Red Earth White Earth Page 6

  “Spear—the spear!” Guy whispered.

  Tom fumbled for the spear, then stood up. Slowly, as Zhingwaak had shown him, Tom lowered the spear until its barbs silently broke the surface of the water. The water trembled around the iron tines.

  “Throw!” Guy said.

  With both hands, Tom drove down the spear. In the same moment Nimishoomis heard the splash above him and swirled his tail. The spear did not strike behind his head and break his spine as Tom had aimed, but struck him far back, drove deep into the fleshy muscle of his tail. Harpooned, Nimishoomis fled. In the water of the hole the spear’s cord hissed away. Hissed away from Tom’s ankle. Tom had time only to open his mouth when he was jerked off balance and into the hole. Guy lunged for him but missed. Tom was in the water, then gone.

  Mary Ann screamed.

  Guy, too, was half in the burning cold water. He held on to the wood side of the fish house. “Zhingwaak—run for Zhingwaak!” he shouted. Mary Ann plunged through the door and was gone. Guy screamed Tom’s name, then filled his lungs with air and pushed himself below the ice.

  In the water, roiled by the pike’s thrashing, Guy could see only a few feet in any direction. The cold cut through him. He swam a few feet straight ahead, then looked again. Nothing. He turned back to the hole but his head hit only ice. He tried to remember how many times he had kicked his legs. Four, five. He swam forward with his back against the gray ice. Suddenly he surfaced in the fish house. He gasped for breath, then pushed himself underwater again.

  This time he swam south ten kicks. Nothing. Only green. He began to scream Tom’s name but stopped himself from opening his mouth.

  He found his way back to the air hole. This time he swam east. From the cold he could go only eight kicks. Far away above him on the ice he heard a faint thudding like a distant thunderstorm. He lost count of his kicks. Red stars popped in his eyes before he reached air again. He hung, gasping, on to the wooden legs of Zhingwaak’s chair. Outside he could hear Mary Ann’s voice screaming.

  There was one direction left. North. Guy swallowed air and went under again. He swam six, then eight, then ten kicks north. He was just about to turn back when he saw something. He swam on. It was Tom. He was floating sideways against the ice, his legs and arms dangling, drifting. The spear’s cord hung limply from his leg. The pike had torn free. The spear lay in the moss.

  Guy pulled himself forward, half swimming, half clawing his way along the ice to Tom. He grabbed the cord and began to tow Tom back. But he had forgotten about the spear, whose barbs lay caught in the moss and weeds.

  By now the last of Guy’s air was leaking from his mouth and nose in a spray of bubbles. With a last lunge, he tore the cord from around Tom’s ankle and pulled him forward.

  But it was too late. He began to breathe water. He was a fish. He felt the cold rush of water in his lungs, saw red roses begin to bloom and burst in the sky above him. A tree fell from the red sky. He grabbed its trunk and held on as everything darkened. Night. Then the moon. A huge full moon to which he was sailing.

  Hard hands pulled him upward. The tree was a ladder. The moon was a door. The door was air. Air was open. Open house, the fish house door. White earth, blue sky.

  When Guy came to, he was alone in the fish house. A large, dead limb stuck up from the water. The tree. Mary Ann. She had put the dead limb in the hole.

  Through the open door he saw Zhingwaak and Mary Ann standing on their heads on the ice outside. Tom was holding them upright. Guy blinked. Then he saw that Zhingwaak was holding up Tom by his ankles and Mary Ann was clapping on Tom’s back. Tom was the one upside down. Tom puked once onto the ice, then again, a long gush of water. Then Zhingwaak called something and jerked his head toward Guy and the fish house.

  “I’m okay,” Guy said as Mary Ann gave him her coat. His teeth rattled. He began to shake all over.

  Zhingwaak carried Tom into the house. Tom stared, white-faced.

  “No . . . ,” he mumbled as he saw the spear hole.

  “You’re safe,” Zhingwaak said. He closed the wooden lid to the spear hole and sat Tom next to the stove. He pulled Guy closer to the heat.

  “More wood,” he said to Mary Ann. Then he began to undress Tom. Mary Ann filled the stove with dead limbs. The wood crackled and threw yellow light onto the fish house floor.

