Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  I got the key, opened the case, and took out a tray of old rings.

  “These are for sale?” she asked. She picked out a ring with a green turquoise stone that looked like the world with all its seas. “How long you had this one?” It swam on her finger, covering joint to knuckle.

  “I don’t know. Couple of months.”

  She picked up the little white tag and looked at the price. She said, “This is my uncle’s ring.”

  “Oh?”

  She took the ring off and looked at its underside. “He’s been looking for it,” she said. “Who brought it here?”

  I shrugged. Every now and again, Mr. Slaugh toted in a bunch of stuff from the pawned goods and put it in the sales case. I’d been there, though, when people came in and saw things they’d pawned up for sale. I saw this one man get so mad that when he rushed out of the room, he sideswiped a display of tomato paste in the grocery section and sent a pile of four-ounce cans flying. Another time, a woman refused to leave the store. She sat down in the middle of the floor and stayed there—all day. Mr. Slaugh had gone to Gallup. None of us could do a thing. I don’t know what happened that time. I was just a flunky and got to leave when my shift was over.

  “My uncle didn’t pawn this,” Purple informed me. “How can you sell something that doesn’t belong to you?”

  I told her she was going to have to talk to Mr. Slaugh about it because I was just a flunky, and she said, “I’m going to take this ring back to my uncle.” She closed it in her fist and put the fist in the pocket of her sweater.

  The whirlies started in my stomach. I said, “Somebody pawned it,” but she was already heading out, though at the door she stopped and looked back. Her upper lip curled and I again saw the prizefighter behind the band building. I knew what she was thinking: Are you a little snitch? Go on and tell, snitch, so I can despise you even more. I didn’t move, just stared back.

  It was a two-hundred-dollar ring. Mr. Slaugh winked at petty theft. Kids stole licorice under his nose, or they popped the tops on their Nehis, drank them while wandering the aisles. He liked to be generous. “Did you pay for that?” he’d ask the thief, and the thief would stare off somewhere, and Mr. Slaugh would say, “Well, you pay for it next time” and then go off all pleased with himself.

  Real theft was a whole other thing. For real theft he called the butcher, a meaty guy named Albert, and Albert pinned the thief while Mr. Slaugh called the cops. The cops came with handcuffs and took the thief to the jail, which was just on the other side of the fence from the company compound. Summers, we lined up at the fence with crab apples and pelted the cops in their paddy wagons, then hid in our houses and watched them tour the block, looking for us. I could just see it: The paddy wagon drives up, the Navajo cop gets out, walks around and opens the back door. Purple, in handcuffs, jumps out. For Purple, Mr. Slaugh’d surely call the Navajo cops, whereas if it were, say, me—if they could prove the ring went missing on my shift, and if I couldn’t lie, and if I couldn’t tell the truth either, if I zipped my lip and swallowed my tongue—Mr. Slaugh would call Officer Chris, the handsome state trooper, because I’m white, and for whites you always called the state troopers first. Our parents warned us all about that: If you get into trouble, call a state trooper; the Navajo cops have no jurisdiction over you.

  There were worse things, I guessed, than riding in the back of that handsome cop’s car. Officer Chris, his dark eyes in the rearview, those sad, sweet eyes full of concern: The reason you kids don’t want to drink and drive is because you could end up just a statistic on the Bloody Thirty. Do you want that? No, sir. All right, then. Full of concern, those eyes, for kids driving through the Wasteland. Riding in the back seat of his car might not be so bad. Plus, everybody’d see me in a new light. Would I be popular then? The little pill’s in jail. “It’s always the quiet ones,” they’d say.

  In truth, it made me feel creepy. I couldn’t bear to be noticed in that ugly way. What would Officer Chris think? He would think I was a child, or stupid—to let a thief walk out the door in the bright daylight and never say a word. Or Mr. Slaugh. He wouldn’t want me around his store, and he surely wouldn’t want me around his kids. To be fired! When I thought of my mother, her horror when she heard the Mormons let me go, it made my stomach hurt.

