The Round House

Chapter Two. Lonely Among Us

I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me.

It was five days since we had found my mother sitting in the driveway. I’d refused to go to school before she came back from the hospital. She was anxious to get out, relieved to be home. She said good-bye to me that morning from my parents’ bed in their upstairs bedroom.

Cappy and your other friends will miss you, she said.

I should go back to school, even though there were just over two weeks left until summer. When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.

My other two friends were Zack Peace and Angus Kashpaw. Back in those days, the four of us were more or less together whenever it was possible, though it was understood that Cappy and I were closest. Cappy’s mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father, Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos. For although Doe became involved with women from time to time, he never did remarry. He was both a janitor of the tribal offices and, on and off, the chairman of the tribe. When he was first elected in the 1960s, he was paid just enough money to take his janitor job down to half-time. When too exhausted to run for a term, he picked up extra hours as the night watchman. It wasn’t until the seventies that the feds put money into tribal government, and we started figuring out how to run things. Doe was still chairman, on again, off again. The way it worked was, people voted Doe into office whenever they got mad at the current chairman. But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight. When it got bad enough, Doe would decline to run. He’d pack up his office, including the tribal chairman stationery that he always had printed on his own dime: Doe Lafournais, Tribal Chairman. For a few years, we’d have lots of drawing paper at Cappy’s house. Inevitably, his successor went through the same treatment. Eventually Doe’s contrite and pleading constituents would work on him until he threw his hat back in the ring. 1988 was an out-of-office year for Doe, which meant he did a lot of fishing with us. We’d spent half the winter in Doe’s icehouse, pulling in northerns and sneaking beers.

Zack Peace’s family was split up now for the second time. His father, Corwin Peace, was a musician on perpetual tour. His mother, Carleen Thunder, ran the tribal newspaper. His stepdad, Vince Madwesin, was the tribal police officer who had interviewed my mother. Zack was almost a decade older than his baby brother and sister, because his parents had married young, divorced, then given it a second try and found out they were right the first time they divorced. Zack was musical, like his father, and always brought his guitar to the icehouse. He said he knew one thousand songs.

As for Angus, he was from a part of the reservation that was hard-core poor. The tribe had acquired the money to put in subsidized project housing—large, tan city-style apartment buildings just outside of town. They were surrounded by hummocks of weedy earth, no trees or bushes. The money had run out before steps were built, so people used ramps of plywood or just hoisted themselves in and jumped out of their houses. His aunt Star had moved Angus, his two brothers, her boyfriend’s two children, and a changing array of pregnant sisters and bingeing or detoxing cousins into a three-bedroom unit. Aunt Star managed an epic amount of craziness. It didn’t help that besides no steps the building itself was a low-bid nightmare. The contractor had skimped on insulation, so in winter Star had to keep the oven on all night with the door open and the water in the kitchen trickling, or the pipes would freeze. There were rags stuffed between the walls and windows, because the Sheetrock had shrunk away from the cheap-john aluminum combination storm frames. The windows soon fell apart, lost their screens. Nothing worked. The plumbing kept backing up. I even became an expert in sealing the toilet with wax and duct tape. Star was always bribing us with frybread to do house repairs or rig up satellite reception off a dented hubcap or some such thing.

Actually, once she had taken up with her big love, Elwin, we did manage the satellite. Star had a fancy television bought with the one lavish bingo win she’d managed in her lifetime. Together with Elwin we MacGyvered some old equipment together and got signals from Fargo, Minneapolis, even Chicago or Denver. The satellite was hooked up in September of 1987, just in time for the season premieres of all the network shows. We improved reception to the point where we sometimes even got the shows syndicated out of certain cities, ever-changing according to the weather and the magnetism of the planets. We had to hunt them down, but I don’t think we ever missed one episode of Star Trek. Not the old one, but The Next Generation. We loved Star Wars, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in TNG.

Naturally, we all wanted to be Worf. We all wanted to be Klingons. Worf’s solution to any problem was to attack. In the episode Justice we found out Worf didn’t enjoy sex with human females because they were too fragile and he had to show restraint. Our big joke around pretty girls was Hey, show some restraint. In Hide and Q the ideal Klingon girl jumped Worf and she was grotesquely hot. Worf was combustible, noble, and handsome even with a turtle shell on his forehead. Next to Worf, we liked Data because he mocked white people by being curious about stupid things that the crew would do or say, and because when gorgeous Yar got drunk he declared himself fully functional and had sex with her. Wesley, the one you’d think we’d identify with, our age and a genius, and with a careless mom who let him get into trouble, did not interest us because he was a bumbling white town-baby and wore ludicrous sweaters. We were in love of course with the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troy, especially when the show let her hair go long and curly. Her jumpsuits were low-cut, her red V belt pointed you-know-where, and her big head and short curvy body drove us wild. Commander Riker was supposedly hot for her, but he was wooden, implausible. Better once a beard hid his baby cheeks, but we still wanted to be Worf. As for Captain Picard, he was an old man, though a French old man, so we liked him. We also liked Geordi because it turned out he was always in pain because he wore the eye visor, and that made him noble too.

The reason I go into this is that because of this show we set ourselves apart. We made drawings, cartoons, and even tried to write an episode. We pretended we had special knowledge. We were starting to get our growth and were anxious how we’d turn out. In TNG we weren’t skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about.

The first day I went back to school, Cappy walked me home. It is unusual to see people walking places on the reservation now, except on the special walking paths created to promote fitness. But in the late eighties young people still walked places, and as both Cappy and I lived less than a mile from school, we often flipped a coin to see whose house we’d go to. His was livelier, as Randall always had his friends around, but mine had a television and box so that we could play Bionic Commando, a game we were fanatical about.

