The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  They were the best cigarettes you could steal. Star’s man usually smoked generics, but he must have come into some cash. Angus slipped them from Elwin’s pack, one at a time, so he would not get suspicious. For this occasion, he’d taken two. I broke my cigarette carefully in half and shared with Cappy. Zack and Angus shared the other. I dragged on the end until it scorched my fingers. We didn’t speak while we were smoking and when we were done we flicked the shreds of tobacco off our tongues, the way Elwin did. The gas can was a battered dull red with a gold band around the top and the bottom. There was a long, crooked spout. Written in thick black script across a flame shape, bright yellow with a blue center and a white dot in the center of the blue, there was a scratched logo: CAUTION.

  I wanna get him, I said to my friends. Watch him burn. They were also staring at the can. They knew what it was about.

  Cappy picked a splinter off the broken door and stabbed the ground with it. Zack chewed a piece of grass. I looked at Angus. He was always hungry. I told him I’d brought sandwiches and fished the bag out of my pack to divide them up.

  First, we unstuck the bread slices carefully from the peanut butter. Next we tucked in my mother’s famous little crunchy pickles. Last, we closed the sandwiches back up. The pickle juice salted the peanut butter, cut the stickiness so you could swallow each bite, and added just the right hot, sour bite to the nuts. After the sandwiches were gone, Angus drank most of the pickle brine and put the hot red pepper in his mouth. Cappy took the dill and chewed the end of the stalk. Zack looked away—sometimes he was fastidious, and then he would surprise you.

  We passed around the water jar and then I told them I had thought of how the attack had happened. Here’s how it went, I said without blinking. He did it here. I tipped my head back to the round house. He did it, then he wanted to burn her inside the place. But his matches got wet. He went over the hill and down toward the lake for dry matches. I told them exactly how my mother had escaped. I said I’d thought that the attacker must have kept some of his stuff in the woods, and that I’d followed the fence posts to the lake and then out into the lake to where he’d sunk the can. I said that he was probably a smoker because he’d gone after the extra matches, or maybe he’d had a lighter. He had to have left something in the woods. If he’d left a pack of stuff out there, he’d maybe even slept out there. He could have smoked, dropped a butt. Or field-stripped the cigarette the way Whitey did, rolling away the threads of the filter, forming the end of the paper into a tiny ball. What we’d look for would be threads, tracks, any foreign material, anything at all.

  We all nodded. Looked at the ground. Cappy raised his head, stared at me evenly.

  Make it so, he said. Starboy?

  Okay, said Angus, whose nickname that was, let’s see what we get.

  What we got was wood ticks. Our reservation is notorious for them. We made a grid of the woods, crisscrossed the area from the fence going south along the lake about thirty feet. In the spring, when you hit a tick hole, which is where a huge bunch have hatched, they swarm you. But they swarm slow. You can shake some off but you can’t really crawl them off. We were crawling through tick hole after tick hole.

  Zack yelled once, panic in his voice. He jumped up and I could see a few flung off him onto Angus and into Cappy’s shiny hair.

  Shut up, you baby! said Angus. Fleas are a hell of a lot worse.

  Yeah, fleas, said Zack. Remember when your mom flea-bombed your place and forgot you were inside?

  Oh man, they shut the whole place up and flea-bombed the hell out of it, said Angus, squinting at what looked like a bit of plastic wrap, then tossing it. Forgot I was asleep in the corner and left me there overnight. All the fleas jumped onto me for safety and I was only four. They had one last drink of blood and died in my clothes. It was lucky they didn’t suck me dry.

  They sucked your brain dry, said Zack. Look what you threw at me. He pinched a matted condom by the edge and swung it back and forth. It had obviously been there through the winter. Older kids made fires on the beach.

  I held out the bread bag and Zack dropped in the petrified condom. And then we found dozens more and so many beer cans that Angus brought them to a rock and started crushing them to take back and redeem. What looked from a distance like leafy new undergrowth actually hid a dump. There were countless cigarette butts. The bread bag quickly filled with condoms and butts. There were also candy wrappers and old balls of toilet paper. Either the police did not consider this area relevant, or they had just given up.

