The Antelope Wife

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Sounding Feather, great-grandma of first Shawano, dyed her quills blue and green in a mixture of her own piss boiled with shavings of copper. No dye came out the same way twice. According to her contribution, always different. The final color resulted from what she ate, drank, what she did for sex, and what she said to her mother or her child the day before. She never knew if she’d end up with blue dye, green, or a dull combination. What frightened her was this: One morning, after she had lost her struggles, done evil in the night, resented and sought revenge of her sisters, slapped her husband and screamed at her child, the quill worker peed desultorily and finished her usual dye. Dipping the white quills into the mixture, she found that the blue she made that day was unusually innocent, lovely, deep, and clear.

Chapter 16. The First Mix-up

WHEN CALLY AND DEANNA were born, the new assistant nurse who clicked the stopwatch twice, as each twin emerged, and later cleaned up after the birth had then to deal with Grandma Noodin.

“Where are their birth cords?” Grandma asked the nurse.

The young woman thought she hadn’t heard right. “They don’t get cards, they get certificates.”

“I said cords, like the thing between the baby and the mother. Where are they?”

“The umbilical cords?”

“That is right, smarty-pants.”

“I guess I threw them out. They’re in the trash!”

“The trash?” Grandma Noodin swelled in alarm. “Go get them,” she cried.

The nurse hustled to the hazardous waste bins, filled with bloody paper birth pads and rubber gloves. She knew already that this must be one of the cultural issues surrounding birth that she had read of in her maternity textbook. She was preparing to keep a straight face if Grandma Noodin wanted to fry the birth cords. She imagined telling her roommates about it. Good thing she remembered how she’d carefully wrapped the two long cords that the father had severed. Cutting the babies’ cords was not his idea, but the mother said it was the father’s job and he had taken it on, reluctantly. He had tried not to shut his eyes. The nurse found the cords and showed them to Grandma Noodin in triumph.

“Here they are!”

“Which one goes to which baby?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Does it matter if you’re going to eat them? Here.”

The nurse had wrapped each piece of umbilical cord in a new length of gauze. Grandma Noodin glared at her in new outrage.

“We don’t eat them, you fool,” she said. “The babies play with them.”

“Play with them?” The nurse’s voice betrayed her disquiet and she tried to hide it by clearing her throat. “Play with them.” She said it again to make sure.

“Yes, that’s right,” said Grandma Noodin sternly. “So you need to have the right cord for the right twin.”

The nurse now looked fascinated. “Because if one played with her sister’s cord…,” she prompted.

“She could get sick later on.”

Grandma Noodin took the cords in their clean gauze wrappings, frowned at them, compared them, shook her head, and put them in a cigar box already filled with tobacco and sage. The herbs would dry the cords out and then she would sew each one into a buckskin holder shaped like a small turtle. She and Grandma Giizis would bead those little turtles using precious old cobalts and yellows and Cheyenne pinks and greens in a careful design. Grandma Noodin pretended that she knew which cord belonged to each baby. She labeled each roll of gauze because she did not want to upset anyone. It was a heavy responsibility. And ever after that, she secretly worried. If the cords were mixed up right from the beginning, all sorts of things could happen.

Indis

The turtles hung off the curved headbands of the babies’ dikinaaganan, then off their belts. Just as Grandma Noodin had said, the indis was each baby’s first toy. Some believed that an indis was supposed to be placed off in the woods. Others said the person was supposed to have it all their life, even to get buried with it back on reservation land. But one day the twins came in from playing and their beaded turtles were gone. Grandma Noodin breathed a sigh of relief. No longer would the girls be mixed up, too mixed up maybe, the way she and Giizis had always been ever since they were young.

Why They Needed Names

Rozin thought differently when she knew they had lost their beaded turtle pouches. Slowly, over time, the absence… it began to tell. The girls began to wander from home, first with Sweetheart Calico. Then they flew away on fevers and she was afraid they would not return. Where would they go next? Rozin wanted to keep them here on this earth.

“I fear the spirits are trying to take them away from me. What should I do?” she asked Noodin and Giizis.

“Isn’t it obvious?” said Noodin.

“Oh, that,” said Rozin.

The girls did not have traditional names. They did not have Ojibwe names. This had always been a sore spot with everyone. One thing or another always intervened. Maybe Rozin had been lazy about it. No, she’d been lazy for sure. One thing was also true. She could ask only Noodin and Giizis to name them, otherwise they would be offended, but then whatever names they came up with everyone would have to accept. Rozin would have to live with their names for her daughters. That was giving her mother and her aunt a lot of power, but now Rozin decided that she had to do it.

Rozin went over to her purse, pulled out a pouch of Prince Albert tobacco, and put a pinch of it in each woman’s hand.

“I am giving you tobacco to find names for Cally and Deanna,” she said.

The old twins’ hard eyes misted over, their hands enfolded the tobacco, they touched the flakes of tobacco with their fingers, and slowly like sleepy birds cocked their heads from side to side. The fact is they had already dreamed long complex dreams in which the names of their granddaughters were revealed. But that night they had short dreams that were like page markers of the other dreams.

The Names

In Noodin’s dream she followed Cally into the woods and out of the woods and along a lakeshore out onto the prairie until she met the place where sky met earth and Cally wrote her name in the dirt: Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe.

THAT SAME NIGHT, Grandma Giizis dreamed that an old white man with stringy gray hair approached her and lifted his arm. He held it sideways so that Giizis could read his scar. Gaagigenagweyaabiikwe.

THEY MADE THE mistake of telling Rozin about the dreams before the ceremony.

Objection to History

“Those names are both freighted with tragedy,” says Rozin. “I knew it! I just knew you’d come up with names that carried old baggage.”

The grandmas stand firm. They have had their dreams and the dreams are definitive. Yes, there was a Blue Prairie Woman. Yes, there was a man named Scranton Roy who killed their ancestor and then appeared on the reservation with that word scored into his arm. Yes, there is history. No getting around it. But the dead exert a protective influence and their spirits rejoice when they know that their names are still used in this world. So Cally and Deanna should receive their traditional names in a family ceremony.

Rozin refuses to give her daughters those names, and the grandmas are shocked and grieved. The dreams are strong. The dreams are correct and it is completely wrong to interrupt the naming.

“We don’t like it,” says Giizis.

“Something might go wrong now,” says Noodin. “Again.”

“You’re trying to scare me,” says Rozin. “Anyway, there’s no hurry. The names are the names, right?”

Cecille drives up from Minneapolis for the ceremony and Rozin tells her that there will not be a ceremony. Cecille says, “I drove up here and canceled all of my classes. Everyone has rearranged their schedules. But who cares!”