Cappy had given me the thunderbird egg in the school hallway, and he told me about it on the way back to the house. He said that when he had found it the tree was still smoking. I pretended I believed him. Without saying anything, it was clear that Cappy was just walking me home and would not go inside. I would not have let him anyway. My mother didn’t want anyone to see her. Although my father was about to take a leave of absence and had called in another judge from retirement, he was still finishing up some paperwork at his office. He had already told me that he’d keep checking in all that day, but that my mother would be glad when I got home.

As we walked up the drive, Clemence came out the front door and said she’d got a call from a neighbor that Mooshum was out in the yard. I assumed from her rush that he’d left his pants in the house. She got in her car and swerved away. Cappy turned around for his own house once we’d reached mine, and I walked to the back door. As I rounded the corner, I saw the twiggy treelets with their shriveled leaves, still laid out in a row on the concrete to die. I put down my books and gathered them up, one by one, and stashed them at the edge of the yard. It was in me at that moment to feel sorry for the little trees and to be aware also that I dreaded going into my house. I had never felt that before. Then I tried to open the door and found it was locked.

I was so surprised at first that I kicked at the door, thinking it was stuck. But the back door was really locked. And the front door locked automatically—Clemence had probably forgotten that. I got the key from its hiding place and went in slowly, quiet, not banging the door and slamming my books on the table as I ordinarily would have. On any other day, my mother wouldn’t have been home yet and I would have felt the sort of elation that a boy feels when he steps into his house knowing that for two hours it is all his. That he can make his own sandwich. That if there is TV reception, there might be afterschool reruns for him to watch. That there might be cookies or some other sweet around, hidden by his mother, but not hidden too well. That he can rifle through the books on his father and mother’s bedroom bookshelves for a book like Hawaii, by James Michener, where he might learn interesting but ultimately useless tips on Polynesian foreplay—but there, I have to stop. The back door had been locked for the first time I ever recall, and I’d had to fish the key from underneath the back steps where it had always hung on a nail, used only when the three of us returned from long trips.

Which was the sense I had now: that just going to school had been a long trip—and now I had returned.

The air seemed hollow in the house, stale, strangely flat. I realized that this was because in the days since we’d found my mother sitting in the driveway, nobody had baked, fried, cooked, or in any way prepared food. My father only made coffee, which he drank day and night. Clemence had brought us casseroles that were still sitting, half eaten, in the refrigerator. I called for my mother softly, and walked halfway up the stairs until I could see that the door to my parents’ bedroom was shut. I eased back down the stairs into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took a big swallow. It was grossly sour. I dumped the milk, rinsed the glass, filled it, and gulped down the iron water of our reservation until the sour taste was gone. Then I stood there with the empty glass in my hands.

Part of the dining room set was visible through the open door, a roan maple table with six chairs around it. The living room was divided off by low shelves. The couch sat just outside a small room lined with books—my father’s den, or study. Holding the glass, I felt the tremendous hush in our little house as something that follows in the wake of a huge explosion. Everything had stopped. Even the clock’s ticking. My father had unplugged it when we came home from the hospital the second night. I want a new clock, he’d said. I stood there looking at the old clock, whose hands were meaninglessly stopped at 11:22. The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud. A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk. I set the glass on the table and bolted up the stairs. Burst into my parents’ bedroom. My mother was sunk in such heavy sleep that when I tried to throw myself down next to her, she struck me in the face. It was a forearm back blow and caught my jaw, stunning me.

Joe, she said, trembling. Joe.

I was determined not to let her know she’d hurt me.

Mom ... the milk was sour.

She lowered her arm and sat up.

Sour?

She had never let the milk go sour in the refrigerator before. She had grown up without refrigeration and was proud of how clean she kept her treasured icebox. She took the freshness of its contents seriously. She’d bought Tupperware even, at a party. The milk was sour?

Yes, I said. It was.

We have to go to the grocery!

Her serene reserve was gone—a nervous horror welled across her face. The bruises had come out and her eyes were darkly rimmed like a raccoon’s. A sick green pulsed around her temples. Her jaw was indigo. Her eyebrows had always been so expressive of irony and love, but now were held tight by anguish. Two vertical lines, black as if drawn by a marker, creased her forehead. Her fingers plucked at the quilt’s edge. Sour!

They have milk now at Whitey’s gas station. I can bike down there, Mom.

They do? She looked at me as though I’d saved her, like a hero.

I brought her purse. She gave me a five-dollar bill.

Get other things, she said. Food you like. Treats. She stumbled over the words and I realized that she’d probably been given some sort of drug to help her sleep.

Our house was built in the 1940s, a sturdy bungalow-style. The BIA superintendent, a pompous, natty, abnormally short bureaucrat who was profoundly hated, had once lived in it. The house had been sold to the tribe in 1969 and used as office space until it was scheduled to be torn down and replaced by actual offices. My father had bought it and moved it onto the little plot of land near town that had belonged to Geraldine’s late uncle, Shamengwa, a handsome man in an old-fashioned framed picture. My mother missed his music, but his violin was buried with him. Whitey had used the rest of the land that Shamengwa had owned to put up his gas station on the other side of town. Mooshum owned the old allotment about four miles away, where Uncle Whitey lived. Whitey had married a younger woman—a tall, blonde, weather-beaten ex-stripper—who now worked the gas station cash register. Whitey pumped the gas, changed oil, inflated tires, did unreliable repair work. His wife did the books, restocked the shelves of the little store with nuts and chips, and told people why they could or could not charge gas. She had recently bought a large dairy cooler. She kept a smaller cooler filled with bottles of orange and grape Crush. Sonja was her name, and I liked her the way a boy likes his aunt, but I felt differently about her breasts—on them I had a hopeless crush.

