Red Earth White Earth Read online

  It took them five minutes at full throttle to reach the accident. And neither Guy nor Tom won the bet. It was not Billy nor Bob who lay pinned beneath his tractor.

  “You sonsabitches help me!” Jewell Hartmeir shouted. Then he screamed. The tractor lay on its side, its engine across his legs. The hot engine block and exhaust manifold had charred his pants legs and Guy could smell burned meat. In the dirt, like the pattern of a brown snow angel, Hartmeir had tried with his hands to fan himself away from the tractor.

  Jewell Hartmeir saw Tom. “You Indian bastard, what the hell are you standing there for—run—get Bub.”

  “Bub’s dead,” Tom said softly.

  Hartmeir’s eyes widened. Then he screamed long and loud.

  “The chain—quick,” Guy shouted to Tom. Guy hooked the thin harrow chain onto the side of the Massey-Ferguson and began to pull with the Allis-Chalmers. The chain tightened. The Massey creaked an inch upward. Then the chain parted—a link hummed past Guy’s head like a spent rifle bullet—and Hartmeir screamed louder as the Massey rocked back onto his legs.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” he shouted at Tom. “You niggers you Indians you’re trying to kill me I know that! All of you—you’re trying to do me in well it won’t work, I’ll get even with you sonsabitches!”

  Guy shouted at Tom to step aside. Then he wheeled the little tractor forward toward the Massey. When its nose pushed against the Massey’s big rear wheel, he gunned the throttle. With the Allis he pushed the big tractor two inches upward. Then the wheels of the little Allis began to slip and spin and dig themselves down. He killed the engine and set the brake. Though the Massey was too heavy to push farther, he had taken some of the weight off Jewell Hartmeir. There was a full water bottle on the Allis. He threw it to Tom, then leaped down. “Give him water—I’ll run for help,” Guy shouted.

  “Water,” Hartmeir groaned, and reached up for the bottle in Tom’s hands.

  Guy ran.

  By the time Martin and Helmer arrived with the big John Deere, the sheriff’s car was wailing toward the field. The Massey creaked upward. Jewell Hartmeir’s legs looked like burned steak. Martin and the deputy slid him, mumbling curses, onto the stretcher. Hartmeir groaned something.

  “Shock,” the deputy said. He leaned closer to try and make out the words.

  “Water,” Jewell Hartmeir groaned.

  “Water?” the deputy said. “He wants water. Anybody got any water?”

  Guy turned to Tom. “Is there water left?”

  Tom nodded. He handed Guy the jug. From its weight Guy knew there was a lot of water left. He spun off the lid. The jar was still full.

  9

  Guy and Tom and Mary Ann turned thirteen, then fourteen, then fifteen. Guy grew tall and thin, a sandhill crane with long bony wings and straight, skinny rods for legs. Tom grew wide rather than tall. His shoulders broadened, his chest deepened, his arms and legs thickened with muscle that, when he walked, gave him a springy, cat-like gait. Mary Ann grew not tall nor wide. She grew deep.

  Tits. That’s what Mary Ann grew. By thirteen they were the size of softballs. By fourteen they were large Texas grapefruit. By fifteen they were big cantaloupes verging on watermelons. At fifteen and a half she stopped showing them to Guy and Tom. She wouldn’t even go skinny-dipping with them at No Medicine Lake unless it was pitch dark with no moon.

  “Hey, you shouldn’t feel that way about your tits,” Guy said.

  “Yeah, I thought most girls wanted tits,” Tom said to her. “Now that you got ’em, you don’t want ’em.”

  “I didn’t need ’em this goddamn big,” she said.

  Two junior high boys turned around and giggled.

  “You two look around again and the Indian is gonna tear your scalps off. With his fingernails,” Guy said. Tom made claws of his hands. The two boys’ eyes turned golf-ball size; they turned around and sat straight in their seat without even looking out the window.

  Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sat in their usual seat, midway back, on Bus #33, the Indian Bus. White farm and resort kids sat up front. Indian kids took the rear. Every morning #33 wound its way across the reservation on a circuitous, hour-long trip to Flatwater High.