The grandmas pout and glower. They smoke their pipes and pray to the spirits that gave the names and tell them that no disrespect is meant. They ask the spirits to have patience with Rozin. They pray over Cally and Deanna. They do their best to put their invisible world back into some order. Right afterward the twins run away again.

This time they stow away in the backseat of Cecille’s car, so of course the running away is again by accident. Cally and Deanna think she’s just going into town to the store, where they’ll surprise her and beg her to buy some candy. But the car keeps going and going and they fall asleep underneath a star quilt that represents the ancestors of the Ojibwe who came from the stars.

Cecille keeps driving, oblivious in the scrawl and loop of her favorite music. One road widens into two lanes, then four, then six, past the farms and service islands, into the dead wall of the suburbs and still past that, finally, into the city’s complex heart.

Lemon Light

The girls wake up when the car stops at Frank’s Bakery, where Cecille is still living in the upstairs apartment. After Cecille gets out and takes things from the trunk to bring upstairs, they slip from the backseat. They walk into Frank’s shop, and the bell dings with a cheerful alertness. They have the chance to smell those good bakery smells of yeasty bread and airy sugar. Behind the counter, lemony light falls on Frank. He is big, strong, pale brown like a loaf of light rye left to rise underneath a towel. But his voice is muffled and weak, like it is squeezed out of the clogged end of a pastry tube.

He grabs the telephone, his eyes still on the girls.

“They’re down here! They just walked in! They must have been in Cecille’s car because she just pulled in! They’re okay. They’re…”

Frank puts his hand over the phone and whispers, “Are you girls fine?”

They nod vigorously.

“They’re fine,” he reports. “No, you can’t kill them. I’ll kill them for you.”

And he puts down the phone and comes around the counter and sweeps them into his arms.

He holds them and they shake his hair out of the thin dark ponytail that he binds up in a net.

“Just as I’m closing.”

His eyes are tearing up. “What will we do with you? I don’t know. Maybe custard buns.”

He cleans his hands on a towel and beckons the girls into the back of the bakery shop, between swinging steel doors. They know him as a funny man, teasing and playing hand games and rolling his eye, making his pink sugar-cookie dogs bark and elephants trumpet. But now he is serious, and frowns slightly as the girls follow him up the back stairs and into the big top-floor apartment with the creaky floors, the groaning pipes, odd windows that view the yard of junk and floating trees. The girls tap the door open.

Cecille sees them and screams. “Omigodomigod!”

“Calm down,” says Frank. “The drama is over. Rozin knows.”

“Let’s put them in the back room, huh?” says Cecille.

This little back room, no bigger than a closet, overlooks a maze of tree branches. There is a mattress on the floor. The girls look out the window and see an old brown car seat below, a cable spool table, spring lawn chairs, a string of Christmas lights.

The room seems safe, the mattress on the floor even has a sheet on it, the blankets, the shelves for things, and the familiar view below.

“Talk to your mom?”

Frank gives orders in the form of a question. He acts all purposeful, as though he is going back downstairs to close up the store, but as the girls dial the number on the kitchen wall phone he lingers. He can’t drag himself away from the magnetic field of their mother’s voice, muffled, far off, but on the other end of the receiver. He stands in the doorway with the towel he brought from downstairs, folding and refolding it in his hands.

“Mama,” the twins say, and her voice on the phone suddenly hurts them. They want to curl next to her and be little babies again. Their bodies feel too big, electric, like powerful bear bodies enclosing tiny mouse souls.

They begin to cry and Frank darts a glance at them, then stares at his feet and frowns. The girls picture everything at Grandmas’. On the wall of their room up north, there hangs a bundle of sage and Grandma Noodin’s singing drum. On the opposite wall, Cally taped up a poster of dogs, photos of Jimi Hendrix and the Indigo Girls, a second grade boyfriend Deanna had but doesn’t have anymore, bears, and Indigenous, their favorite band, another of a rainbow and buffalo trudging underneath. Ever since they were little, they have slept with a worn bear and a new brown dog with wiry blondish hair and a red felt tongue. And their real dog, too, curled at their feet sometimes, if Mama didn’t catch them. Though she lets him sleep with them ever since he rescued them. Now they start crying worse than ever because they realize they left him behind.

The twins never liked dolls. They made good scores in math. They are so lonesome for their dog that they lose track of Mama’s voice and hand the telephone back to Frank. He begins to talk in a wistful bantering tone and the girls wander off in their thoughts until he hangs up and says, excited, “I think she’s coming back here. Coming down here. What you girls did was wrong… oh so wrong… but so right. You didn’t mean to anyway. I’ll never punish you. What kind of doughnuts do you like?”

And they are extremely confused as they eat a chocolate custard bun and a powdered doughnut and drink a glass of skim milk, which Cecille keeps in her refrigerator to make up for all the doughnuts. They are confused because they miss their father. And yet they like Frank. And they certainly like the unhealthy pastries that he lets them eat although just one, because of how the grandmas left to escape his cookies, which spiked their blood sugar. He knows about that. He sits and talks to them and tells them that he is going to put them to work. To work! They could not be more thrilled.

Sweetheart’s Visit

The next morning they start right in and learn the cash register, the prices, how to handle the pastries with a plastic glove or wax-paper tissue. Of course Frank does the real work. There are child labor laws, he says. I’ll pay you under the table.

Now, that is an exciting thought! An exchange of money beneath a table. Grown-ups have strange customs. Even so, they sell doughnuts. Also maple long johns, hot pies, raised braids, and crullers. Things go fine until Sweetheart Calico.

They are behind the display case with a spray bottle of lemon glass-cleaner when they get this tickly, hairy, sifty feeling they are being watched. The store is empty, that dead hour just after lunchtime. The air is quiet though the growl of motors on the street barges and recedes. A few passersby glance in, neutral, no interest in the display of breads or cakes or even the scent of fried dough that Frank has purposely vented where it will attract the casual customer. Deanna hears the scratch of nails on paint, twirls. Nobody. Cally turns back to rubbing the glass and then there is the tap, tap, tap of heels. The girls drop their polishing rags and spring to the door leading back to the ovens. They’re supposed to stay behind the counter, but there are tiny noises and a staticky feeling at the napes of their necks. Nobody is there, and they are about to turn back to arranging cookies when a light touch at Deanna’s shoulder spins her into the antelope gaze.

Sweetheart Calico.

