The Antelope Wife

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The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other’s colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their existence. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.

Chapter 5. Wiindigoo Dog

ALMOST SOUP

So now you have got the story of how the Roys and Shawanos got tangled up. A dog’s-eye view of history, includes certain details that human people might rather skip. I have no illusions. Humans are capable of anything. For instance, you could end up puppy soup if you’re born a pure white dog on the reservation, unless you’re one who is extra clever, like me. I survived into my old age through dog magic. That’s right. You see me, you see the result of dog wit. Dog skill. Medicine ways I learned from my elders, and want to pass on now to my relatives. You. So listen up, animoshag. You’re only going to get this knowledge from the real dog’s mouth once.

There is a little of a coyote in me, just a touch here in my paws, bigger than a dog’s paws. My jaw, too, strong to snap rabbit bones. Prairie-dog bones as well. That’s right. Prairie. I don’t mind saying to you that I’m not a full-blood Ojibwe reservation dog. I’m part Dakota, born out in Bwaanakiing, transported here just after I opened my eyes. I still remember all that sky, all that pure space, all that blowing dirt of land where I got my name, which has since become legendary.

Here’s how it happened.

I was underneath the house one hot slow day panting in the dirt. I was a young thing. Just chubby, too, and like I said white all over. That worried my mother. Every morning she scratched dirt on me, threw me in the mud, rolled me in garbage to disguise my purity. Her words to me were this — My son, you won’t survive if you lick your paws. Don’t be respectable. Us Indian dogs have got to look as unappetizing as we can! Slink a little, won’t you? Stick your ears out. Grow ticks. Fleas. Bite your fur here and there. Strive for a disreputable appearance, my boy. Above all, don’t be clean!

Like I say, born pure white you usually don’t stand a chance, but me, I took my mama’s advice. After all, I was the son of a blend of dogs stretching back to the beginning of time on this continent. We sprang up here. We had no need to cross on any land bridge. We know who we are. Us, we are descended of Original Dog.

I think about her lots, and also about my ancestor, from way way back, the dog named Sorrow who drank a human’s milk. I think about her because I know it was the first dog’s mercy and the hand-me-down wit of the second that saved my life that time they were boiling the sacred soup.

I hear these words — Get under the house, Melvin, fetch that white puppy now. Bam! My mama throws me in the farthest house corner and sits down on me. I cover up with her but once Melvin is in play distance I can’t help it. I’ve got that curious streak of all the Indian dogs. I peek right around my mother’s tail and whoops, he’s got me. He drags me out and gives me to a grandma, who stuffs me in a gunnysack and slings me down beside the fire.

I fight the bag there for a while but it’s warm and cozy and I go to sleep. I don’t think much of it. Just another human habit I’ll get used to, this stuffing dogs in sacks. Then I hear them talking.

Sharpen up the knife. Grandma’s voice.

That’s a nice fat white puppy. Someone else.

He’ll make a good soup for the ceremony, but do you think enough to go around? Should we kill another one?

Then, right above me, they start arguing about whether or not I’ll feed twenty. Me, just a little chunk of a guy, Gawiin! No! I bark. No! No! I’m not enough for even five of your big strong warrior sons. Not me. What am I saying? I’m not enough for any of you! Anybody! No! I’m sour meat. I don’t want to be eaten! In response, I get this tap from a grandma shoe, just a tap, but all us dogs know feet language. Be quiet or you’ll get a solid one, it means. I shut up. Once I stop barking all I can do is think and I think fast. I think furious. I think desperate puppy thoughts until I know what I’ll do the moment they let me out.

A puppy has just one weapon, and there really is no word for it but puppyness. Stuck in that bag, I muster all my puppyness. I call my tail wags and love licks up from deep way back, from the dogs going back to dogs unto the beginning of our association with these predictable and exasperating beings. I hear them stroking the steel on steel. I hear them tapping the boiling water pot. I hear them deciding I’ll be enough, just barely. Then daylight. The bag loosens and a grandma draws me forth and just quick, because I’m smart, desperate, and connected with my ancestors, I look for the nearest girl child in the bunch around me. I spot her. I pick her out.

She’s a visitor, sitting right there with a cousin, playing, not noting me at all. I give a friendly little whine, a yap, and then, as the grandma hauls me toward the table, a sharp loud bark of fear. That starts out of me. I can’t help it. But good thing, because the girl hears it and responds.

“Grandma,” she says, “what you going to do with the puppy?”

“Gabaashimgabaashimgabaashim,” mumbles Grandma, the way they do when trying to hide their actions.

“What?” That gets her little-girl curiosity up, a trait us dogs and children share in equal parts, what makes us love each other so.

“Don’t you know, you dummy,” shouts that boy cousin in boy knowledge, “Grandma’s going to boil it up, make it into soup!”

“Aaay,” my girl says, shy and laughing. “Grandma wouldn’t do that.” And she holds out her hands for me. Which is when I use my age-old Original Dog puppyness. I throw puppy love right at her in loopy yo-yos, puppy drool, joy, and big-pawed puppy clabber, ear perks, eye contact, most of all the potent weapon of all puppies, the head cock and puppy grin.

“Gimme him, gimme!”

“Noooo,” says Grandma, holding me tight and pursing her lips in that terrible way of grandmas, when they cannot be swayed. But she’s dealing with her own descendant in its purest form — pure girl. Puppy-loving girl.

“Grandmagrandmagrandma!” she shrieks.

“Eeeeh!”

“GIMMEDAPUPPY!GIMMEDAPUPPY!”

Now it’s time for me to wiggle, all over, to give the high-quotient adorability wiggle all puppies know. This is life or death. I do it double time, triple time, full of puppy determination, desperate to live.

“Ooooh,” says another grandma, sharp-eyed, “quick, trow him in the pot!”

“Noooo,” says yet another, “she wants that puppy bad, her.”

“Give her that little dog,” says a grandpa now, his grandpa heart swelling up. “She wants that dog. So give her that little dog.”

That is how it goes pretty much all the time, now, theseadays. In fact I’ve heard even grandmas have softened their hearts for us and we Indian dogs are safe as anywhere on earth, which isn’t saying much.

My girl’s doll-playing fingers are brushing my fur. She’s jumping for me. Spinning like a sweet maple seed. Straining up toward her grandma, who at this point can’t hold on to me without looking almost supernaturally mean. And so it is, I feel those ancient dog-cooking fingers give me up before her disappointed voice does.

“Here.”

And just like that I’m in the most heavenly of places. Soft, strong girl arms. I’m carried off to be petted and played with, fed scraps, dragged around in a baby carriage made of an old shoe box, dressed in the clothing of tiny brothers and sisters. Yes. I’ll do anything. Anything. This is when my naming happens. As we go off I hear the grandpa calling from behind us in amusement, asking the name of the puppy. Me. And my girl calls back, without hesitation, the name I will bear from then on into my age, the name that has given so many of our breedless breed hope, the name that will live on in dogness down through the generations. You’ve heard it. You know it. Almost Soup.

Up to the Present

Having introduced myself, I believe that it is now appropriate to bring time and place back into the picture. Time the judge has released Augustus Roy to easy death. Zosie and Mary have also trudged with their brothers toward the spirit world. Peace lived quietly, like her name. She was a shy old woman married to a shy old man named Waabizii, The Swan. She bore one son and feared to have more children lest they turn out twins. Her mothers always made her enough trouble. But her son grew up safely in her care and then fathered twin girls at too young an age. Their mother disappeared and Peace raised them. Until Zosie and Mary died, Peace was caught between two sets of yoked wills. At least she had the numbers, the bank, her father’s desk, and a changing array of colors that flowed beneath her pencil. Her father had taught her to love the sun on her shoulders and wind in every mood. She named the twins for these pleasures, Giizis and Noodin, hoping for happy spirits. But they turned out shrewd, sour, and sometimes ferocious, like their great-grandmothers. In the end, Peace just gave up.

There was a wave of giving up, and then there was a new government policy designed in the kindest way to make things worse. It was called Relocation and helped Indians move to cities all over the country. Helped them move away from family. Helped them move away from their land. Helped them move away from their dogs. But don’t worry. We followed them down to Gakaabikaang, Minneapolis, Place of the Falls. I will return. But I am sorry to say that I must leave you now.

I must give the story over to one particular descendant, Klaus, a man whom we dogs have failed to shape. Though named for the German, an industrious man, Klaus was a sorry piece of work from the get-go. Even though his elderly father counseled him with care, Klaus was lazy, needy, skilled from a tender age at self-deceptions, according to impartial dogs. He was always pining for something over the horizon. I am only letting him speak because he is, unfortunately, and to his own shame, best qualified to tell what happened next. Though sky and space divided the oldest daughter of Blue Prairie Woman from her sisters, her tribe, her family, and the descendants of her rescuers who walk this earth, it only took one drunken idiot to reconnect.

Chapter 6. The Antelope Woman

KLAUS

I used to make the circuit as a trader at the western powwows, though I am an urban Indian myself, a sanitation engineer. I’d hit Arlee, Montana. Elmo, Missoula, swing over Rocky Boy’s, and then head on down to the Crow Fair. I liked it out there in all that dry space; at first that is, and up until last year. It was restful, a comfort to let my brain wander across the mystery where sky meets earth.

Now, that line disturbs me with its lie.

Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. If you chase that line, it will retreat from you at the same pace you set. Heart pounding, air burning in your chest, you’ll pursue. Only humans see that line as an actual place. But like love, you’ll never get there. You’ll never catch it. You’ll never know.

Open space plays such tricks on the brain. There and gone. I suppose it is no surprise that it was on the plains that I met my wife, my sweetheart rose, Niinimoshenh, kissing cousin, lover girl, the only one I’ll ever call my own. I take no credit for what happened, nor blame, nor do I care what people presently think of me — avoiding my eyes, trying not to step in the tracks I’ve left.

I only want to be with her, or be dead.

You wouldn’t think a man as ordinary as myself could win a woman who turns the heads of others in the streets. Yet there are circumstances and daughters that do prevail and certain ways. And, too, maybe I have some talents.

I WAS SITTING underneath my striped awning there in Elmo — selling carved turtles. You never know what will be the ticket or the score. Sometimes they’re buying baby moccasins, little beaded ones the size of your big toe. Or the fad is cheap neckerchiefs, bolo slides, jingles. I can sell out before noon if I misjudge my stock, while someone else set up next to me who took on a truckload is raking the money in with both hands. At those times, all I can do is watch. But that day, I had the turtles. And those people were crazy for turtles. One lady bought three — a jade, a malachite, a turquoise. One went for seven — small. Another bought the turtle ring. It was the women who bought turtles — the women who bought anything.

I had traded for macaw feathers also, and I got a good price on those. I had a case of beautiful old Navajo pawn which I got blessed, because the people who wore that turquoise seem to haunt the jewelry, so I believe. A piece gets sold on a sad drunk for gas money, or it’s outright stolen — what I mean is that it comes into the hands of traders in bad ways and should be watched close. I have a rare piece I never did sell, an old cast-silver bracelet with a glacier-green turquoise the shape of a wing. I have to tell you, I can hold that piece only a moment, for when I polish the pattern on some days it seems to start in my hands with a secret life, a secret pain.

I am just putting that old piece away when they pass. Four women eating snow cones as they stroll the powwow grounds.

Who wouldn’t notice them? They float above everyone else on springy, tireless legs. It’s hard to tell what tribe people are anymore, we’re so mixed — I’ve got a buffalo soldier in my own blood, I’m sure, and on the other side I am all Ojibwe. Though my name is Klaus, a story in itself. These ladies are definitely not from anywhere that I can place. Their dance clothes are simple — tanned hide dresses, bone jewelry, white doeskin down the front and two white doeskin panels behind. Classy, elegant, they set a new standard of simplicity. They make everyone else around them look gaudy or bold, a little foolish in their attempts to catch the eyes of the judges.

I watch these women put their mouths on ice. They tip their faces down and delicately kiss the frozen grains. As they sip the sweet lime and blueberry juice, their black, melting eyes never leave the crowd, and still they move along. Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us.

I take those women in like air. I breathe hard. My heart is squeezing shut. Something about them is like the bracelets of old turquoise. In spite of the secrets of those stones, there are times that I cannot stop touching and stroking their light. In that same way, I must be near those women and know more. I cannot let them alone. I look at my setup — van, tent, awning, beads, chairs, scarves, jewelry, folding tables, a cashbox, the turtles — and I sit as calmly as I can at my trading booth among these things. I wait. But when they don’t notice me, I decide I must act bold. I trade store-minding with my neighbor, a family from Saskatoon, and then I follow the women.

Tiptoeing just behind at first, then trotting faster, I almost lose them, but I am afraid to get too close and be noticed. They finish circling the arbor, enter during the middle of an intertribal song, and dance out into the circle together. I lean against a pole to watch. Some dancers, you see them sweating, hear their feet pound the sawdust or grass or the Astroturf or gym floor, what have you. Some dancers swelter and their faces darken with the effort. Others, you never understand how they are moving, where it comes from. They’re at one with their effort. Those, you lose your heart to and that’s what happens to me — I sink down on a bench to watch these women and where usually I begin to drift off in my thoughts, this morning I am made of smoothest wood. They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.

Their hair is fixed in different ways. The oldest daughter pulls hers back in a simple braid. The next one ties hers in a fancy woven French knot. The hair of the youngest is fastened into a smooth tail with a round shell hairpiece. Their mother — for I can tell she is their mother mainly by the way she moves with a sense of all their consolidated grace — her hair hangs long and free.

Dark as heaven, with roan highlights and arroyos of brown, waves deep as currents, a river of scented nightfall. In her right hand she holds a fan of the feathers of a red-tailed hawk. Those birds follow the antelope to fall on field mice and gophers the moving herd stirs up. Suddenly, as she raises the fan high, my throat chills. I hear in the distance and in my own mind and heart the high keer of the stooping hawk — a lonely sound, coldhearted, intimate.

BACK AT MY TABLES, later, I place every item enticingly just so. I get provisions of iced tea and soda and I sit down to wait. To scout. Attract, too, if I can manage, but there isn’t much I can do about my looks. I’m broad from sitting in my foldable chair, and too cheerful to be considered dangerously handsome. My hair, I’m proud of that — it’s curly and dark and I wear it in a tail or braid. But my hands are thick and clumsy. Their only exercise is taking in and counting money. My eyes are too lonesome, my lips too eager to stretch and smile, my heart too hot to please.

No matter. The women come walking across the trampled grass and again they never notice me, anyway. They go by the other booths and ponder some tapes and point at beaded belt buckles and Harley T-shirts. They order soft drinks, eat Indian tacos, get huckleberry muffins at a lunch stand. They come by again to stand and watch the Indian gambling, the stick games. They disappear and suddenly appear. The mother is examining her daughter’s foot. Is she hurt? No, it’s just a piece of chewing gum that’s stuck. All day I follow them with my eyes. All day I have no success, but I do decide which one I want.

Some might go for the sprig, the sprout, the lovely offshoot, the younger and flashier, the darker-hooded eyes. Me, I’m strong enough, or so I think, to go for the source: the mother. She is all of them rolled up in one person, I figure. She is the undiluted vision of their separate loveliness. The mother is the one I will try for. As I am falling into sleep I imagine holding her, the delicate power. My eyes shut, but that night I am troubled in my dreams.

I’m running, running, and still must run — I’m jolted awake, breathing hard. The camp is dark. All I’ve got is easily packed and I think maybe I should take the omen. Break camp right this minute. Leave. Go home. Back to the city, Gakaabikaang, where everything is set out clear in lines and neatly labeled, where you can hide from the great sky, forget. I consider it and then I hear the sounds of one lonely passionate stick game song still rising, an old man’s voice pouring out merciless irony, no catch in his throat.

I walk to the edge of the rising moon.

I stand listening to the song until I feel better and am ready to settle myself and rest. Making my way through the sleeping camp, I see the four women walking again — straight past me, very quickly and softly now, laughing. They move like a wave, dressed in pale folds of calico. Their pace quickens, quickens some more. I break into a jog and then I find that I am running after them, at a normal speed at first, and then straining, putting my heart into the chase, my whole body pedaling forward, although they do not seem to have broken into a run themselves. Their supple gait takes them to the edge of the camp, all brush and sage, weeds and grazed-down pastures, and from there to alive hills. A plan forms in my mind. I’ll find their camping place and mark it! Go by with coffees in the morning, take them off guard. But they pass the margin of the camp, the last tent. I pass too. We keep looping into the moonlighted spaces, faster, faster, but it’s no use. They outdistance me. They pass into the darkness, into the night.

My heart is squeezing, racing, crowded with longing, and I need help. It must be near the hour that will gray to dawn. Summer nights in high country are so short that the birds hardly stop singing. Still, at dawn the air goes light and fresh. Now the old man whose high, cracked voice was joyfully gathering in money at the gambling tent finally stops. I know him, Jimmy Badger, or know of him anyway as an old medicine person spoken about with hushed respect. I can tell his side has won, because the others are folding their chairs with clangs and leaving with soft grumbles. Jimmy is leaning on a grandson. The boy supports him as he walks along. Jimmy’s body is twisted with arthritis and age. He’s panting for breath. They pause, I come up to him, shake hands, and tell him I need advice.

He motions to his tired grandson to go to bed. I take the medicine man’s arm and lead him over tough ground to where my van is parked. I pull out a lawn chair, set it up, lower him into it. Reaching into my stores, I find an old-time twist of tobacco, and I give it to him. Then I add some hanks of cut beads and about eight feet of licorice for his grandkids. A blanket, too, I give him that. I take out another blanket and settle it around his back, and I pour a thermos cap of coffee, still warm. He drinks, looking at me with shrewd care. He’s a small man with waiting intrigue in his eyes, and his gambler’s hands are gnarled to clever shapes. He has a poker-playing mouth, a head of handsome iron-gray hair that stretches down behind. He wears a beat-up bead-trimmed fedora with a silver headband and a brand-new denim jacket he’s probably won in the blackjack tents.

I’m an Ojibwe, I say to him, so I don’t know about the plains much. I am more a woods Indian, a city-bred guy. I tell Jimmy Badger that I’ve got a hunting lottery permit and I’m going to get me an antelope. I need some antelope medicine, I say. Their habits confuse me. I need advice on how to catch them. He listens with close attention, then smiles a little crack-toothed pleasant smile.

