Red Earth White Earth Read online

  Often they played in the scrap-iron pile beside the machine shed. There they tied worn harrow teeth to sticks and made spears. The rusted iron plates of a field disk were shields. A length of old sewer pipe bolted to a rusted wheelbarrow became a cannon. Discarded grease guns made natural ray guns. From old tractor seats, sheets of tin, and a broken, treadle-powered grindstone, they constructed a space ship complete with a sparking alien death-ray beam.

  But most often they played race and chase. They ran among the square buildings until their backs trickled wet with sweat and their skin glowed with heat. They tackled and tagged each other, then ran again. As the summer progressed Tom got to stay a little longer each time he came. That was because Madeline and Mary LittleWolf talked. At first the two mothers stood together for a few minutes on the front steps. Later they sat on the front steps in the shade. Once Guy saw that both of them held glasses of something cold to drink. Toward the end, the hottest part of the summer, the two women went inside the house. Tom’s father sat motionless in the Pontiac.

  When Tom’s mother came out with the eggs, Tom immediately stopped their game and followed her in silence to the car. He never said good-bye. In the Pontiac he sat straight and did not wave as he left. Soon the car shimmered into the dust. Its blue shape wavered, shrank, then disappeared. And Guy was left alone again on the flat, dry lawn among the tall buildings.

  Once after the Pontiac had gone Guy was in the house drinking his third glass of ice water. On the table were Madeline’s and Mary’s glasses, empty but for thin droopy ice cubes and wilty moons of lemon slices. There was a plate of gingersnaps, still warm. Guy took another. That day he was very hungry. He and Tom had played a long time. Then the porch door slammed as his father came in.

  “So what have you boys been up to all afternoon?” Martin asked. His father was thin and tall and sandy-haired and stoop-shouldered from the dairy cows. Martin looked at the iced-tea glasses.

  “Playing,” Guy answered. He was still out of breath.

  “Playing. There’s work to be done on Saturdays, too, you know.”

  Guy was silent. He looked at Madeline. His mother was short and brown-haired, not from Minnesota. She began to clear the table.

  “You better cut down on that running around,” he said. His eyes were on Madeline. On the lemonade glasses. “Those Indians stay longer every time they come.”

  Madeline turned from the sink to look at Martin. “What do you mean, ‘those Indians’?” she asked.

  “The family with the black hair and brown eyes, they’re Indians, I’d say,” Martin said.

  “LittleWolf is their name. You know that. Mary and Warren LittleWolf. And Tom.”

  “Warren,” Martin said. “He’s the one who never gets out of the car. Wonder why that is?” He laughed once.

  “Likely for the same reason you stay in the barn when they’re here.”

  Martin fell silent. A tiny muscle along his jaw began to move. “Mary, eh? Well, that’s real friendly. But you better not start that. You shouldn’t encourage them.”

  “Encourage them?”

  Martin swung his arm at the plate of cookies, at the two empty glasses. “You do this, they stay longer. Just sell them the eggs. That’s all they come for.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being neighborly,” Madeline said.

  “They’re not neighbors,” Martin said.

  “I’d say they were,” Madeline said immediately. “I enjoy talking to Mary.”

  “What can you have to talk about?”

  Madeline spoke quickly; her words sliced through the air like tiny whips. “We’re both women,” she said.

  Martin turned, slammed the screen door, and was gone.

  In two Saturdays the LittleWolfs’ car came again. But Guy and Tom had hardly begun their play when Guy noticed his father standing framed in the barn door. He was watching. Tom shouted but Guy missed the ball. It bounced across the driveway and rolled close to the Pontiac. Guy ran after it, then slowed to a walk as he neared the car. For the first time he saw, close-up, Tom’s father. He had thick black hair that stood straight up in a long, sharp crew-cut. He had a wide face, small eyes, and his chin jutted forward like a fist. His chin looked large because he had no teeth, and his lips had shrunk back over his gums. From the car came the strong smell of peppermint.

