“Get Me Some Medicine,” an Excerpt from “Night of the Living Rez”
Morgan Talty’s debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, comes with the kind of early buzz that first-time writers dream of but rarely achieve, with starred pre-publication reviews from leading trade journals, such as Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and advance praise from contemporary masters like Tommy Orange, Rick Bass, and Laura van den Berg. A citizen of the Penobscot Nation, Talty received his BA in Native American studies from Dartmouth and his MFA in fiction from Stonecoast’s low-residency program. In an exclusive, Oprah Daily is proud to publish his gritty and unsettling “Get Me Some Medicine.”
In taut, arresting prose Talty explores the grit and grace of rez life in this tale of two Native friends—Fellis and narrator Dee—and a night out that jumps the rails, mishaps born of dim hopes, and brutal marginalization. Drugs, booze, binge-watching The Sopranos: This is the grim reality of Talty’s “skeejins.” As Dee notes, “I was on unemployment for about three weeks, but I forgot to send in the form that showed I was looking for work, and they kicked me off. The only money I’d seen lately came from bringing dead porcupines to Clara over on Birch Hill who paid twenty bucks a stinking carcass. She used their quills in her regalia.”
Porcupine quills, card games, cans of beer, a beat-up iPhone: Talty deftly spins these details into totems of lives on the brink of ruin. “Get Me Some Medicine” chronicles characters beyond the reach of redemption: There’s no medicine to cure what ails them. Out from Tin House on July 5th, Night of the Living Rez announces a blazing new talent. —Hamilton Cain, Oprah Daily contributing books editor
GET ME SOME MEDICINE
A November rain battered the window above the kitchen sink, and a damp brown leaf pressed against the glass. Fellis was searching for the deck of cards. I sat at the table, and I slid away the ashtray with Fellis’s cigarette smoke coiling into my nose.
Fellis slammed a cupboard shut and brought the cards to the table. “Shuffle these, Dee,” he said to me. “I have to take a shit.” He went down the hallway and into the bathroom. I shuffled the cards for a long while.
The past two weeks we did nothing but sit and binge-watch TV, and I was getting tired of it. I wanted movement. My neck was achy and stiff, and while I did enjoy having to constantly focus on the television, following along and paying attention, I felt that I was slowly forgetting something I needed to remember. Maybe I didn’t need to remember—maybe I wanted to remember.
In August, Fellis had started school at the community college off the reservation. He said he only attended to get a refund check from financial aid, which was distributed around week three. After that, he checked out. Tuition was waived for us skeejins, and so since his mom, Beth—who he’s lived with for twenty-six years—made crap teaching at the rez school, Fellis got this nice fat financial aid check that he wasted on Amazon: red-and-black Jordans, sixty—yeah, sixty—pairs of white ankle socks, a smart TV, and an iPhone that he stopped paying for. Now he only used the phone as a flashlight. He dumped the rest of the check on cigarettes, beer, and pot, which I didn’t mind.
One night Fellis bought whip-its, and we huffed four boxes each, and I got so lost in fourteen straight that my father’s voice spoke to me—he said my name—for the first time in nine years and I gave Fellis the rest of mine, and another night Fellis bought some coke from this skinny skeejin named Meekew, and Fellis bitched about him even though Meekew didn’t rip him off. But anyway, all that stuff Fellis bought was a bargain—except the drugs—and since Fellis was a student Amazon gave him a six-month free trial to Prime, and so he never paid shipping.
But that Prime was the culprit in our binge-watching marathon, the reason why I was damn tired of sitting. These past two weeks Fellis and I dumped six, seven hours a day watching The Sopranos for free, and we only ever left his mom’s house to pick up our methadone take-homes or to get smokes. And so when the series was over and Fellis was ready to start a new one, I said hold up, told him I was tired of sitting and said we should go to the bar, but he suggested we play cards. Something different, I suppose, but it was still sitting.
The toilet flushed. It flushed again. Then once more.
Fellis came out of the bathroom and down the hallway.
“I don’t know what’s more satisfying,” Fellis said. “What I just did in there or that feeling you get when the car behind you also runs the red light.”
Fellis went to the cupboard and grabbed the box of spaghetti we used as gambling chips. He shook the box of spaghetti and the uncooked noodles slid onto the kitchen table.
