LaRose

The Letters

MRS. PEACE AT her sparkle-chrome kitchen table. The lacquered surface covered with beading trays, cigar boxes of beads, stacked papers. Snow and Josette carefully slipped very old letters into page protectors. Most of the paper that Wolfred Roberts had written on through the 1860s, then 1870s, was still thick and supple. Some was more brittle, lined, torn from ledgers.

That old-time paper was made so well, said Mrs. Peace. Stuff nowadays crumbles in a few years.

It’s the acid, said Snow. There’s acid in most paper now.

Wolfred Roberts had written fair copies of the letters he had sent in order to recover his stolen wife, fiercely building an archive in his quest. The dates were on the letters, and there was a record of the dates they were mailed, and dates upon which he received replies, if there were replies.

The original backup plan, said Josette.

He used his training as a fur trade clerk, said Mrs. Peace. Keeping track of every transaction. My aunt told me that he kept these letters in a metal box, locked. She was young when he died, but she remembered that little key. It was kept in an old sugar jar, the handles broken off. He worried that kids would mess around with these papers. This here was all he had of her, proof he looked for her.

Mrs. Peace locked the plastic pages into a ring binder. The first letters were addressed to Dr. Haniford Ames. Each of the letters from Wolfred, later from a lawyer also, requested the remains of LaRose Roberts. Her chipped incisor, fractured and knit skull, injuries from the vicious kick of a dissolute fur trader, as well as her tubercular bones, would make her distinctive. His letters searched after her, then the letters went on. Wolfred’s daughter, the second LaRose, kept them going. There were also letters from her time in Carlisle. And then the letter writing passed on to her daughter and then to Mrs. Peace. For well over a century these letters had searched after the bones of Mirage, the Flower, LaRose.

LaRose had some use, first of all, in Dr. Haniford Ames’s research. Letters from Dr. Ames politely refusing Wolfred’s requests attested to the value of her body in the name of science. Her bones demonstrated the unique susceptibility of Indians to this disease, and also how long she’d fought it. Over and over, her body had walled off and contained the disease. She had been, said the doctor, a remarkable specimen of humanity. For a time, also, LaRose had become an ambassador to the curious. Ames, according to the lawyer, had no right to take LaRose on the road as an illustration for his scientific lectures on the progress of tuberculosis. Ames had willed all of the human remains in his possession to the Ames County Historical Society in Maryland, where he spent his old age. The bones went on display.

After the letters from Wolfred, the bones were kept in a drawer next to the bones of other Indians — some taken from burial scaffolds, some dug out of burial mounds, some turned up when fields were plowed, highways constructed, the foundations of houses or banks or hospitals or hotels and swimming pools dug and built. For many years the historical society refused to return the bones because, wrote the president, the bones of Wolfred’s wife were an important part of the history of Ames County.

LaRose’s bones went on display once again and were abruptly removed after an unsolved break-in. Later still, the human remains of the first LaRose, who had known the secrets of plants, who could find food in any place, who had battled a rolling head and memorized Bible verses, that LaRose who had been marked out for her intelligence and decorated with ribbons every year, and marked out also as incorrigible by two of her teachers at the mission, that LaRose who had flung off her corsets and laughed when she walked again in moccasins, not heeled shoes, that LaRose attended to by pale-blue spirits and thunder beings during the births of her children, the LaRose who loved the thin scar next to Wolfred’s smile, that LaRose, what remained of her on earth, was, to the president of the historical society’s great regret, somehow lost.

AUGUST LIGHT POURED long through the trees. The ticks were dead. The grasses flowed in the ditches and LaRose could not stop his thoughts. He was compelled to sleep on the spot of ground where the boy he replaced had died. This inner directive was so strong that LaRose lied for the first time in his life in order to accomplish it. He told Emmaline that he was supposed to go to Peter and Nola’s over the weekend. He invented a friend from school because they didn’t know kids from Pluto, he talked about a birthday party, and he made it sound plausible. He felt a flicker of wonder that his lie was so easily delivered and so instantly believed. Peter would pick him up while she was at work, he said. Emmaline was disappointed. She often brought LaRose to work with her on weekends and he helped in her office, in the classrooms. At noon they went to Whitey’s and bought mozzarella sticks or a petrified-tasting fish sandwich from Josette.

No, said Emmaline at first. No, you can’t go.

LaRose looked into her eyes and said, Please? That look got him things. He was learning to use it. Maggie had taught him.

Emmaline took a deep breath, let it out. She frowned but gave in. LaRose hugged his mother good-bye and kissed her cheek. How long would that last, Emmaline thought, pushing back the flop of hair he now affected. The dark wing hung to his eye.

See you next week, Mom. He gave her an extra hug, extra-sweet. There was something in that hug that made her step back. Holding him by his shoulders at arm’s length, she scanned him.

You okay?

He nodded. Already caught.

I just feel kinda bad but kinda good, he said. Which meant nothing but was also true, so he could say it with conviction. She was still uncertain, but she was also late for the usual emergency meeting. After his mother left, LaRose went back into the bedroom, took a blanket from the storage closet. He rolled the blanket up and tucked it beneath his arm. He unzipped his backpack full of action figures, added a spray bottle of mosquito repellent. In the kitchen, he turned on the tap and filled a canning jar with water.

In all of these things, LaRose was precise and deliberate. He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a.22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person’s nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn’t done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance.

When he reached the place, he spread out his blanket beside the tobacco ties, cedar, disintegrating objects, leaves, and sticks. It was a hot, still day, the only breeze high in the branches. The mosquitoes weren’t the rabid cloud of the first hot summer hatch, and once he sprayed himself they whined around him but didn’t land. At first, they were the only sound. The stillness, the too-quiet, made him uneasy. But then the birds started up again, accepting him into their territory, and he sat down on his blanket. He realized he had forgotten to bring any kind of offering — you were supposed to do that. For sure you were supposed to do that if you went into the woods. You had to offer something to the spirits. He had himself, the pack of action figures, the mosquito spray, his blanket, one song, and the jar of water. The song was the four-direction song he’d learned from his father. He held the jar of water up the way he’d seen his mother do this, offering the jar to each direction. He sang his song as he poured the water out on the ground. He carefully capped the empty jar. Then he lay back and looked into the waving treetops and bits of sky. The trees covered almost all the sky but what he could see was blue, hot blue, though down here the air was warm but not blistering. If not for the mosquitoes that got in an ear or went up his nose and occasionally bit through the repellent, he would have been comfortable.

The chatter of birds, the light hum of insects. He lay there listening to his stomach complain, waiting for something to happen. Toward late afternoon his stomach gave up and the wind came sweeping along the ground. It was harder for the bugs to light on him. He fell asleep. When he woke it was extremely dark. He was thirsty, wished he’d brought a flashlight or some matches. But his parents might have seen a light, he told himself. He’d done the right thing. He was uneasy, thought of going back. But they would find he’d lied and never trust him again. He’d never get this chance. So he lay in his blanket listening to the leaves rustled by small animals, his heart plunging in his ears. Late summer crickets sawed. A few frogs sang out. There were owls. His parents talked about the manidoog, the spirits that lived in everything, especially the woods.

It is only me. He whispered to the noises and their nature changed. They became a whispery chorus, willing to accept him. He fell asleep, at last. He slept so fervently that he couldn’t remember dreaming when the loud birds woke him in the morning. Now he was thirstier, and hungry, but also deliciously weak. He didn’t want to move at all. His body needed food; it was stretching out. Everybody said he was getting his growth. It would be so easy to show up early at Nola’s and say that he’d been dropped off. He’d done what he needed to do — that one night. But he decided to stay because he was strangely comfortable. His throat was so dry and scratchy that it hurt to swallow, but he didn’t care. The heat of the day clenched down, pressed through him.

After a while LaRose heard, or felt, someone approach, but he was held too fast in the hot lethargy to move. He did not feel afraid. Most likely, it was his father. Landreaux liked to range around the woods too. But it wasn’t — in fact it wasn’t one person at all. It was a group of people. Half were Indians and half were maybe Indians, some so pale he could see light shining through them. They came and made themselves comfortable, sitting around him — people of all ages. At least twenty of them. None of them acknowledged or even looked at him, and when they started speaking he knew that they were unaware of him. He knew because they talked about him the way parents do when they don’t know you can hear. He knew right off it was him they were talking of because someone said, The one they took for Dusty, and another asked, Is he still playing with Seker and the other Actions?, which of course he was, but which he tried to hide. All of a sudden one pointed.

He’s right there!

They glanced at him and acted like relatives who suddenly notice you.

Oh my, he’s big now.

The woman who said this was wearing a tight brown jacket, a billowy skirt, and a hat cocked to one side decorated with the wing of a bird. There was another woman with her, holding her hand, who looked very much like her. She pointed out LaRose and they spoke together. The older woman spoke Ojibwe. There was approval in her voice, but something about her was also quick, formidable, and wild. She bent close, looked at him very keenly, examined him up and down.

You’ll fly like me, she said.

There were a few Indians who looked like from history, wearing the old kind of simple clothing. They spoke Ojibwe, which LaRose recognized but could not understand very well. They seemed to be discussing something about him because they nodded their heads at or glanced at him in speaking. They agreed on something and the woman who knew English spoke to him. She spoke kindly, and her eyes rested on him in a loving way. As he looked into her fine, bold features, he recognized his mother. Intense comfort poured into LaRose.

We’ll teach you when the time comes, she said.

In one of the presences he could see traces of the four-year-old picture he had seen sometimes in Nola’s hand. It was Dusty, his age now.

Are you okay? LaRose asked the boy.

Dusty shrugged. Nah, he said. Not really.

Can you come back? Remember we used to play?

Dusty nodded.

I brought some heroes and stuff.

Yeah?

LaRose opened his pack. He took out the action figures and Dusty examined them. They began to play, quietly because adults were right there.

If you come back, you can be Seker.

Dusty’s face brightened and he ducked his head.

A short time later, everybody got up and left. Just walked off in all directions, murmuring, laughing. LaRose sat up and looked after the woman in the hat. He folded his blanket in half, then rolled it up again. He swung the backpack on, put the roll under his arm, and began walking. He felt fine. He took the trail to Maggie’s house and got in through the back door before Nola even knew he was home. Went into the bathroom and put his mouth under the tap. Just let the astounding water pour in.

LaRose?

I came in through the back, he called down.

I didn’t hear anybody drive up.

They dropped me off at the road.

He lay down in bed. The sudden comfort made him pass immediately into a hard, dreamless sleep.

AFTER HIS FAVORITE childhood teacher and the other ladies had committed sabotage, Romeo could never again get wasted with the same conviction. Their betrayal skewed him. The fluid arrangements he had made all of his life, the scams and petty thefts, did not come naturally. To make things worse, or better, he was not sure, he got the job he’d applied for. The real, true job. He was chosen for this job over others. At first, surprise made him industrious. Then he got interested in the stories that took place all around him. He worked extra hours because it was like existing in a living TV drama. To get into the different wards, and find new information, he did more than lean on his push broom. He emptied trash incessantly, especially during staff meetings. He polished floors with a big electric floor polisher because people liked the floor polished. They trusted him more after he polished. He swept, wiped, cleaned up puke and blood with proper protocol. He began to like following rules! He loved wearing rubber gloves! People began to think he had sobered up, and he let them think that. He went more regularly to the AA meeting on the hill, with Father Travis. Everybody was a washout there. Now he was one of the success stories.

Then one day somebody said there would be drug testing at work. Even for sanitation engineers. Someday, not now. But it was coming. Romeo snarled, threw down his broom, and walked all the way into town. The job was also bearable because he was fortified. And yet, it had been a long time since his old injuries had been officially treated. Maybe he could work the system and get newer, stronger, legit prescriptions. His mood improved. His steps directed him to the Dead Custer, though even with his job he didn’t like to spend his money on bar drinks. Maybe there would be somebody he knew there, with cash, maybe on a bender and anxious for a drinking buddy.

Once his eyes adjusted to the dim interior, Romeo scoped quickly for the priest. He wanted to talk to Father Travis, not about the drug testing, but about the latest news. But the priest wasn’t there. He was amazed to see his son at one end of the bar.

He sat down next to Hollis.

What’s this? he asked.

It’s my birthday, said Hollis. I was born in August, remember?

Of course, of course, cried Romeo in surprise.

Hollis had entered school late because, when he was little, they were always on some mission involving lots of car backseat beds, party houses, Happy Meals. Romeo had forgotten to send him to school, but only for the first couple of years. Hollis was now turning eighteen before his senior year. He slid his driver’s license from his wallet to show the bartender, Puffy.

I am ordering my first beer!

Stand me too, my son.

Why don’t you buy me one for a change, said Hollis. Being it’s my birthday.

I would love to honor you but I am busted to bits. Romeo slumped.

Hollis ordered two beers.

What’re sons for? Hollis wearily said. But don’t try scamming on me, Dad.

No, no, I never would.

Right.

Except I got this arm here. Romeo winced, rolled his shoulder.

Your arm and leg. Hollis looked down at the leg. The last time he’d seen his father, that leg had been encased in black fake leather vinyl. Now it wore the sturdy brown cotton/poly of an honorable job.

You know how I got this? How it was Landreaux?

Yeah. You told me lots of times.

Since that day, always been a sad ol’ leg. Romeo laughed, he couldn’t help it. He was moved by the prospect of drinking a beer with his son. His son had not walked out the door. Romeo ducked his head, bobbed it up and down, smiling at the beer.

It is good to sit with you, my son.

I graduate this year, you know.

Wowzer, said Romeo.

I’m joining the National Guard. Got an appointment.

Speechless, Romeo gestured at Puffy to bring the beers, quick.

Ever since they hit the Towers, said Hollis, I’ve been thinking. My country has been good to me.

What? Romeo was scandalized. You’re an Indian!

I know, sure, they wiped us out almost. But still, the freedoms, right? And we got schools and hospitals and the casino. When we fuck up now, we mostly fuck up on our own.

Are you crazy! That’s called intergenerational trauma, my boy. It isn’t our fault they keep us down; they savaged our culture, family structure, and most of all we need our land back.

Hollis took his first legal drink of beer.

Oh yeah, true. But I keep thinking how I could save people in a flood. Motor them out on a pontoon, their little children in life jackets. Their dogs jumping in the boat last moment. I keep seeing that. I mean, National Guard. I probably won’t leave the state.

Hope not, said Romeo, weakly. This acceptance thing was part of being a father, he guessed, and it was more difficult than he’d imagined. He had a jealous thought.

What about Landreaux? He tell you to join up? Because of Desert Storm and all?

Not really, said Hollis. He was on the supply side of it. Medical. Never went out on the Road of Death, just got things ready for the guys, serviced lifesaving equipment and such. But there’s more, anyway, to this decision I’m making. I’ll learn welding, bridge construction, maybe truck driving. Heavy equipment. I want to get some money together, and those benefits. Go to UND later on. Maybe travel to the Grand Canyon or Florida, even. Out of state, anyway.

Romeo nodded and sweat.

I’ve not been the greatest, he mumbled. Who am I to say?

It’s okay, Dad. I know you went to boarding school. People say that fucked you up so. .

Romeo reared his head back.

Say? People say? They don’t know. Leaving boarding school was the thing that fucked me. I loved my teachers and they all said I was college material.

Right, thought Hollis. He didn’t hate his father — he knew some worse fathers. Mostly he grew exasperated and just had to get away from Romeo. He had no quarrel with his mother, either, only wanted to know who and where she might be. He fit in with the Irons, maybe too well, because he found himself thinking constantly of how great it would be if Josette liked him and maybe someday married him.

You got a sweetheart?

Romeo asked this in a shy doggy voice, afraid that his son would say something sarcastic. When Hollis didn’t answer, he thought he’d offended him.

I know I ain’ been a great dad to you, Romeo went on, but you can count on me now.

Hollis looked at his dad, so scrawny, so anxious to be loved, and dropped his gaze, embarrassed.

You can count on me too, Dad, he said.

Romeo frowned into the dregs of his beer and blinked back tears.

That’s one for the books, he said. He put his hand out for the soul shake and Hollis could break his grip only by ordering them both another beer. Hollis asked Puffy to change the channel on the TV over the bar to CNN, because he knew his dad liked it. Someone complained about the news channel, but Puffy hushed him. Sure enough, Romeo sat up and peered intently at the screen.

After a few minutes he slumped back and leaned confidentially toward Hollis.

So that hijacker Atta was maybe meeting some Iraqi in Prague, maybe? A year ago April.

What’s that about? Hollis asked without interest.

It seems to me like Rummy’s scattering crumbs, said Romeo. Rummy’s hoping reporters peck the crumbs up. But come on, Czech intelligence?

Romeo pressed his kung fu ’stache down his chin like a sage pondering.

Hollis shrugged.

They wanna clobber Saddam, said Romeo. Saddam’s a greedy crazy dude, but not like Doe Eyes. That’s definitive!

Doe Eyes was Romeo’s nickname for Bin Laden.

Hollis let his mind drift while his father enlarged his speculations on the motives of this or that public figure or politician. He didn’t hear the nervous fear for himself in his father’s voice. Hollis drank his beer sip by sip, not wanting to leave because once he got home, he’d have to find the summer-read book, Brave New World. Couldn’t even remember if he had a copy. Josette and Snow had stacks of paperbacks, probably including that one. He’d get the book off their shelf. He’d speed-read. Maybe Josette would help him write his paper. Hollis saw himself staring at the PC screen, Josette leaning over his shoulder. A critical frown. Her breath in his ear. Happy birthday. That sweet voice she used with LaRose.

Shut up, brain! Hollis tugged his own hair to jolt himself back. Here he was with his actual father, on his own actual birthday. It occurred to Hollis he might ask about his mother, again, although it was always the same — a song of memory lapse, a dance of drunken veils. These days he asked the question mostly to hear his father’s inventive swoops and swerves.

Hey, it’s my eighteenth birthday. So, Dad. My mother. What was she like? What was her name?

Her name? Mrs. Santa Claus Lady. She brought you, right? Seriously, my son, I don’t remember. Those were insane times, my boy. But seriously, once again, she was holy shit beautiful. She would walk into an establishment. The heads would swivel off their necks. The eyes would beg like a pack of starving mutts. The shit-ass fuckhounds. I was shocked when she allowed herself to be approached. By me.

Romeo shook his head, wagged his finger in the air. Ah, but you see. . it was the drugs. Clouded her judgment. I hope she is alive today, my son, but the evidence of her addictions casts doubt on that. Don’t do drugs or nothing because. .

Wait, Dad. Hollis ordered again, then another beer for his father. Wait, but according to what you’re telling me I would not exist if my mother’s judgment had not been clouded by drugs.

Ergo, laughed Romeo; his clattery heheheh went on until he wagged his finger again. Ergo sum.

That’s what for what?

Therefore I exist.

She took drugs, therefore I exist.

Ain’t life odd? But still, please refrain from getting mixed up with substances.

Okay, Dad, said Hollis, not even sarcastic. So you’re not going to tell me her name even on my birthday?

Hollis felt the cheer leak away and decided to sacrifice his beer, slide out the door before he got mad. Not getting mad was a life policy with Hollis.

He paid Puffy, pushed his beer over to Romeo.

Live it up.

Hollis walked out the door and Romeo watched him go, wounded. Here he was, a loving father in the reject chair again. The beer was nice, anyway, a consolation, and free. But as the door closed, Romeo suddenly pictured his blood-kin son making his way over to the Irons’. And giving Landreaux his filial loyalty. Landreaux, who was responsible for his whack arm and his leg that ached and sometimes trembled. To consider this caused Romeo to gulp down both beers. A mini-relapse! He could tell about it at the next meeting. He abandoned the barstool, tried to keep his balance, and set out for home in the throes of a mellow buzz. By the time he reached his room and removed a low-level painkiller from his stash, he was almost weeping with the contradictory joy of having celebrated his son’s eighteenth birthday and the knowledge that Hollis preferred Landreaux’s family and house to his own dad’s apartment. With a year-round Christmas tree.

So much betrayal. So many lies. Although Romeo could not remember if he’d actually asked Hollis to live with him.

Resentment is suicide! This group slogan often helped interrupt a chain of tigerish thoughts.

Romeo rocked back in his minivan captain’s chair, appreciating what he’d wrought. There it was, a glittering sight. The year-round fake tree cheered a father’s lonesome heart. Still, he could not get positive. Snap out of it! Romeo glared at the walls hung with special things on nails. Such attractive sacred yarn and chicken-fluff dream catchers! He spoke to the faltering TV picture where old Mailbox Head was trying to jolly an interviewer. Such finesse! And the arrogant aplomb.

No one to trifle with, Slot Mouth. Nor am I. Nor am I, ol’ buddy ol’ pal Landreaux Iron. According to my exceedingly detailed memories of our so-called runaway escape, said Romeo to a sky blue dream catcher with iridescent threads, the reason which I am rubbing Icy Hot into my sad ol’ leg, you Landreaux Iron have much to answer for, things you never have addressed!

The good stuff penetrated and his leg felt immediately warm. Pain melted away into the luxury seat. Yet things did not feel very good at all when Landreaux’s avoidance of their mutual past was considered.

You ol’ war bitch, cried Romeo, happily, waking later to Rummy’s interview, sound off, the glow of his mango-scented sparkle tree. Having drifted off, he was now comfortable with the resentment he’d stifled before. Landreaux maybe should have not acted high and mighty to the point of stealing my son Hollis’s affections. Leading my son to join the military, even! Landreaux was the one who dragged me into his plan, and he should have not pretended all his life that he didn’t remember. Landreaux should have shared and shared alike the stuff that he could acquire. Landreaux should not have imagined people had short memories, or would forget. Because people had long memories and never stopped talking around this place. Romeo had heard them and Romeo knew. Landreaux should have not imagined it was over and done with — because a man had ears, tough little pinned-back ears that pricked up when people whispered. A man had a brain that decoded guarded talk between professionals. A man’s heart, shriveled raisin, prune of loneliness, burnt clam, understood what it was to lose out on love. And lose to a lying liar. Romeo bet his livid black heart could burst Landreaux’s baggy heart sack. If he could just get something solid on Landreaux to bring him down.

The Green Chair

THE BOREDOM OF late summer covered Maggie like an itchy swoon. Thirteen, but living in her girl body. No breasts. No period. Too old to act like a child, too underformed to feel like a teenager, she wandered. She packed herself a sandwich, a can of pop, and took off. There were old paths through the woods, made long ago when people still walked places, visited one another, or hiked to town, church, school. There were new paths made by kids with trail bikes and ATVs. If there was no path, Maggie crept in and out of tangled bush, slipping into places of peace or unrest. When she went off the paths, anything could happen but nothing bad ever did. Nobody noticed. LaRose was sometimes with his other family, and Peter was at work.

When had her mother stopped looking after her? Stopped checking? Stopped spying?

Maggie sat in a tree and watched what she decided was a drug house, black muscular dogs chained to the porch. She watched for a week to see if any drug freaks went in or out. Finally a car drove up. A woman she recognized got out. It was her kindergarten teacher, the only teacher she’d loved. Kindergarten was the one year she had been good in school. The muscular dogs tossed themselves over on their backs for Mrs. Sweit to scratch their bellies. When she went inside, the dogs followed her like children. Maggie keenly wished she could tag along with them, but she had to turn away knowing that inside the house Mrs. Sweit was feeding the dogs milk and cookies. She was reading them stories. She and the dogs were cutting lanterns from construction paper. Maggie went home.

The next day she saw a bear digging up some kind of roots beside a slough. Another time a fox arched-leaped high in the grass, trotted off with a mouse. Deer stepped along with their senses bared, stopping to twitch ears and nose-feel scents, before moving from cover. She watched the dirt fly behind a badger digging a den. White-footed mice with adorable eyes, blue swallows slicing air, hawks in a mystical hang-glide, crows tumbling on currents of air strong as invisible balance beams. She began to feel more at home outside than inside.

One day she was sitting high in a tree, pulling apart a wood tick. Something large flowed at her, ghost-silent. She flattened against the bark. Hung on. She felt fingers rake her hair lightly and the thing rushed up, soundlessly sucked into the leaves. She didn’t scare easy, but her breath squeezed off. She scrambled halfway down and huddled against the trunk. It was coming at her again, she could feel it. An owl with great golden eyes lighted on the branch before her, clacked its beak, fixed her with supernatural hunger. She looked straight back. At that moment her heart flung wide and she allowed the owl into her body. Then it sprang. She threw her arms up and it left razor cuts on the backs of her wrists. Her screams impressed it, though. It kept a distance while she climbed the rest of the way down. It swooped her once again, raising the hair on her scalp as she barged through the scrub.

She slowed to a walk as she neared the house. When she came out of the woods, she saw that her mother’s car was in the driveway. She went through the house, but there was nobody home. Outside, in the backyard, she saw the dog sitting alertly outside the barn, staring at the door. The dog felt her gaze and turned. It ran to her, whined, then ran back to stare anxiously at the door again.

Maggie didn’t call her mother’s name or make noise — the owl inside her now. On a pathless path leading to a place of peace or unrest, Maggie went to the barn. Her soundlessness probably saved things. Sensing with bared senses, she pulled open the small side door and stepped inside. There was her mother in a shaft of light. Nola stood on the old green chair with a nylon rope around her neck.

Nola was wearing her purple knit dress with silver clasp belt, maroon pumps, subtly patterned stockings. Nola’s breast was looped with necklaces, her fingers deep in rings, wrists in bracelets. She had worn all of her jewelry so that nobody would ever wear it again. Perhaps Nola had done this periodically for weeks or years. Maybe this time she had stood there all morning, collecting the sickly courage to kick away the chair.

She could still do it. Maggie would not have the strength to hoist her or the quickness to cut the rope. Nola still might do it right in front of her. There would be no point in running forward. Maggie didn’t move, but fury choked her breath.

God, Mom. Her voice came out squeaky, which made her even madder. Are you really gonna use that cheap rope? I mean, that’s the rope we tied around the Christmas tree.

Nola kicked her foot back and the chair joggled.

Stop!

Nola stared down at her daughter from the other side of things.

In Maggie’s eyes, her mother saw the owl’s authority. In Nola’s eyes, her daughter saw the authority of the self and the self alone.

The foot lifted again. Beside Maggie, the dog quivered, at attention.

Okay, said Maggie. Please stop.

Nola hesitated.

I won’t tell, said Maggie.

Nola’s hesitation became a pause.

Mommy. Maggie’s eyes blurred. The word, her voice, shamed her.

If you come down, I’ll never tell.

Nola’s foot came back down and stayed motionless. The air was radiant, hot, stifling like the secret between them. Complicity made Nola remove the rope, step down. Claustrophobia made Maggie throw up.

She puked for two days, sick every time she saw her mother and entered again the tight metal box of their secret. Nola held the glass bowl, wiped her daughter’s face with a damp white dish towel. Tears overflowed her mother’s eyes as she put the towel and bowl away. Mother, daughter. They fell into each other’s arms like terrified creatures. They clung together like children in the panic cellar.

THE NATIONAL GUARD ARMORY was old and friendly, but they were building a new facility out of town. The equipment was used and even somewhat shabby, but they were soon to receive a shipment of the latest armaments, high-tech ordnance. The office space was cluttered and the files were bulging, but soon there would be new file cabinets, computers, desks, and copying equipment. Hollis sat at a scratched desk across from Mike, who was treating him like a long lost brother. Mike was square-headed, solid, with sparkly little blue eyes and thin pink lips. His blond hair was short, but not Marine high and tight. Hollis had resigned himself to losing his lanky rebel hair, and going straight to basic training, but Mike told him that there were plenty of options. He laid them out. The National Guard wanted Hollis to secure his education and would work with him at every stage. It felt so adult, so take-charge, to examine these shapes for his future, make decisions, lay out a plan, sign papers, and finally shake hands.

