LaRose (15 page)

Outside the circle of warmth, the snow squeaked and the stars pulsed in the impenetrable heavens. The girl sat between them, not drinking. She thought her own burdensome thoughts. From time to time, both of the men looked at her profile in the firelight. Her dirty face was brushed with raw gold. As the wine was drunk, the bread was baked. Reverently, they removed the loaves and put them, hot, inside their coats. The girl opened her blanket to accept a loaf from Wolfred. As he gave it to her, he realized that her dress was torn down the middle. He looked into her eyes and her eyes slid to Mackinnon. Then she ducked her head and held the dress together with her elbow while she accepted the loaf.

Inside, they sat on small stumps, around a bigger stump, to eat. The cabin had been built many years ago, around the large stump so that it could serve as a table.

Wolfred looked so searchingly at Mackinnon that the trader finally said, What?

Mackinnon had a flaccid bladder belly, crab legs, a snoose-stained beard, pig-mad red eyes, red sprouts of dandered hair, wormish lips, pitchy teeth, breath that knocked you sideways, and nose hairs that dripped snot on and spoiled Wolfred’s perfectly inked numbers. Mackinnon was also a dead shot, and hell with his claw hammer. Wolfred had seen him use it on one of the very minions who’d shadowed Mashkiig that day. He was dangerous. Yet. Wolfred chewed and stared. He was seized with sharp emotion. For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable.

The Crossbeams

JUNE. BETWEEN THE
two houses, maybe six billion wood ticks hatched and began their sticky, hopeful, doomed search. In that patch of woods, there was perhaps a wood tick for every human being on earth. Josette said this to Snow because she knew her sister was deeply repulsed by wood ticks. No matter how meticulously Snow checked, washed, shook out her clothing, and avoided the woods, she would get wood ticks. She drew them worse than anyone. Because of the ticks, she said she couldn’t wait to live in some big tickless city.

You’d miss your little friends, said Josette. Her jeans were too tight and it was hot. She snapped open the waist and flapped her arms.

They were going over to fetch LaRose. The first heat brought ticks swarming out of their hatch nests. They filled the grass and flung themselves off leaves and twigs toward the supersensory scent of mammals. Walking the path, Snow felt one in her hair and snatched it out.

I’m going back, she said. I’ll take the road even if Mom sees me.

That’s just a baby tick, Josette scoffed. Hey, I’m not taking that dust-ball road. It’s twice as long. If you leave me to get LaRose by myself, dude, you can’t have my turn with the walkman.

The Sony Walkman was their joy, their baby—a sleek metallic CD player for the few CDs they owned: the soundtrack to
Romeo + Juliet
, Ricky Martin, Dr. Dre, Black Lodge Singers. They had to share
it and were strict about scheduling their days and hours. Josette had been sent to bring LaRose back to their house. She didn’t want to go alone and had bribed Snow with all of tomorrow’s hours.

Okay. Snow bent like a dark birch, took off her long-sleeved shirt, and draped it over her head, huddled underneath.

I should have worn my hoodie.

It’s so weird to see you not wearing your hoodie. I mean, Shane’s hoodie.

It was his wrestling team hoodie, which he’d given to Snow in order to show how serious he was about her. But then.

I’m just off him today, Snow said.

Josette knew that Snow’s boyfriend had found a different girlfriend, but she didn’t say so. It made her furious. She wanted to punch Shane in the liver. But when she said things like that to Snow it upset her. Snow said violence gagged her.

I just hate having to work there now, said Snow.

They both worked more regularly now at Whitey’s. They were the youngest, but Old Whitey and his stepdaughter, London, ran it and they liked how the girls gave their all to the job. Every time Snow worked, handsome Shane came in and bought Gatorade and microwave burritos.

See why we like robot guys? Always so much better than real guys. If Shane was only a mech. He’d do my bidding.

Haha, what would you command him?

Just be nice, you know?

I know. Don’t worry. I’ll bust his ass.

Snow must have been deeply upset because she said thanks in Ojibwe, miigwech, which sort of meant this is a real thank-you. Josette was moved.

There was the house. They paused in the brush and regarded the angry neatness of its yard. There were planted flowers, bunched and glowing. A small hedge fiercely trimmed.

La vida loca, said Josette.

I know, it’s so sad.

She tries so hard to be okay, said Josette. I kind of get it. And I like her flowers.

Me too. But she scares me.

You go first.

No, you.

Okay, but you talk to her.

No, I can’t. I’ll bust out.

Nola had developed an unnerving force field. The vibrational aura flowed with her to the door and pulsed toward the girls when she opened it—not wide, just a crack—and said,
Oh, it’s you.
Vibrations flowed out when she spoke, and sealed the door like plastic wrap when Nola closed it softly in the girls’ faces. When she opened the door again, she did it so slowly that the ions were only slightly disarranged. With his backpack on, LaRose popped through. The aura was sucked back in and the three of them ran across the lawn.

After the first time, Nola had stopped herself from watching out the window. She grabbed her headphones and walked straight through the house, out the sliding double glass doors, out onto the deck and down its four steps, across the yard to the shed with its crossbeams that worried Peter. She opened the doors, topped up the tank of the riding lawn mower, then got on and adjusted the walkman clipped to her belt. Peter had given her some very strange music for Christmas. It was soothing and yet disturbing, pipes and echoey voices chanting, ethereal soprano solos, wordless and mysterious voices, melodies that swirled, collapsed, revived in some ruthless disorienting key. She could listen to this music indefinitely as she cut the grass over and over on the riding lawn mower.

