by Will Weaver
“Got no problem with that,” Wicks said. “I was just patrolling and saw someone out by that irrigator, so I pulled you over. Them irrigators ain’t cheap. Seventy-five grand, minimum. The owners like to protect their investment.”
“Owners?” Guy said. This land belonged to old Hank Schroeder.
“Losano brothers. They own most of these fields with the irrigators. Or if they don’t now, they soon will. That is, unless the Indians get them.”
“Losano brothers?”
“From out West. Idaho and California. They grew spuds out there, but that land is fucked now, they say. Too many potatoes, too much chemicals for too many years in a row. That adds up to scabby spuds. So the Losano boys moved into here. Flat land, good drainage, high water table, low taxes. They say potatoes grown here make Idaho spuds look like rabbit turds.”
Guy looked across the field.
“Big money in potatoes,” Wicks continued. “You take one potato, slice it up, and suddenly you got ten or twenty where you had one before. Like magic,” Wicks said. “Get it? French fries.”
Guy nodded. “Where’s Hank Schroeder?” he said suddenly.
“Easy Street. Lives in Detroit Lakes. Got an apartment there and a pocketful of money from the Losano boys. Sleeps late in the morning and eats out every night, they say. Best deal these old-timers could make.”
Guy looked beyond Wicks to the faraway grove and buildings of his grandfather’s farm.
The sun broke through and Wicks put on his glasses. He turned his gaze to Guy’s Mercedes. “Fancy car. California plates.” He looked back to Guy. “You wouldn’t be carrying any drugs in that car, now, would you?”
“Drugs?” Guy said. “Why? You need some?”
Wicks stared.
“Joke,” Guy said.
Suddenly Wicks grinned. “Joke, right,” he said. He turned back to his car. As Guy opened the door to the Mercedes, Wicks called out, “Be around here long?”
“Hard to say. Awhile anyway.”
Wicks nodded. “I ride herd on this side of White Earth. Some night I’ll come by and you can ride posse with me. Cowboys and Indians. Gets wild some nights, so I don’t mind the company.”
“All right,” Guy said. “But I’m no cowboy.”
Wicks grinned his lopsided grin. “Up on the reservation these days you got to be one or the other. Ain’t no riding the fence.”
After Wicks’s patrol car receded in his mirror, Guy stopped and dug under the seat of the Mercedes for the thimble-sized brown bottle. His freeway No-Doz. There was one toot left, but he threw the little bottle, unopened, far into Hank Schroeder’s field.
He drove on. The flat farmland began to rise and sink. Scrub oak and jack pine grew on the hills too steep to farm. In the draws and ravines were hazel brush and aspen. Soon he began to pass Indian houses. Often in the same yard were three types of Indian homes. They represented the three main periods of Indian housing.
Farthest from the road, deep in the yard, often overgrown by brush and jack pines, was the log house. Its thick gray logs and narrow white lines of mortar formed a weathered, flag-striped exterior. On the roof, black paper flapped in the breeze. Where the paper had torn away, the wide sheathing boards were exposed. Where the sheathing boards had rotted through, Guy could see sagged and buckling beams.
The second type of house, usually only a few steps kitty-corner from the first, was the tar-paper shack. Lower, with a flatter roofline, the tar-paper shack’s exterior was black tar paper held in place with vertical slats of pine. Some of the tar-paper shacks were sided with tan, fake-brick asphalt siding. The windows of the smaller shacks were usually larger but often fewer than the windows of the log house.
Closest to the road was the third type, the government prefab. These houses had come to White Earth in the early sixties. They came ten houses to a semitrailer load. Carpenters from somewhere other than the reservation pounded them together, one house per day. The carpenters were supervised by crew-cut men driving beige government sedans. These men determined that the prefab houses should sit perched on four-foot concrete foundations.
“Expecting high water?” Martin had asked them. “Mississippi River’s only sixty miles off.”
Before leaving the reservation, the government carpenters painted the prefab houses bright pink, lemon yellow, sky blue. Kids, afterward, called them rainbow houses.
