Authors: Ty Roth
Only when she let down her single sail and began to scull her way toward a dilapidated wooden dock did anyone notice her approach. It was a young man, dressed like the others, who came running in her direction. Only his disruption of their game by crossing between the stakes—completely oblivious to the potential of taking a horseshoe to the side of the head—alerted any of the beer-swilling invaders that Shelly was there. Even so, only the young man showed any concern for or interest in her arrival.
He was tan (melanoma is the most deadly form of skin cancer; cancer in general is the second leading cause of death in the United States), almost too tan—even for a Native American—for so early in a Great Lakes summer, and, unlike the potbellied others, his body was taut and angular, not muscular so much as lean. As he slowed and strode toward Shelly, his hair fell, longish and lustrous, from his scalp and blew back slightly, like a sheer black curtain. He looked like the instrument-less lead singer of a hard rock band.
“Go away,” he warned her as he arrived and stood at the end of the bowed and partially submerged dock. “You are not welcome.”
Shelly was taken more by the earnestness of his expression than by the beauty of his perfectly symmetrical face,
which housed the darkest eyes into which she had ever peered. His eyes lorded over the high promontories formed by his cheekbones, and over the thin nose and lips that were etched into a straight-line scowl, which appeared more put-on than natural. An adorable dimple cleaved his chin.
“Wow-kwing on-je-baw,”
she said to herself in her half-remembered, stilted Ottawa. It means “He comes from heaven.” Then, out loud, ignoring his command, she said, “You’re him. Aren’t you? You’re the one in the paper. Neolin.”
Unsettled by Shelly’s correct identification, the young man studied her face in search of recognition, defying the obvious impossibility of being already acquainted. Finally, he said, “I’m Neolin. How’d you know? There were no photographs.”
“I can just tell,” Shelly answered, presumptuously throwing him a line to tie off her boat.
Holding the rope limply, Neolin said, “I told you; you aren’t welcome.”
“Don’t be stupid. I’m here to help.
Boozhoo,
” Shelly said as she rose and extended her hand for assistance onto the dock.
“Booze what?” he answered.
“
Boozhoo
. It’s Ojibwa for ‘hello.’ I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
“No one, except maybe for a few elders, speaks the old language. But, how do you? Are you Odawa?”
Shelly noticed his clear pronunciation of the “d.” Never more disappointed in her white-bread origins, she answered, “No. But I did a history project once and used to pretend to be Odawa.” She corrected her pronunciation.
Suspicious, Neolin grasped Shelly’s still-extended hand and helped her up and onto the dock, but he misjudged the required effort, and his backward momentum would have sent him plummeting into the clear green algae-tinted water, if not for Shelly’s grabbing on to the massive silver belt buckle he wore on a thick leather belt through the loops of his faded boot-cut jeans. The back of her hand pressed against the thin trail of hair climbing to his belly button as she helped him to regain his balance. After allowing Neolin to find his footing, she unconsciously let her fingertips linger a little too long just inside the waistline of his blue jeans, until Neolin directed his eyes in that direction. She snapped them away suddenly, as if she’d touched something red hot.
Composure regained, he asked, “Can you teach me?”
“What? How to stand up?” she joked.
“No,” he answered, oblivious to her attempt at humor, “to speak Odawa?”
“I’m really not that fluent, and I don’t think I even speak it correctly. What about those guys?” she asked, pointing toward the picnickers. “Can’t any of them teach you?”
“They know nothing and couldn’t care less about our heritage or the Way.”
Shelly remembered the reference to “the Way” from the newspaper article. “Then why are they here?”
Neolin’s face fell like the side of a glacier. Without explanation, he turned away and walked toward the shore.
Confused, Shelly called, “Wait. What did I say?”
“Go home,” he yelled back, not stopping or turning.
“I’ll teach you,” she said, with just a trace of desperation betraying her budding girlish infatuation.
Neolin halted. He paused. “Okay,” he said, finally turning his head. “Come with me.”
Shelly unzipped her jacket, slid out of her pants, and threw them carelessly into the sailboat. Wearing a pair of soccer shorts, navy blue with white striping, and a white T-shirt with a head shot of a smiling Bob Marley airbrushed onto it, she dropped to her knees and reached into the boat to extract the backpack of supplies she’d brought with her. Rising to her feet, she snuck a look back at Neolin and realized that he had been watching her with something more than curiosity. Shelly blushed.