After signing, shaking, and introductions to others in the armory, Hollis was invited to the afternoon’s youth symposium. Mike made him an honorary uncle for his three-year-old son and introduced Jacey, his wife, who looked uncannily like her husband. Everyone split up into their family groups and each group attempted to build a tower out of marshmallows and uncooked spaghetti noodles. It turned out that Hollis was very good at this. He planned an elaborate base using the noodles and marshmallows like fragile Tinkertoys. While their toddler ate Cheerios and hollered for marshmallows, Mike and Jacey carefully broke the spaghetti into the lengths that Hollis required. He laid five brittle rods together so they could reinforce one another, like a pasta beam. He’d worked at Wink’s Construction that summer tying rebar. Their tower was the tallest of all and it did not even wobble. Sergeant Verge Anderson chose their marshmallow tower as most worthy, and showed it to the other family groups at the end. He pointed out the double construction, the reinforcement, the alignment, the precision. Mike introduced Hollis, gave him the credit, and everyone applauded. Sergeant Anderson said that Hollis had the right stuff to become a combat engineer, if he so chose, or go on to have any sort of career he wanted, and that his country needed him and his presence honored the North Dakota National Guard family — people working together to ensure the safety of their fellow Americans.

Hollis drove back home with a schedule for drills, a schedule for his payments, a schedule for acquiring his uniform and materials for study, a schedule for each step in becoming a member of the National Guard. As he drove, he thought of Landreaux, who had told him that the army was easy to get used to, seemed natural after boarding school. He thought of the times he’d hunted with Landreaux, before the accident, how careful Landreaux had been in teaching him. Landreaux had told him that in basic training his instructor had ordered the western boys to step out, the rural boys from Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas. He’d set them aside to work with one-on-one, because they’d always be his best shots. Landreaux’s grandfather had taught him to hunt so early in life that it all came back, he said. Landreaux hadn’t shot anyone in Desert Storm — he had worked way back in the support sector, filled out their medical forms and done routine health checks, taken care of superficial wounds, and promoted overall general health. Hollis was pretty sure he’d never have to shoot anyone either. He’d do the opposite. He’d save people. In a crisis Hollis would know what to do and be the one to depend on. In a vague way, he understood that saving people could be just as dangerous if they ever got into a real situation.

When he stepped into the house he smelled fried rabbit with onions and bacon. He smelled burning sage and saw that Snow and Josette were smudging themselves, for some special mysterious reason. Emmaline put her thin arms around him. Coochy punched him, punched him harder when he didn’t respond. Hollis felt his heart swelling with love so he put a fake choke hold on Coochy. LaRose yelled.

Take it outside! I’m making a hogan.

He was gluing pieces of construction paper into a frame shoe box. He was making a diorama of Native American dwellings for Emmaline’s office.

Josette quit fanning smoke on herself, looked over his shoulder, tipped her head back and forth.

Make sure you put a cactus in there.

No, said Snow. A sheep. And a FEMA trailer.

Plus a volleyball, Josette said. Those Navajo girls are killer.

Dine girls, said Snow. I think they live in super nice new suburb houses, actually. Put in a cul-de-sac and sprinkler system.

Sprinkler system?

Josette looked disturbed.

Nah, you’re right. They wouldn’t waste their water.

Damn straight! Phoenix is stealing their water! I read about it! Put in big pipes sucking away Dine water! LaRose, you can use drinking straws!

LaRose looked up at Hollis and said, Brother, will you get them out of here?

LAROSE WAS AT his Ravich family, in the lilac bush cave. Maggie squeezed into their green shadowed hideout and sat with him. They’d lined the space with dried grass, like a nest.

I have to tell you something, Maggie said.

LaRose had brought a frozen twin pops out to eat, the kind you could break into two Popsicles. He gave her one half, though she didn’t like banana flavor.

How come these are the ones always left?

Because you don’t like them.

Yeah, they’re gross, said Maggie.

She licked the bogus flavoring and watched LaRose. His eyelashes were so long and full they cast shadows on his cheeks. But he wasn’t a cute boy. He was soft and beaky.

I’d kill to have your eyelashes.

Josette and Snow already said they’d kill for my eyelashes too. Why don’t you pull them out and paste them on your eyes? I don’t care.

Yeah, okay, said Maggie. But see, Mom tried to kill herself.

LaRose bit straight into the banana ice and cold pain shot up between his eyes. Maggie put her hand on his shoe and spoke into his face.

Mom was standing on a chair in the barn; she had a rope around her neck. She was going to hang herself to death.

LaRose frowned at his running shoes. He took a smaller bite, then ate the rest, closing his eyes when the ache bloomed inside his forehead again. He put the stick in the neat pile he was saving to build a fort for his action figures. Maggie put her stick in his pile.

Can you help me? Tears shot into Maggie’s eyes but she blinked them out. She drew her legs up and hugged her kneecaps. Her head flopped down and her hair snarled over her face.

I know what to do, he said, though he didn’t know.

Maggie rested her hand on the ground, splayed toward his. After a while LaRose reached into his pocket and took out a smooth little gray rock. He put the rock on her palm.

What’s that?

Just a little rock.

You’re always picking up rocks. Like, what can this rock do? She threw it down.

We gotta watch her. We gotta stop her!

I know, said LaRose. He opened her hand and put the rock back. It’s a watching rock. You give me the rock if I should watch her. I give you the rock if you should watch her.

She opened her hand. Now the stone was cool and took half the weight off her. Maggie was so tired of sobbing herself sick, and gorping until she could only puke yellow. It was the only way to keep her mother focused on her. Now LaRose seemed very sure. He seemed to know what to do.

But you’re just a kid, said Maggie. How can I trust you?

I’m not just any kid, LaRose said. He waited, thinking, then he trusted Maggie and whispered in her ear.

I got some spirit helpers.

Yeah, right. He made her laugh until she hiccuped. She put her head up and shook her hair out of her face. She was so pretty, with her neat little features, her teeth lined up straight.

You promise you can help?

It’s going to be okay, said LaRose. I know what to do.

He said this firmly, although he still didn’t know exactly what to do besides watch Nola. Sam Eagleboy had told him to sit still and open his mind if he had a problem. LaRose would come back to the grass nest that evening, after Maggie was gone. He would concentrate on the problem. Even if he couldn’t see them, he would ask those people he met in the woods. He would find out what the situation called for.

Two nights later, LaRose startled awake. He sneaked into the bathroom and switched on the light. He flushed the toilet. While the water was running, he eased open the medicine cabinet. There were all kinds of pills in there. Pills in amber plastic bottles. LaRose didn’t know which ones she might use, but tomorrow he’d write them down and get Maggie to find out which ones were poison. Peter usually shaved with his electric shaver, but for special occasions he had a double-edge safety razor. Two packets of Shark double-edge blades were stacked behind an underarm deodorant. LaRose took the razors. He brought them back to his room and hid them underneath his comics. The next day LaRose put the packets of razors in his pocket and went outside. He found an old coffee can and went out to the woods to bury the razors inside of it.

While Nola was outside, he went into the kitchen and removed the chef’s knife. The next night he went downstairs and cleaned out Peter’s tackle box, removing those skinny-bladed supersharp filet knives.

Where’s my chef’s knife? asked Nola the next day.

Nobody knew. But LaRose knew. He was allowing Nola only dull paring knives. He dug a hole with Nola’s small gardening spade and buried the knives, wrapped in a piece of canvas, alongside the coffee can. There was a list growing in his head.

When everyone was gone, LaRose carried an aluminum step-ladder into the house and opened it beside the gun case. He climbed the ladder, groped around the top of the case, found by touch where Peter had secured the key. He untaped the key from behind a decorative piece of molding, then climbed down, and opened the gun case doors. All the guns that Peter kept carefully loaded were fixed in notched stalls.

LaRose did exactly as Peter had taught him. He lifted out the.22 and held the barrel in his left hand, the stock in his right. He pulled the bolt back and down, curved his right hand to catch each bullet as it rolled out. There were three cartridges inside. Always three, Peter’s rule. If you can’t kill it with three bullets, you shouldn’t be shooting a gun. LaRose put each cartridge softly on a pillow. He worked the bolt back and forth a few times, peered into the chamber to make sure it was empty, then put the Remington back exactly as it had been before. LaRose repeated this action with each of the other guns — working most carefully with the one Peter favored. LaRose locked the case, climbed up the ladder to retape the key. He put the ammunition in a glass canning jar, watertight in case he ever had to dig shot, slugs, and bullets up for use. He checked to make sure he’d replaced the guns in exactly the same order, and that he’d left no fingerprints on the glass. He went out to bury the jar in one of his many digging places. He was satisfied.

He threw away pesticides, rat poison, replaced the pills that Maggie said Nola could overdose on with look-alike vitamins. He removed all rope. There was so much rope around — here and there, in Peter’s end-of-the-world stash. LaRose Hefty-bagged and dropped it into the back of the pickup when he knew Peter was getting ready to go to the dump. While he was at it, he tossed in a couple pairs of the sturdy bought-ahead shoes that Maggie hated.

A week after, he woke again thinking of the oven. Was it gas or electric? And how exactly did it work that putting your head inside could kill you? The danger there was maybe low, but then, bleach! Poison, right? Why hadn’t he thought of it?

LaRose crept out of bed and sneaked into the laundry room. He poured the skull-and-crossbones bottle down the utility sink drain and put the empty jug out in the garage. He crept back into bed and slept hard.

Maggie was the one who had trouble sleeping. In vast schools of infinite classrooms, on ever branching roads, towns that stretched across worlds, she tried to find her mother. She would startle awake knowing that her mother was trapped behind a padlocked door, lost on a lost road, wandering in a lightless city. One night Maggie spent hours biting and scratching off her nail polish. Next morning her face was covered with light green flecks. When she came down for breakfast, her mother touched a flake of green off her face and looked at it.

What’s this?

Instead of walking away without answering, enfuried that her mother had dared to touch her face and ask a question, Maggie just said, Nail polish.

The normal, nonsarcastic answer fell sweetly on Nola. She loved Maggie with all of the ripped-up pieces of her heart now. Nola turned to the cutting board and started sawing away at potatoes with a steak knife. Things were disappearing. She was losing things right and left, running out of things, failing to buy things, forgetting. But these matters were not as important as other people seemed to think. They were not crucial. In fact, they didn’t matter at all.

EVERY DAY AFTER the gray dawn or the blue dawn, Hollis stomped sleepily out to the dusty mold-green Mazda with its sagging fender, mashed door. He’d bought this car for six hundred dollars. This car would carry Hollis, Snow, Josette, and Coochy to school in a week. On weekends it carried him off to his first National Guard drills. He and Mike had decided on a delayed-entry program — combat training delayed. School. Drills one weekend a month throughout the year. After graduation, basic combat and advanced individual training. Then he’d get going on his Guard job — maybe combat engineer. He still wasn’t positive. And get the money together for a move, he supposed, although he didn’t still want to. He was happy on the blow-up mattress. Even though his ass touched floor halfway through the night, he loved his sleeping corner. He wanted to keep living with the Irons after he graduated, maybe forever. Besides everything else, Hollis was forever hungry. Emmaline and the girls cooked big, tasty meat-rich stews, thick corn and potato soup, bannocks. Also, that long ago spark of holiday interest in Josette had caught. She had, for real, helped him with his summer read and even written most of his paper. He was the one who had leaned over her shoulder peering at her confident typing. Now a steady glow was his. More than a glow, really. Sometimes, flames.

First day of school. Hollis dressed and schlumped out to the kitchen, where he thought today, maybe, was the day. Maybe he would reveal his mad hopeless love for the mad hopeless glory of Josette.

Always, as soon as he came in the room, she began pouring cereal.

Hey.

Hey.

She was strong, had a wicked jumping overhand volleyball serve, her curves were powerful. She could put a thousand voice-layers into that one morning greeting and so could Hollis. The shadow in her Hey said, I’m into you! They rarely said more than Hey and Hey. But the way it was said would stay with each of them as the day wore on. Their Heys were a pilot light that could possibly flare up if Josette ever took her eyes off the cornflakes falling into her bowl.

If that occurred, Hollis imagined a stare-down in which the animal tension became unbearable. But maybe it wasn’t supposed to happen that he was taken in by good people and he then poached the daughter of the house. Who was younger. So he took his bowl of cornflakes back to the boys’ room, and waited for the girls to call when they were ready for school.

That same morning, Emmaline woke with a clenched heart and could hardly breathe. When? She asked the star quilt hanging on the wall, and then answered herself. Now. LaRose was supposed to go back to the Ravich house, but when Emmaline touched his heavy brown hair she knew for sure. There had to be an end and this was it. From behind the closed door of her bedroom, she called the Ravich number. Peter answered.

I can’t stand it anymore, she said.

Peter felt the heavy sadiron of his heart lurch. He waited but it was stuck on the wrong side of his chest.

Ah, god, please, Emmaline.

I just can’t do it anymore. It was never supposed to go on forever, was it? Her voice began to shudder. She gathered herself, stood straight, tucked her hair behind her ears.

Listen, said Peter, stepping aside to look out the window. School is starting. It will get better.

I’m enrolling him here. With other Indians.

Nola was already up. She was outside fixing up the old chicken coop, painting it. Her thin arm swept back and forth.

Please let’s just keep going for a little while longer. Peter stopped. He was about to beg her for LaRose. That would make him angry. He would become hateful were he driven to that.

Nola’s so much better, he said. She’s finally getting over Dusty. She’s, ah, integrating. Right now she’s painting the chicken coop.

This detail pricked at Emmaline. Painting a chicken coop? Why was that some kind of leap?

Almost three years, she hasn’t talked to me, said Emmaline. We’re sisters. She acts like half sisters aren’t real sisters. She’s my sister and she won’t talk to me. But that’s not even it, not really. I’m enrolling him here, in the reservation school, where his family goes to school. LaRose is with us now.

Oh, Emmaline, said Peter, in an unguarded way that brought Emmaline back because she liked Peter fine; he was solid, and had never hurt anyone. She trusted Peter’s goodness and was sure that in past times he’d kept the lid on Landreaux by just taking his own slow way and leading his friend along the innocent dirt road of a Peter kind of life.

I understand, said Peter, careful. He had to stay in control. He knew enough not to escalate this, not to become emotional. Why don’t you keep him with you a few more days? I’ll explain to Nola.

She won’t understand, said Emmaline.

No.

Still. I am taking him back, said Emmaline. It’s time.

She came out of the bedroom and spoke to the others, who were nearly ready: she told them that she was going to take LaRose to their school.

You’re going to school with your sisters, she said brightly to LaRose. Surprise.

He looked from Snow to Josette, who widened their eyes in a silent message, Mom says. He went back to the boys’ room to get dressed. They were talking out there in the kitchen now. Things were always like this. Although LaRose was used to going where he was supposed to go, and doing what he was supposed to do, sometimes they just threw these big surprises at him.

Coulda told me. Like more than a minute ago, he whispered.

He put on fresh jeans, a clean T-shirt. He smelled his yesterday’s socks, threw them down, and took a pair of Coochy’s from the sock pile.

Peter stood frozen, the phone droning in his hands, gaze fixed on the cipher of a woman out there painting a chicken coop with old white leftover gummy paint. Even though she wouldn’t talk to Emmaline, his wife was better, he thought. Maybe. Maybe men just think women are better if they have sex with us, but even so. A few nights ago she put her hands on him, stroked him without saying one strange word. And they had loved in utter peace. He came back into his body. He could not inhabit himself without her. He had that roughed-up Slav shell and inside a milky tender heart. He had guarded it carefully before Nola. There was nobody else for him but this one woman — he might hate her sometimes, but he would go to hell for her and save her cakes.

Two days later, he tried to have the conversation.

I just don’t like her, Peter, I don’t, because she is a self-righteous bitch.

Why do you say that?

Peter had read magazine articles that advised questions when you wanted to divert a way of thinking in another person. Or you wanted to stall.

Why? he asked again, then ventured. She’s your sister. You could try.

Okay, I’ll tell you why I can’t try. She’s got that program director’s attitude for one thing. Like, here’s Emmaline. Posing at her desk. Wehwehweh. I can listen. Listen with my hands folded and my head cocked. You know? Emmaline puts on her listening mask and behind that mask she’s judging you.

They were outside, at the edge of the yard. Nola ripped up a stalk of grass and put the end in her mouth. She narrowed her eyes and stared out over the horizon, that line at the end of the cornfields, between the sweeping coves of trees.

For emphasis she dipped her head to each side. Right. And left. Judging me.

She tossed the stalk of grass away.

Oh, I guess I could. Talk to her. If she would give back LaRose.

Peter glanced at the ground, disguising his hope.

It’s been four days. I get it, said Nola. I really do.

I never said.

But I get it.

Peter nodded, encouraged.

I mean, it’s wrong, but I get it. She’s holding him hostage because she wants my attention. She wants me to be like, Oh, Emmaline, how are you, how is your project, your big deal, your this, your that, your girls that Maggie likes so much? How generous you are, Emmaline, what a big-time traditional person to give your son away to a white man and almost white sister who is just so pitiful, so stark raving. So like her mother that Marn who had the snakes. People never forget around here. And they will never forget this either. It will be Emmaline Iron the good strong whaddyacallit, Ogema-ikwe. The woman who forever stuck by that big load Landreaux and even straightened him out so he could, so he could. . I’m just saying I would kill him for you. I see your face when you’re chopping wood. I’d kill him for you if it wasn’t for LaRose. So their damn unbelievable plan worked its wonder because now I’m better.

Peter questioned that now, but said nothing.

And nobody’s going to kill the big freak. He’s too fucking tall.

He’s only six three, murmured Peter. I’m six two.

I hope our son doesn’t get that tall. I hope LaRose doesn’t turn into a killer hulk.

It’s been a while now, said Peter.

Yeah, the years have gone by, haven’t they, Nola said. Her top lip lifted in the mad little sneer that sometimes jolted a shiver of lust in Peter.

C’mere, he said.

Why? She ripped another piece of grass out and stuck it between her lips. Maggie was over at the Irons’ house, as usual. They were alone.

Peter took the stick of grass from her mouth and lightly struck her cheek with it. She was still. He searched into her face. Kissed her until she kissed him back. She nodded at the house. He picked her up and carried her to the barn.

Not there, she said.

He carried her in anyway. They passed the old halters on hooks, the junked refrigerator, the green chair, the empty stalls. He threw bales down in the last one, a canvas tarp over the bales. There was that good smell of an old barn where animals had eaten, shat, breathed, an old clean barn full of hay and sun. He untied and removed her paint-streaked worn-out running shoes, peeled down her tight jeans, slipped each foot from the creased-up ankles. He knelt before the bale, lay her back, crooked her legs.

She looked over his shoulder. The crossbeam black oak. The rope gone. Gone. Nola flung her arms straight over her head. Her breasts tipped up.

He placed her feet on each side of his chest, placed his hands under her hips, pulled her onto him, rocked into her. And then they both went back and farther back, to the beginning, where there was nothing else, no bad things happened, where there was no child to grieve, no loss, no danger, where a few wasps hovered over but did not land on Peter’s ass, and the sun shafts lighted up with falling ever falling dust.

And why couldn’t she just see the peace and glory in it anyway? Why did she have to think of all the dead and one fine day herself among them, sifting through bright air? She wouldn’t do it. The rope was gone! How? Don’t ask. No, no, of course. Not now. LaRose told her how much he needed her. Maggie watched over her. She could feel it. She had a new life. Still, she had to think about it sometimes, a little, it wasn’t wrong, was it? Just to fall endlessly and rise forever on soft currents of warm air stirred by bodies of the living. There was nothing wrong with giving over to the melty swoon of it, the null. There was nothing wrong with having more in common with the dust than with her husband, with Peter, was there?

I thought I’d call, said Nola on the phone. Just because it’s a rainy day. Just wondering how LaRose is. .

Then she heard LaRose laughing in the background. One of the girls had maybe answered. It wasn’t Emmaline. Nola’s voice wouldn’t come out of her throat. She set the phone down and passed her hand over her eyes.

Are you okay?

Maggie came into the kitchen. Mom, you are staring at the phone. Was there a phone call?

Maggie still had the stone LaRose had pressed into her hand when he left. It was on her bedside table. She didn’t want it there, or anywhere. She had total responsibility for Nola, and she was weary.

No call.

Nola hugged Maggie. She was hugging her too hard and she knew it.

Honey, she said, LaRose is being kept against his will.

Maggie just hugged her mother harder. I mean, what to say?

Akk, said Nola. You’re getting strong.

Maggie laughed engagingly. Well, you too. You were squeezing me!

They won’t let him come back to me. He’s my only son. Am I too crazy, Maggie? Is there something wrong with me? Is that why? I love him so much. There’s nothing else in my life.

Nothing else. Well. Maggie turned herself off. She spoke in a cool, careful voice.

Dad loves you. I love you. Mom. You have us.

Nola squinted and peered forward as if Maggie were standing at the end of a long tunnel. Maybe at the end there was LaRose or someone else, because for a moment she did not recognize her daughter. She put her hand on Maggie’s face in a gentle way that creeped Maggie out, but Maggie did not move. She stayed in control.

You know what you need? Maggie kept her voice low and normal. It’s kinda cool and rainy. You need some hot chocolate.

I need to speak to Emmaline.

First the hot chocolate, with whipped cream.

Nola nodded thoughtfully. We don’t have cream.

Well then, marshmallows.

LaRose likes marshmallows, said Nola.

So do I, said Maggie.

Okay, said Nola.

Pouring the heated cocoa milk over the marshmallows, Maggie heard her mother press the buttons on the telephone, then hang up again. Nola came into the kitchen and sat down with Maggie.

It’s really hot, don’t. .

But Nola had already gulped. Her eyes widened as the scalding cocoa passed across the roof of her mouth and continued down, a blistering streak. Maggie jumped up, poured cold milk in a glass. Nola took a drink of cold and sighed. Then she closed her eyes and put her hand over her mouth.

Maggie’s teeth clenched her words back. She didn’t say that she was sorry, but she was sorry. She was sorry that she couldn’t do the right thing. Sorry that she couldn’t do what her mother needed done. Sorry she couldn’t fix her. Sorry, sometimes, that she had come across her mother in the barn. Sorry she had saved her. Sorry sorry sorry that she thought that. Sorry she was bad. Sorry she wasn’t grateful every moment for her mother’s life. Sorry that LaRose was her mother’s favorite, although he was Maggie’s too. Sorry for thinking how sorry she was and for wasting her time with all this feeling sorry. Before what happened with her mother, Maggie had never been sorry. How she wished she could be that way again.

Maggie went to find Snow and Josette. It was after school for them. Hers would start Monday. She, at least, could go back and forth and see them and see LaRose. The girls were outside. LaRose had gone to town with Emmaline, they said. She should help them with this thing they were doing. The grass, or weed base of the yard, was torn and gouged. It was hard and trampled. The girls had set up a ragged old volleyball net. Maggie helped them spray-paint orange boundaries on the dirt and mashed weeds. The court was done. While they talked, they bumped the ball back and forth. Maggie had only played in gym. Josette taught her how to bump, showed her how to set. Snow spiked. They practiced serves.

Don’t even bother with an underhand, Josette said. Watch.

Josette set her pointy left foot forward, drew her right elbow back, like she was going to shoot an arrow. She smacked the taut, filthy, velvety ball around in her hand four times, then tossed the ball high overhead. As it fell, she skipped up and slammed it with the heel of her hand. It curved low and fast over the net, bounced down where you wouldn’t expect it.

Ace!

That’s her trademark, said Snow.

I wanna learn it.

Holy Jeez, said Josette, after Maggie tried to serve.

Maggie missed six times and when she connected the ball just dropped down feebly, didn’t even reach the net.

You gotta do push-ups if you want any power.

Drop down, gimme ten, yelled Snow.

Maggie did four.

This girl needs building up, said Snow.

Yeah, you need some upper body. Josette felt Maggie’s arm critically.

Coochy came outside.

Having your girl time? He mocked them, stepping back in a graceless pretend serve. When he turned to walk away, Snow served a killer to the back of his head. It must have hurt but he just kept walking. He was bulking up his neck to play football.

Two points, said Snow.

Josette popped the ball up on her toe and tucked it beneath her arm.

Beaning Coochy is two points, she said to Maggie. Just hitting him is one.

I wanna bean, said Maggie. Show me that serve again.

At home, Maggie checked in on her mother’s nap, waited at the bedroom door’s crack until she saw slight movement. Then she went out to the garage. The big door was open, the air blowing around some papers on the floor. Her father had the hood of the pickup propped up. He was changing the oil and air filters, draining out the sludgy residue.

Hey, said Maggie. Can I change schools?

No, said her father. But grown-ups always said no before they asked why.

Why? he asked. Because of LaRose?

I have to go to the same school as my brother, right? Also, other reasons. Kids at my school hate me.

That’s ridiculous, said Peter, though he knew it wasn’t.

There’s this girl Braelyn one year older, and her brother in LaRose’s old class, and his brother Jason, who’s older. That whole family hates me, plus their friends.

You never said anything before.

Maggie shrugged. I can handle it, that’s why. But I’d rather change schools.

So you want to go to reservation high school? He laughed. Even tougher there.

Dad, they have more afterschool programs now. Pluto’s a dead town. Our state’s so cheap. You know they’ll probably consolidate and we’ll be on the bus an hour more.

What she said was probably true, but Peter didn’t like to think that way, except he did think that way.

Reservation’s getting federal plus casino money.

Peter wiped his hands on an old red rag and closed the hood. He looked down at Maggie, a whippet, finely muscled, her intense stare.

Where’d you hear that?

I heard it from you, Dad.

Did I say our state was cheap? I wouldn’t say that. Plus, their casino’s in debt.

You said the farmers around this part of the state don’t have any money. You said there’s more money on the reservation these days. You said. .

Okay. That really isn’t true. I was, you know honey, I was frustrated.

Grown-ups always say that when they lose their temper.

Now you’re the expert on grown-ups.

Maggie knew it was time to shift strategy.

I can go there because of Mom. Descendancy status and everything. And, see, I wanna go to high school with Josette and Snow. Be on their team.

But you hate sports.

Not anymore. I like volleyball.

That’s not a sport, really.

Sometimes grown-ups didn’t get it. They remembered volleyball as a laid-back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over. Maggie decided to change up on her dad again.

I can’t see Emmaline really keeping LaRose all the time.

Really?

If he goes to their school that’s a difference. A compromise. And if that’s the deal, I shouldn’t be left out. I should be going there. He should have all his family in one school.

There are tough kids at that school. Drinking. Drugs?

Drugs are everyplace. Plus, remember? I’m an outcast. I’m severely hated.

Now Peter laughed. Maggie couldn’t even pretend to pity herself. There wasn’t a whine in her. He was proud of her and she knew it.

Awww, Dad, come on. Snow and Josette have traditional values and all that. They’re A students. They’ll have my back. Plus their big brother Hollis. And there’s Coochy, I mean Willard. We should all be together, Dad. It would really help LaRose.

Peter kept wiping his hands. The cracks in his palm and the wrinkles in his knuckles absorbed the oil so his hands looked like ancient etchings of hands. His tired blue eyes rested sweetly on Maggie. He knew his daughter. He remembered the years of teacher conferences. The teachers were wrong. She was not disturbed. High-spirited. That was it. She was too high-spirited for their dull expectations of girls. So. Could things get any worse? Maybe she was right. Keeping LaRose was some kind of last-ditch test for Emmaline. Maybe allowing the kids from both families to go to one school would help Emmaline come out of it. Things would balance. Whatever happened, Snow and Josette had become like sisters to Maggie. They were half cousins. Cousins and sisters. It struck him that this was the first time since Dusty that Maggie had really wanted something, asked him to help her. So he said yes. And yes, he’d try with Nola.

