He let the car coast past the driveway.
This behavior is something absolutely new.
Earl put his foot back on the accelerator. He looked into the rearview mirror, saw the grove of trees diminish. "Why shouldn't I?" he said, watching them.
A few miles later he turned off the highway onto the gravel track that paralleled Red Medicine Creek into Antelope Park. Under the cottonwoods far back from the highway, other cars were parked. Earl stepped out. The drumbeat of music came from the hill above him, filtered by leaves, and the red lights of the television and radio towers blinked on and off high among the stars, disconnected, the towers themselves invisible. A softer, nearer spread of firelight lay along the top of the hill, an orange glow through the trees.
Indistinct voices. The chuckling of the creek. A single frog's clarinet calling. Smoke drifting down the hill, into the smell of cattails and water. Shaking cottonwood leaves. The sharp, clean smell of cedar cutting into the deep and fishy smell of Lostman's Lake from across the highway. Earl kept his hand on the roof of the car and gazed up the hill. He thought of the empty town. He thought of his mother sleeping. Of the cemetery ringed with plastic bags Wasted souls. The expectations of the dead.
Ssshhh. He shook his head. No thoughts like that. No disrespect.
He took his hand from the car and started up the hill.
It looks like the Careful Indian is in unfamiliar territory. Notice how he seems lost?
Earl thought of peeing on a bush. Marking territory. For the camera.
HE STOOD IN THE DARK OF THE CEDARS
on top of the hill. About twenty young men and women, many of them in high school, stood or sat on the flat space surrounding the towers, where the
NO TRESPASSING
signs and the threats of prosecution had been defaced so long ago that even the inspiration to add new layers of graffiti had been defeated. Orange-tinted and shadowed faces bobbed in the rise and fall of flame: Ted Kills Many, Meredith Remembers Him, Gerald Dupree, Angie Long Feather, the Lemieux brothers. The only pure white kid was Willi Schubert, the German foreign-exchange student, who was eager to do anything Indian. As if drinking, Earl thought, was a different experience in Lakota than it was in any other culture. The great leveler: tip a bottle often enough and everyone becomes the same.
Talk and laughter, the Budweiser cans tipped up, set down.
Well,
Earl thought,
here I am.
But so was the story that had controlled his life for as long as he could remember. Headlights in the wrong lane, filling all space. That story was here. It was anywhere Earl went. He could defy it, but he couldn't walk away from it. At least not this easily. He thought to himself that he could still turn around, go back home. No one knew he'd come. He could watch, then leave.
Earl remembered the way his mother had looked when he brought home his first driver's license, proud of having passed the test, not a single written answer wrong and only a few points taken off for driving, not looking over his shoulder to check the blind spot once. His mother had taken the license from his hands, holding it by a corner, far from her face. She hadn't smiled. She hadn't even commented on the photograph. She'd just looked at the license as if it were some mildly unpleasant object, an unexpected bill perhaps. Her dangling red-bead and feather earrings shivered as she gazed.
"Just be careful," she said. And handed the license back. Earl shoved it into his pocket, felt its clear rectangular edges there. He'd been going to tell his mother how well he'd parallel parked, how the examiner had praised his precise following of instructions. Instead he'd mumbled, "I will be, Mom."
In another year he'd be gone from here. Maybe then he'd be far enough away to be gone from that story. Because maybe the story was here and not in him. Maybe it was in the way the roads went to the tops of hills and then curved abruptly down. Maybe it was in the way people held their beer cans in one hand and steered with the other. If the story wasn't in Earl, he could ride test scores away from it as far as he wanted to ride them. One of the coasts if he wanted. Maybe that story wouldn't survive ocean air, the salt in it, the humidity. Earl had a vague vision of something surrounding him like a veil, a gauze, disintegrating under the influence of salt spray and waves and his hard concentration upon differential equations. Sitting on a beach, book in his lap, and becoming only himself. Cleansed. Pure.
He stepped into the firelight. Heads turned. Stillness came.
The Careful Indian has decided to join the others. Notice how they look at him. They're wary. They don't know what to do.