Guy remembered the rainbow houses burning. The Indians took several years to move into the rainbow houses. By then many of the houses were stripped of copper pipe and sinks and toilets, then burned.
Now, in 1984, the pastel sides of the rainbow houses were battered and smudged by children’s play. Broken windows were cardboarded over. Screen doors, their mesh ripped away, hung askew. Their low-pitched roofs sagged; locals said the prefab houses had been destined for Indonesia, but at the last minute were diverted to northern Minnesota. Guy believed it. Now if smoke rose from the rainbow-house chimneys, others showed no fire. In one yard, beside a particularly battered lemon-yellow house, smoke rose again from the tar-paper shack.
No matter what number or configuration of houses, Indian yards held more cars than buildings. Guy passed a yard with four and a half ’72 Chevy Vegas. The cars were parked in order of repair. Closest to the house, parked in its own tracks, was a blue Vega with two yellow doors. Left of the blue Vega was a yellow Vega with two doors missing. Beside the yellow Vega sat a black one, its front end tilted up from a missing engine. The fourth Vega, white but mostly rust, lay overturned, stripped of its drive shaft and transmission. The half-Vega consisted of a vertical front fender and grill, as if the remainder of the car were below grade.
Guy thought of his ’57 Chevy. If the Indian had a spare car, so did he.
Deeper into the reservation, the Indian yards contained fewer cars and better houses. The rainbow houses had been repainted, this time in browns and greens. In place of wrecked cars were outlines of garden plots. Farther back in one yard, the brush had been cut away from the old log house and its roofline was sharp and reshingled. In another yard, in a small clearing beside the log house, were two low grave houses. They, too, were reroofed and repainted white. Plastic, purple flowers bloomed beside them in the snow. Waist-high at their roofline, coffin-long, the small houses covered graves. The little spirit houses had been a common sight when Guy was growing up. But they were rotting even then. By the time Guy finished high school, trees and vandals had pushed most of the little houses onto the ground.
Guy kept driving. He let the Mercedes turn where it wished, any road. By memory or maybe by ruts in the frozen road, he found himself driving along No Medicine Lake Road toward Doc’s Tavern.
Doc’s lay at the south toe of No Medicine Lake. The tavern stood on the lake side of the road, which separated the flat, gray ice of the lake from a long slope of birch trees on the inland side. Through the birches Doc’s beer lights blinked pale yellow and blue. It was only late afternoon, but Doc’s parking lot was already half full of farm pickups and dented Indian cars. It was, after all, only a few hours until Saturday night.
Guy had spent more than a few Saturday nights at Doc’s, most of them after Tom left. Back then the three-piece bands played loud Creedence Clearwater, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings. People danced: Indians, whites. Often they danced together. Back then Doc’s was like a great blender. Everybody danced, swirling together in a thudding haze of cigarette smoke and beer lights and bass guitar. At closing time, Indians and whites reconstituted themselves and went their separate ways. In the parking lot there was often a fight—a sudden lunging and flailing of fists. Sometimes the fighters were Indians against whites. But most often the fights were about men and women too drunk to care with whom they went home, fights over whiskey bottles and stolen car batteries. If the fight persisted, or drew in bystanders, Doc intervened—from the rear kitchen window came the sudde
n orange flash and roar of his twelve-gauge. By the time his lead shot whistled overhead, reached its apogee somewhere over No Medicine Lake, spattered down on the water, and wafted its way to the bottom muck, the fighters had scrambled into their cars and the parking lot emptied fast.
And Guy had come to Doc’s years before that, when Helmer used to bring him. In the summertime, in July and August, his grandfather often brought Martin and him here. They came during oat harvest, in the evenings after the combines were shut down. They came on the hottest, driest days of the summer. The oat dust had reddened their eyes and ran black at their corners like cheap mascara on tears. That same dust had worked its way through their shirts, and the barbed oat hulls found their way around buttoned cuffs and collars, and boated on tiny rivers of sweat down onto their chests and bellies and into their crotches. They itched all over. But the worst itch was for something cold to drink.