“You’re talking the old days,” he says. “There’s some who still hunt the antelope, but of course the antelope don’t jump fences. They’re easy to catch now. Just follow until they reach a fence. They don’t jump over high, see, they only know how to jump wide.”

“They’ll get the better of me then,” I say. “I’m going to hunt them in an open spot.”

“Oh, then,” he says. “Then, that’s different.”

At that point, he gets out his pipe, lets me light it, and for a long time after that he sits and smokes.

“See here.” He slowly untwists his crushed body. “The antelope are a curious kind of people. They’ll come to check anything that they don’t understand. You flick a piece of cloth into the air where you’re hiding, a flag. But only every once in a while, not regular. They’re curious, they’ll stop, they’ll notice. Pretty soon they’ll investigate.”

NEXT DAY, THEN, I set up my booth just exactly the same as the day before, except I keep out a piece of sweetheart calico, white with little pink roses. When the women come near, circling the stands again, I flicker the cloth out. Just once. It catches the eye of the youngest and she glances back at me. They pass by. They pass by again. I think I’ve failed. I wave the cloth. The oldest daughter, she turns. She looks at me once over her shoulder for the longest time. I flick the cloth. Her eyes are deep and watchful. Then she leans back, laughing to her mother, and she tugs on her sleeve.

In a flash, they’re with me.

They browse my store. I’m invisible at first, but not for long. Once I get near enough I begin to fence them with my trader’s talk — it’s a thing I’m good at, the chatter that encourages a customer’s interest. My goods are all top-quality. My stories have stories. My beadwork is made by relatives and friends whose tales branch off in an ever more complicated set of barriers. I talk to each of the women, make pleasant comments, set up a series of fences and gates. They’re very modest and polite women, shy, stiff maybe. The girls talk just a little and the mother not at all. When they don’t get a joke they lower their lashes and glance at one another with a secret understanding. When they do laugh they cover their lovely calm mouths with their hands. Their eyes light with wonder when I give them each a few tubes of glittering cut beads, some horn buttons, a round-dance tape.

They try to melt away. I keep talking. I ask them if they’ve eaten, tell them I’ve got food, and show them my stash of baked beans, corn, fry bread, molasses cookies. I make them up heaped plates and I play a little music on the car radio. I keep on talking and smiling and telling my jokes until the girls yawn once. I catch them yawning, and so I open my tent, pitched right near, so nice and inviting. I tell them they are welcome to lie down on the soft heap of blankets and sleeping bags. Their dark eyes flare, they look toward their mother, wary, but I fend off their worry and wave them inside, smiling the trader’s smile.

Alone together. Me and her. Their mother listens to me nice and gentle. I let my look linger just a little, closer, until I find her eyes. And when our eyes do meet, we stare, we stare, we cannot stop looking. Hers are so black, full of steep light and wary. Mine are brown, searching, anxious, I am sure. But we hold on and I can only say that for what happens next I have no adequate excuse.

We get into the van while she is still caught by the talk, the look. I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about, a way that wasn’t the way of the girls’ father. Sure, maybe desperate. Maybe even wrong, but she doesn’t know how to resist. Like I say, I get her in my van. I start to play a soft music she acts like she never heard before. She smiles a little, nervous, and although she doesn’t speak, uses no words anyway, I understand her looks and gestures. I put back the seat so it’s pleasant to recline and watch the dusky sky and then I pamper her.

“You’re tired, sleep,” I say, giving her a cup of hot tea. “Everything’s all right with your daughters. They’ll be fine.”

She sips the tea and looks at me with dreaming apprehension, as though I’m a new thing on earth. Her eyes soften, her lips part. Suddenly, she leans back and falls hard asleep. Something that I forgot to tell — us Anishinaabeg have a few teas we brew for very special occasions. This is one. A sleep tea, a love tea. Oh yes, there’s more. There’s more that Jimmy Badger told me.

“YOU’RE SHIFTY LIKE all those woods Indians,” Jimmy Badger said. “I see that trader’s deception. If you’re thinking about those women, don’t do it,” he said. “Long time ago, we had a girl who lived summers with the antelope. In the winters she brought her human daughters to the camp. They could not keep up with her people as they moved on in the bitter cold, the frozen pastures, scattering across the plains. Don’t go near them if that is what you’re thinking of doing. We had a man who did once. Followed them, wrestled one down. Made love to her and was never the same. Few men can handle their love ways. Besides, they’re ours. We need them and we take care of these women. Descendants.”

“They might be,” I said. “Or they might just be different.”

“Oh, different,” agreed Jimmy. “For sure.”

He looked at me keenly, grabbed me with his eyes, kept talking. His voice was remote and commanding.

“Our old women say they appear and disappear. Some men follow the antelope and lose their minds.”

I was stubborn. “Or maybe they’re just a family that’s a little unusual, or wild.”

“Leave,” said Jimmy Badger. “Leave now.”

BUT IN MY HEART, I knew I was already caught. The best hunter allows his prey to lead, not the other way around. That hunter doesn’t force himself to figure and track, just lets himself be drawn to the meeting. That’s what I did.

Suddenly I have her there with me in the van, and she is fast asleep. I sit and watch her for a long time. I am witched. Her eyelashes are so long that, when the light from the outdoor flood lamps comes on, they cast faint shadows on her cheeks. Her breath has the scent of grass and her hair of sage. I want to kiss her forever. My heart’s a panic on my sleeve.

I drive off. Yes, I do. I drive off with this woman while her daughters are breathing softly, there in the tent, unconscious. I leave the girls all of my trade beads and fancy pawn and jewelry, everything that was stored in the corner of the tent. The miles go by, the roads empty. The Missions rear before us, throwing fire off sheer rock faces. Then we’re past those mountains into more open country. My sweetheart wakes up, confused and tired. I tell her jokes and stories, list for her strange or valuable things people throw away. Trading is my second nature, but garbage supports me. I’m in the waste haul business. Me and my partner, or boss I suppose you’d have to say, contract with the city even, big companies, little ones. I drive through the day. I drive through the night. Only when I am so exhausted that I’m seeing double, do I finally stop.

Bismarck, North Dakota, center of the universe. Locus of space and time for me and my Niinimoshenh. We turn in, take a room at the motel’s end. I lead her in first and I close the door behind and then she turns to me — suddenly, she knows she is caught. Where are my girls? her eyes say, their fear sharp as bone. I want my girls! When she lunges, I’m ready, but she’s so fast I cannot keep her from running at the window, falling back. She twists, strong and lithe, for the door, but I block and try to ease her down. She pounds at me with hard fists and launches straight into the bathroom, pulling down the mirror, breaking a tooth on the tub’s edge.

What can I do? I have those yards of sweetheart calico. I go back. I tear them carefully and with great gentleness I bandage her cuts. I don’t know what else to do — I tie her up. I pull one strip gently through her bleeding mouth. Lastly, I tie our wrists together and then, beside her, in an agony of feeling, I sleep.

I ADORE HER. I’ll do anything for her. Anything except let her go. Once I get her to my city, things are better anyway. She seems to forget her daughters, their wanting eyes, the grand space, the air. And besides, I tell her that we’ll send for her daughters by airplane. They can come and live with me and go to school right here.

She nods, but there is something hopeless in her look. She dials and dials long-distance numbers, there are phone calls all over the whole state of Montana, all of these 406 numbers are on the bill. She never speaks, though sometimes I imagine I hear her whispering. I try the numbers, but every time I dial one that she’s used I get that Indian answering machine — that out-of-service signal. Does she even understand the phone? And anyway, one night she smiles into my face — we’re just the same height. I look deep and full into her eyes. She loves me the way I love her, I can tell. I want to hold her and hold her — for good, for bad. After that, our nights are something I can’t address in the day, as though we’re wearing other bodies, other people’s flaming skins, as though we’re from another time and place. Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.

I get so I don’t want to leave her to go to work. In the morning she sits at her spot before the television, watching in still fascination, jumping a little at the car chases, sympathizing with the love scenes. I catch her looking into the mirror I’ve hung in the living room and she is mimicking the faces of the women on the soap operas, their love looks, their pouting expressions. Their clothes. She opens my wallet, takes all my money. I’d give her anything. “Here,” I say, “take my checkbook too.” But she just throws it on the floor. She leaves off her old skins and buys new, tight and covered with bold designs. She laughs harder, but her laugh is silent, shaking her like a tree in a storm. She drinks wine. In a pair of black jeans in a bar she is approached by men whenever I turn aside, so I don’t turn aside. I stick to her, cleave to her, won’t let her go, and in the nights sometimes I still tie her to me with sweetheart calico.

Weeping, weeping, she cries the whole day away. Sometimes I find her in the corner, drunk, marvelous in frothy negligees, laughing and lip-synching love scenes to the mirror again. I think I’ll find a mind doctor, things cannot go on. She’s crazy. But if they lock her up, they’ll have to lock me up too. She’ll rage at me for days with her eyes, bare her teeth, stamp on my feet with her heeled boot if I get near enough to try for a kiss. Then just as suddenly, she’ll change. She’ll turn herself into the most loving companion. We’ll sit at night watching television, touching our knees together while I check the next day’s schedule. Her eyes speak. Her long complicated looks tell me stories — of the old days, of her people. The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to catch the distance, her sweeping looks say. We live there. We live there in the place where sky meets earth.

I bring her sweet grass, tie it into her hair, and then we make love and we don’t stop until we’re sleeping on each other’s pillows.

Winter, and the daylight dwindles. She starts to eat and eat and puffs up before my eyes, devouring potato chips and drinking wine until I swear at her, say she’s ugly, tell her to get a job, to lose weight, to be the person she was when I first met her. That tooth is still cracked off, and when she smiles her smile is jagged with hatred but her eyes are still dark with love, with amusement. She lifts into the air in a dance and spins, spins away so I can’t catch her and once again she is in my arms and we’re moving, moving together. She’s so fantastically plump I can’t bear it all, her breasts round and pointed, and that night I drown, I go down in the depth of her. I’m lost as I never was and next morning, next afternoon, she drags me back into bed. I can’t stop although I’m exhausted. She keeps on and she keeps on. Day after day. Until I know she is trying to kill me.

That night, while she’s asleep, I sneak into the kitchen. I call Jimmy Badger, get his phone through a series of other people.

“It’s her or me,” I say.

“Well, finally.”

“What should I do?”

“Bring her back to us, you fool.”

HIS WORDS BURN behind my eyes. If you see one you are lost forever. They appear and disappear like shadows on the plains, say the old women. Some men follow them and do not return. Even if you do return, you will never be right in the head. Her daughters are pouting mad. They don’t have much patience, Jimmy says. He keeps talking, talking. They never did, that family. Our luck is changing. Our houses caved in with the winter’s snow and our work is going for grabs. Nobody’s stopping at the gas pump. Bring her back to us! says Jimmy. There’s misery in the air. The fish are mushy inside — some disease. Her girls are mad at us.

Bring her back, you fool!

I’m just a city boy, I answer him, slow, stark, confused. I don’t know what you people do, out there, living on the plains where there are no trees, no woods, no place to hide except the distances. You can see too much.

You fool, bring her back to us!

But how can I? Her lying next to me in deepest night, breathing quiet in love, in trust. Her hand in mine, her wicked hoof.

Chapter 7. The Ojibwe Week

Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad

Klaus lives in exactly half of the bottom floor of a duplex built in 1882 and owned now by his friend and boss, Richard Whiteheart Beads. His main room, once the dining room, has a ripply old window topped with a stained-glass panel. Even though the old window looks directly into the window of a brand-new lower-income housing unit built smack on the property line of Andrew Jackson Street, just off Franklin Avenue, an occasional shaft of morning radiance sometimes stirs in the prisms of glass. When that happens, bands of colored light quiver on the mottled walls. The bed, a savage hummocky mattress laid on top of an even older mattress and box spring, which in turn is nailed right into the floor, sometimes catches the rainbows in its gnarled sheets and blankets. The rainbows move across the bodies of late sleepers. Klaus watches the sheaf of colors waver slowly through Sweetheart Calico’s hair and then across her brow. The rainbow slides down her face, a shimmering veil. When she wakes up, she doesn’t move except to sag with disappointment. Her eyes are dead and sad, killing the rainbow, catching at his heart.

“We are codependent,” he says. “I read it in a newspaper. We are at risk, you and I. Well, you most of all since you are the one tied to the bed.”

A curtain tieback solidly bolted into the wall acts as a hitching post for Sweetheart Calico. A web of makeshift restraints binds her ankles, wrists. There is even a cord around her waist, tied with complicating rosebud cloth and functioning as a sort of sleep sash. Klaus unties her and she rises, naked, yawning. She rubs one ankle with the side of her other foot and stretches her arms. She floats to the bathroom breathing an old tune — she doesn’t talk to Klaus but she’s always whispering songs much older and more powerful than any powwow or sweat-lodge or even sun-dance song he has ever heard. There are flushing sounds, water, a shower. She loves the shower and will stand beneath it smiling for half an hour and would stay longer if Rozin, wife of Richard Whiteheart Beads and monitor of hot water use in this joint living space, didn’t stop her.

“I need some hot water for cleaning,” she calls from the kitchen.

Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Saturday and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.

We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.

SHE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.

At night, she remembers running beside her mother.

Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.

When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.

Anama’e-giizhigad

Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.

“Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?”

“Bug off, asshole.”

“She’s mine,” he says. “Don’t touch her.”

Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that nobody can recall that it was the war to end all wars.

“I’ll be asking the Creator for some assistance,” he says to his father’s pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.

“I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will,” he says between smokes.

The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.

Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgrass love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.

Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father’s sock — all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he’s got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.

“You got a lip line a girl would kill for,” one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father’s lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a red-and-white buckshot bag. He puts the feather back into its fold of cardboard and stashes these sacred items on the highest shelf of the kitchen cabinet. He feels much better. He goes out to talk with Richard Whiteheart Beads. He coughs. A puff of smoke.

“Is that a smoke signal?” Richard says. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?”

“She escaped? That’s good. You can’t just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women’s crisis hotline. I don’t want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?”

Klaus coughs.

“Oh, I got that signal,” Richard says. “Me fucked.”

“That is the problem,” says Klaus. “She has enslaved me with her antelope ways.”

“You one sad mess,” says Richard. “Let her go.”

But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.

Nitam-anokii-giizhigad

First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.

Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from shit to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard’s fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it’s way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.

Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard — white squares and red squares — denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus’s foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an assumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.

“They won’t mind. They won’t even notice. They never go out to the barn.”

“You sure?” asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus’s bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet scraps.

We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.

For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.

Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there’d be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.

Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.

Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays to Klaus.

Even if this land is owned by Norwegians it is still Mother Earth, thinks Klaus. Nookomis, please forgive me. I am sorry. I am doing a very tidy job of hurting you, if that makes a difference.

He takes his gloves off and says that a beer would go down good.

“Let’s hit a bar on the way home,” says Richard. And so they do. And they are finished with Nitam-anokii-giizhigad.

Niizho-giizhigad

Life is hell without her tied up next to me. Klaus mourns all night and dismally wakes on the Second Work Day. All the Ojibwe do is work, you would think. Work and pray. Again the carpet ripping and the fetid stink of concrete underneath and again the thoughtful cerebral work of stacking in the barn. Stacking for the future so that the two can climb onto the neat floor from the stairs up to the hay loft and not die in a carpet quake or be swallowed up in a carpet-roll crevasse.

Sweetheart Calico, Sweetheart Calico. My bitter black heart is bursting open. Klaus whispers. His chest still hurts from the intense smoke-praying that he did two days before and from all the secular inhalations in the days since. There’s been no clue, no lead, no sighting of the woman he kidnapped — no, she went willingly, didn’t she? It’s all unclear. He put her in his van at the powwow and took her home and got addicted to her.

Your sex love should be declared a controlled substance, he thinks now. I am experiencing severe withdrawal. He shakes as he stuffs ripped carpet down the seams of the next layer of carpet-roll floor. He should not have done what he did — stolen her, gotten her drunk, loved her, tied her up — except she asked for it with her eyes. Which Rozin will tell him should get him ten to twenty years in Stillwater Pen.

“She never asked for nothing with her eyes,” Rozin says when she finds Klaus’s sweetheart. “Except for you to let her go. You compartmentalized. You put your mental processes in only part of your brain so you can enjoy yourself. Even when what you are doing is a crime.”

“But she tied me up, too,” says Klaus. “She tied me up with those same ropes.”

“And left you there, right?”

“Yes,” says Klaus in a small voice. “I thought something else was going to happen that time. She came back though of her own free will because she loves me.”

“She came back because she has nowhere to go. Where did you steal her from? Where are her people?”

“They are nomadic.”

“Tell that to the cops.”

“They roam Montana,” says Klaus.

Out where the barns are filled with hay, not carpet. Though he knows from the great rolls of carpet glued to floors of acres of malls all through Montana that this is not true and conceivably there could even be two Indians like Klaus and Richard out there disposing of old carpet on their own federal trust land where special rules apply.

Aabitoose

Halfway. How is it that with all the lovely names for the months and seasons and the lyrical possibilities in the origins of this most extraordinary language, the best that can be done for Wednesday is Halfway? To where? To the end of the week or to the day of fun where we wash the floors? Aabitoose is the day Rozin goes to the bakery owned by her cousin Frank. Frank’s Bakery is a real old-fashioned independent little bakery, the kind there used to be, with hand-fried doughnuts — not donuts — the ugh makes them Indian and heavier. Rozin goes to the bakery after the girls are on the school bus because she needs a coffee lift before her second job. There is also Frank himself, who has a crush on her. She likes pretending that his flirting annoys her. She doesn’t go because she wants to find Klaus’s girlfriend, whom he claims in his emotional confusion is part antelope.

But there she is. A dog lolls next to her.

Sweetheart Calico and the dog sit side by side on the curb just outside the shop. A car could run right over Sweetheart’s tiny feet. The dog is gray, shaggy like a coyote, nondescript. Sweetheart Calico is arrestingly graceful, but tired. She is a tired, tired woman with tangled hair, wearing a huge pair of jeans belonging to Klaus Shawano and a shirt that could belong to anybody in the neighborhood as it is a huge black T-shirt with an airbrushed buffalo stampeding away from an American flag and through a hoop of fire with an eagle screaming at its shoulder and beneath its hooves a wolf and bear also running for their lives and all of the animals surrounded by thunder and lightning. You see that exact T-shirt on every other person on the street but this particular shirt belongs to Klaus.