OLD RUMMY. HE’S giving out hints again. See?

Father Travis watched the gray-skinned gray block of talking head. They were sitting out a morning of weird September heat at the Dead Custer.

It’s not supposed to be this hot, Romeo complained.

It is what it is, said Puffy.

Romeo hissed in exasperation. Everyone was saying It is what it is as though this was a wise saying. They would say it with a simple hand lift. To get off the hook, they would say it. They would say it when too lazy to finish a job. Or often when watching the news.

And it ain’t what it ain’t, said Romeo.

Father Travis didn’t register this comment. He just sweated, stoic, with a jar of Puffy’s special iced tea. Last night he’d entered the whirling energy, the black aperture, silence. Before the screams, he was suddenly with Emmaline, naked, their bodies moving and planing, slick with sweat. Father Travis rolled the cold jar across his forehead.

Romeo squinted at the TV, nodding.

There’s that clue. Chemical weapons. They showed some diagrams. Fuzzy gray recon pictures shot off a satellite.

They’re pulling together a case, he muttered.

Father Travis cocked his head and looked sideways at the shapes pictured on the screen. On 9/11 he had watched the Towers dissolve and thought, They’ve learned. After that, over and over, he’d sifted down in his dreams with the others, his body flayed by the acceleration of the building’s mass. He watched the news, flipping channels. It was like the barracks bombing never happened. Nobody made the connection. What was the connection? It hurt to think. He felt himself disintegrating. One night that September, he had gone off the wagon. He drank the bottle of single malt scotch an old friend from the Marines had sent to him. He’d stayed in bed the next morning — sick for the first time in his history as a priest. It had felt like the thing to do.

Hey Father, said Romeo. Can I ask you something?

No.

How come you quit trying to convert me?

This was an opening for Father Travis to say something mildly insulting that they would pretend was a joke but know was true.

I didn’t want to have to baptize you, said Father Travis.

How come?

I’d have to sponsor you. Promise to stand between you and the devil. But there is no space, nowhere to stand.

Haha! Romeo preened in delight. No place to stand! Between me and the devil!

This remark would make the rounds, Father Travis knew. Romeo would repeat it to everyone he saw in the hospital corridors. Knowing that, Father Travis usually gave more thought to what he said to Romeo. But right now he was having trouble. He couldn’t sit still, anywhere. He had to get out of the Dead Custer. He had to get out of every place. He had to get out of his skin.

I have to go.

Was it something I said? Romeo was joking. It was always something that he said. He caught the priest’s arm. Wait. What would you say to a kid joining the National Guards?

Which kid? Father Travis managed to sit down.

My kid, Hollis, the one Landreaux and Emmaline have, you know.

I’d say he’ll learn a useful set of skills, get out of Dodge for a while. .

. . what do you mean, out of Dodge?

He’ll go to Camp Grafton, or Bismarck, Jamestown training sites, depending on what he wants to do.

Not like a war then?

Father Travis was surprised. His attention sharpened.

I don’t think the Guard has ever been called up for a war. Although LBJ was within a heartbeat of doing it for Vietnam, right? But he instituted a draft. Tested the will of the people.

Who said fuck you.

Yes, and I’m sure the Pentagon learned from that, said Father Travis, thoughtful.

If Bush threw the Guards in. . Father Travis paused. He’d voted for this president because his father had been a decent and a prudent president. Bush Sr. had understood that getting out of a war was, like marriage, far more difficult than getting in.

Romeo gulped down his healthful iced tea and Father Travis clapped him on the shoulder as he got up to leave.

SMALL TOWNS AND reservations nearly always had a tae kwon do school, even if no Korean was ever there or even passed through. Great Grandmaster Moo Yong Yun of Fargo had planted the discipline throughout the tristate area. Father Travis had studied in Texas with Grandmaster Kyn Boong Yim. He’d earned his third degree black belt before seminary. A few years after settling into his job, with his teachers’ permission, he opened a dojo in the mission school gym. He had learned that he couldn’t stay sharp himself unless he taught. He had arrangements with several affluent schools that shipped outgrown uniforms and donated color belts. His classes took the place of the usual Saturday catechism classes. Now he just gave handouts on church doctrine. It was much more satisfying to teach combinations and run through drills, to yell numbers in Korean while fiercely punching air.

During classes, Emmaline waited for LaRose in an orange chair with an hourglass coffee stain. She always brought work — kept a laptop open or worked through a stack of papers. Sometimes she put everything down, stared at the class, driftingly smiled, and then caught herself. After the class, Father Travis always found a few words to say about LaRose. He’s making progress, for instance.

Emmaline tipped her head to the side, raised her eyebrow.

He’s getting strong, said Father Travis.

He’s okay, isn’t he?

You did well.

LaRose took her hand. Emmaline’s eyes were fixed on Father Travis.

I kept him this time.

Father Travis nodded and tried not to think of Nola just yet.

Emmaline asked, unexpectedly, How are you?

Priests don’t get that question, or not in the way she asked it. He raised his eyebrows. He laughed, weirdly bubbly, maybe in a frightening way.

Don’t ask, he said, abrupt.

Why not?

Because.

His heart jolted to life, ridiculously banging against his ribs. He put his hand on his chest to calm it down.

Something’s bothering you, said Emmaline.

No, I’m fine.

Really? Because you look disturbed, said Emmaline. Excuse me.

No, really. Sorry. I am fine.

His ploy was feeble. He regretted it.

Emmaline turned away. She and LaRose walked off holding hands. Her thoughts slowed. Why had she asked that question? Why had she turned away when he deflected it and gave a bullshit answer? It was exactly what priests were supposed to do. Keep their personalities subservient to their service. Endure whatever God gave them to endure without complaint. Was a priest ever not fine? Who could tell?

Father Travis watched them go. He had studied his feelings regarding Emmaline. This wasn’t about his vows. It was about her family, her and Landreaux, the fact that he had counseled them, married them, baptized their children. They trusted him to be all things except, actually, human. Be all to all in order to save all.

Thanks, St. Paul. Better to marry than to burn, and this burns. But she’s the only one I’d ever want and she’s already married. So take the heat! Just live with it, he told himself, you fool.

She had asked him how he was, said that he looked disturbed. How pathetic that such an ordinary question and simple observation should make his heart skitter.

Father Travis shut down the gym lights. It was his shift for the Adoration of the Holy Sacrament. He padlocked the door and walked over to the church, entering the side basement. He walked through the lightless dining hall toward the faint glow in the stairwell. Popeye Banks was nodding off in the pew, and startled when Father Travis jostled his shoulder. He stumbled out, yawning, put his hat on at the door, and called good-bye. Father Travis sat down on one of the comfortable memory-foam pillows he’d bought for the people who kept the Adoration going 24/7. Then the dim hush, the arched vault, the flickering bank of candles, and his thoughts. But first his hands, shaky. His chest was stopped up. His breath weak. He put his hand to his chest and closed his eyes.

Open, he said.

He always had trouble opening his heart. Tonight it was stuck again. It was a wooden chest secured by locked iron bands. An army duffel, rusted zipper. Kitchen cupboards glued shut. Tabernacle. Desk. Closet. He had to wedge apart doors, lift covers. He was always disappointed to find a drab or menacing interior. To make a welcoming place of his heart was mentally slippery work. Sometimes cleaning was involved, rearrangements. He had to dust. He had to throw out old junk to make room. It was all so tedious, but he worked at the project until he had the whole damned lot of Emmaline’s family in there and could slam it shut, exhausted, with Emmaline in the center and safe from him.

Emmaline and LaRose got in the car and pulled out onto the road home. Kids always say what’s on their minds while you are driving.

How come you changed my school?

Do you like Mrs. Shell?

Yeah, course, but how come I’m still with you?

You mean not going back to Peter?

And Nola, and Maggie. How come?

Because. Emmaline said it carefully. Because I want to keep you with your family, with us now. I miss you too much. She glanced over quickly at LaRose.

Your dad, your brothers and sister, they miss you too. They know I’m keeping you.

He was staring out the windshield, his mouth slightly open, transfixed.

Is that okay with you, my boy?

He took a moment. He was thinking how to put this.

You just pass me around, he said. I’m okay with it, but it gets old. Problem is, Nola, she’s gonna be too sad. It might be death if she gets too sad, Maggie told me. Plus Maggie and me, we’re like this. He put two fingers together, the way Josette did. We keep her mom going when she can’t get out of bed and stuff.

Everything that LaRose said shocked Emmaline. He’s a little man, she thought. He’s grown up.

So I gotta go back there, Mom. I like Mrs. Shell. She’s not picky. But I need to go back to Dusty’s family.

You remember him, Dusty?

He’s still my friend, Mom. I got his family on my hands, too. So can I go back?

Really, my boy?

She thought she’d better stop the car and throw up. Plus her head hurt suddenly because her boy remembered Dusty, spoke of him with such immediacy, felt this level of responsibility. It was too much to put on him, but there it was.

Yeah, Mom, it’s too late to go back on your promise.

She did pull over, but just put her face in her hands and was too overwhelmed to cry. Anyway, she never cried. That was Landreaux’s job. He cried for both of them. Emmaline tried to cry, tried to well up just to get some relief. But she was Emmaline.

LaRose patted her arm, her neck.

It’s okay, you’re gonna make it, he said. If you just get going you’ll feel better. One step after another. One day at a time.

LaRose was used to mothers’ despair and these were the words that Peter used with Nola.

LANDREAUX DROVE HIS son to the Ravich house. He could see that the change in routine had made LaRose anxious, and restoring the old order was the right thing. Still, Landreaux had trouble letting LaRose go. He hugged his son just before LaRose swung out of the car with his pack on his shoulder.

It’s all good, Landreaux muttered.

He was not all good, would never be; yet there were slender threads of okay.

Landreaux watched LaRose run up the steps. Maggie was at the door jumping up and down. LaRose bounced straight in. Neither Maggie nor Nola had ever waved at or acknowledged Landreaux. It was necessary to be invisible to them, but not to his son. At the last moment LaRose stuck his head out the door and waved good-bye.

The little things that get you. Choked-up smile from Landreaux.

He will be okay, he muttered, pulling out and driving away. This was a phrase he repeated like a mantra when things were not okay. After a while it made him feel better and after a time it worked.

MAGGIE HELD THE stack of new school notebooks in her lap. She was in the passenger’s seat. LaRose was in the backseat. Nola was driving them to school because they weren’t on the bus route. Last year they could have walked over to the Irons’ house, just over the reservation boundary, and taken the bus with them. But the bus no longer stopped there because Hollis drove. Maggie hoped that Hollis would get a bigger car so she and LaRose could ride along. She was tense. Sitting beside her mother going sixty-five miles per hour, she tried not to hyperventilate. Maggie held her breath every time a car swished by in the other lane. Let it out when the danger was over. She had developed propulsive convictions since finding her mother in the barn — like if she held her breath when cars came, her mother would not swerve and kill them all. Or if Maggie held her breath even longer, Nola might swerve but she and LaRose would miraculously survive the crash. Right now, with all the school supplies in the car, and her mother so pleased about having bought new fine-point markers, packages of notebook paper, labels, even a magnetic mirror for the inside of her locker door, Maggie felt the danger of a murder-suicide was pretty low, still she held her breath.

Maggie was dizzy by the time they stopped at the school entry. The doors swished open, the kids were talking. LaRose went one way, she went another. Josette and Snow had flipped a coin to see who got to be her First Day Mentor. Only kids with a top average could get that honor. You got an automatic late pass to your own classes, because you showed the new student around, went to each class to make sure they found the room.

Snow had won. She was standing tall and serene in the entry, wearing a hot-pink tank top layered over a slinky purple T-shirt, waiting with a class schedule and a lock for Maggie’s locker.

Don’t sweat it, she said. Maggie thought she might look nervous, so she tossed her head and grinned.

Hey, Cheeks, said Snow to a stagey-looking boy with earrings and tattoos, meet my little sis.

Hey, Sean, said Snow to a boy with floppy pants, sagging jacket, and wildly inappropriate Hooters T-shirt, meet my sis. Sean, you’re gonna get kicked out for that T-shirt.

I know, said Sean.

Hey, Waylon, said Snow to a scary massive dude with heavy eyebrows, plush lips, football linebacker vibe, meet my little sis. You guys are in the same class.

He put out his hand to shake, formal.

Ever so pleased, he said.

A girl behind him laughed. Get away from her, Waylon! She was tall like Snow, her eyelids hot blue, hair to her waist, balloony blouse, tight jeans.

This is Diamond. The three girls walked to Maggie’s first class. It was Physical Science taught by Mr. Hossel, a painfully thin young man with scarred red hands.

We think maybe he blew himself up, whispered Diamond, in a chemistry accident. Nobody knows.

He’s enigmatic, said Snow.

They left Maggie alone; she went in and sat down. Eyes rested on Maggie, she could feel them, and it felt wonderful. Nobody knew her. Nobody hated her yet. Light, she felt light. Shed of an insufferable responsibility. Nola off her hands for the whole day. Nothing she could do. No way to stop her mother. No way to know. And LaRose safe also in his own classroom so he wouldn’t find Nola dead and be scarred for life. Maggie smiled when she told her name to the class and smiled when they muttered. It wasn’t a mean mutter, just an information-exchange mutter. She smiled when the teacher introduced himself to her and smiled when the class shifted their feet. She smiled down at her new notebook as he went over the day’s assignment and reminded them that his rules included no makeup application during class. Two girls lowered their mascara wands. Maggie dreamily smiled at Mr. Hossel as he told her what she needed to bring to class. Startled, he caught her smile, and thought she might be a little odd, or high. But the class began to murmur, so he went on trying to interest them in the laws of motion.

The Powers

TRYOUTS FOR THE team were that Saturday.

C’mon, Josette yelled from the pickup. Snow was driving. Maggie got into the jump seat just behind. They drove to the school and parked by the gym entrance. The gym was huge and there were three courts with nets rolled up in the steel rafters so that there could be several different games played at the same time.

The eighteen girls trying out for the team wore ponytails centered high on the back of their heads, and wide stretchy headbands of every color. Some looked Indian, some looked maybe Indian, some looked white. Diamond grinned at Maggie. Six feet tall and in full makeup, she danced around, excited, snapping gum. Another girl’s ponytail, even tightened up high, hung nearly to her waist. She was powwow royalty. Regina Sailor was her name. Snow was five ten and her ponytail was also long — halfway down her back. Maggie decided to grow her hair out. Diamond was powerfully muscled and the powwow princess had extremely springy crow-hop legs. Maggie decided to work out more. The coach was small, round, smiley, maybe a white Indian. He wore a bead choker. His thin hair was scraped into a grizzled ponytail. He was Mr. Duke.

Coach Duke started the girls off with warm-up exercises. Josette paired off with Maggie and Snow paired with Diamond. The powwow princess, very striking with winsome cheekbones and a complex double French braid, looked at Maggie with cool scorn and said, Who’s that.

She’s my sister, Josette said. She’s a digger, too. You watch.

The coach made them number off twos and ones, for a scrimmage. Josette and Snow were twos. Maggie tried to stand in a spot where she would be a two, but she got stuck as a one. She was on the same team as Diamond and the princess. They seemed to know where they played best and took their positions. Diamond passed Maggie the ball and said, Serve!

Maggie’s throat went dry. She slammed the ball on the floor — it didn’t bounce crooked like in the yard. The ball came right back to her hand as if it liked her. She tossed the ball high.

Wait.

Coach hadn’t blown his whistle.

Okay. He tweeted.

Maggie tossed the ball up again, knocked it into the net. But the others just clapped and got down to business. Her face was hot, but it seemed nobody cared. There went the next serve. The princess returned it. Josette set the ball and Snow launched, legs gangling, spiked the ball left of Maggie just the way she did in practice. There wasn’t time to slide under it so Maggie dove fist out, konged it up high, and rolled. Diamond messaged that one deep but Josette was there with a bouncy blonde, who again fed the ball to Snow, who again whacked it straight at Maggie.

Ravich! she screamed.

Maggie dug it out again with a kamikaze dive.

Holeee, screamed the powwow princess. Another girl set and the princess slammed a pit ball past Snow’s lifted arms right into the sweet spot of gym floor nobody could reach.

Kill!

Maggie couldn’t serve or jump. She couldn’t hit for squat. She wasn’t graceful, but she got to where the ball was, wherever it went, and popped it up. Sometimes she pounced, sometimes she frogged, sometimes she stag-leaped to cork it overhead, backward, if a teammate smacked it out of bounds. And her placement was good. Her craziest save was playable. She gave everything — every fret, every gut clench, every fear — freed herself for a couple of hours, made the coach laugh, and picked up the team with her slapstick retrievals.

Okay, you might be on the bench a lot at first. Don’t worry, said Josette, when they found out she’d made the varsity team. You mighta got more play JV. But we need you.

You’re suicidal out there!

Snow laughed. They were driving back. Neither of them saw Maggie’s face freeze at the word, saw her eyes lose focus. She was suddenly in the barn — her mom standing high in the slant of light. Zip. She ricocheted back into the car. She was afraid that she felt too good, too happy, and that would make her mom feel the opposite. She watched the road, anxious as the sisters gabbled. Snow was driving fast enough, but still, she needed to get home.

RANDALL HAD A friend who had inherited a permit to cut pipestone at the quarry in South Dakota where the pipestone lived. This friend gave pipestone freely to Randall, who gave it to Landreaux, who made pipes for him. But this was a pipe for Landreaux’s own family. They all took the pipes into the lodge whenever they went. They treated the boys’ pipes like people. All the children were given these pipes early on, but didn’t smoke them until they were grown. LaRose was the last child without a pipe, so Landreaux was making one. He used an electric saw, then a hasp file on the red stone to rough it out. Later, a rasp, finer files, and a rattail file for the curve in the bowl. He would use graduated grades of sandpaper. At last he would use fabrics, then polish the bowl with his palms and fingers for a few weeks. The oil from his own hands would deepen the color. It was a simple pipe. Landreaux didn’t believe that pipes should be made in eagle head, otter, bear, eagle claw, mountain goat, turtle, snail, or horse shapes, as he’d seen. They were supposed to be humble objects to pray with humbly.

Landreaux felt that working on a pipe was a form of prayer, but prayer where you could multitask. He often brought a pipe bowl to work on when he sat with his clients as they went through procedures, waited for tests, watched TV in hospital lounges or at home.

Today, he brought the pipe to work on when he went to Ottie and Bap’s. He got Ottie’s hygiene taken care of first. He showered Ottie and carefully protected the still healing fistula that would help access large veins in his chest. Landreaux also bathed Bap’s dog just because she’d be pleased. Bap was visiting their daughter in Fargo. Ottie rolled up to the television, pointed the weak-batteried remote, and flipped erratically through the channels while Landreaux made them sandwiches, nothing juicy. Sometimes Ottie said he longed for an orange so bad he wanted to cry. He was on a low-fluid diet. Ottie found the cooking show he liked, and they ate while watching the flashing knives, close-up batter whipping, sizzling, critical tasting. But Ottie was still washed out from dialysis the day before, couldn’t finish his sandwich, and soon even the show couldn’t hold his interest. He wanted to talk, though. He switched off the tube and asked how things were going for Landreaux. His voice was thready and soft.

Guess I have to say the whole situation’s stable now, but goddamn, said Landreaux to Ottie, who smiled at him with dim eyes. Landreaux had the pipe bowl in his hands, but he couldn’t get calm.

I shouldn’t swear while I’m working on this pipe, he said. Randall says it might get offended. The pipe’s supposed to be treated like a grandma or a grandpa.

You’re too reverential, all that. Grandpa Pipe won’t get pissed off, said Ottie. Grandpas take pity. Plus this isn’t really a sacred object yet. Has to be blessed.

True, said Landreaux.

Swear away, said Ottie.

Sorry, said Landreaux to Ottie. Sometimes it gets to me all over again.

Ottie knew that Landreaux could get on a jag.

Hey, I wonder.

Ottie groped to change the subject.

When did you and Emmaline first meet?

He surprised himself. Maybe it was an unusual thing for one guy to ask another. They had him all plumbed up like a toilet. Dying so slowly was boring.

So?

At a funeral, said Landreaux. It was Eddieboy’s funeral, her uncle. During the wake, while Eddieboy lay there looking his best, Emmaline got up and spoke for him. The things she remembered: like this raccoon he tamed that sat on his head like a hat. The way he let kids be his workout weights, lifting them up and down on his arms. The green plastic shoes. These things brought him alive, you know?

I remember Eddieboy.

People were smiling and nodding at Emmaline’s memories like you’re smiling and nodding, said Landreaux. Eddieboy’s morning Schlitz — and he never drank at any other time. Those Hawaiian shirts. How he used to go yabadabadoo at the end of jokes. I watched Emmaline and thought that someone who could raise those mental pictures at a sad time and make people smile was a good person. Plus, a looker.

For sure, said Ottie. I bet the feast was good for Eddieboy.

Potato salad, macaroni shells. Ambrosia. Of course we ate together, then I left. I was working in Grand Forks as a night clerk. I’d got her address and I wrote her every night on Motel 6 letterhead paper. She kept all my letters.

I wrote Bap too! What’d you say in your letters?

Landreaux was smiling now.

I would die for her, eat dust, walk the burning desert, that kind of thing. Maybe I said I would drink her bathtub water. I hope not.

Ottie still looked expectant, so Landreaux went on.

Oh well, you know. We tried each other out, I guess. No, it was more like we disappeared into each other for a while. Vanished out of the ordinary world. To be honest, for a while we drank hard, drugged some. Then got sober. We wanted a baby, then Snow was born tiny and we had to lean on each other to make sure our baby lived. Emmaline was in school. We made it through that. Earlier in this time we got Hollis. Along came Josette. Eight pounds! We came back here and got into the traditions, to stay sober at first, then to bless our family. We went deeper into it, got married traditional before the kids, got married by Father Travis way after. Coochy came along, then LaRose. One thing had led to another in a good way until. .

Don’t skip ahead, said Ottie. You lucked out with Emmaline, but maybe it wasn’t just luck. You’re a good man, too.

Ottie had perked up during Landreaux’s story, but now a powerful wave of fatigue hit him. Abruptly, he fell asleep; the air whistled between his lips. Landreaux fixed a travel pillow around Ottie’s neck so that he could sleep comfortably in his chair. The past was stirred up in Landreaux. It had been a long time since he’d thought of the way he and Emmaline were in the beginning. Even to remember, now, both hurt and pleasured his mind.

Up until Emmaline, he had been living in his sleep. Dozing on his feet yet doing a thousand things. And then she had roughly shaken him and when he dared look into her eyes he saw: together they were awake. She began to inhabit him. He felt too much. Had strange thoughts. If she left him, he would go blind. Deaf. Forget how to talk and breathe. When they argued, he turned to air. His atoms, molecules, whatever he was made of, started drifting apart. He could feel himself losing solidity. How had she done this? Sometimes at night, when she left the bed and he was anchored in half-consciousness, he couldn’t move. Terror built in him, a panicky, anxious, stifling misery that abated only when he felt her stirring about beside him again. If Emmaline had not loved him steadily in return he would have died of the experience of falling in love. It was like he had been born in a cave, raised as a wolf child or a monkey with a bottle strapped on a wire for a mother. To feel was nearly too much to bear.

Landreaux thought about the Fentanyl patches kept in the back of the bathroom drawer. They were for Ottie’s unhealable stumps.

Sit tight, said Landreaux to himself.

He gripped the pipe bowl and watched his knuckles whiten until the need, the need, the need passed down a level, which was the dangerous moment when he would think he had conquered the need but that sly part of him could bypass the conviction. The desire, the shame, the fear that stopped his breath was settling. He had been infected with feelings and his body held them like a live virus. But he could turn them off, go to sleep again, find safety in a self-compelled oblivion. He put the stone to his forehead until he felt safe. He took a deep breath. That erratic thing in him had settled down. He talked it down some more.

Now, you stay there. Leave me alone, he told it.

Landreaux handled the pipestone lovingly. It was the blood of the ancestors through which Emmaline and his children existed in this precarious world.

MAGGIE WALKED LAROSE back to his brothers and sisters on an October weekend. The radiant leaves had blown off quickly the night before, and stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. Maggie stayed on at the Iron house to do homework with the girls, and because she was invited to their beauty spa. Josette and Snow were going to turn their kitchen into a relaxing world of skin and hair regimens.

The treatments could be assembled out of the pantry and refrigerator. Sugar facial. Salt exfoliation for the feet. Cinnamon and honey lip exfoliation. Egg-white facial that would tighten your skin. Cucumber eye mask. Frozen tea bag eye mask. Lemon hair rinse. Mayonnaise hair moisturizing treatment. They decided that they were going to do that one first.

Snow set a jar of mayo on the table along with a roll of plastic wrap. She poured a quarter cup of oil into a bowl. Maggie sat down in a kitchen chair, a towel over her shoulders, and Snow massaged mayonnaise and canola oil into the crown of Maggie’s head, then down each strand of hair. Maggie wanted to laugh. The smell was annoying but Snow’s massage felt so good that she fizzed up inside. She closed her eyes and sealed her lips. It would be weird to laugh. Snow wound the plastic wrap around and around Maggie’s head. She tucked the ends tight, then wrapped a towel tightly over the plastic into a turban.

Now you can go sit in Dad’s recliner and Josette will do the frozen tea bag treatment on your eyes, and the salt exfoliation on your feet. After that, Josette’s going to do the mayo treatment on my hair, then we all do the egg-white face mask.

I want one too, said Emmaline when she saw the girls painting the egg whites onto their faces, and onto LaRose. They lay on the couch, or on towels on the floor. They listened to the radio while waiting for the egg white to dry. As it dried, it started pulling on their skin.

Can you feel it?

I can, said Maggie, her eyes shut beneath the melting Lipton tea bags.

Kinda hurts, said Josette after a moment.

That’s because it’s stimulating your collagen.

Emmaline sat up. Can I take it off now?

Maggie took the tea bags off her eyes. Mine’s dry.

Ow! Don’t smile, said Josette. But she laughed. The dried egg white on Snow’s face had cracked in a web of tiny lines.

Get it off!

They washed off the egg white and admired the smoothness of one another’s skin. They unwound the turbans, washed their hair, and couldn’t get the mayonnaise out. Maggie looked into the mirror and saw that the tea had left raccoon marks around her eyes. Within the stains, her eyes gleamed as if with fever. She looked mysteriously ill. She examined the porcelain finish on her cheeks.

Wow, said Emmaline. My face is all dried out. It feels like my skin is going to fall off.

Me too, said LaRose.

She stared into the mirror and started rubbing Oil of Olay onto her forehead.

Now the manicures!

Josette brought out a tray of nail enamels.

I’m leaving for town to get Coochy. Do your homework, said Emmaline to the girls. And this egg-white mask? I think it aged me ten years. Her skin was still tight and strange.

I’m going with you, said LaRose.

You’re from the olden days, said Josette suddenly, bending over to hug LaRose. You got an old spirit.

Just that egg white, said LaRose.

Know what he said? You guys, know what he said? He said what we used for TV in the olden time was stories.

Come on, said Emmaline.

No, really, he said that!

I mean come on — let’s go.

Maggie and Snow jumped in the car and got a ride into town. They wanted to buy cinnamon for the lip treatment, and they had to get more shampoo.

We smell like freakin’ sandwiches, said Snow.

Whose idea was this, the mayo?

Mine.

Really?

Actually, Josette’s, but she’s sensitive, you know?

Maggie hadn’t thought of Josette as the sensitive one.

My mom’s sensitive, said Maggie, and wished she hadn’t. Anyway, they were both sitting in the backseat of the car, where Emmaline couldn’t hear. Snow was silent, but Maggie could tell she was thinking of what to say. After a while, Snow spoke.