“Where to?” she asked.
Neolin squinted in the sunlight and pointed past a tiny tent village, which had been constructed beneath a copse of large elms, to the run-down farmhouse. “There. That’s our White House.”
Shelly smiled. “Isn’t that ironic?”
After Shelly entered the musty headquarters, the old wooden spring-loaded screen door slammed shut, startling her. A damp coolness greeted her inside, as if the house were air-conditioned. The windows, at least those that weren’t painted shut, had been thrown open in a futile attempt to air out the place and to let in light.
To the immediate left of the door, a set of stairs in disrepair ascended to the second story. A makeshift table, consisting of a sheet of warped plywood spread across two rickety sawhorses, sat surrounded by stacked milk crates, which
served as chairs, in the middle of what had once been a living room, or what Shelly generously described to me later as a “parlor.”
Doing her best to situate her skinny ass on top of the rigid milk crates, Shelly asked, “So, why are you here?”
“I thought you read the article.”
“I don’t mean here, as in on the island; I mean
in
here, while everyone else is out there?” She threw her thumb over her shoulder toward the front lawn.
Neolin made a lemon face, but the wistful tone of his voice betrayed his hurt when he said, “What? With those guys? I don’t need them. They’re just muscle. They won’t be here for long.”
“Why you?” Shelly asked. “Why did they put you in charge? You’re so …”
“Young?” He finished her sentence.
“Cute.”
She actually had intended to say “young” but had bailed after his defensive reaction. Her response temporarily staggered Neolin. When he regained his mental footing, he said, “I’m the only one who went to college. Well, for one year anyway. Ottawa University.”
Shelly laughed, thinking it was like when her father said that he’d graduated from the school of hard knocks, but the hurt in Neolin’s eyes betrayed his seriousness. “You weren’t kidding,” Shelly said apologetically.
“It’s a real school?”
“Yes. It’s a
real
school.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you, but I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s in Kansas on what was once Odawa reservation land, before Baptist missionaries promised to build a school in exchange for the property, and promised to let Odawa go for free. But I’m not going back.”
“Not going back?” Shelly echoed. “Why not?”
“It’s not really Odawa. The students and professors are almost all Anglo and Christian. I’m the minority at a college named for my people and on our land. I’ve decided it’s time to come home. To my real home. Here in the land of my ancestors. I attended a meeting of the tribal council and reminded them of ‘the Way’ that we were meant to live. I told them about my plan to reclaim some place in our people’s journey. I did my research. This island seemed the most promising. Almost no one lives here. To be honest, I was surprised when the chief encouraged the council to not only give its approval but also give financing and some men to help get started.”
“But do you really believe—” Shelly began.
He cut her off. “I have to. I can’t go back. My only option is living here according to the Way, or …” Neolin didn’t finish; instead he rose, walked to the front bay window, and looked out over the frontage of the property to the lake waters beyond. Two hundred and fifty years rewound in fast motion. He seemed to be returning in his imagination to the day when all in his current line of vision had been Ottawa. He cursed his ill-timed life.
Shelly watched his silhouette inside the dust-mote-crowded sunlight streaming through the window. “What exactly is ‘the Way’?” she asked.
Neolin turned and faced her so that he was backlit,
washed in an ethereal aura. Then he floated (I know that he walked, but Shelly described it as if he floated “like Jesus on
South Park
”) toward her and sat at her feet (this is going to be cringe-worthy), “Indian-style,” on the dust-covered hardwood floor.
He raised his eyes to meet hers and said, “Do you know the Odawa word ‘
pimadazin
’?”
She shook her head.
“It means ‘a good, healthy, and moral life living in a community with others.’ It’s obtained by following the seven
ways
of the Odawa: purity in mind, purity in heart, purity in body, humility, honesty, love, and respect.” He ticked off each one on a finger as if he’d memorized them for a test. “Taken all together, they are
pimadazin,
or the Way.”
“But why couldn’t you find that in Oklahoma? Why’d you have to come here?”
“Have you been to northeast Oklahoma?”
“No.”
