“Sorry. I left the motel in a hurry. Tony, could you drop me off at the nursing home? I have to meet my mother.”
He nodded and turned the car back onto the road. “Going to the game tonight?”
“No.”
“Still grounded? Well, it was a pretty big hole.”
Cory looked out the window. “I think I’ve had this conversation before, maybe in a bad dream.”
“When is your release?”
“One more week.”
Tony honked at some classmates who were loitering in the cold outside of Zanker’s service station. “Could you sneak out and go with Sash and me?”
“Only if I have a death wish. Anyway, you know how I love being a third wheel with you guys.”
He pulled into the nursing home parking lot. “There sure are a lot of cars. Is it visiting hours?”
“Oh, no,” Cory groaned. “I forgot they were having a wine and cheese party for the residents. The head nurse is leaving.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“It has to be almost over. And I can’t go home because Mom and I had plans.”
“Saturday night with your mother? What fun did you have in mind, a Disney movie?”
Cory closed one hand over another and sat still. She wasn’t sure she wanted to tell him. Bad enough that she was spending Saturday night with her mother. She watched as a crooked, white-haired lady waved from the door of the home to her departing guests. The woman continued waving long after the car had driven away. Cory turned to Tony.
“Do you want to know the god-awful truth?”
“Sure.”
“We’re going to a powwow.”
Tony was usually quick with a joke or a sharp remark, and Cory waited for it now. He surprised her.
“The one at the armory in Twin Lakes? Sash wanted to go.”
“She did?”
He shrugged off her disbelief. “She’s real curious about things. I told her, though, that the Indian stuff around here is all part of a different world. She called me a cute bigot. I’m not a bigot. It’s just not my world, and I don’t want to go gawk at a bunch of people dressed weird and dancing in a circle. Why are you and your mom going?”
“To gawk, I guess. One of the women she works with is sort of a friend and she invited us. My mother accepted.”
Tony combed his fingers through his chin-length blond hair, which was straight and usually hanging over half of his face, a style nearly identical to Cory’s. Tony’s mother ran the town’s only hair salon and whenever she was enthusiastic about a new look or cut it showed up on any number of townspeople, regardless of gender.
Tony’s hair fell back down over his left eye. “After Sash called me a bigot, she said it would be a good idea to have some school programs on cultural understanding.”
“Like what?”
“You’ll have to ask her. She’s full of ideas. She said…” He stroked the bumpy ridge on the underside of the steering wheel with his thumb.
“Said what?” Cory prompted.
“That since you were one of the junior reps to the student council maybe you would bring up some proposals. She’d write them.”
“When did she start cooking up all this?”
He shook his head. “Beats me. I warned you, okay?”
“You should keep her busier, Tony.”
“Hey, I try, but I can’t keep the lights off all the time.”
Cory feigned disgust and punched him on the arm. “Ow,” he said. “That’s three times. You’re out of here.”
Cory stood and watched as he drove away too quickly. Tony’s car swerved as he turned onto the street, and he almost swiped a lamppost. He regained control and disappeared around a corner.
Just inside the nursing home front door several residents were clustered, looking at the ground and laughing. Then they looked up and at each other, and the laughter increased until each of them seemed in danger of shaking apart. One of them noticed Cory.
“Here’s Margaret’s girl. Tell her what you did, Alicia.” A pudgy hand with several rings permanently embedded in the fingers clamped onto Cory’s arm with surprising strength. “Tell her, Alicia!”
Cory smiled at Alicia, who was one of the residents she knew best. Alicia was tall and towered over Cory. She leaned forward, and her long black hair fell around her pale face. Cory could think only of countless fairy-tale illustrations of wicked witches.
“My shoes,” Alicia began, articulating each word so clearly it seemed to pop out of her glossy, purple lips. “My shoes don’t match!” This was a signal for renewed laughter among her companions, which quickly dissipated into six simultaneous anecdotes about personal lapses of one sort or another. Cory squeezed Alicia’s hand and slipped away.
She sometimes stopped to visit with the residents when she came to get a ride with her mother after school or work. She was usually willing to listen to someone’s life story or admire a display of family pictures, but the encounters often drained her. She wondered frequently how her mother and the other nurses could sustain the energy needed to work at the home.
Her mother hadn’t managed today. Cory could tell immediately when she entered the staff lounge. Her mother was stretched out on the sofa, feet stacked heel-to-toe, eyes closed.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
Margaret Knutson turned her face slowly and Cory gasped. Her mother was as pale as Alicia.
“What’s wrong?” she repeated.
“Nothing.” Her mother sat up. “I’m just tired. Nothing’s wrong.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong,” a voice said firmly. Cory turned and smiled at Roxanne Chapelle, one of her mother’s coworkers. Roxanne eased around Cory and dropped a box on the cluttered coffee table. Cory heard the muffled tinkling of metal on metal.
“What’s wrong is your mother hasn’t been taking her iron pills, she skips lunch daily, and today she worked an extra two hours cleaning up after the party.” She offered a steaming cup to her friend. “Soup. Not the soda you wanted.”
Margaret smiled at her daughter. “She doesn’t approve of my diet.”
Roxanne motioned to Cory to sit on one of the chairs. “I’m so glad you’re coming with us tonight.” Cory nodded slightly. She knew better than even to hint there had been no choice.
Roxanne lifted the cover off the box she had set on the table. “I present the world’s most beautiful jingle dress.” Almost before Cory could wonder what a jingle dress was, she had her answer.
The short-sleeved dress was a bright blue that made her think of indigo buntings flashing between branches in the trees around her house. There were hundreds of small metal cones sewn onto the fabric in tidy rows. Roxanne shook the dress slightly, and the cones chimed as they bounced against each other. A jingle dress.
“Perfect, isn’t it?” said Roxanne. “And your mother helped.”
