This Town Sleeps

by Dennis E. Staples

  Except instead of an oak tree, there is a sweat lodge. It’s a big dome, about the size of one storage unit, and covered in a pale tan canvas. Nearby is a small flickering firepit surrounded by rocks. Anni parks next to the owner’s station wagon and I park behind it in case he wants to leave before me.

  We both step outside and wait. I expect the guy to walk out of the sweat lodge wearing all buckskin but instead he walks out the front door in flannel and jeans.

  It’s hard not to react to the sight. This guy is like an Indian Grim Reaper. His skin is coarse, dark brown with liver spots like a loaf of raisin bread. Tufts of white hair hang out from a navy baseball cap like out-turned pockets. He smiles, but the few teeth he has left are toffee brown and do nothing to improve the unsettling look.

  The eyes are the worst. Clearly bloodshot, but the whites are more like yellows, only visible at the edges of his giant irises. They look like they dried out years ago and he covered them in layers of clear nail polish to hold them in. If I met this man anywhere else, I would assume my time had come.

  “Aaniin, noozhis.”

  His voice is as friendly as any Indian grandpa’s. “I’ll leave you to it . . .” Anni shakes the man’s hand and walks inside. I assume he’s going to fall asleep or watch the ball game.

  The old man approaches me slowly, a regular walk that doesn’t hold any sign of age. I expect him to offer a handshake but he waits.

  “Oh! Right, um, here ya go.” I hand him a bag of cherry-scented tobacco that Anni had at his house. “My stepfather told me a phrase to say in Ojibwe but I’ll be honest, I completely spaced it out.”

  “That’s okay, noozhis. He told me a little about why you’re here.” The man pulls out a phone from his pocket and reads a text message. It’s a smartphone. Even more technologically advanced than Anni’s.

  “I didn’t catch your name, sir.”

  “Ask me then.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “In Ojibwe. Try ‘Aaniin ezhinikaazoyan?’”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Aaniin ezhinikaazoyan?”

  “My colonial name is Carey. Ataage indizhinikaaz.”

  “Okay.” My Ojibwe may be rusty, but I believe he said Ataage is my traditional name.

  “No use wasting time,” he says as he takes off his hat and starts to undo the buttons on his flannel. “Young Aanakwad tells me you have some maji-manidoo following you.”

  I suppose a guy that looks like Carey could call anyone young. “Yeah, a ghost or a zombie, something like that.”

  Carey starts to laugh and fully remove his shirt. “Children always have the biggest imagination. Ghosts aren’t real, noozhis. That’s white-people shit. What you’ve seen is a manidoo.”

  “Um . . .”

  “You’re not undressing,” he says. “I hope you’re not uncomfortable. The young bucks today all seem to live inside their clothes like turtles.”

  I pull my shirt off without hesitation. “Trust me. I have no problem taking my clothes off in front of men.”

  I stand there naked as he carefully places a basket of hot rocks inside the sweat lodge, next to a small fire in the center. He gestures for me to join just as he pours water over the rocks from a faded ice cream bucket. The steam fills the dim enclosure and instantly my skin is slick and warm, like a humid summer night washing over me all at once, except there’s no tent, river, or ex-boyfriend.

  Carey sits with his legs spread as if advertising, but I know attraction when I see it and this is not it. This is just a man of another time, no shame or fear of his own parts. I sit with my legs crossed. Not out of shame but because the floor of this sweat lodge is just old pine boughs that become soft and muddy as the steam slicks every inch it can waft into.

  “I’ll begin with a prayer.” Carey begins an invocation in Ojibwe and sprinkles tobacco over the fire in rhythm with his vocal emphasis. His eyes close but I just sit there and wait. The heat inside the lodge is building and I can feel my own sweat joining the mist, like a sauna after a night in a hot tub.

  “Have you ever sat and listened to nature?” Carey asks.

  “No.”

  “Do you pray?”

  “No.”

  “Do you prefer white men or Indian men in your bed?”