Then Ted Kills Many, a twenty-five-year-old there, drinking with the high schoolers, raised his beer can in mock salute.
"Earl Walks Alone! You lost?"
Earl stuck his hands in his pockets, shook his head. "Just figured I'd see what was happening, you know?" he said.
"Maybe you're lookin for your homework. Thought the wind blew it up here, enit?"
"Just seeing what's happening."
"This is what's happening." Ted snapped a Budweiser out of its plastic ring and flipped it over the fire at Earl. It came tumbling out of the smoke end-over-end. Earl fumbled it, managed to catch it before it hit the ground, then stood looking at it in his hands.
"You know how to open one a those?" Ted hooked his finger, pantomimed flicking the snap top.
"Thanks, you know? But I'm not drinking."
"Not drinking?" Ted mimicked. "You come up here to work out some equations, then? Calculate how many Indians it takes to drink a case? There an equation for that?"
Earl wished he could be smart without everyone knowing about it. Being smart was almost a disease. Except that no one blamed you for having a disease. No one took it as an insult. He looked at the ground, unable to think of any response to Ted.
"Leave 'm alone, Ted."
Meredith Remembers Him spoke quietly, not so much in Earl's defense as in just not wanting to listen to this. She ran her fingernail around the top of her beer can, in the little groove inside the lip. Then she lifted the can and took a swallow.
"Leave 'm alone? Earl wants a beer. Just don't know it yet. Go on, Walks Alone. Have that beer."
"If Earl don't wanna drink, he don't hafta. Set it down, Earl."
Ted was angry Meredith had stopped the nervous laughter and sheepish grins Ted had started in the group at Earl's expense. Ted reached down to his side, ripped another Bud from the plastic ring, popped the top, and sucked the foam that erupted.
"What the hell's he doing here, then?" he growled. "This's a drinkin party, enit?"
Earl wished Meredith had stayed out of it. She wasn't really interested in him. Now, no matter what he did, he was taking sides. Following someone's orders. Drink or not, he'd be winning someone's argument. He looked at the can in his hand. A simple snap of the finger, the metal edge breaking cleanly, sinking into the foam. Nothing to it.
"Earl's goin places," Meredith said. "He don't need this shit."
"Yeah. Apples don't roll straight, but they roll. Right off the rez."
"That's old, Ted."
Meredith sounded tired, and the whole thing made Earl tired. He hadn't come up here to be discussed as if he didn't actually exist. But then, why had he come? He walked away from the fire and sat down on one of the concrete slabs anchoring the radio tower. He leaned his back against the steel frame. No one followed him. He shut his eyes and felt the cold steel against his spine. Then he opened his eyes again.
The Careful Indian,
he thought,
has retreated to observe the group.
But he found even this monologue boring now, and not very funny.
Against his back the steel skeleton of the tower vibrated in the high wind. Another almost-voice. Earl looked away from the fire at the land below him. He could see the metallic surface of Lostman's Lake across the highway, bluewhite in the moon, no more depth than polished stone. Water shimmered white over the spillway. Someone changed the rap music in the boom box to an Indian drum group singing powwow music.
You can't get into the drum group if you're drinking,
Earl thought,
but with modern technology you can bring the drum group into the drinking.
Over the rim of a hill above the dam something white moved. Earl dismissed it, but it came again, a signaling from out there in the darkness, dimmer than fireflies or faint stars. Like something waving to him. He stared but could see nothing. He averted his gaze for better night vision, and after a bit the firelight left his eyes. Then he saw what was out there. Barely visible in a pasture above the lake, dim and indistinct shapes, three horses stood in the dark. Earl gazed at them. He didn't know it then, had no idea at all—but he had just stepped into Carson Fielding's story.
W
HEN CARSON PULLED AROUND
the curve in the driveway with the roan horse in the trailer behind him, his grandfather had been waiting near the barn. The old man pushed away from the peeling paint and weathered wood and ambled to the corral gate as Carson swung the trailer around. In his rearview mirror Carson saw his grandfather undo the chain holding the gate and push it open.
