Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  “Go back,” she told him. “Wait for me.”

  He grinned. She thought the dark stripes lining his teeth could be mud. “Let’s go to the fair,” he said.

  “You’re hurt!”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “You’re crazy!”

  But he was leaning into her, pushing her forward. He was going to the fair. She turned and tried to hook her arm around him, but he pushed her away, so she walked ahead, turning again and again to look at him. She was trying to remember if there was a telephone anywhere over there. There would be police, and maybe an ambulance somewhere, like they had at the football games. There was always an ambulance parked at the edge of the field. There must at least be a telephone. The air smelled of animals, and the music, floating out from the rides, warbled on the wind. At the highway, she put her arm firmly around her father’s waist. “Eh?” he said. “Sweetheart?” She ignored him, and he let her be his walking stick.

  The highway, packed with slow-moving vehicles, was a shadow under their feet, though she kept thinking it was probably green from manure because the stink was so strong, and there had been so many horses in the parade. Her father was leaning down and looking into car windows as they walked along the edge of the road, and she saw the faces startle—white people with out-of-state plates, tourists passing through—and it made her giddy to think of what they saw: mud man with a Kleenex hanging from his forehead. It made her want to scream. White people in some cars, and Indians, none she knew—where did they all come from? Indians packed in their pickup, laughing at them—her father’s body still trembled. Her father’s little body. He was like a little boy, so bony and tough, and hot, hot with fever. She tried to feel his head, but he jerked away from her. “Eh?” he said. “Shi-honey?”

  When they got close enough to see the people on the Ferris wheel, she led him across the highway, through the cars, and half pushed him up the low bluff. She could not see the ground because it was too dark. She knew there would be glass there. She had walked across the bridge to the rodeo many times, and she had had to sidestep the jagged glass that littered the mesa. Her father was breathing heavily, or whistling. Her father was whistling. He was whistling a single note. Over and over again, he was trying to whistle along with the songs—three or four different songs rang out from different rides. His body, so hot. She put her hand on his face before he could jerk away. The face was cold. He pushed her away again and walked away from her. They should sit down, she thought. She didn’t know what it meant that his body was hot but his face was cold. They should go to the Knights of Columbus tent. They could sit there. There were chairs there, and maybe she could find a telephone. Three different notes. He was now whistling three different notes: Three blind mice. One of the songs on the air was “Three Blind Mice,” and her father was whistling along with it.

  In the Knights of Columbus hamburger tent, the air crackled with frying grease. The folding chairs were positioned this way and that, and the tables were smeared with ketchup and mustard. The priest and all his helpers were scurrying around with plates of hamburgers, and the little red dog was begging for scraps. “What happened to you?” the priest called, and other people called it, too, when Willa and her father walked into the light under the tent. Willa was looking for chairs, and her father was standing in the center of the tables, swaying. He removed the Kleenex from his head, stared at it in his hand, and seemed to shrink inside his skin, and she hurried to him, leading him to the chair she had found. “Coffee!” he demanded.

  “Is there a phone?” she said to the priest.

  “Coffee!” her father said again, and slumped down, his head wedged between his shoulders. Willa hurried to the machine, a large aluminum serve-yourself coffee machine, poured a cup, and carried it to him.

  Leroy Atcitty, her father’s friend, came over and stuck his hand out. Her father stared at the hand, and then touched it, said, “Oa, Ya’at’eeh,” and closed his eyes. Mr. Atcitty sat down in a chair facing her father and spoke to him softly in Navajo. Her father shook his head and said, “This girl.”

  Willa, scanning the booths outside the tent for a telephone, froze.

  Her father opened his eyes. “This girl,” he announced to his friend, and to all the people sitting around, “clobbered me.” He closed his eyes, cradled his head between his hands, and moaned. Mr. Atcitty laughed. “She reee-ly clobbered me,” he called, and all around them, the people sitting in their chairs laughed. Her father shook his head and took a sip from his coffee. “Hey!” he shouted to the priest. “Bring this girl a hamburger. This is a growing girl. Bring her two hamburgers.” He leaned across the table toward Mr. Atcitty and said in a hoarse stage whisper, “None for me. I’m dizzy from where she clobbered me. With her broomstick!” her father said, and the people laughed again. “That’s what she clobbered me with, all right.”

