Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  There were rules for assemblies, which we broke every time. Number one rule: Clap. We had been warned. Monday morning after the quilters and then after the firemen, Mr. McGilly took fifteen minutes on the intercom: “You want to make our guests feel welcome, don’t you? You like getting out of class, don’t you?” Sometimes the cheerleaders clapped, and we all watched them. Sometimes my brother marched back and forth with his band baton, raised the baton as if to orchestrate clapping, and we all laughed because he was popular, but we didn’t clap. I don’t know why.

  When the show was about to start, Mr. McGilly got up on his tiptoes and clutched the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he shouted, his eyes bulging, “let’s hear a warm round of applause for Mystic Michael Hurt.” The microphone squawked. Mystic Mike put his arms over his head as if dodging a hurricane, dug into his ear, and we all laughed, and the cheerleaders clapped.

  Mystic Mike did rope tricks. “Now watch the circle,” he said. He made a lasso out of the rope and stood twirling circles at his feet. “If you can concentrate,” he said, “if you can watch the circles without blinking, say the way a cat—” He had this deep agreeable voice, like a priest’s. I watched the circles loop and wobble in front of him, then to one side, then the other, big sloppy Os that skimmed the surface of the floor, skimmed, skimmed, slapped hard like a jump rope, then skidded. Stopped dead in a wad at his feet. The boys behind me went, “Ya-eee.” “Just watch the rope,” Mystic Mike warned, his voice changing to a throaty bark. I guess those guys’d seen better rope tricks. Me too, but Michael Hurt was so handsome! I watched him jerk his hips and head, getting the circles started again.

  I half-closed my eyes until his lasso began to wind in blurry, smooth circles, and I thought of how sweet it would be if a handsome hypnotist held my trapeze. I’d never worried myself over how the trapeze ropes were fixed, but something had to hold them. Or somebody, and I figured it would be fine if this gentleman hovered in the clouds above, like Jack the Giant—or no. Like Geppetto. Who would look like this guy. Like Mike. Somewhere above me in deep space, a giant puppeteer might chant in a deep, priesty voice, and I probably wouldn’t understand the words: they’d be spiritual sounds—

  “Hypnotism is simply deep concentration.”

  —the ropes laced through his fingers, and as I pumped, he might give me a little push, a finger twitch, that would send me arcing wider and wider, higher and higher. I’d understand him in my heart, not my head—

  “Animals,” he said, “go into trances all the time. Pigs. Horses. Coyotes.” Mystic Mike. I didn’t like his name. Mystic Michael. Why Michael? It was so plain. He was chewing his lip and talking at the same time. “They have greater access to altered states than we, but some of us, a special few, retain this tremendous connection to the waking dream.” He let the rope drop at his feet. He began looking us over, turning his head slowly from side to side, stopping now and again to squint at somebody, a little smile on his lips. My heart started thudding when his eyes stopped at me. I held my breath and waited for him to look away. He didn’t. He just stared at me!

  I didn’t want to be hypnotized. I didn’t know exactly what it would mean, but probably it’d mean standing up in front of everybody, which I couldn’t do. All of a sudden I can’t breathe, and my hands are wet, cold, and a lump’s in my throat, like vomit or something’ll come out if I open my mouth. He won’t look away. He’s saying, “Ten percent of the population is highly vulnerable. While we’ve been talking I have suggested, well, other ways of being. Subliminally. If you’re one of the ten percent, you will do whatever I want you to do.” Did he want me to do something? He drew his hands together under his chin. He looked like he was witching me! “I want you all to be very, very quiet.” He began rocking back and forth from heels to toes.

  He said, “Horse.”

  I stared at this girl’s braid in front of me. It was a thick, snaky gob of hair.

  He stamped. He said it again.

  Behind me somebody was laughing. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this kid stand up. It was Hayden Kramer. Tossing his head, little Hayden, the typing teacher’s kid, no bigger than I was, but a junior, a middling-popular red-haired pip-squeak—neighing. “Come on down here,” Mystic Mike said. “Shh,” he said, because a lot of kids were laughing, but Hayden went on down and started trotting, tossing his red mane. The boys behind me kissed the air.