“It’s wide open, flat country. For over two hundred years, the Odawa have tried to farm. Either the land is no good or we’re no good at farming, or maybe both are true. Besides, our nature is to hunt and fish and trade.”
“That’s what
Odawa
means,” Shelly interjected proudly. “ ‘Trader.’ ”
“Yes. Even I know that. But now we have joined the native tribes who have opened casinos to screw the whites. Only, in the end, and like all the others, we will mostly screw ourselves. A few will get rich, but most will squander their share of the payouts inside the very casinos that were meant to liberate them from the poverty, alcoholism, and boredom.”
His outrage was palpable and rising. Neolin paused to collect himself, then said, “I am sorry for my anger. It was not true to
pimadazin
.
“Besides, look at this place.” He rose to his feet and returned to the window. “The green of the grass and trees, the blue of the water. It’s beautiful. It’s filled with life and possibility. Where I come from, it’s brown and dry and full of death.”
“And death is so bad?”
“Well, of course.”
“What makes you think that they will let you stay?” Shelly changed the subject. “This island, most of it’s owned by the state now.”
“Why wouldn’t they? They’re not using it.” He let loose a smile that was indicative of either naïveté or cunning, Shelly wasn’t sure which.
“Even if they let you stay, what will you do? How will you survive?”
“I don’t know. Fish. There are fisheries in port cities all along the coast. I’ve done some research. We’ll buy a boat and nets, and we’ll sell our catch to the fisheries here or maybe in Canada.”
Shelly could tell that he was rambling and hadn’t really thought through the whole relocation thing. “What do you know about boating and commercial fishing?” she asked.
“I’ve fished before. Many times.”
“What? With a cane pole in a creek or from the shore of some lake that even I could throw a stone across? Haven’t you noticed the size of this lake? Get a few miles from shore,
and it may as well be the ocean. And wait until you see the storms it kicks up with almost no warning.”
Her words deflated Neolin.
“It
is
much bigger than it looks on a map,” he admitted.
Not wanting to let him off her tenuously implanted hook, Shelly let out some slack in her line and allowed him to enjoy the illusion of swimming freely once again.
“I know it won’t be easy, and it won’t happen quickly, but I believe I can do it—if the government will leave us alone. The time is now. I can feel it.” He was regaining his confidence. “The Odawa need to know that I’ve returned to reclaim this island for them, to give them dignity when they leave their pathetic farms and the casinos and return to the old ways.
Pimadazin
.”
“How about the guns?” Violence was the deal breaker, the one nonnegotiable factor in all of her schemes. (The accidental discharge of firearms accounts for approximately 1 percent of teenage deaths annually.)
“A temporary necessity. The men insisted,” he said. “I’d prefer not to be armed, but the government’s history with secessionists leaves us little choice. If it makes you feel better, I’m a terrible shot.”
Shelly weighed this compromise against her supposedly engraved-in-stone insistence on peaceable protest, then said, “I want to help.”
“You? What can you do?”
“First of all,” she stalled, having no ready answer, “I can handle any kind of boat. I—well, my father—has others that I can use to get supplies or whatever.”
“We have boats and we can get supplies for ourselves,” he said.
“Well.” She was thinking fast, trying to offer some way of making herself necessary. “I’ve got a laptop, and I can write. You’ll need to get the word out. I can start a Web page.”
“But the Way demands that one turn away as much as possible from modern conveniences and technology.”
“I’m not Odawa. So technically,
you
won’t be in violation.”
Neolin laughed and said, “You’ve got a point there.”
“So I can help?”
“Let me think about it. C’mon. Let’s get out of this stinking house. It’s a beautiful day in Odawa country. I’ll show you around and you can teach me my language.”
Shelly was tempted to reach for his hand but resisted the urge. Instead, she followed him out, taking a long look at his broad shoulders, tapered torso, and rounded ass.
When they emerged, the sun temporarily blinded them, but they could hear clearly the off-color comments about Shelly from the men, who had finished their game of horseshoes. Most were sitting on fold-up cloth lawn chairs and eating burgers and dogs from the grill. They’d obviously begun to feel their beers. Shelly liked nothing about the way the biggest one, standing with a rifle resting over and through his folded arms, leered at her. She’d seen that look before.