Your mom, she’s okay. I mean, she’s done pretty well, don’t you think, considering?

Mom’s hard to deal with, said Maggie. She stopped herself from chipping at her new nail color. Pale sky blue.

Snow didn’t tell her how she and Josette had recoiled from that witchy vibe Nola had given off those first years. She said that Josette liked how Nola planted flowers.

She’s into that, said Maggie.

Snow’s approval of something that her mother did had a strange effect on Maggie. Her stomach seemed to float inside her body. Yet there was a jealous itch in her brain. She looked at Snow, at the elegant way she held her mayonnaise-smelling head, the slim flex of her shoulders, the perfectly layered T-shirts. She needed Snow to understand.

My mother actually doesn’t like me, you know, said Maggie. She loves LaRose.

Snow’s eyebrows drew together, her lips parted; she stared into Maggie’s face. Just when Maggie was about to shoot her mouth off, say something tough, swear to stop what she saw in Snow’s eyes might turn to pity, Snow reached an arm around Maggie’s shoulders and said, Oh shit, baby-girl, we gotta stick together. Look.

Nicking her head toward the front seat, she shaped her face to indicate LaRose and Emmaline.

He doesn’t even have to call shotgun anymore, said Snow. Guess who’s always stuck in the backseat whenever Mom’s got time with LaRose?

Maggie stuttered; it was like an unexpected present thrust into her hands.

I never knew.

It’s a fact of life, said Snow. We call her out on it all the time. She doesn’t get it. Hollis and Coochy, they’re tight. And we got each other, me, Josette. And, hey.

She rocked Maggie toward her comically.

We got you covered too.

After they left, Josette started prying up the packed powdery dirt beside the front steps of their house. The rest of the yard was damp, but this part stayed dry because of the overhang of the roof. Maybe it wasn’t the best place to plant because of that, but her vision demanded fulfillment. Her parents had no feel for gardening, for home beautification. They were focused on the human side of things — medical, social, humanitarian, and all that. But over the past year, whenever she had picked up LaRose, Josette had seen how Nola got some new flower to bloom every week or so. They weren’t just ordinary flowers, and Josette didn’t know their names. Somehow they bloomed one right after the other, all summer and even into fall. Between these unusual plants were the constant marigolds and petunias, which she did know. Nola was growing vegetables out back of her house, too, climbing vines that twined up chicken wire. Rows of plants were set off by straw paths where the chickens pecked. It all looked to Josette like a magazine house. Of course, Nola had a part-time job only. Anyway not like her mother. Emmaline’s job was endless. Josette would take charge.

Yesterday, she had brought home seeds and some tiny, droopy marigolds from the grocery store. They were in a bin marked FREE. This was her vision. There would be colorful bursts of flowers beside the door to their house instead of a junked bicycle and rusted scooter that could not be used by a kid on a gravel road. Those things, she had hauled back into the woods.

The dirt, though, was not like the dirt at Maggie’s house. It was filled with tiny rocks and the color was gray. The water just turned it to soup.

Dirt’s dirt, right?

Josette sat back on her heels.

She put the seeds in, gingerly pulled the marigolds from their sectioned plastic pot. She set each one gently into a hole and sifted the gray dust from beneath the eaves over the roots. She watered everything, nearly washing the plants away until she learned to trickle the water from the bucket. She leaned back on her heels again.

Grow, little flowers, grow.

She loved the scent of them, pungent and warm. She heard Hollis’s car from a long way off, struggling toward the house. The engine was plaintive, but patient with the slight hill. Soon he pulled up in the driveway, got out.

Hey, he said.

Hey, she said back.

What’s that?

Oh, just making a garden, said Josette. Thought I’d brighten things up.

He admired it from every angle. He praised the marigolds. He didn’t tell her that the first frost would kill them off and they wouldn’t come back the second year. Or that planting seeds was useless in the fall. But he wondered how it was she didn’t know that. Why hadn’t she picked up on these pieces of knowledge in her life? The air was warming, but the spindly plants with their leaves yellowing already were doomed.

So, he said when she brushed herself off and stood and looked at him.

So what’s there to eat?

Is there any soup left?

They walked inside and rifled through the refrigerator, lifted the tops off stove pots, found the hidden cookies, leftover bannock. Josette smelled intensely of something that made Hollis hungry. He tried to make a sandwich, but there wasn’t any mayonnaise. Josette toasted some bannock in the iron skillet. They sat down to eat.

Hollis sprinkled a spoon of sugar on his bannock. Josette tried to chat.

This old sugar bowl, you know? It belonged to this house from way back. My great-great-et-cetera-grandpa from olden times used to keep a key in it.

Although Hollis already knew about the no-handle sugar bowl, he said nothing. Josette kept talking.

It was something from the first LaRose. She lived here when it was still a cabin-shack. All we have of hers is this little sugar bowl, I guess, except some letters and records. Grandma’s got those.

Your family goes way back, huh.

Josette looked at Hollis and because of the way he said this, in a softened voice, staring at her with a peculiar serious regard, she remembered what Snow had said about Hollis liking her. Which was disturbing. A stormy sense of this moment’s weird potential gripped her and she screeched, making him jump.

Everybody’s family goes way back! Fuckin A. Back to the future, man.

She began to laugh with what she thought of as a dangerous sexy growl, and he looked at her in wonder.

Old Story 1

THE OLD PEOPLE were parked around the room in folding chairs and wheelchairs. LaRose’s namesake grandmother, the fourth LaRose, was frying frybread. She lifted each golden pillow of dough from fat and set it in a nest of paper towels. Emmaline put the squares on plates and handed them to each elder. The boy LaRose brought around the butter, the chokecherry jelly. He set out the coffee mugs: the Tribal College mug, the Up Shit Creek Without a Paddle mug, the scratched casino mug, and the brand-new casino mug with the slot-machine fruits. The coffee-machine coffee was still dripping into the glass pot. LaRose watched it. He was pudging out a little before he shot up another inch. Malvern Sangrait squinted at him and nodded each time he did something.

Oh that boy, oh that boy, she whispered. He’s made of good ingredients. Maybe, after all, your Emmaline stepped out on Landreaux.

Shut up, bad lady, said Mrs. Peace.

The last few pleasant years with Sam Eagleboy had taken none of the meanness out of Malvern. She watched Mrs. Peace tong the frybread out and tried not to say anything about her technique. Still, other words popped from her mouth.

Is that your jelly or your daughter’s jelly?

We put it up together, said Emmaline.

How come you ain’t living with your mother? Is it he, Landreaux, against it? How come your mother ain’t living in her own house?

You asked me that a hundred times, said Mrs. Peace, and I told you I like my habits. Like living here, alone except for you and your mean mouth.

Ignatia wheeled in with her tank of oxygen.

God save the queen, said Malvern.

Naanan, said Ignatia, holding up her tiny claw hand for LaRose to pretend to slap.

Ignatia’s face glowed like a young person’s when she decided to smile.

I got a good story for you, she said to LaRose. In the middle of the night I remembered all the pieces. This story came off my own grandmother, too, maybe when I was your age. That long ago. I forgot all about this story until the other night.

Let’s hear you say it then, said Malvern, pouting, jealous.

I can’t, said Ignatia with a proud little wag of her hand.

Why not? Malvern leaned close, eyed her narrowly.

Ignatia drew herself up, tucked her chin to deliver the teaching.

There is no snow on the earth. The legless beings do not yet sleep.

Ooooo, you sound like an old-time Indian, you, said Malvern. Her eyes lighted with malice. Nothing was worse than being called out on sacred tradition by another elder.

You know we do wait until snow’s deep on the ground, said Mrs. Webid.

I do know that, said Malvern, enraged now. It was me who originally remembered that rule and Ignatia who tried to break that rule. The beings who might bring our stories to the lowest levels of the earth, to the underwater lions and the giant snakes and other evil beings, they have to be froze in the ground, sleeping.

There’s one more piece of frybread left, said Emmaline.

Let her have it, the one who tells the stories out of season, said Ignatia, pursing her angry lips at Malvern.

Gawiin memwech, said Malvern. Let’s give it to the one who tried to steal my husbands, all six of them, one right after the other one. She tried to snatch away the fathers of my children by jiggling her stuffs at them! For shame!

They never saw nothing they didn’t want to see. Ignatia gave a choking snarl. You were so mean you scared them limp. They couldn’t take it. They swarmed after me.

Giiwanimo!

Don’t you call me liar. Your pants are smoking!

Emmaline cut the piece of frybread in half and slathered it with butter and jelly. She put a piece in each woman’s hand. The antagonists gnawed off bits, glowering and guttering, and for a moment it looked like they might soften. Then Malvern blurted.

Giiwanimo! Giin! Your underpants are burning! Hot pussy, you, at this age. For shame!

Ignatia threw her buttered bread at Malvern and it stuck to her breast, right at about her nipple. She looked down and snorted.

Here, let me help you, my darling, said Sam Eagleboy. He lifted the bit of bread off, then spit on his handkerchief and scrubbed slavishly at her bosom. Malvern pretended to bat his hands away.

Sam automatically popped the frybread in his mouth.

Sam ate the whiteman’s food! Mrs. Webid leaned excitedly toward Malvern. He must love you pretty bad, eh?

A man who will do that will do anything, said Ignatia. I should know. Her face screwed into a wink.

NIGHT SHIFT? YES, I believe. . I am certain. I will be. Quite happy with those hours, said Romeo, nearly dumbstruck with excitement.

Sterling Chance had a round, worn, dignified face. His hands were calm between the stacks of papers on his desk.

You are working out real good here, Romeo. Don’t always get to see that. We don’t just clean and repair stuff, you know, we are kind of the guiding force around here. If we don’t do our job, nobody can do a damn thing to fix people, right?

So far, Romeo had tinkered with and revved up an emergency generator. He had hot-wired the ambulance. He had gently broken into file cabinets and even an office when nurses had forgotten their keys. He had squeezed a breathing pump for a kid with asthma during a blackout. He had figured out stuck windows, coaxed fluorescence out of touchy bulbs, unclogged toilets, and dehairballed showers. All without uttering one single swear word that could be heard outside the sanctum of his head.

You’re polite, said Sterling Chance, with gravity. That also counts.

As Romeo walked out of the maintenance office, his prospects expanded.

Not only would he not be alone, at home, at night, which had gotten tedious, but certainly there would be only sleepy supervision at the hospital. Certainly the rules would relax. During the first week of work, he found that he was right. All around Romeo, over the upside-down hours, there was talk. Gossip ruled the night shift. Not mean gossip, like at the Elders Lodge, just valuable updates. You had to talk to stay awake. And you had to move around to stay awake, too, so Romeo might as well do some work. He continued to normalize servile behavior in order to get close to many conversations — any of them might be useful. He let himself be seen polishing the floor on his hands and knees.

You know, we’ve got a floor-polishing machine, someone said to him.

Thank you, but I have my standards, he replied.

The emergency team had a little picnic table set up outside their garage door. Of course, they had life-and-death matters on their minds, but really, what careless people! Romeo had to pick up the bits of paper they crumpled, the cigarette butts of course, the candy and sandwich wrappers that blew down off their lunch. He did this even after the sun went down, as they sat beneath the floodlights. Then he had to slowly, slowly, dispose of these items. He had to smooth out and stack each piece of trash before he lowered it reverently into the bin. Romeo placed himself near the emergency team, around the emergency room, anywhere he could get near the EMT on duty or the nurses who might have a bit of information to spare, or the doctors. He blended into the hospital furniture with his mineral-colored outfits. He wore a tan turtleneck to hide the blue-black skulls around his throat. His gray stretchy jeans were the color of dirty mop water. Probably, they were women’s jeans. He didn’t care. He didn’t tell his own stories, he just encouraged others. He didn’t make himself obvious in any way. He wore black rubber sneakers he’d found abandoned on the highway. Mornings, on the way home, head brimming, he entered his disability sanctum and emptied his pockets of papers — jottings on Post-it notes, papers drawn from the trash, even copies of a few files left out overnight. He kept his notes in piles. Pocketed another box of colored thumbtacks. Kept on tacking the pertinent scribblings up on the softened drywall of his rotting walls.

From these scraps of conversation Romeo learned: There was a kind of disease where you acted drunk, but it was just your own body making alcohol. Eating food off the edge of a sharp knife had resulted in an ambulance call for Puffy Shields. A baby was born with hair all over its body. Another baby was born holding a penny that the mother had swallowed. Old Man Payoose had a son on methamphetamine. That son had stolen the old man’s money and while that boy was high had shoved a carrot up his own ass, which was what brought him to the ER. A lady whose name he tried to catch used small round lake stones to exercise her vagina. A tribal member, a roofer, had breathed several nails into his lungs and wouldn’t let the doctors take them out. There was too much salt in everything, including the air. A little girl froze to death because she couldn’t get back into the house where her mother was passed out. Although she was pronounced dead at the scene, a doctor CPR’d and warmed her blood and brought her back from the spirit world. Now the girl knew things, like that other kid, LaRose. A teenager froze to death sleeping under the porch of his father’s house. They tried, in hope, but couldn’t get that boy back. An old woman got lost taking out the garbage but she didn’t quite freeze because she buried herself underneath the snow.

But wait. Romeo mopped his way up to the door of the dispatcher’s office, where the ambulance crew sometimes did paperwork or just talked. He heard Landreaux’s name. He strained, leaned closer, held his breath and tried to make out the words.

Not the femoral, said someone.

For sure?

Not that one either.

What day was it?

A Wednesday? A Tuesday?

You coulda fooled me.

Then they started talking about the carrot again.

Romeo strained his work-weakened mind. Tried to memorize. When he had to move on, he swiftly wrote down what he’d heard on pages torn from a waiting-room magazine. Into a file folder rescued from the trash, he slipped all that he found. Possibilities. Creative possibilities. He took pride in how he organized his own reality.

MAGGIE SNEAKS INTO LaRose’s room and curls up at the end of his bed.

I think it’s going good. I think she’s happier, says Maggie.

Me too. She’s not making the cakes.

And she might take a job with Dad at Cenex. I heard them.

You gotta stay nice to her.

Are you saying. . Maggie’s voice is low. . are you saying she wanted to hang herself because of how mean I was?

Course not. But you were.

I was a bitch. I am a bitch. That’s what they call girls like me. Not so far, I mean, at this school. There’s bitchier bitches here. But it will happen.

LaRose sits up. No, you’re just tough. You gotta be.

Lemme show you tough!

She jumps up, bounces the bed, and smacks him with his pillow. He lunges for her and they wrestle off the bed, onto the floor. They stop laughing when their bodies thump down hard. Nola calls out. Maggie is out the door into her own room quick as a shadow.

The parents’ door creaks. Nola’s voice floats from down the hall.

Some books fell, says LaRose from his bed. It’s all right, Mom. You can sleep now. I’ll be quiet.

Maggie?

Whaaaa? Mom? She answers from her own room, pretending she’s groggy and crabby. All is quiet. Falling asleep, Maggie thinks about LaRose. She thinks about him every night. He calms her down. He is her special, her treasure, she doesn’t really know what he is — hers to love.

Suddenly he is there, at her bedside, finger at her lips. He’s never done this before.

She turns toward him.

I wanna ask you something, he says.

Okay.

Who were those boys, you know, in the other school. Whenever. Those ones who held you down. Who did that stuff?

She looks over at LaRose’s skinny boy arms and hair so thick it won’t stay down. His question makes her sick. She thought she was over it, but turns out she’s been holding a pool of slime in her body. Now it seeps from her pores, a light film. Are there tears? She wipes her face. Damn. It still gets to her. And they remember, those guys. Last year Buggy said to her, fake innocent, Hey, Ravich, you still want it? You still want it like you did before? Another time, coming down the hall toward her, Buggy had grabbed his crotch. At least he flinched when she went in for the kick.

She tells: Tyler Veddar, Curtains Peace, Brad Morrissey, Jason “Buggy” Wildstrand.

I think I’ve seen those guys, says LaRose.

Plus there is this Wildstrand sister, Braelyn, just a year above me. She’s mean, pretends she’s hot, wears a ton of makeup. Plucks her eyebrows into half hoops. I hate her. I’m so glad we changed schools. She used to give me the stink eye. The finger. For nothing! I know Buggy said something to her, told Braelyn it was my fault.

I never forgot what you said that night, says LaRose.

You didn’t? The oozy snot dries off her. Their prying fucky fingers fly off her skin. You remember? What’d I say?

Can a saint kill?

A saint?

You meant me. Even though I’m not a saint.

LaRose, oh shit. I didn’t mean you should kill them.

Don’t worry. I’m not gonna kill them exactly, but yeah, now I’m stronger.

No, you’re not, she says. Please!

Tyler is now a high school wrestler. Curtains is ungainly and slow but a hulk. Brad Morrissey plays football. Buggy is nerveless, cruel, and very smart.

It’s over. Over! It does not affect me. Besides, they’re kind of brutal. They’re mean assholes. Promise you’re going to leave them alone.

Don’t worry. LaRose holds his voice down, modest. You know I work out with Father Travis. I have my green belt now.

Oh my god, don’t you try anything!

Ssshhhhhh.

He disappears.

Material of Time

PETER BROUGHT NOLA to his Cenex job and she began to work beside him a few days a week. She ran the registers, stocked the shelves and refrigerator cases, kept the bathrooms fiercely spotless. Not an item was out of place, all labels visible. The coffee station glowed like an altar. As she worked, Nola’s daily ration of sorrow dissipated into thousands of small items — the creamer cups, wrapped straws, adjustable candy hooks, the slushie machine and donut display case. Sometimes she stared long at the hot dog broiler turning endlessly until gold beads of sweating fat glistened on the skins of the lethal wieners. Sometimes she read and pondered the ingredients on the flimsy snack packages. When she counted the ice scrapers or replaced a shoplifted tire pressure gauge or studied the placement of magazines, it seemed that in righting the tiny things of life she was gaining control of herself, perhaps at a molecular level, for she was made up of all this junk, wasn’t she? The beef sticks, which she chewed in the car ride home, the fluffy chemical cups of French vanilla latte from the automatic dispenser. She drew an extra-large cup for herself every morning and sipped all day — the taste growing harsher, the dry acid eating at her.

Then Peter started drinking gas station lattes too. They laughed together at their latte addiction. The laugh flew out of Nola’s throat, harsh and rusty. It dissolved when it hit Peter’s chest. Nola saw it. That night, she rested her head there and closed her eyes.

A COLD RAIN was blowing, not sleet yet, or snow. Fat drops smacked Nola’s face as she came back to the house one afternoon. LaRose was upstairs, the door to his room halfway shut. Walking by the door Nola heard him talking, or rather, having a conversation. He often spoke while he was playing in his action world. He used Legos, blocks, magnets, an old erector set, Tinkertoys, cast-off bolts and odd bits of metal, even butter tubs and cracker boxes, to create a complex citadel. This magic edifice was attacked and defended by members of alliances that shifted and formed in his hands when he played with the many plastic creatures he had found in Dusty’s toy bucket or been given. Tetrahellemon, Vontro, Green Menace, Lightning, Mudder, Seker, Maxmillions, Warthog, Simitron, Xor, Tor, Hiki, and the Master.

He was shy about his games. He never played around people, usually closed the door entirely, sometimes spoke in whispers. But today LaRose was so absorbed in the invented drama before him that he didn’t hear Nola approach, or sense her listening.

Let’s connect our fists and rocket over the dinosaurs.

You can’t push me!

I repeat.

The plasma boat got our back. We’re safe.

Get Xor out! Quick! He’s getting weak!

Triceratops forced him in his jaws!

Good one, Hiki. The Master likes.

Don’t use that one, Dusty.

He lost his powers yesterday. He’s recuperating in the chamber.

Green Menace will stop the infest!

The cycle has begun and we must complete the universe.

Maxmillions. Take Maxmillions.

Yeah, you’re Seker. Hold the exam button down.

Then mouth explosions. Bchchchchch! Pfwoooozhzhz! And the quiet clashing of molded plastic.

Nola sank silently down against the wall beside the open door. Her face was peaceful, her eyes downcast; her lips moved slightly as if she was repeating a name or prayer.

She heard everything. An epic battle between light and darkness. Forms passing through the material of time. Character subverting space. The gathering and regathering. Shapes of beings unknown merging deeply with the known. Worlds fusing. Dimensions collapsing. Two boys playing.

The next day, Nola splashed gasoline on the rotted lumber and ten-year-old tax records and bank statements she had gathered in the burn pit. It was a sparkling, mild, windless day. She threw in a burning twist of paper. There was a dull whump. When the fire was burning hot, she pushed in the green chair.

That’s all over, she said out loud.

Whenever she was alone, tears had filled her eyes. No drug had helped, and even LaRose had not helped at first. But after listening to him play with Dusty yesterday, she woke this morning and got out of bed before she knew she’d done it. There had not been that agonized mudlike hold the bed usually had on her. Then later this morning her old self stirred. Something unknown, internal, righted itself. She felt unalone. Like the inner and the outer worlds were aligned, as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. Something good he was doing for her by playing with her son from the other kingdom.

Plans sprang up. She would get fancier chickens, not just her old reliables. She would get barred rocks, wyandottes, Orpingtons, some of those wild-looking featherhead Polish chickens. She would make the garden bigger, better. They already had that ugly dog who wouldn’t leave her alone. So an old sweet horse. Flowers, shrubs, bats now that bats are good, bees now that bees are good. Bird feeders. Trap the feral cats, but then what to do with them. No. Let them hunt rats, keep the barn safe. A cow, two maybe, for milk only. She hated sheep. No sheep, no goats. Rabbits, though, in a stack of rabbit hutches and from time to time she supposed Peter would remove one and kill it for supper. She’d make him skin it, too, cut it up in pieces. She would fry it, sure, but wait, their eyes! Big soft eyes! Too much. Too much, too soon. If you could eat a rabbit, you could eat a cat. If you could eat a cat, you could eat a dog. So it went, on up. No, she’d just have chickens, she thought, staring into the flames. That was all the death she would be able to bear. Slow down, she counseled herself. You have time to live now. She looked around, behind her, toward the woods.

See? She whispered. I burned the chair.

Wishing Well

WISHINGWELLWISHING WELLWISHING WELLWEHYAHHEYWHENYAHHEY. Ojibwes have a song for everything. This was Romeo’s lock-picking song. He sang beneath his breath as he unlocked a hospital file cabinet with an unbent paper clip.

It is truly wonderful, he thinks, that such precious information is considered secure when protected by a lock so jiggly, and cheap-john enough to break. Or merely find a key to this generic lock if he so wishes. Or saw it off. But he has the time and inclination to pick this lock, which will make his entry invisible.

For ten quiet minutes Romeo toys with the innards of the lock, humming and whispering his lock-picking song until the tumblers line up and the mechanism yields.

Within the cabinet his secretarial finger-flipping produces the copy of a file it would be hard to obtain otherwise, the original probably residing in tribal police headquarters. From which zone he is barred except as an arrestee. Funny the trust that resides in him as a recovering alcoholic. Everybody loves that recovery shit, he thinks, as he slides out the paper he needs and replaces the file just in case anybody thinks to look for it although nobody ever will, as this was considered an open-and-shut sort of thing, a tragic accident.

He puts the document into a flimsy black cloth bag, another freebie he’s cleaned up from the tribal security conference, where he witnessed tribal police officers using their Homeland Security grants to practice double-cuffing each other on the floor. The pack also holds ten sealed squares of expired noodles, the kind with pungent little foil skibs of flavoring. He’s also scored three blueberry yogurts from the staff fridge at the hospital. Romeo heads up to the Catholic day school to see about lunch leftovers — he has been lucky there. If he could find some protein source to complement the noodles, and perhaps a wilted carrot or two, he’d have a hearty soup. An onion would be a plus!

Romeo scores a flabby cucumber and some chicken cooked so dry it almost flakes, but the soup will soften it. And there is nothing wrong with boiled cucumber. Back home, he switches on his television and the hot plate. Feeling domestic, he rinses out his enameled tin saucepan in the bathroom sink. He opens three packets of noodles, douses them with water and flavoring, pares the cucumber into bits, cutting against his thumb. Behind him, CNN seems stuck on yellowcake.

Yellowcake, he sings.

Weyoheyoh weyoheyhoh

Yellowcake

Yellowcake

Make my sweet tooth ache.

Then, remembering all of the yellow cakes he’s devoured at funeral dinners and always with that chocolate frosting in tiny elevated swirls, he becomes nostalgic. Settling in before the television he meanders back to the times he went to visit Mrs. Peace so long ago and accepted squares of cake from the hands of little Emmaline. If he had ever declared his love to her once they were grown, would it have mattered? Would she have gone out with him, not Landreaux? Every year she moved farther above him, ever more out of his league. Not that he cared to be in any league, anymore, where women were concerned. My junk is monk, he thought. LOL. He’d learned LOL at work. In the olden days, there had been a chance. When he was considered smart. When there was cake passed on a little flowered plate from her hands to his hands. He can taste it, the melting scoop of vanilla soaking into the sweet loam of the slice. Like her dearness soaking into his porous heart. He’s not high, just living with that memory.

Not just to bring down Landreaux, he suddenly thinks, staring at his detective wall. But more. Maybe something true. I am not just a scabbed-over pariah. People should know.

The ramen hisses up, boiling over. Romeo busies himself rescuing his dinner. He gets his spoon ready, an old heavy metal cooking spoon from the government school. With a rag for a pot holder, he brings the pot of soup over and sets it upon a folded towel on the floor next to his chair. Waiting for his soup to cool, Romeo fixes his attention on the news. More yellowcake uranium powders. Italian what? Military Intelligence. What? Apparently Saddam has purchased Niger uranium powders, yellowcake uranium powders, which look like what they sound like, yellowcakey powders used for nuclear weapons. Then McCain comes on and Romeo puts the spoon back. McCain says that Saddam is a clear and present danger and that his pursuit to acquire weapons of mass destruction leads McCain to have very little doubt that Saddam would use them.

Romeo nods and vacuums in the noodles, along with these words. McCain has suffered and survived. McCain knows whereof he speaks. Romeo loves to say that name, so cowboy. McCain would never put the young people of American reasonlessly in harm’s way. Romeo upends the cooled pot, drinking the soup dregs.

The file he took such pains to steal remains in his tribal security conference bag. Just before settling into a concocted dream state, Romeo remembers. He pulls the bag over to his mattress and switches on the cockeyed lamp. He pulls out the paper and glances over the coroner’s report on the accident that occurred just about three years ago, on the reservation side of the boundary line only by a few dozen yards. His eyes cross. He’s barely following the letters. He knows anyway what’s in it, knows from the conversations he has pieced together on his bulletin board, knows just what happened, can see what happened, if he wants to, in his mind. But he doesn’t want to. Who could. He shoves away the document, the black bag, the responsibility that he has assumed. He shoves away the fact that his country sounds like war. Then suddenly, halfway into a dream, he gets it.

There is more than they dare say. More the carotid than the femoral, more than these tubes and cakes. Condoleezza, her eyes glitter when she says the word cavort as in cavort with terrorists. The image of Saddam cavorting when the Holy Towers were destroyed. They know something they won’t tell the public. Don’t want panic. McCain knows what it is. McCain must think the Towers were only the beginning. Behind all the flimsy bits of pretend truth there must be a real truth so terrible it would cause a stock market crash. But what if that truth is some kind of bubble truth? What if behind the truth, there is nothing but a heap of pride or money or just stuff?

Romeo has seen the havoc that occurs when commodities of all sorts are going bad and people need to use them fast — in cafeteria the strange amount of celery, the overflow of tapioca, in clinic the medications, so useful but of fragile potency past a certain month. What if.

What if there is a use-by date on a heap of war stuff?