“Let’s play with money,” I said.
“You don’t have any money,” Fellis said.
“Loan me twenty bucks. I’ll play with that.”
“How you going to pay me back when you lose?”
“I’m not going to lose.”
“But you always lose,” he said.
I had no way to get him the money. I was laid off last summer, had been working tribal maintenance part-time and mowing the graveyard. I was on unemployment for about three weeks, but I forgot to send in the form that showed I was looking for work, and they kicked me off. The only money I’d seen lately came from bringing dead porcupines to Clara over on Birch Hill who paid twenty bucks a stinking carcass. She used their quills in her regalia.
“I’ll find a way,” I said. “I can do your chores.”
“I don’t have any chores.”
“You got chores,” I said. “You just don’t do any. Your mom’s always asking you to do shit around here. Take the garbage out, wash some dishes, chop some wood.”
“She don’t ask for any of that,” he said. “She knows I’m busy with school and all.”
I laughed, and so did Fellis.
“For real,” I said. “She asks you to do stuff.” I stood and went to the kitchen counter. I grabbed the white envelope with postage and waved it at him. “You remember Beth asking you to put this in the mail this morning before she went to that teacher’s conference?”
Fellis stacked his spaghetti. “Fuck you,” he said. He went to his room. When he came back he held cash. He always had money somewhere, yet he never said where it came from. I’d asked once, and when he wouldn’t tell me I kept joking, kept saying, “I bet you’re sick in the head and get disability.” He got pissed, started saying shit like, “You’re sick in the head, can’t even apply for a fucking job, can’t even go get an application.” It was all a joke, but he got so upset I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe he was on disability.
Fellis handed me the money. “If you lose you owe me twenty bucks. Deal the cards.”
We played a few hands back and forth, and I was up five dollars. Fellis grabbed the cigarette that was now burned out in the ashtray, and when he relit it the paper flashed giant red. He took two drags and handed it to me, and before we killed the smoke I was up ten. “Hold on,” he told me, and he went to his room for two more fives.
When he returned he asked for the cards. “I’m dealing,” he said.
“You think I’m cheating?” I said.
“It’s just strange you’re winning all of a sudden.” He cut the deck in fours and shuffled two at a time. When he had two piles, he shuffled them. “I think you stacked them,” he said. “That’s some shady Meekew shit.”
“I ain’t cheating,” I said. “And would you shut up about him? He didn’t rip you off.”
“If I’d had a scale I would’ve known. Top of the bag was filled with too much space.”
“It weren’t neither,” I said. “Deal.”
“Bet first.”
I bet ten. He matched and then dealt. I looked at the cards. Nothing. I bet like I had something, though. I raised the pot by ten and then discarded one card. Fellis went to his room and got more money.
“He’s lucky I didn’t go and find him,” Fellis said, sitting down.
“He would have kicked your ass,” I said. Meekew was skinny, sure, but he was wiry and long. He was a few years younger than us, did well at the university—“Dean’s List,” the tribal paper wrote—and he sold drugs to help pay his car loan (that was what I thought, but Fellis said Meekew sold drugs because he was a scumbag). Fellis never liked him. He said Meekew preferred white people to his own kind.
“No, he wouldn’t have,” Fellis said.
I gave a Yeah, okay look.
“He wouldn’t have,” Fellis said. “So shut the fuck up. And you better not have touched these cards while I was in my room.”
Fellis snuffed out the cigarette. It smoldered in the ashtray.
We bet, and then Fellis dealt one last time. I peeked at my cards. Barely better than nothing.
“Next time I see him I’m going to say something,” Fellis said.
“You do that,” I told him. “I’ll watch you get beat up.”
“You fucking would watch, wouldn’t you?” he said. “You’d help him up after I beat him all to hell, probably bandage his face and bring him home. Bet.”
I bet once more, leaving me with no more money. Fellis matched, leaving him with no more either. Fellis cracked his knuckles and fingers. The pot was at sixty bucks.
“Christ, Beth will be bandaging your face,” I said, and I started laughing. “Look at those skinny arms of yours. You ain’t beating no one to hell.”
“Fuck you, Dee,” he said. “Flip your cards over.”
“You first, tough guy.”