I took my bicycle and a backpack. I had a battered black five-speed with trail-bike tires, a water-bottle clip, and a silver scrawl on the crossbar, Storm Ryder. I took the cracked side road, crossed the main highway, circled Whitey’s once, and slid sideways to a halt, hoping that Sonja had her eye on me. But no, she was inside counting Slim Jims. She had a great big flashy radiant white smile. She looked up and turned it on me when I walked in. It was like a sunlamp. Her cotton-candy hair was fluffed up in a swirly yellow crown and a glossy two-foot ponytail hung out of it, down her back. As always, she was dramatically outfitted—today a baby blue running suit with sequin piping, the top three-quarters unzipped. I caught my breath at the sight of her T-shirt, a paler fairy-wing-transparent tissue. She wore white unmarred spongy track shoes and crystals in her ears big as thumbtacks. When she wore blue, as she did quite often, her blue eyes zapped with startling electricity.

Honey, she said, putting down the Slim Jims and taking me in her arms. There was nobody at the pump or in the store at that moment. She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.

I was lucky: I was a boy doted on by women. This was not my doing, and in fact it worried my father. He made valiant attempts to counteract feminine coddling by doing manly things with me—we played catch, threw a football, camped out, fished. Fished often. He taught me to drive the car when I was eight. He was afraid all the doting I experienced might soften me, though he’d been doted on himself, I could see that, and my grandma doted plenty on him (and me) in those years before she died. Still, I’d hit a lull in our family’s reproductive history. My cousins Joseph and Evelina were in college when I was born. Whitey’s sons from his first marriage were grown, and Sonja’s relationship with her daughter, London, was so stormy she said she’d never want another. There were no grandchildren in the family (yet, thank god, said Sonja). As I said, I was born late, into the aging tier of the family, and to parents who would often be mistaken for my grandparents. There was that added weight of being a surprise to my mother and father, and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me—the bad and the good. But one of the chief goods, one I cherished, was the proximity I was allowed to Sonja’s breasts.

I could press against her breasts for as long as she hugged me. I was careful never to push my luck, though my hands itched. Full, delicate, resolute, and round, Sonja’s were breasts to break your heart over. She carried them high in her pastel scoop-neck T-shirts. Her waist was still trim and her hips flared softly in tight stonewashed jeans. Sonja massaged her skin with baby oil, but all her life she had harshly tanned and her cute Swedish nose was scarred by sunburn. She was a horse lover and she and Whitey kept a mean old paint, a fancy quarter horse/Arabian mix, a roan Appaloosa with one ghost eye named Spook, and a pony. So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse. She and Whitey also had three dogs, all female, ferocious, and named in some way after Janis Joplin.

Our dog had died two months ago and we hadn’t got a new one yet. I opened my backpack and Sonja put in the milk and other things I’d picked out. She pushed back my five dollars and gazed at me from under her delicate, pale-brown, plucked eyebrows. Tears flooded her eyes. Shit, she said. Let me at the guy. I’ll waste him.

I did not know what to say. Sonja’s breasts made most thoughts leave my head.

How’s your mom doing? she said, shaking her head, swiping at her cheeks.

I tried to focus now; my mother was not fine so I could not answer fine. Nor could I tell Sonja that half an hour ago I’d feared my mother was dead and I had rushed upon her and got hit by her for the first time in my life. Sonja lit a cigarette, offered me a piece of Black Jack gum.

Not good, I said. Jumpy.

Sonja nodded. We’ll bring Pearl.

Pearl was a rangy long-legged mutt with a bull terrier’s broad head and viselike jaws. She had Doberman markings, a shepherd’s heavy coat, and some wolf in her. Pearl didn’t bark much but when she did she became very worked up. She paced and snapped the air whenever someone violated her invisible territorial boundaries. Pearl was not a companion dog and I wasn’t sure I wanted her, but my father did.

She’s too old to teach to fetch and stuff, I complained to him when he got home that night.

We were sitting downstairs, eating heated-up casserole brought once again by Clemence. My father had made his usual pot of weak coffee and he was drinking it like water. My mother was in the bedroom, not hungry. My father put down his fork. From the way he did it (he was a man who liked his food and to stop eating was usually a relinquishment, though these days he wasn’t eating much), I thought he was angry. But although his gestures of recent were abrupt and he often clenched his fists, he did not raise his voice. He spoke very quietly, reasonably, telling me why we needed Pearl.

Joe, we need a protection dog. There is a man we suspect. But he has cleared out. Which means he could be anywhere. Or, he might not have done it but the real attacker could still be in the area.

I asked what I thought was a police TV question.

What evidence do you have that this one guy did it?

My father considered not answering, I could tell. But he finally did. He had trouble saying some of the words.

The perpetrator or the suspect ... the attacker ... dropped a book of matches. The matches were from the golf course. They give them out at the desk.

So they’re starting with the golfers, I said. This meant the attacker could be Indian or white. That golf course fascinated everyone—it was a kind of fad. Golf was for rich people, supposedly, but here we had a course of scraggly grass and natural water pits. With a special introductory rate. People passed their clubs around and everybody seemed to have tried it—except my dad.

Yes, the golf course.

Why’d he drop the matches?

My father rubbed a hand across his eyes and again had trouble speaking.

He wanted to, tried to, he was having trouble lighting a match.

A book match?

Yes.

Oh. Did he get it lit?

No ... the match was wet.

So then what happened?

Suddenly my eyes began to water and I bent over my plate.

My father picked his fork back up. He quickly shoveled Clemence’s well-known macaroni and tomato sauce/hamburger concoction into his mouth. He saw that I had stopped eating and was waiting, and he sat back. He drained another cup of coffee from his favorite heavy white china diner mug. He put a napkin to his lips, shut his eyes, opened them, and looked at me directly.