“Oh, my god, here you are. Are you all right, Sweetheart? Come and have a coffee with me.”

Sweetheart Calico holds in her hands a fragrant, tawny, puffed-up ball of dough with a saddle of lemon jelly that quivers when she takes a bite. She throws half the pastry to the dog, who snarfs it midair. Mouth full, she follows Rozin into the bakery, where there are three tables with two chairs each that fit right against the window. Frank has a Bunn coffeemaker — just decent old-fashioned coffee — one dollar a large mug or free with any pastry.

“You forgot your free coffee,” he says now to Sweetheart Calico, though he gave her the pastry too, free, and now gives her another lemon jelly doughnut.

The dog waits alertly right outside the door. Frank just smiles because all of the awkward semisuggestive lines about fresh buns and long johns were used up long ago.

“Niinimoshenh, what can I get for you?”

Rozin ignores that word, which means my sweetheart but which can also mean my sex-eligible cousin. She examines the trays of chocolate éclairs, bismarcks, long johns — no scones or lumpy vegan muffins here. She buys a cup of coffee and selects a loaf of bread. Gives it to Frank for slicing.

Rozin and Sweetheart Calico sit down with their coffees at a table in the sun of the window.

“Are you okay? Why did you run away from Klaus? Is that sucker mean to you?”

Sweetheart Calico shrugs and licks sugar off her fingers. I am lost, her look says. I don’t know how I got here.

She stuffs the jelly doughnut into her mouth. The lemon filling has real lemon in it, sweet and tart.

“Do you want to come home with me? I’ll let you in downstairs. You can sleep. You can shower.”

Sweetheart Calico glances out the window at the dog. Rozin makes a face. “Okay, it can come too.”

Frank gathers the slices from the machine into a tight transparent bag. He walks over to them holding out the loaf, so fresh it sags between his hands like an accordion.

HALFWAY DAY. If it was All the Way Day things might have gone much differently. But Rozin walks only halfway into the downstairs apartment. The dog, too, halfway in. Then it settles on the floor. Sweetheart Calico is halfway glad to get home. The twins, Cally and Deanna, do halfway well at school and make it halfway home on the bus before they sort of fight and pretty much make up. Rozin halfway wants to quit work as usual, but does not. Klaus and Richard work hard and the barn is half full when they leave. Unfortunately at home the meat is halfway cooked because the electricity has gone out and the crock-pot is cold when Rozin touches it. Then Richard and Klaus are cleaning up at the same time and you can hear them yell halfway through their showers when cold water hits their skin.

Later, Rozin is halfway through with sex with Richard when she thinks of Frank Shawano holding that bread. She tries to push the picture out of her mind. What’s he doing there? Get away, she thinks. No, come back. The picture makes her feel something she was not feeling before. Richard has been drinking with Klaus after work but he is not even halfway drunk. He has been patient about the half-cooked meat. He has listened with half an ear to all that his daughters did during the day. So Rozin should be at least halfway into sex, which is all it really takes to satisfy Richard. But she isn’t. She is somewhere else. Afterward she turns away with the sudden feeling that her heart is breaking right in… not half — it is shattering into golden infinitesimal fragments. It is bursting and the grains are flying fast against the sun. Her heart is pollen glinting on the wind. No, it is flour, blowing toward Frank’s bakeshop wanting to get mixed into his batter with eggs and sugar and formed into a doughnut. Her heart travels faster and faster, toward Frank’s deep fryer, and all the time Richard thinks she is asleep, weighted firmly in the dark that will become tomorrow.

Niiwo-giizhigad

Pragmatical disappointment! Day Four. And so many other choices for this poetic day — a day near the freedom of the weekend yet not the frantic rush to get your work done… not yet. A day that can almost stand by itself because of its special ceremonial associations in Ojibwe teachings. Anyway, Day Four. Day of new existence. Day of anything can happen. Day of pollen on the wind. Day of Klaus half awake tied to his own bed by Sweetheart Calico and thinking in his dream that he hears the clatter of her hooves as she runs wildly back and forth bashing into unfamiliar walls and believing that when he opens his eyes his sheets will be covered with her inky cloven erotic tracks.

Actually, she is outside playing with her new dog. Well, not new. That dog is definitely secondhand, thinks Klaus. It is a used dog, a thrift dog, at best a dollar-store animal with its skinny legs, big belly, scraggy pedigreeless fur. And its head is way big for the rest of it, like a sample fur toy that was never mass-produced but thrown into a discount bin.

I don’t like that dog, he thinks. There is definitely something sinister about its big, round, grinning head.

And it growled when he took the rope out last night.

Forget about locking me in the bathroom, its look said. I’ll shit on the floor.

Then it growled worse and worse until he handed the rope to Sweetheart Calico.

AT LEAST DAY FOUR is about four, the number that the Ojibwe love best of all. Every good and sustaining thing comes in fours — seasons, directions, types of people, medicines, elements. There are four layers of the earth, four layers of the sky, four push-ups to a song, four honor beats, four pauses of the great megis on the way to Gakaabikaang and hereabouts. So why shouldn’t today, which partakes of that exquisite number, be an extremely lucky day, thinks Klaus, eyes still shut, although I can feel the cords that bind my wrists and ankles tightly and I remember somewhere in the night that she wrapped her long tense legs around my body and used special antelope knots on me.

“Oh no,” Klaus speaks but still doesn’t open his eyes. He tries to move but can’t. He whispers, “Sweetheart? Are you there?”

DAY FOUR BEGAN so well for Cally and Deanna. Instead of iron-fortified and vitamin-enriched sugarless multigrain cereal flakes, instead of the stinky-boy cackling bus, their mom brings them to the bakery for anything they want and drives them to school in her car. And says, glowing happily, “Girls, we should do this more often!”

Blood sugar peaking from the cracked glaze on the doughnuts and the éclair custard, both of them swear thrillingly that they will become A+ not B- students if this regimen is followed by their mother. Twinklingly, she laughs. They stand on the sidewalk in front of the bank of school entryway doors, waving until her car is down the street.

They look at each other and both say at once, “Is Mom okay?” Then they say in unison, “Get out of my head.” They scream with laughter and walk to the doors doubled over. When the sugar wears off and smacks them to the harsh floor of the gym at 9:00 a.m. and they profess to be ill, both are sent to the school nurse, who takes their temperatures with fever strips and gives them each a plastic cup of high-fructose-enhanced orange juice. Jacked up for another few hours, they return to class and do a prodigious pile of pre-algebra equations, which they both love. An affinity for numbers! They were born on the fourth day of the fourth month, at 4:00 and 4:04. So no wonder they are not to be mistaken for ordinary twins at all. They are mystic twins, like the twins who created the world. Only those first twins inarguably messed it up and if Cally and Deanna had a chance they would make the world properly. In fact, they make the world up all of the time. It is their favorite thing to do when they get home from school.

Cally and Deana start to draw the world after school on Niiwo-giizhigad, but the dog brought home by Sweetheart Calico interrupts. It barks as it chases Sweetheart Calico around and around in the weedy yard. The antelope woman laughs silently as she leaps on high heels, evading its teeth and paws. The dog jumps and twists in the air looking like a big gray wind-tossed rag. It isn’t a very good-looking dog. Couldn’t be called any one particular breed of dog. Yet a sympathy for humans shines out of its eyes and the girls fall instantly in love, not knowing that this very dog is the fourth dog of the fourth litter of the forty-fourth daughter of the dog named Sorrow.

They join in running and playing tag with the dog and with the woman whose great-grandmother on her human side slit the throat of that ancestor dog and boiled its meat so that her daughter would have the strength to travel into the blue west, wearing the same blue beads that Sweetheart Calico hides now as she leaps away from the dog, laughing that wild and silent laugh. She screams noiselessly, even as poor Klaus, whom she has freed to go to work that morning, creeps into the apartment and showers off the greasy grit of random Minneapolis citizens whose shoes mashed every form of personal grunge into the mall carpeting and transferred that human scurf to Klaus, so that he’s covered utterly with the invisible populace — including refugees from every tribal and oil war in the world. And it won’t wash away. Twin Cities people have entered his very pores and he has breathed them in also, so that Klaus is now inhabited by the world’s thousands. Dead and living. Brand-new and ancient. Bargain-hunting ghosts inhabit Klaus on Day Four of the week as Rozin too returns from her work and says, what the hell is going on it this madhouse but wearily smiles as her daughters are whirling and chasing and full of life and if Rozin half closes her eyes and watches them through the blur of eyelashes, she sees the inutterable grace of antelope children galloping midair.

Naano-giizhigad

Oh please, you wouldn’t name this day sacred to the now Ojibwe workplace just… Day Five. There are so many other good names for this almost-there day when you wake and think, Tomorrow I can sleep. The morning will bring the rainbows on again like the week before and Klaus can watch them cross the elegant wild structure of her face. Tomorrow for Cally and Deanna there will be drawing and a dog to play with and no more teacher’s dirty looks or locker-slamming-on-your-fingers boys who suck dead rats and pretend that Cally and Deanna are Chinese or Hmong or Mexican and sneer, go back where you came from.

“That’s just boys,” says Rozin. “Go back where you came from! How can you say that to a Native person?”

“I’ll fix ’em. I’ll go right in there,” says Richard.

But here it is Day Five and he and Klaus must pull up the last of the carpet.

“Go then,” says Rozin.

The girls watch for a kiss between them but are disappointed. They have noticed that their mother likes to talk to Frank at the bakery and that their father’s eyes follow Sweetheart Calico even though she is the girlfriend of Klaus. And all of these grown-up doings make them sick, sick, sick. They’d rather make the world over in girl image. The world would be only girls and animals and no boys or disappointing grown-ups except perhaps their mother visits bringing favorite food once every two weeks and long hugs but I could last a month, says Cally.

“Nobody mean can live on our planet,” says Deanna.

“And the dog will be our brother.”

“We won’t take husbands.”

“Obviously.”

WHY CAN’T THIS be the day of the otter, the kingfisher, the coot, the loon, the balsam tree, the moccasin flower, or the trout? The Ojibwe words for all of these lovely animals and plants are original and fluid words but in all probability some lackluster hard-assed missionary Jesuit like maybe Bishop Baraga the famous Snowshoe Priest put those names down in his Ojibwe dictionary in the hope of making the Ojibwe people into hard-assed lackluster people like him by forcing them to live every day of their lives working or praying or halfway to nowhere. Many days of the week in English go back to various ancient pagan gods (Thor’s Day, Frigga’s day, Saturn’s Day, etc.). Naano-giizhigad would be so much better as Nanabozhoo-giizhigad. As Nanabozhoo was a great teacher who taught lessons via foul hilarity and amoral idiocy, so the day could celebrate and commemorate the great lessons learned from fools like Klaus.

For he knows he is a major doof to work for Richard on this scam, which becomes every day more deadly and strange as the carpet mounts in the barn and the checks get written out and Richard signs his name on government paperwork.

“That’s government paperwork,” Klaus notices.

Richard winks a movie-star wink, an old-time black-and-white-movie lip-hanging-cigarette wink. Thank god it’s Naano-giizhigad and they can get the hell out of the barn before the ghost carpet swallows them.

“It’s all over, my friend,” says Richard. “Let us cash these obscenely fat checks and treat our wives to a fancy dinner.”

“My lady don’t sit still,” says Klaus. “She likes to take long walks. We buy food on the way. We keep walking.”

“C’mon, say it, Klaus. She likes to graze.”

“Shut up,” says Klaus.

“You should bring her back to where you got her. She’s trouble. She’s a goddamn ungulate.”

“I know,” says Klaus. “But I can’t let go.”

Neither of them remarks on Richard’s use of a high school vocabulary word, which he has carefully saved up until this moment. He had also saved what he thinks is a Zen saying.

“You can hold more water in an open hand than in a closed fist,” says Richard.

“That’s ridiculous,” says Klaus. “You can hold the neck of a bottle in your closed fist.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. You’re not tying her up anymore. ..”

“No, she’s got a dog now and it bites.”

“Well, okay.”

“Now she’s the one who ties me up.”

“I don’t think I’d like that,” says Richard.

“It’s pretty good though,” says Klaus. “Except when she runs away and leaves me there.”

They drive up to the divided house built twenty years after the murderous year when the starving Dakota were told that their dying children should eat grass and some lost patience with the settlement of their homeland by people who hated their guts and so killed some and were killed worse in return and their leaders hung and the rest driven out and the women and children hunted down and kept in a concentration camp which was the same Fort Snelling Scranton Roy started out from at the beginning of this book. The house now inhabited by the Whiteheart Beads and Roys and one antelope woman and a dog was built by another soldier who’d come home from the Civil War with a sickened heart that he could numb only by pounding nail after nail. Pain made the house solid. Klaus and Richard park the car on the beaten-down part of the yard that has become the driveway. Cally and Deanna, looking out of their window, watch them remove a case of beer each from the trunk.

“Let’s leave them out of our world,” they say in unison. “Jinx!”

They slap hands, spin hands, rap their hands up and down, and ruffle the air four times to seal in the luck of words spoken together. Rozin walks out the door and says to Richard, “Watch the girls. I have to go buy a loaf of bread.” The descendant of Sorrow slides along the foundation to the alley dense with buckthorn and mulberry. The dog ambles close to and settles down by Sweetheart Calico, who stands very still in the leaves, believing she is invisible.

Chapter 8. Why I Am No Longer Friends with Whiteheart Beads

KLAUS

When people ask me why I am no longer friends with Whiteheart Beads, I hedge around and come up with a neutral type of explanation. I say something innocuous, to keep things going on the surface. I have to do that. The reason is I’m afraid. My fear is this — if I ever begin to tell the story it will all flood out of me. It will be gone, unfixed, into the mouths of others. I’m afraid the story might stop being mine. Which would be dangerous. I rely on the story, you see. I keep it inside me because without it I might forget or dismiss the reason I no longer trust him. And once I did that, there is no telling what could happen.

Richard Whiteheart Beads, I’ve thought so often, foe or friend? I decided on the first because he cost me everything I had. I did manage to keep my life, but aside from that — my clothes, my savings, and even, yes, my wife, Sweetheart Calico. My Antelope Girl. Gone. Due to Whiteheart.

Now you’ll say to yourself there is no human on this earth with power of that magnitude. None. You wouldn’t believe it surely if you did meet him. He has a handsome, bland, forgettable face. Forgettable unless of course he has ripped out your heart. So me, I remember his face just fine.

SOME THINGS HAPPEN easy, and you feel like they were meant to be. And some things, oh god, they come so hard. The party we attended together, put on by the regional waste collection association, that was the easy part that led to the impossible.

I am standing before the salads and cheeses and deli meat with Richard Whiteheart Beads. We start loading our plates. While we are selecting food, he tells me about yet a newer truck he is thinking of buying — he’s always thinking of what he can acquire. This truck, it is just another example of Whiteheart’s imaginary surround. I know that. But I listen as though I believe in its pinstripes and refurbished engine, its Thirstbuster cup holders.

“Wish I could get an automatic sunroof, too,” Whiteheart Beads is saying. “Then you could travel with the wind in your hair.”

“What hair?”

I’m an Indian with a buzz cut now. I got it when she left the first time. I cut my hair for sorrow. She left again. More sorrow. And again. Yet shorter. Anyway, now that she’s back my hair says to her, I hope, what I have reformed myself to believe. Plain living. Hard work. The simple life, unadorned, ridding the world of waste. “People You Can Count On.” My new motto in garbage management. My belief.

“You should grow it out again. Long. Women love it.”

Whiteheart Beads is referring to his own ponytail, a serious thick rope reaching halfway down his suit-jacket back. We, the two of us, present a very different image and I must admit that his is probably the more selling look in terms of women. And for sure, since from our association raffle he has won two Appreciation Top Prize all-expense-paid tickets to Maui, a fact revealed shortly after the soda pop stops flowing at this lunch, his ponytail might bring good luck.

We mill around. We eat more. Used to be us Indians had nothing to throw away — we used it all up to the last scrap. Now we have a lot of casino trash, of course, and used diapers, disposable and yet eternal, like the rest of the country. Keep this up and we’ll all one day be a landfill of diapers, living as adults right on top of our own baby shit. Makes sense to me. Of course, our main business is that we deal with EPA staff. Richard aims to be the first Native-owned waste disposal company in the whole U.S. He’s already proud of it. Proud of our imaginary management expertise and good old-fashioned ability to haul shit. Not to mention stabilize it. Let’s not talk about carpet.

A cake is wheeled in and it is shaped like a collection vehicle with bright colors of thick frosting, the lard and sugar kind, heart-stopping artery paste.

“You want ’em?”

Whiteheart holds the tickets out casually in the lucky presentation envelope. I take the envelope: pictures of windsurfing Barbies and Kens, a couple of sea turtles winging through the gloom. Native Hawaiians dressed in flowers, holding torches, paddling a huge wooden canoe.

“Right,” I say, reluctant to hand the envelope back. I notice it’s not transferable, his name is filled in the blanks.

Whiteheart waves his hands at me, fanning out his fingers.

“Keep ’em. Keep. My wedding present.”

“Wedding?” My heart jumps.

“Or pretend wedding honeymoon only. It’s up to you.”

Whiteheart looks at me and shrugs, very modest, as though any gratitude will just embarrass him, as though it makes him very nervous, which I notice he has been all along, that day, through the cheese and crackers, fruit, cold meats, the cake. He’s been looking over his shoulder, staring into corners, behaving in this distracted and jumpy fashion I know so well. Woman trouble.

“Whiteheart, Whiteheart my friend.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Who is she? You can tell me.”

His smile snaps across his face like a banner pulled tight.

“Not a woman. Not a woman. You take those tickets, Klaus. You can borrow my ID. You have a good time — hey, I mean it.”

Then, with surprisingly little fuss or bother, Whiteheart exits through a side door, disappears almost. Unlike him until the eleventh hour.