He flipped his cards over. A king, a queen, a jack, a four, and a seven. “Wait,” he said. “What?” He searched the bottom of the deck.
I laughed and flipped my cards over. “A pair of twos beats nothing!” I said. I took the money and held out the four fives I owed him.
“I meant to keep these two.” He showed me. “Shit! If you weren’t talking my face off.”
“You lost,” I said. “Just like you’d lose to Meekew.”
With one sweep of his arm Fellis sent all the cards and spaghetti onto the floor. He snatched the fives from my hand and went to his room.
I picked up the cards and stacked them on the kitchen table. I cleaned up the spaghetti—some rolled under the stove, so I left it there—and I put what I could find back into the box.
Fellis’s door was open, his bedroom light bright like day. He sat on his bed, looking at the floor and rubbing the back of his neck as if something had struck him.
I leaned against his dresser. “You know how you can make the money back?” I said.
“I don’t want the money back.” “But you know how?”
Fellis stood. “I don’t give a shit.” He opened his closet.
“We can go hunt porcupines and bring them to Clara.”
Fellis said nothing. He grabbed his jacket from the closet floor.
“Where you going?” I said. “To the bar.”
I looked at the clock. “Last call’s in an hour.”
“Then let’s hurry,” he said.
My jacket was in the living room, draped over a box filled with old assignments that Beth always kept and filed away, like her young students would one day grow up and come looking for their old tests on fractions.
Fellis brushed past me and opened the front door.
“Hey,” I said. “Put that envelope in the mail for your mother.”
“Is the mail going to come between now and when we get back from the bar? Let’s go.”
It was raining. Fellis didn’t speak much on the way to Overtown. When we crossed the bridge—the river moving below— and left the reservation, Fellis pointed to Jim’s. He bought two packs of Camels and four tall Steel Reserves. I bought a pack of Marlboro Reds and a pint of Smirnoff. It felt good to buy something.
The door jingled shut behind us and rain hit my face. We crossed the street and kept on to the bar. Off in the woods, the river rushed by. But other than that rushing and Fellis’s heavy breathing he did when he was mad, the night was quiet and cold and rainy. The roads were black wet. Ahead, a streetlamp flickered orange above a red For Lease sign. I didn’t remember what used to be there.
Fellis pulled me by the sleeve off the road and into the woods for a drop-off. We went down to the riverbank, and Fellis set his plastic bag of tall boys against a tree. The river flowed strong, and the wind sprayed water on our faces.
We went back to the road and shared my pint between us, and when we walked by the red For Lease sign we took a left on Falls Road.
The bar was quiet. Two people stood outside, talking. Inside, the lights were dim like honey. Fellis took his jacket off and hung it over a chair, and I did the same. Four men wearing soaked jackets were playing pool—the green cloth torn in spots—and a couple sat at the bar.
I felt bad Fellis lost the money, so I bought him a drink. “You’re welcome,” I said.
He sipped.
I was feeling hot—the alcohol set warm in my blood.
Pool balls cracked. The bartender called last round. “Let’s kill these and get one more,” Fellis said.
We did, and I bought the next two again.
Pool balls cracked once more, a shot after the game, and the men leaned their sticks against the wall and zipped up their jackets. Two rows of overhead ceiling lights turned on, and the bar brightened like a bulb about ready to blow, and in the newly lit air I noticed that the wood table we sat at was filthy with straw wrappers and peanut shells and two used wet matches and blue gum that stuck to a pepper shaker.
I brought the cold glass to my lips and Fellis smacked me, spilling beer down my chin and shirt. I swore, and Fellis shushed me. He pointed at the four men walking to the door. One scratched at the back of his neck, and in seeing that I realized I was rubbing the back of mine. Next to him stood a fat man in a blue Ecko sweatshirt whose pants hung low, red boxers sticking out like a panting dog’s tongue. Behind him another man shook loose a smoke from his pack, and he handed one to the man behind him, the man I recognized.
“He won’t even look at us,” Fellis said.
“Would you leave him alone?” I said.
“Why do you defend that fucking kid so much?” Fellis said, but before I could say, “Because he’s not a dud like us,” Fellis stood and yelled to Meekew, who was halfway out the door.
“Doosis,” Fellis said. “Duna’gak?”
Meekew looked back, and then gave a nod. He said something to the three men, let the door shut, and then walked over to us.
