep, but Landreaux stayed awake, staring at the ceiling. The sky fell, as it did each moment. Shame covered him. He saw that he was supposed to share LaRose all along because the boy was too good for a no-good like him. LaRose, again. LaRose had saved him before. On the day the bus left for boarding school, he had been only a few years older than his son was now. It seemed impossible that his parents had let him go. They didn’t tell him, but they were on their way to live, and die, in Minneapolis.

Landreaux’s parents had left him at the bus with his things and driven away in his grandfather’s car. He was nine years old. The school people took his sack of clothes and belongings as he got on and that was the last he saw of it. He was going to a school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the U.S. government, said his parents. They’d both been to mission schools and didn’t like them. They thought the government school would be much better. Plus they could visit him. They could take a different kind of bus if they moved to Minneapolis.

The seats of Landreaux’s bus were green and tough, hot because it was still August and the bus had been sitting in the parking lot. Halfway to the school there was supposed to be a lunch, and it was true. They got off at a park. The older kids ran around laughing. Waxed-paper parcels were handed out. The sandwich was soft white bread. There was butter and the cheese was orange. There was an apple. His stomach glowed. He asked for and got another sandwich, the same. He ate it all, drank iron-tasting water from a pump.

After he climbed back on the bus and was counted, he sank onto the floor. He crawled under the seat. The bus rumbled back onto the highway and Landreaux made himself comfortable there beneath the seat. He could make out a name emphatically formed many times on the metal inside of the bus there.

LaRose. LaRose. LaRose.

Girls behind him murmured, happy. Other children started crying, soft, in low hiccups. A four-year-old softly vomited. Some were staring out the window, mesmerized. Some kids laughed and chatted, expectant. Other children were going numb. Curled underneath the bus seat, Landreaux stared at that name. The letters were drawn in heavy pencil, traced over and over. LaRose. He dozed off and soon he was sleeping heavily on a full stomach. He did not wake when the bus stopped, when all of them got off. He did not wake when they shaved his head for lice and left him in the shower while they found him new clothes without bugs. Not even in bed that night, the next morning either, did he wake. He never woke up. He was still sleeping on that bus.