“How do you know?”
“They tell me about it.”
Lonnie sat back on the couch and laughed. “Dude, they’re fuckin’ liars. People in gangs don’t tell you they’re in gangs.” He started to drink a beer and made Jared drink another one down.
“Why are you in a gang?” Jared asked.
“Because of this.” Lonnie pulled up his sleeve. There was a tattoo of a feather and an arrow crossing. “I’m an ogichidaa. A warrior.”
“I can be too.”
Lonnie leaned over to his glass table and put his face over a line of powder. “Oh yeah?” There was a loud snort. “You dropped like a bitch back there.”
“Then teach me how to fight.”
Another loud snort, and now Lonnie’s shoulders were bobbing up and down. “Okay. But you’ll have to go through another, heh, initiation.”
Lonnie reached for his fly and unzipped.
21
FROM THE FIRST TIME Faron Mykleseth taught Kayden how to play basketball, no other cousin was close to being Kayden’s favorite. He was close as a brother—closer, as was common for many reservation families.
“We’ll start easy,” Faron said. He launched the basketball from just underneath the hoop. It floated straight up from his hands and bounced off the rim softly to Kayden. “Go, little man!”
Kayden caught the ball and began to dribble toward the three-point line. He had barely run five feet when Faron’s hard hands snatched the ball right back. The eighteen-year-old Faron knocked twelve-year-old Kayden flat on his ass, and the boy strained to hold in angry tears.
“Why’d you do that?” he shouted.
“You turned your back, little dude. No one is gonna give you a break in a real game, so get up and don’t let it happen again.”
Faron knew that Kayden would not find the coaching he needed in Geshig’s middle school team. The high school put on a good show every year, not always the best, but never bad, and he knew from experience that middle school sports were more about friendship, obedience, and after-school-special bullshit. No coach would ever dare to push Kayden’s limits.
He would have coached him slower had he not already been enlisted. Marine Corps. Operation Iraqi Freedom. When Faron donned that uniform for the first time, he knew what it meant to be a warrior. He would make his whole family proud. His own veteran father, and the grandfather he and Kayden shared. Vincent Kelliher was the epitome of a warrior in both their eyes, and Faron would make him proud, live or die.
The funeral for the twenty-one-year-old Faron Mykelseth was held in the Geshig auditorium.
It was a community event, with coverage from all over the state and every bleacher filled with mourning patriots. This was the price of freedom, said the reverend who officiated. This is God’s will, no matter how painful or confusing it may seem.
Kayden Kelliher was listed as an honorary pallbearer. In private he told his mother he could not handle the task of escorting Faron’s casket and burying him, so he walked behind the group as they brought it out of the gym and outside for one last salute.
All Kayden could do as the guns rang out in the parking lot was stare at the flag-covered coffin as the group waited behind the hearse. His eyes burned red as the stripes, and his tears were no longer being held back. They dropped from his eyes and slammed onto the ground like basketballs.
His grandfather was not crying. He held stone-faced as he aimed the rifle into the air and saluted his fallen kin. Kayden glared at his grandpa, his once-hero, and didn’t know why he was so angry.
This was bittersweet. This was what it meant to be a warrior. A freedom fighter. An ogichidaa.
For the first time in his brief life, Kayden Kelliher did not wish to be an ogichidaa.
Indoodem (My Clan)
WHENEVER JARED RAN AWAY from home, he would walk toward St. Eric’s Church on the east end of town. The Catholic presence in the town had always been small, and the dilapidated church had eventually been abandoned in favor of a smaller, inconspicuous building that most passersby mistook for a gas station.
Half a block behind the skeletal church, up a short driveway with tire marks bored into the dirt, and partially hidden by white lilac bushes was their real home.
It was not a nice home, barely better than the cracker-box housing of the north-side ghetto, but it was enough private space for the clan.