  That Monday, Purple wore the ring to school. She showed it to Lily and Tyrone in the cafeteria. Tyrone was Purple’s boyfriend and the star point guy on the varsity basketball team. She knew how to get in with the popular kids. She was always getting Tyrone in trouble. They made out everywhere—in the halls, in the cafeteria, on the bus—and were always getting called into Mr. McGilly’s office for grossing everybody out.

  Anyway, she came in that Monday, and she was wearing her sweater, jeans, boots, and these bright orange gloves, which she began to remove slowly, very slowly—it was a procedure. Hand in the air, finger by finger, she took off the right, wiggled her fingers for all to see, then started on the left, the knitted pinky, the ring, the middle, inching each halfway off, moving very deliberately like a magician—like, Guess what I have in the palm of my hand?—then whipped the thing off, and Presto! There was the ring on her middle finger, half of it wrapped in red yarn to make it fit. She held it out for Lily and Tyrone to admire.

  Just in case I hadn’t noticed, she made a big deal of it at practice. While the rest of us gathered around Miss Adams for our instructions, Purple cartwheeled back and forth across the mat, the ring orbiting her, and she couldn’t seem to hear Miss Adams call her. Ten minutes later, I was standing at the uneven bars, waiting for her to spot me. She came walking over, twisting the ring. Said, “I don’t think I can get this thing off. It’s stuck.”

  “I thought it was your uncle’s,” I said.

  She grinned. “He let me borrow it.”

  I wanted to smash her.

  Every day that week she wore the ring and wanted to talk about it. I couldn’t stand to look at her ugly face.

  On Saturday, Mr. Slaugh held an employee meeting. He’d done a preliminary inventory, getting ready for the end-of-year count. He wanted to know if we knew what slippage was, then told us. “Missing inventory. A store can tolerate some slippage, but it looks to me like we might be as high as eight percent this year. Eight percent, people!” He was especially concerned about the high-priced items, the jewelry, the sand paintings, the quality hats. He wondered if he needed to supervise these items himself, though he didn’t see how he could. He was just one man. “That’s why I hired you,” he told us. He looked each of us in the face—there were the two cashiers, Mae and Alice, the grocery stocker, David, the bookkeeper, Lois, Albert, and me. My face started to get hot. I tried to remember who else was around when Purple had pulled her little caper. Had anybody else seen? I couldn’t remember anything about that morning but her. “I have faith in you,” Mr. Slaugh said. “You’re good, Christian people, every one.”

  I was the only non-Mormon employee. He was looking at Mae, then at me, then Mae again, then—I tried to meet his eyes. There were red veins in the whites. He wasn’t looking away. He had this fixed look, like he was trying to read my mind. He was boring a hole right through me!

  I said, Karen is invisible. I said it silently. With my mind, I said it. I didn’t look at the red veins. I looked at the blank spot in the middle of his forehead. I said it over and over without making a sound: Karen is invisible. Karen is invisible. Karen is invisible.

  He said he was going to put up a box. If anybody had any suggestions about where he might look for lost items—“Eight percent, people!”—he or she should please put a little note in the box, anonymous was fine, no questions asked.

  Karen is invisible.

  I dreamt about trapezes in the middle of the afternoon. I couldn’t help it. I used to do this all the time, anywhere, until blink, here’s Mama shaking me, yelling, “Can’t you hear me talking to you?” I don’t like people spying on me, so I tried to pay attention and only dream when I was alone, but then all of
a sudden, right in the middle of history, I looked outside the window, out across the field of yellow weeds, out where Mr. Neskahi’s hobbled horses stood, their breath visible in the cold, and from the sky, a trapeze floated, skimming the horses’ bent backs, just a little bit, barely grazing those old horses. Like some kind of light-footed horsefly, my trapeze came to get me, and before I knew it I was soaring through the blue-white cold of the winter sky. Out beyond the river, up and over the bluff, past the graveyard, that old raggedy place with its rotting graves, out to clean, bare sand. My ears closed up, and my eyes went dead, and I never heard the bell ring, and didn’t even see kids get up and go, and then Mr. Bellows was standing right there, shaking me, asking me if I was asleep, which was so embarrassing.