All right, Joe, you’re asking a lot of questions. You are developing an order to things in your mind. You’re thinking this out. So am I. Joe, the perpetrator couldn’t light the match. He went to look for another book of matches. Some way of lighting a fire. While he was gone, your mother managed to escape.

How?

For the first time since we’d pulled out those trees the Sunday before, my father smiled, or it was some version of a smile, I should say. There was no amusement in it. Later on, if I had to classify that smile, I would say it was a smile like Mooshum’s. A smile of remembrance of lost times.

Joe, do you remember how I used to get so exasperated when your mother locked herself out of her car? She had—still has—a habit of leaving the car keys on the dashboard. After she parks, she always gathers her papers or groceries off the passenger seat, then she puts her keys on the dash, gets out, and locks the car. She forgets that she left her keys in the car until she needs to go home. Then she rummages through her purse and can’t find her keys. Oh no, she says, not again! She goes out, sees her car keys are on the dashboard, locked inside, and then calls me. Remember?

Yeah. I almost smiled too as he described what had been her habit, the whole rigmarole we went through. Yeah, Dad, she calls you. You use a mild swear word, then you get the extra set of keys and take a long walk over to the tribal offices.

Mild swear word. Where’d you get that?

Damn, I don’t know.

He smiled again, put his hand out and nicked at my cheek with his knuckle.

I never really minded, he said. But one day it occurred to me that your mom would be really stuck if I wasn’t home. We don’t go many places. Our schedule is pretty boring. But if I wasn’t home, or you weren’t, to bike her keys over.

That’s never happened.

But see, you might have been outside. Not heard the telephone. I thought, What if she really gets stuck somewhere? And thinking this, about two months ago I glued a magnet onto the back of one of those little metal boxes Whitey sells mints in. I saw someone else had a key holder like it. I put a car key in the box and stuck it inside the car’s frame just over the left rear tire. That’s how she escaped.

What? I said. How?

She managed to reach under the car; she got the car key. He came at her. She locked herself in the car, then she started the car and drove away.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t help a sense of her fear from slashing through me and it made me weak.

My father started eating again, and this time he was clearly going to finish his meal. The subject of what had happened to my mother was closed. I went back to the dog.

Pearl bites, I said.

Good, said my father.

He’s still after her then.

We don’t know, said my father. Anybody could have picked up those matches. Indian. White. Anybody could have dropped them. But probably it was someone from around here.

You can’t tell if a person is an Indian from a set of fingerprints. You can’t tell from a name. You can’t even tell from a local police report. You can’t tell from a picture. From a mug shot. From a phone number. From the government’s point of view, the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history. There must be ancestors from way back who signed some document or were recorded as Indians by the U.S. government, someone identified as a member of a tribe. And then after that you have to look at that person’s blood quantum, how much Indian blood they’ve got that belongs to one tribe. In most cases, the government will call the person an Indian if their blood is one quarter—it usually has to be from one tribe. But that tribe has also got to be federally recognized. In other words, being an Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape.

On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge—like love, sex, or having or not having a baby—has nothing to do with government.

It took me another day to find out that it was already going around that there were suspects—basically anyone who acted strange or had not been seen or had been seen walking out of his back door with loaded black garbage bags.

I found out by going over to my aunt and uncle’s house to pick up a pie on Saturday afternoon. My mother had told my father that she thought she had better get up, bathe, get dressed. She was still on pain pills, but Dr. Egge had told her that bed rest wouldn’t help. She needed mild activity. Dad had announced that he was cooking dinner from a recipe. But he could not manage dessert. Thus, the pie. Uncle Whitey was sitting at the table with a glass of iced tea. Mooshum sat across from him, hunched and frail, wearing ivory-colored long underwear, and a plaid robe over the long johns. He refused to dress in street clothes on Saturday because he needed a day of comfort, he claimed, to get ready for Sunday, when Clemence made him wear suit pants, a pressed white shirt, and sometimes a tie. He too had a glass of iced tea, but he was glaring at it.

Bunny piss, he griped.

That’s right, Daddy, said Clemence. It’s an old man’s drink. It’s good for you.

Ah, swamp tea, said Uncle Whitey, swirling the glass appreciatively. Good for everything that ails you, Daddy.

Cures old age? said Mooshum. Takes the years off?

All but, said Whitey, who knew he could have a beer as soon as he got home and quit pretend-drinking with Mooshum, who was lonely for the old days when Clemence poured smooth whiskey. She’d become convinced that it was harming him and was always trying to cut him off.

This goes down hard, my daughter, he said to Clemence.

Cleans out your liver good, though, said Whitey.

Here, Clemence, pour a little swamp tea for Joe.

Clemence poured me a glass of iced tea and went to answer the phone. People were calling her constantly for news, gossip really, about her sister.

Maybe the pervert really is an Indian, said Uncle Whitey. He was carrying an Indian suitcase.

What Indian suitcase? I said.

The plastic garbage bags.

I leaned forward. So he left? But from where? Who is he? What’s his name?

Clemence came back in and flared her eyes at him.

Awee, said Uncle Whitey. Guess I’m not supposed to talk.

Or have even a little glass of whiskey. Or piss in the sink, as I will do until she no longer pours swamp tea. A man’s kidneys overflow, said Mooshum.

You piss in the sink? I asked.

When given tea, always.

Clemence went into the kitchen, came out with a bottle of whiskey and three stacked shot glasses. She arranged them on the table and poured two a quarter full. She poured the third half full and tossed it back. I was astounded. I’d never seen my aunt toss back a whiskey like a man. She held her drained glass delicately for a moment, regarding us, then put the glass down with a short smack and walked outside.