She doesn’t speak. Her lean face is clear, smooth, pale milk-caramel, sweet as a hen’s egg; her tea-brown eyes are wistful, sad. Her hair is a powerful wing sweeping down her slim back. She has slender, jutting hips, long legs. On her feet black stiletto heels like shiny fork prongs. Perfectly honed features. The girls smile at her and open their mouths to talk. A mistake. For then she smiles back at them.

When she opens her mouth, her eyes go black. Her grin is jagged, a tooth broken and as sharp as a nail. Her smile is fixed, frightful. Her gaze scrapes over them. The scariest thing of all is this: they can sense she is glad they are here, but not in a good way. Excited. She wants them near and as they stand quiet before her they feel it all — her hating need and eager sly wishing washes toward Cally and Deanna like an oily black wave. She wants them in her part of the world, Gakaabikaang.

She wants to steal them again! They have come to believe as their mother says, that they were kidnapped by Sweetheart Calico. It has all gone vague except for their dog who brought them home. It all goes vague now. Then the wave recedes. She is gone as suddenly as she appeared.

Frank walks in, whistling, a tray of crullers on his shoulder.

Their hands are clumsy as they rub the display glass, smearing it. They are not the same afterward, nor will they ever be until they understand the design. They don’t know how to take this, don’t know what to make of it, have never known and do not now want to know a person like Sweetheart Calico. For she alters the shape of things around her and she changes the shape of things to come. She upsets the girls, then enlightens them both with her truthless stare. She scatters everyone’s wits.

SWEETHEART CALICO STILL lives secretly in Rozin’s house, which Frank is renovating. She does not break in, really, just melts through the walls and takes showers, endless showers for as long as she wants. She uses up so much hot water that Frank thinks there is a leak in the water heater. He is even thinking of getting a new water heater. Which would be a hassle. He would have to ask Booch Jr. to help him move the old one out. He never even suspects. She doesn’t leave her cloven tracks, now, she is too clever. Nobody is there at night so nobody knows. She hums in her sleep. Sometimes Frank notices the smell of prairie sage, but he thinks that is a wonderful smell and it reminds him of the old days of his youth when he wandered to the place where sky meets earth.

Frank would not be surprised to see Sweetheart Calico in the shop, even though he doesn’t know she lives in Rozin’s house. Only Cecille knows that he felt sorry for this woman adrift, and hired her to work. Although work is not exactly what she does. If she is around, Sweetheart is sitting in the corner, down in the yard, poking through things in the basement, doing the shop chores somehow not quite right — sweeping with her broom between drags on her cigarette, but then forgetting to pick up the piles of dust. Washing pans but not rinsing them, so next day the maple long johns taste faintly of soap. Dusting the blackboard and the pictures of muffins onto the floor. Leaving them there. Washing the bathroom mirrors with toilet paper so the little papery bits are stuck all over. She takes hours in the bakery bathroom putting makeup on and hours taking it off. She lotions her face. Sits on the top of the toilet, at peace. Often, just before she leaves, she tries to get Frank or Cecille to go with her. Tries to pull them out the door. Frank and Cecille never go, though her face is desperate. They are pretty sure she walks and walks, sometimes for days, going places nobody knows. Returning with a silent, baffled, pitiful look on her face.

She likes to sit in the back of the bakery kitchen, listening to the radio and watching the telephone to see if it will ring. The next day she is there when the girls’ mother calls.

“I’m on my way.”

“Okay, Mama.”

Frank takes the phone, turns his back on them all as he speaks to Rozin.

Meantime, Sweetheart sits in the corner smiling her shark-tooth smile and smoking a Marlboro. She blinks her hexing eyes slowly and openly stares.

The girls don’t want to get her attention, make her grin. That scares them. Cally turns away after a quick, weak smile. Deanna too. But she feels immediately, right in the small of her back, the calm prickle of Sweetheart Calico’s gaze.

Sweetheart Calico veers close and gives them each a hug. It is a strange, boney, upsetting, long stranglehold that twists Cally in her own sleeves so she can’t speak. Sweetheart Calico is gone before Deanna can untangle her sister. All that is left upon the girls is the scent of her perfume and they find that they can’t get the green smell off. They can’t stop thinking of her. They see her in their deepest thoughts. Her perfume smells like grass and wind. Makes them remember running in the summer with their hair flopping on their shoulders. Her scent is like sun on their backs, like cool rain, like dust rising off a waterless, still, nowhere-leading road.

Cecille

The twins also get their first real jolt of Cecille. She’s like a caffeine surge. She teaches in a tae kwan do school right down the block from the bakery shop. Through this, and peroxide, she has made herself a bicep blond-dyed Indian with tiny hips and sculpted legs that she shows off by wearing the shortest shorts. She has the glitteriest, most watching eyes, with green glints.

Some bloods they go together like water — the French Ojibwes: you mix those up and it is all one person. Others are a little less predictable. You make a person from a German and an Indian, for instance, and you’re creating a two-souled warrior always fighting with themself. There are Swedish and Norwegian Indians who abound in this region, and now, Hmong-Ojibwes, those last so beautiful you want to follow them around and see if they are real. Take an Indian who shows her Irish like Cecille, however, and you’re playing with hot dynamite.

Rozin thinks it’s the salt.

When Rozin drives up with the dog in the passenger seat, when she jumps out and runs into the shop and starts scolding and crying, Cecille thinks she’d better calm her sister-cousin down with lunch. She takes her to a café and tells her to try meditative breathing. Rozin breathes deep and slow and begins to focus. First thing, Cecille gets the saltshaker. She salts before she tastes. Rozin has read that’s a habit can lose you a job in an interview lunch. This salting before tasting is supposed to indicate some kind of think-ahead deficiency. Some lack. To Rozin, the pre-salting indicates this notion that the world is automatically too bland for Cecille. Something has to be done, in big and little ways, to liven things up and bring out all the hidden flavors. Something has to be done to normal everyday life, time spent, to heighten and color the hours, to sprinkle interest.

As salt is to food, so lying is to experience.

Or not lying, that sounds too bald. How about sprucing up, spicing, embellishing reality? At first as people get to know Cecille they think everything that happened happened just the way she says. But even after lunch, which is simple — health food for Cecille, nuts and carrots and a swipe of peanut butter — she sits back and tells Rozin stories of her students, their progress, then lectures Rozin on all of the amino acids she’s imbibed. On the legendary qualities of the naked almond and the undisclosed secret of ginkgo.

“My memory,” says Cecille, “used to be a blip. Now I recall every single thing that happens hour by hour, minute by minute. Things I’ve read, even license plates. My memory is getting close to photographic.” She doses herself with more grainy pressed oval pills and swallows bottled water by the gallon to clean her liver.