  I scatted on out of there, and I almost didn’t go to practice. Almost, I talked myself out of it, but Miss Adams always checked the absence list and always made a big production when somebody skipped practice. I didn’t want a big production, so like some kind of zombie I went ahead and went, where I had to look at Purple and listen to her, and I couldn’t stand that.

  Ronnie had an opinion about Purple: “She’s a sex-starved exhibitionist,” he said. He, on the other hand, was what he called a calculating opportunist, which meant he knew how to seize the moment and make it work for him. He planned to seize the moment when it came, and skedaddle on out of the “rat hole.” “Here,” he said, “we’re big fish. But on the outside, we’re nothing.” College would have to be his ticket off the reservation. He couldn’t count on academic scholarships because a good GPA in our school was a joke, and no way were we prepared for college entrance exams. He planned to rely on charm, good looks, and connections. He already had glowing recommendation letters from his coaches, and Mr. McGilly was going to call an old fraternity brother who was president of the Colorado School of Mines. Mr. McGilly promised he’d get in there—with money.

  Dorks, on the other hand, didn’t have a prayer. “You gotta get noticed, make some noise,” Ronnie advised, “but it’s got to be the right noise, in the right place, at the right time,” which was the key to being a calculating opportunist, but not an exhibitionist.

  “She makes me sick,” he said about Purple. As far as he was concerned, she was single-handedly destroying the varsity basketball team’s chances of going to state because of her exhibitionism, which was also robbing him of a chance to be seen by college scouts who went to the state tourneys. Ronnie wasn’t a bad basketball player, but he was nothing next to Tyrone, who had been put on “official notice” for “inappropriate displays of affection.”

  “It’s not Tyrone’s fault,” Ronnie said. “He wasn’t like that before she came. She’ll do anything to get attention.”

  He didn’t know the half of it.

  Every day, Purple cooked up some new torture for me. She was smart in that way. It’s like she walked into my head and poked around and found my secret-desire room. I mean, she noticed things other people didn’t. Poked around in there, thinking, What does this white girl like? then, Oh, looky here: I think she knew how much I liked the uneven bars. Swinging on them—it’s the closest I got to a real trapeze. So Purple, she figured out how to mess that up for me.

  It was just after Christmas break. Miss Adams sat us down and gave us a little lecture. Said she was generally disappointed in us. “You’re miserable.” She wanted to know why, after nearly nine weeks, our joints were still jelly. “Excellence, girls, is an attitude. Failure is an attitude, too. If you believe you’re failures, you will be. Single-minded devotion to the sport, that’s what you need to be an athlete. No distractions. When you’re in this room, you think about the sport. You don’t think about boys, you don’t think about the Twinkies you had for breakfast. You visualize the movements, and when you see the routine and nothing but the routine—”

  “Like, hypnotize yourself?” Purple said.

  “Exactly,” Miss Adams said.

  “Like, say you’re a monkey. Ya-eee.” Everybody laughed.

  Miss Adams scowled. “Evangeline, take your sweater off. You make me hot just looking at you.” Then she started talking about how we all thought we were reservation rats. “You think just because you’re from the rez you don’t count?” Everybody kind of sat back, like, Here we go again. The teachers were always talking about how cool it was to live on a reservation. She launched in about some native girls’ basketball team from some boarding school in Montana, who, in 1904, exhibited at the World’s Fair.

  “They were exhibits in the fair?” Purple asked.

  Miss Adams glared at her. “They had an international reputation for excellence in their sport.”

  Purple pursed her lips in a round little O.

  “Now tell me,” Miss Adams said, “what can I do to help you learn to concentrate?”

  “Music,” Purple said.

  “No,” Miss Adams said.

  Then everybody else said it—“Music!”—and Purple was beaming, all pleased with herself.

  Miss Adams squinted at us, shook her head, but then asked us if we promised to work, to really work, and to take ourselves seriously, to pursue excellence, and not to play the music too loudly, and not to play anything obnoxious, and we all promised everything.

  The next afternoon we did our warm-up jumping jacks to the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar.”