NEXT THING I KNOW, my sweetheart and me are getting ready for the trip. Maui. Glorious. Tropical. Hotel on the beach. We decide to go immediately in case Whiteheart’s mind changes or he comes along, a thing he is fond of doing on our dates. I was always the one who minded those lopsided occasions worse than Sweetheart. I think back on that now. I should have known from the beginning, but love blinded me the way it does. She probably would have rather been with Whiteheart even then! But no, no. Don’t get ahead of the next event.

It all happens bang right out of the gates. These guys. Two guys at the airport looking us over in that special way I am familiar with from getting kicked out of the army. Big guys. In suits. Four words to cause concern. Big guys in suits. I’ll never look at life the same.

We check in.

Apparently there is some sort of seating arrangement that goes with these tickets, and it involves my wife and I split up in separate seats. Not only that, but the middle row seats.

“Hey, this can’t be right. We’re together, on our honeymoon,” I tell the check-in personnel — exotic-looking woman, nails to here.

She chews her lip and fiddles with the keyboard, scowls at what blips up on the screen, and then looks at us with a blank, closed expression. Lots of purple eye shadow.

“I can’t do a thing about it.” Her declaration is such that I don’t even think to argue. She stamps our tickets, asks us if anyone had given us anything to carry on board the plane, waves us on.

“We’ll switch once we’re on the plane,” I say to my lady love, reassuring her. “Someone will be glad to change places with a couple newlyweds.”

I like your faith in human nature, her look tells me. I am proud of her pessimism, read it as an answer. And she is right about those guys. One of them sits next to each of us. I ask, politely, lying. “We’re newlyweds. Our seats got screwed up. Would one of you fellows mind switching?”

Like asking a favor of a set of bowling balls. These guys are muscle-bound and thick of neck, ponytailed like Whiteheart. One with a gold ring in the chunky lobe of his ear. The seatmate I address is the color of a Hereford, too, reddish and whitish. Dull eyes of a slab of meat. And you know what it’s like in the middle seat of an airplane anyway, that stuffed-in-a-cat-carrier feeling, claustrophobic. I am directly behind my love and to take my mind off my panic, I watch with longing the only part of her that I can see — top of her head and dark hair ponytailed in something I’ve heard called a scrunchie, a purple satin cloth band thing that bobs and slides up and down as she nervously mimics the flight attendant’s demonstration.

It concerns me, her sitting next to that guy.

Quite apart from the weirdness in the first place, she’s that sort of taut-bodied, fine-boned woman who arouses instant lust. From the back, especially, one of her most attractive angles. She has a sloping deer-haunch bottom. I am glad it is pressed against the seat. Her mouth now that her tooth is broken always looks as though she’s just bit into a sweet tart candy, pursed together like her scrunchie. When she smiles, though, it looks real witchy. I find her broken tooth something to adore, though I admit it is not to every man’s taste. Anyway, what I’m trying to say, politely, is that her front side, grinning, though lovely to me, is not her most attractive to the less discerning. I hoped she wouldn’t have to rise, say, to visit the bathroom, putting that lovely rear of hers within a handsbreadth of that ape.

No chance of that, I later find.

I was in perfect agony, she communicates, slumping against me once we have deplaned, and do you think they would so much as let me stir? Pretended to speak another sign language, or not understand me. I ended up pointing you know where and hissing. I wince. They didn’t get it. She shrugs. Pretended not to. What’s going on?

This is at the car rental place, in Maui herself, where we find ourselves waiting a mere ten hours after boarding that plane. We are standing in the patient headlights of those guys in suits.

“Something odd about those guys,” I mutter, tired, fed by a prescient insight. “Something that has to do with Whiteheart.”

Sweetheart always perks up when his name drops from my lips. She peers at me now through her tattered hair. Whiteheart. These burly types in suits. I keep not getting it even as we drive through the booming night air, light and sugary, blowing a pale salt through the windows of the car. They are going along the same road, it appears. I still don’t get it when they make the turnoff, directly behind us. When they park, next space. When they emerge just as we do and form an escort phalanx around us like Roman guards. Then, as we march into the huge waterfall-running Bird of Paradise lounge and check-in desk, I do get it. They’re going to kill us. They’re assassins.

ONCE I UNDERSTAND THAT, I’m okay. My mind is clear.

The hallways of this big elaborate jungle hotel lobby contrast with the long white light tunnels to the stacks of rooms. Walking toward our number we are of course accompanied off the elevator by the big guys in suits, whom I am tired of seeing at every turn. So tired of it all, in fact, so clear in my read, that without thinking or caring about the consequences I confront them.

I whirl, annoyed to the point where I do not have fear. I face them with stony resistance. They sweep right past, whereas I thought they’d halt, we’d speak, have words. No words. At least an exchange where I could ask who on earth they thought I was — a man worth pursuing and killing? How come?

“Hey”—I take on the smaller, bullnecked one—“what’s the rush?”

Both stop and look, eyes like marbles.

“You’re sent to kill, I know,” I say, amiable. “Obvious. So why not enjoy yourself first?”

“We’re not here to hurt you,” says the shorter one after a pause. “It’s nothing like that.”

The bigger one laughs. “Worse.”

My heart thumps. My voice comes out scratchy and small.

“IRS?”

“Not exactly. We’re here because of dumping practices. You’re part of a major sweep. It’s okay to tell you, we just got the word.”

“Might as well do the honors,” says the big guy.

“You’re under arrest.” It is the smaller one who shows his badge.

“You have to say his name,” the larger guy prompts, underneath his breath.

“Oh yeah,” says the newer cop, officer, whatever.

“Whiteheart. Richard Whiteheart.”

“Beads.”

“No! I’m not him!” A sudden wave of relief gushes through me. I start to laugh, to explain. “He gave these tickets to me for my honeymoon. He sent us here, made us a gift, changed our lives.”

“Oh, right.” They both grin little tight shark smiles and remind me that I’m on an island. We’ll leave in the morning. They’ll accompany me to the airport.

“Really, though. I’m not Whiteheart. Look.”

I take out my wallet, open it, slip my license from the interior of its pocket, and to my complete sincere suddenly remembering shock I find that I am carrying the ID pictures of Whiteheart — he gave them to me, of course, to present for the tickets. We look enough alike, I guess, being both the real thing Anishinaabe men.

“Wait,” I say, digging for the real me, which I can’t find. Where is it and where am I and worst of all who?

SO THAT IS ABOUT the extent of our honeymoon, me and Sweetheart. I decide, since we’ve got one night in paradise, to make the most of it. I purchase my babe mai tais in a big plastic cup. We go down in the elevator to the tile whirlpool hot tub, a hidden glade unit surrounded by flowers. Of course, the big guys follow.

We get in, her and me. She’s wearing a suit covered with blue hibiscus flowers. Something I bought her back in Gakaabikaang. And oh man, but is it ever good, this whirlpool bath of heat and chlorine. The hot jets rumble up and down my spine and the presence of my lady is all but too much for me. I’ll never forget this, never, I think, her face in the rushing blue lights. Her hair in smooth snakes and curlicues floating and drifting on the surface of the medicinal waters. The booze, which I suck down in order to enjoy the present moment, disremember the past, meet the stupid future, both knocks me down and buoys me up. The night progresses and the heat intensifies. Of course, there is a certain restraining factor in the presence of the gorilla.

“You have to sit there in that suit?” I say at last to the big boy in the shadows. “How come you don’t just hop in here?”

“Yeah, wish I could.”

“Why don’t you guys pretend not to catch me for a while and stay here, I mean, hang out and absorb some rays. Snorkel. Beachcomb. Hot tub. Swim.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he says, but in a wistful tone.

MY DEAR ONE and me stay up all night, and I tell you it is a night to remember. A night I won’t forget. Sensations abound that haunt me even now in the underpasses and the park undergrowth and old abandoned boat shacks of Gakaabikaang. There is something very pure and old that happens when we’re on, together, moving like we’re running over distances, floating like swift clouds. The next morning, breakfast, and by nine o’clock we’re hustled off. We’re boarding. We’re gone. It’s like we dreamed the night. I can’t tell you with what a sense of desolation and purpose I look down on that green beauty and blue sea from on high.

Maybe I know then, and maybe I’m just starting to understand, that life will always be like this around Richard Whiteheart. One minute high in Maui and the next minute yanked from bliss. I’m heading back now to tell my story before the judge, and I don’t even know what my story is, though I’m certain it involves waste carpet. I decide, right then, as we pass into a cloud, whatever else happens I won’t take the blame I can sense waiting at the terminal. No, that will be Richard. I won’t pay. Will not be held responsible. I’ll rat. I’ll speak. Things get dumped, terrible poisons in deep old wells. Or barns. Nothing’s endless, though. Every place has limits. And everybody.

Chapter 9. The Deer Husband

The Autumn Rose Dress

The air is pink and golden, smelling of fresh rain. The girls’ canvas high-top shoes soak through as they run over wet grass to the time tunnels, the monkey bars, the fenced plain of deer. Early fall. The late roses are blooming, their petals flimsy, trembling, floppy silk and tight furled centers. They see a woman in an autumn rose dress just like their mother’s. She is walking across the rose garden with a man. With Frank, of course. The girls see that the woman is their mother. Rozin. They are with their father, Richard, because he has been bullied into taking them somewhere, anywhere. They grab him by the wrist, bring him to the rose beds. They point across the grass to make him understand that it is Rozin. He returns their excitement with a calm gaze, chin tipped down. His eyes clouded and hard.

“No, that isn’t her.”

“Look!” The girls pull on his sleeves.

“No”—he speaks indifferently—“that isn’t your mother. I know she looks like your mother.”

“She is! She does!”

“I know she does.”

“But Daddy”—they are together in this now, persuading him—“she has the same dress.”

“A lot of women bought that same dress.” He speaks with deliberate and now forceful gravity. “Like I said, that’s not her.”

It is only when the two walking people get close enough for the girls to clearly see her face, laughter fading in their mouths, that they decide, as she bends to the other man, touching his chest with the flat of her hand, that their father is right. They are looking at some other woman whose face, alight and radiant and still with anticipation, they have never seen before.

CALLY AND DEANNA turn away from their father and away from that woman who looks like their mother. They begin to slap each other’s hands in a complex, nimble patty-cake.

I don’t wanna go to Hollywood

No more, more, more.

There’s a big fat Michael Jackson

At my door, door, door.

He grabbed me by the hips

And made me kiss his lips.

I don’t wanna go to Hollywood

No more, more, more.

Shame on you!

Then they laugh hysterically and do the rhyme over and over all the way home and keep it up until Richard thinks he’ll lose his mind.

Love and Relocation

Get them off that land! Away from one another. Split apart those families just getting to know one another after boarding school. Relocation is the main reason fewer Indians now live on reservations than in cities — like Klaus, like his cousin Frank, like Rozin, and like Richard Whiteheart Beads, whose mind is a bright rubber-band ball twisted of bewildered jealousy.

He keeps taking the colored bands off the ball, his emotions, and shooting them into space. Green fury, white disbelief, yellow hurt, purple rage, brown embarrassment. Also, he gets served with papers. Right after he returns from the park, two men come into the yard. The dog doesn’t even bark. It only laughs. The men are there to serve him with papers. Not divorce papers, yet at least! These papers are a court summons. If he does not appear in court he will be arrested. The legal paper servers wear gray suits. They always wear gray suits. No ties. Maybe they think the person who accepts the papers will reach out and grab them by the tie. Do they carry mace? Do they carry weapons? Do they carry tissues or handkerchiefs for people to cry into?

I won’t do any of those things, thinks Richard as he takes the papers. They needn’t fear me. But maybe Klaus should!

“Klaus!”

“Yes, I told them.”

Klaus gave Richard up. Just like that. He told the men, whom he said were big and scary and wore black suits, where Richard lived. Klaus cracked. Klaus squealed: Richard lives on Andrew Jackson Street in Minneapolis. It doesn’t matter, though. Klaus is up to his neck. Implicated. Richard reads the papers, then he sits down on the front step and begins to chain-smoke. No matter whether he goes to court or whether he is arrested he will be served with divorce papers. No, he decides. From all papers, he will flee. Damn Relocation! None of this would have happened without the proximity of all those many acres of carpet, which could only be so proximate in the city, which is why Relocation sucks so bad, thinks Richard. If I had been educated on my home reservation and lived with my family and received instruction in our traditional ways, I would have probably been a medicine man.

Whiteheart Beads, Medicine Man

Richard keeps thinking about the future that he might have had but for government programs. The War Department program for Indian eradication in the beginning, then treaty-making or removal. If his reservation had not been clipped back severely his family would have had more land, perhaps enough to live on and farm. Then every kind of sickness. If the few left had not had their children forcibly removed and shipped off to boarding schools where they either died of fresh diseases or died of loneliness or survived and got drunk and run over in the road… then… And if the few left after that hadn’t sold their land during the allotment years and become completely homeless and got tuberculosis sleeping on the ground, then…

If my ancestors had not got so sick from sleeping underneath that grand piano, maybe I would still have deposited toxic carpet in that barn, thinks Richard. Or maybe I would have healed people with my ceremonial knowledge.

He visualizes himself in his natural state. Not naked. He is wearing a loincloth. One of nicely tanned buckskin that his woman has chewed until soft. Sad. Her teeth are all worn down. His imaginary loincloth is smooth as silk from all of Rozin’s chewing. He laughs and cracks a beer. Early in the day to drink, but he’s been served with papers, is no medicine man, so needn’t stand on ceremony.

Did a man just dangle under that loincloth, he wonders, or was there some sort of diaper arrangement? A ball band, he decides. There had to have been a soft buckskin jockstrap underneath the loincloth. He sees his flowing braids, his stomach hard as a pine board, his biceps tough and stringy. Racing around curing people keeps him in shape. He is a shaman. Not a sham man, as Klaus always calls them, but the kind of shaman white people search the Internet for now and, when they find one, worship.

WHEN ROZIN COMES home later on, after the girls have seen her in the park, she doesn’t show that face with the beauty and ecstasy painted across her features. She is the very same mother as before. Calmer. Irritable. But in the old familiar ways. But then she drives off with their father and they stay away for the weekend. The girls can tell that something has happened that is not love, not getting back together. It is some sort of panic over looking happy with Frank for Mom and breaking a law for Dad. Cally and Deanna heard their mother shout that they could lose the house. They heard their father angrily deny it as she’d kept it in her name. They heard the name Frank and they ran up to their room.

It is a small room with bunk beds and the paint on the windowsills has been tested for lead. The top layer is perfectly acceptable now, but the woodwork has been in place since 1882, so the mustard-colored, the black, and the bitter-red paint under the fresh white coats is toxic. Cally and Deanna have been instructed never, ever, to chip away at the paint on the walls and woodwork and especially not to eat it.

“Let’s eat it now,” says Cally. But Deanna does not understand the logic.

“They’ll have to pump our stomachs,” she explains. “That will bring them together.”

“Can’t we do it without getting our stomachs pumped?”

“No!” says Cally.

So she and Deanna chip off a bit of paint, put it on their tongues, swallow, and wait to die.

“First we’ll have convulsions, that will tip them off,” says Cally.

“Where are you getting this information?” says Deanna.

Nothing happens. They forget about having eaten the paint after a while. Then Sweetheart Calico bolts outside with the dog. They run downstairs and whirl through the yard playing tag and hide-and-seek.

Nookoomisag

They emerge from the truck with their hard little suitcases, and cast their cold eyes around the house and yard to check for enemies. They see Cally and Deanna and their eyes turn into grandma eyes, black and warm. The grandmothers are both round-shouldered, powerful, small women. Their little hands are tough and splayed. They heat up cans of beans and corn for the girls that evening and let them watch TV while they sit at the table with the harsh light on them. From cheap plastic bags they draw silky deerhide, needles in wooden cases, little fan-shaped boxes of quills, and spice jars full of colored beads. Grandma Noodin pricks up beads and sews calmly. Grandma Giizis wears moccasins. They have traveled down from the reservation to care for their granddaughters in the city, while Rozin and Richard work things out.

Grandma Noodin hopes they work it out and Grandma Giizis does not like Richard and says he is a snake. She thinks that Rozin and the girls should move back and live with them anyway. Forget about these no-good men and forget about the noisy, crowded, ugly, tangled-up, bewildering Gakaabikaang.

Sweetheart Calico

Grandma Noodin catches a glimpse of Sweetheart Calico playing with the girls the next afternoon and says to Grandma Giizis, “Something is not right with that woman.”

They both begin to watch her, to spy on her, to question the girls all about her. They are awake that night when it rains and they open the curtains to peek outside. There she is with her clothes off, running around and around the yard. In the morning, hoof tracks.

Grandma Giizis nods at Grandma Noodin. “One of those,” they agree.

The Girl Who Married the Deer

Their gitchi-gitchi-nookomis was a peculiar girl known for her tremendous appetite though she stayed thin as a handful of twigs. During berry season, she went picking many times a day, filling her birchbark makak over and over but eating it empty before she ever made it to the house. Not only that, but she couldn’t keep her hands off mushrooms, food of the dead. She robbed the wild rice caches. Ate all the boiled meat. It worried people to see that she was always eating, always hungry, but never full.

A voice.

I’ve been watching this girl. Maybe she’s a wiindigoo.

No, said her mother. She’s only that hungry. Nothing wrong with her.

Still, the other people ignored her or gave her shaming looks when she approached a food pot. Hungrier than ever, she took to the woods. More and more time, days even, passed with her gathering and cooking out there in the heart of the dense bush. You could smell the steam, the good smells, you could smell the smoke rising.

She’s cooking out there. Wonder what she’s making? Wonder if a little child disappeared, we would find it in the cooking pot? Great-Great-Grandmother ate the whole rabbit. Ears too. She wanted to eat her own arm.

And then she was joined out in the woods.

The girl was cooking up a fine pot of dried corn stew when a deer approached, stood by the edge of her camp. Just waiting. The girl thought, Should I eat him or should I share with him? Which? She picked up her killing hatchet but when she finally advanced toward the deer and looked him in the eye, she felt ashamed. She knew hunger when she saw it. Just walked past the deer and chopped a little more wood for the fire. Finished that stew.