  Guy stared. But Warren LittleWolf did not see him. He was staring across the yard at Martin. Martin suddenly stepped through the barn door into daylight and stalked toward the house, where Madeline and Mary LittleWolf had gone inside. As Martin quickly crossed the yard, Tom’s father tooted the Pontiac’s horn once. Then again. But Martin had reached the front door by then. Guy and Tom turned to watch. From inside the house they heard loud voices. Then Tom’s mother came quickly, almost stumbling, down the steps. She walked rapidly across the lawn. Tom ran to join her. This time when the Pontiac pulled away its wheels spun and snarled across the gravel.

  Guy stood in the empty yard. A bumblebee droned by. In the windbreak a cicada buzzed. From inside the house he could hear his parents shouting. He heard something crash and break. He saw his father come out of the house backward, then cross the yard to the barn. Guy went to the shade of the red oak and waited. In a few minutes his mother came from the house. She carried a small suitcase, got in their car, and started the engine. She stopped the car by the driveway and the red oak. She got out and kissed him. He could smell iced tea and lemon on her breath. She had been crying too.

  “Mommy will be gone for a few days,” she whispered. “You can eat with Grandma, okay?”

  Guy nodded.

  On the sixth day Guy received a postcard from St. Anne’s, Manitoba. That was where her family was. On the card was a picture of a river. On the ninth day Guy awoke in the morning to find his mother in the kitchen making scrambled eggs.

  She did not speak of her absence. Guy did not ask. It was as if time, turning on the little sprockets of the clock, had jumped its chain, had slipped ahead several days, then caught again. Things went on as usual. Except for one thing.

  The LittleWolfs’ blue Pontiac did not come again. Every Saturday Guy watched for its blue speck to appear down the road. But only farm pickups, the milk truck, and occasional tractors pulling grain wagons came along. In the garden Guy hoed potatoes. He trimmed and hauled to the chickens the tomato vines and cabbage leaves and carrots that had run to seed. Soon he hardly looked up at the sound of a vehicle on the road. Around him there were only the endless rows of potatoes, peas, and beans.

  But once when he was head-down, hacking along with his hoe, thinking of nothing at all, which was the best way to hoe potatoes, he heard a scraping noise. The sound of gravel on tin. He looked up. There, out on the road, spinning in dusty circles on an old blue bicycle, was Tom. Tom! Guy flung aside his hoe and raced from the garden.

  Tom would not come into the yard, so they took turns riding and then bucking each other down the road on the bicycle. Later they played in old man Schroeder’s windbreak. Among the close, even rows of pine trees, on the red prickly blanket of dead needles, they played cowboys and Indians. They hid from, stalked, and shot pinecones at each other the rest of the afternoon. And never did they speak of their parents.

  2

  On the Fourth of July, an hour before sundown, the rodeo ended in a pink haze. Guy and Tom sat atop the corral fence, faces into the sun. They were eight years old. Guy was nearly a head taller than Tom, his thin neck was sunburned red, and his hair was as white as the pigeons that dipped and fluttered above the grandstand. Tom had no neck; his black hair, shaved short, ended at his shoulders, wide shoulders that promised strong arms and a deep chest.

  Guy and Tom sat on the edge of their plank perch like two birds near flight. They wanted to watch the cattle jockeys whip the Brahma bulls into the trailers, but they also wanted to be first at the edge of the river for th
e Big Blast. Already town kids were deserting the corral fence. Already behind them people were filing from the grandstand. Already in the parking lot pickups spun their tires on the gravel and threw plumes of dust into the red sunlight.

  The biggest bull, a tatter of rope dragging between its legs, slammed forward into its trailer; Guy and Tom looked at each other. They leaped from their perch.

  They had no bicycles, which proved they were not town kids, but they could run. They dodged through the crowd. Their shadows weaved and darted among the walkers as they sped down the crowded, unpaved street. When they reached the asphalt streets of downtown the dust of the fairgrounds fell away. At Main Street the day’s heat, trapped by the brick buildings, washed over them like an oven door opening in their faces. The tar was soft underfoot. A block beyond Main Street they smelled water.