  “You too,” Zhingwaak said. Guy struggled out of his shirt and pants, then sat naked with Tom. They shivered as the harsh heat washed over them. The sides of the stove turned gray, then dark red, then cherry.

  As they warmed themselves, Zhingwaak looped the decoy line across the ceiling and hung up their clothes to dry. As he worked he began to hum a low song that rose and fell. Guy thought of the starbursts. Of the Fourth of July. In the heat Zhingwaak’s face shone with sweat and he took off his fur cap. His long white hair fell down in a braid.

  When the clothes were all hung, Zhingwaak took the big gray feather from the wall and ran its vane through his braid. He took the little tin man and tied it onto his wrist. Then he opened the leather pouch. He threw a pinch of something onto the flat top of the stove. The stove top hissed and smoked. A sharp, sweet, burning smell filled the fish house.

  Zhingwaak sat again on his stool. He leaned over the now-shut doorway into the lake. With a thin, dead limb he began to tap on the wooden floor as he sang. He closed his eyes. He was like a singing blind man with a cane.

  Guy and Tom watched. The stove’s heat began to work its way through them and they stopped shivering. Zhingwaak sang on, stopping once to throw more sage onto the stove—that was it, sage—Guy thought. His mother used it at Thanksgiving. It smelled good then. It smelled sweet and strong and even better now.

  Zhingwaak sang and drummed on the hollow wood floor until their clothes were nearly dry. Mary Ann had begun to giggle at their nakedness so they stood up and pulled them on. Zhingwaak set aside his sticks. He wiped his face and watched them dress.

  Zhingwaak looked at Guy. “Ningos is a good swimmer.”

  “Tom taught me,” Guy said.

  “Lucky for him,” Mary Ann said.

  Tom did not speak.

  Ningos opened the door of the fish house. Outside, the snow was blue.

  “I’ve gotta go,” Tom said. His voice sounded funny, like he was speaking through a pipe.

  Zhingwaak nodded. Pulling the toboggan they began the walk home. Zhingwaak stood on the ice beside his house. He watched them until they stepped over the ice ridge onto land.

  On the way home Mary Ann talked on about the accident. “Did you see anything under there?” she asked. “What was it like?”

  Both Guy and Tom walked on in silence.

  “You must have seen something,” she said.

  “Just shut up for once,” Tom said. He just kept walking and staring across the purple fields.

  7

  In the spring when they were eleven, in late May when it was finally tennis shoe weather, Guy and Tom were fixing Mary Ann’s bike chain in the farm shop. Suddenly Tom dropped his wrench and stared at Mary Ann.

  “Hey, you got tits!” Tom said.

  Guy looked at Mary Ann’s T-shirt.

  “Jesus,” Guy said. She did have tits. He had not noticed them because they were not the pointy kind. Sometimes in the summer Guy noticed girls in town who were eleven or twelve and had uneven little points under their T-shirts like horns growing on a calf. Sometimes the points were uneven, and once he saw a girl with only one. He began to watch for tits after his grandmother once clucked her tongue at one of the town girls and murmured that the girl was too old to run around dressed like that.

  But Mary Ann’s tits did not come out pointy. Rather, they were wide mounds growing like muscles across her chest.

  “My daddy says they’re going to be big ones too,” she said. She held up her T-shirt.

 
Guy knocked over the oil can. He and Tom stared. Her tits were swelled up like two big muffins with a glob of pink frosting in the center of each.

  “Jesus,” Tom murmured.

  “Amazing,” Guy said. He glanced through the open door of the machine shop into the yard. It was quiet and empty.

  “That’s not all I got,” Mary Ann said. Guy and Tom looked at each other.

  They went to the hayloft, to their hay house, to see the rest of Mary Ann’s secret. The hay house was a little lean-to building that Guy and Tom and Mary Ann had built in the corner of the loft out of old lumber; they went there, sometimes slept there, whenever their parents were drinking or fighting.

  But now Martin and Helmer were dust clouds far out on the fields. Etta worked in the garden with her back to the barn. Madeline was gone to town. Sunlight came through the little windows and made a rectangular spotlight on the board floor.