She put the stew onto the plate, set the plate down in front of the deer, got her own plate full, and ate sitting before him. He never moved. She ate the whole stew, mopped up every trace of it with bannock, then sat quietly looking at him, crescent of horns, waiting. Unafraid. She had this feeling. Full. So this was what other people felt. She looked over at the deer. His eyes were steady and warm with a melting black light. His heart shone right out of his eyes.

He loves me, she thought. He loves me and I love him back. Right down to the ground. Who he is. No different. Of course, too bad that he’s a deer. That night, she made a bed out of young hemlock branches and curled against his short, stiff pelt. She began to live with him, stayed with him out in the woods, and traveled with him on into the open spaces. Became beloved by his family, too. Got so that she knew how to call the hooved ones toward her. They came when she stood in the open. Her song was peculiar, soft, questing.

THE GRANDMAS LIGHT their small red-bowl kinnikinnick pipes. They sit in the corner, smoking and brooding.

They are wondering what to do about Sweetheart Calico and what to do about their daughter, Rozin, and about the twins, Cally and Deanna, who say they have eaten lead paint off the windowsill. They are wondering what to do about Frank, who’s come by with sugar on his pants and flour in his hair. There was in his hands a large box. In the box, between layers of wax paper, an assortment of fancy sugar cookies cut into the shapes of carrots, trees, dolphins, stars, moons, dogs, and flowers. Each type of cutout is decorated with a different color of hard icing trimmed with a rickrack of frosting, studded with edible foil-sugar beads or blue-black raisins. Grandma Noodin puts down her pipe. She puts the head of a pink dog into her mouth and bites it completely off. As the crumbly cookie dissolves grain by grain on her tongue, she understands that Frank loves her daughter. She believes that Richard Whiteheart Beads will run from prosecution and try to hide. She hopes he’ll take Klaus along with him. Those two are a couple of bums.

Grandma Giizis puts her pipe down, too. She eats a carrot-shaped cookie frosted orange with green piping leaves.

“My doctor said carrots are good for me,” she says.

Cally eats a dolphin and Deanna eats a flower.

“So what happened to the girl who married the deer?” asks Deanna.

“Wait until I finish my carrot,” say Grandma Giizis.

THE GIRL DIDN’T want to leave her deer husband, but her brothers came to get her one brilliant spring. Shot her man with three arrows, one bullet. Brought her back to her family, her village, her people. She was not hungry anymore, and she was grown. They named her for the flowers that stretched past her shielding arms and were spattered with deer’s blood, blue flowers scraped from patches of sky. Blue Prairie Woman.

She married one of the Shawano brothers, even though that family was said to be descended of wiindigoog. She lived winters on the traplines with his father and brothers. Spring through late fall they stayed in a village where she could be with her woman relatives, talk all night, cook, laugh. She never used her medicine to attract the hooved ones. Never. But everyone knew what she could do.

Sometimes the deer people came to her, anyway.

One slender doe did on the morning of the big knives. Told Blue Prairie Woman to leave, go now, tie her baby on the back of the dog, and run. Too late, though. Just as she started out a tornado of bluecoat men. Everything scattered, lost, burned, murdered. She saw the same man who killed her great-aunt leap forward suddenly and run, uttering inhuman cries of loss, from the swirl of death into the distance. He was following her baby. Her baby tied in the dikinaagan. Riding on the back of the dog-mother of six fat, fine puppies. One, Blue Prairie Woman would nurse with her own milk. The others grew too weak to save.

Chapter 10. The Gravitron

THEY ARE GIVING out free figures of gods of the underworld along with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. Driving up to the window, Rozin buys the meals. Cally gets Hades, a sinister blue guy with skinny arms, and Deanna gets two plastic halves of the three-headed dog Cerberus, which makes the twins wonder immediately whether, if Hades went into a pet parlor to get the dog clipped for the summer, he’d have to pay triple.

“Cerberus has one body. That’s definitive,” says Cally.

“But the heads represent separate thoughts, separate dogs,” Deanna points out.

“With my crummy job we’ve got enough to worry about,” Rozin tells her daughters.

She laughs shortly but the supermarket checker job she took again, temporarily, is turning out to last a long time and still no benefits.

THE TWINS’ ROOM has a rattling old window. Their outlook on the world. The trees are black locust and tree-of-heaven trees that grow everywhere, tough, with small, oval pointer-finger leaves that flip over in a breeze. Sometimes the girls watch the dull underside roil. They bathe their brains in showers of four-o’clock gold, streaming from the west. Sometimes a branch tosses high, like a horse against the bit. They think of riding the branch, hair flying against the wind. The thought of that same wind ruffling leaves and heading north along no highway to ruffle the leaves of their grandmas’ trees pulls at them with longing. Some days, the twins feel that pull more than others. Summer has been comics and bakery and turning almost ten. Already leaves are turning on the driest trees. Some mornings are quick and cool. A low wind rides, trembling in the stiff grass, unwinding and slowing their steps. The gravity tugs harder. School looms too close. The girls turn to each other with wide eyes.

Will they take us on rides, anyplace there are rides, if we dance, if we cry, if we hold our breath? How about we reasonably ask.

THAT IS WHAT almost being ten is about. They ask to go to the state fair and their mother says yes. End of August. It is night, the cheese-curd stands frying curdled milk, the Australian batter-fried potatoes, the chili con carne bars at war, the dip cones, and the beer gardens. Eating something long, snakey, and blue, the twins, Cecille, Rozin, and Frank watch the show horses practice outside the arena in a sawdust ring. So delicate. So fine. Hooves like sewing machine needles, they do fancy stitch work up and down the sides of the metal fence. They pass so close the girls can feel the breath off their velvet noses and smell the warmth of their glossed hides, braided manes, sense the determination of their stiff little riders.

Here is Frank, so kind, his hands plucking cotton candy off a paper cone to hand first to her, then the girls. And so unassuming. He looks at the prize rabbits of every shape and size, and the bread sculptures and the Elvis faces made of beans and seeds, and he makes no jokes whatsoever about the size of the prize boar’s sexual equipment. Nor does he look as though he feels entirely outclassed in that matter, like some men, staring back over their shoulders at the pig in envy and fascination. Frank might be good for me, Rozin thinks, walking behind the girls, who hold hands with him. Cecille walks ahead of them all. Rozin follows as they make their way zigzagging to the sizzling zipper lights of the midway. They walk past the howling bungee jump, over the Chinese bridge, on and on until right before them the Gravitron rears.

CALLY AND DEANNA stand in the drama of light and music and fair noise watching people move like happy zombies to the entrance of the ride, a big crowd. Just over their heads, they see the exit and entrance of a new bunch of people slightly nervous and chattering as bored attendants strap them in. The operator of the ride looks way too young — brushstrokes of a soft yellow beard, hair in a braid, earring. Vacant. He disappears for a minute under the equipment and then jumps to his music monitor control panel and begins rattling some strange Wolfman Jack spiel into the microphone.

The Gravitron starts slowly with the purr of a giant motor and a lurch of gears. The deep bass throbs to life, heavy rock beat, a flame of guitars. Strapped in standing, hands at their sides, the riders are hugged by welded bars to the inside of a gigantic pie plate that starts turning now, turning against the night. Green lights in refracting bands. Rippling blue. Pink. A maddened cake stand that swivels on its base! Tipping side to side, it spins faster, faster, gravity a hand flattening the faces of the screamers to one green dimension….

“Looks like fun,” says Cecille.

“Yes!” says Rozin.

The twins think they must be hearing things. Rozin says it again. Her tone so dry the twins think she must definitely be kidding, but she’s actually not. This is how on the next run the girls find themselves watching with Cecille, astounded at Frank and their mother. They walk up the ride stairway and climb into the cages that close over them like alien claws. Again the Gravitron comes to life, now, Frank and their mother clinging to the bars and straps, blurring into one unit as the ride commences. The girls’ faces are serious with worry. Cecille tells them not to worry and she turns away for a moment. Turning back the other way around, she casually catches the eye of the operator, or not his eye so much as the strange fixed grin that he is shooting right through her from the little cage he inhabits next to the gears and motors.

He stares at Cecille and she stares back at him until she realizes he’s not seeing her. Staring through her as though he’s disordered, his whole body fixed and frozen, he’s a shirt-store dummy.

High, Cecille thinks in total understanding.

“Hey you!” She waves her hands at him, yells. He whips his head away and with a screech of Wolfman laughter only crazier and nastier, he accelerates the ride. Faster. Higher. Cranked up and down with fire shooting from their eyes, the riders scream. The operator starts to blow froth bubbles. Rabies! An overdose! And he’s garbled, makes no sense. There’s only this overarching manic howl that penetrates the Hendrix “Purple Haze” lick and funk. The girls cling to Cecille in terror. She is certain he’s hit the far edge. She starts forward. Others, concerned, do the same. Cally and Deanna grab each other and watch as people surround the lighted booth and start to knock, and then find that his door’s wedged shut. The people start to claw and beat and yammer. He’s spouting chilling warbles and declaiming as he revs the inner body of the Gravitron.

What follows from above is frightful, the riders understanding now that something has gone most horrifically wrong and the ride, a killer to begin with, now juiced up to unbearable, is whipping them mercilessly through time and space. They’re roaring. Puking. Blurred. They’re like those tigers turned to butter. They’re all one face of horror smeared across the inner circle of the Gravitron. They’ll die. Brain damage, inner organs turned to mush. The girls are so terrified they grab a railing and begin, with another desperate and grounded loved one, to wrench the bar from the walkway. They think they will use it to batter in the Plexiglas window, flail against the door, somehow jam the mechanism. But no, someone is there before them. With a tire iron swung with swordlike precision, Cecille smashes the window. People jump to the marked controls and now, at last, the ride is slowing. Each rider, coming into focus, is the very picture of sick and dazzled terror except for one.

Rozin. She steps out of her cage, doesn’t falter, not a single misstep. She helps a wobbly, limp, gray-green-faced, sweating Frank off and leads him to a place in the grass where he sits in grateful wonder with his eyes still spinning. She strokes his hand. She holds his shoulder, puts her arm around him, and holds him lovingly, the way the girls cannot ever remember her holding their father. The way she acts is so different, so natural, so real, so warm and naked that they suddenly have this picture of what has just happened to her.

Their mother has been scaled. All the scales of convention and ironic distance have been scuffed off her. All the boney armor she affects against the world. She has been stripped by centrifugal force and jumbled up inside. The wrench of gravity has undone all her strings.

HE CALLS, THAT night. The twins hear them long on the phone and put their pillows over their heads, laughing at them. Juvenile! The next day is Saturday and he calls again. She’s jumping up and pacing back and forth. Strewn with a blasted weight of emotion. The girls can sense waves of feeling, banners with cutting edges, huge sensations ranging from her, all set loose. Dressed, but awkwardly, her collar turned inside, she bats away their hands when they try to fix it. Goes to a corner of the room. And it is there from watching her back and shoulders tremble that the girls understand it is too big for her, too much. It is pulling at her with inexorable weight. She’s falling into it. Gravity. They don’t know what to do. Already in the other room, the phone is ringing. As their mother walks toward the receiver with her hand outstretched, she seems to shrink and fall into the steady pull.

Chapter 11. Yellow Pickup Truck

ROZIN WAITS FOR the school bus alongside her daughters. They stand close together on the street corner, watching traffic. Her hand brushes down her daughters’ slippery brown hair. The girls ask about the deer husband and Blue Prairie Woman. Is it true?

“That old story,” says Rozin. She holds their slim shoulders against her. Their heavy backpacks clunk against her hips on each side. The bus bumbles to a stop and the doors sigh open.

“Is it true?” Both of the girls look back as they are getting on. They pause on the black school-bus steps.

“Don’t worry,” says Rozin. “It will be all right. It will be okay.”

“What will?”

“The divorce,” hisses Cally.

Deanna halts as the door swishes shut and the bus drives off before they sit down, completely against safety regulations. Now they are waving from the backseat. Rozin watches until the bus turns down the street and then she walks into the kitchen and puts the old blue kettle on to boil. Standing tall in her black yoga pants, in which she will do the same jumping jacks and sit-ups she learned in high school, hands pressed on the pale tiles of the counter, unsmiling, she gazes out the window into the festooned yard. She leans forward and frowns as though looking for something hidden.

When her husband steps into the kitchen, yawning, rubbing his chest, and pulling down a thick sweatshirt, she drops her gaze. Unspeaking, she sets out spoons, milk, slices a grapefruit, rattles a cereal box, takes down a pair of white lotus bowls. Richard pours the steaming water into the plunger coffeepot and then he stands with her in a drowsy suspension.

“Klaus and me are going to take a lot of heat on this. Bad stuff is going down,” he says.

“You never talk like that anymore,” says Rozin. “Why are you talking like that again?”

They fell in love at an American Indian Movement protest and her mother told her she had a sinister feeling about the future. But did Rozin listen? No, she ran off with those people and lived here and there, but fortunately not on Pine Ridge during the years it had the highest per capita murder rate in the USA. Being in AIM was frustrating since the old ways were taken up again, the ceremonies and the pipes and the berets… wait, those berets were French? — but they looked cool. AIM was complicated for women because for instance if you had your period you couldn’t be around any of the good-looking men and couldn’t cook or touch their pipes or any sacred objects but had to stay in a moon lodge, which was usually the apartment of a sympathetic white person. Rozin had rebelled against her mother’s traditional ways, but once they were AIM ways she felt spiritual.

Richard cheated on her many times while she was in the moon lodge. She never knew it at the time, but it later became a reason she felt justified in drinking coffee with Frank.

Eventually, Rozin tried to put her politics into practice. She went to school to be a social worker but didn’t finish her degree. Sometimes she does community work. Other times she’s laid off and works at the supermarket, or for temp agencies. Anyway, she is steady and was able to buy and rehabilitate this very old house. As for Richard, all he’s got left of AIM is the ponytail.

Richard is always participating in some scam or another. She has gotten used to this. He was the treasurer for AIM for one month and money vanished. He was actually kicked out, but things were getting very dangerous and he felt lucky not to have been executed by some former friend whose mind was poisoned by Cointelpro agents. Handsomely, charismatically, he flunked out of college and cast about for other ways to live. Once he was a telemarketer, he said, but he was actually part of a group that invested old people’s money in a nonexistent Indian hot springs resort. Another time he took a casino job and commuted. That worked out pretty well and he made enough to buy the yellow pickup truck that everybody knows him for driving.

“That pickup truck was never a good idea. So easy to spot,” says Rozin.

“Easy to repo,” says Richard.

She nods, but does not answer.

As always, she pours the coffee into his pottery cup. As always, he takes his first drink and winces at the stinging heat.

“Does it even bother you that I am going underground?”

“Underground, isn’t that for radicals? You’re an illegal carpet dumper.”

“I suppose you’re glad. I suppose that you’ll be messing around with Frank.”

“Yes,” sighs Rozin. “I suppose so.”

During a recent receptionist break she read a magazine article about the brain chemicals that are released in the beginning of romantic love. Wow, has she ever got them, and to spare.

“Are you in love?” says Richard poisonously.

“Madly,” says Rozin flatly. She succeeds in tamping down a warm flutter.

Her matter-of-factness deflates Richard. He thinks of how he could refer to Frank’s unhealthily sweet pastries and tell her he hopes they both get diabetes. But he just doesn’t have the energy. Maybe once he and Klaus are on the move his outlook will improve. He will call her on the phone with a slashing comeback. He will leave eloquent and withering messages.

“Are you changing your identity?” asks Rozin. “I’ll want to know when I get the divorce papers. I’ll want to know so I can serve you with divorce papers.”

“Make those guys who bring the papers wear neckties. And of course we’re changing our identities. We are going to masquerade as homeless guys who can’t remember who we are.”

Rozin is alarmed and sits down across from him, frowning.

“That’s stupid, Richard, and so dangerous.”

“What do you care?”

“I still care for you.”

“You won’t have sex with me.”

“That would be crossing a boundary.”

“It was a boundary we once loved to cross, like the state line, like the Forty-fifth Parallel, like the line between Central and Mountain time.”

They are both very quiet and sadly sit drinking their coffee and remembering that they’d had many good and crazy years before these bad years.

“Aren’t you worried about Cally and Deanna, about how they’ll take this?”

“I have the grandmas here.”

“They never liked me. They’ll talk bad about me.”

“No, I won’t let them.”

But they both know the grandmas are out of anyone’s control and that they have always said that Richard would end up homeless in the streets being hunted down by the authorities. Sure enough, that afternoon, the grandmas are watching when two of those very authorities come up to the house and repossess the yellow pickup truck. The repo men ask for Richard, but he is gone, because by that time Richard and Klaus are crawling around in the bushes down by the Mississippi River. They flip for who will buy the first bottle and Klaus loses. They roll out their sleeping bags and take the first burning swig. The sky is clear, slate blue. Soon enough, the air chills, dusk comes on, the brightest stars show, and the moon is nearly full.

“It’s not so bad,” says Richard.

There are deer in the leaves. A head pokes through once; a young doe stares at them meltingly and disappears.

Chapter 12. The Ojibwe Holidays

GRANDMA NOODIN AND Grandma Giizis call the city Mishiimin Oodenang, Apple Town, because of the sound of the word — Minneapolis. Many Apple Us. They call Thanksgiving Day Gitchimiigwechiwegiizhigad, which means the Day When We Give the Big Thanks. It is not an original holiday, but the Ojibwe are big on feasts. Noodin and Giizis still live on the reservation homestead, the allotment that belonged to their grandmother, now a farmed patch of earth and woods and mashkiig from which they gather their teas and cut bark for baskets. The tribe gave them a brand-new prefabricated house, two bedrooms, slate blue. They can sit on the deck with their backs to the lake, and watch the road. Noodin can fold and sew a ricing tray or a makak without looking at her hands, but both she and Giizis prefer to construct and quill fancy boxes bearing animal icons — bear, loon, deer, and bear. They are hard-packed women with wise nimble fingers, heavy ankles, and legs that run straight down like fence posts into their shoes. Their faces originally had the same wide, plain soft beauty, but as twins will they have grown into their differences. They are like two cookie sheets. Noodin’s is the newer sheet, relatively unmarred, while Giizis’s is a pan baked on, burnt, shaded into character.