  At first the river’s smell was only a faint coolness in their mouths. Then it flowed thicker over their cheeks and foreheads. In another block, the water scent divided itself into sharper layers of smells. Wet willow wood. Green algae. Somewhere a rotting duck. The faint vinegar and iron smell of the municipal sewage plant downstream.

  But they were not first at the edge of the river. Already town kids lined the shore of the Bekaagami River. Tom jerked his head at a big willow tree whose roots snaked into the water. He squatted and made a hand cradle. Guy took a running step, hit Tom’s hands with his right foot, and went up like a pole-vaulter. He caught the lowest limb and pulled himself up. Then he reached down for Tom. White hand on brown wrist, brown hand on white, they scrambled up the loose bark to the crown of the tree until the limbs began to bend under their weight. Above the crowd, they could see everything.

  In front of their willow stretched the bay, a blue two-acre bulge of the Bekaagami River whose slow south side formed the Flatwater Municipal Swimming Beach. A long fly ball’s distance from shore floated the dynamite raft, a rick of brown logs eight feet in length. The logs were made of papier-mâché. They concealed the stick—some said ten sticks—of dynamite. Fourth of July was Dynamite Daze in Flatwater.

  Dynamite was the town’s founding father. In the 1890s Flatwater had grown around the thick peninsula that slowed the current of the river. The great rafts of white pine and Norway logs floating south to the lumber mills in St. Paul always tangled and jammed at Flatwater. There lumberjacks made a permanent encampment on the peninsula. Daily they dynamited the channel clear. Later Guy would come to see Flatwater as a town built on an impediment, see the constricted flow of the river and the town beside it as connected and metaphorical. But he did not understand that now. Right now he turned with Tom to check the height of the sun.

  “Nine minutes, tops,” Guy said.

  “Five,” Tom said immediately.

  “Bet,” Guy said.

  “Nickel,” Tom replied.

  “Shit, you don’t have a nickel,” Guy said.

  “You don’t have a watch,” Tom said.

  “Neither do you.”

  “Do too.”

  “Bet,” Guy said quickly. He knew Tom had no watch. This was easy money.

  Tom held out his arm and turned his palm and fingers sideways to the sun and to the horizon. Guy watched as Tom squinted over and then below his fingers. Tom peeled back two fingers, then a third. Sighted again.

  “Free,” Guy said suddenly, which meant the bet was off.

  Tom grinned. The sun shone on his wide white teeth and through the gap between them wide enough to hold a pencil. “Lucky I let you off,” he said. “See, here’s how I do it.” He squinted over his fingers again. “It’s simple. Every finger’s width is five minutes.”

  “Shit,” Guy said.

  Tom shrugged. “Try it with a clock sometime.”

  Guy was silent for a moment. “So where’d you learn that?” he asked.

  “Zhingwaak showed me.”

  Zhingwaak was the old Indian who lived on the reservation. He sang and drummed at the powwows, and told stories to the children. Guy’s father said that was because Zhingwaak was too lazy to do any real work.

  “Was Zhingwaak a real medicine man once?” Guy asked.

  Tom shrugged.

  Guy turned back to watch the sun. He sighted over his fingers but the light hurt his eyes. Its orange glare shone on the white crown of the water tower, gleamed on the galvanized sides of the town grain elevator. Already Main Street was in shadow, and so were the white houses that ran in even rows like a picket fence down to the city beach.

  On the brown grass near the diving platform stood a circle of tourists. Black camera straps cut across flowered shirts. Inside the circle four or five Indians shuffled to the thudding of a drum. The drumming sounded weak and far away, like a partridge thudding his wings somewhere deep in the woods. The Indian powwows were organized by the Flatwater Jaycees. Guy’s father said that the powwow was to keep the tourists’ minds off the Bekaagami mosquitoes, keep the tourists’ wallets in Flatwater as long as possible.