  “Um. That’s a little private, isn’t it?”

  “We’re naked.”

  “Even so . . . Why does it matter?”

  “Might explain why you think so much like a white man.” He laughs. “No Ojibwe name, no prayers. I can feel it in your energy. You don’t respect me or this ceremony.”

  I shrug. “You got me there.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know—I guess—maybe I’d like to know a little bit about your qualifications? Do you have a degree in medicine?”

  “Even better. I’m a card-carrying member of the Board of Shamans. BS for short.” Carey pulls out a card from a bison-skin wallet. “Proof.”

  “This is a strip of birch bark.” I turn it over. “And you drew a cock on it!”

  “You have what the white folks call a lack of faith.” Carey laughs. “You’re gonna need to trust me.”

  “What do Indians call a lack of faith?”

  “Being white.”

  Carey begins to rattle on for what I think is about fifteen minutes. I can’t really tell because the heat of the lodge is finally getting to me. My breathing is hot and dry, like I’m sitting inside the onset of a fever. I feel my eyes closing, but I make myself sit up straight and listen to his spiel.

  “Our people knew that every living thing has a spirit. And when the white men in lab coats looked in their microscopes, they found out humans and animals and plants all share the same kind of stuff in their bodies. Atoms, and carbons. Or what we called spirit. So, you see, Indians knew the truth about the world before any white scientist.”

  “That all sounds fascinating, but I don’t feel too good.”

  “You’re opening up your mind!” He raises his arms and looks toward the ceiling. “Let the spirits take you away!”

  “I need a drink. Do you have any soda?”

  “Tough it out, kid. Be a real Indian. Ogichidaa. I know it when I see it, gwiiwizens. You’re a warrior. Like me.”

  “You don’t look like a warrior. You look like a dried potato.” Did I say that out loud? I really can’t tell anymore; the heat is too intense.

  The old man stared right into my steam-cooked eyes and sat forward. “Do you want to know the finest act of my life? My defining moment as an Ojibwe warrior.”

  “I guess.”

  “I blew up Mount Rushmore.”

  I laugh, and the dryness of my mouth causes it to spurt out like a broken squeak toy. “What?”

  “I defaced that ugly rock forever. Would you like to hear that story before we talk about your name?”

  “I got nowhere else to be.” I feel my head and shoulders rock back and forth. This feeling . . . it’s not all that different from being baked out of my fucking mind. A ringing starts inside my ears, like I can feel the shape of the canals and the eardrums pulsing with the steam. And then the only thing I can hear is Carey’s voice.

  I looked up at those faces and thought, fuck, these white rats are ugly. Great White Fathers? Good thing us apples fell far from the tree. I was with AIM back then.

  The American Indian Movement?

  Yes, gwiiwizens. I knew all those guys. But I had to prove myself because I had just recently come back from ’Nam. That’s where I learned how to make bombs.

  What kind of bomb did you make?

  A small one. Like the size of a cherry. I thought it would be funny lighting a cherry bomb on Slave Master Washington’s cunt face. Anyway, I had to prove myself to the honchos in charge so I whipped up a bomb, brought it right to the tip-top of the mountain and I lit it. At first I tried to run away, but when I looked back and saw the wick shrinking, I knew this was how I wanted to go out. I wanted to ride the crumbles of these white rats all the way down until I was cru
shed to death. I’d be a hero for the ages.

  But you didn’t do it.

  Of course I did, gwiiwizens! I just survived, and then ran away before the park rangers could arrest me.

  That’s a neat story. Except for the part where Mount Rushmore is still there, but, ya know, a good story.

  Carey’s eyes bore into mine with cherry-red lines on the yellowing whites. “So, you’ve been there? You’ve been to Mount Rushmore and know it’s there?”

  “No. But—”

  “Then how do you know it’s there?”

  “Because . . . I mean, it’s not exactly something you can hide. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories.”

  “Ah. So that’s what you’re taking from this, you can only trust what you see with your own eyes?”