  Willa sat down. He was all right. There was nothing wrong with him at all. He was perfectly fine, and he had tricked her again. She looked down at her hands. They looked like an old woman’s hands, coated with mud and wrinkled. She scratched at the mud with a fingernail, peeling it in flakes, and then she touched her hair. Her hair was plastered with mud. She had not thought about her hair until now, and then she thought that the backs of her arms and all her clothes were also plastered with mud, and it seemed odd to her that she hadn’t thought of all the places on her that were dirty.

  “Not ree-ly,” her father said, and tapped her on the arm. “Just kidding,” he said. “Call somebody,” he said gruffly. “Call a doctor,” and he laughed.

  She began to scrape the mud from her hair. The little red dog was following the priest around, her tiny little legs scrambling and collapsing under the weight of her body. Willa watched her bellying along, getting distracted by a scrap of food or a noise, stopping, and then twisting her head this way and that, running again and trying to catch the priest. Willa kissed the air, and the dog stopped. It looked at her, then quickly away, as if looking were a sin, and Willa kissed the air again.

  Her father had begun telling the story of how he had flown through the air over the river. How it had been his first time flying because he had never been in an airplane.

  She half listened, and she listened to the carnival music. “Three Blind Mice” played over and over again from the speaker in the Knights of Columbus tent. She stared out at the people walking around the carnival. Some she knew, and they ducked their heads to look at her. She didn’t know what they saw.

  “Ojo de Dios,” the priest said. He was standing in front of their table, holding two hamburgers on one plate. The little red dog was with him, panting. Willa snapped her fingers, and the dog came over to lick them. The priest set the hamburgers down in front of her. “Ketchup?” he said. “Mustard? Ojo de Dios,” he said to her father, and he leaned across the table, putting his hands on either side of her father’s coffee cup, staring at the cut on his forehead. Willa scratched behind the little dog’s ears, and the dog stepped on her feet, wanting more.

  “Eye of God,” the priest said. “Look at it,” he said to Willa, and she looked at her father’s forehead. There in the middle of his face was a third eye, all red and black. “Ojo de Dios,” the priest said again, and wandered away.

  Her father leaned over, pressing into her shoulder. She could smell the river on him. “Did you hear that?” he said. “Eye of God. Did you hear that?” He banged her elbow with his.

  She looked at the meat in front of her, and she smiled. She leaned across the table toward Mr. Atcitty. “That white man at the water treatment?” she said. “He has one, too. Right in the middle of his face.”

  She grinned at her father, and he stared at her; he stopped laughing and stared at her coldly, and for an instant she saw him swinging again over the river, his eyes white with fury. She opened her mouth and laughed out loud.

  Her father nodded. He took a sip from his coffee. He stared at the liquid in his cup, took another sip, and then put the cup down and shook his
head. “This one,” he said. “This one you got to watch out for.” He nodded again as if he had just decided something for himself.

  At her feet, the little dog was begging with pretty eyes. Willa scratched her head, tore some meat from the hamburger, tossed it in the air, and watched the fat little thing try to jump. Outside the tent, a carnival man was buckling girls in a Ferris wheel seat. He was teasing them, rocking them back and forth in their swinging chair, and they were laughing, and—

  She had a painting in the fair. She remembered it now, and she felt the happiness again. Maybe it had earned a ribbon, she didn’t know. She watched the carnival man pull the Ferris wheel switch and send the girls off. They rose slowly, then faster and faster, and Willa felt her stomach turn, as if she were riding, too.

  Blue Fly

  Coming home from school on a Monday morning in the spring, Sadie Evers stepped through a hole in the schoolyard fence right onto the hem of her dress. When she straightened, the left sleeve separated from its seam. Her brother, Madison, heard it rip. He turned and saw his little sister’s bony shoulder naked to the world. Sadie stood trembling, her black eyes two burnt holes, the sleeve of her only school dress hanging by threads. Madison grinned.