  “Rooster,” the hypnotist said, and up jumped Leonard Kotaceet, the sophomore class president. Leonard was crowing. Put his fists into his armpits, flapped his wings, and practically fell trying to get to the floor. Then my brother turned into a cow. I could tell by the way his mouth was twitching—Ronnie wanted to laugh.

  So he was faking it. The act was rigged. My ears stopped thudding so bad. I watched Linda Bitsui, one of the three Navajo cheerleaders, start to purr, and Randi Rouseau, one of the white ones, started barking, and I wondered if I’d always be a dork. Everybody around me was laughing, nudging each other, like what a good joke, like they’d been in on it all along.

  Mystic Mike raised a nice little zoo. Before the show was half over he was herding a pig from student council, a duck from the honor society, and a first-string bulldog from the football team, all oinking and quacking and barking and laughing, a very popular zoo, probably handpicked and coached by Mr. McGilly from a list he’d jotted down of everybody who was anybody—a list I’d never be on. When Mr. McGilly looked at me, he got this silly smile, like he was wracking his brain, thinking, Who’s this specimen? Like, I should know this girl . . ., and he always said, “Hi there” instead of “Hi, Karen.” I bet I’m the only white kid in that school whose name he never remembered.

  Mystic Mike was beaming right at me. The faker. He didn’t even see me.

  Like Moses, he shivered his hands over the zoo, and the animals screeched their noises, and he shouted, “Owl.” Nothing happened so he shouted again, motioning the herd to pipe down, but nothing happened. He stamped, boomed, “Owl!”

  A voice to the left of the bleachers said, “That’s me.” I craned my neck. It was Purple! She stood up, stepped down the rows onto the floor, her hands in the pockets of her sweater. She was grinning at her friends, waving inside her pocket, and I’m thinking, She’s on Mr. McGilly’s list? Because Purple was not popular, not with Mr. McGilly. Then I remembered she was the student council representative from Soph. Level 2. The others on the floor were all Level Is. You got put in a level based on how good your English was, though the way I saw it, it wasn’t that Purple didn’t have good English. I believe the teachers thought she had too much of it. She was a troublemaker. She had a reputation. She said, “Who.” Said it flatly, not at all like an owl. Then she said, “Ya-eee,” and grinned. All the girls where she was sitting started clicking their tongues. “Who,” she said. “Ya-eee.” Mystic Mike rolled his eyes. She stopped in front of the zoo, faced us, and took a little bow. Some kids clapped. Then Mystic Mike bowed, too.

  They called her Purple because of the purple sweater she always wore. I’d made her acquaintance three years earlier, our first year on the reservation. I was walking home from school, taking the shortcut behind the band building. Then, the sweater swam around her hips. It still did because she tugged it down, but now there were holes where the yarn had pulled loose at the shoulders and collar. That day behind the band building, she taught me something: Indian girls will hit you. This amazed me. She said, “What would you do if I socked you in the stomach?” And then did.

  Right away I thought, Tell Mom. Mama was gathering evidence that first year to justify marching us off the reservation. She wanted us back in civilization, which meant Catholic schools. There were Catholic boarding schools for Indian kids, but none for us. “You’re a smart man,” she told my dad every night. “You can get other jobs.”

  Then again, telling Mom things didn’t always work out so well. That was also the year Ronnie decided to get holy. Until then he’d always been a go-along Catholic. He’d go with us to mass
if he didn’t get a better offer. But this one day, out of the blue, he announced that his new mission in life was to light a fire under the Catholic Youth Organization. My mom’s eyes went all soft when he said this, like he had read her mind and said the one thing she’d been praying hardest for. Ronnie was in ninth grade then. He spent hours in front of the mirror, smearing his hair with VO-5 and then parting it this way and that. He told me that Catholic girls are sex-starved and the reason so many joined CYO is because they got to do the hug of peace in Jesus’ name. He told me he planned to be there for all those sex-starved nymphos, to let them rub up against him just as long as they wanted, and that I’d better plan to take over all the chores because he had a lot of CYO business to take care of. Sure enough, he started skipping out right after dinner—I don’t think he did a dish all year, and he was never around for Saturday chores. I tried to tell Mom exactly why he was so interested in CYO—“Sex. He told me so!”—and she looked sour. “If, indeed, your brother told you this, I’m sure he didn’t intend you to tell me. You don’t want to grow up to be a snitch, do you, Karen?”

