by Will Weaver
“The irrigator farmers pay only fifteen dollars a year to water a 160-acre field. In towns and cities the white and Indian families alike pay that much or more every month—and that only for water to cook and bathe with—why should this be so?”
Guy felt someone reading over his shoulder. Another farmer waiting for his feed. “What’s that, that Indian bullshit?” the man said.
“Makes sense to me,” Guy said, not looking up.
The man spit over the edge and turned away.
On the way back to the farm Guy had to stop a quarter mile from the green White Earth sign. Cars lined the shoulders. People walked rapidly forward, as if they were headed to an accident or an auction. Guy joined them but was stopped by a police cordon fifty yards from the tanker.
The big truck had not moved. Behind it were several other Losano Farms vehicles, including a pickup pulling a 500-gallon sausage tank of propane, two tall John Deere tractors with engines idling, and three trucks loaded with seed potatoes. In the crowd of Indians and farmers were TV men from Fargo and Alexandria and Duluth.
Centered in the crowd, Tom LittleWolf stood with arms folded across a sheaf of white papers. Tom was listening to Ricardo Losano. Losano’s face was scarlet. The jerk of his jaw quivered his jowls; he shook a finger in Tom’s face. Tom listened in silence. Tom the wooden Indian.
“Tell us again the Indian position,” a reporter called.
“About the injunction,” another said loudly.
Without expression, Tom read a statement: “The White Earth Anishinabe Council has filed a lawsuit of ten million dollars against Losano Brothers Farms. The suit is for use of and damage to Chippewa natural resources—namely our land and water. If the Indian people are to have a heritage that breaks the present cycle of poverty, it must be a heritage based on land—land that has belonged to the Indians from aboriginal times. Today the constant pumping of billions of gallons of water along with heavy use of dangerous chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers threatens the land and therefore the future of the Indian people on White Earth.”
Tom paused and looked up. He held up another paper. “The Tribal Council has obtained a temporary court injunction that suspends all pumping of water and application of agricultural chemicals on reservation land.”
“How did you get the injunction—on what basis?”
“Ownership of White Earth land is under litigation. The injunction is a common tool of law to prevent misuse of property or funds until conflicting legal claims are settled,” Tom said.
“Suspends irrigation and use of chemicals—until when?” a reporter asked.
“Forever, we hope,” Tom said, “or certainly until a court ruling.”
“How soon before a court ruling?” someone asked.
“That’s up to the courts.”
“What about the potato crop? Right now, I mean,” a Flatwater Quill reporter called out.
“Potatoes planted on the reservation must fend for themselves,” Tom said. “Like the Indians who live here.”
“Mr. Losano,” a woman reporter called, “can you grow potatoes without irrigation or chemicals?”
“Sure,” Losano said loudly, “if you want potatoes the size of rabbit shit.” He turned to face the TV cameras. He struggled to keep his voice steady. “This country would go hungry if it weren’t for irrigation and ag-chemicals. I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with these Indians. First, they’re trying to sue me about land that’s not even theirs—second, they’re trying to ruin my potato crop. My french-fry plant employs two hundred and fifty people. If there aren’t any potatoes to make into french fries, then two hundred and fifty people will be out of their jobs—it’s that simple. If the public lets this happen, that’s fine. I’ll move my plant somewhere else.”
“That’s unlikely,” Tom interjected. “If you’re thinking of moving out, why are you buying up more and more reservation land?”
Losano stared.
Tom glanced at some figures on another sheet. “Our information shows that in the last four weeks Losano Farms has made purchase agreements for an additional two thousand-plus acres of land. Because of clouded title, the land is very cheap now. You buy the land at way below market price from worn-out old farmers, from scared young farmers. Then you plan, with Senator Stanbrook’s help, to clear the title later—isn’t that right?”