“I’m all set,” she informs her cousin, “to live a hundred years. I want to be around to see my grandchildren.”

She has no kids as yet. Rozin stares at her.

“I have looked into our genealogy,” she says. “It appears we don’t start menopause until well into our fifties. And then, since we’re running around with a two-year-old upon our hip, we just don’t notice. We don’t have time for that hot-flash shit. We bear late.”

She gives Rozin a little curious look.

“So are you taking the girls back?” she asks. “I mean, not that I’m criticizing you, but shouldn’t they be in school or something?”

“I don’t know what to do,” says Rozin. “They get into trouble here. But they get into trouble up there. Should I stay here? Should we give the girls those old names our mothers dreamed of? Those old names scare me. As do my feelings. Should I live with Frank? Should I move back into the house? Should I marry Frank? Should I get another job? Where should I be, what should I do? Where is my ex?”

“Whiteheart Beads?”

“Who else?”

Cecille eyes her cousin significantly.

“I know where he is,” she says.

Rozin opens her mouth to ask where, but she can’t put what she really wants to ask into words. There is this big thing stored up in her, she doesn’t know what it is called. Some smooth, round, important piece of data. She keeps tapping the sphere but she doesn’t know what’s inside. The globe is huge, yellow, sometimes changeable of shape and substance. A weather balloon, sometimes it bobs to the surface of Rozin’s day and she must bat it aside, this thing, this ache, this ambition. She shrugs at Cecille now, helpless to describe its bounding weight.

“I think I know what you are feeling,” says Cecille.

Rozin looks at her eagerly.

“I have these books,” says Cecille, “that belonged to our ancestor Augustus Roy. He was interested in time.”

Rozin is disappointed. Time got her in trouble, in the form of being late. Time lost her job for her. Time seems to be trying to steal her daughters from her, too.

“He tried to trace the effects of time on his women. You remember how they hid their identities from him, how he never knew — or at least pretended not to know — which one was whose mother? How this got them into trouble and they were investigated by the priest and that crooked Indian agent? How his children nearly got taken away until they arbitrarily wrote down Mary as his wife, even though we suspect it was Zosie?”

“Yes,” says Rozin, keenly listening now.

Cecille goes on, tapping the table with her clipped nail.

“He writes about all sorts of connections in the margins of those old books. He writes about Blue Prairie Woman and about how after she was given the name Other Side of the Earth she walked west looking for her daughter. How she found her daughter and gave her the song that she herself learned from her first husband, supposedly a deer husband. The song that called the antelope.”

“I get all that,” says Rozin. “Or I remember it, vaguely, the stories.”

“But haven’t you ever asked yourself,” says Cecille, “how this all affects us? Haven’t you ever wondered how history is working on us? Don’t you sometimes pause in the midst of things?”

“Yes,” says Rozin. “I do pause in the midst of things.”

“And wonder?”

“Yes, I wonder.”

“Think about it,” says Cecille. “We developed as a people over many thousands of years. Our culture. Our ways. Our adaptations. Then all of a sudden in one generation — wham. Warp-speed acculturation. And now we’re the products of two cultures. Something happened in our family that cannot be explained by the culture we live in now. When our mothers tell the stories they heard from their grandmothers and great-grandmothers, we listen and nod as if we think the stories are true. But we don’t think they’re true. We don’t think they’re historical facts. Our minds don’t work the same way as our ancestors’ minds worked. Our minds sort fact from fiction. We think the stories are powerful, maybe, but metaphorical, merely.”

“Yes,” says Rozin. “Yet…”

“… yet. I know what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t explain her.”

“I can’t explain her either,” says Cecille. “Do you know I’ve followed her? To try and figure out if her tracks change?”

“And did they?”

“She walked the whole time on sidewalks and streets. So no tracks. But she walked miles in stilettos, which to me seems inhuman.”

“I couldn’t do it,” says Rozin.

“No woman I know could do it, or at least she’d be limping, which Sweetheart wasn’t.”

Rozin nods, thoughtful. “I have this feeling…”

“Exactly,” says Cecille. “It’s not the heels, the tracks, nothing you can put your finger on. Yet. It is no accident that Klaus brought Sweetheart Calico here. Her presence is meaningful. History is at work.”

“History is random events, not fate, or coincidence.” Rozin shakes her head.

“How do you know?” says Cecille.

Frank’s Bakery

The bakery has huge steel witch ovens and a concrete floor slippery with grease. There is a dough-pounding table of blocky wood covered with sparkle-shot linoleum. The high windows, coated with years of flour dust, look to Rozin like something from a fable or a movie with their tiny blocks of glass. A tulip, gold stem and leaves, bursts fierce red in the pane. It is an old bakery, much loved and tunneled to by rats, floors creaky with shadows. The doors all set crooked or stuck. There is a built-in deep-fry pit, too, which can be zapped up to bubbling or left to glaze over. It takes up one entire corner of the kitchen. There is a wonderful scent that rises when the grease is fresh. Frank slips in the little slabs of dough and they bob there, bubbling, reminding Rozin of back home at powwows and sweating ladies at the fry-bread stands laughing, pushing those gold rounds at you, hot and welcome.

Rozin, Cecille, and the girls stay in the shop to help Frank the next day. He is absorbed, melting and beating at some transparent substance in his treasured copper pan. The girls asks questions. They can’t help but ask questions. They ask questions even though it takes him so long to answer that they have thought of about twenty more before they manage to pierce his distraction.

“What’s that pan made of?” Cally asks, just a question to warm him up. But he takes a long time even to answer this.

“This pan is made of spirit metal,” he says at last.

“What’s that?” Deanna says immediately, so he won’t lose his train of thought.

“Miskwaabik,” he mumbles, absent in his work. “They say the thunder people sent down this red stuff, put it in the ground.”

“Why’s it your favorite pot?”

“Conducts the heat real good.”

“What about those bowls?”

“Smooth the batter out.”

The answers are getting closer, quicker.

“What are you making?” Rozin herself asks, even though she could look into Frank’s sweat- and butter-stained recipe notebook, a tattered spiral-bound, and find out for herself. He won’t answer for a long while, though, and this makes Rozin naturally curious. So she peeks over his shoulder at the notebook, sees a word she has never seen before, although she has heard of it. Blitzkuchen. Written on top of the lined paper in tired ink.

Blitzkuchen! All of a sudden, he gets talkative. Frank sets the egg timer. He is always timing — this, that — because of course there always is something in the oven to rescue or to check. Anyhow, that day, Frank is working again on his life project. The cake of all cakes. Early in his life, says Frank, he tasted it — light as air with a taste of peach. A subterranean chocolate. Citrus. Crumbled tears. Sweet lemon. A smooch of almond.