The old man was peering into the trailer when Carson got out of the pickup. They stood next to each other, looking into the dim interior where the roan horse stood as far from them as possible, pressed against the other side.
"He a good one?" the old man asked.
"I think so. Is Dad around?"
"You think, huh? Well, let's see 'm."
Carson's grandfather walked to the back of the trailer and knocked up the lever holding the trailer door shut. The door swung open.
"Is he around?"
The old man shook his head. "Drillin wheat," he said.
"Oh. I was hoping maybe he'd..."
Carson looked around as if he might find his father walking toward them.
His grandfather missed the boy's disappointment. "Been in that field all day," he said. "C'mon outta there now."
For several seconds the roan didn't move. Then the trailer clanged, a set of huge and dissonant cymbals, and the animal burst from it, running flat out. It barely managed to turn itself at the sudden apparition of the corral fence looming. It flowed around the far perimeter of the corral, turned, and flowed back the other way, seeking an opening, avoiding the two human beings.
They watched in silence. The old man nodded, reached into his shirt pocket, removed a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, stuck it in his mouth, replaced the pack.
"Looks like a pretty good one," he said around the cigarette.
"I thought he looked OK. You think Dad'll like him?"
"He know you bought 'm?"
"I never said."
"Maybe he won't even notice. Anyways, won't like 'm any more or less 'n another horse, I guess. Your dad never was much for horses."
"Maybe he'll like this one, though."
"Nervous sumbitch."
The roan was now trotting back and forth along the far fence, watching them, head raised, nostrils flared.
"Seems like."
"Give us sump'm to do."
The old man removed the unlit cigarette from his mouth, held it out, and looked at it.
"I been needin sump'm," he said. "Your ma's after me to quit smokin. Says it'll kill me. I been tryin a make her happy. She cooks better when she's happy. Been makin sure I got no matches on me. Other day, though, I tried a light one a these off a catalytic converter. Crawled under the pickup and stuck it against the converter when the engine was runnin. Didn't work though. Hadn't a been for the tailpipe leakin, I wouldn't a got no smoke at all."
He stuck the cigarette back in his mouth and nodded in the direction of the horse. "Trainin that there animal'll keep my mind off inventin ways a killin myself."
The horse had quit roaming the perimeter of the corral and settled into a corner, not frenzied, just alert and a little hateful.
"Got a name?" the old man asked.
"The horse?"
"I assume you ain't havin babies."
"Guess I ain't thought've a name yet."
They both had their chins on the top corral rail, their wrists dangling, two heads watching the animal. Ves opened his fingers and dropped the unlit cigarette into the corral.
"There ain't hardly anything more worthless than a cigarette you can't light," he said.
"Cept one you can."
"Your ma tell you that?"
"Thought it up myself."
"Well. Sounds like sump'm she'd say."
"Whyn't you just not carry 'em with you? Don't make no sense, seems like, to have 'em if you ain't gonna light 'em."
"Never know. Hate to go cold turkey. Catalytic converter mighta worked. Or I might get struck by lightning. Got 'em on me, I can take advantage. But still be quittin. You believe that story?"
"What story?"
"'Bout the catalytic converter."
"Probly not."
"I probly don't myself. Could be true, though. Either way, probly best your ma don't hear it. She can be half-gullible. She got to believin somethin like that, no tellin what she'd do."
LATE THAT AFTERNOON
Marie Fielding drove out to where Charles was drilling wheat to get him for supper so he wouldn't have to drive the Case back She waited for him at the end of the round, the tractor rolling toward her, chased by its slow cloud of dust. It reached the fence line, and the drill heaved out of the ground on its hydraulic rams. Charles parked it, walked over to the pickup, knocking dust out of his clothes with his palms, climbed in.
"Is it going OK?" she asked.
"Nothing broke."
"That's good."
"Unusual."
Marie put her hand on the gearshift and moved it back and forth without engaging it.
"Your son bought a horse today," she said.
"I didn't figure he was pulling that horse trailer around the county for the fun of it."
She looked at her fingers wrapped around the gearshift. The way the light came through the windshield and whitened her knuckles. The diamond on her finger, its brilliance. The dry skin on the back of her hands.