Losano’s eyes bulged. His neck reddened. “Who the hell do you think you are? You . . . you goddamn parasite! That’s what you Indians are, parasites on the land. You don’t produce anything. You don’t provide anything. You look for all the loopholes in the law and then take advantage of them. If this country had been left to the Indians, you wouldn’t see farming, you wouldn’t see towns and factories—all you’d see here would be . . . buffalo chips and teepees!”
At that instant a sharp hiss and then a rushing noise drowned out the reporters’ voices.
“Run!” someone shouted.
Guy saw a white vapor cloud spew from behind the propane tank. Two Indian boys dressed in black scrambled away from the gas tank and ran toward the woods. The battery boys—Guy thought instantly—the two boys he had seen stealing the pickup battery at the town meeting.
The crowd stampeded. Whites ran toward the police cordon. Indians fled down the road to their cars. Tom LittleWolf stood fast. He shouted and pointed toward the Indian boys who ran toward the woods, “Catch them!” Several Indians gave chase. The drivers whose tractors were parked closest to the propane tank gunned their engines to wheel away, but a radio station’s van blocked their path. The propane cloud drifted over the trucks and tractors. The drivers leaped down from their cabs. Holding arms across their faces, coughing, they sprinted away. The white mist drifted over the green tractors like fog closing around trees. One tractor’s engine still idled.
Tom still stood shouting directions to the other Indians. He was not looking at the gas cloud.
“Run—Turd—Run!” Guy shouted. Tom turned at Guy’s voice. He saw the gas cloud among the tractors. He began to back away, then turned and walked quickly down the road, all the while looking over his shoulder. Tom was still only thirty yards from the trucks when light flashed around the green tractors. They bucked, once, against their weight like tied horses rearing from a flashbulb. The white sausage of the propane tank tore free from its trailer, slammed against the radio van, overturning it, bathing it in fire. Then the propane tank, like a tipped-over rocket, spun and slammed itself against the tanker truck. The ammonia tank ruptured and pressurized ammonia billowed into the air. Tom sprinted away.
The propane tank, on fire, tumbled down the road toward Tom. Guy saw Tom look behind once, then dive for the ditch flat-out, like he used to dive off the rocks into the shallow waters of No Medicine Lake. Coughing flame, the propane tank passed directly over Tom, skipped into the field, burning, hopping, a great white chicken with its head cut off and yellow fire for blood. A hundred yards into the field, the propane tank lurched ahead slower and slower, finally came to a stop, tried to heave itself forward one last time, then hissed and lay still.
In the foreground the tanker truck and the radio van burned. The two tractors and another truck also blazed. A TV man stood beside Guy, his camera whirring.
“Tom!” Guy called. “Tom!” Tom LittleWolf slowly pulled himself up from the ditch. His braids and the back of his shirt were burning. Guy pushed aside the policeman at the cordon, ran to Tom, and beat out the flames with his hands.
At Tom’s house Tom sat shirtless and backward in a chair as Madeline clipped away his charred braids. Guy sat and watched. He wore mittens of white gauze. His palms ached; blisters had grown like toadstools, then popped. Tom shook his head again. “All ruined, all ruined . . .”
“Hair grows fast,” Guy said.
Tom didn’t look up.
That evening they watc
hed themselves on TV. They watched the propane tank bounce. Smoke rise. Tom on fire in the ditch. Guy leaping on him, pounding his back. There were long close-ups of Guy pulling Tom to his feet, supporting him until his head cleared, holding on to him.
Then the TV reporter stood framed against the backdrop of burning tractors and trucks: “. . . a violent clash of Indians and farmers . . . an apparently well-orchestrated attempt by the White Earth Indians to force their wishes upon reservation farmers, particularly upon the potato grower Ricardo Losano. While previously working within the boundaries of suits and countersuits and injunctions—in short, within the law—the incident today marks a new and lawless direction by the White Earth Tribal Council and its leader, Ma’iingaans.”
Madeline turned off the TV.
The screen hissed and shrank gray to black. Tom and Madeline and Guy stared at one another.