What was that? Uncle Whitey asked.

That was my daughter pushed too far, said Mooshum. I pity Edward when he returns. The whiskey will have set by then.

Sometimes whiskey sets Sonja too, Uncle Whitey said, but I have tricks.

What kind of tricks, said Mooshum.

Old Indian tricks.

Teach them to Edward, eh? He is losing ground.

The pie began to scent the air with a sweet amber fragrance. I hoped my aunt hadn’t got so angry she’d forget the pie.

The golf course. Is that where it happened? I looked straight at Whitey, but he dropped his eyes and drank.

No, it didn’t happen there.

Where did it?

Whitey raised his sad and permanently bloodshot eyes. He wasn’t going to tell me. I couldn’t hold his gaze.

Mooshum’s grip, so unsteady on the tea glass that he’d slopped it on the table, tightened now. He lifted the shot and took a neat sip. His eyes shone. He had not taken in our exchange. His brain was still fixed on women.

Ah, my son, tell Oops and me of your beautiful wife. Red Sonja. Paint the picture. What does she do at present?

Whitey shifted his eyes off me. When he grinned, the devil’s gap between his front teeth showed. Red Sonja was my aunt’s exotic dance persona not so long ago. She’d worn revealing barbarian armor, which was bits of studded plastic. Tattered scarves flowed from her hips. The transparent material looked to have been chewed and clawed by desperate men or pet wolves. Zack had found the picture in a Minneapolis publication and made me a gift of it. I kept it deep in my closet, in a special folder I had made that said HOMEWORK.

These days Sonja works behind the cash register, my uncle said now, the whiskey adding its soft glow. She is always adding numbers. Today she is figuring out exactly what we must reorder for the next week.

Mooshum closed his eyes, held the whiskey at the back of his tongue, and nodded, conjuring her up, bent over the accounts. I could see her suddenly, too, breasts riding like clouds over the long columns of neat little figures.

And what will she do, asked Mooshum dreamily, when she has the sums and figures for the day, when she is finished?

She will leave the desk and go outside with a bucket of water and the long-handled squeegee. She cleans the glass every week.

Mooshum wasn’t wearing his flashy dentures and his collapsed smile spread. I closed my eyes and saw the pink sponge side of the squeegee drip its window-solution suds down the plate glass. Sonja stretched up on her tiptoes. Cappy’s big brother, Randall, said girls looked so good stretching up on their tiptoes that he liked to sit watching down the rows in the school library. Randall used to put all the good books on the top shelves. Mooshum sighed. I saw Sonja pressing the rubber blade hard against the glass, drawing the dust and the smudges down with the liquid and leaving a sparkling clarity.

Clemence came back in, breaking my thoughts, and I heard the creak of the oven door. Then the slide of the rack as she removed two pies from the oven. I heard her set the pies out to cool. The oven door clanged and the screen door whined open and clapped shut. In a moment, the faint crispness of a burning cigarette wafted through the screen. I’d never known my aunt to smoke before, but she had started since the hospital.

The scent of Clemence’s newly taken up smoking sobered both of the men.

They turned to me and Uncle Whitey’s face was grave as he asked how my mother was.

She’s coming out of her room tonight, I told Whitey. I’m supposed to take a pie home. My dad is cooking.

Mooshum stared at me, an edge of harsh brilliance in his gaze, and I knew he had been told something, at least, of what had occurred.

That’s good, he said. Hear me now, Oops. She gotta come out. Don’t leave her to sit. Don’t let her alone too much.

Clear spring shadows spread like water across the road. Down past the quiet slough, engines rumbled up to and away from the liquor store’s drive-up window. From yards invisible behind stands of willow and chokecherry, the short, vibrant cries of women rang, calling their children home. A car slowed next to me and Doe Lafournais nodded at the empty passenger seat. Doe had a quiet face, a crooked nose, kind eyes. He had powerful arms and stayed strong through constant hard labor—besides being the chairman and janitoring, he had built their house from scratch. He and his sons had messed it up from scratch, too. The place was layers of junk on interesting junk now. He drove on when I shook my head and called out that I’d see him later—I was helping out that evening at Randall’s sweat lodge. Clemence had put the pie in the bottom of a shallow cardboard box. The steam from the warm apples threaded from the slit crust. The evening wasn’t cooling off, but I didn’t care. I’d sweat to eat that pie. I turned down the driveway and Pearl popped out of the lilacs. She gave one deep-chested bark of recognition and, after sniffing the air about me, she accompanied me, at a space of about three feet, up to the back door of the house. There she left me and went back to lie underneath her bush.

My father let me in. The hot kitchen smelled of some violent experiment.

Perfect timing, he said, and put the pie on the counter. Let’s keep this as a surprise. The pièce de résistance. She’ll be down in a minute, Joe. Wash up.

While I was in the little toilet off the study, I heard the stairs creak. I stayed in there, washing and drying my hands slowly. I didn’t really want to see my mother. It was terrible, but it was true. Even though I understood perfectly why she had struck me, I resented that I had to pretend it hadn’t happened or didn’t matter. The blow had not left a visible bruise and my cheekbone was only slightly tender, but I kept touching the place and reviving my sense of injury. When I finished washing, I refolded the towel for perhaps the first time in my life and hung it carefully upon its rail.

In our dining cove, my mother was standing behind her chair with her hands nervous on the wooden back. The fan was on, stirring her dress. She was admiring the meal laid out on the plain green cloth. I looked at her and was immediately ashamed of my resentment—her face was still garishly marked. I busied myself. My father had made a stew. The collision of smells that hit me when I’d entered the kitchen were the ingredients—sour turnips and canned tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad. The concoction gave off a penetrating reek.