“It explodes on your palate,” he says, eyes fixed and grave.

“Oh, gimme a break,” says Cecille, who has heard this before. “Stick with our daily bread. Or daily doughnut.”

Frank considers. An aura of furious effort. Concentrated baker’s conversion of heat, light, energy.

“I make the staff of life,” says Frank in a dignified and measured voice. “That is my calling. But I will never stop attempting the blitzkuchen.”

He’s trying to reconstruct the recipe. Trying to capture time. Or at least the punch line of an old family story. The cake is a fabulous thing, he says. The cake is holy. Extraordinary with immense powers of what sort nobody knows. He calls it the cake of peace. The cake of loving sincerity.

Rozin looks at him in wounded skepticism. This is a very different Frank. He has never spoken this way. He has always been down-to-earth. That is something she likes about him. This streak of mysticism, over a cake of all things, makes Rozin nervous, makes him suspect.

For years, he says, he has searched and tested for the exact recipe. In fact, the hunt for this recipe could be called his life quest. Always, between other concoctions, even inventions like his popular rhubarb sludge bars, when he has a little moment to himself, Frank makes a trial cake. Attempts a variation on the length of time he beats the batter. Amount of ground hazelnuts. Type of sugars and butters. Whatever.

“Of exquisite importance,” he says to Rozin, waving a darkly wrapped bar of chocolate now, his wide-boned, pleasant face remote and concentrated. “Cocoa content seventy-seven percent. Strong and dark.” He writes this in his notebook, scrawls it, and sighs over the batter he is now whipping in the bowl.

“Perhaps,” Rozin says, “it is all in the stirring.”

He frowns, lost in concentration now, and doesn’t answer for the longest time.

“Hey, Frank,” Deanna says, wanting to break the spell and change the subject, “why don’t you do the nose trick?”

He looks at the twins, shy.

“Come on, Frank.”

Frank can push his nose all the way to one side and tape it there. He can also pop his joints, vibrate his ears, and roll back his eyelids. He was the high school clown. He used to be ironic and jolly, always with a sly humor and a broad goofiness. But his fear of losing Rozin has made him serious.

Humor or the suggestion of it reminds him that he might say something to offend Rozin. He is stilted, stunted, stymied by his need to win her. Jokes puzzle and panic him. Put him in a sweat. Like right now, just thinking of a stupid old funny trick that made him look like a big dork, he gets upset. He thrusts his smooth hands deep in the flour barrel. Looks like he’ll cry until a teary dough forms around his fingers. Maybe, Rozin thinks, watching him knead and sugar and tenderize, this is how he works through the unresolved grief that Cecille says sociologists have begun to suspect every Indian is born with. Rozin has no idea he has lost his humor because of her.

Chapter 17. Nibi

KLAUS AND RICHARD have medicine breath from the family-size bottle of Listerine they are drinking. They are sitting by the art museum, half asleep in the heated shank of the day. The air is stifling. The heat is very unseasonable. It is April and should have been cool, but the heat gags thought. The heat makes everyone uneasy. Cars rush by on the other side of the bench.

“Nice to get that breeze from the traffic!” says Richard. “That carbon monoxide. Ah.” He takes a deep breath, sits up, and hits his chest. Klaus, a red bandanna wrapped around his head and a T-shirt torn from collar to waist, lies curled, booze-thin, his legs folded neatly as a cat’s, his arms a pillow. He opens his eyes and croaks.

“Nibi. Nibi.”

“Oh shut up. I got no water, Klaus. Go to the drinking fountain.”

“Where’s it at?”

“Over there.”

They both know it is dry, always is. No fountains work in this part of the city. They share out the last of the Listerine. Richard screws the black cap carefully onto the empty bottle. He sets the bottle on the margin of grass beside the museum steps.

The bench feels good to Klaus, hard but broad enough to curl his knees on. He is so comfortable that he does not move, decides to endure his thirst. He shuts his eyes.

A woman comes out of the museum. She is carrying a huge orange cloth purse slung over her shoulder. It thumps against her as she walks, like a big soft pumpkin. Richard calls out, “Hey, white lady!”

She frowns.

The woman isn’t all white. She is something else. Hard to tell what she is, exactly. Richard thinks maybe a Korean or a Mexican or maybe, but probably not, she could be an Indian from somewhere else. She takes some money from her purse and puts it in his hand. Bills.

“Oh,” says Richard, “that’s very nice of you. I’d like you to meet my friend.”

The woman walks away.

“Still,” Richard calls after her, “I thank you. I’ll put down tobacco for you.” She does not turn around. “That’s a sacred gesture. We’re still Indians.”

“You got cigarettes?” Klaus peers at Richard and holds out his fingers.

Richard gives him a cigarette. “That is my last cigarette,” he says, although he has more. Klaus holds it lightly in the palm of his hand, in his fingers again. He does not smoke the cigarette.

“How much did that lady give?” he asks.

“There’s four here,” says Richard, counting the bills over slowly, twice.

Holding the cigarette, Klaus shuts his eyes again and listens. There is music. A sweetheart song playing between his ears. He is still dancing from some long-ago night, as he always does in his dreams. Even now, though her image sags like air is escaping, he pictures his Niinimoshenh and her twenty-six sisters and her daughters in shawls of floating hair. Over and over again they spring into his dreams. Gallop at him. Brandish their hooves like polished nails. He bats them off. She is alone again. There for him again. But he can’t stop his mind from turning his sweetheart into a Disney character. The Blue Fairy. Her light increases. Her smile spreads slowly into jag-toothed mercy and then her voice flows, the cool of a river. Once, very drunk, he watched the movie Pinocchio eight or ten times in a row with successive nieces and nephews, their friends, their friends’ cousins, then the cousins’ cousins and friends. By the time the night came on and the children were draped in slumber on the floor and on pillows and heaps of blankets and clothes, he had fallen in love with the Blue Fairy.

“What should we do with this money?” says Richard.

“I’m sick.”

Klaus stretches out his arm, too heavy, and then lets it drop. Unconscious again. Two men come out of the art museum. Surprisingly — what day is this? — one of them hands Richard money too. Coins. Then a group of people emerge from the big doors and skirt the men as they pass talking loudly to one another about where to go for lunch. More people come, the two men go invisible. Some event sponsored by the museum is letting out. No more luck. The streams of people soon disappear into their cars.

“That was exciting,” says Richard.

“I’m sick,” says Klaus. “Water.”

“I wonder if they’d let me in to look at the paintings. Maybe we should make a donation.”