  Mary Ann stepped into the light, then backed out. “This will cost you,” she said.

  Guy and Tom stared at each other.

  “A quarter apiece.”

  Guy and Tom fished into their pockets. Two nickels between them.

  Mary Ann took the nickels. “A nickel apiece and do what I do.”

  Guy and Tom stared at each other, then nodded.

  Mary Ann stepped back into the sunlight. She undid her pants, then pulled them down.

  “Jesus,” Guy said.

  Mary Ann wore no underwear, and between her legs was a triangle of bright red hair.

  “It’s red!” Tom said.

  “What the hell you expect, purple?” she said, pulling up her pants.

  “Wait,” Guy said, leaning closer for a better look at the hair, the tiny pink tongue at the top of her slit.

  “Yeah, give us our nickel’s worth,” Tom said. They dropped to their knees so they could get a straight-on look.

  “Time’s up,” she said soon. She pulled up her pants, then stepped away from the sunlight. “Your turn.”

  Guy and Tom stared at each other.

  “Who goes first?” Tom said.

  “Why not do it together?” Mary Ann said.

  Guy and Tom looked at each other, then stepped into the spotlight.

  They unzipped their zippers.

  “Hey, that’s cheating. All the way down,” Mary Ann said.

  They stared at each other a moment, then undid their belt buckles. Their penises, one white, the other brown, stood straight up; around them neither Guy nor Tom had any hair.

  Mary Ann laughed. Guy and Tom started to pull up their pants. “Hey,” she said, “give me my money’s worth.”

  “You never paid anything,” Tom said.

  “But you got to see my tits too,” she said.

  Guy and Tom stared at each other, then let her look some more.

  “Do you guys?” she asked, and made an up-and-down motion with her fist.

  Guy looked to Tom. Neither of them said anything because they didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Really?” she said. “My brothers do it all the time. Want me to show you?”

  Tom turned to Guy.

  She stepped between them, spit in first one palm and then the other, then took their penises into her hands. She began to stroke them. She started out slow, soon spit on them again, then moved her hands faster and faster. Guy began to feel a burning sensation. The burning started low in his crotch and moved higher and higher until he spurted a thin spray of white onto the hay. Tom groaned and did the same thing.

  “There,” Mary Ann said.

  Guy felt wobbly on his legs. He pulled up his pants, as did Tom. They both got down on their knees to look at the white stuff. It was shiny, with white swirls in it like the glass of pearly marbles. It settled into the hay and drew bits of dust on its surface like lint on Jell-O.

  Jism. His first jism. And Tom’s too.

  They looked up at Mary Ann.

  “Where’d you learn that?” they said at the same time.

  “From my brothers,” she said. “They make me do it for them every day. They say it’s part of my chores.”

  Guy looked at Tom. “Does your dad know?”

  “Sure. Sometimes when my brothers are asleep he gets me up and I have to do him too.”

  8

  “Niggers,” Jewell Hartmeir said from underneath the tractor, “they’ve taken over everything from Des Moines, Iowa, south. That’s why we came up here. Cheap land and no niggers.”

  Martin grunted and pulled harder on the chain hoist. Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sat on Martin’s tractor. Guy operated the hydraulic loader that supported the Hartmeir Massey-Ferguson. They were in Hartmeir’s field. Guy’s father was helping to fix the front axle of the Hartmeir tractor. Billy, or maybe it was Bob, had been harrowing at road-gear speed. The front tractor tires hit a large stone, the axle snapped, the tractor flipped onto its side and threw either Billy or Bob fifteen feet out into the soft dirt of the field. Since neither would admit to being the driver, Jewell had whipped them both with a cattle cane. Now the two boys stood stiffly on either side of the tractor. From a long arm’s reach they handed their father wrenches and sockets and pry bars.

  “Should have bought a new axle,” Martin said again. “That weld might not hold.”

  “Some people ain’t got a hundred bucks,” Hartmeir replied. “Besides, my own daddy showed me how to weld.” He fit the socket onto another nut.

  Martin was silent.