My father beckoned the two of us to sit down. There were potatoes, nearly cooled, way overcooked, disintegrating in an undrained pot. He ceremoniously heaped our shallow bowls. Then we sat looking at the food. We didn’t pray. For the first time, I felt the lack of some ritual. I couldn’t just start eating. My father sensed this and spoke with great emotion, looking at us both.

Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.

My mother took a sharp breath, and frowned. She shrugged away what he’d said, as if it irritated her. I guessed she’d heard his Marcus Aurelius quote before, but looking back on it, I also know she was trying to build up her shield. To not feel things. Not refer to what had happened. His emotion grabbed at her.

With no ceremony, she picked up her spoon and plunged it into the stew. She choked her first gulp down. I sat poised. We both looked at my father.

I added caraway seeds, he said gently. What do you think?

My mother took a paper napkin from the pile my father had laid in the middle of the table, and she held it to her lips. Deep violet streaks and the yellow of healing contusions still marred her face. The white of her left eye was scarlet and her eyelid drooped slightly, as it would from then on, for the nerve had been tampered with and the damage was irreversible.

What do you think? my father asked once more.

My mother and I were silent, staring in shock at what we had tasted.

I think, she said at last, that I should start cooking again.

My father cast his eyes down, put out his hands, the picture of a man who had tried his best. He pouted a little and dug into his bowl, with a pretend heartiness that grew labored. He swallowed once, twice. I was aghast at his strength of mind. I filled up on bread. His spoon slowed. My mother and I probably realized at the same time that my father, who had taken care of my grandmother for many years and certainly knew how to cook, had faked his ineptitude. But the stew with its gagging undertone of rotted onion was so successfully infernal that it cheered us up, as my mother’s decision to cook had done. When I cleared away the awful dinner and the pie was produced, my mother smiled slightly, just an upward movement of her lips. My father divided the pie into three equal pieces and laid a slab of Blue Bunny vanilla on top of each piece. I got to finish my mother’s. She started teasing my father about the stew.

Exactly how old were those turnips?

Older than Joe.

And where did you get that onion?

That’s my little secret.

And the meat, roadkill?

Oh god, no. It died in the backyard.

I wasn’t particularly worried about missing dinner that night because I knew after Randall’s sweat lodge that Cappy and his sidekick, me, would eat top-shelf. We were the fire keepers. Cappy’s aunts, Suzette and Josey, who had made Doe’s boys their pets, always fixed the food. On ceremony nights they’d leave a feast put up neatly in two big plastic coolers alongside the garage. Farther back, nearly in the woods, the sweat-lodge dome of bent and lashed-together saplings, covered by army-surplus tarps, humidly waited, gathering mosquitoes. Cappy had already made the fire. The rocks, the grandfathers, were superheating in the middle. Our job was to keep that fire going, hand in the sacred pipes and the medicines, bring the rocks to the door on long-handled shovels, close and open the flaps. We’d also throw tobacco into our fire when someone in the lodge yelled for it, to mark some special prayer or request. On crisp nights it was a good job—we’d sit talking around that fire, staying warm. Sometimes we’d secretly roast a hot dog or marshmallow on a stick even though the fire was sacred and one time Randall had caught us. He’d claimed we’d taken the sacredness out of the fire with our hot dogs.

Cappy looked at him and said, How sacred can your fire be if we sucked out its holiness with just our puny wieners? I couldn’t stop laughing. Randall threw up his hands and walked off. It was too hot to roast anything now, besides we knew we’d eat hugely at the end. Food was our pay, besides sometimes driving Randall’s beat-up Olds. It was usually a pleasant enough job. That night, however, instead of cooling off, it grew muggy. There was no breeze. Even before sunset, whining clouds of mosquitoes swarmed us. Their attacks made us sit closer to the fire, in order to take advantage of the smoke, which only made us sweat enticingly. They just kept sucking on us through the salty, smoky layers of Off.

Randall’s friends, who all belonged to a powwow drum or danced like Randall, showed up laughing. Two of them were baked, but Randall didn’t notice. He was obsessive about setting everything up perfectly—the rack for the pipes, the star quilt blanket smoothed out beside the entrance, the abalone shell for burning sage, the glass jars of powdered medicine, the bucket and dipper. He seemed to have a little measuring stick in his head for lining up these sacred items. It drove Cappy nuts. But other people liked Randall’s style and he had friends from all over Indian Country—just that day he’d opened a package from a Pueblo friend which contained a jar of medicine that was now sitting with the others. He was humming a pipe-loading song and putting his pipe together, concentrating so hard he didn’t notice that the back of his neck was covered with gorging mosquitoes. I swiped them off.

Thanks, he said distractedly. I’m gonna pray for your family.

That’s cool, I said, though it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being prayed for. As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine. But that was Randall, too, always ready to make you feel a little uncomfortable with the earnest superiority of all that he was learning from the elders, even your own elders, for your benefit. Mooshum had instructed Doe on how to set up this lodge and Doe had passed it down to Randall. Cappy saw my look.

Don’t worry about it, Joe. He prays for me too. And he gets a lot of girls with his medicine. So he’s gotta keep in practice.

Randall had a stony profile, smooth skin, and a long braided ponytail. Girls, especially white ones, were fascinated with him. A German girl had camped in their yard for a whole month one summer. She was pretty, and wore the first earth sandals ever seen on our reservation, so Randall got teased about them. Somebody got a good look at the label and it was Birkenstock, which became Randall’s nickname.