“Who are those winooches?” Fellis said.
“Some guys from school,” Meekew said. “They’re cool. We came up to shoot pool.”
Fellis finished his beer and he set the frothy glass on the table. “Pound that,” he said to me, looking at my glass, and he stood. Fellis led Meekew outside.
But I drank my beer slowly, not wanting to deal with Fellis. With one sip left of my beer, I thought briefly about going out the back door, but from there I wondered where I would go. Not Mom’s house—I’d been avoiding there since she left to get better, and I didn’t want to hear the voice mails she left on her own machine wondering where I was, when I was going to visit her, and if I could please bring her cigarettes. And there was no way I was going to Tabitha’s apartment in Overtown where I’d been staying and trying to pay rent with her. We were over, and she left me and that apartment, which, like Mom’s house, I’d been avoiding too.
I wished the bartender would turn the light off until everyone left.
I put my jacket on and went out front. Fellis passed me his cigarette.
“Go do it after,” Fellis was saying to him, and Meekew looked up at the dark sky and blew cold breath. “Just walk with us a little ways. Split off at the bridge.”
And like that we started moving down the road to the rez. Fellis walked beside Meekew, and I walked sort of behind them, watching. Fellis was talking, asking him about the coke. Where he gets it from. How much he pays. How much he makes. Meekew didn’t say who he got the coke from, but he told Fellis how much he ended up with in the end, and Fellis whistled.
“You think about expanding?” Fellis said.
“Nah, man,” Meekew said. “This is temporary until med school.”
Over his shoulder, Fellis gave me a can-you-believe-this-Indian look.
We passed under the orange light and then by the red For Lease sign. Fellis stopped walking.
“Doctor Meekew,” Fellis said. “Let’s go down here. The woods are holding my beer.”
“I got to get going,” Meekew said. “I have three tests tomorrow.”
“I want to buy some of that medicine,” Fellis said. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“Fellis,” I said. “Didn’t you hear him?”
“One minute,” Fellis said. “Just one minute.”
The riverbank was dark. Fellis took out his iPhone and turned the flashlight on and looked for the bag. He pulled out a tall boy and cracked it open and offered it to Meekew, who said he was all set.
“Don’t say I didn’t offer,” Fellis said. He then tried to give it to me, but I flashed him my pint and then took a small burning swig.
Fellis drank the tall boy and then he shone the phone’s light in Meekew’s face. He squinted, and like the squirrel he was named after Meekew had no indent between the bridge of his nose up to his brow.
“Let me get a gram,” Fellis said. “Sixty, right?”
“I’m not selling grams right now,” Meekew said. “Only balls. You were the last person I sold grams to.”
Fellis set his beer against a tree. “Is that why the bag was a little light?” he said.
I pulled from the pint.
“What are you saying?” Meekew said.
“I bet you don’t rip white boys off,” Fellis said. Meekew waved a hand and turned to leave.
“I’m messing with you,” Fellis said, and I started laughing.
Fellis was full of shit.
“Find me another time,” Meekew said.
“Just wait,” Fellis said. He reached into his pocket and took out his money. “Dee, front me some cash.”
“I’m out,” I said. “Spent the rest on your beers.”
Fellis counted what he had. Meekew waited between two crooked pines. “Here,” Fellis said. “I got seventy-one. I have more at my place and I can get it to you tomorrow.”
“I don’t sell that way,” Meekew said. “You know that.”
Fellis stepped toward him. “Take it,” he said. He stuffed the money into Meekew’s pockets, and when Meekew took it out Fellis wouldn’t take it back. I sipped the Smirnoff.
“Here,” Meekew said. Fellis backed up. “No.”
Meekew threw the bills in Fellis’s face, and Fellis jumped forward and grabbed him by the arms. Back and forth, their bodies rocked and smacked together. Punches flew one after the other. Fellis fell down and picked up a stick and swung, but Meekew dodged and rammed his shoulder into Fellis’s stomach and lifted him into the air and slammed him down so hard that all the air in Fellis shot out. Meekew turned to leave, but Fellis wasn’t done. He kicked Meekew’s knees and he buckled. Fellis was tired—his punches were slow and had no power. Meekew wasn’t, and with great ease he grabbed Fellis, turned him around, and held him in a headlock.