The Breaks

IN HIS SINGLE bed with his head resting on one hard polyester-fill pillow, Father Travis tries to sleep. Under a woolen Pendleton, a flashy turquoise Chief Joseph blanket he was given by the Iron family when he blessed the vows of Landreaux and Emmaline, he gives up. He opens his eyes and stares into a soft-sifting darkness that seems to rise and fall in the room.

No trappings of authority, no special hotline to God, he tries to pray. He has been through so many definitions of his God now that he has to scroll around to find one to address. First there was fervent protector of his childhood, the God of kindliness. Then there was a blank space where he did not think of God and trained his body to act in the service of his country. God resumed as the unknowable exacting force that allowed a bomb to take his friends’ lives but gave a thin boy the power to rescue Travis. Afterward, there was the God who spoke one night about fractured mercy, waters of being, incline of radiance. He was invited to a conference attended by immortals, who spoke to him and dressed his arms with colored ribbons. Scarlet and blue whizzed and yellows ruptured, spilling brilliance through the room. That was pain in West Germany. But he was somewhere else, from time to time, watching the familiar body on the white sheets. Oh, you should have been a priest. He was sure he’d heard those words from the mouth of God, in the hospital, but later he realized that his mother might have said this as she prayed beside him before he came back alive, before he entered a drabber, more monotonous daily agony.

Was there a Polish God? The God of sausage and pierogi. A mystical, shrewd, earth-dwelling God who always took things hard. His parents’ God, the one they’d left him with not long after he was ordained. Having seen him back into his life, they’d felt that it was all right to leave, he’d guessed, because bam bam, a stroke, a fatal disease, and they were out of existence.

You should stop making Gods up, imagining them as a human would imagine a God, he says to himself, again. Address your prayers to the nothingness, the nonfigurative, abstract, indifferent power, the ever-so-useful higher power. Talk to the unknowable. The ineffable author of all forms. Father Travis finally dozes thinking of all the trees, all the birds, all the mountains, all the rivers, all the seas, the love, all the goodness, all the apple blossoms falling on the wind, then the dust of the world swirling up and falling, the stillness on the waters before it all began.

Father Travis bolts up, slumps over, head in hands.

It is over, he thinks.

In the morning, there will be a call from the Most Reverend Florian Soreno, His Excellency, Bishop Soreno, who will tell Father Travis what he already knows.

THE FEARSOME FOUR still meet, only now they really are fearsome. They get together in Tyler’s garage. They have another electric guitar to compete with the old one. Their noise is louder and they smoke weed, drink beer, share cigarettes, talk. They have girlfriends, but only Buggy’s lets him do everything he wants. He tells them all about it, and the other boys save his stories in their heads. They have not forgotten Maggie, but it’s different with her. She beat on them! Back then, they respected her. Now when they think about it, they’d like to kind of dominate her. Show her. They got big and she stayed spindly. The way it goes. But then, she’s unpredictable and quick. Her nut kicks now living on in legend. Buggy had to get some outpatient surgery. His parents considered sending the doctor bills to Peter and Nola Ravich. But Buggy didn’t want everyone to know. Also, Maggie’s family is now associated with those Irons from the reservation. Maggie’s got her danger girl Indian sisters, Josette and Snow. The Fearsome Four are much aware. Yes, those girls go to another school but they could come right over with a posse, ambush their asses, no problem and there’s those older brothers, Coochy and the one who worked in construction, Hollis — ripped dudes. Bummer though it is, Maggie is off-limits unless one of them gets ridiculously high. They hardly even talk about her, except for sometimes, in low voices, wondering if she ever told anyone about what they did.

It didn’t go too far, anyway.

Nothin’ nothin’ really. We never crossed, you know, a line there.

For sure. No line was crossed. Was it?

Dude, we hardly touched her. She just got mad for no real fucken reason!

Will you guys get off it? That was so long ago. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares.

Anyway, says Buggy, she wanted it and she still wants it.

The other boys are silent, taking in this line of reasoning. They all nod, except Brad, who stares off into the air like he hasn’t heard them. Though he has for sure heard what they said, he is Christian, and that doesn’t sound right at all.

Block. Punch. Side kick. Knife-hand. Block. PunchPunch. Snap kick. Block. Block. Poor kid, thinks Emmaline, LaRose’s got Landreaux’s exact nose, okay on an adult but too big for a boy’s face. Yet he is a handsome kid. And those eyelashes. Landreaux’s, again wasted. Expressive brows. His sisters shouldn’t put makeup on him, but they do. A year’s growth and he won’t let them. Maybe Emmaline should stop them now.

Father Travis stands beside her. She rises from her chair.

He wasn’t going to speak of it. He was going to make a simple announcement. Next Sunday Mass. Or the Sunday after. But—

I’m being transferred.

Leaving.

Yes.

Her gaze is fully fixed on him.

When?

I’ll help the next priest for a few months. After that, I go.

Where?

I don’t exactly know yet.

He laughs uncomfortably. Mutters something about a new line of work.

Emmaline turns away, and when she turns back, Father Travis is unnerved to see that she might be crying. It is hard to tell, because she’s talking at the same time as tears well up and disappear without spilling. Father Travis knows that Emmaline rarely weeps. When she cried on that terrible day in his office, it was a rent soul leaking quietly, eclipsed by Landreaux’s tearing sobs. She tries to speak but she is incoherent, which undoes him. Even when emotional she has always made sense before. Emmaline shakes her hair across her face, creases her brows, bites her lips, tries to hold back words, then blurts out nonsense. Father Travis listens hard, trying to understand, but he is rocked by her emotion. She stops.

I’m blubbering! I’m having trouble absorbing this. You’ve always been here and you’ve done so much. Priests blow through here, but you’ve stayed. People love you. .

She looks down at the balled-up tissues in her hand, not knowing how the clump got from her purse to her hand, stunned that this wave of language poured out of her and what did she say?

What did I say?

I don’t know, but I’ve fallen in love with you, says Father Travis.

She sits down hard in the plastic chair.

Behind them, LaRose is still practicing his forms. Punching air with increasing ferocity, so he doesn’t hear. Everyone else is gone, so nobody sees the priest kneeling before her, offering the large white handkerchief he keeps on his person for out-of-office emergencies. Emmaline puts the square of white cloth on her face, holds it to her temples, and cries beneath it. There is no question now. She is really crying beneath the handkerchief. Father Travis waits for a sign. This is what he began doing when he was a soldier. This is what he has been doing ever since he became a priest. Kneeling, waiting for a sign, comes so naturally to him now that he hardly notices. He focuses on not taking back or apologizing for what he just said. He leaves it all with Emmaline.

That’s not fair, says Emmaline from beneath the cloth.

LaRose is still fighting invisible foes. Kicking the practice dummy so hard it tips and rolls. This one’s for Tyler, then Curtains Peace, another donkey kick for Brad. LaRose whirls to punch Buggy. They blast backward from the force of his attack. They land stunned, writhing on the mats, try to bumble away. One sneaks up from behind. LaRose can see behind his back! Wham. Cronk. Lights out.

HOW DOES AN eight-year-old boy find out where high school boys hang out? White ones? In an off-reservation town? There is a long highway between them, and a lack of access deep as a ravine. He asks Coochy, but his brother doesn’t know who they are at all. He asks Josette, but she doesn’t care to answer. Or, is there some reason she raises her eyebrows? As does Snow. They keep their eyebrows up together, staring at him in a creepy way like they are frozen, until he backs out of the room.

He asks Hollis.

Those assholes? Why?

LaRose doesn’t have an answer.

Did one of those guys do something to you?

No.

Sounds like maybe something happened.

No.

Come on. You can tell me.

Nothing happened.

So why’re you asking?

I just wondered.

Okay, so nothing happened. Then there’s nothing you need to know about those guys except avoid their asses.

Sure.

I mean it. Hollis watches LaRose closely as he walks out of their bedroom. It’s weird that a little boy would ask about those guys — about Curtains, that freakin’ jerk who tried to hit on Snow by asking if she wanted to go for a drive in his rusted-out conversion van. Or Buggy, that Indian-hating blackout who walked by Waylon after they trashed the Pluto team in football and called Waylon blackout and Waylon laughed and put the hammer on Buggy and Buggy yelped to his friends, He’s scalpin’ me! Blanket Ass is scalpin’ me! And, because he might have killed Buggy and gone to jail, Waylon slung him away and got into his car.

And so on. Tyler, or was it Buggy, one of those guys once called Josette a squaw, so Josette is already intent on killing him, or them, any one of them, but Hollis wants to get there first.

GETTING A BLOCK or spiking from anywhere was all about jumping, crucial if you were not tall.

That’s what Coach Duke told Maggie.

Out in the barn, Peter marked a stall post with chalk. In the beginning, the height she could jump, reaching up with her arms, took her only a couple of inches above an imaginary net. But every week, she gained a tiny fraction. Coach Duke noticed.

Hey, Ravich, come over here, he said after practice. You’ve put a few inches on your jump. Are you practicing?

She told him about her chalked post. He gave her jumping exercises.

He showed her squats, ankle bounces, step-ups, and his favorite, the four-star-box drill. Coach Duke’s heart beat to inspire. It tuned him up when kids worked at getting better. That Maggie had set herself these personal goals, improving her jump to make up for height, got Coach Duke so happy that he called her parents that same night.

Peter answered, and when the coach said who he was Peter’s stomach clutched, sure that Maggie was getting kicked off the team. But no, this was a good call. The first good call about Maggie that her parents had ever received.

Every night after school, now, she got a pass from setting the table. Peter and LaRose set the table as long as Maggie went out to the barn to do her exercises and jumps. The dog sat in the doorway concentrating on her pogo leaps. At first it was hard to jump for five minutes. Then hard to jump for ten. Then fifteen, twenty. Dark came early. She turned on the barn light and massaged her legs. It got cold. She wore a parka and sweatpants to keep her legs warm, so they wouldn’t seize with cramps. Her muscles became hard springs. She practiced serves — running, leaping, at the height of her leap punching the ball just so, at the dog, who politely stepped aside and never got beaned.

Once, as she vaulted toward the dog, she thought that if she’d had a knife sharp enough, and with the height she could now achieve, she could have jumped up and cut the rope. Her mother falls, gagging. Maggie kicks her in despair. Maggie saw it all happen. Then she heard her mother call.

Turn out the barn light. Come in. Come in now, Maggie. It’s dinnertime. Your food is getting cold.

Old Story 2

MEWINZHA, MEWINZHA, SAID Ignatia, right after the first soft snow securely blanketed off the living from the dead. Long time ago. This was before the beginning of time. In those days everything could talk and people had powers. At that time, there was a man living in the woods with his wife and his two little boys. They lived good on what they had; they were doing okay. But then the man noticed, when he was getting ready to go out and hunt, his wife was putting on her whitest skin dress, her quill and bone earrings, all her beautiful things. The first time he thought that she was preparing herself for him, but when he returned with meat on his toboggan, he saw that she was wearing her old clothes again. He was jealous. The next time he prepared to go hunting, she put on her finery the same way. But he doubled back. He hid himself, and when she left their boys behind and went out into the woods, in her fancy clothing, he followed her secretly.

This man’s wife goes up to a tree. He watches her. She strikes the tree three times. Out of the tree comes a snake. A big one. Yes, a big snake. The wife and the snake begin to love each other up then. The man sees his woman and the snake together and oh my, she loves that snake better than she ever loved her husband.

Don’t talk bad!

Oh, shut up, Malvern.

The two women frowned at each other, and at last Malvern nicked her head at LaRose, made some motions with her lips that Ignatia interpreted.

See here, LaRose, the snake and woman they want to hold hands but the snake don’t have any hands. They want to kiss but the snake don’t have any lips. They just have to twine around together.

Ignatia moved her arms around to show LaRose how this could happen.

What kind of story is this? asks LaRose

A sacred one, Ignatia says.

Ohhhh-kayyyyy. . LaRose has learned the okay of a skeptical eight-year-old from wise-ass sitcom eight-year-old boys.

I know this story, said Malvern. It is a frightful story. Not a good story to tell a young boy.

Maybe, said Ignatia. But it is a story of existence. This boy can know it; he is brave enough.

She went on telling the story.

The man was very jealous of the snake. So the next day he went hunting, and when he came back he said to his wife that he had killed a bear. He told her to go and fetch the meat. When she was gone, he put on a skirt and went to the serpent tree. He struck the tree three times, and the serpent appeared. Then he stuck his spear through the serpent, killing it dead. He brought the snake back to his lodge, cut that snake into pieces, and made that snake into snake soup.

Snake soup?

Yes, my boy.

They ate snake soup in the olden times?

The old women frowned at each other.

Ignatia said that in the olden times the kids had no TVs. They just shut up and listened to stories and didn’t interrupt.

Malvern said that his question was good and she would answer it.

They ate the snake soup just this one time, she said.

Okay, said LaRose. I mean, I had to ask. It’s unusual.

So moving on with the story, said Ignatia. When the woman finally returned, she said that there was no dead bear in the place he’d told her to go. There was no meat. She had searched, but found nothing. Her husband told her not to worry because he’d made soup.

Wait, said LaRose. Made soup out of the snake she. .

Loved, yes, said Ignatia.

That’s like. .

Point of the story, said Malvern.

Did she eat it? LaRose stared at them, pained.

Ignatia nodded.

Oh, said LaRose. This just gets worse.

IT’S NOT MUCH of a life, said Ottie in the car. But it’s something.

This dialysis makes people crazy, Landreaux said, but you’re holding up good.

I’da checked out if it wasn’t for Bap.

She loves you.

People who were chronically ill either dulled out and watched TV or cut to the chase in surprising ways, Landreaux found. The dulled-out ones were easier. But Ottie had been asking these questions and was so pleasant and forgiving that it was, almost, possible to tell the truth.

We’re in love. The good stuff lasted, said Landreaux. For me.

I get it, said Ottie.

I’m like you, Ottie. Probably check out if not for her. That don’t go both ways. He laughed, but it was a heart-worn laugh.

Emmaline would not check out if he did; she would survive for the kids. For herself. Also, the good stuff was in question. Emmaline had put a wall up, Landreaux thought. He even pictured it — brick but at least there were gaps, maybe windows. Sometimes she reached both hands through, unclenched, and Landreaux hurriedly clasped her from the lonely side. He understood the wall as blame for what happened. He did not understand when she said he was asleep. His eyes were open. He was driving. He was pulling up in Ottie’s driveway.

Landreaux got Ottie into the house and settled by the window, where Bap had put a bird feeder. Landreaux went out and refilled the empty feeder. He could hear winter in the sharper scolding of the chickadees. After he got into the car, he thought of the two oxycodones in his pocket. He’d skimmed them off one of the new prescriptions he’d filled for Ottie. Only two. He’d throw them out. But he didn’t. He drove home. Was this a night he had to drive anybody anyplace? No. He plucked out the one pill. Swallowed. Only one, hardly anything. This would barely mellow him, still.

You resist and resist and resist and wear yourself down. For all these years he had been substance free, but lately, well, this summer, the deterioration of his clients and the helplessness of waiting for Emmaline’s touch further diminished him. That was an excuse. He should be stronger. He’d made the Stations of the Cross last spring and wondered why Christ’s torture was called his passion. Jesus suffered drug free. He’d seen Emmaline go through drugless childbirth. She wanted drugs but only got lucky with Josette. Twice the trusted, competent anesthetist was not on duty at the IHS hospital. She didn’t want a bad spinal, an everlasting epidural or headache. Without one, the pain took up everything, she said. When she went to visit friends in the maternity ward, the smell of the place made her blood pressure shoot up, her hands shake. Light-headed, she had to sit. Some physical memory. But all worth it, she said, as women always did.

Maybe Jesus thought so too, Landreaux thought as he walked toward the house. Or maybe he looked at all the sorry-ass fuckups he saved, like Landreaux, who couldn’t stand the pain, and said, Why?

Landreaux resolved to flush the other pill down the toilet. He heard shouts. When he walked in the door, Snow and Josette were slapping open-handed, blocking each other. At least they weren’t punching or pulling each other’s hair. He kicked his boots off and stepped between them.

He grabbed each girl by one wrist but they reached around him with their flapping hands. Finally they quit, sullenly ripped their arms free, and agreed to talk from opposite corners of the room. Josette stuck her lower lip out, slumped, arms crossed. Her foot jiggled. Snow sat knock-kneed looking at her orange-glow fingernails.

What’s the deal? said Landreaux.

Snow says I like Hollis.

Well he likes you, said Snow.

So?

He’s my brother. It’s gross.

Josette drew her arm back and made a fist. There was a face drawn on her fist. Lips where her thumb met her crooked forefinger. A nose and eyes, too. Snow lifted her arm and made a fist. A face was also on her fist. She kept her teeth clenched and barely moved her lips.

You have no DNA in common. You grew up together and he still likes you — bedhead, bad breath, gray old underwear in the laundry — it’s a miracle.

I have never let my underwear be seen, said Josette, with considerable dignity. And it is not gray.

Stop, begged Landreaux. His head was softly ringing.

Josette collected herself.

I suppose we can talk about this like mature adults? she said.

There’s only one in the room, said Landreaux.

In the first place, said Josette, I know Hollis has a crush on me. That’s immaterial.

I’m gonna go nuts, said Landreaux.

Because I don’t have a crush on him, Josette said. Who knows, I might be a lesbian.

Like you’d even know, said Snow.

Landreaux’s heart muttered. Lesbian?

You guys don’t KNOW me, said Josette.

Okay, said Snow. Nobody KNOWS you. You’re SO mysterious.

You know me, said Josette to her balled-up hand. I can tell you everything!

I love you for yourself, said her smeared fist.

Get outta here, said Landreaux. You’re making me loco. I want to make myself some coffee and read my paper.

Like you always do! Josette and Snow, a team again, jumped up and rushed him. You’re so predictable. Why can’t you bust loose? Drink tea? Read a comic! C’mon, Daddy, be creative!

They knew they could make him laugh, and when he did they attacked him, jumping on him, pretending to fling him on the floor. He fake fell, cowered in a dramatic I-give-up, hands in the air.

Mercy! He begs for mercy! Show him no mercy, growled Snow and began to fake punch him so he fake reeled back, holding his stomach, laughing until the girls left him on the floor.

Okay, Daddy, try to pull yourself together. Go do your wander. Or here’s a newspaper full of want ads. Or boring news. Just don’t TELL us about every boring thing that happens in the tristate area. We’ll go make you that weak coffee you like to guzzle. We’re gonna cook, too. We got some meatball meat. Noodles. Mushroom soup. You’ll flip.

Landreaux sat back in his chair. His back ached from lifting Ottie, rolling, bathing, seating Ottie. Then it didn’t ache. The pain left. His heart rate slowed. He didn’t mind anything now. This was the first time in a long time he’d goofed off, let the girls wrestle him down. He felt lighter, almost happy, and he didn’t need the other pill, but after Snow brought him a cup of coffee, he felt his fingers tease it from his pocket. Then it slipped from his fingers, onto the floor. Some better person tried to crush it with his heel. But the heel was in a sock and the pill was coated with a hardening agent, which resisted until Landreaux walked over to the entry, got his boot, and hammered the thing to powder. Even then, on the vinyl tiling, there was a perfect little patch of whiteness, which, if he went down in a yoga crouch, nose to the floor, he could inhale. But how would that look to his girls, ass in the air? He sat down again and swirled his foot around on the powder until it was absorbed into the floor so that the desperate man would have to put his nose to the ball of the foot of the sock and sniff the powder out with mighty whiffs and he was safe, yes safe, because Landreaux had taken this process down too far a level even for himself.

ONE DAY LAROSE closed in. He had written down the last names of the Fearsomes and narrowed down their probable locations from a telephone book. He lied again, got a ride from Peter, who dropped him off in Pluto to visit a friend whom LaRose ditched after an hour. The town was small, some blocks now bulldozed clear of houses that had collapsed. Empty. It wasn’t hard to find the various houses after all, but he was looking for the one with the garage that Maggie had once described. When he saw the Veddars’ garage, and looked in the window, he knew that was the place. He walked in the side door. Nobody was there, so he decided to wait. He fell asleep on the broken couch. When he opened his eyes, it was Tyler shaking him.

LaRose lets his punch fly — he’s been dreaming of it.

Ow! Tyler steps back, puzzled, rubbing his jaw. Why’d you do that?

LaRose leaps up on the couch. They are all there! He channels Maggie’s claw hand moves, hears Father Travis’s shout in class: Loud kiap! Loud kiap. To strike fear into the enemy.

LaRose gives his choking war cry. Kiap! Then another, more confident. Ready stance! Heart rammed in his throat, pulses thudding.

Why’d you do that? Tyler turns to the others. He socked me!

For Maggie!

Buggy has snapped a beer open. Maggie! Hatred warps his face. He’s the meanest. Brad Morrissey is the biggest, but he isn’t mean at all anymore, except in football. He has certain codes of honor now, because of Jesus and football. He only kills people in football. And Curtains is just confused.

What’s your name, little kid?

LaRose launches himself onto Curtains’s back, climbs his shirt, tries a choke hold.

Get him off me!

Accidentally, but on purpose, Buggy slaps LaRose so hard that he flies off Curtains and lands on his back. When LaRose hits the floor with a violent smack, he bounces out of his body. His lungs squeeze shut. He is hovering above, looking down at himself in wonder.

Brad is bending over LaRose, concerned. Why’d you do that, Buggy? He’s, like, not breathing.

LaRose hovers, watching to see if he’ll take a breath. Freedom, buoyancy, repose. Oh yes, and take that breath before Brad gives him mouth-to-mouth. As soon as he fills his lungs, LaRose is sucked back into his body with a gentle thhhhpppp. He lies still until he’s sure he’s intact. He stands up, dusts off his pants, picks up his backpack, and leaves. He means to walk home, but Brad Morrissey insists on giving him a ride. They say not one word until the Ravich driveway.

The way you defended your sister was awesome, says Brad.

LaRose turns and knife-hands Brad on the nose, drawing blood. Then he gets out of the car.

You should go out for football someday, calls Brad as he pulls out, mopping at his face. LaRose walks into the house, up the stairs to his room. He needs to be alone. Something has happened.

THERE ARE FIVE LaRoses. First the LaRose who poisoned Mackinnon, went to mission school, married Wolfred, taught her children the shape of the world, and traveled that world as a set of stolen bones. Second, her daughter LaRose, who went to Carlisle. This LaRose got tuberculosis like her own mother, and like the first LaRose fought it off again and again. Lived long enough to become the mother of the third LaRose, who went to Fort Totten and bore the fourth LaRose, who eventually became the mother of Emmaline, the teacher of Romeo and Landreaux. The fourth LaRose also became the grandmother of the last LaRose, who was given to the Ravich family by his parents in exchange for a son accidentally killed.

In all of these LaRoses there was a tendency to fly above the earth. They could fly for hours when the right songs were drummed and sung to support them. Those songs are now waiting in the leaves, half lost, but the drumming of the water drum will never be lost. This ability to fly went back to the first LaRose, whose mother taught her to do it when her name was still Mirage, and who had learned this from her father, a jiisikid conjurer, who’d flung his spirit all the way around the world in 1798 and come back to tell his astonished drummers that it was no use, white people covered the earth like lice.

Old Story 3

WHAT TASTES SO good? This was the man’s wife asking.

The blood of your husband, the snake. I have made him into broth, said the husband.

The woman was furious and ran to the tree where her snake lived. She knocked three times, but it did not emerge and she knew it was killed. While she was gone, her husband plunged the two little boys into the ground, for safety.

That doesn’t sound very safe, said LaRose.

This time Ignatia didn’t answer, just kept on with the story.

When the woman ran back, her husband cut off her head. Then he rose into the air to flee away into the sky.

How could he do that? asked LaRose.

In those olden old days, said Ignatia, remember, before this earth existed, those people had all kinds of power. They could talk to anything and it would answer.

I mean how could he cut off her head, said LaRose.

But Ignatia had resolved to ignore all questions.

After a while, said Ignatia, the woman’s head opened its eyes.

Scary, said LaRose, with respect.

The head asked the dish where her children were. She asked all of the belongings in the lodge, but they would not tell. At last a stone did tell her that her husband had sunk the children into the earth, and that now they were fleeing underground. The stone said that he had given them four things — power to make a river, fire, a mountain, a forest of thorns.

So the head began to follow those children. It cried out, My children, wait for me! You are making me cry by leaving me!

Ignatia’s voice was wicked and wheedling. LaRose looked aghast but leaned closer.

Really scary, he said. Keep going.

The little boy was riding on his big brother’s back, and he kept telling his little brother that the head was not really their mother. Yes it is! Yes it is! said the little brother.

My children, my dear children, do not leave me behind, called the head. I beg you!

The little brother wanted to go back to the mother, but the older brother took a piece of punk wood and threw it behind him, calling out, Let there be fire! Far and wide, a fire blazed. But the head kept rolling through fire and began to catch up with them.

The boy threw down a thorn. At once a forest of thorns sprang up, and this time the rolling head was really blocked. But the head called to the brother of the snake, the Great Serpent, and that serpent bit through those thorn trees and made a passage. So it managed to catch up with him.

The brother threw down a stone and up sprang a vast mountain. Yet that rolling head got a beaver with iron teeth to chew down that mountain, and it kept on pursuing the children.

The brothers were very tired by now and threw down a skin of water to make a river. By mistake it landed not behind them, but in front of them. Now they were trapped.

LaRose nodded, caught in the story.

But the Great Serpent took pity on them and let them onto his back. They went across the river. When the rolling head reached the river, it begged to be carried across. The Great Serpent allowed the head to roll onto its back, but halfway across the serpent dumped it off.

Sturgeon will be your name, said the Great Serpent. The head became the first sturgeon.

What is a sturgeon? asked LaRose.

It’s an ugly kind of fish, said Ignatia. Those fish were the buffalo of our people once. They still have them up in the big northern lakes and the rivers.

Okay, said LaRose. So that’s the end?

No. Those two boys wandered around and by accident, the younger boy was left behind. He was all alone.

Now I must turn into a wolf, said the little boy.

That’s interesting, said LaRose. Just to become a wolf.

When his older brother found him, then the two walked together. This older brother became a being who could do many things — some places he is known as Wishketchahk, some as Nanabozho, and he has other names. He was kind of foolish, but also very wise, and his little brother the wolf was always by his side. He made the first people, Anishinaabeg, the first humans.

Huh, said LaRose. So what’s the moral of this story?

Moral? Our stories don’t have those!

Ignatia puffed her cheeks in annoyance.

They call this an origin story, said Malvern, also annoyed, but precise.

Like, ah, like Genesis, said Ignatia. But there’s lots more that happens, including a little muskrat who makes the earth.

And our Nanabozho, he’s like their Jesus, said Malvern.

Kind of like Jesus, said Ignatia. But always farting.

So the rolling head’s like his mom, Mary? And this whole story is like the first story in the Bible?

You could say that.

So our Mary is a rolling head.

A vicious rolling head, said Ignatia.

We are so cool, said LaRose. Still, getting chased like that. Maybe caught. Maybe slammed on the ground. Getting your wind knocked out.

It is about getting chased, said Ignatia, with a long suck on her oxygen. We are chased into this life. The Catholics think we are chased by devils, original sin. We are chased by things done to us in this life.

That’s called trauma, said Malvern.

Thank you, said Ignatia. We are chased by what we do to others and then in turn what they do to us. We’re always looking behind us, or worried about what comes next. We only have this teeny moment. Oops, it’s gone!

What’s gone?

Now. Oops, gone again.

Ignatia and Marvern laughed until Ignatia gasped for breath. Oops! Oops! Slippery!

What’s gone?

Now.

Oops, laughed LaRose, slipped past!

