I remember that the sky was dark. There was no moon and the stars did not give much light. But still, I could see his face when I knelt to him. His eyes were scared but when he saw me, he smiled his wolf grin and grabbed my hand.
The Arsonist
I CALLED THE COPS with Kayden’s cell phone. And then I hid it in my shirt. If you read the reports, you won’t see it listed at the crime scene. It was found later in his bedroom, where I hid it after reading through and deleting his messages.
When I knew he was dead, I lost all control of my thoughts. I was screaming and crying and yet somehow I had managed to find his cell phone in his sweater, make the call, and then hide it.
I had had my suspicions about him for a while. Ever since the fight between him and Jared, I knew there were parts of his life that he did not tell me about but that was easy to ignore when he was holding my hand and treating me like a princess.
I don’t know how I ended up at my grandmother’s house but I woke up the next morning aching all over. My eyes, my head, my chest. My stomach. I held my stomach and prayed for hours. I was so scared that I was going to lose Maya that my body was shaking. I just knew it was going to happen any moment.
Kayden wanted children so badly. He had wanted to be a father for so long and he wasn’t going to be. I called out his name over and over. When my voice was gone and my tears were dried, it was then I noticed that my stomach no longer hurt. I stopped worrying. I kept grieving but I stopped worrying.
When I could pull myself out of bed I took a shower and then finally opened the cell phone. Kayden wasn’t stupid. Most of the gang members weren’t but there was one who stupidly made his text signature ~NDN BLOODZ 4 LIFE!~. Even if it hadn’t been there, I could read between the lines of the texts and see that Kayden was in the gang. The very last text he got was a warning from an unknown number that Levi Dotson was on his way to kick your ass for burning Lonnie’s house. I could barely hold the phone.
That’s what Kayden died for. Lonnie Barclay’s meth house.
Did he burn it down? I don’t know. I’ll never know and I don’t care, but regardless of if he did, it doesn’t mean he deserved what happened. I struggled with that for a long time, Marion. Wondering how I could grieve for a man I loved who did things I despised. Things that took my father away from me. Kayden knew that, and he joined the gang anyway and hid it from me.
You know the rumors about the tribal council, right? Well, I can’t confirm any of those, but I know two things happened in the year after Kayden’s death. My mother, still married to my father, got an approval for a new house to be built. She’d only meant to request some funds for repairs, but the offices urged her to apply and they expedited it.
Then later that year, another woman got a house too. Brenda Haltstorm. She still lives there. I don’t know her well, but Kayden’s mom says she’s doing better. Anyway, she lived in a bad trailer on the edge of town and also found herself approved for a building project. The tribal college kids built it, so the council basically paid themselves.
Odd, isn’t it? The wife of a prisoner, a known gang leader, gets a free house, same as the mother of a murderer, a murderer who was in the same gang.
Now, I’ve got no proof of this or I would’ve come forward long ago. But I never visited my father after that. Maybe I will, but I ain’t in a hurry for it. I know the day I do, the only thing I’m going to ask him is why, and no matter what he says, I’m gonna walk away no worse for wear. Because I’ve already been through the worst.
No, I don’t grieve for Kayden every day. I don’t grieve for him in the way I used to. I will miss Kayden every day of my life, and I see his face every time I look at Maya, but sometimes I can’t even remember that part of my life easily. I only remember being pregnant and crying over a man who betrayed me by joining a gang, but who I loved with every part of my being, my spirit.
Thirteen
The Basketball Champion
WHEN GERLY FINISHES, SHE smiles and shrugs. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Kayden, but if it’s real . . . you can understand, I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Understand completely. I don’t even want to be a part of it.”
“That’s life, kid. Look, I’ve already shed my tears for Kayden. Now and then I wake up after dreaming of him and maybe there’s a small tear or two. I know I’ll never be over it but I’m comfortable where I’m at with him. I don’t need to revisit.”
“Thank you for telling me all that, Gerly. I’m sorry you had to though.” I laugh. “If all this is real, he probably planned this, so maybe it was inevitable.”
“Spirits can be bitches like that.”
She stands and walks to the front of the room. The crucifix hangs above like it’s waiting for her. “So, your turn. Tell me about Gordon.”
“It’s stupid. Nowhere near as . . . meaningful as your story.”
“Tell it anyway, kid.”
“Do you remember I used to live in Minneapolis?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s why I moved back to Geshig.”
It started in my second year at a tech college. I was going for a general business degree, but didn’t have a lot of passion for it. I was good at the accounting courses but even that late into the program I wasn’t sure if it was what I really wanted.
There was a lot of want from me in those days. Pining for something more out of life. Then I discovered meeting men through the Internet, through phone apps, and I thought my calling had been found. I wasn’t destined to be a businessman. I was destined to do business with men.
In my first semester of college, I met a man named Gordon through one of the apps. He was a bit older than me, thirty when I was still eighteen. He was my first boyfriend, but I left him the night after we first had sex because it freaked me out. I’d only been out to my mother, no one else, and being that sort of intimate with a man was a big step I wasn’t ready to take.