  “I don’t feel good. You sure you don’t have like a Sprite or a Heineken in here?”

  “Tell me what you saw. Again. Tell me what you saw.”

  I try to speak but my throat is burning, and the headache has spread all across my forehead and through my eyes. “I saw a dog. It came back to life from underneath some playground equipment. And it led me to Kayden Kelliher’s grave.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Why?” he shouts.

  “I don’t fucking know, asshole!”

  “Why?” His scream echoes across the sweat lodge like a cannon and then his voice changes. His mouth moves but it’s not his voice. The dead marble eyes glower like a spinning nickel.

  “There are four. Worlds. The Ojibwe walk in. But it is not. You. That is walking now.”

  Fuzzy orange lights overtake my eyes and I run out of the sweat lodge. My tongue tastes the sour green grass before my lungs begin to heave and I throw up a rancid mix of bile and coffee.

  After a few minutes of suffering, I feel a jet of moisture across my face. Above me, the medicine man is holding a garden hose and spraying it right into my face.

  “You need to sweat more. Like a real Indian.”

  I snatch the hose from him and inhale as much as I can without drowning myself.

  THE WOULD-BE MEDICINE MAN can’t make a good cup of coffee.

  Inside his house Anni and I are eating bowls of potato soup with specks of disintegrated corned beef. His coffeepot needs a cleaning, for the taste resembles a mix between burned bread and a mouthful of coins. I remember when I was a kid, pennies tasted the worst.

  Anni and Carey are talking about the Vikings season while I sit in silence and wait for words to form. I really can’t speak. It feels like there is a chain-lock on my throat whenever I think I have something to say. The creamy soup is helping but the coffee seems to reset the progress.

  I finish the last bite and take a breath. “Did you shop at Jake’s Hot Springs or Northern Spa Solutions?”

  Carey throws his head back and a laugh like a backfiring car spurts from his throat. “Jake’s. They offered a better interest rate. How could you tell?”

  Back in the sweat lodge, while he was going on about spirits or some shit, I noticed a logo on the side of the benches. It was the logo of a line of spas that rich white people buy to host swinger parties or just because they’re bored with their disposable income, I guess.

  I know this because I sat in a similar sauna and hot tub when a pair of older married men invited me over, gave me champagne, and relived their wild days of youth all over my body. Really makes me question that degree in BS Carey claimed he had.

  “I’m building my own house,” I reply. “Thinking about what kind of spa I’m gonna put in it.”

  Anni knows I’m lying but he knows me well enough to just nod.

  “Well, ya got me. I cut a few corners, but no one should lose faith over it. I am still willing to dream your name, noozhis.”

  “Miigwech. You can just text it to me when you find it.”

  Carey begins a retort but just then my cell phone rings. The screen lights with Shannon’s scruffy face. He never calls, so this must be important.

  I excuse myself and answer.

  “What’s going on?” No use pretending that something isn’t wrong. “Is Basil okay?”

  “I’m sorry, Marion.” Shannon’s voice is flatter than usual. “I—I can’t find him.”

  “Okay. How did that happen?”

  I feel guilty that what he says next affects me more than knowing Basil is gone.

  “My—uh. My girlfriend let him outside this morning. She didn’t think he’d run away.”

  “I’ll be back today.”

  “Marion, I’m s—”

  I hang up the phone and take a deep breath. The red eyes of the Revenant stare into mine again, this time in my stupor from the sweat lodge. Other images flash, ones I couldn’t have ever seen before. A cabin made of red pine. A young girl drinking liquor while her sisters watch.

  A gaunt and tough-faced woman, putting pieces of food on a blackened jawbone.

  I text Shannon. Meet me at my place in two hours. I know exactly where he is.

  Eight

  The Lost Forty

  Hazel

  GOOD MOTHERS DON’T GIVE their sons marijuana.

  Great ones do.

  Hazel repeated this in her mind over and over as she drove away from Marion and the house she and Anni shared. It boiled down to simple actions that her body knew even when cloudy.