The heat grew worse and we guzzled dippers of the sacred sweat-lodge water. I envied the guys going into the lodge because they would get so hot that this outside heat would seem like a cool breeze when they came out. Plus the fiercer heat from those grandfathers would wilt the mosquitoes. They all went in. Cappy and I brought the rocks to the door with the long-handled shovels. Randall took them off the shovels with a pair of deer antlers and placed them in the center pit. We handed in all of their stuff and closed the flap. They started singing and we sprayed ourselves again with Off.

We had finished three rounds and passed in the last of the grandfathers. We’d gone up to the house to refill the water cooler and were coming out, standing on the back deck, when there was an explosion. We didn’t even hear anyone yell, Door, signaling us to open it. The top of the sweat lodge just billowed up and heaved with guys fighting to get out. They raged and flailed in the tarps. There was muffled howling. Then they popped out any way they could—gasping, yelling, and rolling naked in the grass. The mosquitoes dive-bombed. We ran down with the water cooler. Randall and his buddies made gestures at their squeezed-up faces and we doused their heads. As soon as they could jump up, each one of them staggered or ran toward the house. Cappy’s aunts were driving up just then with extra frybread for the feast, so they saw eight naked Indians trying to grope their way across the yard. Suzette and Josey just stayed in the car.

It took a long while, everyone sitting in the house amid the piles of bachelor junk, for the men to emerge from shock and figure out what happened.

I think it was, said Skippy at last, that Pueblo medicine. Remember just before you threw a big handful on the rocks you thanked your buddy down there, then you said a longish prayer?

A long, long prayer, Birkenstock. Then you ladled on that water ...

Oooh, said Randall. My friend said it was Pueblo medicine. I was praying for his situation with a Navajo woman. Cappy, go and get that jar.

Don’t order me.

Okay, please, younger brother, seeing as we’re all butt naked and traumatized, would you go out and get that jar?

Cappy went out. He came back. There was a label on the jar.

Randall, said Cappy, the word medicine has quote marks around it.

The jar was filled with a brownish powder that didn’t smell very strong to us—not like bear root or wiikenh or kinnikinnick. Randall held the jar and frowned. He sniffed it like a fancy wine taster. At last, he licked his finger, stuck it in the jar, and put his finger in his mouth. Tears spurted instantly.

Aah! Aah! He stuck his tongue out.

Hot pepper, said the others. Special Pueblo hot pepper. They watched Randall dance around the room.

Man, look at his feet fly.

We should give him Pueblo medicine next powwow.

For sure, man. They took long drinks of water. Randall was at the sink with his tongue sticking out under the water tap.

Randall placed that medicine down on the rocks, said Skippy, but when he threw down four big ladles of water, then, man, it vaporized into our eyes and we were breathing that shit in! It burnt like hell. How could Randall have done that to us, man?

They all looked at Randall with his tongue under the faucet.

I hope he puts more clothes on finally, said Chiboy Snow.

We remembered the aunts when we heard them pull out of the driveway. We looked out. They’d left behind two bags of fresh frybread. The grease was darkening the paper sacks in delicate patches.

If you bring our clothes in, Skippy said to us, and hand in that feast, I’d pay youse.

How much? said Cappy.

Two each.

Cappy looked at me. I shrugged.

We hauled their stuff in and as we were all eating Randall came and sat next to me. His face was rugged and raw like all the other guys. His eyes were swollen red. Randall had most of his college education, and sometimes he talked like he was addressing me as a social service case, and other times he treated me like his little brother. This was one of those close familial Randall times. His friends were already laughing and eating. They’d forgotten to be mad at Randall now and everything was funny.

Joe, he said, I saw something in there.

I filled my mouth with taco meat.

I saw something, he went on, and he sounded genuinely troubled. It was before the hot pepper blew things up that I saw it. I was praying for your family and my family and all of a sudden, I saw a man bending over you, like a police maybe, looking down at you, and his face was white and his eyes deep down in his face. He was surrounded by a silver glow. His lips moved and he was talking, but I could not hear what he said.

We sat there quietly. I stopped eating.

What should I do about it, Randall? I asked in a low voice.

We’ll both put down tobacco, he said. And maybe you should talk to Mooshum. It had a bad feeling, Joe.

My mother cooked all the next week, and even made it outside, where she sat on a frayed lawn chair scratching Pearl’s neck, staring into the chokecherry bushes that marked the boundaries of the backyard. My father spent as much time home as possible, but he was still called to finish out some of his responsibilities. He was also meeting daily with the tribal police, and talking to the federal agent who was assigned to the case. One day he traveled to Bismarck and back to talk with the U.S. attorney, Gabir Olson, an old friend. The problem with most Indian rape cases was that even after there was an indictment the U.S. attorney often declined to take the case to trial for one reason or another. Usually a raft of bigger cases. My father wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.

So the days went by in that false interlude. On Friday morning, my father reminded me that he would need my help. I often earned a few dollars by biking to my father’s office after school and “putting the court to bed for the weekend.” I swept out his small office, spray-wiped the glass top of his wooden desk. I straightened and dusted the diplomas on his wall— University of North Dakota, University of Minnesota Law School—and the plaques recognizing his service in law organizations. He had a list of places he was admitted to practice that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I was proud of that. Next door, in his closet-turned-chambers, I did a sweep-out. President Reagan, ruddy cheeks and muddled eyes, B-movie teeth, grinned off the wall in his government-issue portrait. Reagan was so dense about Indians he though we lived on “preserves.” There was a print of our tribal seal and one of the great seal of North Dakota. My father had framed an antiquified copy of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, plus the Bill of Rights.

