by John Sayles
It went slow and then fast and then slow again for a bit and then really fast till it was over. He was nice and lay around playing with her braid for a long time after.
“Never sleep with somebody you don’t want to wake up with,” he said, meant as a compliment, she thinks, but kind of like he was giving her advice on how to go out and deal with other guys. And then he saw the fancy digital clock and said he needed to make some business calls.
None of the rooms look like anybody has been in them, a house waiting for its people. Fawn said there are colored lights, but it’s still daytime. Tina supposes that if she had a lot of money she wouldn’t build a house but would travel, see different places and find out what the people who lived in them are like. She knows this Brent and his wife went to Hawaii, which is part of the United States but like another world. And if you really had a lot of money you’d fly first class, where stewardesses bring you drinks and bake you cookies.
Or so they say.
It’s like a big deal at school, girls kind of bragging, but she’s not going to tell anybody. Keep it hers. Hers and Wayne Lee’s. He doesn’t seem like he’ll talk about it either, even to his man Brent, though you can’t be sure. He used the rubber at the end, which if Fawn wasn’t such a nitwit she would have insisted on. Tina has seen the guy, Brent, around town more than a few times, driving his Corvette. Not her type, with all that muscle, but Fawn says he’s ‘dynamic.’ She thought only cars and planes and speedy boats could be that, like ‘hydrodynamic,’ but everybody’s got their own taste.
When she saw the backpack she had the sudden thought that they were going to camp out and do it in a tent, but that was just her being a little panicky when she got into his car. She’d been a mess pouring coffee all afternoon, knowing this was The Day and she signed herself up for it. She tries to think now about what comes next, but draws a blank. A lot of people, not her grandfather but a lot of people, seem to be living that way since the boom started, making crazy money, buying things, partying, trying not to think about tomorrow.
‘If you never hope for anything, you’re rarely disappointed,’ her grandfather says. ‘But then you’re a pretty dull character.’
Mrs. Gatlin says she should go out of state for college, and Mr. Reidy, her guidance counselor, says her grades and SATs could get her a scholarship somewhere. She already feels more confident about going. Wayne Lee, who has been all over the place, wants to be with her, she’s not a virgin anymore, and she’s had a real job.
She turns into a room with lots of big leather-covered chairs, with an entertainment center that has more units than she can guess the functions of, with posters of almost-naked women looking at you with puffy lips from the walls. A room with the smell of marijuana she recognizes from parties at Dylan’s house and a glass-faced display case full of guns.
There are pistols, the sleek kind you see in James Bond movies, and rifles of different kinds, some with beautiful wood and metal and others looking like high-tech plastic. There are a couple of things that must be machine guns, or whatever the ones the Navy SEALs or school shooters use are called, that can kill a whole classroom in the blink of an eye.
She hears Wayne Lee moving toward her, finishing up a conversation on the phone. This is a ‘man cave,’ like what they joke about on TV, and suddenly she feels like Goldilocks in the three bears’ house. Not supposed to be there.
Wayne Lee steps in, pocketing his phone, his mind a million miles away. He looks at her, then at the guns in the display case.
“Yeah,” he says, shrugging his shoulders. “My man Brent is way into this stuff.”
THE ONLY THING HE and Fawn really don’t agree about is the radio. He’s a Nirvana and Chili Peppers guy, and she likes rap of all things, black guys rhyming about their dicks and their hos and their money and how they’d like to fuck the police up. Maybe it’s an Indian thing. So no radio, which makes it a long drive with her in a mood.
A legitimate clinic, you’d need the parent’s permission, and that ditzy mother of hers would already be picking out baby clothes. If this guy that the buddy of his buddy recommended is as good as advertised, there won’t be any medical issues. And Fawn is such a slick little operator, a natural talent, that they’ll never know. Best for everybody, give a young girl her childhood back, all that shit. He’s at least not taking her across state lines or into Canada.
With Bunny the first time she went to this Asian woman, vouched for by Planned Parenthood, diploma on the wall, the whole deal. A few questions and then, “Well, if that’s what you’ve decided,” and bingo, case closed. The second one she lost on her own, just one of those things, and started to get mopey about it. Children were never a clause in their agreement, not portable enough, not resilient. He’s read where with some nomadic people, the women fuck all they want but only get pregnant when they stay put for a while.
Or maybe it was wildebeest.
But Bunny is moping back in California and Fawn is sitting next to him, hair blowing in the wind as they eat up highway heading to Dr. Fixit.
“Brent,” she says, looking moonily out at the prairie flying by, “if we like– if we were going to keep it, what names do you like?”
“You want to name something, get a turtle.”
“Just pretending.”
“Okay. For a boy, Rocket. It’s already cool, and for nicknames you get Rock, Rocky, Rockabilly.”
“And for a girl?”
“Fallujah.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. It’s a beautiful name.”
“It’s a place.”
“So’s Dakota. So’s Georgia. There are girls named–”
“It’s a place where there was a battle.”
“Even better. Kind of sexy, kind of mysterious, but like, don’t fuck with me. Another good boy name would be Armageddon.”
“You’re mean.”
“I’m bad to the bone. That’s why you love me.”