  You never knew how something would hit her. So I didn’t tell her about Purple. That night, I played it over and over in my head. Purple’d been standing in the shade with her cousin, Lily. I said, “Hi.” She said the thing about socking me in the stomach. I kept walking, but I watched her face. First there was the idea, then, an instant later, the decision. I’m gasping and she’s squinting at me, her fists clenched. Then she crossed her arms like some kind of prizefighter, and there was this gleam in her eye, and I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking, Yes, I do dare punch a hole through this scared little white girl in her corduroy coveralls and saddle shoes and pin-curled hair. Yes, I’d be pleased to roll this little puff of kitten fur in the dirt.

  I believe she was the first Navajo to really notice me, and I guess the only one to go really deep—from the rim of my belly button to the mole on my spine. I waited to see what would happen next, but then Purple went away. I heard they sent her to boarding school in Kansas. But that was three years ago.

  Purple and I weren’t the same size—I don’t care that the scales read ninety-three pounds for both of us and that the metal measuring stick resting on the tops of our heads showed our heights to be fifty-eight inches exactly. She was not my size. Stand us next to each other in our P.E. costumes—they were these baby-blue one-piece button-down gizmos, short sleeves and a metal Wonder Girl belt at the waist, with folds of cotton ballooning out and then gathering in tight elastic that left lines of pink dashes on our legs—stand us next to each other under a spotlight in the center of the gym, and Purple would cast the larger shadow.

  Miss Adams didn’t see it that way. “You girls are exactly the same size,” she announced. “You’ll spot each other.” This was a couple of days after Purple did her owl impersonation. The custodians had just put up the uneven bars for gymnastics. I had decided I would try out for the new gymnastics team, since the BIA was so nice to buy us the equipment and all. Trying out for some team was on my “to do” list that fall, along with saying hi in the halls. I had also decided I would speak up in class at least once a week. I was doing great at that one. Each Friday, when Mr. Bellows assigned the weekend homework, I raised my hand and asked him to repeat himself. He always obeyed, right there in front of everybody, which was cool. For half a minute every Friday afternoon, I was a star.

  I almost backed out when I saw Purple among the would-be gymnasts, but then I thought, That’s exactly what I always do, back out, and I was sick of doing what I always did, so I stuck around that first day. We learned how to do round-offs on the mats, and I was pretty good at it. I just kept my distance from her, and she stuck with her cousin, and everything was fine. We spent the first three weeks tumbling around on the mats, and we spent the next on the balance beams, but for the bars we had to have spotters, and oh, lucky me.

  “Now don’t be shy, girls,” Miss Adams said. She had me stand barefoot on a padded mat. She had Purple kneel behind me. “Karen, fall backwards, and Evangeline will catch you.” Evangeline was Purple’s real name. I couldn’t fall backwards. “Just relax,” she said, and pushed me in the chest, and I stepped back on Purple’s leg.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “This is easy,” Miss Adams said. “You have to be Loosey Goosey if you want to be a good tumbler. Remember, girls,” she said, and there was that whinny in her voice, “you won’t break.” She had Purple put her arms across my back, and she told me not to bend my knees, and she pushed me. I looked in Purple’s eyes. They were perfectly bland brown eyes. I was thinking, She doesn’t remember me.

  All period, we fell into each other’s arms, and we were sort of laughing, and it wasn’t so bad. Later, in the locker room, Purple and Lily stood in front of the mirrors, ratting their hair. “Now, don’t be shy,” Purple said to the mirror. “Ya-eee.”

  Lily said, “You have to be Loosey Goosey.”

  Everybody was cracking up because Miss Adams was such a dork, and I was thinking, Say hi in the halls. Before I could talk myself out of it, I said, “Remember, girls. You won’t break.”

  I was sitting on a bench behind them, tying my shoes. Purple looked at me in the mirror, and I saw this hardness come into her eyes. She was watching me, her eyes narrow and evil. She smiled, and she began to nod very slowly. She said, “You might break,” and I knew from the gleam in her eye that I was the you she was talking about. If she hadn’t remembered me before, she did now, and I didn’t know why I’d opened my fat mouth.