I was about ready to step in, but I wanted to see Fellis get his ass kicked. Fellis’s phone had landed in the mud, but the light pointed away and shined on the wet trees so it was difficult to make him out. I could see that Fellis was on his knees, hands trying to peel Meekew’s forearm from his throat. Meekew stood strong behind him, and he kept squeezing. Fellis was talking shit—“fucking white boy, fucking punk”—so he must have had his chin tucked down good, preventing a sleeper.
I was laughing, sipping my pint. In the semi-dark, Meekew pulled his fist back and drove hammer-handed into Fellis’s thigh. Fellis let out a horrendous, high-pitched scream that muffled the rushing river.
“He’s stabbing me, Dee!” Fellis yelled. “Dee, he’s stabbing me!”
I moved quick. I grabbed the plastic bag of Steel Reserves and swung it over my head and brought the three heavy cans down on top of Meekew’s skull. Fellis broke loose and stepped back. Meekew dropped and fell forward, his face plopping into the mud. He rolled onto his back and held his head.
“Where’s the knife?” I said. Fellis stood and then stooped, and he picked up leaves and sticks and mud and tossed it all over Meekew.
“Fellis!” I yelled. “Where’s the knife!”
Fellis kicked the ground over Meekew, adding to the great heap of earth already covering him. With one hand I grabbed Fellis’s arm and pulled him with me through the woods and in the other I gripped the plastic bag. On the road, we ran—Fellis behind me—and we hurried over the bridge and onto the reservation— slanting rain pelting our faces—and we kept going past the church and food pantry and around the small pond—streetlights on the far side casting light over the water and showing the thousands of raindrops plunking the surface and giving the illusion of a boiling pot of water—and when we saw the rusting community building bulging in the dark we turned away from it and slinked into the woods and followed the watery path to Fellis’s road. It was on that road that the rain turned to mist.
We walked slow, out of breath. The bag was ripped, and the beers were gone.
Inside his house, we sat at the kitchen table.
“Let me see where he got you,” I said, and Fellis started laughing.
“I got you,” Fellis said. “Nice to know you got my back if someone’s got a knife.”
I got up quick and Fellis flinched. “What’s the matter?” he said.
I threw the plastic bag away. “What if he’s dead?” I said.
“They’re cans,” Fellis said. “He probably woke up and went home. Fucking apple.”
“We shouldn’t have left him there,” I said.“We shouldn’t have.”
“Well, I ain’t fucking walking all the way back there. He’s fine, Dee. Quit worrying. You hit the boy with some cans. What’s the worst that can happen?”
I felt sick. I leaned against the sink, and on the window rain droplets raced down. I turned the water on and rubbed my face wet and let it stay wet. My head hurt. The pint on the table didn’t even look good. Fellis’s room up the hall looked close.
He asked what I was doing and I told him I was tired.
I spread blankets on the floor and undressed down to my boxers. Fellis came in, flicked off the light, and sat on his bed, his back against the wall and his gums flapping with talk. The room spun, and since I was on the ground I couldn’t do that trick where you put one foot flat on the floor to steady yourself, steady the rotation of the earth. Fellis was talking, going on about his phone he’d left by the river. “I should have bought that waterproof case,” he said. “It was on sale too.”
I burped and gagged.
“You want a wastebasket?” Fellis said. He got up from the bed.
Again, I burped and gagged.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let me get you a wastebasket.” . . .
I woke up to the sounds of Beth’s cooking—the sizzling of a pan and the opening of the fridge. The red-lit clock read eight, and I sat up. Fellis was asleep on the floor, about an arm’s reach away. The wastebasket was at my side. It was empty. I threw the blankets off me and dressed. The bottoms of my jeans were damp and cold and muddy. I dug around the floor for my lockbox that held my methadone. It was under a pile of dirty clothes. I opened it and took out my last bottle of that pink drink and sipped it slow like coffee.
I crossed the hall to the bathroom and I glanced at Beth in the kitchen. She was bent over and picking something off the floor.
In the bathroom, I peed and washed my face. I scrubbed my hands with soap three times. I turned the shower on but didn’t shower. Sitting on the toilet, hands in my face, I said out loud, “That motherfucker better be alive.”