“Helped make a dress?” Cory’s impolite disbelief amused the women.
“Helped with the jingles. They’re made of tobacco can lids. Before she made Mike quit chewing she saved all his can lids. Look closely and you can tell that’s what they are.”
Cory obediently fingered one of the thin cones. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
“We Indians are resourceful.” Cory didn’t know if she should laugh; Roxanne joked a lot. She settled on a slight smile.
“It’s Paula’s first fancy dress,” said Roxanne. “If we don’t get going, we won’t make it to Twin Lakes in time for the grand entry, and then I will be one sorry mother.” She folded the dress, placed it in the box, and set down the cover. “Margaret, are you sure you’re up to this?”
“Your soup has worked a miracle, Rox. I could run a marathon. Anyway, Cory can drive—”
“Yes!” cheered Cory.
“Just tonight, dear.”
“My license, I don’t have my license. Some cruel people took it away.”
“I brought it. It’s in my purse and it stays there.”
“Mom, please.”
“Hey, Cory,” said Roxanne. “I saw that hole in Dawn’s store. Big hole, big probation.”
“Everyone saw the hole. Everyone for miles around.”
“Cory can drive,” Margaret continued, “and we can sit in the back, Rox, and you can tell me everything about powwows.”
Roxanne nodded. “The first thing you should know is that they start with a blood initiation involving select male virgins. Then—”
“Roxanne.”
Roxanne lifted two jackets from hooks on a wall and handed one to Margaret with a smile. “I’m just so glad you both agreed to come tonight.”
Cory followed the women out the door and into the hall. Spotting a clock on the wall, she zipped up her jacket with a defiant yank. All her friends would be leaving soon for the game in Rhinelander while she, Cory Knutson, the town’s most famous driver, was going to a powwow.
2
Eight hundred people lived year-round in Summer, Wisconsin, and most of them knew Cory Knutson. Or knew her family, or knew someone who worked with her mother or with Mike at the window factory, or had gone to high school with her brother, Rob, or was related somehow to Mike’s ex-wife. Most people knew the story of her father’s death in a hunting accident. Cory had been three when he died and seven when her mother married Mike. A year later Mike adopted Cory and she took his last name. But Rob, who was seven years older and could still remember and love his father, didn’t want that change. So, until last year when he married and moved to southern Wisconsin to work on the state road crews, there were two names on the mailbox—Kranz and Knutson.
That was the family history, and, just as the people of Summer knew it all, Cory knew theirs. She knew about the deaths, the romances, the church affiliations, the school problems, the babies, the new cars. She knew something about everyone.
Almost everyone, she admitted now. Eyeing Roxanne in the rearview mirror and listening to the women share an animated, girlish conversation, Cory realized she couldn’t say she knew very much about any of the American Indians who lived around town, or the few who were in school. She could count on two hands the Indian students in any of her classes and could picture them sitting at their own table in the lunchroom. The Reservation, some of the kids called it. Always the same table, right next to the one she always shared with Tony and Sasha and Karin and the others. Tables side by side, every noon. Throughout any day there were never more than a few words exchanged; however, at least there were never any bad ones.
Not like in Ashland or Hayward, larger towns near the reservations. Cory knew that in those places bad feelings often boiled and spilled over into real nastiness. She had heard from Mike’s youngest child who lived in Ashland with her mother that there were plenty of fights in and out of school and plenty of tire-slashing and name-calling.
But in Summer it had always been calm just living side by side. A different world, Tony had said. A parallel dimension, Cory added to herself as she recalled a science fiction movie she had recently watched. And apart from visits exchanged with Roxanne, or Peter Rosebear, who worked with Mike and sometimes came by on Fridays for an end-of-the-week beer, her family, like others, didn’t mix. There was distance, but anyone would have to believe it was caused by habit, not hate.
Cory parked the car at the edge of the crowded armory lot. Roxanne opened the door, and Cory could hear drums. People streamed into the cavernous building’s open doors, as though drawn by the relentless pounding. A parallel dimension, and she suspected she had just crossed over.
“This is a competition powwow,” said Roxanne as she led them to the armory. “There’s some good prize money, and there will be dancers and drum groups from all over.”
Roxanne seemed to know everyone, but after stopping a few times to introduce her guests, she gave up. “This is no good,” she said. “We’ll never get in at this rate, and Paula is probably already frantic. Do you mind if we meet people later?”
Margaret laughed and pushed her friend forward. “Your rudeness is just barely forgivable.”
Once inside, their progress was slowed by a seemingly impenetrable mass of people. Looking around, Cory twice came face-to-face with young men in full regalia: feathers, beads, face paint.
Not war paint. She willed herself not to think of it as war paint. And the drum—she didn’t know if it was actually called a tom-tom. The drum song had intensified in volume and rhythm, and she could feel her heartbeat adjust its pace. She saw several dancers in traditional dress: a man wearing a huge feathered bustle, two girls in fringed buckskin and beaded ribbons, women with elaborate and colorful shawls. Then, stepping at last into the main hall and seeing a sea of men and women and boys and girls in fantastic, puzzling, beautiful dress, Cory knew she would be content to be quiet and watch.
Roxanne dropped her nylon bowling jacket on a folding chair. “Let’s take these seats. I told Paula to find me by the host drum, and that’s these boys here.” She waved at a group of men sitting around a large kettle drum. Several of them raised drumsticks in response. Cory dropped her own coat on a chair and looked around the room. Rows of chairs had been set up on two sides of the hall. At each of the open ends there were two drum groups. One of the circles at the far end was drumming and singing. Cory watched the rhythmic action of the rising and falling arms and she was mesmerized by the white-tipped sticks, which caught the glare of the fluorescent ceiling lights as they streaked up and down.
“Mother, where the hell have you been?”