  The high school was a two-story brick building just off Main Street, a building with a slumped back and acne. To save money on construction in the 1920s, the Flatwater school board voted to use local pine rather than western lumber, and bricks made from local yellow clay rather than the hotter-fired red brick from southern Minnesota. Now, in 1969, the school roof drooped, and chips of yellow brick formed a deep, crunchy ring underfoot around the school’s perimeter. A new school was planned, but a local bond issue failed four years in a row. Maybe when the Vietnam War was over, people said. Then they would build. Right now there were Communists to fight overseas. First things first.

  When Bus #33 arrived at Flatwater High the town kids were already there. They leaned against the flagpole, lounged on the front steps and lockers with spitballs, paper clips, and rubber bands. They formed a gauntlet as the Indian Bus unloaded.

  Guy and Tom and Mary Ann always walked inside together. Because their group of three was not white, not Indian, not boy or girl, the Flatwater toughs did not know what to make of them. Guy and Tom and Mary Ann usually walked unimpeded. Unstung.

  Inside there were fights—a sudden flail of fists, the thuds of bodies against lockers. Usually the fighters were brown and white. But the fights ended quickly when Tom LittleWolf appeared. Like a boxing referee, Tom butted, pushed, sometimes threw the fighters overhead into the crowd. Usually he ended up in the principal’s office for his effort.

  “You fuckin’ apple!” a nose-bleeding young Indian kid once screamed at Tom.

  “Apple. Why did he call Tom an apple?” Mary Ann asked.

  “Think about it,” Guy said.

  Later Mary Ann said she still didn’t get it.

  “Red on the outside, white on the inside,” Guy said.

  In their classes Guy was good at English and social studies but lousy at math and chemistry. Tom got A’s in art but D’s in civics and history. Mary Ann got C’s in math but D’s and F’s in everything else.

  “My mind goes blank,” she said. She was sixteen now. Her tits had stopped growing, but then she had grown rounder all over. Her yellow hair was longer now, which made her look shorter and thicker. She wore excessive lipstick and rouge, plus strong perfume she bought in the dime store, and often she smelled sharply sweet and sweaty. To Guy, Mary Ann began to look like the women he saw at the feed mill. The women with squalling children. The women with sunburned faces and strong arms in sleeveless blouses. The woman with big, chapped hands. The women who came driving their husbands’ pickups that pulled wagons of ear corn and oats and then sat uptown in the cafes while the cow feed was ground. Often Mary Ann skipped her history class and went uptown to watch the soaps in the same cafes.

  “The teacher asks me something and everything in my mind just freezes,” she continued. “It’s like there’s a fuel line in my brain that gets a slug of dirt in it. The engine shuts down. I just sit there. People laugh.”

  “Tell me who laughs,” Tom growled. They were sitting in the school’s basement cafeteria. The tables were crowded. Indian kids sat at the far, corner table where the light was dimmest from a boarded-over window. Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sat at table number three, which was part Indian, part white. White kids took up most of the cafeteria, including the honor society and student council creeps who sat at the table closest to the faculty dining room and its picture window on to the rest of the cafeteria. The tables were crowded but, as usual, there was an empty seat beside Tom. “Just point the fuckers out,” Tom said.

  Mary Ann looked up from her plate of Spanish rice. “You can’t go around roughing up people for me the rest of my life,” she said. She looked away, up through the g
lass-block basement windows. “Shit, I should quit school and get a job.” She looked back to them. “I could. I’m sixteen. There’s nothin’ anyone could do about it. Get a job, buy a car, say to hell with all this.”

  “What kind of job?” Guy said, glancing at Tom.

  Mary Ann shrugged. “Uptown. Waitressing maybe. Or somethin’.”

  “Or somethin’,” Guy said.

  “Get married maybe too.”

  Tom spit out some milk.

  “Married!” Guy said.

  “You can get married at sixteen,” Mary Ann said, pushing out her red-painted lips.

  “But who to?” Tom said. “First somebody’s got to want to marry you.”

  “I could find someone. Easy,” Mary Ann said.

  Across two tables sat Kurt Fenske, the beefy brown-eyed basketball center. Alternately Fenske stared opened-mouthed at Mary Ann’s chest and glowered at Guy and Tom.

  The three of them continued to ride #33 the rest of their sophomore year, though Mary Ann often got rides home with Kurt Fenske.