  People are disgusting, said Zack. This is way too much evidence.

  I knelt on the ground with the bread bag. Ticks were crawling all over me. I said we should quit and drown the ticks in the lake. So we left the woods and stripped down on the beach. The ticks were mainly still in our clothes and not many were attached yet, except that Angus had one stuck on his balls.

  Hey, Zack, I need some help!

  Oh, fuck you, said Zack.

  Cappy laughed. Why don’t you let him stay on till he gets really big? They’ll call you Three Balls.

  Like Old Man Niswi, I said.

  He really had three. It’s true. My grandma knows, said Zack.

  Shut up, said Cappy. I can’t take hearing about your grandma doing it with a three-balled man.

  We were in the water now, splashing around diving and mock-fighting. We’d been so hot and sweaty and itchy it felt wonderful. I reached down to make sure no tick had gotten me where that one had got Angus. I went underwater and stayed as long as I could. When I came up, Zack was talking.

  She said they tapped against her ass like three big ripe plums.

  Your grandma says all kinds of things, said Cappy.

  She told me all about it, Zack said.

  There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort. Grandma Ignatia Thunder. She had been to Catholic boarding school but it just hardened her, she said, the way it hardened the priests. She spoke Indian and talked about men’s secrets. When she and Mooshum got together to reminisce about the old days, my father said they talked so dirty the air around them turned blue.

  When the water numbed us, we got out and made fun of one another’s shriveled dicks.

  Zack laughed at me, Aren’t you a little short for a Storm Trooper?

  Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?

  Zack had a Darth Vader, circumcised, and I did too. Cappy’s and Angus’s still had their hoods, so they were Emperors. We argued over whether it was better to be an Emperor or a Darth Vader—which one girls liked better. We made a fire. We sat around it, naked, on logs already carved with the names of other boys, picking ticks off our clothing and flicking them into the fire.

  Worf’s an Emperor, said Angus.

  For sure, said Cappy.

  Nah, I said. Anyhow, the important one would be Data’s, because they’d give an android the kind girls like best, right? And he would definitely be a Darth Vader. I don’t see him as anything but a Darth.

  I think everyone on that ship’s a Darth, said Cappy, except for Worf.

  But hey, said Zack, a Klingon? You’d think hung, man, but there’s no bump in his uniform.

  Do you question Klingon power? said Cappy, standing up. He looked down. Rise, my friend.

  No response. We started laughing at him. Cappy laughed too. After a while, we wished we had another cigarette and we were hungry again. Angus went off to take a piss. He walked into the lake and went around the fence, into the woods.

  Holeee, he yelled.

  Then he marched out of the woods with two full six-packs of Hamm’s beer. One in each hand. Cappy and Zack whooped with joy. I ran toward him. Every other can we’d crushed or bottle we’d found had been Old Mill or Blatz, the reservation beer of the time. In spite of the dancing, drumming, feather-wearing Indian bear in the Hamm’s commercial, we were a Blatz people.


  Drop that, I yelled. Angus froze. He laid the six-packs carefully on the ground.

  I think he left those, I said. I think it’s evidence. There will be fingerprints.

  Uh . . . I could see that Angus was thinking as fast as he could. He talked fast, too. Does water erase fingerprints? I found these in an open cooler. The beer was covered with water.

  You found his stash, I said.

  Can I pick up the beer? asked Angus.

  I guess, I said.

  Can I crack one open?

  I looked at my friends. Yeah, I said.

  Their hands shot out and pulled cans from the plastic ring.

  If there’s no fingerprints then the main evidence is that he is a Hamm’s drinker, I said. Make of that what you will. I took a beer. The can was wet and icy. I held it as I followed Angus back to where he’d found the stash. I said we shouldn’t get too close yet and destroy the evidence, that we should probably crawl up to this thing and collect what we could find all around it.

  Crawl? Again? said Angus.

  The cooler, cheap Styrofoam, sat against a tree. There was a heap of clothes to one side.

  Cappy said that he’d prefer to drink the beer first and get a buzz, then crawl over to gather evidence before he jumped back in the lake and drowned his ticks off again. We drank our beers.