Guy drove home to Martin’s house after the 10:00 PM news. The yard was full of cars and trucks, twenty or thirty of them. Loud voices and the smell of cigarette smoke came through the open windows. The Defense League. Guy thought for a moment of sleeping up in the barn on his old cot in the hayloft. But he walked toward the house.
When he stepped through the door, conversation died. Martin sat at the head of the table with his bottle of Jack Daniel’s before him and a cigar in his mouth. Martin never smoked cigars.
Guy looked around the room. Looked at the men with caps on. At the staring faces. Jim Hanson. Kurt Fenske. The regulars from Doc’s. Jewell Hartmeir. Mary Ann beside her father. Mary Ann’s small blue eyes flickered to the floor, then back up, defiantly, to his.
“Maybe I’m at the wrong party,” Guy said. “I’m looking to buy some Tupperware.”
Mary Ann giggled. Several others laughed, but, when no one else laughed, fell silent. Martin looked down at Guy’s bandaged hands. So did Kurt Fenske.
“The TV star,” Fenske said.
“Coulda saved your hands and all the rest of us a lot of trouble today,” someone else said.
Martin drew deeply on the cigar, then lurched forward to cough. He continued to cough until someone clapped him hard on the back. Recovering, wiping at his eyes, Martin slid the Jack Daniel’s bottle across the table toward Guy. For his father’s sake, Guy took a drink.
The loud talk resumed. In the haze of cigarette smoke Guy slipped through the crowd into his old bedroom and closed the door. He lay back on his bed looking up at the sloping walls, the low ceiling, the bulletin board. The brown and crumbly cork tiles were pinned with yellowed newspaper clippings of him and Tom playing basketball. A red FH school letter with tiny gold basketballs and bars and stars on it. A tail-feather fan from a partridge. A newspaper clipping of John Kennedy holding his coat at the throat, his hair tousled by wind as he spoke to a crowd. As he lay there staring, the door clicked. It was Mary Ann.
“Come in,” Guy said.
For long moments they stared at each other. Then she looked about the room. “It’s exactly the same,” she said.
“Only smaller,” Guy said.
She nodded and let herself smile. They stared another moment.
“How are your hands?” she said.
“Better.”
“Let me see them,” she said, in a mother’s voice. She came forward and took them and turned them over to inspect the bandages.
“Who did the doc-work, not you?”
“Madeline.”
She nodded.
“Sit,” Guy said to her, patting the bed.
She released his hands and sat on the end of the bed.
“How’s Tom?” she said quietly without looking at Guy. She glanced at the door, then down at her hands.
“Lost a foot of his braids, but otherwise he’s okay.”
Mary Ann grinned briefly. Then her face fell again.
“They all want him off the reservation,” Mary Ann whispered. “They think if it weren’t for Tom, there’d be no trouble.”
“What about you?” Guy asked.
Mary Ann’s nose quivered. A tear grew like a pale pearl in the corner of her eye. She swallowed. “I don’t know. In one way Tom’s right. But I got my kids to think about. My job . . . ,” she said. She slapped away the tear before it could roll, shook her head as if to clear it. She turned to Guy. “Why couldn’t things be like they used to be?” she said in a rising voice. “Every year we got older, the more mixed up things got,” she said. “Look what’s happened to us!” she said. Another tear grew, moved down the thick flesh of her cheek. But she shook her head again. The tear flew onto the pale bedspread and left no mark. “It’s like a person goes through different lives all in the same life,” Mary Ann said, softer now. “Tom used to be just a kid. Now he’s an Indian. You used to be the reader, the thinker. Now you got rich and live in California. I wanted to be on TV. Now I got four kids and a job stripping rotten spots out of potatoes.”
“Leave,” Guy said. “Move to California if you like. I’ll get you a job, find a better house for you.”