  “She’s fucking him. For sure,” Guy whispered to Tom. He and Tom, in the back row of biology class, had developed the LittleWolf-Pehrsson Opthalmological Virgin Indicator Theory. It held that a close-up, extended look into a girl’s eyes revealed whether or not she was fucking.

  “What, have I got something in my eye or something?” Mary Ann said, leaning away from them.

  “Thought I saw something,” Guy said.

  Tom leaned forward for a closer look.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said.

  “Fuck you two,” she said.

  Rather than get a job, Mary Ann decided to become a cheerleader. Her boyfriend, Kurt, mainly by reason of bulk, was the long-standing team center. If Mary Ann were a cheerleader, she could cheer especially for him. Plus there would be the long, dark bus rides home from games in other towns.

  But Guy said, “Nah, you don’t want to be a cheerleader.” He knew she wouldn’t make it. The cheerleaders were all town girls, perky blondes with short hair and little tits and great cartwheels.

  “I can jump as good as any of ’em,” Mary Ann said.

  She demonstrated. “Rah!” Her great tits bounced.

  Tom grimaced. Guy looked away.

  “Cheerleading is really dumb if you think about,” Tom said. “You run around clapping and screaming. And the crowd just wants to see the game, not the cheerleaders.”

  “So why do the TV cameras zoom in on the Dallas Cowgirls all the time, huh?” Mary Ann said immediately.

  Guy and Tom were silent.

  “Tryouts are next week,” she said. “I been practicing for a month. You just watch me.”

  Cheerleading tryouts were held before a school assembly. In the auditorium the bleachers faced the basketball floor. Across the floor, on the high cement-block wall, painted in red and black, was the school insignia, an Indian headdress crossed with a tomahawk. “Go, Fight, Win! Flatwater Indians!” was painted in tall letters below.

  Miss Simpson, a gray-haired, long-skirted history teacher who was also the cheerleading adviser, stood before a microphone. Beside her was a table manned by three other teachers and a record player. The teachers started the same record for each girl, then noted on paper the duration and intensity of the applause.

  The girls waited in a row of chairs to the left side. For uniformity’s sake, each girl had to wear a short black skirt and a red school-letter sweater. Since there were not enough red sweaters, the first girls changed clothes in the locker room and gave their sweaters to the last girls.

  Mary Ann waited near the end of the row as several girls wheeled and bounced their way over the floor. Her turn approached. Guy saw Jennifer Price, a blond senior and already a cheerleader for three years, confer with two other seniors. Jennifer giggled into her hand, then came forward and handed a sweater to Mary Ann. Mary Ann went to change. Guy didn’t see her again until Miss Simpson called her name and the record began.

  As Mary Ann ran onto the floor the boys began to whistle and thud their feet on the bleachers. Mary Ann’s sweater had been taken from the smallest girl, probably Jennifer Price herself; it hung on Mary Ann like a short, orange curtain on a big window. Every time she leaped, the sweater rode up and exposed the white bottom of her bra.

  Intent on her routine, Mary Ann bounced this way and that across the floor. “Jesus, she did practice,” Guy murmured. Her cartwheels were straight and high. She popped up from splits like a sturdy grasshopper. Her sweater rode up each time. Sometimes she remembered to tug it down and other times she didn’t. From the corner of his eye Guy saw Miss Simpson waving her hand at the teachers who worked the record player. But the other teachers stared at Mary Ann with slack jaws.

  Mary Ann’s final series was a cartwheel, then a backflip in a split, something no other girl had tried. She wheeled, flipped. And on the last, scratchy note of the song, she landed in a perfect split—arms out, legs out—except that her sweater came to rest in a narrow band just under her armpits. Unaware, she beamed at the roaring crowd. The bleachers thundered. The boys screamed.

  Miss Simpson scuttled across the floor and yanked down Mary Ann’s sweater. Mary Ann looked down, shrugged, then smiled and waved to the cheering crowd.

  On Wednesday, Guy and Tom waited with Mary Ann for Miss Simpson to post the list. “What about that backflip, huh?” Mary Ann said. “Did you see any other backflips?”

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Listen,” Guy began. Mary Ann had already paid six dollars down on a red and black letter sweater.

  “Did you hear applause like that for any other girl?” she said, grinning.

  “No,” Tom said. He looked at Guy.