  When it was time for the uneven bars, I perched like a canary on the low, waiting for Purple to come and spot me. We couldn’t start without our spotters. Purple had appointed herself music monitor. She was making a big production about choosing the right record to get us swinging on the bars. Everybody else was already into her routine—there were five sets of bars altogether, and only ten of us gymnasts. Miss Adams was always telling us how generous the BIA was to give us five sets, so that we didn’t even have to share, which was another reason we should be stunning, because we got more practice time than nearly anybody else in the state.

  So we each got fifteen minutes, and I was perched up there, waiting for my spotter, and she put Jimi Hendrix on the record player, and she was heading across the mat, and Miss Adams screeched, “That’s obnoxious!” Purple shrugged, went back, and took Jimi off. She started sorting through the records, looking at one, checking out the back of the cover, looking at another, and so on. I was just sitting there. My turn was like half over. I looked over at Miss Adams. She was all tied up trying to get the blob, Mary Louise Enos, up and over her low bar. Purple finally found something she liked, and it was Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child.” So she was heading toward me, and I had maybe five minutes left of my turn. Janis was singing, “Victims of society . . .” and Purple was moved to tumble. She could not contain herself. She went flipping across the mat, came out of a round-off singing with Janis, “Why can’t they just let us be?”

  I’m wondering if I can make her have a little accident. I wonder just how powerful I can be if I really concentrate. I close my eyes. I picture her falling. From some great distance. A high bar, a very high bar. I put her up there on this very high bar, and she’s twirling, but her hands slip just when she’s upside down, so she comes down, and there’s the knee crack, the headfirst lunge toward the low, a five-inch gash across her forehead, a flip backwards, the long dive down, down, down, and Oh, looky who’s here: me. My arms—they give under her weight, a little too much to break the fall, then jerk up hard, just enough to break the back.

  I opened my eyes. I clutched my perch. A kind of lightning was shooting through my arms. Purple was coming toward me, grinning. “My turn,” she said. Sure enough, Miss Adams must’ve yelled, “Switch,” but I didn’t even hear her, and I didn’t hear the end of the song, either.

  Purple began chalking her hands, and I had this lightning going through my arms, like if I didn’t do something about the lightning my arms would catch fire, and then I amazed myself. I swung one leg over, swung around the low bar, then again, then again, then lunged for the high. I was electrified. I bent at the hips, just like we’d been taught
. Legs straight, feet overhead, I began to pump until I got a maximum swing, then rolled up and around for a perch on the high, and I didn’t look at her on the mat below. She didn’t have any choice. She was my spotter. She had to spot me.

  I crooked my leg over the top and began to do glide kips, and I could feel the blisters building on my hands because the chalk had worn off, but I didn’t care. I did three, swung my leg around, twirled once, and then let go—I leapt to the low, caught it in the crook of my knees, swung there upside down, up, almost around, not quite, swung back, reached up to hold the bar, and suddenly Miss Adams was right there watching. She said, “Karen, that’s great. Good job.” I huffed it back topside of the low bar. “Are you taking energy pills?” she said. I looked down at Purple. Miss Adams said, “Evangeline, take your sweater off. You make me hot just looking at you.” Purple was watching me, this funny smirk on her face. I smiled at her. She smiled back.

  She said, “You’re hot?” She was looking at me, but she was talking to Miss Adams. Her voice was drippy sweet, as if Miss Adams’s body heat was a personal tragedy for her.

  Miss Adams said, “Evangeline, you stink. Take your sweater off this instant.”

  Purple just knelt there, her arms held ready—a good little spotter—and she was smiling, but then I saw her eyes turn cold, that hard, glittery, hateful cold, and for once, I knew that that look was not for me.

  “Did you hear me?” Miss Adams said.

  I knew she wouldn’t tell that I stole her turn. She would never tell Miss Adams anything important.

  Karen, that’s great. Are you taking energy pills? I kept thinking about what Miss Adams said. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. My hands were so sore! I put Vaseline on them, and the blisters soaked it right up. I was glad it was Friday. I thought maybe I could wrap them if the blisters were still bad after the weekend. I didn’t want to miss my turn on Monday. Karen, that’s great, she’d said.