Mary Ann’s eyes gleamed for a moment, then she shook her head. “No. No moving. I moved around all my life, one damn moldy, piss-smelling crop house to the next, and I swore once I had kids they’d never have to move even once.” She put her hand on his arm. “But thanks anyway.” She stared down at her own hand. The fingers were chapped and starting to twist at the knuckles. Her fingernails were bitten down to red meat; flesh curled up like the round shell of a snail into which the fingernail was retreating. She suddenly made fists.
“So you don’t want to move, okay,” Guy said. “But you need a better house. I can help you. I’ve got some money, plenty of it, I’ll give you some. You need—”
“No,” she said. “I ain’t takin’ money from nobody!”
“I’ll lend it to you, then. You can pay it back whenever you can—next year, fifty years from now—it’s just money, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Well it matters like hell to me,” she said, her cheeks coloring with anger. “We Hartmeirs don’t need any help. We’re doin’ all right fer ourselves.”
Guy was silent.
She looked back down to her lap, to her hands.
After a while she slowly shook her head. “But that ain’t true. It ain’t even my own words. That’s what my daddy always says. Even the boys say it now. You hear something often enough, you believe it. And if you can’t believe your own flesh and blood, who can you believe?”
Her eyes filled slowly with tears. “You ever wish you was somebody else?” she whispered, not looking at Guy.
Guy nodded.
“I do it a lot,” she said. “It scares me sometimes. On the line at the potato plant sometimes I start to dream and I only snap out of it when the bell rings for break or quittin’ time or my fingers hurt and there’s blood on the potatoes ’cause I cut myself.”
“Daydreaming is a way of getting through the day,” Guy said. “Everybody does it.”
“But I do it all the time,” she said. “And it’s not like I’m somebody else when I’m daydreaming. I’m not me and I’m not them. I’m not nobody.” She turned to Guy.
Guy was silent.
“I mean when I’m home and the kids and Jewell are there all shouting and wanting something, then I’m me. But all day at work. That’s when I think about being somebody else. That’s when I’m nobody.”
“Who do you think most about being?” Guy asked.
Mary Ann thought a moment.
“Princess Di, I think. Or if not her, then Marlene Evans on Days of Our Lives.
Guy nodded.
Mary Ann looked down at her hands once again. “Sometimes I think TVs are like dollhouses but with real, little people inside,” she said. “There’s little houses and cars and people right inside the TV. Close your eyes sometime, and put your ear right on the s
ide of the TV. It’s like you’re listening through a wall to the neighbors.” She blinked and looked up suddenly to Guy. “You must think I’m nuts,” she said, and lurched up from the bed.
“No,” Guy said. He grabbed her before she could go through the door.
“You’re not nuts—you’re just too damn bullheaded—like your father. You’re too stubborn to let anybody help you. And you know what that means? It means the way things are is the way they’re going to be—maybe not forever, but for a long time.”
Mary Ann set her jaw.
“So let me help you. I can make things easier for you.”
“No,” she said. She pulled away from him. “That’s not the way I was raised. And the way I was raised is the way I was raised—I can’t change that.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way,” Guy said.
But Mary Ann only stared at him with her lip pushed out until he swore and turned away.
“Now you’re mad,” she said.
Guy shook his head.
They stood in silence.
Mary Ann looked at her hand on the doorknob. She looked at both her hands, then up to Guy. She said, “If you want, there is one thing . . .”
The next morning Guy drove toward Ricardo Losano’s french-fry plant to meet Mary Ann. She wanted to show him around the factory. “That’s all?” Guy had said.
“What d’ya mean ‘that’s all’? It’s eight damn years of my life,” Mary Ann answered.
He was supposed to arrive at exactly 11:35—no earlier, no later—on the west side of the building by the employees’ entrance. Guy checked his watch, drove slower.
The potato factory squatted like an airport just beyond the north city limits of Flatwater. A tall, long terminal of gray concrete stretched parallel to the highway. The only color on its plain face was a giant yellow potato with beams of light streaming toward the name, painted in yellow cursive, of Ricardo Losano. The main building was silo-high, sixty or seventy feet, the equivalent of seven or eight stories.