On those days Helmer always bought six Orange Crush soda pops. Two apiece. Guy always drank his so fast that pinwheels popped behind his eyes and his nose hurt. Martin drank his only a little slower. Helmer’s pop always lasted the longest.
Once, on a day when the thermometer read 101 degrees, the coolest it had been for three days, Helmer bought four orange pops and a tall draft Hamm’s beer. Martin and Guy stared. Helmer did not drink beer, never touched alcohol. People down the bar turned to stare. Doc glanced at Martin and Guy, then slid the frosted mug in front of Helmer. Helmer’s big Adam’s apple moved the dusty skin of his throat. He leaned forward toward the beer. The head of foam rose up and hung bubbling over the rim of the glass. Slowly Helmer brought his hands toward the mug until he gripped the cold glass. Guy forgot to drink his own pop.
Helmer tried to lift the mug; the long, brown muscles puffed up his arms. But the mug was frozen to the counter. Either frozen to the counter or glued. Either glued or else the beer mug was not glass at all but iron. The mug was made of iron and the pine-tree bar was not pine at all but rather a great magnet. Or, if the beer mug was not frozen or glued or magnetized, it was made of something like osmium or some asteroid material so heavy that no man, not even his grandfather, could lift it.
Then, instead of allowing itself to be lifted, the beer mug began to draw Helmer’s mouth down to it. It was now the magnet, and his grandfather’s lips, iron. Helmer’s mouth opened. His lips quivered as they touched foam. Suddenly the mug flew from his hands and shattered against the wall behind the bar. Down the stools, someone clapped slowly. But Helmer didn’t look around. He paid for the pop, for the beer and the mug, then drove home and drank a gallon of cold well water.
But now Guy was thirty and the old tavern door squeaked. In a haze of cigarette smoke, forty or more faces turned to look. Half brown faces. Half white. They were easy to count because the brown faces took the right side of the bar, the white faces the left. Between them was a five-stool empty space. Guy took a seat in no-man’s-land.
At least the bar was the same, a long white-pine log split exactly in half lengthwise, planed smooth, and then varnished dark brown. Above the smoky mirrors still hung the black-velvet painting of John Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln. Beside the velvet presidents, the tattered moose head still wore its propeller beanie. And in a moment, canted steeply to the left from a bad back, a bar towel over his shoulder and his gray eyes still twitching from the smoke, there was Doc.
“Pehrsson. Guy. Long time.”
“Hello, Doc.” They shook hands.
“What’ll it be? On me.”
Guy smiled. “Hamm’s and a schnapps.”
Doc talked as he poured. “Heard you’re out in California. Struck it rich, they say.”
Guy took a long drink of the musty-tasting Hamm’s, then leaned forward and whispered, “Gold, Doc, nuggets the size of oranges. Just reach down and fill your pockets. But don’t tell anybody. This place would fold.”
Doc did not smile. “Let her fold. Then I could get out of here.” He wiped an imaginary spill. “Sometimes I think I ought to drop a cigarette in the back room, lock up, and go home. Come back the next morning and collect the insurance money. I’ve got a sister out West, you know. Sacramento.”
Guy knew. But he remembered Modesto.
“Or maybe it’s San Francisco. Anyway, she works on the line at Lockheed. Makes twelve dollars an hour and has two orange trees in her backyard. She said once I could get on at Lockheed. Now would be the time to go. You don’t know what the hell is going to happen around here. Another year and this place could be called the Chippewa Firewater Inn.”
“What do you mean?” Guy said. Wicks. If the Indians don’t get it back, he’d said.
“You serious?” Doc said. “You don’t know?”
Guy sipped the schnapps and waited.
Doc looked down the bar to the Indians, then back. He lowered his voice. “This place. The resorts. The farms, and that includes your granddad’s place—the Indians want them. The Indians say any land owned by whites within the boundaries of the reservation belongs to them. They say they got cheated out of the land. They say they want it back. They’re digging back into the old treaties, the old deeds, to prove it. The whole business stinks,” Doc said, wiping the bar again.
Guy finished the schnapps. He laughed once.
“What’s funny about that?” Doc said.
Guy shook his head. “Tell me some good news, Doc. Just one piece of good news.”