“Don’t do that!”

Klaus surges to life and props himself against the steps, a big loose-jointed man doll. His lady love is still there in the back of his mind, standing in a ball of blue light.

“I’d like a drink of water,” he says to her. She has a glass of water in her hand, too, Sweetheart Calico, but she pours it out in front of his eyes. The molecules dissolve all around him and do nothing for his thirst.

“Did she do that to you, too? Did she?” Klaus is disappointed, outraged.

“What?”

“Pour the water out right before your eyes!”

“No.”

“What did she do then, Sweetheart?” Klaus asks, jealous. “Tell me every detail or I’ll kill you right here.”

“With what?”

“My bare hands,” says Klaus lazily.

“Klaus,” says Richard in a fatherly voice, “you’re sick.” Gently, he takes the cigarette from between Klaus’s fingers. He unpeels the wrapping from the cigarette and begins to sprinkle the tobacco on the clipped grass. Klaus and Richard are very quiet, watching the flakes of tobacco fall to earth. Above them, in the trees, a cicada begins. A long drawn-out buzzing whine. Wait, thinks Klaus, it is only April, that can’t be a cicada. It must be the heat in my brain. The day is heating past bearable. When all of the tobacco is shaken onto the grass, they get to their feet. Klaus steadies himself. His knees shake. As they slowly move down the street past the museum, on both sides of the sidewalk the sprinklers set into the sod of the lawn sputter on and then spray out cones of mist. Klaus bends over, puts his mouth on the little holes in the ground, the spigots, and tries to drink.

A museum guard in a dark uniform, a large woman bland and bored, walks down the steps and tells them to leave.

“You’re supposed to say,” Richard admonishes, “quit the premises. Better yet, vacate them.”

The woman shrugs and walks back up the steps.

“Vacate,” says Klaus, his face beaded with spray, “I’m still thirsty. It’s hard to get much. That spray is thin.”

“Well, let’s go.” They decide, taking themselves back down the street, to find a Wendy’s hamburgers. Sneak in a side door to their bathrooms. If challenged, show their money.

“Where is this supposed Wendy’s?” says Richard after they walk in the broiling sun over to the other side of Minneapolis.

“I’m thirsty,” says Klaus.

They stand outside a grocery store next to a liquor store on Hennepin and they feel good, laugh, making the choice.

“Mad Dog or Evian?” Richard asks Klaus.

“I’m going in there,” Klaus says, pointing up at the grocery sign. “I’m asking for a drink of water.”

He is in and out the door in seconds and a security guard nodding with satisfaction yells, “Good luck anyway, finding a fountain.”

“He didn’t want to do that,” says Klaus. They walk into the liquor store. “He was just doing his job.”

“So was Custer,” says Richard. “I opt for a subtle white.” He addresses the storekeeper. “Something with volume. I don’t get too hung up on the bouquet.”

“That’s good,” says the clerk.

“My circumstances won’t permit it.” Richard nods. “I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can’t fool me. Don’t try.”

“I wouldn’t.”

The clerk scrapes their money off the counter and bags up two bottles, each in its own individual sack, and sets them on the counter for the men to take.

“You wouldn’t have a cup of water handy, would you?” asks Klaus.

“Not really,” says the clerk.

“Did he mean not as in reality or really not,” asks Richard as they go out the door.

“He meant they don’t have a glass of real water,” Klaus says, gazing back into the window with longing, “just those cardboard pictures on the walls.”

“That’s all you need,” says the Blue Fairy, holding up the bottle before his eyes. Twice, with her glass hoof, she strikes the hollow ground. “Let’s mogate.”

“To the big water. Gichi-ziibi.”

“Howah!”

They walk. Hotter. Hotter. A few times they take a drink from their bottles, but mainly they want to get to the Mississippi, so they walk. Shaking a little, hungry. Go around the back of a pizza place where the manager leaves unclaimed orders every once in a while. Past the Deja Vue Showgirls. SexWorld. Fancy café garbage Dumpster and outdoor bar. Nothing there. A woman exiting an antique store holds out a dollar and the moment Richard touches the bill she drops it like he’d run an electric wire up her arm. She darts away.

“It’s that sex thing,” says Richard, his look sage. “I have that effect on women.”

“They run like hell.”

Klaus laughs too hard, furious, thinking of how his antelope girl could take off and sprint.

They reach the broad lawns and paths beside the river, go down the embankment and edge along the shore until they find a clump of bushes, familiar shade.

“We were here a while ago. I remember this place,” says Richard. “We should put down some tobacco.”

“Or smoke it.”

“We just got two cigarettes left.”

“Let’s smoke it like an offering then. It don’t mix with wine, not for religious purposes.”

“That’s true,” says Richard. He slowly decides, and then he speaks. “This afternoon, let’s just regard our tobacco as a habit-forming drug.”

Klaus sways to his knees and then painfully, slowly, he inches down the bank of the river, leans over the edge to where the water begins. At that place, he lowers his face like a horse. He puts his face into the water, sucks the river into himself, drinks it and drinks it.

“That’s Prairie Island nuclear water,” Richard yells.

Klaus keeps drinking.

“He can’t hear me,” Richard says to himself. “Besides, that plant is down the stream farther.”

Richard lights a cigarette, takes a drink of wine.

“Or Xcel shit. Or some beaver might have pissed up near Itasca.”

Klaus keeps drinking and drinking.

“For sure,” says Richard, worried.

Klaus doesn’t stop.

“Wowee,” says Richard, taking a drink of the wine, swishing it around on his tongue, “full-bodied as my sour old lady.”

“How about you?” Richard yells to the river. “Klaus?”

Klaus is still face in the water, drinking, drinking up the river like a giant.

“What do you think he sees,” says Richard, helpless without an audience, wishing he could open Klaus’s wine already. “What do you think he’s looking at? What do you think he sees?”

After another drink, Richard answers himself.

“To the bottom.”

And he is right and she is down there. Klaus is watching her float toward him — his special woman — the Blue Fairy, merlady — a trembling beauty alive with Jell-O light, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales. The water is medicinal, bubbling, hot turquoise. She stops for a moment, flying backward in the great muscle of the current pushing south. It tugs at her hair. She has to go, Klaus knows. Longing for her scorches him through and through. He stretches toward her with all of his soul, but she only looks back at him over her shoulder with her hungry black eyes. Gives a flick of her white-flag tail.

Chapter 18. Finding Sweetheart

ROZIN FLIPS THROUGH a pile of mail, two paper bags at her knees. One for glossy junk mail and one for plain envelopes and letter paper. Gakaabikaang insists that its citizens sort their business out, and Rozin does this with even more devotion than she used to before her husband created a toxic waste dump in the barn of innocent old people. A story that has been reported in the newspapers she recycles.