  In my mind, I saw myself boomerang up from the low bar, reach back for an eagle grasp of the high, and I felt my fingers cramp, unable to curl around the steel; I watched myself drift down toward her chalky hands, hands that disappeared, and I listened for the splat.

  She said, “Remember. The spotter’s responsibility is to break the fall, not the back.” She grinned at Lily.

  I knew I’d better watch out.

  Purple came into the trading post that Saturday. I had a little weekend job measuring cloth and selling jewelry in the dry goods section. Purple was with an old woman. I’d often see her walking around town with this woman. The woman dressed traditional, long tiered cotton skirt, velvet blouse. Tennis shoes, a bandanna over her gray hair. I figured she might be Purple’s grandmother. She wore turquoise bracelets from wrists to elbows, and a huge squash blossom around her neck, a heavy necklace that dragged her toward the ground. She was stooped, a tiny woman, her face all wrinkly.

  When Purple saw me, she squinted. They breezed by, back to the rug room, where I heard the trader, Mr. Slaugh, say, “Ya’at’eeh shimah”—hello, my mother—which was what he said to every old woman who came into the store, and always made me think of the time the vacuum cleaner salesman came to our house in Colorado and said, “Hello, Mom,” to my mother, and she slammed the door in his face, yelling, “I am not your mother.” But the Navajo women had rugs, and Mr. Slaugh was there to buy.

  Mr. Slaugh stocked bolts of stiff, waxy cloth that he sold for forty-nine cents a yard, and I spent most of my Saturdays measuring yards and yards of it, colorful, printed cloth that people bought to throw over sweathouses for ceremonies. That was what I was doing when Purple came and draped herself across the glass jewelry counter, smudging it—I sprayed that counter with Windex a hundred times a day—and said, pure spit in her voice, “What are you doing here?”

  “Working.”

  She stood there glaring at me, as if what I was doing was a personal insult to her. I could hear the old woman talking in Navajo to Mr. Slaugh.

  I tried to cozy up to her. I whispered, “The Mormons are trying to brainwash me.”

  She didn’t smile; the sneer did not leave her face, so I didn’t go on. It was true, though. The reason I had the job, a good job for an underage kid, was because my employers were bribing me. I’d proven my reliability. I had babysat for the Slaughs, good Mormon traders, for the past three y
ears. I was a good babysitter and let the kids bite me. They wanted me to come and live with them—to be their live-in babysitter and go on vacations with them to exotic places.

  “Over my dead body,” my mother said. My mother did battle with Mormon missionaries on a regular basis. Every few weeks, a couple of white-shirted, clean-faced Mormon boys came onto the company compound. We were mostly Catholics, Baptists, and Church of Christers. The missionaries would say their how-do-you-dos and ask for glasses of water all around the block, and the Protestants, who were generally polite, sometimes gave them cookies. My mother, on the other hand, met them at the door, and while she didn’t carry a baseball bat or gun, she might as well have. “God save the Navajo people from the likes of you,” she’d say, right to their faces, and she explained to them in no uncertain terms about how Jesus built his true church, the Catholic Church, on Peter the Rock, our first pope, but you didn’t see his ambassadors, the priests, going door to door like vacuum cleaner salesmen. The missionaries seemed to like this. They’d plant their feet, open their mouths, and match her point for point. They always spent hours longer at our house than any other, and they never got cookies or water. As far as my mother was concerned, she always won because they always left.

  She liked a good fight. She spent hours comparing numbers in the various churches, scheming about how to beat the Mormons by upping the Catholic ranks among the Navajo. She saw us kids as soldiers in the field. While I wasn’t the little crusader Ronnie turned out to be, I never quarreled about going to mass or confession. I believe my mother let me work for Mormons because she liked putting her little soldier in the line of fire, just to show the enemy what true faith was.

  But Purple’s face told me she had no interest in any of this. We had dead pawn in the case she leaned on. She watched me measure cloth for a while, and then decided to be interested in pawned jewelry. “Let me see this,” she said, poking the glass.