Lonnie hated the word gang ever since the first time Jared uttered it years ago. When he bought the house—the details of which he wouldn’t reveal—he relocated all his operations back to Geshig and made his own rules. No one said the word gang around Lonnie, not his older brother, not Jared, not even his uncle Levi who was known as the strongest fighter on the reservation.
Jared joined the clan with a greenish-gray feather tattoo on his shoulder. No name or other marking, just a fine-lined plume and the knowledge of what it meant. They called themselves the Debwewin Ogichidaag. The True Warriors. They did not care about the white laws of the nation, and strived to live according to their own code. As much as a group of high schoolers could do.
Jared just got out of juvie for petty larceny when he heard about the fire.
The official report printed in the Geshig Herald listed the incident as accidental, resulting from faulty drug-cooking equipment. It was well-known among the clandestine users of Geshig that Lonnie Barclay wasn’t just a dealer; he cooked meth himself. According to the fire marshal, the oven he was using to heat the chemicals caught fire, exploded, and the sole inhabitant was burned to death. Never stood a chance in the blaze.
Jared did not go to Lonnie’s funeral because he couldn’t afford a bus ticket to the distant reservation where his cousin was from. His grandmother would be no help, having decided she would never speak to him after his latest stay in lockup. And Brenda was probably whoring herself out for her next drink, he thought angrily, bitterly, as the tears fell onto the dark ash where Lonnie’s house once stood.
But Jared knew the fire marshal was wrong. This was no accident. Lonnie wasn’t stupid, and there was no doubt in Jared’s mind that this couldn’t have happened to him on his own.
Thanks to his grandmother’s rants and ravings against every tribal politician she knew of, Jared knew where to follow the trail of corruption. The fire marshal was in the pocket of the Anders County sheriff, who was in the pocket of the reservation itself, which was run by the council. And the current tribal chair was one Lindale Kelliher, whose family was pushing as many drugs as they claimed to be fighting.
Jared went over the facts his grandmother told him until he concluded two things: This was arson. And the arsonist would pay.
Drum and Dance
ON HIS FIFTEENTH BIRTHDAY, Kayden brought a leather pouch full of pipe tobacco to his drum teacher.
“Will you find me a name?” he asked her in Ojibwe. Cecilia made sure she did not cry at the request, accepted the asemaa, and later that night searched for Kayden’s real name. When she found it, she planned a celebration dinner for the immediate Kelliher family, as was custom.
Kayla Kelliher had signed Kayden up for Drum and Dance the day after he called her woman, and every Wednesday night he learned from Cecilia Aysibohn what most Indian boys would learn from men. For that exact reason, it was a small class. No parents had said it out loud, but the attendance was down to less than a quarter of what it was the year before.
Cecilia Aysibohn’s drumming caused controversy during the first powwow she attended, but it never stopped her from the beat. There was further controversy when she became the music instructor at Geshig High School.
Whoever heard of such a thing? A woman on the drum, pounding the taut, dried skin and wailing out the songs only men were meant to.
At least in Geshig there was controversy. Some reservations did not have the same sort of taboo, but to cover her ass, Cecilia asked permission from a medicine man to sing. Or so she claimed. Whenever she was asked who gave her the blessing to take a man’s seat at the drum, she gave a diff
erent name. There was no database of accredited elders or spiritual leaders in North America. If the name and the story sounded correct, who was to stop Cecilia Aysibohn from singing or teaching?
But Kayden didn’t care about who was teaching once he saw the dewe’igan. He had never drummed before but at first sight of the big circle of splotched brown hide, he ran to a seat, picked up a drum beater, and sang.
His first attempt at sound was a series of loud, monotone yahs that had Cecilia holding back her laughter. It seemed as if his voice was not the type for powwow singing, but she would not discourage him.
In time, Kayden found his voice but his dancing was specialized. He couldn’t move to any beat with his legs, clumsy and wild as a spider, but on the basketball court he was as graceful as a shawl dancer. The town watched Kayden glow on the court, and Cecilia saw it in a dream.