A letter with a handwritten address. BIA boarding school script, thinks Rozin. An elder. Indians of the boarding school era have beautiful handwriting — flowing, spikey, and precise. The capitals are rounded and tailed. Rozin looks at the letter and thinks: swollen fingers whacked by rulers and many tears made these letters. These are the well-formed and perfected small triumphs of shame. The name where there should be a return address is Jimmy Badger. The letter is addressed to Klaus.

Rozin opens it because Klaus is gone, and reads:

Bring her back to us. Her daughters are going crazy and are running through our men. They have broke up every marriage and punched out every wife. Our tribal leaders are again locking each other up and the school board is devouring the administration. Gangs are here, the drugs are getting harder, the drinking bloodier. Nobody stops at the gas station and the casino deal is stalled. Birds are falling from the sky. An eagle died in my yard. I have made its tail feathers into a white fan for the woman with the blue beads, the one you stole. Bring her back to us! Bring her back!

Rozin drops the letter on the table. That’s it. Cecille is right. History won’t let up. Sweetheart’s presence has meaning and from Jimmy Badger’s letter Rozin now understands that is true. If only the BIA had been more careful about teaching details like a return address! It seems Sweetheart Calico is throwing our world out of whack. She belongs where she was — the stamp is canceled Montana. Since Klaus stole her and brought her here, thinks Rozin, everything there and here has gone downhill. That carpet scam went bad. Klaus and Richard disappeared. I got happy with Frank, but the twins were spirited off by Sweetheart and I lost my job. Then I took them north and they got sick. Finally, they jump in Cecille’s car and end up here. At least they’re back in school. But we should figure out what to do with Sweetheart Calico.

It seems that Sweetheart doesn’t want Rozin to find her, because she won’t be found. She has stopped coming to the house since Rozin came back. That is because Sweetheart is busy stalking Klaus and Richard, just out of sight. When they fall asleep, she steals whatever they’ve rustled together in their day of foraging. She takes it all. The dog has run away to live with her, hunting rabbits in the melted underbrush and through the new spring yards. It’s not a bad way to live although it is sometimes so repetitious. Klaus and Richard walk to the same places, collect the same change, buy the same bottles, sleep curled in the same smelly mess of sleeping bags and blankets.

Sweetheart has two sleeping bags. She knows the most deserted hiding places. Finds a house. Creeps into the bag with the dog and both stay warm and also they have scored another old forsaken pizza. Inside the sleeping bag with pizza dog farts, Sweetheart sleeps deeply, happily, even profoundly. She is dreaming of the open spaces, of running and running. She is laughing with her daughters as they charge up and down the hills. She goes to visit Jimmy Badger in her dream and he blesses her with an eagle tail fan and tells how glad he is that she’s come home.

Ziigwan

As the days slowly grow warmer, Rozin rises earlier and earlier. She is looking for a job. It isn’t going well. She has moved back into her house and Frank keeps bringing by the unsold goodies at the end of every day. Rozin knows she can balloon up fast on day-old muffins, so sometimes she tries to go running with Cecille. The jogging suit Cecille wears, made out of the same silk as a parachute, bright yellow, flares up and down the street and over to the river, her route. With her hair in a ponytail and neat black ribbon, she is a fixated bee. Shadowboxing. Leaping. Posing with her hands cocked and her eyes steady. Man-eating tiger eyes. Irish-Anishinaabe masterpiece woman. Rozin sweats like mad as she bounces slowly along behind her cousin, feeling heavier and madder and more resentful of her joblessness and lack of power in the system. Perhaps I will go back to school, she thinks. Become a lawyer. Hit Richard up for child support. How would that work? You can’t hit up a man who has made himself into a wino. You can’t garnishee his panhandling take, but I would like to.

She works in the bakery sometimes, but only when Frank is busy. She doesn’t sit or have coffee or pass the time of day. Rozin handles the customers and cleans the glass counter and display case of their eternal fingerprints.

Still there are times Rozin rises even earlier, and in those blue morning hours, Frank teaches her everything he knows about the attractions of flours to yeasts to butters. He explains the temperatures that make them brown and rise. Rozin learns to skim with serious efficiency the bits of blackened dough from the Jacuzzi-sized deep fryer full of boiling fat and to run the whip cycle on the mixer that froths up lard and sugar. Her favorite part is to add the food coloring in drops. Instant red, blue, lavender. Killer frosting, whipped high.

All day, people stagger in from the tae kwan do school down the street, exhausted from Cecille’s workouts, craving butterfat icing and reflex-slowing caramel-fudge fritters. They have to touch the cases where these things are displayed on doilies. They press close to the delectables, breathe, smudge, cough the air full of predatory microorganisms. Rozin can see their instant relief, after they have paid. Opening the crinkly white bag, exposing sweet deep-fried dough, biting into the spot on the powdered bismarck that holds the squirt of cherry jelly, they sometimes give out a small involuntary moan.

The grandmas drive down to stay a week. Noodin comes into the shop wearing a pair of pink-beaded earrings that Rozin gave her. It is clear from the implacable set of her mouth and her blink at the sight of Frank that she is sneaking away for a jolt of sugar. She is small as ever and her face reminds Frank of one of those squashed-in little dogs. Soft round flat cheeks, heavy chin, a grim wide mouth. Her nose is pug round, brown as a knot of tobacco, and her eyes are dark and yielding with a kind of liquid mournfulness. Her big gaze sweeps over the cakes and cookies. The contents of the lighted case seem to her a tragic puzzle. She sighs over all the choices. She slowly opens her purse. And here’s where when Frank knows he is in trouble, not one word yet exchanged. Her little plastic snap purse is held together with a rubber band.

Those rubber-banded snap purses. Watch out, Frank thinks. You see an old lady slowly draw one forth and you know you are going to pay for her lunch and pay beyond that in ways more than money or time. No way you can spiritually afford to charge an old lady with a broken, old, green-plastic snap purse who has, in her pride, saved and used to close it a blue rubber band off a bunch of broccoli she bought to aid her slow digestion. No way you can charge her a dime. Even if she points at the biggest, puffiest, creamiest, most expensive piece of cake in the case you can’t charge her.

No way you can get out of marrying her daughter, either. Not that you want to.

“Please,” Frank says, sliding the piece of cake at her over the counter, already on a six-inch paper plate, with a plastic fork and napkin beside. “It’s on the house.” Grandma Noodin rears back as though suspicious. As though she has just recognized Frank.