Eventually she parked, got off, and went into the house. She went up to her room, leaned on the closet door, stared into the clothing. Except for her one purple dress, she had four of everything, in neutral colors, and she wore only these things. Four jackets, four pants, four skirts, four jeans, four shirts, four panty hose. Four of everything for
dress-up, and four for everyday. But she had lots of pretty underwear that she bought from a catalog.

At first, she was only going to change her underwear. Her belly was tight. A push-up bra of scratchy maroon lace. A tiny white bikini. Then she stood there and laid out the eggshell white shirt, the whiter pants, upon the bed. She took the brown heels out of their box. Laid the gray jacket, tailored, with no collar, around the eggshell shirt. The whole outfit was assembled there as though by an undertaker. Too businessy to be dead in, she thought, and took away the white pants and replaced them with a short, flaring skirt. I’ll have to think again, she decided. She tapped her lips and opened the closet.

Wild Things

THE TWO GIRLS
and LaRose between them walked back through the woods. Snow did not forget about the ticks but just gave up, she was so happy. They had their little brother back for a few days now and the light was pure green, cool, the sun hot only outside the trees, on the road. Halfway there, LaRose stopped and said to them, Can we go? They knew he meant to the tree. Nobody knew how he knew about the tree, but he did know and often he insisted on going there when the girls came to get him. They didn’t mind so much. They never told their parents. It was easy to get to and in a moment they stood before Dusty’s climbing tree, the branch, and the space of ground beneath, where dead flowers, tobacco ties, loose sage, and two small rain-beaten stuffed animals—a monkey and a lion—were arranged. LaRose put his backpack down and took out
Where the Wild Things Are.
He gave it to Josette and said, Read it. She read it out loud. After her voice stopped, they stood in the resounding sweetness of birdcall.

What was that about? said Josette.

LaRose took back the book. He turned it to his pack with a little frown.

I think it was his favorite, said LaRose. Because she reads it to me all the time.

Snow and Josette put their hands over their hearts and mouthed the words
for sad, for sweet.
They each took LaRose by a hand and kept walking.

I am so over that book, LaRose said loudly.

The girls batted their eyes at each other to keep their laughs inside.

Maybe you should leave that book for him, said Snow.

Put it with his stuffed monkey and stuff.

I can’t, said LaRose. She would search.

Well, said Josette, okay, but she wouldn’t find it. So she’d give up, right?

No, said LaRose. She would never give up. She might go out to the barn and scream like a banshee.

Ooo, said Snow. What’s a banshee?

It’s a boney old woman with long teeth that crawls around graves and screams when someone dies.

Holeee, said Josette.

Creep me out! said Snow. Where’d you get that?

Maggie told me. She’s got a collection of pictures from books and things that she keeps underneath her bed. All scary.

She keeps scary junk underneath her bed?

Josette and Snow looked at each other.

Whoa, for badass.

Where’s she get that crazy shit?

Don’t say that to LaRose.

She rips pages out of library books at school, said LaRose.

Little man, said Josette. Don’t let her bother you.

I’m used to her, said LaRose. I’m used to everything now.

The girls just held his hands and didn’t talk after that.

Before they took LaRose to the Ravich house last fall, Landreaux and Emmaline had spoken his name. It was the name given to each
LaRose. Mirage. Ombanitemagad. The original name of Mink’s daughter. That name would protect him from the unknown, from what had been let loose with the accident. Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort, which is why LaRose was sent.

EMMALINE PEACE. A+
English student. Thought she’d like to teach literature. Got her teacher’s certificate, taught high school, and only got high on weekends. She decided she was better with little kids than teenagers because the teenagers were too much like her, and she was right. Any authority she had literally went up in smoke the night she was enjoying skunky fine weed at a party and a couple of her students entered the room.

After the momentously drunk days with Landreaux, she received an offer. Funding for a degree in administration because the tribe was taking control of the school system from the top down. Emmaline went back to graduate school, grew up. Returning with her expedited degree, she got excited about a newly funded pilot program—an on-reservation boarding school for crisis kids.

People didn’t want to think about boarding schools—the era of forced assimilation was supposed to be over. But then again, kids from chaotic families didn’t get to school, or get sleep, or real food, or homework help. And they’d never get out of the chaos—whatever brand of chaos, from addictions to depression to failing health—unless they got to school. To succeed in school, kids had to attend regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly, and study regularly. Maybe the boarding schools of the earliest days had stripped away culture from the vulnerable, had left adults with little understanding of how to give love or parent, but what now? Kids needed some intervention, but not the wrenching away of foster families and outside adoptions. A crisis intervention, giving parents time to get on track. The radical part was that, unlike historical boarding schools, this one would be
located on the reservation. Pre-K through grade 4. After that, kids could board but go to regular school. This new/old sort of boarding school, equipped to pick up the parenting roles for families that went through cycles of failure and recovery, became Emmaline’s mission.

Two double-wide trailers for classrooms. Renovated BIA family group housing with houseparents, teachers, teacher’s aides, all supposedly trained in child psychology or working on their own teaching licenses. At first she was the assistant director, which meant she helped collect data, strategize, order supplies, lead meetings, organize funding, construct endless progress reports, plans, plus a host of functions that weren’t in her job description. Heartbreak mitigation. That was not described. Her heartbreak. Kids’ heartbreak. Parents’ heartbreak. Also: mop puke, replace paper towels, lock and unlock doors, rock sobbing hurt little boys until their fury slept, play Crazy Eights with little girls while they told how their mom had stabbed their dad, or vice versa, make muffins with the moms who were getting straight, raise hell with the moms who weren’t. She didn’t deal with the dads. Left that to the director. Then she became the director.