Two years after I left him, I saw his obituary. Meth overdose. I had no one to tell this to, not my mother, not a friend in the world who would understand.
I couldn’t be in the city that introduced me to him so I fled back home to Geshig. It’s been five years and I’m still in this town.
Gerly listens to me silently and smiles when I finish. “I’m a lifer here. I got no reason to leave, and I don’t want to. But you don’t belong here. You don’t even live in Geshig, but it seems like Half Lake ain’t your town either, kid.”
“I’ve wanted to leave for a while now.”
She pats me on the shoulder. “You’ll have to say goodbye to Maya first.”
“You sure? Do you trust him?”
“Not entirely. But I’m not worried.” Gerly walks to the altar and lights a branch of sage and sweetgrass in a cowrie shell. “I know she’ll be safe.”
OUTSIDE AT THE PARK, Gerly sits down on a bench. Maya runs over from the basketball court. Her breathing is quick, but she doesn’t look tired out. She holds a faded black basketball between her forearm and her hip.
“Uncle Marion is out of practice,” Gerly says. “You should show him how to play twenty-one.”
“But he’s taller than me!”
“Your dad wasn’t that tall and he was the best.”
“Okay. You ready, punk?” Maya says. Suddenly her voice isn’t soft and cheery, but a commanding bite.
She quickly goes over her rules for twenty-one—Kayden’s rules, which her older cousins taught her—and we begin.
I don’t like basketball. Or most sports really, but something about basketball is particularly boring to the point of contempt. Maybe it’s because I never played but went to a high school that revolved around it. Or maybe it’s because I don’t like fish tanks. I find nothing entertaining in staring at living things moving back and forth in an enclosed space.
But clearly I’m in the minority. I’ve seen enough enthusiasm on the rez to know that. Did you know you can just order a trophy from a company and engrave it howev
er you want? I ordered myself a trophy in the exact size, shape, and fake plastic luster as the one state basketball championship trophy that sits in my high school’s awards cabinet. Except instead of being about basketball, my trophy says Marion Lafournier, World’s Biggest Cynic. And really, who could blame me?
A billboard in the middle of this town tells the children PLAY BALL, DON’T SMOKE METH.
As if basketball ever really saved any Indian from it. Near as I can tell, all it does is build up expectations and make the desire for mental escape even stronger when those expectations fail. A state championship near loss is still a loss. Tears are on the court. A small town puts on the face of pride, but everyone is filled with shame and regret. The star player enters adulthood at a loss for purpose, gets a job at the casino or tribal office, drinks, smokes, and breeds. Repeat.
A more accurate message on the billboard might be PLAY BALL, DEFINE YOUR LIFE BY YOUR LOVE OF IT, AND THEN TURN TO METH WHEN THE COLD, HARD FACTS OF LIFE SHATTER YOUR DREAMS.
Yes, I’ve earned that trophy. And Kayden earned his.
Kayden Kelliher spent years playing basketball. He trained his whole life for the championship and earned the first-place ribbon around his neck. And in the end, none of it mattered as he bled out in his backyard. Jared Haltstorm will only return to this town to be buried. Basketball did nothing to save either of them.
Maya scores the first point easily. I stumble around awkwardly, partially out of fear of tripping and falling into her small frame. After each point, the opposing team gets the shot, but they have to start at the half-court line and make the same shot as the previous one. Kind of like horse, but no penalties for missing, nor are there any breaks. The other team has to get the ball and defend quick as they can, no mercy. Eventually, there seem to be no rules at all.
And I miss. I miss every shot until Maya gets to ten points, basically halfway over with.
I am out of breath. I am hacking my weed-coated lungs out. I am . . .
The first point that is not Maya’s is scored. The ball falls through the net with a crisp swish. It rebounds to the girl’s hands and she sets the next play with a shot from the three-point line, and it just barely swirls into the rim.
The next shot leaves these hands from the same line and glides into the hoop, and again, and again. The two combatants circle around and around the half-court and soon they are neck and neck: twenty points to twenty points. And the final point goes to the girl after she narrowly misses a block by the boy who stares at her in fierce admiration.
“That’s game,” Maya says, turning back to the boy.
And then the basketball champion kisses his daughter on the forehead.
The black dots, the kind of fuzzy vision you get when standing up too fast, that’s what happens to me when Kayden leaves. I can’t see where he goes but I know he is no longer with me, and not with Maya, or with Gerly, who stares at us with tears in her eyes.
“That was . . . a good game,” she says. “A damn good game.”
I grab my stomach. “I need water. Or a stretcher.”
Gerly grabs Maya’s hand and they walk back to the church. I wave them off and take a short walk around the park to catch my breath.
On the far side, the merry-go-round is gone and left behind is a small patch of thin grass. No skeleton underneath, no dog, no Kayden.
Just a forgotten rumor.
Fourteen
Hey, Lumberjack
THE FIRST TIME YOU met the girl, it was while wearing a red flannel shirt, tight blue jeans, and an olive-green hat with a walleye with a hook in its mouth embroidered on the front. She walked right up to you at the bar and said, “Hey, lumberjack.”
At first you thought she wasn’t local. Most girls are used to the sight of guys like you, and rarely do they prance over so confidently and demand attention.