Doc squinted across the bar toward the window. He rubbed his chin. “Ain’t any,” he finally said.
“Some information, then,” Guy said. “My mother. And Tom LittleWolf. Where are they?”
Doc started to speak, then fell silent as he looked over Guy’s shoulder. At that moment someone clapped Guy hard on the back and spilled his beer. “Well, if it ain’t Guy Pehrsson, basketball star of yesteryear.”
Guy turned. It was Kurt Fenske.
Beefy in high school, now Fenske was thicker still. He had put on a thick coating of meat from his eyes down. His black beard grew from just below his eyes all the way down his throat, where it disappeared into a sweat-stained red and black wool shirt.
“Hello, Kurt,” Guy said.
“‘Hello, Kurt’? Is that all you can say to an old friend? A teammate, for Christ’s sakes? We went to the same school, remember?”
“I remember,” Guy said evenly. He remembered that Fenske was trouble back then, and he was trouble now.
“I mean, aren’t you supposed to say something like, ‘Kurt, old buddy, how’s the wife?’ After all, I mean, you and Mary Ann and Tom LittleWolf. It’s not like you didn’t know each other, if you know what I mean.”
Guy drained the last swallow of Hamm’s. “Kurt, old buddy, how’s the wife?” he said slowly.
“That cunt? She walked. Hit the road. Just like your mother walked out on your old man.”
Guy felt his breath leave him.
Fenske gestured at the barroom around them. “So I come here. Sometimes I run into her. That’s logical, ain’t it? A woman runs off, you go to the nearest place where there’s other men. That’s why you’re here, right? You’re looking for your mother?”
“Go easy, Kurt, you’ve had plenty—” Doc said.
“But if you’re looking for your mother, you’re sitting in the wrong location,” Fenske continued. He pointed down the bar toward the Indian section. “Brown-town, that’s where she’d be.”
So here it came. The oldest male demon of all, the fight.
“Down with the Indians or maybe out in the parking lot. Check the back seats, if you know what I mean.”
Guy swung on his bar stool and kicked Fenske in the crotch. Fenske grunted and went down, but caught Guy a glancing blow on the mouth as he fell. Guy’s lips went numb. On the floor, Fenske held his crotch and tried to get up. Guy kicked him once more, hard, in the face. Fenske’s right cheek split beneat
h Guy’s boot, and blood leaped in his eye. Fenske swore and flailed.
“Guy—that’s enough!” Doc was shouting. “He’s finished. You better go!”
Down the bar, the whites stared and the Indians grinned. Fenske crawled to his hands and knees.
“Doc,” Guy said. His heart pounded in his ears. “What about my mother?”
Doc looked down at Fenske. “She got a little wild . . . drank for a while. Used to see her in here a lot. She was kind of crazy. I tried to hold her back, but what can you do? She’s an adult, right? She’s better now, I guess. Lives up in No Medicine.”
“Where in No Medicine?”
“North of town.”
Fenske staggered to his feet. Doc pushed Guy toward the door. “Get—and don’t worry about finding your mother.” He jerked his head toward the Indians. “After today she’ll know you’re here.”
Outside, Guy spit red on the snow.
18
Guy slept that night on his father’s couch that smelled of cows. Toward morning he began to dream. No pictures. No colors. Only a gray fog. But something in the fog. Something . . . the promise of weight or force. Something or someone.
He jerked awake and sat up. Silhouetted against the pink light of an east kitchen window, in a chair beside the couch, was someone. A woman. Madeline. Mother.
Guy reached for her. In his arms she was thin and hard and she smelled like fresh air and wool and leather and soap.
“How long have you . . . ,” he began.
“A half hour. Since your father went out for chores.”
“I didn’t hear you come in,” Guy mumbled.
“Neither did he.”
Guy let her go and leaned forward to look through the window into the yard. There was no car. “How did you get here?”
“Walked.”
Guy shook the last gray webbing of sleep from his head. He rubbed his eyes and stared at his mother.
“Your lip, what happened?” she asked.
Guy felt it. His top lip felt like a dried bread crust.
