LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

about her.

      There wasn’t a name Cash hadn’t been called: squaw, whore, stupid, heathen. She had heard them all. These days, she mostly just ignored irrelevant behavior. She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. Free beer and free games all night. What did she care?

      Ahead she saw a sign that read: RED LAKE RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED. She laughed. These Red Lakers had all kinds of Indian Pride. Their reservation was the only closed reservation in the state. Meaning they didn’t fall under state jurisdiction. Meaning they fell under federal jurisdiction. Which is what Wheaton meant when he said that as a county law man he didn’t have any jurisdiction up this way. Which explained the feds in the suits standing back there in a cornfield where a Red Laker’s body had been found.

      Cash finally reached the main road that halfway circled Red Lake, the lake itself.

      She braked at the stop sign. Plain logic told her that if she turned east she would run into the town of Red Lake. If she followed that road farther north, it would take her to Ponemah, where they still practiced the old medicine. About the only people who took that road were folks who lived there.

      Somehow that direction didn’t feel right anyways. Cash turned left. She kept the truck in third gear and drove slowly, watching the sides of the road. The stand would be on the north side. She could see it in her mind’s eye.

      Here and there a crow flew. There it was. Grey weathered pine boards, probably from an old front porch, had been nailed together to create a three-by-four-foot table. The two legs on each end had branches from a birch tree nailed in an X to steady the table. The ditch grass had been trampled down.

      There was a driveway leading to the lake. Cash turned down it. Straight ahead, a fairly new boat sat at the lake’s edge, with nets hanging on a makeshift rack close by.

      Animal traps hung from another tree. And there, in the pines, was a rundown government HUD house. Weathered red paint. Weathered, unpainted steps leading to the screen door that had seen too many kids and too many reservation dogs. At one time the window trim must have been painted white, but was now a dirty grey. The picture window had a makeshift curtain, an Indian-print bedsheet. Even from the outside one could tell it was nailed back and that a safety pin held a corner up to let some light in.

      The wornness of it reminded Cash of the house where she had spent the first three years of her life. Except her mom’s house had been a two-room tarpaper shack. With no running water or indoor plumbing. Which wasn’t all that uncommon back then. Cash remembered visiting the white neighbor kids, and they had outhouses too. But their houses were painted white. And they had a mom and a dad. Not just a mom living off the county, a mom who tended to drink a bit too much most weekends and ended up in the ditch more often than other mothers seemed to.

      Cash remembered that after that roll in the ditch, the county social worker became the constant female adult in her life. She would pull into their driveway and load Cash into her big black Buick and drop her off at a different white farm home.

      The farmers’ wives tended to harshness. Cash learned to duck her head out of a slap’s way. She learned to take a beating stoically. She learned that behaviors that had made her mom throw her head back and laugh made these other women go red-faced and shame her into silence.

      Cash learned to be watchful. Wary. Not to make too much noise or sudden moves. Do the dishes and sweep the floors when told. She learned these women believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and that her permanently tanned skin was a mark of someone’s sin.

      She would go to bed each night in the stranger’s house looking out the window at the stars, wishing for home. Back then, she didn’t have a sense of time. Was she in one home a week? Two months? She never knew. She just knew the joy that filled her heart when the social worker pulled up, put her back into the thin, bare clothes she had arrived in.

      In those first years, each time, Cash had expected to be driven home. Back to her mom. It never happened. Cash searched each new school for her brother and sister. She didn’t understand. At their mom’s, they always had something to eat even if it wasn’t the full spread the farmers wives put out. Sometimes her mom didn’t have the gas money to drive into town to get the water jugs filled and they would drink the rainwater from the rain barrels next to the house. They all slept curled in one big bed, kept warm by a kerosene stove in the winter months. There was always laughter. No swatting, no shaming. She and her brother climbed trees to the very top. She and her sister made mudpies and fed them to each other, their mom pouring a bucket of rainwater over them to wash them off.

      Cash remembered other nights when Wheaton had stopped her mother. Told her she shouldn’t be drinking and driving with kids in the car. Her mom would laugh and promise to get them home safely. He would always say to her as she turned the car back on, “Might be a good idea to stop drinking, you know.” And her mother would laugh, say sure and wave goodbye.

      Cash wished she could remember what happened the morning she woke up in jail. She had never gotten the courage to ask Wheaton.

      With that thought, Cash threw the Ranchero into park and looked around the Red Lake yard. There were lots of tire tracks. There was a shadow standing in what she assumed was the kitchen. She got out of the truck. It was colder here by the lake than she had expected. She reached back into the cab and put on her jean jacket and stuck the half-empty pack of Marlboros into the front left pocket. She walked up the weathered steps and knocked on the door. A girl child—about seven, black hair, with eyes just as black—cracked the door and looked up at her.

      “Your ma home?”

      The kid nodded.

      “Can I talk to her?”

      The girl shut the door and Cash waited, listening to the waves of the lake gently ease to shore. The woman who came to the door was a few inches taller than Cash. She was wearing a pair of black pants and a man’s worn plaid work shirt. On her feet were scuffed penny loafers, no socks. Her hair was black, wavy with strands that had escaped the rubber band holding it back. And her questioning eyes were as black as her daughter’s.

      Cash said, “Mind if I come in? I’m from down by Fargo, originally from White Earth, but been living and working in the Valley most of my life.”

      The woman said, “My husband is working down there, driving grain truck.”

      Cash said again, “Mind if I come in?”

      The woman opened the door and pointed with a tilt of her head to the kitchen table. Cash went over and sat down. In the center of the table were salt and pepper shakers, the glass kind you find in restaurants. A melamine plate with pale white commodity butter. A bowl with some sugar. An ashtray with a couple roll-your-own ends stubbed out in it.

      Half the table was covered with more melamine plates. Each plate held beads of a different color: red, white, yellow, green. The front piece of a moccasin, half-beaded with a red flower, sat next to the plates of beads.

      On the floor was a stack of three birchbark baskets, each with a different size of pinecones in it.

      The woman placed a cup of hot coffee in front of Cash and motioned to the sugar bowl. She also set out a plate of smoked whitefish and a piece of frybread. She leaned against the kitchen counter and took a sip of coffee from a cup she had poured for herself.

      “Thanks,” said Cash. “I haven’t eaten yet today. I slept along the road last night. By the way, folks call me Cash.” She broke off some of the frybread. Without a word, the woman handed her a knife. Cash put some butter on the frybread.

      While she was chewing the woman spoke. “Did you run into my husband down that way? Folks call him Tony O. When he can, he plays baseball. Hits the ball like that Cuban guy, Tony Oliva, that plays for the Twins. You coming with news about him?”

      She took another sip of her coffee without ever meeting Cash’s eyes. When she spoke again, there was quietness in her voice that hadn’t been there before. “He’s been working the fields down that way. Driving grain truck. He should be home any day now.”

      “How

Скачать книгу