“I dreamed the name Waasegiizhig. Glowing Sky,” she announced at his dinner.
“Oh.” Kayden laughed uncomfortably. “I lost ten bucks. I bet my mom it would be the Wolfman.”
Though he was good at pretending, she noticed the slight fall of his smile when she said it out loud the first time. Disappointment. He was a young man, after all, and he probably wanted a name that made him sound tough. But her dream did not lie. She took him aside and told him what was rightfully only meant for his ears.
“I saw this town in my dream. I saw a great curtain of fog roll over, but it was black like smoke. But wherever you walked, the smoky fog went away. You’re the future, Kayden, the light of the town. Geshig. Waasegiizhig . . .”
The big points of his teeth finally showed in his smile, and he hugged her. “Miigwech, gikinoo’amaagewikwe.”
Cecilia was so overwhelmed with pride and gratitude, so focused on watching the light amid that fog, that she didn’t think it strange when Kayden did not leave the party with his mother.
Instead, Kayden left with his cousin Dominic, who he told to meet him at the door near the end of the party.
Far out of town, away from the town’s silly dancing and basketball, Kayden, Dominic, and a handful of other boys began to crack open bottles of malt liquor around a campfire. Though he was not supposed to reveal it just yet, the others coaxed and hazed him into telling them his new name.
“Ay! Waase!”
“Waasay!”
They raised their bottles to the name and saluted the gang.
“Indian Bloodz for life.”
The light of Geshig clinked his bottle and concurred. “NDN Bloodz for life.”
Medicine Wheel
THE FIRST STAB WAS the only one he felt and it was the only one needed for him to realize life was now minutes, if even. Kayden’s life did not flash before his eyes; there were not enough memories for that. Instead, he had two thoughts, one for the future and one for the past.
His daughter or son, whatever it may be, he hoped they would be loved, be happy, and never experience this kind of pain. He would never hold a baby in his arms, something he had only done once before as a toddler. So, he thought of that and imagined instead it was his own.
Kayden prayed as hard as he could for the child in his arms, and when he was done he saw the red glow of the past. The bright glass beads on a bandolier bag, a medicine wheel. The color of zhaawanong, the south.
The color of a red-hot sun that was setting and leaving behind nothing but dirt on a darkling hill. Instead of flat on the ground, Kayden felt his body was now leaning against that hill and above him, the face of the girl he loved. She refused to climb the rest of the way without him but eventually was urged onward by small, shadowy hands on her stomach and as she reached the summit she did not look back.
The beads on the medicine wheel shattered, and Kayden felt himself drift into the air from the second hill of summer to deep black winter. He could see nothing but ishpiming. Up above. Slowly, points of light appeared. Not stars but not unlike stars. It was as if he was under a black sheet tattered with small holes, and through each shone the most beautiful light.
He felt his body fade away as he reached up to touch the sky.
Five
What Mothers Do
WHEN I WAKE UP, Shannon’s body and arms are wrapped around me from behind and I’m sweating from the heat of his body. My head hurts and my throat is dry. Too much whiskey and weed. But I feel his chest moving and his breath on the back of my slick neck, and smile.
“You okay to talk yet?” I ask.
“Mmm, can’t we just enjoy this?” He squeezes me tighter.
“I guess, but you’re the one that wanted to come over.”
“And I can still change my mind.”
“Okay. But can we talk about anything?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about your job.”
“It’s a resort. There’s a lake and there’s woods. Not much to say . . .” Goose bumps rush down my neck and I try to shake away from his wet grip. “Well, actually, we think there’s been a wolf out there.”
“Why?”
We peel our bodies away from each other. “We’re finding a lot of dead animals around.”
I watch Shannon get dressed. He wears tight gray boxer briefs with a shiny waistband and designer label. When we first met he only wore plain boxers with dull checkered designs but as the summer went on his attire became conspicuously smaller and more colorful. His overall hygiene and look improved too. Part of me does miss the smell of the lake and sweat that used to cling to him.