  “Now you done it,” he said. He picked the ripped sleeve from her arm, then let it fall again. “You should tear the other side. Then they’ll be the same.”

  “Be quiet,” Sadie said.

  “You could be a fancy woman.” He leaned down, his hot breath in her ear. “You could be a bare-breasted whore.”

  Sadie stared, stony, at her feet.

  “I saw this fancy woman once,” Madison said. He put his arm around his sister and began guiding her along the path. “She took all the feeling from a man’s toes. He was sitting right there on a chair in front of the Strater Hotel. She gave him a foot rub. And when she got to the toes, you know what she done? She put ‘em in her mouth.” Sadie squinted at her brother. “It’s true,” Madison said. “One by one. She put them toes in her mouth and sucked ‘em, and they were dirty. But when she was done, you know what? The man starts hollering. He says, ‘I cannot feel my toes, I cannot feel my toes.’ He jumps up and starts waddling like a turkey. He didn’t know he had any toes anymore.”

  Madison grinned. “That woman was a witch.”

  The sky was the color of Colorado columbine, and the fields were soft to the touch. All the way home, Madison told his sister about the witches and the world, but when the soddy came into view he stopped talking. The door to the shack was open, the inside, shadowy. There was no one in sight, but he could hear his sister-in-law, Katherine, talking to herself.

  Madison dug his hands deep in his pockets and tucked his chin, as if against the weather. Something about the air began to feel dense. Something about it felt like pushing against water on a flooded plain.

  But Katherine was not exactly talking to herself. She stood inside before the table, a leather switch in her hand, her weedy hair a tangle around her cheeks. Madison and Sadie watched from the doorway. Katherine was holding conversation with blue flies. In the shadowy room, Madison could not see her furious eyes, but her shoulders were bunched into her neck, and her hands, worrying the flies, were bone white. “Who,” she was saying—then swish, she slapped the table, and splat, a fly fell—“invited you?”

  The hut reeked of vinegar. A vat of brine stood sweating on the table, its sides pimpled with blue flies. In the vat was pickling beef. She had put the beef up on Friday. Or Thursday. In the dead of night, sometime between Thursday and Friday, Madison had woken to find his sister-in-law banging pots. She had woken Sadie, who sat on her cot, dog-eyed and silent, holding her quilt around her. Katherine didn’t care. She had a taste for pickled beef.

  The vat began to stink on Saturday, and on Sunday the flies came. Katherine was at them this morning when Madison and Sadie left, and from the looks of the winged corpses that pocked the table, she had been at them all day long.

  Now, Katherine squinted past him to Sadie, a shadow in the sunlight. She raised the strap and pointed at Sadie’s naked shoulder. Sadie said, “Auntie Kate, I tore—”

  “Don’t even,” Katherine said. The strap shook in her hand.

  Sadie looked at her brother. Madison watched the flies. They were the half-starved winter flies, quick but skinny. They were not the juicy, gorging summer flies, and their white guts were not visible in the mess on the table. But they were noisy, the ones on the vat and buzzing around his head, and they had been noisy all night, and all night the place had stunk of vinegar.

  “You ought to take that out of here,” he said.

  Katherine laughed. “Ought I?” The floor, too, was a mess of flies, most dead, some walking in drunken circles.

  Madison walked to the table, slapped the vat with both hands. Flies scattered, then quickly resettled. Katherine’s eyes, rimmed red, were slits in her head. Madison picked the vat up. Katherine grabbed it, but Madison pulled hard, and he heard her fingernails scrape the wood, and he heard the liquid inside slosh up against the lid. Quickly, he carried the thing out of the soddy and set it down by the door of the storage shed.

  Katherine didn’t say anything when he came back, just watched. Her lips were thick and quivering. He watched her back, though he could hear his heart thudding. After a minute, she walked around the table. He smelled her sweat when she brushed by. She went out, and a few seconds later Madison heard the slosh of liquid. Sadie, still in the doorway, put her hand over her mouth. “She kicked it over,” she whispered.

  Madison shook his head and grinned. “Now we’ll have bears.”

  “You,” Katherine screamed from the clearing, “are not my children!”