And then, just like that, Ignatia died. She gave them a glowing look and her feet kicked straight out. Her head fell back. Her jaw relaxed. Malvern leaned over and with her nurse’s paw pressed the pulse on Ignatia’s neck. Malvern looked aside, frowning, waiting, and at last took her hand from Ignatia’s throat, pushed Ignatia’s jaw back up, and pulled down her eyelids. She then cradled Ignatia’s hand.

Take her other hand, said Malvern. She’s starting out on her journey now. Remember everything I say, LaRose. This will be your job sometime.

Malvern talked to Ignatia, telling her the directions, how to take the first steps, how to look to the west, where to find the road, and not to bother taking anyone along. She said that everybody, even herself, Malvern, who had never told her, loved Ignatia very much. They held Ignatia’s hands for a long time, quietly, until the hands were no longer warm. Still, LaRose felt her presence in the room.

She’ll be around here for a while more, said Malvern. I’m going to get her friends so they can say good-bye too. You go on home now.

LaRose placed Ignatia’s hand upon the armrest of her chair. He put on his coat, walked out the door, down the hall. He went through the airlock doors, then out the double front doors, into the navy-blue frost-haloed air. He was supposed to meet his mother at the school, so he walked along the gravel road and crossed the uncertain pavement, the buckled curb. The cold flowed around him and down the neck of his jacket. His ears stung, but he didn’t put his hood up. He moved his fingers, shoved in his pockets. There were so many sensations in his body that he couldn’t feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past.

THE PICTURE DIAGRAM on Romeo’s wall was slowly taking shape, with bits of information plucked forward or pushed back. Romeo’s television had lost sound, but no matter. He only watched the mouths move and read the closed captions. It was better because otherwise their voices, the emphasis they put on certain words, could distort his thinking. He still liked the word yellowcake, and the unknowable place it was from. Niger! But already they were past that. As bright October shifted to the leafless icy dark of November, there was scarier talk of weapons of mass destruction.

Oh please! Everybody in North Dakota lived next door to a weapon of mass destruction. Right down the road, a Minuteman missile stored in its underground silo was marked only by a square of gravel and a chain-link fence above. You passed, wondering who was down there, deep and solitary, insane of course, staring at a screen the way Romeo was staring now, at the mouth of Condoleezza Rice and knowing, as nobody else but Romeo knew, that this was a hungry woman who strictly controlled her appetites. This was a woman so much more intelligent than any of the men around her that she played them with her concert hands like chopsticks on her piano. Even Bulgebrow Cheney with his frighteningly bad teeth — and he must have millions so why could he not get new teeth — even Cheney was her mental slave. Didn’t know it, but he was. Her eyes glittered. Her mouth a deep blood red. She had no feelings for any man. She ate them. Talked of rods. Smoking guns.

Romeo adored her.

Of them all, she was the smartest and most presidential. Could they see it?

From his pockets, he emptied the night’s take onto a cafeteria tray. He went through it meticulously now, pushed aside tiny blue pills, fat white pills, round green pills, oval pink pills. He was quite sure that another clue was hidden in the story he’d heard just that evening about the way a person bled to death from only surface wounds. That fit into the findings somehow. A tack. A placement. A string that would attach the phrase and the possible meaning. He’d cross-medicate, then medicate. It was beautiful, like an art project, this thing he was doing.

MAGGIE BADGERED HER mother into teaching her how to drive to school. Nola instantly got used to it. Every morning, after her father left, Maggie went out and started the Jeep. Nola put a long puffy coat on over her robe, thrust her sleepy bare feet into Peter’s felt-lined Sorels. With a thermos go-cup of coffee in hand, she settled comfortably into the passenger’s seat. LaRose took the backseat. On the half-hour drive, it was Nola’s job to make encouraging noises and dial through the radio channels, finding the Hallelujah stations. Rush rants. Perky pop and stolid farm reports. It woke Nola up, freed her from the sticky webs of benzodiazepines. The radio and its familiar chaos flipped a pleasure switch in Maggie’s brain. Because she had her mother belted in safe beside her and LaRose safe in back, because she was in charge, she was light with relief. She hummed and tapped her fingers on the wheel. Through snow, through black ice, slippery cold rain, Maggie was a fully confident and careful driver.

When she got to the school drop-off, her mother kissed her dreamily, then walked around to slip behind the wheel and drive home. Maggie let her go. She let LaRose go. She walked down the high school hallway, flipped her hair, and now said hi to many girls. She called home sometimes, from the school office, just to hear her mother’s voice. On one hand, Maggie was now a stable, caring, overprotective daughter — adjusting slowly to the fear smother of her mother’s fragility. On the other, she was still a piece of work.

A disciplined piece of work.

She was cute in an early-supermodel-Cheryl-Tiegs way except her hair was dark, her eyes either gold or black, and except that sometimes there was hot contempt in her skewed gaze. She made it her business to study boys. How their heads, hearts, and bodies worked. She didn’t want one, but she could see herself controlling one. Maybe each of the so-called Fearsome Four, hunt them down, skewer their hearts. Have them for lunch although she was trying to be a vegetarian — because good for the skin. She was strict with herself.

Somehow, hulky Waylon got past all that. He stood by her locker and watched her exchange a set of books — morning books for afternoon books.

So are you okay here? Anybody bothering you?

She found it surprising that he would ask her this question, and weirder than that, she answered yes. Though nobody had bothered her at all.

Waylon’s interestingly lush features focused. He had an Elvis-y face, which Maggie knew only because Snow actually liked that old music. He was thick and broad, with soft skin over cruel football muscle. His hands were innocent, expressive, almost teacherly. His summer football practice crew cut was growing out into a thick fuzzy allover cap of furlike hair. He was taller than Josette but not quite as tall as Snow. Maggie stared at his hair intently, then decided that she liked his hair, a lot.

Waylon’s look had turned somber.

Who? he said at last.

What?

Who bothered you?

It wasn’t kids here, said Maggie. It was kids at my old school.

He nodded gravely, without speaking. He let his face talk, lowering his brows to let her know he was waiting for more. Maggie liked that, too.

There’s some guys, call themselves the Fearsome Four?

Waylon’s jaw slid sideways and his teeth came out sharply, gripping his bottom lip. He leaned his head to the side and squinted his sleepy eyes.

Ohhh yeahhh, he drawled. I know those guys.

Those guys bothered me real bad, said Maggie with a comfortable, bright smile. Especially Buggy. Wanna walk me to class?

Waylon swayed slightly as he walked, as if his heavy body needed to be set upright after every step. With Maggie beside him, so tensely pretty and purposeful, people looking at them, shy pleasure made him blush.

Whenever Nola and Peter had gone to teacher conferences at Maggie’s school in Pluto, it was the same: careless homework, trouble in the classroom, mouthing off, probably she wrote the c-word in a bathroom stall. However, test scores always perfect. That meant she was smart enough to change her behavior, if she wanted to. Clearly it was all on purpose, said her teachers. Peter had always left Maggie’s classroom gasping for control. Nola was silent, clutching his arm, her lips moving. They would walk unsteadily down the hall. After LaRose started school in Pluto, however, LaRose’s teachers had consistently erased Maggie’s distressing reviews.

Ah, LaRose! Maybe not an A student, but a worker, quiet, and so kind. Respectful, easygoing, pleasant, a little shy. Those eyelashes! What a sweet boy. Dreamy sometimes. And accomplished! He could draw anything he wanted. Sang, off-key but with expression. A talent show favorite with Johnny Cash tunes, the boy in black. Just a love, the teachers gushed, he makes it all worthwhile. They knew the teachers meant worthwhile dealing with Maggie, how the struggle for her soul was worth the effort once they got to LaRose.

Maybe things would be different now that Maggie was in ninth grade. Now that she had more freedom. Now that her whole other family — Hollis, Snow, Josette, Willard, and LaRose — was in her new school also.

Peter and Nola each ate a tasteless cookie from the plates set out in the hallway. They sipped scorched coffee waiting for the first teacher to finish with the parents before them. At last they entered the classroom.

If she’s trying to find her footing here by kicking in doors, that’s not an appropriate choice, said Germaine Miller, English teacher.

I am trying my hardest not to fail her, because I can tell she’s bright, said Social Studies.

If only she would do her homework! Cal Dorfman shook his head over math scores.

Nola explained that Maggie did math homework every night. Peter said he’d even tried to check it but she was so independent now. The three looked from one to another in distress. The teacher sighed and said that Maggie probably didn’t turn her homework in because she lacked organizational skills. From now on he would stop the class every day until she coughed up a homework paper. So it went.

Except for Physical Science. Mr. Hossel gave a pallid smile when they introduced themselves. But Mr. Hossel was already talking about what a hardworking daughter they had and how they must be extremely proud of her deductive skills, her logical mind, her disciplined approach to handing in homework and how well she worked on group projects. She seemed fascinated by the laws of motion, for instance, and she was excellent at calculating speed.

Nola gaped, Peter flushed. Mr. Hossel grew more animated.

She is super eloquent describing the electromagnetic spectrum, he cried.

We are Maggie Ravich’s parents, they reminded Mr. Hossel.

The science teacher scratched his hands, poked at his glasses, and went on.

I wish more students were like Maggie in terms of class participation. What impresses me is that she’s fearless. Shrugs off mistakes. That’s unusual in a young person — they are terrified of being laughed at — you know this age! But Maggie will play with an idea. Throw something out to spark discussion. At what exact moment does inertia become momentum? Can we measure that moment? It goes to the heart of everything, said Mr. Hossel with a pensive sniff.

Again he repeated those golden words: You must be very proud of your daughter.

Then he showed them her A.

Peter and Nola beamed out of Mr. Hossel’s classroom. They crossed the parking lot holding hands, brought together by the contradictions.

Finally, a teacher who gets her, Peter said.

He really was. .

Nola faltered.

He really was talking about Maggie, wasn’t he?

Maybe at school, she only shows her real self to him, Peter answered. She trusts Hossel the way she trusts us. I see all of those things in her, the bravery, you know? The discipline. This teacher has just opened some door for her. I don’t understand, honey, but with this experience the sky’s the limit! She always had it in her, didn’t she. Always had it.

We weren’t wrong.

Nola clutched his hand tighter. They got into the car and drove home, silent, Nola gripping Peter’s knee.

As they pulled into the driveway, Maggie opened the door, waving with a happy smile. Usually, her cheerful greeting after teacher conferences was an attempt to mitigate the misery she knew she had inflicted on her father. Up until this year, she hadn’t cared if she pained Nola. But now she did care. She wanted to avoid bringing down her mother’s mood. She didn’t want to trigger a relapse. While they were gone, she’d made oxtail and vegetable soup, plus the little frybreads Josette had showed her how to make. Maggie loved, or at least pretended to love, making soup and frybread. LaRose charmingly stole pieces as they cooled, tossing the oily, hot bits of fried dough hand to hand. Maggie chased him around the kitchen island. Nola laughed at this, giddy. Peter should have been giddy too, but something about the scene was disturbing. It was as though the two were putting on a show for Nola, giving her a warm glimpse of normal brother-sister hijinks. They glanced at their mother, from time to time, anxious to make sure she was pleased.

That weekend, in celebration of Maggie’s Physical Science A, Nola wanted to bake a cake with her daughter’s name on it. Maggie told her that eating cake gave her diarrhea.

But you love cakes, said Nola.

Mom, I wanted to make you happy. But no cakes.

Maggie had read about obsessive-compulsive behavior in a library magazine and had resolved to keep her mother from embarking on addictive binges — plus she did hate cake because of all the cake making after Dusty was killed, and after LaRose appeared. Cakes brought bad feelings, especially cakes bearing names. She didn’t want cakes in the house.

Let’s watch a vintage movie, like an eighties movie, and eat popcorn?

Because of the sale bin at Cenex, they had several unwatched VHS movies. Soothing ones from the older days, like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club. Maggie talked to Nola about how she still related to these movies as a teenager although they were of this unthinkable time and place where cell phones were only in cars and big as shoe boxes. Yes, they talked. Or rather, a version of Maggie talked as though she were Molly Ringwald finally coming to terms with life’s complexities. And Nola talked to her like a parent slow on the draw but ultimately loving. Peter came home and witnessed them slouched in pillows, one of them out fast asleep and the other smiling thinly into the air.

He sat next to Nola, the smiling one, and quietly asked.

What is going on?

What do you mean?

She just kept smiling, didn’t look at him. Spooky.

What are you watching?

Peter gestured at the movie on the screen.

Nola opened her mouth and shook her head, entranced at some dialogue between two teenagers. She leaned her head on his shoulder and Maggie stirred in the pillows pushed up against her mother so the three were now connected, sitting there like normal people.

Maybe this is it, thought Peter. I feel weird because it’s all so normal. I’m the odd man out, the only one who cannot understand that we are now going to be all right.

What were you saying? asked Nola once the moment of on-screen drama had passed.

Nothing, said Peter. It’s just me.

The Wars

THE PLUTO BOYS were already the Planets, so the Pluto girls were the Lady Planets. Their colors were purple and white. Their mascot was a round planet with legs, arms, a perky face. The reservation team was the Warriors, but the girls weren’t the Lady Warriors, they were just the Warriors, also. Their colors were blue and gold. They didn’t want to have themselves as a mascot, so they had an old-time shield with two eagle feathers. This was printed on their uniform. The volleyball shirts were close-fitting nylon, long-sleeved so that hitting balls on their forearms wouldn’t leave them bruised, though they were often bruised anyway. They wore tight shorts and knee pads. Coach Duke made them wear headbands and ponytails because no matter how disciplined they were, girls still got distracted and touched their hair. The girls had come to idolize Coach Duke and his mingy ponytail. The Warriors had won every game of the season except their first game with the Pluto Planets. The nights turned colder, colder, and suddenly they were 8–1, with a grudge. Tonight they were playing the Pluto team again and ready to win.

I don’t like that they call scores kills, said Nola. Nothing should die.

Peter took her hand.

Nothing dies, said Peter. It’s just a word.

They were crushed into the stands, parent knees in their backs, parent backs against their knees. Nola had packed a small padded cooler with sandwiches. An ice pack slipped into the side kept the sodas stuffed around it cold. She’d even bought green grapes, so expensive this time of year. Peter helped her take her coat off, or lower it anyway. There was no place to put it so she wrapped the puffy sleeves around her waist. The gym was stuffy and there was only one stand, so the parents of the opposing teams had to sit together. They tried to group themselves according to the team they’d come to support, but inadvertently mixed.

The teams warmed up, doing stretches first, then a pepper drill — pass, set, spike, pass, set, spike. Next each player jumped and spiked the ball off the coach’s toss. At last, both teams got court time to practice serves. The Warriors’ strategy was to look weak to the Pluto team. They would even pretend to argue.

Ravich, hissed Josette. You awake?

Invisible wink. Elaborate pout by Maggie. Lots of ball smacking. No smiles at each other. Then the girls lined up.

She’s so small, Nola whispered, always struck by the contrast between Maggie and her teammates.

And the Planets are. . but Peter caught himself.

He was going to say massive or planetary. They were big, solid, formidable girls. Maggie had told them to watch for Braelyn.

I see her, said Nola loudly. The harsh eyeliner!

Peter put his arm around her and spoke, low, in her ear. Remember? The other parents? He hadn’t seen Braelyn’s parents for a while, but was pretty sure they were behind them.

Oh! Nola pulled an imaginary zipper across her lips.

Landreaux and Emmaline came in, found a place to sit, wedged in with a group of Warrior parents. The Warriors saluted first the parents, then their coach, then passed the opposing team fake-touching hands through the net and saying good luck to every Planet. Good luck, good luck, good luck, you wanted it, said Braelyn to Maggie with a smile pasted on her face. She passed swiftly, looking straight ahead.

Did you hear it?

Snow had been directly behind Maggie.

Hear what?

You wanted it, thought Maggie. Buggy had told his sister. Shake it off. Maggie had a little thing she did, a shimmy to get rid of a bad feeling or a failed hit. It was an almost invisible instantaneous all-over shake. Josette knew about it, though. The team made a circle, put their arms around one another. Coach Duke stood holding his clipboard in one hand. His other hand sliced the air with each deliberate sentence. He told them volleyball was just a game except for right now when it was more than a game. He reminded them about relaxed intensity. Focus. Bold acts. Knowing when to take their time setting up a spike. He told them to stay loose, keep focus. They were a family, sisters, warriors who would beat this team, restoring honor. Stop everything except being right here, right now, he said. And use your voice. Call the ball. Slap hands on the floor and stay positive.

Diamond was team captain. She looked at each one of them in turn. They silently rose and each put three fingers in the air. Everyone thought they were pointing to the Holy Trinity, but it was their special move, a W for Warriors. Then they roared Warriors, Warriors, Warriors, jumped high, smacked hands.

Josette was first up to serve. She loved the moment when the team slung off its false girly vagueness and became a machine.

Rock that serve, baby! Emmaline’s voice was then consumed by the other parent voices.

Josette flew up and bashed it. But one of the brutal redheaded Planet twins, Gwenna, caught it on one forearm. A mishit, but a setter managed to play it and Braelyn boomed it down the seam. Snow nonchalantly lobbed it, Diamond set with a precise fingertip pass to Regina, and that was that. Regina could drop the ball on a dime. An actual dime. For fun they had set up shots for her, twenty dimes on the floor. She kept every one she hit, and made two dollars.

A medium blonde named Crystal, pretty, twisted to return Josette’s next serve and shanked. So it went. Josette got six serves in before the Planets called time-out.

They’ll blast back now, said Coach Duke. Maggie, you’re our secret weapon right now. They haven’t tested you. So be ready. Josette, they will try to get your next serve if it kills them, so give ’em heck. Regina, if you get a chance. .

Don’t say it, Coach.

Take a dump, said Diamond.

Let’s call it a surprise left-hand attack, okay? And everyone, remember, an assist is as good as a kill.

Maggie didn’t think so. After each game she totaled her kills on a piece of paper taped to her bedroom wall. The scorekeepers added them up too, and if a girl reached 1,000 she got a foot-high golden trophy. Maggie wanted one. Newspaper headline: Girl of 1,000 Kills. She had developed her jump to ballerina height and perfected a sliding tip. The merest tap, never push, a deflection of trajectory that sometimes happened so quickly that it was uncanny. She could score without remembering how the ball came at her. Sometimes she’d even feel its shadow and think the shadow off her hand onto the floor of the opposing court. When she was rotated into the hitter’s position up front, the other team always wanted to show the tiny girl what. With her slippery, eccentric, high-leap blocks and tips, Maggie got to show them what.

Josette’s serving surf was upset by the interruption, as the Planets’ coach intended, and Maggie felt the energy on the court shift. The Warriors crouched, pep-talking one another, passing around Call it call it call it so they’d remember to use their voices. Braelyn was at serve. Square-shouldered, chubby-jawed, goth-eyed, she didn’t look at Maggie or seem to aim at her, but Maggie was ready anyway. Braelyn got an ace off her. The ball had hesitated, Maggie could swear, and changed direction. She flushed. But once she knew Braelyn’s trick she could handle it. She watched the ball come off the heel of Braelyn’s hand this time and saw where it would break. Maggie was there, but the ball wasn’t. That was two points. Back-to-back aces. The Planet parents were shouting. Her parents were tense and silent. Maggie shimmied all over and stepped back into the game.

She kept her eyes on the serve and pried a weak rescue off the floor, something Josette, on her knees, could put into play for Diamond. But the Planets returned the shot and there began a long, bitter, hard-fought, manic volley with miracle saves and unlikely hits tamed into dinky wattle-rolling blurps off the top of the net that drove the parents nuts. They leaped up gasping, yelling, but it was friendly pandemonium. By the time Regina finally won a joust with Crystal, everyone was in a good mood. Except Crystal, who hissed at Regina, a startling freckled cat. Regina turned away and said, Freaky. The players bounced into formation and although the Warriors continued their five- or six-point lead they fought hard for it. Luck was with them in close calls, causing a few Planet parents to grumble. The Warriors took the first two games. Then the Planets bore down, the luck went their way. So did the next two games. The tiebreaker fifth game was now on.

Most volleyball games were competitive but affable, everyone straining toward good sportsmanship. Coach Duke had even sent home a code of conduct that the player and her parents had to sign. But during the fourth game there had been hard hits, harder looks, a few jeering yells, smug high fives on points. By the fifth game, an ugly electricity had infected the gym. Nola knew which parent was for which team. There was no placatory murmur, Nice hit, when the opposing team scored a point, no friendly banter. Nola had yelled hard but held back her glee, as the coach’s flyer counseled, when the other team faulted. She had tried not to contest line hits. Tried not to call out when she thought she knew better than the player where the ball would strike. She had tried, as Coach begged, not to dishonor the game of volleyball.

Nola surreptitiously ate a grape. It was disappointing, with a tough tasteless skin, a watery chemical pulp. She tried another. Maggie didn’t always serve, but the coach did not remove her from the lineup. There she was, up. The Warriors had lost the first two points. This serve had to stop the Planets’ momentum. The pressure! Why Maggie? Peter shouted encouragement, but Nola was silent. She stared hard at her daughter, trying to pass luck into her daughter by force of love.

Maggie served into the net. Desolate, her mother threw her hands into her lap like empty gloves.

The Planet parents with the knobby knees in the Raviches’ backs, the Wildstrands, cackled in pleasure. Peter caught Nola as she turned, put his arm around her.

Don’t go there, honey, he said into her hair.

The Warriors were relaxed and intent on the next serve. Coach had directed them to breathe from the gut, focus, and high-five every play even if it ended in a lost point. His philosophy was based on developing what he called team mind meld, where each player visualized exactly where her teammates were on the floor and where each player had the power of the whole team inside of her. But Nola only saw that Maggie was now stuck. Right in the line of fire. A sob of anxiety caught in Nola’s chest. But a buttery warmth now spread across Maggie’s shoulders.

Maggie looked so small and vulnerable, with her sylph frame and spindle legs. She could have been standing on the court alone. She crouched, arms out. Crystal served straight to her and Maggie set for Regina’s surprise left dump. Point. Next serve, from Snow, the other redhead burned the ball down Maggie’s left but Maggie flipped underneath and socked it high. Josette assisted Diamond, who landed a swift spike. Another point. Another. Tie. Braelyn stepped up and flared her vixen fury eyes. Maggie’s stomach boiled. Braelyn slammed the ball twice on the floor, impassive and stony mad. With a flick of power she sent Maggie her booby-trap special. It was supposed to break just over Maggie’s head and land behind her, but Maggie knew Braelyn’s arm now and with a surge of exuberance lifted off her feet. She swerve-spiked the ball into the donut. Kill.

Nola had been standing the whole time. A parent nudged Peter and he tried to pull her down.

Kill! She screamed into a spot of silence. Kill! Kill! Kill!

Maggie heard it and the butter swirled down around her heart. Peter tightened his arm around Nola’s shoulder, whispered in her ear, but she was someplace else. And this, oddly, filled him with relief. Because this was not fake or unreal, there was no hidden meaning. This was the Nola he knew, not the supersmiley one. This was the family dynamic, not the manufactured happy family with no aggravation, no anger, no loud voices, no pain allowed, where he felt alone.

He was for sure not alone now because Nola was going batshit.

Sit the goddamn hell down! It was the woman behind her.

Nola heard that command with a grape in her cheek. She turned, opened her mouth to give a dignified piece of her mind, and out it flew, exactly like a glob of green snot-spit, landing on the mother’s broad pink nose. A shocked pause. The father lifted himself, a squarish, bearlike man with sloping shoulders, a walrus mustache, a trucker hat that said Dakota Sand and Gravel. He put his arms out to shove Nola down, but having perfected her move on Father Travis she leaned forward and popped her breast into his grip. Trucker Hat yelped.

Get your paws off me, shrieked Nola.

Peter saw only the hands. Mrs. Trucker Hat was still wiping grape off her face when Peter let his fist fly. It felt so good to let the rage out, then instant remorse as Trucker Hat bent over, face in hands. Nola, however, went numb with pleasure. The game was stopped and thin, apprehensive Mr. Hossel was forced to extract the four parents from the stands. Nola dreamily slid out, clinging tight to Peter’s arm. Both failed to see that their daughter had blazed a beanball straight at Braelyn as the whistle sounded to stop play. Distracted, Braelyn let down her guard and sustained a facial. Now her nose was bleeding all over the floor.

The referee held up a yellow card and out went Maggie to the boos of Planet moms and dads. The Planets, hearts blistering, played with vengeant energy but lost control, faulted, missed easy returns, tried for nasty cut shots without the setup, and lost by eight points. The Warriors high-fived it and made a subdued exit. It didn’t feel exactly good, like a win; it felt like something bigger and darker had just played out.

They didn’t know the half of it, thought Maggie, still quiet with joy at the sight of Braelyn’s blood on the floor.

When Peter and Nola were escorted out, Landreaux and Emmaline followed. Braelyn’s bearlike father with the sore nose, and his wife, who was stocky and had a sensible Prince Valiant haircut, walked over to their pickup. There was no one in the lot to make sure the parents didn’t start another brawl, but the fight was out of the Wildstrands. And Maggie’s parents were embarrassed to be escorted out by Maggie’s science teacher. Mr. Hossel turned his soul-wounded gaze upon them, gestured apologetically with his scraped hands, and turned away. Nola was hyperventilating.

What if he takes back her A because of us?

We can bring Maggie back, said Emmaline to Peter, if you want to bring Nola home.

No, no, leave me alone, Nola gasped out. But Emmaline didn’t step away or change expression. Although her teeth were chattering, Nola wouldn’t get in the car. Mist had frozen in the air. Sparkling auras hung from each halogen light, cloaking the cars, frosted windshields, and gleaming asphalt with the peace of another world.

Emmaline nodded at the idling pickup. Braelyn’s parents! Mrs. isn’t even supposed to go to games. Last year she got suspended.

Before Nola could move, Emmaline put her arms around her and then released her so suddenly that the hug was over before Nola could even react.

We should stay here until the girls get to both cars, said Peter.

It wasn’t Maggie’s fault, said Landreaux. The ref blew the whistle while her hand was in the air.

The four of them stamped and beat their hands together against the cold.

Come on, said Peter, we’ll watch for Maggie from inside the car. He coaxed Nola to him, cajoled her along.

Nola gave Emmaline a long look as she turned away. It was something, the way Emmaline had hugged her. It hadn’t felt bad or good. She didn’t know how it had felt. Maybe normal was the way it felt.

Snow and Josette walked Maggie out the gym door. Braelyn passed but they stink-eyed her and she strode to her parents’ pickup.

How come she’s got it out for you?

She’s from my old school. I gave her brother Buggy the ball kick.

How come? asked Josette.

Maggie looked down at her feet and hunched her shoulders.

Oh, said Josette.

Guess they’re still mad, said Maggie.

No shit. She was gunning for you, said Snow.

They watched the pickup, with Braelyn in it, roar from the parking lot.

Oh my god! Holeee!

Diamond caught up with them.

You know your dad punched out Braelyn’s dad? Your mom spit on her mom?

You got a badass family, Diamond said.

Maggie jumped into her car’s backseat.

Mom? Dad?

Maggie?

Nice game, said Peter.

FATHER TRAVIS TURNED Emmaline’s words over.

Unfair. Not playing by the rules. Was that what she’d said when he’d talked to her after the tae kwon do class? He kept imagining that she’d replied with the same words as his, and stayed. . But Emmaline had shoved his handkerchief back and left with LaRose. Her face, remarkably, had been neither red nor swollen, betraying no emotion, no sign that she had spoken wildly. Nor had she answered his declaration.

What did I do? Why did I say that I am in love with her?

Every time Father Travis asked himself this question shortly after their meeting, he was still too exhilarated to answer it. But as week after week passed and she didn’t show up at class, sent one of the older sisters or brothers with LaRose, he began to regret his words. He began to wonder if he’d even said them, or if she’d understood, or perhaps was crying for some other reason.