  “But the niggers,” Hartmeir continued, “I could tolerate working with niggers when I had to. But not for niggers. Take that last place we farmed. No crop two years in a row. But that didn’t matter to the landowner. If we were a day late with the payment, we’d get a letter the next day. Never saw who it was we gave our money to. Didn’t think it mattered at the time. But then we got behind, couldn’t make the payments. Got letter after letter. Finally the owner comes out to the farm. Drives a big Lincoln. A hundred degrees outside and the windows are rolled up. Air-conditioning. He gets out of the car. A big nigger, he was. Purple as an eggplant. Wearing an expensive suit. At first I thought he was some kind of salesman. Then he serves us the papers. Turns out he’s an attorney from Atlanta who owns a lot of land he rents out to poor whites and other niggers. I looked at him. I said, ‘Mister, for two years this farm hasn’t grown any more cotton than fuzz on a baby’s cunt and now I know the reason why.’”

  Guy and Tom snickered.

  “Shut up,” Mary Ann said, and jabbed at them with her elbow.

  Martin did not hear them because he had leaned over to stare at Hartmeir’s work.

  “Tighten that third hub bolt more,” he said.

  “I did.”

  “Give it another turn,” Martin said.

  Hartmeir spit but gave the nut another yank with the wrench.

  “Course up here you got Indians,” Hartmeir said.

  Beside him Guy felt Tom stiffen.

  “Niggers, Indians,” Hartmeir said. “Throw ’em all in a toilet, flush it, and you can’t tell one turd from the other, they say.”

  “I never met any coloreds,” Martin said, easing up on the chain hoist. “But I met lots of Indians and I know this. None of them want to work. They want everything handed to them while the rest of us work.”

  Guy drew in his breath.

  “Shall I let down the loader?” Guy called to his father.

  “No,” his father said immediately and turned. He stared. He had forgotten they were there. He glanced beside Guy to Tom, who met his gaze. Martin looked back to the axle. “Not until everybody’s out from underneath—you know that.”

  Guy knew that. He was thirteen now.

  “That’s what I figured,” Hartmeir said. “Bunch of parasites on the rest of us. Indians probably st
eal like niggers too.”

  “Don’t have much trouble with that,” Martin mumbled.

  “I catch any of ’em around my place, I’ll let the air out of ’em in a hurry,” Hartmeir said. “No law against protecting yourself, least not down where I came from.”

  Jewell Hartmeir climbed out from underneath the tractor and slapped a cloud of dust from his shin. Then he and Martin knelt to work on the chain-hoist bolts.

  “I gotta go,” Tom said suddenly to Guy. He leaped down from the tractor and started across the field.

  “Wait,” Guy said. He climbed off the tractor and ran after Tom.

  “Let’s go to my house,” Guy said, grabbing his arm.

  “Don’t want to,” Tom said, jerking away. He walked forward without looking back.

  “Guy—give the chain some slack,” Martin called.

  Guy stopped. Tom kept walking.

  “Guy, goddammit!” Martin called.

  Two days later Guy was harrowing the north forty with Helmer’s little orange Allis-Chalmers. He was not yet old enough to run the big tractor. But soon.

  Tom rode with him perched on the fender. As soon as Guy was finished harrowing they were going to look for agates in the washout. Across Hank Schroeder’s field they could see the red Hartmeir Massey-Ferguson moving in and out of a cloud of dust. Occasionally its tall aluminum-colored rear wheels glinted dully through the dusty haze. The Hartmeir tractor made a round and a half to their one.

  “Billy?” Guy called to Tom over the tractor’s noise.

  “Bob,” Tom said.

  “Bet?”

  “Quarter.”

  Guy nodded and began to circle the Allis-Chalmers farther north toward the fence, where they could see better. He was watching the harrow behind when Tom shouted and pointed across the field.

  Dust drifted and thinned in the Hartmeir field. The red nose of the Massey-Ferguson lay on the ground below the big rear wheels. The tractor had overturned.

  “Jesus!” Guy shouted. “Unhook the drag!”

  Tom leaped to the ground. As Guy backed up, Tom unbuckled the clevis, then leaped aboard as Guy gunned the tractor down the fence line toward the road.