Noodin and Giizis are arriving early because Rozin has made a doctor’s appointment. This was made for Noodin because she confided a set of feminine symptoms to her daughter, the sort of thing for which it was felt that she should be seen by what she calls “a woman’s expert.” Noodin is furious that she must see a doctor. But none of her own medicines work.

Sitting in a rocker

Eating Betty Crocker

Watching the clock go

Tick, tock, tick, tock

Shawallawalla

Tick, tock, tick, tock

Shawallawalla

ABCDEFG

Wash those boy germs off of me!

The twins are smacking their hands together and singing and rubbing off boy germs. They are not interested in what the grandmas will be angry about or what foods they will tell everyone they prefer — the burnt heart of the turkey to the white breast meat, cranberry sauce made from fresh berries only. Mincemeat pie gives Giizis the runs. Pumpkin stops Noodin’s bowels. Wild rice must be prepared with no salt, and garlic gives both an instant cramp.

Misty snow, plump clouds, occasional breaks of sun. Ice on the sidewalks slick and treacherous under the white dusting. Rozin is just returning from a long emergency run to a convenience mart, when she sees her cousin Cecille back Frank’s delivery truck with expert care into a space across the street. Inside the truck, both grandmas are sitting high and proud on grass-blue vinyl, their stunning Miss Indian America profiles on display in the watery dark of the window. The truck is white. The snow is neat, a new fall outlining the shoveled walk and steps. Rozin breathes blue air stepping out of her car to meet them.

“Take this. Here!”

Giizis opens the truck door. She holds a casserole pan in her lap, a meat-fragrant oblong warming her knees through her red-and-white trader’s-blanket coat. Rozin takes the food carefully. There is the night before Thanksgiving meal to feed everyone and Giizis has arrived with her famous wild rice and duck hot-dish. The grandmas don’t even get out of the truck — they’re too busy reminding Booch Jr., Cecille, and Rozin of their complex digestive needs, which change every year.

“Noodin takes no salt. I eat the whites of eggs only, yolks will kill me. Plus Noodin’s got that sugar in her blood. She craves it, though. Try not to tempt her,” Giizis whispers. “Don’t leave the cookie plate alone in the kitchen. She’ll make a pig of herself behind your back and then she’ll lapse into a coma. Me, you know I’ll eat whatever.”

“No you won’t,” Cecille tells her. “You’re picky as your whole family put together. And the yolks of eggs will not kill you! Rozin has already fried the onions and celery for tomorrow’s stuffing. You’ll have to divide it out.”

“She is making the stuffing already? That’s ours to make.”

Noodin is nervous about her appointment and scurries into the house. She locks herself in the bathroom. She only has a few minutes, Rozin calls through the door. They are going to be late unless she hurries.

“I am hurrying,” shouts Noodin, her voice thin with anxiety.

“Don’t pressure her,” says Cecille. “After all, she’s never been to a gynecologist before. She’s very upset about this.”

“It’s unbelievable,” says Rozin. “Well, I’m taking her to Doctor Carr. He’s very nice, really. I have seen him a couple of times.”

“Him? I would never have a him.”

“How ridiculous,” says Rozin sharply. “They are professionals. They’ve seen a million of ’em.”

“ ’Em?” Cecille laughs. “And isn’t he young?”

“Okay, he’s seen thousands of ’em.”

“ ’Em.” Cecille walks off. “Booch,” she calls, “how many of ’em have you seen?”

“How many of what?” Booch asks.

“ ’Em,” says Cecille.

“Oh stop it,” says Rozin.

Noodin is still in the bathroom. The water is gushing and there are frantic sounds of hurry.

“Just relax,” says Cecille. “I’ll call and say you’re running fifteen minutes late.”

But they are at least half an hour late by the time they get Noodin into the car.

AN HOUR PASSES. Noodin slams into the house and Rozin follows.

“What’s the problem?” asks Cecille, her hands deep in flour.

“She won’t tell me.”

Noodin throws her purse in the corner, glares at everyone, and then thumps into the kitchen. She microwaves a heaping bowl of her own hot-dish, eats it. Without a word to anybody else she begins to tear up loaves of bread for her own stuffing and to chop apples. She likes apples and raisins and sausage in her stuffing. She takes a big package of sausage from the refrigerator and dumps it into a frying pan. Noodin broods as she cooks it, breaking it with the edge of a spatula.

“What’s wrong with you?” asks Cecille.

No answer. Cecille shrugs. “What’s wrong with her?” she asks Giizis.

“She’s like that,” says Giizis.

Eventually Noodin stomps off to bed, still without a word to anyone.

“What was the diagnosis?” asks Cecille once Noodin is sealed in the bedroom.

“Normal,” says Rozin. “Everything benign! Except her! Maybe she’s just mad because she went to the doctor for nothing?”

ROZIN’S KITCHEN IS a long, sunny galley with three windows over the sink and a chopping board built into the side opposite the stove, underneath the cupboards of dishes. Out in the other room Cecille sets the table with Rozin’s holiday cloth — turkeys, pilgrims, and golden-eyed deer — and plates with the border of twined green leaves. Cecille has brought her own special water glasses. Beautiful rummage-sale cut glass of an elemental blue that does not match anything.

Just like her, Rozin thinks, annoyed but also obscurely pleased. Everything else on the table is red, orange, or gold. I’ve set it carefully, and here comes Cecille insisting on her blue water goblets.

Cecille is slender as a dancer. She shows off her breasts and shoulders by wearing leotard tops. Her eyes are wide, deer-brown, caramel-cream, and she has grown her hair long, thick, and wild. She likes to streak it with henna. The twins are proud of her. Sometimes her earnest and pedantic air as she discusses her martial arts annoys everyone. But she is a second-degree black belt now, tae kwan do, she is going to school to become a drug counselor and holding down a regular job selling food supplements. Cecille is a success. Her apartment over Frank’s shop is filled with textbooks, meditation mats, and bowls that sing when struck with a wooden mallet.

Rozin sugars the rhubarb Noodin brought, frozen from last June. Following Frank’s recipe, she spreads it on the bottom of a baking pan with strawberries and then mixes the butter, oatmeal, brown sugar, and crushed walnuts for the topping. Spreads the sweet stuff evenly across. She slides the pan into the space below the turkey, which is almost ready, its small red-plastic timer button half extended. Cally and Deanna hold out spoons to baste the tender, crackling skin. The heat fans their faces and they suddenly think of their mother’s face brushing against Frank’s. They put down the spoons and flee.

Miss Mary had a baby

She named it Tiny Tim

She put it in a bathtub

To see if he could swim

He drank up all the water

He ate up all the soap

He went down the drain

In an envelope

“Nothing makes sense about that drain,” says Cally.

“The envelope would dissolve and anyhow a baby wouldn’t fit,” says Deanna. “Let’s spy on Sweetheart Calico.”

She is in the small apartment watching Klaus’s television and trying out colors on her toenails. She takes the polish off with pink acetone, then paints them a new color. She must have a hundred little bottles of color. They are scattered everywhere. The room reeks.

Cally and Deanna are worried.

“Let’s not spy,” says Deanna. “Let’s paint our nails too and show her how to put the tops back on the nail polish.”

So the twins spend Thanksgiving preparation time screwing the tops on the bottles and arranging them in a row along the side of the mattress where Sweetheart Calico curls. They have heard their mother worry about bills and say that Klaus has paid enough rent for the rest of November but after that Sweetheart Calico will have nowhere else to go. They will open the big door that divides this part of the house from the rest, and she will then live with them.

“She’ll have to get a job,” Rozin said, looking doubtful.

“THE GROWN-UPS ARE sitting down,” Cally tells Sweetheart. The girls comb her hair out and blow on her fingernails and find a pair of thongs for her feet. They find a white shirt for her to wear over her tight push-up bra low-cut tank. They take her hand and lead her to the table.

Cecille is talking about Klaus and Richard.

“They’re on the streets, looking like hell warmed over. Making signs that say they are war veterans! For which they could get arrested!”

Booch Jr. hands Frank the gravy pitcher, pretending not to hear Cecille talk about Klaus, his favorite uncle, like a father to him. Frank’s face is pained, he is searching for the right tone, stalling. Frank has eaten with the family before, but never with Richard out of the picture, never with the potential to be Rozin’s man. He wants to make sure that everyone knows he isn’t taking Richard’s place. That he has no hostility. That he doesn’t want to hear gossip. He takes the pitcher in two hands and leans over to Cecille.

“He’s the girls’ dad, so have some respect.”

“Yeah. Give it a rest,” Booch says to Cecille. She pauses, but only to gather momentum. Even with no marriageable male attention, she preens in her short skirt, folds her arms against her breasts. Her eyes are perfectly lined and shadowed and her neck is sultry with a thick gardenia perfume. She bends her mouth into a seesaw smile of irony and does not give any satisfaction. Does not back off her subject.

“I know. It’s not in the family, maybe our culture even, to speak out, to mention these sad, hard topics. I know that. But how much better if we all accepted truth and spoke with honesty, from the heart! For instance, Cally and Deanna are at a higher risk for depression and substance abuse because their role model exhibits self-destructive behaviors. I’m saying it. Because I want them to realize!”

“They’re not depressed,” says Booch Jr., “but all of us could get temporarily deranged, by you.”

Booch grips a salad bowl of honey-colored wood. He stares back at Cecille and slowly, imperceptibly at first, then with increasing force he trembles, mildly jittering, from the feet up, from the ground, then with more vigor until his head tips to the side, his eyes roll back to the whites. The mass of dark leaves jumps. He grips the bowl even tighter until he is shaking all over in explosive starts and jerks.

“Quit it, Booch,” laughs Rozin.

Giizis starts forward, scared. Booch stops. Looks around at the table, blank. “Where am I?”

Cally and Deanna think he is hilarious.

“Booch?”

Cecille’s voice is instantly suspicious. “What was that?”

Grandma Giizis shakes the serrated knife she’s using on the bread. “Get out of here, you crazy boy, or I’m gonna take this to you!”

Noodin unfolds her arms and goes back to fluffing her wild rice, puts the lid back on the pot, carries it in to the table with two dish towels wrapped around her hands as mitts.

“You egg him on,” she says pointedly to Cecille, in passing. Cecille gives a pleased shrug. The twins and Sweetheart sit looking at the table. The turkeys and pilgrims and golden-eyed deer race along the borders of the tablecloth. Red candles. Ivy plants. Gold paper napkins. The unexpected blue glass.

THE TABLE IS long, with boards to add and with extra wings at the end. A table made for big gatherings and doings. It’s a good thing, because the topics of conversation at the table tend to polarize. Especially the things the grandmas say. Past a certain age the Roy women believe that they have earned the right to talk about sex, birth, blood, the size and shape of men’s equipment, the state of their own, even at the holiday dinner table. But at this Thanksgiving, Noodin is strangely subdued. Still fuming and filled with secret hostility.

“There should be no salt on this table!” cries Grandma Giizis. “In the early days we had no salt. We didn’t know of it. We had no taste for it. Now look at us.” Her blood pressure medication keeps her dizzily alert.

“I can eat as much salt as I want—” says Cecille.

“If you’re pregnant—”

“I’m not.”

“Eat the head of a skunk,” advises Giizis. “In the old days, that was the way to make sure the baby’s head would be a little head, easy to push.”

“Did you have morning sickness with Cecille?” Booch asks. His mouth stitches together in anxious amusement. “That skunk head might not sit too well.”

Giizis continues on with implacable deliberation.

“I knew a woman with that morning sickness. She ended up in labor for two weeks!”

Helping herself to mashed potatoes, Noodin takes up the theme now, in a darkly relishing tone of voice. “The pain was constant, too, hard labor for a total of twenty-four times fourteen hours. Plus, all the while she screamed. No, it was more a yodel. So pitiful. And people heard her — this was before they set up the soundproof room in the hospital.”

“A big baby?” Giizis purses her lips in knowing fashion.

“They couldn’t stitch her back together in the right order. And yet she somehow lived.”

“Only to die the next time, probably.”

Noodin shrugs.

“On that note,” says Booch, his face sunken and pale, his voice catching, “shall we toast an easy labor and healthy outcome? Toast!”

“I’m not pregnant,” Cecille says uselessly. “I don’t even have a boyfriend.”

But Booch desperately raises his mug of apple cider and downs it like a pirate tossing back hot grog. Still, the grandmas are not finished.

“That’s a bad way to go. And they had to bury the baby in a little shoe box. Me, when I go,” brags Giizis with a long slow wave of her hand across the heaping plate, “you won’t have to take up a collection. My funeral is all paid up.”

“Whose isn’t?” Noodin shrugs her sister’s boast down. “Those vultures. They come around the reservation with those sales handouts—”

“Brochures.”

“Catalogs. They make the rounds and you sit paging through those pictures of the caskets—”

“Mine!” Giizis says loudly. “Mine is frosted, I tell you, frosted!”

“Oh, that sure is wonderful.” Rozin rolls her eyes. “Like a cake.”

“Please,” says Booch, “do we have to—”

“If you must know,” Noodin loudly interposes.

“We don’t need to know,” says Booch, and Frank looks at him gratefully.

But Noodin’s eyes flare with indignation. She ignores him. “I am paid up, too, with money from my checks. I put a small amount away each month. I got the cardinals, red cardinals painted on my casket and it’s made of real oak, not cheap pine board. A cheerful woodsy scene on front. Spared no amount of big expense! I even got the dinner paid for and no jelly and no peanut butter — oh you bet, no commodity funeral for me!”

“Ticking. Mattress ticking. Railroad cloth. I like that on the inside of a casket, though,” Giizis reflects.

“Homey-looking.”

“Like you were really going to sleep or something. And then the sheets.”

“Mine are satin.”

“Don’t you think,” Rozin breaks in again from her corner place, where she’s filled and refilled her plate, picking through her food with furious dispatch, “if you’re going to spend for satin sheets, you could at least get enjoyment out of them in life?”

“You would,” says Giizis sternly, spearing Frank with a look. But her attempt at embarrassing Rozin falls flat, for Rozin just nods and as though struck by some ecstatic thought smiles openly and suddenly at Frank, right across the table. Everyone can see her and notice that smile, too, which is the sort of curious and gloating smile a teenage girl turns on the first boy she’s shown her breasts to in a parking lot. Returning her look, Frank’s is grave and intent. Their look holds, and then, with quiet attention, tenderly, he dips some small morsel of dark meat into the scarlet of cranberries. Placing the tart, reddened flesh in his mouth, he casts his eyes down and chews.

Giizis has removed the slender forked bone from the breast meat already and stripped it clean, handing it to Cally, who has vowed with Deanna never to be tricked into pulling apart a wishbone. She gives it back to Grandma Giizis and has the presence of mind to say, “Share it.” Giizis holds out the wishbone, and Noodin touches it. The bone is cool and faintly slippery in her fingers. The tiny strips of meat cling to it tenaciously. Looking into each other’s brown, sorrowful eyes they seem lost, unguarded. The bone is fragile between them. They know from childhood that to break a wishbone to your advantage you must hold your thumb higher than that of your opponent, your sister.

And so Giizis tries. But Noodin has been harboring some secret anger and her thumb creeps higher. Giizis twists her hand to try wrenchimg the wishbone from her sister. Noodin stands with a cry and snaps off the longer piece of the bone. The two old twins pant and glare at each other and throw down the pieces of the wishbone. They bare their teeth murderously and then, still staring directly into each other’s eyes, they change expressions and slowly, sheepishly, secretly, begin to laugh.

Noodin wipes her eyes. They sit. The pie is coming out, the rhubarb crisp, the cake, the coffee, the swamp tea, the cookies and Jell-O mold salad with peaches set in star shapes. And the men are talking to each other. They have outlasted the women’s hold on the conversation and they are talking about their cars. They are discussing the insides of their cars the way women discuss their own insides. Pre-labor. Post-labor. Just the same except instead of doctors the men talk about their mechanics. Opinions, prognoses, prescriptions, and probabilities.

Dishes clatter. Coffee scents the air. The house is too warm, though, so the girls decide to cool themselves at the back door. They have sneaked out a plastic bag of turkey scraps. With it, they step out onto the tiny porch and stare from the steps out at the frozen gray yard and garage.

The dog appears instantly and smiles lovingly at them as they dump the scraps into his bowl.

THERE ARE TIMES in the city, rare times, when the baffle of sound parts. Cally and Deanna listen for those times of transitory silence. No cars. No planes’ roar. No buses or distant traffic. No spatter of television noise, even people talking. Now, just as the twins define the moment by the absence of all it isn’t, someone laughs, a car door slams, there is a screech of tires. It is gone, their moment of baseless peace.

The noise that brings them back is the muted plastic thump of a city garbage Dumpster and then crisp, slow steps. Rozin and Frank round the corner of the garage but they don’t notice the twins because their eyes rest upon each other. Cally and Deanna can see their mother’s warm three-quarters profile as she gazes seriously up into Frank’s face. He is turned from them, but although they cannot view his expression they know it.

The grown-ups are staring at each other with moon-glow sitcom eyes!

“They are acting like two cows,” says Cally.

The girls laugh in a mean and outraged way. They have also got a parcel of turkey bones they were told to throw in the sealed garbage container and not give to the dog. They give the bones to the dog.

GIIZIS TAKES A SIP of the coffee, a bite of pie, and holds up her tiny piece of the wishbone. Noodin laughs, but then her face goes dark as she remembers. She finally speaks to the women sitting at the table.

“Yesterday,” she announces. “Yesterday. That young doctor was forward with me!”

“What?” says Rozin.

“I knew there was something,” says Giizis.

“How?” says Cecille.

All of the women put down their coffee cups and look at Noodin.

“The nurse came and told me to take off my clothes and put the robe on. So I do that. So I was lying there covered with that sheet,” says Noodin, “and he came in for the exam. When he lifted that sheet for the exam he said, ‘My, aren’t we glitzy today!’ ”

“ ‘Glitzy’? You’re kidding!”

Rozin and Cecille say this practically in unison.

Noodin frowns. “I hate when you say that. Of course I am not kidding. That is the way it was, the phrase of words, ‘My, aren’t we glitzy!’ I said nothing, of course. Why in the world do you think he said it?”

“Maybe you’re”—Cecille tries to think—“unusually better than normal down there!”

Giizis and Noodin look aghast.

“Did you wear some fancy underwear or something?”