“Frank,” she says, and already her snap purse has vanished.

“I’ve been hoping you would stop in.” Frank comes around the counter to sit down with her, intent on not letting her out of his sight. It is unseasonably hot, one of those wild April heat waves that tell you humans may not last on this planet. Frank has already closed the door and turned on the air-conditioning.

“Miigwech,” she growls. “What kind of cake is this?”

He tells her, by pulling out a chair and tidying the corner that he is going to try to keep her in. “This is my attempt at the world-renowed blitzkuchen.”

Grandma takes an immediate bite.

“Needs something.”

“What?” he asks.

Her face goes intent with thought, trying to discover what spice or ingredient the cake is missing. He watches her sit back, solid as a gray lake rock, chewing in meditation. In the window, looking out as she slowly licks the schlag from her plastic fork, she gives a secret little smile. A familiar expression from up north. Frank is the one suspicious of her now. She’s toying with him, this tiny bulldog lady.

She knows, but she won’t tell.

“So Nookomis, I’ve actually been looking all over for you,” Frank starts again.

“Oh?” She opens her eyes in what may even be real surprise. “Good thing I came in here then. What did you need?”

She asks Frank, right out, what he wants of her. Just like that. And just like that, faced with the question, he asks not for permission to marry Rozin, which requires many gifts and a longer buildup, especially since Rozin is still married; no, he asks Noodin for the secret ingredient.

“Secret of what?”

“This cake.”

Noodin looks down at the crumbs.

“You know the story,” she says. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“I’ll tell you then.”

Frank holds his breath.

“The cake was baked by a man afraid for his life. He put his fear into the cake.”

The revelation sets Frank back in his chair. If he were to make the cake, say, as he was misdiagnosed with cancer or if someone held a gun to his head only it was loaded with blanks… or if you desperately loved a woman and were trying to think how to marry her when suddenly her husband showed up…

Noodin makes significant eye contact with Frank, tips an imaginary bottle delicately to her lips. And there he is.

FRANK DOESN’T RECOGNIZE Rozin’s husband at first, for Richard Whiteheart Beads is saggy-skinned, drooping like a week-old helium balloon, and he is sick, with a bruise the green of old cooked liver on his cheek, and puffy eyelids. Around his head a frayed red bandanna. A U of MN Golden Gophers sweatshirt from the Salvation Army with its sleeves chopped off and the gopher just a faded ghost gopher. Shorts sagging underneath a watermelon-tight paunch. Shorts held up with rope. Flapping tennies and no socks. He stands before the counter barely holding himself upright and then he turns. Directly, for he knows, he fixes Frank with such a stare, like looking down into the bottom of a dry well. His mouth opens. A powerful wave of sour breath hits Frank as he croaks three times like a raven, “Cawg… cawg… cawg…,” then stops, gulps dry, and looks even harder at Frank and croaks in a terrible whisper.

“Nibi…”

Wheeling backward, whirling his arms like a suddenly light scarecrow tossed by a wind in the air, Richard stagger-skips backward to the door. Frank leans toward him in a tangle of conflicted feeling, but he is out, into the street. Frank, Grandma, and Klaus watch his runaway figure round the corner and vanish.

“That was quick.” Noodin returns to her cake, presses up the remaining crumbs with the tines of her fork.

“Aawww… we just wanted… a drink. A drink of water.”

Klaus is still standing in the middle of the store. He voice is wracked, bone-dry. Klaus tries to speak more words, tapping his throat. He’s in an even worse state than Richard. He sways back and forth making small mewling noises of thirst.

Frank steps up to Klaus and catches him before he can pitch down. He pulls Klaus’s arm over his own shoulder and drags him back into the bakery. Once behind the swinging steel doors, Frank rolls Klaus gently out on a stainless-steel bread table. Makes him drink a cup of water sip by sip. Turns down the lights. Frank takes an apron or two off the wall hooks and drapes them across his cousin’s arms and chest and bare legs.

Rozin walks in with Cally and Deanna. Frank can tell from their faces that they missed seeing Richard, and he’s relieved. The girls’ eyes go big when they see Klaus sprawled out on the bread table.

“Major disinfection needed there,” says Rozin.

“Klaus needs rest,” says Frank to the girls, his big face steady. “You come on out to the front. Your uncle needs to sleep.”

For an hour or so, Frank works out front, doing nothing more than checking the ovens in the bakery, the specific one in which he’s got the next blitzkuchen. Fear! What about frustration? From time to time, he makes sure that his relative is still peacefully passed out. Frank mops down the entry floor and even goes outside and sweeps off the spotless sidewalk. Rozin watches him standing there gazing out at street life, massive from behind, casting a shadow around his feet like a little black pool. She blinks, thinks maybe a dog pauses, just for a moment, out of the searing noon sun. The hot and sticky day is the reason Klaus became desperate enough to throw himself into the entry of the bakery shop.

“They don’t come here much,” says Frank when he steps back in.

Rustling, groans. Frank starts forward but the steel door barges open. Klaus has thrown it wide. He is staring at them like a confused scraggly coyote who doesn’t know how it got into this body. Or understand why his clothes are covered with filth or what to do with the feet that can’t steady the rest of him. His hands reach out, shaking, his face twists like a rag.

“Nibi,” he cries, and staggers forward. Frank pours from a plastic pitcher, then gives Klaus the pitcher. Klaus drops the pitcher.

“Oops.”

Sweetheart Calico slides in and stands behind Klaus as he staggers forward, and in her eyes there is something Rozin can’t name at first. Not kindness, not love. Maybe a savage mercy.

It is really painful when we self-sabotage, her look says to Klaus. I know where you are at. Sweetheart grabs his arm. Turns him. In her hand there is a plastic cup of water. Stumbling and reeling, he tries to accept. His hand won’t cooperate. He swipes toward the cup and misses. Holds his elbow with the other arm and concentrates. It takes Frank sitting him down on the floor and crouching next to him, holding the cup to his lips.

And all the time Sweetheart is sitting across from Klaus, looking at him, her eyes fixed in his eyes, their minds locked in some form of knowing. They rise in unison. She somehow imparts her grace to him and they float out the door with their arms around each other. Between them, the pilot light of alcohol, dead blue and steady.

Gakaabikaang. That’s the name our old ones call the city, place of the falls is what it means from way back when it started as a trading village. Although driveways and houses, concrete parking garages and business stores cover the city’s scape, that same land is hunched underneath. There are times, like now, Frank gets a sense of the temporary. It could all blow off. And yet the sheer land would be left underneath. Sand, rock, the Indian black seashell-bearing earth.