“What do you do with the remains?”
“I just find a spot in the woods and bury them.”
“Has anyone seen the wolf?”
“There’s been a few reports but it’s always on the move. Did you see it?”
“A wolf? No.” Not a lie. When he is fully dressed, he sits back on the bed. Usually he makes his getaway a lot quicker. His fingers are tapping on the mattress and his feet are tapping on the floor. He sighs. “I don’t know what to say.”
I lean over and run my fingers over his hand. “You could say why you keep coming over. You could say what you actually want.”
“No answer for that either.”
“Wife? Kids? Live in Geshig forever?”
“No, fuck no, and yes.”
“What about . . .” I stop myself before I blurt out the word husband. “A boyfriend.”
“That won’t work.”
“Is that an assumption or experience?”
“It’s my family. Some things are better left unsaid.”
I don’t know much about the Harstads but it’s not too far-fetched to imagine them as that kind of family, even on a reservation. Could be Christian, could be secular. If he thinks it’s better to stay closeted to them, he probably knows their initial reaction wouldn’t be good.
“Do you have anything to eat?” he asks.
“Haven’t shopped lately. Just go through the kitchen and try whatever looks edible.”
I drag myself out of bed and put on clothes while he rifles through the cupboards. I let Basil out the front door and then pick up my phone from the couch cushions where I left it last night. My mother has replied five times to my text, called twice, and has left one voice mail. Each message progressively gets more worried in that motherly kind of way that is sweet and overbearing. I call her right away without checking the voice mail.
She answers on the second ring.
“Hey, Mom. I’m doing fine.”
“You need to start answering your phone more, brat.”
Shannon peeks his head around the corner and watches me talk. “Sorry. I meant to reply last night but I was . . .” Shannon smiles. “Walking my dog.”
“You haven’t killed him yet?”
“No. He’s doing fine.”
“Anni says he’ll take it off your hands anytime you want if you can’t handle it.”
“Stop trying to take my dog away.”
“I’m just saying. So why did you ask to come down here? Is there something wrong?”
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“No. Just wanted to see you. And Anni, I guess.”
“Honestly, Marion, I don’t know how a child of mine could be such a bad liar.” I hear the loud, gruff laugh of my stepfather, Aanakwad, in the background. “Just head down when you’re free and we’ll talk.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too, kiddo.”
When I hang up Shannon laughs. “You sounded like a kid just now.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m the same way when my dad calls me. Sometimes he needs help with yard work but it sounds like he’s telling me rather than asking me.”
In the kitchen, Shannon has made two sandwiches with peppered turkey. He has already bit into his. “What the hell kind of bread is this? It tastes like black licorice.”
“Licorice? What? It’s pumpernickel. It doesn’t taste like licorice.”
“Yes it does.”
I take a bite of mine just to see if this loaf was made differently. I buy it from a small bakery downtown. “It’s a sweet bread, but I don’t know where you’re getting the licorice taste. Can you finish it?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Just weird. We only get white bread, so I’m used to that.”
“Yuck. This is way better.”
In between bites, we sit in an awkward silence and give each other the occasional glance. It always slips my mind until moments like this that beyond the sex, we don’t have much in common and even less to talk about. Probably the second most awkward breakfast I’ve had since moving back to Half Lake.
“Do you have cable? Wanna watch the game?”
“Sure.” I have no idea what game he means. I assume football since it’s that time of year, but it could be something else for all I know.
In the living room he grabs the remote, falls back on the couch, and flips through the channels. I let Basil back inside and he begins to pad around the house restlessly. At first I sit on the farther end of the couch, but Shannon motions for me to scoot closer. He pulls me over him so that the front of my body is on his and my head is between his chest and his arm.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I tell him as the men on the screen pile on each other.
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