The girl gives him an appraising look, as if deciding whether this is true or not.
“You know, if something bad happens to me, my stepfather will kill you.”
“Bow and arrow?”
“With his bare hands.”
Brent flexes a bicep, keeping the other hand on the wheel. “Like to see him try.”
She’s quiet for a long time then, which gives him time to think about the Hal Tillerman problem. Gotta get that piano off my back.
“It makes me feel old,” she says finally. “Having the procedure.”
“Mature old or decrepit old?”
“Like something that’s been used. Not new anymore.”
“Darlin,” he says, patting her on the knee, “you weren’t new on the day you were born.”
When they get to the place she won’t get out of the car.
“I changed my mind.”
The place could be more impressive. Stuck alone out where the suburbs become the country, decent-looking woodpile under the carport, a mailbox that looks like a cardinal, an old satellite dish with dead leaves in the bowl, a snowmobile up on cinderblocks.
“You gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“I’m not going in.”
“So what, you’re gonna blow up like a blimp, go through a day or two of agony and then play mommy to little Fallujah?”
She glares at him. “I don’t know yet. But I’m not going in here.”
They say you’re supposed to count to ten, but it’s never worked, just giving him a moment to decide which to fuck up first, the teeth or the eyes. He looks to the sky. It’s getting late.
“I’m going to take a very short walk, and when I come back I hope you’ll have made the right decision.”
He heads down the steep driveway and hooks around onto the country road. He can see Fawn sitting in his Vette. She isn’t moving.
He pulls out his phone and the number Scorch gave him, punches it in. The guy answers on the third ring.
“Yeah?”
“This is the man
in North Dakota,” says Brent, turning his back on Fawn and the doctor’s house. “I believe our mutual friend told you I might be calling.”
“Right. You understand I don’t perform the service itself. I’m a middleman.”
Fucking subcontractors. Next he’ll want an indemnity clause–
”I understand that.”
“And you know it’s half on engagement of services, half on completion.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“It’s a serious undertaking.”
Could be a nice little scam, he thinks. Anybody contracting a murder probably lacks the stones to get physical themselves, so if you take the half up front and don’t deliver, what are they gonna do? Call a cop? Out you on Craigslist?
“Knock that down to a third up front and we keep talking,” he says.
A pause. Brent wonders how much he’ll have to pay Dr. Fixit up there for services not rendered.
“All right,” says the guy on the other end. “Tell me the play.”
“I got a problem in Pocatello.”
“Not a word,” he says as he slams back into the car. “One fucking syllable out of you and you walk back to the reservation.” He jams his Uplift Mofo Party Plan disc into the slot, cranks it up loud, and peels out for Yellow Earth.
THERE AREN’T ANY MANDANS on the Mandan Braves this year. Lots of German names from the people who built Bismarck up, one black kid at forward who can jam. The Three Nations Warriors have their hands full, playing on the road against a bigger school, less height and no point-machine since Ziggy White Elk graduated. Good ball-movement, though, with the coach, Ed Munger, sixth man on the team Harleigh captained back when they went to the state semis. Ed always puts together a killer defense, zone or man-to-man, the kids flying back and calling out the switches. It won’t be embarrassing.
They’re only down four, halfway through the second quarter, when he comes in, looking for an open seat on the visitors’ side. The only one left is next to Claude LaMere, whose grandson is on the JVs.
“How we doing?” he asks as he squeezes in.
“We better shoot damn good,” says Claude, eyes not leaving the gym floor, “cause we won’t get an offensive rebound off this bunch.”
The black kid goes under and makes a reverse layup.
“I got stuck behind a convoy of tank trucks, coming and going so there’s no chance to pass,” says Harleigh, wondering why he’s explaining himself. The job description doesn’t include attendance at every minute of every tribal sporting event. “JVs win?”
“Got massacred. Couldn’t buy a bucket, then they started with the turnovers.”
Harleigh settles in, watches the back and forth. No mental mistakes from the Warriors, just the lack of size and superstar. The game has changed a hell of a lot since his day, no more calling out a play and making three good passes before you think about scoring, no more weave, and now you got high-schoolers jamming the ball, which had been outlawed while Kareem was in college, all the white dinosaur coaches afraid they were losing their game. They lost it, and saw it replaced by something much more fluid, more improvised, more acrobatic.
The Fox kid, related to all the Foxes over at Mandaree, has a classic jump shot, beautiful backspin as he sinks one with his toe on the three-point line. Too bad he’s short and slow.
“You know where I live,” says Claude.
Claude is a good mechanic, fix anything on your car that’s not a computerized unit, lives by the lake at Sanish.
“I do.”
“Been out there lately?”
“Can’t say I have.” The Chairman is never off the clock, which he supposes is the biggest negative of the job. But Claude is not a squawker, so if there’s something wrong–
“Looks like a second Dust Bowl out there.”
“The trucks.”
“They run em fast as they can, down a dirt road.”
“It’s been dry.”
“I thought there was somebody sposed to wet it down now and then.”
“We hired a company.” Actually, the job went to ArrowFleet when Brent said it could be done by his people on the cheap.
“I look out at the road from my shop every day. Never seen any water truck.”