  Went down good, said Angus. He attempted to crush his can against his thigh. Ow, he said.

  We fanned out and crawled in a circle, closing in on the cooler. It was on the edge of that cow pasture and there were dried cow pies here and there. We’d drunk the beers fast, to get buzzed, knowing that we each had two more waiting, cold, and we’d drink our next beers slower by the fire. The crawling around was definitely easier on us this time, though Angus lifted his leg and flared a boogid at me.

  No boogid wars, said Zack.

  Aw, said Angus, cracking another fart.

  All of a sudden, Cappy tossed a cow pie into the open pasture like a Frisbee and started laughing.

  Why did the Indian ignore the cow pie?

  Nobody said anything.

  He didn’t know shit!

  Ha-ha, said Zack. You’re gonna turn into a powwow MC like your dad.

  How much is four bucks and four bucks?

  An Indian bar fight, groan, said Angus. He lifted his leg but he had no gas left.

  It was true that at home Doe, Randall, and Cappy sometimes just sat around inventing bad Indian jokes.

  As we crawled along, I noticed us. My skin was very light brown. Cappy’s was more brown. Zack’s a deeper brown. Angus’s was white but already tanned. Cappy was getting his growth, I was next, Zack and Angus were both shorter than me. Between us, we had so many scars that it was hard to count.

  How come the four naked Indians in the woods were laughing, said Cappy.

  Don’t encourage him, I said.

  They got tick-led.

  Sore. I laughed. For a handsome guy that girls loved, Cappy was not cool.

  Angus was crawling away from me. I kept my distance. His butt was packed with purple marks where his brother had shot him with a BB gun. We were bumbling around at random now, not following any grid. There was hardly any trash on this side of the fence. I’d guessed that the attacker had gone in the lake, too, around the end of the fence, and put his stash away from the beach area. We got close to the cooler and I used a stick to prod at the pile of blankets and clothes.

  The blankets were made of crummy polyester. There was a rotted-looking shirt, a pair of jeans. It all stank like behind the Dead Custer Bar.

  Maybe we should leave this to the police, I said.

  If we tell them, then we have to say we were here, said Zack. They will figure out that I listen to Vince’s radio and phone calls. I’ll be in deep shit.

  Also, said Angus, there’s the beer.

  Drinking half the evidence doesn’t look good, said Cappy.

  Let’s get rid of it all, said Zack.

  Okay, I said.

  We went back, around the fence, and built up the fire. Then we ran down to the lake and jumped back in and got rid of the new ticks. Zack showed the place where he’d got speared in the armpit. He could have died, they said. The stitches had healed like a tiny white railroad track running mysteriously up his rib, under and along his arm. We put our clothes on and felt normal again. We sat by the fire and popped open the rest of the evidence.

  Was his third ball the same size as the other two? Angus asked Zack.

  Don’t start that again, said Cappy.

  I wonder, I said, if we should even talk to the cops. I mean, they missed the gas can. They missed the cooler. They missed the pile of clothes.

  That pile stinks. It smells like piss.

  He pissed himself, said Angus.

  We should torch that stuff, I said.

  My throat burned and I was invaded by a stab of feeling so acute that I wanted to cry—again. Suddenly, we froze. We heard what sounded like a high-pitched eagle-bone whistle up the hill through the riffle of woods. The wind had changed direction, and a series of notes sounded as the air poured through the gaps in the mud chinking of the round house.

  Cappy stood up and stared at the round house.

  Angus made the sign of the cross.

  Let’s bug out, said Zack.