Back in his office, I shook out his brown wool rug. I put away and straightened up his books, which included all the later editions of the old Cohen Handbook at home. There was the 1958 edition, issued during the era when Congress was intent on terminating Indian tribes—it was always left on the shelf, its disuse a mute rebuke to the editors. There were the 1971 facsimile edition and the 1982 edition—big, heavy, well worn. Next to those books there was a compact copy of our own Tribal Code. I also helped my father file whatever his secretary, Opichi Wold, hadn’t put away. Opichi, whose name meant Robin, was a dour little skinny woman with pin-sharp eyes. She functioned as my father’s set of reservation eyes and ears. Every judge needs a scout out there. Opichi gathered tidbits, call it gossip, but what she knew often informed my father’s decisions. She knew who could be released on recognizance, who’d run. She knew who was dealing, who was only using, who was driving without a license, who was abusive, reformed, drinking, dangerous, or safe with their own children. She was invaluable, though her filing system was opaque.

We kept all papers next door in a larger room walled with tan metal filing cabinets. A few files were always left on top of the cabinets because my father had expressed an interest in reading them over, or was adding notes. That day I noticed large stacks were left out—chestnut brown cardboard files with the labels neatly typed and fixed on by Opichi. Most were notes on cases, summaries and thoughts, drafts that preceded a final published judgment. I asked if we were going to file them, thinking there were too many to finish before suppertime.

We’re taking them home, said my father.

This was a thing he did not do. His study at home was his retreat from all that went on in tribal court. He was proud of leaving the week’s turmoil where it belonged. But today, we loaded the files into the backseat. We put my bike in the trunk and drove home.

I’ll take those files in myself after dinner, he said on the way. So I knew he did not want my mother to see him bring those files into the house. After the car was parked we took my bike out and I wheeled it around back. My father entered before me. Walking through the kitchen door, I heard a splintering crash. And then a keen, low, anguished cry. My mother was backed up to the sink, trembling, breathing heavily. My father was standing a few feet before her with his hands out, vainly groping in air the shape of her, as if to hold her without holding her. Between them on the floor lay a smashed and oozing casserole.

I looked at my parents and understood exactly what had happened. My father had come in—surely Mom had heard the car, and hadn’t Pearl barked? His footsteps, too, were heavy. He always made noise and was as I have mentioned a somewhat clumsy man. I’d noticed that in the last week he’d also shouted something silly when returning, like, I’m home! But maybe he’d forgotten. Maybe he’d been too quiet this time. Maybe he’d gone into the kitchen, just as he always used to, and then he’d put his arms around my mother as she stood with her back turned. In our old life, she would have kept working at the stove or sink while he peered over her shoulder and talked to her. They’d stand there together in a little tableau of homecoming. Eventually, he’d call me in to help him set the table. He’d change his clothes quickly while she and I put the finishing touches on the meal, and then we would sit down together. We were not churchgoers. This was our ritual. Our breaking bread, our communion. And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we’d sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on. But now my mother flushed darkly and an almost imperceptible shudder coursed over her. She took a gasping breath, and put her hand to her wounded face. Then she stepped over the mess on the floor and walked carefully away. I wanted her to shout, cry out, throw something. Anything would have been better than the frozen suspension of feeling in which she mounted the stairs. She was wearing a plain blue dress that night. No stockings. A pair of black Minnetonka moccasins. As she walked up each riser she looked straight ahead and her hand was firm on the banister. Her steps were soundless. She seemed to float. My father and I had followed her to the doorway, and I think as we watched her we both had the sense that she was ascending to a place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved.

We stood together even after the bedroom door clicked shut. At last we turned and without a word we went back into the kitchen and scraped up the casserole and broken dish. Together we brought the mess outside to the garbage. My father paused after he closed the bin. He bowed his head and at that moment I was first aware that he exuded a desolation that would grip him with increasing force. When he remained there motionless, I truly became frightened. I put my hand urgently on his arm. I couldn’t say what I was feeling, but that time, at least, my father looked up.

Help me get those files in. His voice was hard and urgent. We’ll start tonight.

And so I did. We unloaded the car. Then we slapped together a few rough sandwiches. (He prepared one of the sandwiches with more care and put it on a plate. I cut up an apple, arranged the slices around the bread, meat, and lettuce. When my mother didn’t answer my tap on the bedroom door, I left it just outside.) Holding our food in our hands, we went into my father’s study and crammed our mouths as we frowned at the files. We brushed our crumbs to the floor. My father turned on the lamps. He settled himself at his desk and then nodded at me to do the same in the reading chair.

He’s there, he said, nodding at the heavy stacks.

I understood that I was going to help. My father was treating me as his assistant. He knew, of course, about my surreptitious reading. I glanced instinctively at the Cohen shelf. He nodded again, raised his eyebrows a fraction, and lip-pointed at the stack near my elbow. We began to read. And it was then that I began to understand who my father was, what he did every day, and what had been his life.

Over the course of the next week, we culled several cases from the corpus of his work. During this time, which was the last week of school, my mother was unable to leave her room. My father brought her food. I sat with her in the evenings and read to her from The Family Album of Favorite Poems until she slept. It was an old maroon book with a ripped cover picturing happy white people reading poems in church, to their children at bedtime, whispering into a sweetheart’s ear. She would not let me read anything inspirational. I had to read the endless story poems with their ornate words and clunking rhythms. “Ben Bolt,” “The Highwayman,” “The Leak in the Dike,” and so on. As soon as her breathing evened out, I slunk away, relieved. She slept and slept, like she was sleeping for a sleeping marathon. She ate little. Wept often, a grinding and monotonous weeping that she tried to muffle with pillows but which vibrated through the bedroom door. I’d go downstairs, into the study, with my father, and continue reading through the files.

We read with a concentrated intensity. My father had become convinced that somewhere within his bench briefs, memos, summaries, and decisions lay the identity of the man whose act had nearly severed my mother’s spirit from her body.