It was a no-bid contract, over a half-million dollars, that he ran through the council without a vote.
“Then I’ll have to talk to the fella we contracted.”
Claude nods across the court. “He’s right there.”
And yes, Brent is sitting over behind the Braves’ bench, glad-handing with a white fella in a turquoise cowboy shirt. Claude must have looked up the contract, learned what the numbers were. People see six digits, they get excited, not figuring in just how many hundreds of miles of dirt road there are on the reservation.
But you never want them to think you been caught off guard. “Well, that’s convenient, idn’t it?”
He’s been chasing after Brent for a week, trying to cut him loose, and was hoping to do it quick and professional and private. A ‘just business’ kind of thing.
“Wind blows west, the dust settles on Old Man Good Iron’s pasture,” says Claude, “and his milkers turn their noses up. He wanted me to fix up some concrete speed bumps, slow them oil trucks down.”
“And start a war.”
“That’s what I told him. Oil folks have paid off the right people, they can do anything they want on the rez.”
“It’s called a lease.”
“Any time an Indin signs a piece of paper, I call it a robbery.”
The half ends with the Fox kid just missing a buzzer-beater from midcourt, the Warriors down eight. Harleigh is careful to walk around the court and not on it with his new boots, waving to Coach Munger, who is limbering up for his halftime chalk-throwing.
Harleigh catches Brent by the table where they sell the pizza squares.
“You’re a hard man to track down.”
Brent does a good job making light of the ambush.
“Heyyyyy– there you are! You see what I got on my line?”
“Looks like a wax figure from the Cowboy Hall of Fame?”
Brent lowers his voice and takes Harleigh’s arm, steering him further from the refreshment counter, moving down the hallway by the vice principal’s office.
“Texas beef money, wants to get into oil without making a fuss about it. I’m brokering a lease on Shorty Winstead’s acres.”
“That’s not reservation land.”
“But it’s surrounded by reservation land, and my man’s been burned by the PC police a couple times– built a strip mall on sacred land or something– so I’ve promised him I can get you to smooth things over with the neighbors.”
“There’s nothing to smooth.”
“He doesn’t know that.” Brent looks like he just ate the whole pie. “I figure to throw maybe ten percent of my end your way. I’ll just bring you over for a quick intro before the second half, shake your head about what wildasses the folks parked around the lease can be, but how you know how to talk to them.”
“Brent, it’s over.”
Brent looks at him like he didn’t hear.
“If you think fifteen is right, I can go for that. This is basically a no-show job.”
“I’m dissolving the partnership.”
Brent’s face doesn’t change but something in the air between them does, Harleigh feeling an icy ripple up the back of his neck.
“You can’t do that.”
“I already talked to Ruby, she got the paperwork with your wife in progress.”
“Bunny doesn’t run shit!”
Harleigh lowers his voice, hoping Brent will take the cue, people looking down the hall at them. “Everything is in her name. It’ll be a fair split, profits and liabilities, don’t worry. I just can’t have my position with the tribes hooked up to your service company any more, can’t having you using me like a tire iron to jack open the door to Indian Country.”
“You can’t.”
“I
can and I have.”
Brent’s color is different now, like something terrible is rising up to bust out of him.
“You’ll regret it.”
It is more of a threat than a prediction.
“I already do, buddy. I already do.”
Harleigh heads back down the hall to the crowd buying sodas and candy and Cheetos, stuff he didn’t allow when he ran the rez high school. He’d had to cut bait a couple times back then, firing relatives, passing a friend up for a janitor job, and it was never easy dropping the bomb and walking away. But this is the first time he’s been scared to look behind.
Fawn steps out from the gaggle of her old rez girlfriends clustered by the stairs.
“Were you talking about me?”
Fawn doesn’t come to Warriors events anymore, and this is an away game. He wonders how she got here.
“Why would I be talking about you with Brent?”
“You were arguing.”
“Business dispute, darling. You need a ride home?”
She looks upset about something, something more than him suddenly appearing on what used to be her turf.
“I’m covered,” she says, and flicks her reddened eyes to Brent as he walks by, the buzzer from the gym blatting to call the crowd back in. “I’m going to a party after.”
“Don’t get back too late. Your mom will blame me.”
“She’s your girlfriend,” says Fawn, rebounding with that little wicked smile that always makes him hope she’s listened to Connie’s birth control lectures. “Deal with it.”
HITCH AND DENNY HAVE thrown plastic dropcloths, the cheap ones you get at Walmart, over any of the furniture that can stain. They pulled this off once before when their parents went to an Herbalife conference in Fargo, and this is a weekend trip up to Regina to visit some of their mother’s Lakota relatives. The house is pretty isolated to start with, and they’ve told everyone to park around back where they won’t attract attention from the road.
“The wide and the narrow!” Hitch calls out when Dickyboy lands with Dylan. “Come to party or just making a delivery?”
It’s not like they put out invitations, word just travels and whoever shows up shows up. Dickyboy made the last party, chugging a ceremonial Red Bull at dawn and pitching in with the frenetic cleanup drive the boys insisted on, a half-dozen survivors still there and just sober enough to put the house back in order.