  Madison and Sadie stared at each other, then Sadie’s eyes crossed. They burst out laughing.

  Three weeks earlier, Madison’s brother, Mark, had gone missing. Mark liked to go missing. Just like their old man. The old man had been gone three years now—ever since the summer of 1900. Mark usually went for a day or two, just to see the country, he always said, but when he didn’t come back after a week, Katherine started fretting. She was afraid he was dead in the river. She wanted to roust all of the men in the area and make them drag the river, which Madison said was a foolish thing to do. Nobody was going to drag the river for Mark. They all knew Mark, how he was. She didn’t know the people around here. Katherine wasn’t from here. Mark had found her last year, up north. Last winter when the money ran out, Mark had gone up north to the high Rockies near Rico, and worked in the mines. In the spring he brought Katherine back with a wedding ring on her finger. Nobody knew if there was a paper behind the ring. If there was, Mark wasn’t showing it. But she was pretty. And young. Nineteen, just five years older than Madison. Madison could see very well why Mark brought her home.

  All this winter they’d lived together, the four of them, here in the soddy. “This is the foundation,” Mark was always saying. “This is just the beginning.” They’d moved from Durango last summer when the Ute land opened up for homesteading. They got a prime spot in the southern lowlands, just where the Rockies tapered into flatlands—good farming, good grazing. A stone’s throw from the Animus River. They dug the foundation, but it snowed in August, a freak, early storm, so they laid cedar beams over the top, patched between with mud and straw. They built the roof up thick so when the wild horses came on their way to the river they wouldn’t fall through; they dug a sloping channel for a doorway, and they made a thick cedar door. “Come next spring, we’ll start the house,” Mark said. But spring was here and Mark was not, and they were living in a hole in the ground.

  The hole was dark. When the door was closed, there was no way to tell if the sun was up or down. And when they were asleep, the darkness breathed louder than they. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Madison would wake to a clap in his ear, and he’d bolt up, his heart racing. He listened hard then for the thud of hooves overhead or for the sound of human beings, and his fingernails would itch.

  In the ea
rly evening, Madison dished cold soup from the pot on the stove, a bowl for him and one for Sadie. Katherine was gone; he didn’t know where. The air in the hut was still thick, and the flies were buzzing. Later, when it got chilly, he’d light the fire, but now he was hungry. “Come on and eat,” he said. Sadie was sweeping. Already in her nightgown, Sadie had folded the torn dress in a neat square like a brown bread sandwich, and she had put it on Katherine’s sewing basket.

  Madison watched her as he ate his soup. “You think she’s going to fix that? She ain’t going fix it.”

  Sadie didn’t say anything. She was doing a tour of the room, jabbing spiders in the corners with the broom, just as Katherine had shown her. “Take care of the corners,” Madison said in falsetto, a sassy imitation of his sister-in-law. “The middle will take care of itself.” He scuffed his shoes under the table, kicking the dead flies. “Sadie,” he whined, “that’s the cleanest dirt floor I ever did see.”

  “Shut up,” Sadie said.

  “She probably won’t even come back. Why would she?”

  “Where’s she going, then?”

  “Nah, she ain’t coming back.” He scraped his soup bowl with his spoon. From where he sat, he could see the sun perched in the lowest branches of the cottonwood just beyond the shed. He could see the pickled beef, too, where it lay in the shed’s shadow. It looked like a stogie, a big stogie. Or a turd.

  “She’s coming back. Where’s she going, then?” Sadie was sweeping the flies in a pile.

  “You think she’s going to sew that dress? Why should she? You think she cares if you go to school looking like a gypsy? Like a little Mexican?” Madison batted a fly. Sadie’s pile looked like a little black hole on the gray floor; the floor was disappearing before his eyes. Soon it would be as dark as the pile. “You’re going to school looking like a little nigger girl. I can’t go with you tomorrow, honey.” Madison got up. He took his bowl and put it in the bucket by the stove. The bowls from breakfast were still there, gummy with dried oatmeal. Black specks crawled in the goo. “If you go really early and sneak in and hide in the closet, maybe nobody’ll notice the little ratty-tatty nigger girl, little pickaninny nigger girl—”