“I had none on, of course,” says Noodin. “None on at the time. No, it was simple rudeness, or worse….”

“Did you wear some, ah, maybe some perfume?”

“Oooo,” says Giizis.

“That neither,” says Noodin. “I just, well, I used some of that feminine hygiene spray they advertise. I took it from your bathroom, that’s all.”

Rozin looks at her quizzically.

“I don’t have any of that stuff.”

“You don’t have any?”

“No.”

“Then… well, it looked like a can of what they advertise. Same color.”

“Mom!”

“What?”

Noodin gets up and goes to check the bathroom. They hear her rummaging through a drawer, and finally she brings back the can. She holds out the can and shows it to Rozin.

“Is this what you used?” Rozin asks.

She nods. Rozin hands her the close-up pair of reading glasses that the twins share. The can is left over from Halloween. She did up Cally and Deanna’s hair with a frosting of gold spray-glitter.

“Read the label, Mama.”

Noodin does, then rears back, thoughtfully blinking.

Chapter 13. Rozin

IT IS NOT SO SIMPLE being Rozin Roy. You have a missing carpet stasher for a husband, an ardent baker who keeps dropping off boxes of ginger-frosted gingersnaps, a mother with a secret glitzy place, a job you must go to every day even if the week after Thanksgiving weekend one daughter wakes up with a headache and the other has a sore throat and both are experiencing a sense of loss because their father will soon be divorced from their mother. No matter that he was not around much, or when home, dimly lit or even smashed. He is their father.

“I never thought you’d be divorced,” Cally weeps. “We hate Frank.”

“No,” says Deanna, “we love him, remember? But as our uncle, okay, Mom?”

Deanna quietly broods on her cereal. Both are mourning with reversals of mood. Rozin looks at the clock and thinks how when she was late just a week ago her supervisor gave her one of those looks of cool skepticism that signal the beginning of lack of trust. It was wrong for Rozin to have spent her three-month perfect record of goodwill. She had coffee this fall, too often, with Frank. All that dependability she’d built up, spent now that her children need her. She should certainly have anticipated this, but she made the mistake a so-called functional parent makes about a so-called dysfunctional parent. Yes, they do miss him! Of course the girls are sad! And now the grandmas have returned home saying they couldn’t eat more of Frank’s cookies. The cookies kept appearing once Grandma Giizis said she liked them. Irresistible cookies. Irresistible like Frank. But perhaps like Frank overbearingly sweet, Rozin thinks, an unworthy thought. He has become her lover. Their blood sugar has also shot way up into the heavens.

“I have to go to work now,” Rozin tells her daughters. “I just have to. I’m going to get in trouble!”

Cally and Deanna look at each other and big burps and bubbles of sobs come up as they feel the same thing together. The feeling bounces back and forth, getting larger. This happened to them when they were babies. Rozin had to separate them to calm them.

They hear a flamenco tattoo, as if a tap dancer was merrily clicking across the floor on the other side of the wall. It is Sweetheart Calico. Tapitty tap tap, tapitty tap tap. Faster and faster. Tapittytaptaptap. The girls’ sobs turn to fascinated hiccups. A door slams. They walk to the window as Sweetheart Calico, now silent, flashes across the weeds. Rozin bolts out the door.

“Wait! Come back!”

Sweetheart turns, eyes wide, and walks back toward Rozin’s beckoning hand. Sweetheart is dressed in tight jeans and a flowing pale pink shirt. Her tiny black boots have steel clips on the toes and heels. Her hair is combed and braided on one side. It loops long down the other. Rozin doesn’t tell her about the lopsided hairdo — maybe she’s got only one hair band.

“Could you please, oh please, babysit the girls? They are too upset to go to school. They won’t get on the bus. It is weirdly hot today! They need time to have their emotions. And I have to go to work.”

Rozin’s pleading rivets Sweetheart Calico and she stands very still and cocks her head forward in order to understand what Rozin is telling her. Rozin goes on, throwing her arms up and down, pointing at the car. Sweetheart’s dog cocks his head side to side as Rozin swishes her arm at the door where the girls stand together, dressed alike as they do for comfort, and sad.

Yes, of course! Sweetheart Calico’s look says. I’ll take care of them the same way I would take care of my own daughters!

She nods and walks up to the girls, takes their hands in hers. Now the three are standing in the doorway and Rozin is waving good-bye.

“Good-bye, Mama, we’ll be okay.”

The girls cling to Sweetheart Calico. The dog sits steadfast at the doorstep. Rozin has many doubts but she drives off anyway, afraid of cool skepticism. Afraid of lack of trust. Afraid to offend her supervisor, who could take away the job that pays the mortgage and feeds them and buys all they need to live.

The Spaces

As soon as Rozin drives away, Sweetheart Calico lifts the girls’ hands. She looks from one to the other. The cracked-off tooth in her smile makes her look homely and goofy, but also she is beautiful in her pointy boots and swirling blouse. She has a lot of makeup on — bubble-gum pink lipstick, happy blue eye shadow, blaring black eyeliner.

“You forgot one braid,” says Cally.

“Yeah, you look weird like that,” says Deanna.

Oh this? Sweetheart Calico touches her flowing hair uncertainly. Wrong?

“But it’s not so bad,” the girls decide. “It’s a look.”

Sweetheart Calico rolls her eyes, happy. Here we go! She swings their hands as she steps down the steps.

“Wait!” says Cally. “We never finished our breakfast!”

“We don’t have jackets! Plus we’re supposed to be sick!”

So what? Her arm swinging makes them laugh. We’ll find food. You’re not really sick. It’s weirdly warm today. Time to move, to go, to walk, to tap along, to jump and run! The girls take jackets anyway because they do not trust the warm sun and they follow Sweetheart down the lumpy old sidewalk with the tree roots bulging up out of the earth. They run past her once they get to the park; they leap and scurry through the swing sets, monkey bars, and field of grass, where they find half an old Frisbee. They toss it awkwardly to the dog, who gamely chases along after it as if he is doing them a favor. Which he is. He is worried about where they are going. Sweetheart Calico always gets lost. He laps all the water he comes across. Pees everywhere he can. He does his best to leave a trail, in the manner of Hansel in the forest, but this has been a dry fall and there are few puddles. He pees like a frat boy. Everywhere. But can’t reach fountains to replenish. They pass the lake and he gulps at the toxic shore until his stomach bulges. They are foraging on and on into the city, into the downtown area near the bus station, past the Irish pubs, music bars, and old buildings made of reddish purple stone dug from the northern Minnesota quarries or fawn-colored Kasota stone dug from the southern Minnesota quarries. Farther yet until they hit the river. There on its banks, the dog smells an entire two-day-old novel that Richard and Klaus have written with their scent in the leaves, on the sidewalks, on the ground, on the benches. They are not here anymore.

The dog tries to communicate with Sweetheart Calico: Let’s go back now, it’s time. Let’s go home. They are not like your daughters. They can’t run forever. They are not as swift, not as strong, and they are human, not like you.

The dog leaps at her, snapping at her one braid. Sweetheart Calico catches his jaw with her pointed steel toe. He yelps and crumples. Gets up showing his teeth. If only I were still a wolf, then I’d hamstring and eat you! The girls are slowing down, slumping over. They sit down on a curb. They are so hungry and thirsty that can’t even cry. Desperate, the dog barks, lolls, leaps at everyone who passes in his most appealing way. Which is not appealing. Someone says, “There are leash laws, you know.” Sweetheart Calico stands watching, twitchy and annoyed. She does not like to stand still. The girls droop on the curb some more. At last a man comes out of the pizza shop behind them with sodas and slices. He can’t stand it anymore. The children gobble up their food with big eyes and he tells Sweetheart Calico that she should take them home. He keeps talking, trying to impress the gravity on her. They shouldn’t be around here. This is not a good neighborhood for children as they could get picked up and drugged and either sold to a Wayzata businessman or trafficked up to Duluth to service the freighters — and it is dark, anyway, and who are they and maybe he should call the police?

Sweetheart Calico gives her most human nod and saunters off. The dog and the girls follow her. The man shrugs and walks back inside. It’s getting cold. Around the corner, Sweetheart leaps high and cuts a little caper. It’s time now! The lights are going to ride up and down! The signs pulse on: There’s girls hot, hot, hot! And free drinks for pretty women! Just past Augies she forgets the twins. But that’s all right because they’re gone, anyway, following the dog, who is following the trail of his own piss marks down the streets and through the alleys and across the parks and backyards and church landscaping across the bus station sidewalk and along old park benches and over the walking bridge that spans I-94 and its torrent of noise.

And do their feet ever hurt. And their sad little hearts feel ever sadder. And will they get back to their mother?

A COOL FALL NIGHT on Andrew Jackson Street. Dead cottonwood leaves clattering and traffic a dim snarl to the west. Rozin sits with her back to the open window. She watches her phone as if staring at it would make it ring. She imagines the police voice, We’ve found them. We’ve found them. The police told Rozin to stay home and wait because missing children usually show up. They usually do! They will! But nothing happens. Her heart’s flamenco tattoo taptittytaptap. Hating itself. Adrenaline floods her like poison. She’s alert and leaden. There is the phone, ringing with some crazy new ringtone. But no, that’s just chatter of sleeping sparrows in the leggy vines. She hears the girls outside! But no, that’s the fan in the next room, sifting fire through its sleeves. The light socket with the bulb out grows a new bulb. What thoughts. Stupid thoughts.

Rozin wakes to the telephone’s persistent ring. Downstairs, in the yellow wash of light over the kitchen sink, she raises the phone to her aunt’s voice.

“Did you find them?” Giizis asks.

“No.”

Rozin lowers the receiver into its cradle. She passes her hand across her face, crumples a fist to her mouth, and wonders what she will feel next. Nothing comes. Just nothing, though her blood roars and her skull suddenly feels tight as a helmet. Her brain overstuffed with too many thoughts. She is just about to lift the phone again and call somebody, anybody, when Deanna’s voice floats down from the top of the staircase.

“Mama…”

Rozin steps back out into the hallway, stands at the bottom holding the worn curl of the banister.

“Mama?” Deanna asks. “We’re lost.”

Cally says, “Shut up, Deanna. She knows.”

They aren’t up there. The house is empty.

Rozin freezes. An excuse, a little laugh, shoots up inside her and then her throat shuts. If she lets her daughters keep talking, they will never stop. They’ll go on talking. She’ll talk them all the way home. The air at the top of the stairs is thick as black cotton and she can’t see where they went. Her knees give.

“Come home,” she whispers.

Dread like an ice cape. Silence. The dread passes over and a lighter feeling sails in. Her heart bobs and the longing is a stitch in her side. She gasps painfully.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she calls out, hopeful and afraid. But there is no answer. Wax leaves clatter against the side of the house. She crouches on the bottom step, motionless.

She won’t call Frank. Perversely, she thinks he got her into this mess. He poured the coffee that kept her from going to work all those times, which made her paranoid about missing work this morning. And Sweetheart Calico. Her. Her. Why did Rozin ignore her best instincts and leave her children with a woman who has never spoken a word out loud, a woman weird and wild or FAS or learning disabled or suffering a form of autism or some undiagnosed ADD or ADHD or who is off her medication for some mental disorder even though she sometimes seems so pleasant and willing and kind and playful.

Rozin begins to pray to the great and kind spirit. The earth tips its farthest shoulder to the sun and the dark goes solid. Cold air seizes in bands along the mopboards. She sits there, waiting. Incrementally, the dark motes thin to gray. The air stirs with the cold soupiness of dawn. She doesn’t shift her weight. She doesn’t lean or twist to move again, not until the starlings begin to whistle in the tattered cedars.

ROZIN RISES AND slips her arms into an old shirt. One of Richard’s that she kept, a black-and-white checkered shirt that reaches almost down to her knees. For he is a tall man, and she is more her mother’s size. She removes a heavy iron pot from its cupboard place and brings it over to the bowl of the kitchen sink. Into the pot, she pours an inch or so of wild rice. A fine sweet dust rises off the rice like smoke, smelling of the lake bottom, weedy and fresh. Next, she runs water into the pot, swirls her hand among the ticking grains. Black-green, brown-green, dotted with paler speckles and very fine. Uncultivated. Not the fake stuff. Knocked into the bottom of Noodin’s beat-up aluminum canoe. A few small hulls, sharp and papery, ride the surface. Poured off, the water carries away green clay, powdery silt. Another water. Five waters altogether, until the last comes clean and she sets the pot aside. Onions now. She holds a kitchen match tight between her teeth so the juice won’t make her eyes water, then she crosshatches the onion from the root end, slicing the tiny cubes into a pile she keeps neatly triangled with the flat of the knife.

Broth will slowly cook the onions into the rice. Before she sets the top on the pot she adds a tiny pinch of white pepper but no more. The twins like simple foods, no spices. Odd they never got their dad’s complex food tastes. Basic foods. Potatoes and cheese for Cally. Rozin remembers the stubborn genius of Richard’s ways and sees him, now, before her suddenly. Dark brown hair and brown eyes with a curved smile and hollow cheeks. Shuts her eyes against the picture. He is a magnet, Richard Whiteheart Beads, with a prickly and unappeasable energy some people resent and others worship. Around him, she was like that herself, never doing things the easy way, always finding the method of most resistance. Even now, she prefers to cook food she’ll have to guide and watch over. A soft vanilla pudding from scratch. Stewed turkey. Creamed corn still from scratch, though she can’t use fresh cobs, only frozen this late in the year. She butters and creams them, pours them back into a plastic bowl. It is good, though, the care she takes with everything, for the smell of this food is going to bring them home.

She sets two places carefully. A paper napkin folded once. Knife, fork, and spoon all on one side. She fills the plates with the wild rice in a heap beside the turkey, the milky, buttery corn, a bit of fruit salad containing strawberries, and, beside them, a large bowl of vanilla pudding.

Come on now. Come home. Eat it, eat it all up, now, she thinks vehemently, heartsick. You’ve been out all night. The sooner you eat the sooner you can go to sleep.

The minute hand flicks down the face of the clock. 7:30. The phone rings. The caller ID says it is Frank so she does not answer it. At 7:36 she hears the dog scrabbling up the steps and then the tired dragging footsteps of her daughters. She’s out the door and holding them. They smell like salt, pepperoni, leaves, garbage. They smell like the only meaning in life. They slept in the park, they tell her in amazement, underneath the heaviest bushes. They had their jackets! There was a thick layer of newspaper down on the ground, so they curled up because they couldn’t walk farther and the dog curled with them to keep them warm you should have heard he growled a horrible growl if anybody came near the bush. They don’t know where they were. Where Sweetheart Calico was. And no, she didn’t kidnap them. No. They just went with her. For the fun of it. And then it wasn’t fun and they were lost and a man gave them pizza and the night covered them. Then to get back here they followed the dog. And what’s that smell? It smells good. Is there some food? They sit at the table shoveling in the food with concentration. As Rozin watches them, her being fills. She gets up and walks to the refrigerator. She takes out a pound of hamburger, which is all the meat she has, unwraps the meat, and puts in on a plate on the floor. The dog comes over, inhales the meat. Laps fresh water from the bowl she sets beside it. Rozin slowly lifts the phone.

“Did you find them?” asks Noodin.

“Yes,” she says.

Rozin knows that they have been smoking their little pipes and praying all night long. They learned the words to their prayers from their grandmother Peace and their grandfather Waabizi, the Swan, during the years those two raised them. The words call the spirits by name from each direction, from the sky, from the earth, from the night, from the day, from the sun, from the moon, from the winds, the flocks of birds and the solitary birds, from the clans, from the animals that give themselves as food or are sent to delight us or to help us, like the dog, from the rivers, from the lakes, from the rain, from the water in the mother’s body and the water in the snow, from the stars and the mysterious place the stars came from, and the fire, the original fire.

Chapter 14. Almost Soup

NOW, MY BROTHERS and sisters, having retraced my urine with stunning accuracy, snarled at bums all night, snarfed a bowl of hamburger, and having guarded and saved my young humans, I will resume the story of my life. I begin shortly after I received my name. As you know, I started my life in the vicinity of Roys and Shawanos. There I lived among my relatives, who all descended in some manner from the dog named Sorrow, who was nursed by Blue Prairie Woman and bequeathed to us our eternal protective connection, the devotion of Sorrow’s descendants to hers. I was brought down to this place by the theft of Sweetheart Calico. We dogs sensed that danger and chaos in her form could threaten the twins.

I like Gakaabikaang. I’ve made it my home. Here on the ground where I now sprawl and scratch, I intend to live out my years of strength, fertility, and purpose. As you see, I have survived into my tranquil middle age. But not by chance. Not by luck. I have the dog skills of the ages in my blood.

Survival Rules for Animoshag

It is jokingly said by Anishinaabeg that those Indians who live on the plains eat dogs while they, the woods Indians, eat rabbits. However, it is my dog experience that this is not entirely true. I tell you now, relatives and friends, it is best to beware. Even in Ojibwe country, we are not out of danger.

There are the slick and deadly wheels of reservation cars. Poisons, occasionally, set out for our weaker cousins the mice and rats. Not to speak of the coyotes, the paw-snapping jaws of clever Ojibwe trapper steel. And we may happen into the snares set as well for our enemies. Lynx. Marten. Feral cats. Bears, whom we worship. I learned early. Eat anything you can at any time. Fast. Bolt it down. Stay cute, but stay elusive. Don’t let them think twice when they’ve got the hatchet out. I see cold steel, I’m gone. Believe it. And there are all sorts of illnesses we dread. Avoid the bite of the fox. It is madness. Avoid all bats. Avoid all black-and-white-striped moving objects. And slow things with spiny quills. Avoid all humans when they get into a feasting mood. Get near the tables fast, though, once the food is cooked. Stay close to their feet. Stay ready.

But don’t steal from their plates.