The hallway floor creaked and creaked. A door opened and closed. Silence. I flushed the toilet and went out into the hall. Beth had gone into her room. In the kitchen, bacon spat in a hot skillet and eggs fried in another. The kitchen smelled of pepper and grease. I put on my jacket and laced my shoes. Fellis’s Jordans were caked in mud.
The sun was hot gold in a cool sky. I hurried, cutting through the woods—I saw one beer from the ripped bag, but left it. I passed the community building and pond and food pantry and church. Father Tim was opening the double doors and I didn’t say “Father,” just passed by him and walked to the bridge, and halfway over I glanced back and saw no Father. A wind had blown shut the church doors he had opened.
I walked slow to where he’d been left, and I made sure no cars were coming when I dipped into the woods. I kept my head down, watching the ground, not wanting to know. Finally, I had to look. Meekew was gone, but an imprint of where he’d been remained in the mud next to the river, and the great heap of earth Fellis had covered him with was scattered about. I wondered how long it would stay that way.
In the mud was Fellis’s iPhone. I picked it up. It was wet. The screen was smeared, and I tried to turn it on but it was dead. I thought about skipping it like a rock over the river, but then I’d have to tell Fellis that I didn’t find it, and he’d be convinced that Meekew took it.
Halfway back to Fellis’s house I was feeling sick again. I made it to his road, and up a ways something brown waddled over the sidewalk and into the woods. Money. I crossed the street and then ran after the porcupine, split through dense pine trees, and as I chased it, following its sound of crunching leaves, I had to stop and crouch down and puke. I spat. My head throbbed, and when I stood and wiped my mouth on my sleeve I heard nothing but a dull ringing in my ears.
Back at Fellis’s, Beth was washing dishes. Fellis sat at the kitchen table, his hair pressed to one side, talking with his mouth full.
Beth looked at me as if she wanted to know where I’d gone, but instead she said, “You forgot to shut off the shower.”
I stepped toward the hallway and bathroom.
“It’s off now,” she said. “Sit. I made you a plate. There’s more toast too if you want it.”
I thanked her—either for turning off the shower or for the food, I wasn’t sure which—and I grabbed the plate and sat.
Beth got a broom from the pantry closet. She hit at Fellis’s legs for him to move. She swept under the table.
“Why is there spaghetti everywhere?” she said.
Fellis took a sip of pink juice. He stood and demonstrated with a dirty rag. “Dee was holding the box last night—you know, to make a snack—and he got a big leg cramp and he goes, ‘UGH!’ and he threw the box up into the air.”
Beth laughed. “You’re ridiculous.”
She leaned the broom against the wall and picked up the rag. She lobbed it onto the counter. Over the garbage she turned the broom pan, and spaghetti and dirt scattered.
I was chewing a bite of egg, laughing still, when Beth said, “What is this?”
She reached into the garbage and pulled out an envelope.
“Didn’t I ask you to mail this?” she said.
“I forgot,” Fellis said. He kept eating.
“Why is it in the garbage?”
“It must’ve fell in.”
Fellis stood and grabbed more bacon from a white plate next to the stove.
Beth stared at him as he sat back at the table.
I got up and asked for the envelope. “I’ll go put it in the mail,” I said, but Beth wouldn’t look at me.
“You want to get charged for your tuition?” Beth said. “If they don’t know you’re Native they’ll process you like a white person.”
“I ain’t white.” Fellis wiped his greasy mouth with his shirt.
“I’m surprised they haven’t already charged you,” Beth said. “You were supposed to have given the form to the school months ago.”
“Beth,” I said. “Let me see it. I’ll go put it in the mail.”
“I ain’t white,” Fellis said. “So they better not.”
“No,” Beth said to me. “You sit and eat. Fellis will do it.”
“Dee said he’ll do it.”
“Put this in the mail!”
Fellis stood and snatched the envelope from his mother. He brought it to the trash and stuffed it down with the spaghetti and dirt and eggshells and bacon fat.
“I quit school,” he said, and he sat back at the table.
“Quit?” Beth said.
“What did you expect?” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing there. I didn’t even want to go. I did it to stop your nagging.”
“You didn’t even try,” Beth said.