One night when Snow walked into the class with LaRose, Father Travis stepped down too hard. His foot pressed into the floor as if a support beneath the wood had given. His knee buckled. He went down in surprise, but righted himself and taught the class with complete concentration. That was what he liked about tae kwon do in the first place — there was no room for any thought but what came next.

After everyone had clapped for one another and he’d dismissed the class, LaRose approached him. He liked the boy, his fearless and confiding way, and his hard work. Though he had no talent, LaRose plonked his way through the forms and eventually memorized the drills. His kicks and punches rarely possessed conviction; they were just motions he made in the air.

LaRose stood before his teacher, at attention.

Sir.

Yes?

I had a fight, and I lost.

I’m not teaching you to fight, you know that. I’m teaching you to defend yourself.

Well, sir, I was doing that.

So someone was hurting someone weaker, and you tried to defend that person getting hurt?

Someone did something to someone else, so I went there to fight the bad guys.

This bad thing someone did? Was it right then?

No. A few years back, I guess.

That’s not defending, then. That’s revenge.

That’s what revenge looks like, she said that.

Who?

LaRose didn’t answer.

Okay. I can guess.

These guys did bad things to her. I went to their garage. I punched one guy, but then another guy knocked me down and almost stopped my breath.

Father Travis walked LaRose to a corner of the gym, where they sat down together on a pile of floor mats.

How old were these guys?

LaRose said they were in high school now, and that Brad, oops, one of the guys, had driven him home afterward and told him that he should go out for football.

Brad, huh? Morrissey. I know those guys. So you went to beat them up. This is just what I tell your class never to do. You’ve broken the discipline. I should take your belt.

LaRose hung his head. His shaggy hair flopped forward.

They hurt her very much, LaRose whispered.

Father Travis took a deep breath and held it until he could control his voice.

You told the truth, so you earned back your belt, he said, and now you must tell me everything.

I don’t know exactly, said LaRose, except she took so many showers, after, to get clean. They made her feel like a broken animal.

Father Travis tried to keep his hands from tightening by putting two fingers to one temple and closing his eyes. The infection of fury rose in him.

Father Travis?

I’ll have a word with them, said Father Travis, opening his eyes. A word or two. Not a fight, you understand?

Waylon, Hollis, and Coochy decided to drive over to Hoopdance for a hamburger at the truck stop. In case they saw Buggy or any of his friends, they brought tube socks and rocks. The rocks were in the glove compartment and the tube socks stuffed in the cup holder. If things got bad, they’d put the rocks in the socks and come out swinging. But in the truck stop most booths were filled with elderly farm people talking loudly, sinking their upper plates carefully into the day’s special. The boys ignored the steam table and the tiny salad bar. They sat in a back booth. They had helped Bap and Ottie clean out their garage, and they had money in their pockets. Halfway through their hamburgers, Buggy entered, alone. He didn’t notice them. He paced around a bit, finally sat down at the counter, then jumped up again right after he’d ordered. The boys stuffed down the rest of their food, signaled to the waitress, put money on the table, and got out the door. Buggy was talking to the short-order cook. They sat in Hollis’s car waiting for him to come out.

After a few minutes, Father Travis pulled up next to them in the white church van. He saw them as he got out, said hello, and walked into the truck stop. They saw him sit down next to Buggy on a counter stool. When Buggy jumped up to leave, Father Travis put a friendly hand on his skinny shoulder and Buggy sat down hard.

The boys saw this clearly.

What’s he doing?

Maybe Buggy got a vocation.

They watched the two at the counter, Buggy talking and gesturing but hunching forward until his face was practically in his hash browns. Every so often, Buggy swiveled around, darting glances to every side as if somebody might be listening in, though most people in the booths were nearly deaf, tuning their hearing aids up or down, filling themselves with weak coffee. Finally, Father Travis handed some bills to the cashier and they walked out of the truck stop together. Buggy fidgeted, standing next to Father Travis, until Curtains drove up. When Buggy got into that car, Hollis started the engine. He was pulling out when Father Travis stepped over, stood right in their way, and put his hand on the dented hood. Hollis killed the engine. Father Travis came around the driver’s side and Hollis rolled down the window. Stepping back, Father Travis motioned for them to get out of the car. They did, and stood awkwardly, not wanting to meet his eyes.

I understand, Father Travis finally said. But don’t do it.

They shot looks at one another.

Buggy’s beyond intimidation. He’s breaking down, but still dangerous, so don’t go near him. His parents kicked him out. He did something to his sister. He’s just got the one friend left. I think you should let things play out. If you go after him, you could end up with assault charges, and that would stay on your record. Hurt you when you apply for college.

Waylon hadn’t seriously considered going to college, and it warmed him that the priest thought he might.

Once Father Travis had driven off, the boys got into Hollis’s car, talked for a while, and then drove out to look for Buggy Wildstrand, but he had disappeared.

Two weeks later, on a warm day, Coochy heard where Buggy was hanging out and they drove over there. The place was down a long unpaved tractor road and became no more than a mud rut as they crossed a slough. Past that, trees closed in and Hollis said, Isn’t this the place where that kindergarten teacher lives? Mrs. Sweit?

She had, notoriously in the area, fled town that past year.

Waylon and Coochy didn’t answer because they saw the house. It gaped open. The windows that weren’t broken were lined with stained blankets. Three crumpled black garbage bags lay in the thawed rocky muck and snowed-on shit of the yard. As the boys walked carefully forward they smelled and then saw that the bags were the sunken carcasses of dogs stretched out at the ends of chains.

This is bad. Let’s not go in, said Hollis.

Coochy and Waylon were already on the porch. Hollis stepped up behind them. Sharp chemicals and deadness hung in the air. They pulled their T-shirts up over their noses, stood in the entry.

The place was spectacularly trashed. Kitchen cupboards were torn apart. Every surface was piled with plastic jugs, snarled tubing, or melted plastic. Petrified gunk hung down from the ceiling and was flung up against flares of charred Sheetrock. The cold floor was heaped with clothes soldered together with food, mined with broken dishes, crushed cans, shattered bottles. They stepped carefully through bagged and unbagged garbage, pizza boxes, ancient pizza like slabs of reptile skin, gluey pop, gnawed bones, and human shit. Against the opposite wall of what might have been the living room there was no motion, but a sensation of something alive came over Hollis and his neck prickled. Waylon tore a blanket off the nearest window. They saw two people, one snared in garbage, asleep maybe. The other staggered upright. It gathered energy and they could see it used to be Buggy.

His eyes flickered like neon in his yellow skull; his mouth was a black hole. His hands clutched and unclutched. One hand dug at his scabby and bleeding arm.

You came here to kill me, said Buggy.

No, said Hollis.

We’re gonna leave now, said Waylon.

Coochy stepped back.

Buggy lunged, silently flailing and striking as he bore Coochy down. Waylon tried to pull Buggy off and Buggy reared up, head-butted Waylon, and then slugged Hollis so venomously that he dropped, gasping in the slippery filth. Buggy kicked and hammered them with such dazzling intensity that they barely made it out of the house and to the car. It was all done in hideous silence. Hollis gunned the car in reverse; Buggy flew after them with giant leaping strides. He threw himself onto the hood of the car and mashed his face on the windshield, pop-eyed, tongue swirling on the glass. Hollis had to wrench forward, hit the brakes, and jerk backward to fling Buggy off. Hitting the ground at an odd angle slowed him. But as they drove off Coochy looked back and saw Buggy crouching, as if to spring after them along the ground on all fours like a movie demon.

They drove for about a mile and then Hollis said that Buggy was supposed to graduate as class valedictorian.

Maybe, said Waylon, he will come in second now.

Salutatorian, said Coochy.

Hollis flipped on his windshield wipers to try to clear the glass of Buggy’s spit. But his car was out of wiper fluid and the spit smeared in a streak.

Just like a bug, said Waylon. But nobody laughed.

IN MARCH THERE was the war. Father Travis started to watch the shock and awe, then switched it off. He was trembling inside, couldn’t think. He turned out the lights, knelt beside his bed, and bowed his head onto his folded fists. He tried to pray but his body was enthralled by a sticky, hot, beetling-red rage. The air in the room went thick and whirled with freakish energy. He jumped out of bed, put on his running clothes, and dashed down to a field near the school and hospital where he could run in circles all night if he wanted. It wasn’t a large field and he’d made only a few circuits when he registered the light in Emmaline’s office.

He told himself he would not, but he found himself going there. He told himself he’d just make sure she wasn’t there, or if she was, that she was safe. He told himself that if she was there, if he glimpsed her, he would immediately leave. But when she came to the door of the empty building, he did not leave. When he stepped in, he knew that she had been expecting him ever since they’d last spoken. Everyone else was home right now watching the war, so he and Emmaline were alone.

She walked straight back to her office and he followed. Once inside, she didn’t close the door. The light was harsh. She sat down at her desk and gestured at the other chair.

They didn’t say anything for nearly five minutes, nor did they look at each other. He listened to her breathe and she listened to him breathe. He shifted slightly, leaned forward. A small, strained gasp escaped her, almost inaudible.

THE RECEPTION ON Romeo’s TV was so lousy that he was sure Condoleezza had not been consulted on the presentation of the war. There were some green glows. A filthy sky. Wolf Blitzer repeating the words intense bombardment and a list of the three thousand types of precisely precise precision weapons guided only to the hardened bunkers of the enemy who ran around waving white sheets in disarray. Complete disarray was happening except for maybe on that hill. They kept talking about the hill where Iraqi intelligence was gathered and how they’d shaved that hill down by a couple of feet. Shaved it? Using missiles, artillery, hit after hit, then what was left? They used napalm to finish off everything alive or that might ever live there. Then the ground troops and the light show. Yet the reassuring news that no homes were being damaged, no collaterals damaged, no buildings even, only ruined tanks and other weaponry to be found. The fast-breaking-news ticker tape along the bottom said that people were getting beaten away from U.S. embassies all around the world. How useless, thought Romeo. You cannot stop a warlike people from doing what they like to do. Besides, frugality. Those giant flares were probably due to expire next week.

Romeo looked around himself, at his life, at his dinner. He was eating leftover pizza heisted from the hospital fridge. The pepperoni had dried to rigid disks. The cheese was tough. It wasn’t bad, but Romeo wished for digestion’s sake he had procured a vegetable. He had paychecks deposited in his bank account now, but he didn’t like to go to stores. He didn’t like to feel the payment for things coming from himself. What was he saving for?

The same footage, over and over. Why hoard his money? The world could be ending either there, or here.

Why save?

He really didn’t know. The amount of money just kept growing. Perhaps one day Hollis would look at the bank account that shared his name and say something. Maybe he’d think that Romeo wasn’t such a shithead father after all.

That’s what, said Romeo to CNN, that’s who I am saving for. That’s why I am eating this petrified cheese and this tagboard pizza. That’s why I have no sound on my TV.

The war was on at the Iron house. Josette screamed, Fuckers fuckshit fuckers it’s about the fucking oil! Hollis was out with friends and came back late. Maybe a little drunk. At the Ravich house only Peter watched. He said that LaRose shouldn’t watch, so Nola went upstairs with him. Maggie was not interested. The dog laid his head on Peter’s leg and closed his eyes under Peter’s hand, mesmerized as the voices droned in self-important excitement.

Suddenly, shoved aside, the dog circled and plopped down with a disoriented groan. Peter paged through the slim directory, dialed.

The man he had punched at Maggie’s volleyball game, Braelyn and Buggy’s father, answered.

Wildstrand here, said the voice.

Hi, said Peter. This is Peter Ravich. Sorry I punched you. Hope your daughter’s okay too.

Peter put the phone down.

Why’d I do that?

He asked the dog. The dog’s brown-black eyes shone with rich appreciation. After a few moments, the phone rang. Peter picked it up.

Wildstrand here. I never meant to touch your wife.

I know it.

Wildstrand hung up this time. Peter let the dog out and in, shut things down on the first floor, checked the doors.

He called up the stairs. There was no answer.

Dusty’s gone, he said.

He bent over and the dog leaned into his arms.

Peter walked up the stairs and found them, each in bed, faces visible in the crack of light from the hallway. LaRose a shadowy lump in the bottom bunk, face buried in the pillow. Maggie with puddles of jeans and underwear on the floor, books splayed, papers, notebooks. Yet on her dresser the bottles of nail polish in strict rainbow array. He stepped into his and Nola’s bedroom. Soap and stale sleep. Nola on her back like a stone queen on a coffin. She didn’t stir as he eased into the bed and settled himself with stealthy care. By morning gravity and his greater weight would roll her down to him, and he would wake with her sleeping in his arms.

EMMALINE PACKED FOR a conference in Grand Forks. She took nothing more than the usual overnight things — a change of clothes, her makeup case, shoes to walk in if she shopped at Columbia Mall. On the drive there, she could have played the tapes that were in the car — but each album or mix reminded her of other times. She played nothing, and didn’t give herself a problem to think through, either, as she often did on these drives. She just steered herself along. The wind out of the northwest was dry and bitter. Off the dunelike billows along the ditches, snow blew and sifted across the road. Emmaline only glanced from time to time at the continually vanishing tails of snow. A driver could be hypnotized by their loveliness.

When she reached Grand Forks, she drove straight to the University of North Dakota. She gave her presentation, talked to several colleagues. Soon she excused herself to check into her hotel. She’d taken a room in a generic place across the river where no one from the conference was likely to stay. She gave her information, signed the check-in slip, and went up to her room. She took off her jacket, shoes, and stockings. Then she lay down on the bed. Quickly, she got up. But she was weary and eventually she pulled back the covers and lay down again, still dressed. She curled up on her side and dozed until the phone rang. Her hand hovered until the third ring, but she picked it up and gave him the room number.

She let him in and he closed the door carefully. They stood before each other. He was dressed of course like a normal person. They didn’t speak. After a while she reached out and tugged the arm of his jacket. He took it off. She touched his shirt. He took that off too. Scars webbed his chest and thickened where they disappeared. She waited and he touched her blouse. She undid the little white shell buttons. He pushed the material off her shoulders. She shrugged and it fell. Once that happened, everything was easy and they slipped together like the snow along the way, endlessly rushing across the pitch-black surface of the road.

CHEAP FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS were advertised that spring — Saturday morning in the Alco parking lot. Maggie insisted. Peter said it was hokey. They had plenty of photographs. Shelves of framed photographs.

But none are by a trained photographer, said Maggie.

Peter pointed to the lines of school photographs.

All of us, Dad, in one photograph. It will make Mom happy.

She’s okay, isn’t she?

Oh come on, Dad!

Peter hesitated. They hadn’t taken a family photograph since Dusty. Also, he didn’t know if this would be a secret photograph, to keep hidden from Landreaux and Emmaline. Because LaRose would be in the photograph, it would be a symbolic thing. Peter had worked to keep things like this low-key — neither family claiming LaRose overmuch. He was even more careful since Emmaline had temporarily reclaimed LaRose. He said no. But Maggie stared at him in her spooky, smiley, perfect-daughter kind of way.

Will a family photograph make you happy? Peter asked Nola as she entered the room.

We should do it! Maggie threw her arms out to spark her mother. Nola sparked.

Yes! I’d just love a family photograph.

I need a beer, thought Peter.

Lately, Maggie had given him several characters to play: Bumbling Dad, even though he was the handiest man he knew. Wet Blanket Dad, even though he just liked to check in on reality once in a while. Careless Dad Who Lost Things, even though he was beginning to understand that somebody else had long been losing stuff. Maybe he really was Emotionally Lost Dad because he understood that Maggie was taking care of Nola all of the time, in ways he could not define. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t remember what she’d been like before, anyway. So maybe he was Absentminded Dad. And Spaced-Out Dad because he liked to avoid these questions. He was Best Boy Buddy Dad, although LaRose was clearly the character mainly playing Nola’s son. She doted on him. Her eyes followed the fork he ate with. His back when he left the room.

In the case of this picture, however, to make everybody happy, all he had to do was wear his best shirt and smile.

Or maybe a suit, said Maggie. Do you have a suit? We are all dressing up, Dad. You need a suit. You need a tie.

Peter found his wedding suit and tie.

Nola came out in a purple dress with a silver buckle at the waist. Maggie lowered her head and stared at her mother. Charged ions moved. Nola turned around and went back into their bedroom. What just happened? Peter wondered. He would never see that plum-colored dress again. Nola was now wearing a tan suit, white shirt, black heels. She looked like a flight attendant or a presidential candidate.

You get my vote, he said.

Mom, that outfit begs for those twinkly green earrings, said Maggie. And a scarf! Nola returned to the bedroom.

LaRose did not have a suit, but he did have a dress shirt. Maggie slicked his hair back with water. Nola said he looked like the exceptional boy he was. Everybody beamed. Maggie had on a matching sweater and shell, hot pink, and a short, sassy, eggshell-colored faux leather skirt. She was wearing a white headband and white plastic go-go style but nineties boots that had belonged to her mother. Peter found it disorienting when Maggie wore clothes that he remembered Nola wearing during college, in those years when he took keen notice of her clothing and her in it.

I’m a lucky man, he said, looking them all over and meaning that sincerely.

Nola and Maggie gazed at him indulgently. In their script they often didn’t understand what he was saying but rolled their eyes away from him with the gentle exasperation of two mothers.

With just the right amount of oxy, Romeo looked at things as a movie drama where revenge was justice, saw himself outside of himself, even heard the music, furtive or swelling. And see? Peter was all dressed up in heroic clothing to act his part in a heroic portrait, thought Romeo. But a startling message approached.

Romeo made his way toward Peter Ravich, whom he’d spotted in the Alco parking lot. To keep walking, he had to keep arguing with Landreaux in his head. Still, still! Landreaux had never talked to Romeo about the old times, and was too high and mighty to give Romeo a sign he even cared one shit about the sacrifice that Romeo made, trying to save Landreaux, even to this day. Plus he was stealing Hollis and Emmaline and all that Romeo should have. Getting away with stealing these because they all believed in a false Landreaux, a saved and sober Landreaux, a Landreaux who could do the worst thing possible and still be loved. That Landreaux must fall.

I tried to warn him, tried and tried again.

Now Romeo stood before Peter Ravich.

Can I talk to you?

Peter vaguely remembers Romeo, but doesn’t know from where. Romeo himself does not recall that he once approached Peter while the man was pumping gas into his vehicle, and scammed him as he frowned at the whirring readout of numbers. He told Peter that he had lost his wallet and needed ten dollars’ worth of gas to bring his grandmother to the hospital. Peter had unfolded his lean wallet and given him five. Now, stooping and shadowy, Romeo cuts Peter away from his family.

This is private, he says.

Romeo’s skinny tail of hair is neatly braided, by himself, braided wet from a shower obtained by stealth from the casino campgrounds. He has broken into his supply of swag and wears a T-shirt stiff with newness, featuring a huge plastic press-on eagle, comrade to an Indian-headbanded turtle, both bursting fiercely through a dream catcher. A red bandanna is tied crisp around his throat, the indigo skulls peeping discreetly over the folded cloth. Romeo has clipped sharp the drooping wisps of his wisdom ’stache. His jeans are slung low, barely on his hips. He speaks calmly, though clearing his throat every other word.

Apologies, he says, this will only take a minute.

I’m supposed to be over there, says Peter.

I’m a friend of Landreaux’s.

Oh?

Well, not a friend, as you will see, but a former friend before I found out what Landreaux was up to.

Romeo pauses; he is proud of that as you will see, which Mrs. Peace once called foreshadowing. He makes a pious sorry-face, like he’s sad to give the news of Landreaux’s hidden character to one who believes in him.

In fact, feeling inspired, Romeo uses that line.

I know you believe in him.

I. . yeah, sure. . what’s going on? Peter glances at his family and smiles uncertainly, waves at their impatient faces.

You see, I am a hospital worker, says Romeo in a formal way. For that reason, I accidentally hear how things really go down from time to time in real life.

Peter feels the pull of where this is going and tries to extricate. But Romeo is an assured narrator and already has him with the suckage of story. Romeo puts his hand to his heart.

I apologize if this causes you to revisit trauma, says Romeo, but you weren’t told the truth. And I just feel — me being me — that you, as a parent, deserve the truth.

Now everything is very slow or even paralyzed, like time has quit its business and there is only Romeo, and only Peter, and dread like a gong in Peter’s head.

So that day three years ago, says Romeo.

Cut the shit.

Peter’s shoulders hunch and square, his chest expands, his neck swells, his heavy hands itch to grab that red bandanna and twist to choke the words off. This guy is slime. This guy is doing violence here. At the same time, this is something Peter can’t help coming to know. It will be there whether he hears it now or walks away. It will exist behind the sorry-to-tell-you mini-frown with the smugness boiling up behind Romeo’s unctuous manner.

It’s not shit, says Romeo, calm. He expected this resistance from Peter, so he goes in more slowly. Poor Landreaux. Romeo sighs. Sometimes he tries to self-medicate, you know? Looks like he tried to that day. I heard the guys who were on the ambulance crew that day. I obtained access to the coroner’s report.

Coroner?

Yes, nobody told you? Nobody gave you that report? You were perhaps unaware?

Peter’s legs go weak. No. Maybe it was filed away or burned. It had not occurred to him. The unthinkable had been, at least, straightforward. Peter had seen the tree where it happened. It had all made unbearable sense. He hadn’t wanted to know any details. He’d had his hands full, back then, with Nola spinning off in space and Maggie clutching him like she was drowning. Then fighting him off. Then clutching him. There was no sense in looking at the paperwork of death. It would not have brought his son back. Reports were the cold logistics of death and he’d been dealing with the hot truth of grief.

So, no.

I do have it here, said Romeo in a hushed voice, then repeating the TV phrase. I was able to obtain the file. I can tell you what it says, basically. Romeo’s voice is dry and competent. He marvels at how intelligent he makes himself sound — his brain though wormholed is a smart brain, after all.

It says that Landreaux’s shot missed Dusty’s head, heart, lungs, liver, aortic artery, femoral artery, and stomach. It says that Dusty was not killed by the shot but by the tearing shrapnel of the branch he was sitting on. Shallow wounds, sir. He bled to death while Landreaux was restraining your wife in the house. It doesn’t say this in the report, but the guys speculate Landreaux’s judgment — tragically! — impaired. If Landreaux had not run or panicked, but stopped to treat the boy’s bleeding, which as a personal care assistant he certainly knew how to do, he would probably have saved Dusty’s life.

And. . here Romeo embroiders for further effect. . and, if your wife had been allowed to run back there, even she might have saved the boy.

Peter feels the paper in his hands. He opens the thing, filled out in squirrelly handwriting. His brain will not read the phrases in sequence, though the words Romeo just used pop out here and there. The paper falls. Romeo picks it up and tries gingerly to press it back into Peter’s hand, but there is no response, so he steps back. Peter’s arm is long and now is the time Romeo might get slugged.

As Peter stares through Romeo his face goes fragile. Peter’s skin crinkles and lines form, flushed brown as old parchment, and he is suddenly very, very old. Romeo takes another step back from this amazing special effect. Then Peter’s daughter calls.

Daddy! It’s our turn.

Peter closes his mouth. His eyes focus. He walks past Romeo and goes to stand before the photographer.

At the end of his driveway, Peter. Motionless, balanced, hands dangling at his sides. He does not wave at or even see the few cars that pass, the ones that are not Landreaux. Behind him, the pickup, his hunting rifle in the gun rack across the back window. He’s wearing blue jeans, a shirt, his old red and black checked jacket. Head buzzing. Hollow roar of blood in his ears. Had he remembered to relock the gun case? He’d grabbed the gun so quickly. Yes he had, yes. He asks himself this question every three minutes. Part of him already knew what Romeo would say and had been waiting for this. It didn’t feel like news. It felt like corroboration. Every noise is magnified. The dog shuffling in the undergrowth. He watches the birch and popple trees. The leaves shiver with light. He cannot remember his son’s voice. He cannot call a happy image to his mind that is not a photograph. But he can see his son in the leaves, and where before Dusty was at peace, gone instantly in one shock, now his eyes are open, he is calling. He is afraid. Peter bangs the side of his head, trying for another image. The good times. Not a photograph. The real times. Why had he not memorized the moments?

This moment, anyway, he has stone cold.

He lifts his arm, waves Landreaux down. Does not move. It is apparent to Landreaux that Peter has something to say so he pulls over and gets out, worried.

What is it?

Peter turns, opens the passenger-side door of the pickup.

Get in, he says.

Landreaux does.

Peter slides into the driver’s side, starts the vehicle, pulls out.

Where are we going?

Hunting.

It isn’t hunting season, says Landreaux.

Yes it is, says Peter.

On their way to federal land, Peter tells Landreaux all that Romeo told him in the Alco parking lot. Landreaux does not argue with the narrative because in the sudden crush of images, he doesn’t know, can’t remember. Was he high that day? No. He doesn’t think so. No. He knows he wasn’t. No. But does that even matter? He is guilty whichever way. He took the shot. And if he could have saved the boy. . Landreaux puts his splayed fingers on his face, as if to push pieces of himself back together. They drive in silence. Peter’s skin is gray as rock. But his hands are loose and warm on the steering wheel. Forty minutes pass in seconds.

The pickup lurches down an old logging road and comes out on a ridge, an opening in dense second-growth woods. Together, many years ago, they had hunted in this place. There was an old clear-cut full of browse, and one time Landreaux had perched in a tree stand on the southern end, waiting, as Peter beat down toward him from the north. They had taken a fine buck.

Now they get out of the truck and Peter reaches back in for the rifle.

I’ll find that stand down there, says Peter, gesturing toward the southern limit. He nods to the north, calmly meeting Landreaux’s eyes. You walk down from that hill toward me. I’ll be waiting.

Landreaux turns toward the hill. A giddy ease steals into him. That all of this will soon be over. Peter is a good shot. It will be like vanishing. No more hiding his miserable truth. No struggle with the substance or not the substance. No waiting for Emmaline to love him again. Although the kids. . set them free? He doesn’t think he can exist, anyway, seeing forever what he now sees and knows about that day. His thoughts loop. Yes. Peter’s got sights on his rifle. Landreaux won’t even hear the shot. To die will be nothing. It seems like a favor, almost. Landreaux takes his time. He sleepwalks peacefully up the hill. When he gets halfway up, he tells himself to turn and walk down. It is here that he has some trouble.

The unwelcome desire to live nearly thwarts Landreaux as he gazes down into the woods where Peter is waiting. He sees the birch, the crisp film of new green. The trees quiver with light. His grandfather had tapped birch trees in spring, and they drank the cold sap, which tasted of life. The bark, the inner layer; he had eaten it when he was hungry and his parents were out drinking. Close by, he sees that dark stands of bur oak could hide him. Peter’s shot would never penetrate that wood. The frogs start singing again down that hill — telling him to run. But he does not run. Blood drains from his heart. His arms and legs go transparent. He glances down to see if he is shot yet. He is both keenly downcast and relieved to see there is no blood. Thoughts tell Landreaux he can still get away. He is out of range. He can run. Why, then, does he drop his head forward and walk back down the hill?

He is stubborn, and he is angry, and he will not give Peter the satisfaction. With a composure that surprises him, Landreaux orders his shaking legs to move, and they do move. As long as he points his head down the hill, it turns out that the rest of him will follow. He keeps his eyes on the ground. Shy trillium and garlic mustard, swamp tea, snowberry, wintergreen, wild strawberries. Landreaux stoops, picks a few of the berries, puts them in his mouth. The taste is so intense that he nearly drops, right there, to crawl into the downed trees, rough brush. But he doesn’t. Step after step. Fear fizzes in his blood. He mutters, Kill me, you fuck, kill me now — trying to keep the anger. He tries a death song like old people talk about, but his throat shuts. Kill me, you fuck, kill me now, take the shot, take the shot, take it now. But one step follows another. Sometimes he stumbles, but he picks himself up and keeps going.