  Tom followed Guy’s eyes to the dancers. He watched briefly, then looked away.

  Suddenly behind them at the shore an outboard motor coughed alive. Tom whooped. They whirled to face the river. It was time.

  The sheriff’s motorboat left the shore and plowed slowly toward the dynamite raft. In the late sunlight its waves spread like even windrows of wheat across a blue field. The boat slowed before the raft, bobbed sideways toward it. A green-headed mallard fluttered away from the water near the raft. Some people along the shore clapped. The sheriff leaned over the side of the boat and lit the fuse. When he jerked backward into the boat, his deputy gunned the engine. The propeller snarled once and the boat sped toward shore. More people clapped. The sheriff waved to the crowd. The green-headed mallard floated close to shore.

  But suddenly the water around the mallard began to dimple and splash. The mallard fluttered once, then swam in a widening V toward deeper water. More splashes followed the duck.

  “Look,” Tom called, jerking his chin, pushing out his bottom lip to point down shore. Indians never pointed with their fingers.

  Down the shore stood a cluster of town boys. With slingshots. One of their stones splashed a hand’s length from the mallard, which scrambled into flight. It flew to the dynamite raft. There it perched on the highest papier-mâché log, ruffled its feathers, then settled down to stare at the crowd.

  “Wait—no—” came one or two voices from the crowd.

  “Holy shit,” Guy murmured.

  The mallard turned to peck once at a flea on its left wing, then sat motionless again.

  The crowd fell silent. Suddenly the raft and the duck began to balloon in size. The duck swelled into a rooster. Then a Thanksgiving turkey. It rode the rising silo of foam and shredded papier-mâché. At the height of the blast the duck reached sunlight. There it became a peacock in full spray. Then in a rainbow mist of meat and feathers it disappeared.

  The Big Blast crashed through the willow. It whipped the thin branch ends across Guy’s and Tom’s faces, and they grabbed each other to keep from falling. Below them the crowd let out a long cheer. The fireworks began.

  After the final red rose died away in the black sky, Guy and Tom stayed put. The crowd passed beneath their tree. Tom began to break off dead twigs and drop them onto the heads of the passersby. A man cursed and rubbed his head. When he looked up he saw Guy and threatened to bring back a chain saw, though his wife soon enough pulled him along.

  “Thanks, fuck-face,” Guy whispered.

  Tom’s teeth glinted white in the dark.

  Within ten minutes the beach was empty but for Tom and Guy, and a few of the town boys who poked along the riverbank looking for unexploded fireworks. And the powwow Indians.

  A steady drumming still came from among the dancers. The tourists had left, but the Indians still danced, six or seven of them now.
The dancers moved clockwise in a jerky circle about the bright yellow eye of a gas lantern.

  Guy and Tom slid down from their tree. “Come on,” Tom said, jerking his head toward the shadowy town boys along the riverbanks.

  “Naw,” Guy said. He was tired. He had been in town all afternoon at the county fair. His mother had brought him. She was helping at one of the food shows. He was supposed to meet her near the powwow after the fireworks.

  “Let’s watch,” Guy said, staring at the dancers.

  Tom shrugged and followed him closer.

  They sat close by on the grass in the shadows and watched. “They dance different when the tourists leave,” Guy said. Now the dancers sang more. Couples crisscrossed hands and danced a dipping, weaving pattern. Sometimes women picked men from the crowd. Guy turned to Tom.

  “‘The Forty-Nine Song,’” Tom said.

  “Why forty-nine? Forty-nine states?”

  Tom laughed once and shook his head sideways. “Huh-huh. Lots of Indian men went off to fight Germans in the war. Only forty-nine came back to the reservation.”

  They kept watching. Many of the men dancers had taken off their shirts. Their skin glistened in the lantern light. On the chests of two older men bounced necklaces, thin gray tubes of something strung on a leather cord.

  “What are those?” Guy asked.

  “Rabbit bones,” Tom said. “Leg bones. You break off the longest leg bones, then poke out the guck inside and let them dry.”