  We crushed the Hamm’s cans along with the others, piled them in a piece of plastic, and tied them together to bring back for Angus to sell. Then we put the fire out and buried the rest of the trash. I tied the gas can to my bike with a shoestring and we took off. The shadows were long, the air was cooling off, and we were hungry the way boys get hungry. Irrationally hungry so that everything we saw looked tasty and all we could talk of on the way home was food. Where we could get food, and eat food, a lot of food, and quick. That was our concern. Zack’s mom would be at bingo. Aunt Star was either flush or broke, never in between, and it was a Saturday. By now, she’d have spent what she had and probably not on food. Things were lean that week at Cappy’s house, though his dad possibly had stew. Doe’s bachelor stews were a crapshoot, though. Once he added commodity prunes to his chili. Another time he left some bread dough overnight and a mouse burrowed into it. Randall got a slice with the head and Cappy got the tail. Nobody could find the middle. My friends didn’t mention my house, though before what happened we would definitely have showed up there on a raid mission. Whitey and Sonja’s place was on the way, but I hated it when my friends talked about her. Sonja was mine. So I said they would be working at the gas station. Our other prospect was Grandma Thunder. She lived at the retirement home in a one-bedroom apartment with a full kitchen. She liked to cook for us; her closet was bursting with commodities that others traded to her.

  She’ll make frybread and meat, said Zack.

  She always has canned peaches, said Angus. His voice was reverent.

  She has her price, said Cappy.

  Just don’t anybody bring up balls or say the word twat.

  Who would say that word around their grandma?

  It could come out by mistake.

  Come? Don’t say come.

  Don’t even mention cats. She’ll say pussy.

  Okay, I said. The list of topics not to mention while we stuff ourselves at Grandma’s is balls, cats, pussies, dicks.

  Don’t say head, ever.

  Don’t say wiinag, don’t say anything that rhymes with the f-word or the word cock.

  Don’t say crotch, prick, snatch, you know, like snatch at something. She will take it wrong, believe me.

  Don’t say horny, don’t say hard.

  Don’t say hot or tit or virgin.

  I have to get off my bike, said Angus.

  We all did. We put our bikes down. Avoiding one another’s eyes, we mumbled something about going off to take a piss and each went off alone and in three minutes relieved ourselves of all those words and then came back and got on our bikes and continued riding onward, taking the back road past the mission. When we got into town we rode over to the retirement
home. I was feeling guilty about having written just LAKE to my dad, so I called home from the lobby. Dad answered on the first ring, but when I told him that I was at Grandma Thunder’s, he sounded glad and told me that Uncle Edward was showing him my cousin Joseph’s latest science article and they were eating some leftovers. I asked, even though I knew, where Mom was.

  Upstairs.

  She’s asleep?

  Yes.

  I love you, Dad.

  But he had hung up. The words I love you echoed. Why had I said those words and why into the phone just as I knew he was replacing it on the cradle? That I had said those words now made me furious and that my father had not responded singed my soul. A red cloud of anger floated up over my eyes. My head was light with hunger, too.

  Come on, said Cappy, coming up behind me, startling me so my eyes filled yet again that day, which was too much.

  Shut the fuck up, I said.

  He put his hands up and walked away. I followed him down the hall. Just before we got to Grandma’s apartment I spoke to his back, Cappy, I’m . . .

  He turned around. I put my hands in my pocket and scuffed my shoes on the floor. My dad had refused on principle to buy me the type of basketball shoes I had wanted in Fargo. He said I didn’t need new shoes, which was true. Cappy had the shoes I wanted. He had his hands in his pockets too, and he was looking at the floor, ducking his head back and forth. Strangely, he said what I had been thinking, though he lied.

  You got the shoes I wanted.

  No, I said, you got the shoes I wanted.

  Okay, he said, let’s trade.

  We traded shoes. As soon as I put his on, I realized that his feet were a size bigger. He walked away from me on pinched feet. He had heard what I’d said on the phone.

  We went into Grandma’s and sure enough the meat was already frying, and with an onion. The smell had a wonderful power and my stomach jumped. I wanted to grab anything that I could put in my mouth. There was a stack of jam sandwiches on the table, to tide us over. I ate one. Her back was to the stove and on her table there was a bowl of sweet little dried apples. There was an apple tree behind the senior citizens and Grandma always harvested the apples. She picked every apple out of the tree and she pared the apples into thin slices and dried them out in her oven and sprinkled them with sugar and cinnamon. I ate another jam and white bread sandwich. She had set plates on the table and more paper towels on the plates to soak up the frybread grease.