Avoid medicine men. Snakes. Boys with BB guns. Anything ropelike or easily used to hang or tie. Avoid outhouse holes. Cats that live indoors. Do not sleep under cars. Or with horses. Do not eat anything attached to a skinny, burning string. Do not eat lard from the table. Do not go into the house at all unless no one is watching. Do not, unless you are absolutely certain you can blame it on a cat, eat any of their chickens. Do not eat pies. Do not eat decks of cards, plastic jugs, dry beans, dish sponges. If you must eat a shoe, eat both of the pair, every scrap, untraceable. Always, when in doubt, the rule is you are better off underneath the house. Don’t chase cars driven by young teenage boys. Don’t chase cars driven by old ladies. Don’t bark or growl at men cradling rifles. Don’t get wet in winter, and don’t let yourself dry out when the hot winds of August blow. We’re not equipped to sweat. Keep your mouth open. Visit the lake. Pee often. Take messages from tree stumps and the corners of buildings. Don’t forget to leave in return a polite and respectful hello. You never know when it will come in handy, your contact, your friend. You never know whom you will need to rely upon.

Which is how I come to my next story of survival.

Avoiding Sacrifice

Within the deep lakes of the Ojibwe there is supposed to live a kind of man-monster-cat thing that tips boats over in the cold of spring and plucks down into his arms the sexiest women. Keeping this cranky old thing happy is the job of local Indian humans and they’re always throwing their tobacco in the water, talking to the waves. But when the monster takes a person in whatever way — usually by drowning — there is some deeper, older, hungrier urge that must be satisfied by a stronger item than tobacco. You guessed it. Lay low, animoshag. I tell you, when a man goes out drunk in his motorboat, hide. Say he’s just good-timing, lapping beer, driving his boat in circles, and he hits his own wake coming at him. Pops out of the boat. Goes down.

Humans call that fate. We dogs call that stupidity. Whatever you name it, there’s always a good chance they’ll come looking for a dog. A white dog. One to tie with red ribbons. Brush nice. Truss in a rope. Feed a steak or two. Pray over. Pet soft. Not worth it. Stone around the neck. Then, splash. Dog offering!

My friends and relatives, we have walked down the prayer road clearing the way for humans since before time started. We have gone ahead of them to present their good points to the gatekeeper at that soft pasture where they eat all day and gamble the night away. Don’t forget, though, in heaven we still just get the bones they toss. We have kept our humans company in darkest hours. Saved them from starvation — you know how. We have talked to their gods on their behalf and thrown ourselves in front of their wheels to save them from idiotic journeys, to the bootlegger’s, say. We’re glad to do these things. As an old race, we know our purpose. Original Dog walked alongside Nanabozhoo, their tricky creator. The dog is bound to the human. Raised alongside the human. With the human. Still, half the time we know better than the human.

We have lain next to our personal human shrouded in red calico. We have let our picked-clean ceremonial dog bones be reverently buried in bark houses. We have warned off bad spirits from their babies, and talked to the irritating ghosts of their suicide uncles and aunts. We have always given of ourselves. We have always thought of humans first. And yet, for me, when Fatty Simon went down I did not hesitate. I took to the woods. I had puppies, after all, to provide for. I had a life. Next time, there was a guardrail accident way up on the bridge and Agnes Anderson met her end that way. Again, not me. Not me tied like a five-cent bundle and tossed overboard. Nor when the lake took Alberta Meyer or the Speigelrein girls, not when old Kagewah fell through that spring sitting in his icehouse or even when our track star Morris Shawano disappeared and his dad’s boat washed up to the north. Not me. Not Almost Soup. That is my name and I refuse to give it up for human mistakes or human triumphs.

I refused, that is, until my girls weakened and got sick.

As I told you, a girl saved my life, but also saved me from worse — you know. (And now I specifically address my brothers, the snip-snip. The Big Fix. The words we all know and watch for in their plans and conversations.) Cally and Deanna hid me whenever their mother tried to drag me to the vet. Thus, they saved my male doghood and allowed me full dogness. I have had, as a result of their courage, the honor of carrying our dogline down the generations many times. For this, alone, how could I ever thank them enough? And then they got sick, as I say.

Visiting their grandmas for Christmas, it happened. One foul night in a blizzard they got sick with a fever and a cough. It worsened, worsened, until I sensed the presence of the black dog. We all know the black dog. That is, death. He smells like iron cold. Sparks fly from his fur. He is the one who drags the creaking cart made of sticks. We have all heard the wheels groan as they turned, and hoped they would keep on past our house. But on that cold late winter night, up north, he stopped. I heard his hound breath, felt the heat of his lungs of steam and fire.

Chapter 15. Lazy Stitch

ALMOST SOUP

Curled underneath the beading table with the shoeless feet of women, you hear things you’d never want to know. Or things you do. Maybe it’s the needles, Pony Number Twelve, so straight and fine they slip right through the toughest hide. Maybe it is my own big ears that catch everything, and more. Maybe it’s the colors of the seed beads that work up in stitches so intimate and small — collect, collect — until you have a pattern to the anguish.

We dogs know what the women are really doing when they are beading. They are sewing us all into a pattern, into life beneath their hands. We are the beads on the waxed string, pricked up by their sharp needles. We are the tiny pieces of the huge design that they are making — the soul of the world.

See here, Rozin says, holding out her work with a trembling hand. We dogs know already what happened down in Gakaabikaang and why she left for her mothers’ house. After her children ran off with Sweetheart Calico, after her lover, Frank, left boxes of cookies that the dog willingly wolfed, after Rozin was late the entire next week and the week after the trauma and the celebration of Cally and Deanna’s return into her arms, she was laid off. She applied for unemployment and was given enough to live on if she used her savings bit by bit as she looked for the next job. But not enough to pay the mortgage on that house.

Frank suggested that, as the girls were out of school for Christmas break, why not go up north and stay with their grandmas for a while? “I’ll fix up your house,” he said, “and we can live there when we get married. I’ll even help with the mortgage.”

That last line seals it (although Rozin ignores the when-we-get-married part). She takes the girls up to her original turf for a visit. And then she stays. And Frank travels up and travels back. Up and back. And whatever is happening down in Gakaabikaang just happens without Rozin. Her cousins up north, Jackie and Ruby, who figure they have a say in Rozin’s love life, counsel her to go back down and snap up Frank. He has a job, they say, fully employed! And pleasant enough looks and is maybe insecure but that’s a plus in an Indian guy. He doesn’t appear to drink to excess. Wow! He is also known to be one of those rare men who was faithful to his wife until he left her. So what is Rozin waiting for? Why the hesitancy? Why the chilled feet? Why enroll her daughters in the tribal school and disrupt their learning process? She even has a house down there! Is it that you miss the grandmas? They will visit you. Is it that you fear commitment after Richard? Just get over it. Do you guys lack chemistry?

“No,” says Rozin, “there’s too much of it.”

“There can’t be too much,” says Ruby, looking puzzled at Jackie. They are both large, happy women who laugh often and make anything, everything, into wild rice hot-dish.

ROZIN CAN’T SAY exactly what “it” is and so cannot be helped. She just wants to stay where she is, living out by the lake with her mother and her aunt. Even though they drive her crazy, she just wants to stay with them and learn things, oh, cultural and spiritual things, maybe, and she wants her daughters near and she does not want to rely on a man to make her happy. Frank. Though she misses him. Well, but she can live with it.

Here’s the real reason: Getting her children back feels like all the luck in her life is now used up. She doesn’t want to take any more risks.

But I could have told her that from a dog’s point of view life is nothing but risks.

Wild Rose Pattern

“Let me tell you about this flower,” Rozin rambles to her mother now, “this leaf, this heart-in-a-heart, this wild rose, these girls of mine.”

“Cally knows everything about me. Deanna knows everything about everything.”

“What things, for instance?”

“Ridiculous things!”

Rozin lowers her velvet and the old twins’ eyes glide over at the swimming vines, the maple leaf in three blends of green beads, the powerful twist of the grape tendril, and her four roses of hearts that she’s finishing in a burst of dangerous pinks. Rozin is becoming tiny and bird-boned. She has developed a drooping eye. You could think this eye was giving you the curse. Or you could think it was giving you the come-on.

“So how, ridiculous?”

“Just listen!”

“My girls and I get confused about one another. It happens with mothers and daughters, you know it does. Deanna. Cally. We think the same things sometimes. They don’t mind if I am nine years old again. Will they even like me three years from now? Will I embarrass them? Will they hate me like the other girls all hate their mothers? Was I like that to you?”

Noodin and Giizis exchange a look that says, whatever they deal to her she’s got it coming.

“Eya’, indaanis,” says Noodin. “Don’t worry.”

CALLY AND DEANNA are always outside. It’s good for them, Rozin thinks. Cally stomps massive clearings out on her snowshoes and throws her jacket off, her hat, for me to run with and toss. We see a mink flash by. Deanna loses her mittens for me to find. The girls play hard then tear into the house, faces dark with joy, cheeks blazing, the raw cold and sweat of icy breezes swirling in their hair.

Rozin paints their fingernails a golden satin pink. Cally burns her mouth on hot bread behind her back.

“Ow, Grandma!”

But Cally is laughing, fanning off the tip of her tongue, taking the next piece of dough her grandma fries with more care. Instead of eating once it cools, however, my girl suddenly sets down the golden crust, unfinished. Cally coughs hard and then she is tired. She curls up by Deanna. They wrap together in one blanket beside the stack of old newspapers that the grandmas keep by their easy chairs. They don’t want to play with the dog anymore. I sneak under the edge of the couch-cover fringe. They usually don’t let me in the house — the girls have to hide me.

Just like her great-grandfather Augustus, Giizis reads all of the summer news through long winter nights. She calls out to Noodin or Rozin occasionally, exclaiming over a visit from the Pope, another shooting, the practices of cults and movie stars. Now she shades Cally and Deanna from lamplight as they curl into a knitted afghan. It is only later when the girls wake, flushed in their first misery, that anyone except me even knows they are sick.

Their fevers shoot up abruptly to an identical 103. Rozin takes the steel bowl and washcloth. She wrings the cloth reluctantly, sloppily, and bathes down the fever, wiping slow across her daughters’ arms and throats. Faster, faster! I think desperately, whining. She touches the girls’ stomachs and they both cry out. Their faces wrench suddenly.

“Mama!”

Rozin bundles off the knitted blankets, brings fresh sheets and remakes the couch. All that night they are up, then down. I am constant. Under the couch, I keep faith and keep watch. Rozin falls asleep on the roll-away in the next room and Noodin sleeps beside the couch in the recliner, covered up with an old hunting jacket and a giveaway quilt. Giizis sleeps down on the cold floor. Every hour, Cally or Deanna cries out and is sick with nothing in her stomach, her whole body straining, her face fiery with heat again.

There are eight inches of new snow on the ground next morning. Rozin wakes to a still brightness in the tiny bitterly cold closet where she slept as a child. She curls for a moment into the blanket, deeper, then rolls wearily over when she hears the girls. She closes her eyes, aching for the warmth again, waiting for Noodin or Giizis to respond. Cally and Deanna continue to cry softly. Rozin rips the covers down with an almost angry gesture and hops out, stretching. Shit, she mumbles, walking into the next room. Her hand, though, touches down gently on Cally’s forehead and cheeks as she strokes. She refills the basin, then sponges each daughter’s blazing gold forehead, throat. She lifts Deanna’s head and puts the cloth against the back of her neck and again rubs Cally’s chest, again waits out the dry heaving.

Noodin goes out to shovel. An hour passes, and then Rozin pours a little ginger ale into a cup and sits down, careful not to jostle her daughters. She feeds them teaspoon by teaspoon, waiting for each spoonful to settle. Their lips are dry. Rozin puts a bit of Vaseline on her finger, rubs their deep and punished color. Cally lies back in the pillows, impossibly still. Deanna turns over and stares dully at the wall.

When Noodin comes in the door, Rozin turns.

It’s no good, Noodin’s look says. The phones were unreliable anyway, now cut off.

Then the girls can’t keep down even those precious teaspoons of ginger ale and the whole miserable process begins again. They’ll get dehydrated, Rozin says. Now Giizis comes in from outdoors, from the old lean-to where she’s been searching through rolls and bags of bark for the best slippery elm, the strongest sage to boil to make a healing steam. Noodin goes back out and all morning they hear her shovel or the regular fall of her ax as she builds up the woodpile. I go out to encourage and guard her. Slip back in, dart under the couch. Hardly eat. By the end of the afternoon, Giizis’s eyes narrow, her lips crease with worry. The smell of cooking upsets the girls. More snow falls and all day they take turns sleeping and eat cold food.

Cally is shrinking, thinning, hardening on her bones, Deanna is coughing in explosive spasms that shake the springs just over my head. Weeping tiredly. Cranky. Then they lose the energy to fight and grow too meek. I lick the hand that hangs over the edge of the couch. I call upon my ancestors and their old ones for help. That night, the girls seem even worse. They stare blankly at Rozin, who takes a sleeping bag and sleeps in the chair and sends Noodin to sleep on the roll-away. Rozin coaxes her daughters back to sense after that odd stare. Falling instantly into my own sleep, I dream of hissing cats.

Bad omen! Bad things! I wake at Cally’s cry and Rozin jumps to her. Cally thrashes her arms and legs, but then silently and rhythmically. The regular movement of the seizure stiffens Rozin to a calm horror. She holds Cally as best she can until the climbing movements of her arms and legs cease. At last Cally sags, unknowing, her face at her mother’s breast, eyes staring out of the whited mask of her features.

“Cally.”

Rozin’s voice is deep, from a place in her body I have never heard. Cally. She calls her daughter back from a far-off tunnel path. Cally’s mouth opens and she vomits blood into Rozin’s hands, into a towel she holds beneath her daughter’s mouth. She calls until her daughter stops looking through her mother and brings her troubled gaze to bear. She regards her mother from a distance, then, with eyes that soften in a grown woman’s pity.

Rozin wipes her daughter’s mouth, her forehead, her twig wrists, the calves, so fine, burning, dry. The soles of her feet. She wipes and wrings and wipes again until Cally stops looking at the ceiling. Rozin keeps on stroking with the cloth, finds herself humming. Slowly singing, she wipes up and down the pole arms. The forehead, her daughter’s beating throat. She wipes until Cally says, I’m thirsty, I’m so thirsty, in a normal voice.

You have to wait. Just wait a little bit. Rozin’s voice shakes.

Cally falls back. Her eyes shut. Her lips have darkened, cracked in fine, bloody lines, and her skin dries the wet cloth. Rozin keeps on wiping the fever away. I know she feels it underneath her hands, swirling, disappearing, but always coming back. After a while, I can see the fever itself, a viral red-yellow translucence creeping behind the blue of the wiping cloth. The exact same thing happens to Deanna next. Rozin puts the fire out, all night she puts the fire out, wiping until the sweet blue trembles in her daughters and she herself is light, lighter, rising to her feet to get the teaspoon again, fetching the ginger ale, the cup. She adds more water to the boiling kettle on the stove, more bark. The air is steaming, the windows a solid black with frost, a heart-rent blue, a dim gray, then white when Noodin rises to take her place.

Rozin sleeps, but her nerves are shot through with adrenaline. She lasts one hour and then rises strong with fear. She washes her face — the water icy from the tap — brushes her teeth. Her eyes in the mirror are staring, young and round. She slicks her hair back into a tail and chews a nail impatiently.

“Go to bed.”

Giizis sends her back, fierce, almost slapping at her. And so a day passes. Another evening. Another night in which Rozin and Cally and Deanna do as before, the same routine, no change, except that the girls are weaker, Rozin stronger in her exhaustion.

You get too tired, you’ll get sick too.

The grandmas send Rozin to bed with hard words, but their eyes are warm and still with a mixture of worry, sympathy, and something Rozin has not seen in their faces before. Drifting away she wonders at it, but then the dark well opens and she drops into an unconsciousness so profound she does not hear the four-wheel-drive winter ambulance finally groan and whine down the road that Noodin is killing her heart to shovel.

The ride down to IHS is complicated by new drifts and whiteouts. I jump in the back and hide just as they swerve off. No way that I’ll get left behind. The dark comes on quickly as the EMT drives along, silent. In the back Rozin holds our girls. Snowlight flicks through the branches as the wheels grind and tear and the ambulance swings patiently along. Rozin stares into her daughters’ faces and whispers. Cally’s skin goes white as wax. Deanna’s dark eyes bore into her mother’s face, intent and strange. Their skin is rough as velvet when cool, then slides up to the skid of wax again when hot. They finally get there, carry the girls into the emergency room, into the hands of the nurses and doctor.

One look at their blood pressure and the doctor orders IVs. Cally has surprising strength. I watch through the hospital window. Hear her yells and shouts. See Deanna tug away, or try to, but Rozin holds her close in a fixed and tender grip saying calm words, calm though wrenched inside out at her daughter’s feeble terror. They put a cot up right beside them in the hospital room. At last with Noodin downstairs on the phone, signing papers and arranging things, with Cally and Deanna on the IVs suddenly unhollowed, full of color, strengthening and falling into sleep, Rozin lies still, breathing calmly.

It is then, in the hospital room, halfway asleep, that Rozin feels me put her daughters’ lives inside of them again. Unknown to her, I have taken their lives with me to keep them safe. Waiting for her daughters to return, Rozin feels some confusion, a fall of silver, a branch loaded with snow, the snow crashing through her arms. Then Cally and Deanna are back in their own beds and they are separate, drifting off under different cotton blankets, in sterilized sheets, into deeper and deeper twilight, entering new ravines.

ROZIN IS SEWING the roses onto a shawl of black velvet, a border of madder pink and fuchsia flowers, twining stems, fancy leaves that never grew on any tree except in her mind. She has an odd thought — Cover the whole world with lazy stitch! Then Cally and Deanna walk in the door and say in unison, There’s nothing lazy about it! Rozin rubs the corner of her one drooping eye, but she says nothing. It’s a small thing, this mind reading that the girls do on her these days, and it’s harmless except that sometimes her daughters get big feelings they are not ready for yet. The old, dead, angry love between her and Richard, unfinished sadness so big and devouring that she can’t understand it herself. The worry at what he has become. The lonely wish to walk small between her mother, her aunt again, their arms curving over her like tree branches, making a smooth dim path for her to travel.

She takes agonizing stitches. Uses harrowing orange. They almost shoot fire in the dark room, these pinks. The word for beads in the old language is manidoominensag, little spirit seed.

Though I live the dog’s life and take on human sins, I am connected in the beadwork. I live in the beadwork too. The flowers are growing, the powerful vines. The pattern of her daughters’ wild souls is emerging. With each bead she plants in the swirl, Rozin adds one tiny grain.