WHEN ROMEO LEAVES the Alco parking lot, he wanders, now empty of purpose. All of his being was concentrated on this one attainment.

It is finished, he says.

He has triggered events over which he now has no control.

My work here is done.

Who to visit, what to do? Nothing appeals. And now that the adrenaline is spent, this is a low day, all energy in the air sucked away in spite of sunshine. Romeo should sleep before his shift. He only got a couple hours last night. But he can resort to several chemical enhancements to keep moving. He doesn’t feel like sleeping right now. These are hours of destiny. If he could only talk to another person! But as usual, nobody wants a visit from Romeo. His treasured captain’s chair sits empty in his gracious home — he could go there. He could arrange the window blankets, put the light on, read the tribal news or some of the literature he’s picked from the hospital trash. People toss perfectly good books away. In theory. When he opens them they’re always crap.

Where to? Where to, my man?

The AA meeting beckons. Destination? Romeo recalls that the group was maundering on about the step that includes a searching and fearless moral inventory. Romeo’s favorite. He loves to listen to his compatriots’ new inventory items every week. Romeo’s avid listening skills sustain the group narrative. His later comments provoke humor and tears. The staginess of the meetings suits him and always improves his mood. So off he goes. Catches a ride up the hill, slouches around the side of the church, down the steps, along the corridor and into a homey room with mildewed carpet. Chairs in a circle, waiting. Nobody here yet. Romeo sits down and realizes that he may not have the means to get himself into the right mood to withstand assaults of fellowship. He has some means, which he exits into the bathroom to safely take advantage of, and feels himself fortified when he returns.

Still, nobody. And a dry Mr. Coffee.

The sun leaks in and there is the smell of funeral power-cooking down the hall. Good eats later. The hard chair becomes more comfortable as the chemical fortification builds. Plus, there is gloating to accomplish. The attainment of his ends is now Romeo’s to nibble on. Thinking back, he calls up each word, each exchange, each emotion loosed in the Alco parking lot. These moments are his forever, his to taste singly. He lingers over the initial confusion, the dawning dread, the vertigo, the resolution, which will mean a big fat comeuppance at last for Landreaux. Maybe death, even, fast or slow, though unlikely. And would he want that for real? He had set things in motion. That’s all.

My work here is done.

I like that, says Romeo out loud.

He leans back with his head resting lightly in crooked arms, legs outstretched, the sad one shorter and now quiet. This is the pose of satisfaction Father Travis comes upon as he enters the meeting, and sits across from Romeo, who slumbers in that unlikely position. Eventually, the priest calls his name and wakes him up. The meeting was supposed to start ten minutes ago.

Guess it’s just us two, says Father Travis.

Hardly worth it.

Romeo is disappointed — there will be no entertainment.

On the contrary, says Father Travis. A chance for special attention to your growth in the program, Romeo.

I am supposed to be somewhere, says Romeo.

You’re supposed to be right here, says Father Travis.

They pass the page-protected ritual greetings and organizational prompts back and forth. They read the steps aloud. Father Travis says, You’re up.

I’m up?

You’re the speaker of the day.

I got nothing.

Sure you do.

Romeo wants to say the fuck with that, but his mouth surprises him by uttering other words.

Okay. I’ll start.

His mouth, his tongue, his voice box, seem to be working separately at first. His Adam’s apple shivers, the skulls vibrate, his voice quakes. What’s going on? It is as if a different Romeo is speaking, an interior Romeo. This unknown alternate Romeo has staged a coup. This Romeo Two has infiltrated his communication infrastructure. Are the drugs betraying him? What did he take again? What shape of pill? Romeo thinks it was a big white oval but there also were some smaller yellow articles. Perhaps crisscrossing side effects. Romeo is startled to silence even as Romeo Two becomes voluble, moved to unload certain acts undertaken for certain reasons. Romeo Two’s mouth claptraps, his voice shifts gear, high and higher, until Romeo One understands in despair that Romeo Two has frog-leaped all the way to that holy step somewhere beyond three, maybe four, five, where you tell God and another human the exact nature of your wrongs. Talk about combined side effects. Where among the vertigo, gastric pain, incontinence, shortness of breath, and possible kidney failure was telling the truth? Meanwhile, Father Travis, another human, and God’s representative on earth, is caught up in the fever of Romeo’s surprise recital:

I wasn’t always this scumbag a person, Father Travis. Once, I was somebody. Once, I was considered the most intelligent kid in my class. I was the treasured confidant of Landreaux Iron himself when Landreaux was a cool guy. This was before his sad-sack days. It was when he was new at boarding school. Landreaux at the time had a kinda rock-star quality, always leaning on a board. Then Landreaux tempted me to run away. A fiasco that would change my life. That would. .

Tears, not the eye-welling teasers he used to gather the information-spilling sympathy of others, but choking, wretched, wracking. His voice scratches out. Ruin my life! Romeo tries to take control of Romeo Two, but it’s too late to stop. They merge. He keeps talking.

In our mutual adventure, Landreaux fell upon me from a height and broke my leg and arm — you know the story. Everybody knows the story. Landreaux’s fate is to cause death and destruction to those around him, while he always slips free into the sunset. Or to Emmaline. I mean, there we were at school. This was after we had run away. We were caught, we had surrendered. I had come back from the hospital with my whole side wrecked, arm in an itching, stinking, long-term cast, leg pinned together inside, and afflicted with the nervous damages I bear to this day. First thing, I see Landreaux.

My man! I call out to him. My man!

He looks right through me. Maybe he feels bad for what he did. But not sorry! He looks right through me.

Father Travis, that right there is why I fell from grace. Not because of my crinkled armbone or my sad ol’ leg, not because I lost brain cells in the fall, not because I am at heart a raging addict who’d do anything to feed his want, though that’s true also. But, Father Travis. That’s not why.

You ever heard of omphalosite? You know what that is? It’s a kinda parasitic twin. It has no heart. Depends on the twin’s heart for circulation. Just lives off the twin and usually dwindles away before anybody even knows it exists. That’s how it was with me — like Landreaux was the beating heart and I the fainter twin and when he didn’t know me anymore my circulation stopped. I became a dead person, Father Travis. I was dead inside after that first year when Landreaux suddenly did not know who I was, suddenly would not answer to my call, suddenly outcast me when I needed him the worst. I needed him to come to my aid and stop a nickname from sticking on me. It took all my doing to slide out from under or slap down those nicknames. I battered Crip to the earth and went after Stooper. Sank my fangs into Wing and I defined myself. I stayed Romeo. I did it, but it cost me, and now here behold: I am who I am. Not a good person, not a bad person.

Father Travis listens, impassive, his eyes cast down.

Well, maybe, says Romeo. Could be I am a bad person. Unforgiving all these days and years. But when I see Landreaux living large with the girl who marked me out, who might have loved me at one time the way I love her, then I am deader than I was dead before. I become the gray worm. Just a digestion tube, really.

So Romeo loves Emmaline too, thinks Father Travis, and the sudden fact that he and his friend the weasel are afflicted and exalted by the same emotion makes him raise his head and settle his eyes on Romeo. That little gesture of attention causes in Romeo a deeper unflooding.

Truth he doesn’t even know is true tumbles out.

I put the mark on Landreaux just now, Father Travis.

What do you mean?

Romeo loses track. What does he mean? Put the mark. He stammers, under the influence of truth-tell side effects, to piece together what he has with utter certainty divulged to Peter Ravich. He spoke with such confidence. His delivery had been dignified, fluid, impressive. Oh yes. Now he remembers. Romeo puts on his honest face.

So you know that Landreaux Iron had relapsed that day. Yes! Romeo raises his hand, testifying. We know he’s struggled, and he’s fought, and I more than anyone understand that. Acknowledge it, Father Travis. I more than anyone dislike bearing unpleasant news. But, yes, it takes a strength of character. Even if Landreaux had that strength, which I know he does, Father Travis, because I know Landreaux well, even so there are times. This was one of the times. His shot blasted a tree branch, splintered it, and the boy was struck as with shrapnel. But shallow wounds, many of them, here, here, here, etc. Not one of these wounds hit a major vein or artery. The cause of death, exsanguination. However, had Landreaux not fled the scene he might have stopped that bleeding. Had he not overpowered the boy’s mother, she might have reached her son in time to stop the bleeding. This boy might be alive. I made copies of the coroner’s report, which bears this out. It is signed by Mighty Georgie herself, yes, Georgie Mighty, unavailable right now, most sadly, or she herself could bear this out as it was also corroborated by the state coroner, who happened to be in the area and was called in on this case, so yes. Most sadly. .

Romeo drifts a bit, then rouses himself, riffles in his pocket, draws out the report.

Father Travis puts his hand out, takes the paper. He reads the paper. He holds it long enough to read it several times over. At last he lifts his eyes to meet Romeo’s dozing-off eyes.

It doesn’t say that.

Romeo blinks.

It doesn’t say that.

Romeo sits up in his chair, mouth clamped.

I put it all together! Romeo speaks firmly. Father Travis!

It doesn’t say that, Romeo. The words you used are written here, but they don’t add up to your story. It just doesn’t say that.

Please don’t take this away from me. This is my only thing!

He peers stubbornly at Father Travis.

You are mistaken! Romeo slaps his knees. Mistaken!

Romeo rounds up all of the scattered bits of who he is, or was, and flings them on the table.

Father Travis, he says with authority, I gathered every word from trusted sources. I assembled the whole report from pieces of information relayed to me by people who were on the ground that day. That terrible day. Even if the report doesn’t say exactly what I said, there is corroboration. It’s not like I wanted to find these things out.

These things aren’t things. Father Travis gestures at the paper. They’re not here.

These words, these connections, these facts. They fell into place. Little by little. They added up! Into an inevitable story. I made diagrams. I procured a box of tacks. Tacks were in my wall. Still there. I drew lines between words and then elided. . do you know that word? The meaning of that word?

Yes.

Don’t you love that word? I fit these connections to other connections until a huger connection emerged.

What are you talking about? Elide doesn’t mean that. It means erase.

Or slur together!

Yes, like when you’re drunk, slurring, erasing part of your word.

Well, says Romeo, maybe. Erased the meanings between the salient points. Could have.

And then what?

And then, and then, well. Peter Ravich was there in the Alco parking lot, okay?

Romeo searches his hands, polishes his wrist, and tells Father Travis every detail of what he’d told Peter Ravich. He is still talking when Father Travis gets up. Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his own life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down off his face. He stands to follow Father Travis, still talking. Climbs upstairs and through the center aisle of the church, still talking, too stunned at himself to genuflect. Steps out the front door of the church.

From there, he can see down the hill into the marrow of the reservation town. High and mentally blasted as he is, he sees into each heart. Pain is dotted all around, glowing from the deep chest wells of his people. To the west the hearts of the dead still pulse, burning soft and green in their caskets. They stream out pale light from the earth. And to the south there are the buffalo that the tribe has bought for tourism purposes. A darkly gathered congregation. Their hearts also on fire with the dreadful message of their extinction. Their ghostly gathering now. Like us, a symbol of resistance, thinks Romeo. Like us, now rambling around in a little pen of hay getting fat. Like us, their hearts visible as lamps in the dust. To the east, also, the holy dawn of all the earth, every morning of every day, the promise and the weariness. He is so tired, Romeo. Because of course Peter will kill Landreaux. He saw this, has always known it. He doesn’t want to look north because he realizes he’s thought in the counterclockwise fashion that belongs only to the spirit world, where, it appears to him now, he belongs. His place of rest.

So thoroughly relieved and convinced is Romeo in that instant, and so fully does it seize him, the idea of his death, that he casts himself violently headlong down the twenty cement church steps, to the very base.

FATHER TRAVIS DROVE the parish outing van along the BIA road across to County 27 and pulled into the Ravich driveway. Landreaux’s Corolla was parked to one side of the drive, and Peter’s pickup was gone. Nola came out the front door and stood on the fussy little stone pathway to the drive, hands on her hips, full makeup, brightly frosted hair, immaculate pale outfit. She held his gaze pleasantly. As if she’d never seen him before.

Hello? Can I help you?

Is Peter home?

No.

I need to speak to him right away.

Nola gave him a suspicious flounce, and called Maggie. She came out, also smartly dressed.

What’s wrong?

Maggie could tell immediately that everything was not all right. Not all right again. And she had tried so hard with the family photograph! But clearly, something had happened with her dad. He’d acted weird the whole way back. And now the old Vin Diesel priest.

Can you tell me where your dad went?

I’ll look around, she said to Father Travis. Just wait.

Maggie walked through the house with her radar on. Her mother kept everything so exactly in its exact place that Maggie could always feel, before she even saw, what was different about a room.

Maggie came back outside.

He took his best deer rifle.

Thank you, said Father Travis.

WAYLON DROVE UP just after Father Travis left, and Maggie turned off her radar, right there in the driveway, where he met her. She had asked him over to help her work in the cornfield. Peter had plowed last year’s stubble into the field, but there were already weeds up in the rows. She went inside, and changed into work clothes, put on SP 30 and came out. Together, they walked to the field. It was warm. They each had a hoe they’d keep sharp using the files stuck in the back pockets of their jeans. Maggie’s were short cutoffs. She was a faster or more indifferent weed killer, so she got ahead of Waylon right away. He left a few pickers in the black dirt and stumbled after her. Maggie’s white shirt was tied off at her belly. Her foal’s legs shot down into thick socks, heavy tie boots. A battered straw cowboy hat shaded her face. Her lips were moving to some song in her head. Both of them had heavy brown cotton gloves in their back pockets but they swung their hoes bare-handed. The scent of dry crushed plants, torn dirt, piercing and pure, followed them over the earth. Waylon was proud of his shoes — Jordans — which he shouldn’t have been wearing in the field. His dad had bought them and didn’t have the money. He’d had to sign something to get them — but he wanted people to know that Waylon’s family could afford them. Fine dirt was sifting into the shoes and his sweating feet turned the dust to paste. He kept on swinging the hoe, slicing off pickers, shuffling along behind Maggie in his pasty shoes. One moment he was thinking about washing the shoes out later with a hose, or maybe a wet cloth, and if he would ruin them. The next moment everything changed.

Maggie’s white shirt is slung off. She is chopping weeds in just her bra — sky-colored cups holding two small creamy scoops. She is pale all over because of the sunblock slathering that went on before an incident of possible sun exposure. Her skin is marless. Not a freckle, a fleck of mole, or even a blemish. Only the blue dot on her shoulder. Which Waylon sees when she turns away. That dot. He knows what it is. She told him. And his heart is pierced as with the needle-sharp pencil. He puts his hand to his chest, takes his hand off, even looks at his fingers, but there’s no blood. Just her, obliviously swaying with her hoe, occasionally leaning forward to viciously whack a deep-rooted thistle.

The sunblock hasn’t kept her back from glowing a supple golden. Her spine sweatily glistens down into the tiny cutoffs. Her legs are milky white and deerlike. There is dirt up the insides of her calves, thighs, adhering to her sweat like shadow.

Waylon sits down between the rows, on sunny dirt. A small black jumping spider lands on his knee. Stares at him with fierce, pent sorrow. Then pops away. Waylon doesn’t move. He rubs his head as if to rearrange his thoughts.

Maggie moves down the row.

Get up, lazy-ass, she says. Don’t make me do this whole field by myself.

Waylon leaves the hoe on the ground, gets up, and stands before her. She squints up at him, smiling her bad-luck good-luck smile. Right then they are the only people in the universe, yet Waylon is too shy to say out loud what he leans over to whisper against her neck.

Maggie could wind herself through the bush, no matter how snakey and dense, but Waylon was like a big calf and stumbled after her, hair flopping, eyes wide, lips pink and lustrous, skin darkly glowing with sweat until at last she pushed her hand on his chest to make him stop.

Okay, this is the place, she said. My place.

It was an old oak so huge that it had choked out all other brush but the long pale grass they lay on underneath.

Do you love me? asked Waylon.

No, said Maggie.

You’re lying, huh. You love me.

I said no. Maggie laughed.

He put his hand around her face and adored her chin. She was thinking about her volleyball kill score — she had got up to 200 last season. It would take at least another couple years to hit 1,000.

Okay then?

All right then, said Maggie. Let’s try it. I mean, if it hurts too much you have to quit.

She leaned toward him and he tried not to grapple with her, not treat her like he couldn’t wait, not lunge or buck, tried to be all manly and collected, but it was all too unbelievable. She was just so small but just so quick. She got on top of him and moved aside her panties, unzipped him and got him out and started to try.

Put it in, she said.

They couldn’t get it in. She got off, lay down, opened her legs. He got on top and tried that way. It worked better, but she screamed.

Get it out!

He moved backward.

Okay, she panted. Try again.

Waylon sweat and worried, trying to slow down but stay hard all at once. Then it was suddenly better and she relaxed under him and said it was okay and she could handle it.

So move, she said.

His uncles had teased him, Hold back, you got to hold back. They had eased their arms in slow cranks like pulling a boat back to an idle. So he tried to hold back, yet to keep moving. This was only the third time for him, and he had promised himself he would hold back by counting, thinking of numbers, as he was bad at math.

That’s good, said Maggie.

He thought of the wrong number and lunged too hard. She cried out, dug her nails into the small of his back, so deep he could feel the blood. He stopped. His eyelids drooped, but he wasn’t at all mean, he was just trying to hold it.

Okay, said Maggie. Now go.

He moved and moved in a trance of happiness. She moved with him underneath that tree and suddenly she lifted out of the pain. She was right at home with herself. She was Maggie. The owl had entered her body and she was staring out of its golden eyes.

FATHER TRAVIS FORCED himself to back the van from the Ravich driveway without laying rubber, to shift calmly from reverse into drive. Then he gunned it to Landreaux’s house, jumped out, and knocked on the door. Emmaline appeared, shadowed by the screen. He tried not to rest in the cool shade of her gaze, her presence behind the mesh door. She said come in. He stepped inside. She stood too close to him. No, it was a normal distance. Any distance was too close.

What’s happening? Is everyone okay?

Father Travis could not think of how to put words to the buzzing in his head.

They’re okay, except I need to find Landreaux. He. . Romeo. . he had this idea or notion he’s been putting together that Landreaux was, well, he was high when he killed. .

No, said Emmaline, standing taller. He was not. Romeo makes things up.

She stood taller, stepped back from him. She made more distance between them. He wanted to cross that, step toward her, but wrenched back to stay focused on Landreaux. Emmaline read him. She folded her arms and drew into herself. Wisps of her being had dispersed and she gathered them abruptly in. In that moment she went back to existing as one with the father of her children. She was expressionless, waiting.

Romeo makes things up, she said again.

I know, said Father Travis. But he sounds convincing. He told Peter.

Emmaline’s arms dropped away, to her sides.

Where are they?

I need to know where they’d go if they went out hunting.

Her eyes went a pale green and she knew what was happening.

Federal land, west.

Emmaline told him how to get there but she didn’t ask to come along. She just stood there holding herself together.

LANDREAUX APPEARS FIRST to Peter’s naked eye as movement, a faraway shift of greeny blur as he parts leaves. Then he gets Landreaux in his gun sights and watches. Peter’s hands are cool and steady because they belong to the other man, the one who pictured doing this and did not, the man who split Landreaux’s skull a thousand times chopping wood. The other man who dreamed what Peter is doing now.

Landreaux is still far away, stepping carefully along. He stops from time to time and pulls aside a branch, giving Peter a clear shot. When he sees that Landreaux isn’t going to obstruct him, Peter feels the reason they were friends. He sees Landreaux’s lips move and is glad that Landreaux is praying. The way it has to end feels right. An agreement signed by both parties. Witnessed by two sons. He lets Landreaux come close enough for him to take the infallible shot. Closer and closer yet. There it is. Peter squeezes the trigger gently with his heart exploding. Nothing. He knows his rifle’s loaded because he always keeps it loaded. He never did unload it and nobody knows where he hides the key — so he puts the crosshairs on Landreaux’s third eye. Shoots. Nothing. Peter wills himself to pull the trigger again. But now his hand won’t do it. Won’t do it. Landreaux’s face fills the sights.

Peter lowers the rifle but holds it close to him. He watches Landreaux still stepping wearily toward his death. From a human distance, now, Peter sees LaRose in Landreaux’s solid, hip-slung walk. Funny, he never noticed. Then he sees more. Sees all he has kept himself from seeing. Sees the sickness rising out of things. The phosphorus of grief consuming those he loves. A flow of pictures touches swiftly, lightly, through his thinking — all lost things; then all the actual lost things: the aspirin, the knives, the rope, all deadly in Nola’s hands. And the bullets deadly in his own hands.

LaRose.

The picture of those small capable boy hands now fills Peter. Those hands curving to accept the bullets. Loading and unloading his gun. And the ropes, the poisons. Those hands taking them from their places and getting rid of them. The missing rat poison, strychnine, the missing bleach. LaRose saving him now, saving both his fathers.

Well, Landreaux. Peter turns from the murderer. Landreaux doesn’t need any help to die. Let him hoof out his dread alone. Let him walk. Peter will be the only one who knows he pulled the trigger. The knowledge engulfs him. There is a slough glittering in the new air. Peter walks to the edge, runs, hops, and tosses the rifle like a spear toward the sun-sequined water.

As it crashes in, he feels one moment of lightness. He lifts his arms. He holds his arms up waiting for the energy of absolution. Nothing comes. Nothing falls from the warm, sunny, ordinary sky except the same knowledge. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. He killed Landreaux. Nothing happened.

FAR OFF, DOWN the broad county gravel road, Father Travis spots a small figure moving along the ditch. When he recognizes Landreaux, he feels the cold tension leave his arms. Weakness, so foreign he doesn’t know what he is feeling, washes down his body, from his heart, draining his nerves. He pulls over and switches off the engine. His heart is still vibrating, his nerves on alert. Whatever happened, Landreaux is right there in front of him.

A dissonance in his thinking surfaces.

Along with his relief, there is a bizarre disappointment related to the fleeting thoughts that passed through his mind, rejected, but popping up again. Basically, what if. What if Landreaux was just gone. What if, well, it meant he was dead. Okay. What if Landreaux was dead. Forget what would happen to everybody else.

What if Landreaux was dead and Emmaline needed me now.

What if there was no Landreaux, just Emmaline, what if.

All along the road these thoughts had come and gone, but Father Travis had not reacted to them. It was seeing Landreaux, kicking along the road, shambling toward him, that made the thoughts real.

Not that he’d asked for the thoughts. Sure, he’d rejected and rejected, but the thoughts had come into his mind again and again. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel and lowered his head, shut his eyes. Everything was all right because Landreaux was alive, but he’d had those thoughts.

Who are you?

Father Travis addressed himself in a small voice, in a whispery voice. He looked up. Landreaux still walking toward him. Larger. Larger.

I could still run him over, said Father Travis to the windshield.

After a hopeless moment, watching the big man trudge toward him, Father Travis felt the wildness burst from a space below his heart. The sound came out weird. Like a jackal. Something in a zoo. He didn’t recognize this sound he was making until it looped into a kind of laughter.

I could hit the gas!

He was still laughing when Landreaux got to him. When Landreaux opened the passenger door. Father Travis took a look at Landreaux’s big ol’ sad-sack face, exactly the face Romeo had described, and gave a sobbing guffaw. Slammed his hand on the steering wheel. Laughed and laughed.

Landreaux shut the door and kept walking.

He made it home around dark with questions still rattling in his head. Did Peter really try to kill me? Or was he just putting fear into me? Father Travis? Was it all a joke and what was true? Josette had put a wobbly tin fence up along the side of the house, and he caught his foot. Nearly fell up the steps. So maybe Emmaline, sitting at the kitchen table, thought for a moment he was drunk, but when he walked in she knew he was just clumsy.

Whatever the answers to the heavy questions were, he was weightless now. He’d got lighter and lighter all the way home until suddenly, at the doorway, he’d lifted off the ground, kicking off his shoes at the door. He went straight to her, bent over and put his arms around his wife sitting in the chair. She put her hand up and held his arm. The kitchen light was harsh. She closed her eyes and leaned back. He pushed his chin lightly along the crown of her head.

You smell like outside, she said.

She kept her hand on his arm, frail gesture. Hardly the way a woman treats her husband when she’s become aware that it might be her cousin Zack who comes to the door. Hardly. Something, though. The hand on his arm hardly represented what had been their passionate marriage, their once-upon-a-reservation storybook time. She just held his arm. He leaned over her, his elbows on the back of the chair. Leaning wasn’t much, when compared to how they used to push a chair under the doorknob in a cheap motel where the lock was broken. They used to think they were something special. Lucky. They used to say they were sure nobody else had ever been this happy, ever been this much in love. They used to say, We will get old together. Will you still love me when I’m shriveled up? I will love you even better. You’ll be sweeter. Like a raisin. Or a prune. We’ll be eating prunes together. That’s the way they used to talk. But now they were tasting the goddamn green plums, weren’t they. Bitter. What about me? Will you love me? I don’t know, it depends on where you shrivel up. That’s the way they used to talk.

Landreaux straightened up and got two glasses of water. He sat down in another chair. Emmaline felt a surge of fear that suddenly contained what might be, could be, identified as possibility. She took a drink of water and closed her eyes. She saw a slough thick with reeds, muck bottom, tangled, both deep and shallow. She saw the ducks batter their way across and up. She saw herself, Landreaux beside her. She saw them both wade in together.

WHEN FATHER TRAVIS returned to the church grounds, having spoken to Peter Ravich, having made Peter read the coroner’s report, the new priest was there. He was wearing an elaborate medieval priest outfit with chain for a belt and shoes that looked like carpet slippers. He was from a newly formed order. He was young, with a creamy complexion, apple-blossom cheeks, bright cornflower eyes, and corn-silk hair cropped to the skull. His voice was startling, high-pitched, but commanding of attention all the same.

I suppose you’re Father Travis, said the new priest. A frowning flush mottled his cheeks.

I suppose I am, said Father Travis.

I am Father Dick Bohner.

Oh no, thought Father Travis.

I am your replacement, said Father Bohner.

You should go by Richard here, said Father Travis.

Dick is my name, said the new priest fiercely.

Of course it is, said Father Travis.

Things will be changing around here, said Father Bohner, flushing still more violently. Saturday mass should have started ten minutes ago.

You’re late then, said Father Travis.

Father Travis walked away to pack his suitcases. He had come with two hard-sided Samsonite cases. Somehow, in the packing, he found that he had downsized. He had only enough to fill one suitcase. His cash, what there was of it, was in a bag behind a loose ceiling tile. He called Randall Lafournais, who drove down to Fargo every week, and arranged a ride with him. Father Travis decided to get off in one of the train stop towns, buy a ticket on the Empire Builder to Fargo, Minneapolis, Chicago, and then continue on east by train and south by bus to Jacksonville, North Carolina, and Camp Lejeune. He would walk down the boulevard among the memorial trees. He would visit the broken wall and touch the names engraved there.

As he was folding clothes, he realized that after all he had very little money. The phone rang. He let it ring and then pounced suddenly, brimming over, laughing.

Shit-broke soldier of God here! What can I do for you?

The person on the other end of the line was an Indian who laughed with him and hung up.

You love a woman you can never have, he thought, dropping the phone. Suck it up and deal. But his blood expanded and his heart seemed ready to explode. He sat on the bed, put his head in his hands. He thought again about the money. After a while he got up, stood heavily over his last few belongings laid out on the bed. He picked up the slippery blouse he’d asked Emmaline to give him, put it to his face, then added it to the suitcase. He snapped the suitcase shut. It was a heavy, dull red thing.