“For fuck’s sake,” Fellis said. “I didn’t belong there. For two fucking weeks I sat in that philosophy class with that short fuckwit of a professor—who all he did was sit in a chair in front of the class swishing cough drop after cough drop around in his mouth—and I tried to pay attention but when I realized I’d spent two weeks—two fucking weeks!—thinking we were talking about that clothing brand—what’s it called,” he snapped his fingers, “—Aeropostale, yeah, that’s it—but we were actually talking about some guy named Aristotle, I knew I was screwed. So I bolted midclass. Even left my books.”
We were quiet. My eggs were cold.
“And my notebook, too,” Fellis said. “The one Aunt Alice bought me.”
I wanted to feel bad for Fellis. Really, I did—he’d never told me that was what happened. Why would he? He’d made it out to be all about the money. But seeing how bad he treated Beth lit my temper and got me burning.
Beth picked up Fellis’s napkin and threw it away. She left the envelope in the garbage. She turned to say something but didn’t. Down the hallway, I expected her to slam her door, but she let it close with a gentle click.
Fellis rose and stood at the sink. “What did she expect?” he said, eating a strip of bacon. “She did all my homework for me throughout high school. Fucking bitch.”
I brought my plate to the sink. My hands shook and the fork on the plate rattled. I rinsed the plate and slid it under a dirty bowl. There was one piece of bacon left and I wanted to eat it, wanted to chew on it and release a primal rage, but Fellis took it before I could and he stuffed it into his mouth.
He smiled at me and I broke his fucking nose.
. . .
For four days—the air cold and moist and the sky continuously pale, the feeling of the first snow coming—I searched for porcupines along the sides of the rez roads. I’d not spoken to Fellis, and so each day I was on my own, hunting porcupine, searching the woods (one day was wasted on the bus route up to the methadone clinic). But on those days I was out looking I found nothing. Porcupines—dead or alive—were not easy to find. At night, tired of searching, I slept in the boiler room out back of Mom’s house. I went inside only to get food or to use the bathroom or to change my clothes. The phone on the kitchen table blinked red, but I never checked it, and I never heard the phone ring. The house was clean: the dishes were put away, the floors were swept except for what I dragged in, and the place smelled as if it had been aired out, the way houses do when nobody’s been using them.
Early each morning, right as the sun was coming up, I set off to look for porcupines to make some money. My body hurt from sleeping on the hard concrete in the boiler room, and as each day passed my bones felt closer to breaking. By the fourth morning—it was about 3:30 AM—I got up, went inside, and unplugged the phone. I slept on the couch, and when I woke up it was noon. The first thing that came to mind were the Steel Reserves. I said, Fuck that porcupine, told myself I wasn’t going to find it, and I switched my attention to those missing beers.
That afternoon I only found one, and the can was dented and smeared with dirt. I kept on through the woods, picking up kindling and cradling it, and I came to the river. It was high and scraped the bank as it flowed by. Under the darkening sky, the river looked black.
I found a little patch of ground with no vegetation growing—hard, chilled soil and rocks—and settled onto it and built a small fire. I chugged the Steel Reserve to rush the buzz. The river flowed like a sound machine and I spaced out, watching the cold ground. Like looking at the stars, there were various rocks stuck in the mud that seemed to outline a figure. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and it got me remembering a story my mother told me.
It was after the tribe had forced my father to leave. I was no more than ten, eleven—he’d come up, had driven ten hours to take me for the summer. Mom wouldn’t let him, kept saying, “That’s what you get when the money’s late!” I remembered it: the police charging in and dragging him away from the bedroom door—“I have rights to my son!”—behind which my mother had barricaded us. It wouldn’t have come to that if we’d gone to camp with her boyfriend—or if her boyfriend had been around—but that was how it ended up. She’d covered me with a blanket and had hidden me in the closet among her upside-down shoes and snapped plastic hangers.
She’d told me the story after all that, after he’d been banned and visited me through the phone for some time.
The story was about the stone people. I remembered standing on a chair that had been pulled to the sink. Mom washed dishes, and I dried them. She made conveyer-belt noises as she passed me a dish. At some point—perhaps when the noises grew less funny—she told me about Gluskabe, the man from nothing. I never understood—and I still didn’t—how Gluskabe was from nothing since Kci-niwesk—the Great Being— had created him.