  Open door.

  Sit down.

  Seat belt.

  Keys in ignition.

  Leave it all behind.

  The Famous Disappearing Act of Hazel Lafournier.

  Except she knew in the cerulean-moonlit road that she would turn back.

  Stop the car.

  Let it idle.

  Stare into the woods.

  Light another joint.

  And then she would return to wake the dogs and explain to Marion and Anni why she drove off. Again. How long had it been since her last incident? Not anytime recent. Not since her marriage and since Marion moved out for the first time.

  It must have been at least ten years, maybe two years after Kayden’s death. It couldn’t have been right after because she never would have abandoned Kayla in her time of grief, but it was definitely when Marion was in high school.

  Was he mad? She could not remember.

  It seemed like something that should be simple to recall. Was a teenage boy mad at his mother leaving?

  No. When Marion

  was a teenager he

  spent his days in his room

  listening to sad music and pretending.

  On the road ahead of her, the coarse gray of the reservation roads began to turn into a more smooth, slick black. Hazel reached the highway, lit another joint.

  And she left again.

  THE HIGHWAY OUT OF the reservation that led to Fargo began in a series of wide curves and a few small lakes and resorts. Hazel knew the roads well enough to drive in any condition.

  Drunk.

  High.

  Crying because of her mother’s death.

  Crying after her best friend’s son’s death.

  Crying because the smoke

  filled the car and began

  to sting her eyes.

  She opened the windows and the smoke dissipated. Her cell phone rang. Either Anni or Marion, but she did not answer.

  The winding roads eventually flattened out and the highway to Fargo was just one left turn away, a smooth drive with only a handful of traffic lights, little chance of getting stopped by a cop this time of night.

  Only, she did not know whether to turn left or right. She had no idea where she was going to, but she did know that she had options.

  She could turn right and visit Kayla Kelliher in Geshig. Or Brenda Haltstorm. The two women she never thought she would leave behind.

  She could turn left and find wherever Jamison lived in Fargo. Finally tell him to his face about his firstborn son.

  She could turn around and rejoin Anni and Marion, pretend she had never left.

  But t
hey knew, and she knew more than anyone, that once a person leaves their life behind, however temporarily, there is no apology that will wipe it away. Hazel and Eunice would always be the mothers who left.

  No, that’s not true, she knew. They weren’t like she had been to her mother, vicious, resentful, unforgiving. She could be gone for days and Anni and Marion wouldn’t hate her. It was she who had the problem with leaving, both forgiving her mother and forgiving herself.

  The eyes of the wolf had caused her to leave, and now the headlights approaching in the mirror behind her hastened her decision.

  Left

  Right

  Left

  Right

  Simple as that, she told herself. Simple as that.

  SHE WANTED TO WALK out on her second baby’s life because her first had walked out on her. Or rather, he stopped breathing and then left her body without a goodbye. Jamison would have talked her out of it upon her first doubt. Had he known she was pregnant again.

  “Did you know some Ojibwe can see the future?” he said the night they met, with a big smile full of dark, tobacco-stained teeth. “I see a lot of you in mine.”

  Now she sat in an empty apartment and wished she had never inflicted herself onto that man’s future in any way.

  Hazel met Jamison Reyes not long after her twenty-first birthday at a dive bar in Minneapolis. She and a friend from work were shooting pool and tequila and two women alone in a bar were bound to attract some kind of attention. She was not really looking for a man’s attention, but when Jamison gave it to her she seemed to crave it like a fresh pack of cigarettes. The day after, when she woke up in his bed with no memory of the night before, he claimed he saved her from starting a bar brawl with a group of white college girls.

  From the moment he first challenged her to a game of eight ball, her impulse to clash was always met. They fought harder and with more vitriol and passion than she and her mother, Eunice, ever had. She had never known a man worthier of fighting with than Jamison, or of making love with, or walking with, driving with, smoking weed with, anything two people in love could do.