  “Listen,” Guy said again. “Miss Simpson . . . she controls the whole thing. She can pick anyone she wants to.”

  “The most applause wins,” Mary Ann said immediately. “That’s the rules. It’s just like Queen for a Day. And I got the most applause.”

  At precisely twelve noon Miss Simpson came through the door of the faculty lounge, posted the list with one jab of a thumbtack, then disappeared back into the lounge. Girls crowded around the list. Alternately they shrieked or walked away in silence.

  Mary Ann did not walk away. She stood staring at the list without her name until she was alone before it. She waited there. She waited as if the paper were a magnet that would gradually draw her onto its surface, or as if it were a window through which she could pass. Guy and Tom stood to the side and waited for her. Finally the bell rang.

  “Come on,” Guy said. He tugged her arm but she jerked away.

  “Next year,” Guy said. “You’ll make it next year.”

  Without turning, she shook her head. “Ain’t gonna be any next year,” she whispered.

  10

  Mary Ann no longer rode #33 to Flatwater High. But then neither did Guy and Tom. As soon as Guy got his driver’s license, which was the fall of his junior year, he bought a car, a black two-door 1957 Chevy with red interior. He bought it from a gray-haired widow woman who had begun to confuse the accelerator with the brake pedal. The Chevy was dented. The woman’s middle-aged son made her sell.

  Guy’s mother helped him buy the Chevy. “I’ve got some egg money saved,” she said without his asking. “You should buy it. Then you could get away from the chores more. Stay after school. You’ve always wanted to play basketball. You and Tom could go out for the team. You could get away more from the farm, from the reservation. You two could take a summer trip, go to Minneapolis, to Winnipeg, to California. Anywhere.”

  By the second game of the basketball season, Guy, who was now six feet four, displaced Kurt Fenske as starting center. Fenske quit the team and began at noon hour to smoke in the parking lot across from school.

  Tom played guard, benchi
ng Arnold Granland, who spoke to no one, not even to his girlfriend, Jennifer Price, for the remainder of the school year.

  And the team began to win.

  Guy and Tom, from their years of hayloft basketball, played to each other. Off each other. Guy cleared the rim of rebounds and passed up-court before his tennis shoes touched wood. Tom spurted ahead for twisting, hanging lay-ups. Guy followed up to tip in the few balls of Tom’s that did not fall. They were Pehrsson-LittleWolf, LittleWolf-Pehrsson, depending on the bounce of the ball; any stranger tuning in to the local radio broadcasts of the games would mistake them for one person.

  The team regularly won by twenty points. By thirty. More. There was talk in Flatwater, in the barbershops, in the cafes, of a trip to the state tournament in Minneapolis.

  Opposing teams knew that to win they had to break up the Pehrsson-LittleWolf combination. They usually tried first by roughing up Guy underneath the boards.

  “Maxi-Burger time?” Tom asked.

  Guy shook his head.

  “Come on, they’re killing you!”

  “Not yet,” Guy said.

  But when the elbows got too sharp and too low Guy finally nodded for the Maxi-Burger. On the next trip down-court the chief offender from the opposing team suddenly got an open chance to block a Pehrsson lay-up. But if Guy came from the right side, Tom sliced in from the left. Somewhere underneath the basket the three players sandwiched together with a crunch. Tom hit low, Guy high, and the opponent hit the floor on his back and head with a sound like a melon dropped from the top bleacher. The game stopped as the opponents dragged their player from the floor. The team managers wiped up sweat and sometimes blood from the floor with towels. Tom took the foul. Then the game resumed in a more civilized fashion.

  Sometimes the abuse took a different form.

  “Hey, Redman!” players hissed at Tom.

  “Hey, Tonto—where’s the Lone Ranger?”

  Guy’s passes usually kept Tom up-court or in the air, away from the mean shit at floor level. If it got too bad, Tom benched himself before he swung at someone. Then Coach Anderson immediately put in Jimi Henderson, a skinny, frizzy-haired guard with thick glasses who played electric guitar not unlike his idol Jimi Hendrix, and who had fingernails to match. Punji nails, it was rumored. Jimi kept his nails a quarter inch long, filed sharp, and, some players said, he dipped them in shit before each game. One swipe across a neck or chest or down a forehead left behind rake-teeth lines of blood.