He’d come from somewhere, I said to my mother, and she laughed. “Honey,” she said, maybe passing me a plate or a spoon to dry, “men are so self-absorbed and so proud they would like to think they created themselves.”
Before Gluskabe got us right, or close to being right, my mother said, before he shot an arrow into an ash tree and split it in half and out poured us into first light—the people of the dawn—he made beings out of rocks. For a time, he walked among them and tried to teach them. But they were cold stone, aggregates of minerals, and when they walked their joints of quartzite sparked and created fire that caught the dry grass and spread to the oak ferns and then to the shagbark hickory and birch bark and oaks until the world was half burning. One stone man pointed to the sky—to the sun—and then he pointed back to the earth as if predicting.
The stone people couldn’t feel the heat, couldn’t feel pain, and so Gluskabe accepted he’d failed. One by one, he set out to smash them, to destroy them, to start over. But some of them ran off to the mountains and hid. Occasionally, my mother said, the stone people come out and walk among us.
. . .
The fire was out, and I felt embarrassed for having remembered such a story. I stood and brushed the back of my jeans off and stretched. I grabbed the beer I’d chugged and took a sip of an eyedropper’s worth of booze from the bottom and then chucked the can into the woods. After stepping on the fire and making sure it was out, I started for the boiler room, even though I was thinking about the couch.
It was dark, but I found the path and followed it. Every few feet, I tripped over large roots or jutting rocks. The path forked, and I went to take the left so I’d come up behind home, but I heard footsteps down the other way, heard branches snapping and the sound of rummaging. I went right.
It was way darker down that path, as if all the trees were pressed too close and the bare stripped branches too tightly tangled together so as not to permit any light, even from the moon, which was up above behind the clouds that periodically broke away to light the place in a blue hue. I walked slow on the bumpy dark path toward what sounded like someone cursing.
He was nothing more than a standing shadow, swinging a stick back and forth in the air at a tree.
“Meekew?” I said.
The shadow jumped and dropped the stick. He bent down and picked it up.
“No, you fucking idiot,” Fellis said. “Get a stick and help me.”
I asked what for, but he didn’t answer me. I kicked around the ground for a stick. Three times I thought I found a good one, but they were each short and wet and brittle.
“There’s no good sticks,” I said. “Christ,” Fellis said. “Use mine.”
He handed it to me, got close to me, and in the dark I could not see his face but something else.
“Fellis,” I said. “I’m sorry about your—”
“Don’t worry about it, Dee,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.
Just swing that stick.” “Swing it at what?” I said. “Look up in the tree.”
I looked.
“You looking?” “Yeah, I’m looking.” “What do you see?”
I looked hard. The moon came out and shone but not enough to see anything but blurs of branches. “Nothing,” I said.
Fellis rustled around the ground for a stick. Finally, he found a long one—at least fifteen feet—and when he turned holding it I had to back up out of the way.
“Watch this,” he said. He hoisted the stick above him and pointed it right up in the tree. He sent it flying, and it crashed through the branches until gravity pulled it back down. Debris fell over us, and the stick whacked the back of my neck.
We looked up, and I finally saw the prickly animal sitting on the highest branch. It looked down at us, terrified.
“Did I hit it?” Fellis said.
I told him no, that it was there staring at us. In the dark, Fellis leaned against an oak.
“We can wait for it to come down,” I said. “What else do we have to do?”
Fellis lit a smoke, and in the lighter’s flame I saw his swollen, puffy nose, saw the corners of each eye filled with a dense, thick red. He took two deep, deep drags, and with each inhale the orange glow grew brighter. He handed me the cigarette and set to making a fire. When it was blazing, I pitched the butt into the flames and sat next to Fellis.
“You want to bet how long it takes for him to come down?” I said, and Fellis laughed.
“No,” Fellis said. He took out from his jacket pocket an opened bag of something. He reached in it and took whatever was in there and then he handed the bag to me, and against the fire’s light I saw it was that thick foggy plastic filled with a stack of saltine crackers.
A can opened. Fellis slurped and handed me some of the other Steel Reserve.
“Why not?” I said. “You afraid you’ll lose again?” I took a sip and passed the can back to him.
“It’s not that,” he said. “I’m afraid that neither of us would win.” He tossed a stick at the tree. “I have a feeling that fucker ain’t coming down.”
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