She called herself Jeanie, short for Jeanette, and from the first moment she spoke her eyes couldn’t stop falling to your beard and below. Just like Marion. All he ever does is stare at your beard while rubbing your chest hair and waiting for another kiss.
So, you decided that this girl was the one. Right when she looked into your eyes and giggled at something dumb you said. That’s when you knew it was right.
There was no waiting, no long courtship or dates. She fed you shots of tequila while she nursed a Guinness and eventually a tall glass called a Gets-Me-Naked was brought out with two straws. It tasted like a watermelon got fucked by acetone but it delivered what it promised.
Somehow, you two ended up back at her place. You don’t remember the how but that wasn’t important, only what happened next.
Kissing. Lots of it, and moans. Hers.
A belt unbuckled, a skirt unzipped, and then your face tickling her thighs as she held your head between her trembling hands.
Because you’re a man’s man. You’re not some faggot who likes to kiss men with prickly beards or big muscles. You love pussy. You love women.
Marion would hate me if he knew.
That was all you could think about as you fucked her. Or she fucked you. The Gets-Me-Naked got right on top of you, so she took control while you laid back and waited for the big finish.
She got hers and you pretended you got yours, and then you passed out with your arms wrapped around her. She was either asleep or pretending to be when you whispered, “Marion,” because the next day she didn’t kick you out. The night did not end.
The girl who called you lumberjack keeps in contact with you, and these messages you don’t erase right away. You keep them sacred instead of erasing them like his. Finally, a person you don’t hide from. A body you don’t feel disgusted by when you’re done.
A person your family would be proud to know.
Hey, lumberjack, maybe you finally found a wife.
MARION HASN’T TEXTED SINCE the day down at the Quarry Way cemetery, but you don’t care. You’ve moved on, he’s moved on, it’s over.
The girl is planning a dinner. She wants the meeting with the parents to go well, and it apparently involves switching between several cookbooks, setting the table just right, and keeping her apartment in top shape, not one knickknack or decorative pillow out of place.
She’s a perfectionist, not like him.
His bedroom was a pigsty, and his house wasn’t much better. It smelled like dog hair and shit, and a cheap attempt to cover it with a eucalyptus-oil diffuser that always made your nose feel funny when you woke up.
The girl knows how to keep a clean house. She knows how to cook, and most importantly, how to order you around. Table setting, measuring out food, pouring just the right amount of red wine and not a drop more. All things you do at her behest, and not in a commanding way.
Like a grandmother, she has a soft voice as she says, “Shannon, could you bring me the colander?” for her boiled potatoes, hand-peeled. The lines she traces on your shoulder when you complete the task, you could live for this. You’d give up everything to live for this.
The doorbell rings and the parents arrive, her mother and father.
They are everything you expect to have raised this angel from the bar. God-fearing and folksy, like a couple straight out of Fargo, almost like your own parents. The type who could raise a girl that drinks dark beers and hard liquor, rough and tumble in the streets, a picturesque woman in the kitchen. This is what it’s all about.
Marion wouldn’t know how to talk to this couple. He’d make it political, mention something about them living on stolen land or their white privilege or something else soapboxy. He’s a stubborn man, but she’s the perfect girl.
You pass the evening with flying colors, answer every question her father has about your job, your retirement plans, the type of truck you drive and the teams you root for, and you glow for the mother who has always wanted a son. She would be doting on you if the girl wasn’t already doing that.
Hey, lumberjack, you’ve found the perfect family.
You don’t even know anything about Marion
’s family.
THE DOORBELL RINGS ON a day when your roommate isn’t home and standing on the porch with a rolled-up towel in hand is a wiry, older Ojibwe woman with raspberry-chocolate hair and a smile like a romance novel ending. Something about her just screams gorgeous to you, as if you met your soul mate but thirty years too late.
“Shannon? You look so handsome.” That novel smile has a secret, some kind of twist ending that you don’t like.
“Do I know you, ma’am?”
“You used to come over when you were just a boy, so maybe. My name is Hazel. You and my son Marion used to be friends.”
Life freezes for what feels like ten long, painful, torturous seconds. Bezhig, niizh, niswi . . .
“What did he tell you?” The words can barely squeeze through your clenched teeth.
“What world do you live in where Native boys talk to their mothers?” Her smile is coy, and you lose your temper.
“You got three seconds to tell me what you’re doing here, lady, or I slam the door in your face.”
“I know what he sees in you now.” She laughs, a deep smoky kind of laughter. “If you’re scared, we can take this inside. I would like to talk to you about something.”
“That’s not what I asked for.”
“I can tell you why it’s not working between you two. Why it may never work.”
You feel the urge to fill with hot anger and scream at this bitch’s face. Nothing ever needs to “work” because you don’t do shit with guys, you’re not a faggot. You’re going to tell that to this woman’s face and then shut the door.
“Okay . . . Come in.”
In the living room, you bring her a cup of dark coffee and then pace around. How long until the roommate comes home? Is it an early day at work for him? What if he walks in, what do you say?
“Has my son told you anything about our family?”
“I don’t remember.”
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