I. Pud
The moment before things started to unravel, Norman Rockwell might have painted our rez playground—little brown kids in tennies with jump ropes and marbles. Sure, no frilly anklets on the little girls’ feet, the boys’ T-shirts a bit ratty and mosquito bites marring their bare backs as they bent to their cat’s-eyes or shooters, but even Rockwell’s nostalgia understood poverty and the beauty of doing-the-best-you-can.
We are America’s “Indians.” At least on the surface. Peddling crafts and paddling canoes—sometimes even the tribal council wants to relax into that image. Maybe that’s why we find little help for the dark trouble some of us live in.
Still, I guess that night our small covey of “Indian youth” had let our guard down too. We had fallen into the still life—an evening of no math homework, just stretching our dreams like they were lanky adolescent legs too long for the swings. We expected nothing more of the hours than sneaking a smoke behind the pool hall, pitching horseshoes, and jawing.
I remember the soft opening to the drama: On the merry-go-round, teenagers scream like they’re five again. Then Melmo’s head drops down. He leaves a trail of puke—pink from the strawberry Boone’s Farm. A circle of blue-jeaned legs that instinctively push to keep spinning. No one wants to get near the skinny guy with vomit covering the leather wraps of his braids, covering his hoodie. The girls’ screech now high and piercing like a hawk’s.
From the sling-bottom swings, Wally and I watch like the drama is the last down of a football game. Everything riding on the run. Just like our Hornets game, this will end badly. Somehow a fight will erupt. Parents will shake their heads. Someone will get suspended.
Wally spits sunflower seed shells onto the brown sand. “Another Godot moment.”
I arch my eyebrows.
“What are we waiting for?” After a beat, he commands, “Ambe, Pud.” He pulls me up, and we walk toward the spinning mess, the toes of his boots arrowpoints headed to target.
Ten minutes later, we are washing slime off our shoes under the hose at Trish’s house. Retelling it. Laughing. Trish has stripped off her John Prine T-shirt. She splashes us, pushes back her curtain of bangs, then settles on the porch steps to study her painted toenails. Lanie breaks into the merriment. “What about Melmo?” Always timid, she wears her ball cap pulled down in the front, shading her face. I long to see the dark ovals of her eyes, want to trace her full lips. I think we all do—especially Trish. But the porch light, with only one working bulb, refuses to show us the perfect curves of her aloneness.
“Nothing about Melmo, Lanie.” Wally’s answer comes out like a command. His gray eyes extend his dare. Lanie, surprised, looks up at him. The two of them hold the stare no more than three seconds, but to Trish and me it seems longer. Long enough for someone—the Stage Manager or Trickster—to change the set. This is no longer an idyll, Norman Rockwell’s Native America—it’s Vine Deloria’s.
“He’s a fuckup,” says Wally. “He throws up. Tomorrow, he wakes up, sun on his face, smelling his own puke. Classic Melmo.”
No one counters. Except the moon, which suddenly slides out from behind a cloud. A sky that hurts.
“Verso, you idiot.” Wally waits for me to comply.
We’re in his uncle’s shed. The maker and the gofer. Wally’s working on a hide today. We’re both sweating. Not talking about Melmo last night, Melmo’s not showing up for school today, or anything sharp enough to rip open the day, including Lanie’s fragility. Not talking is like being on hold. You can’t relax into it, because you know something more is coming.
Wally tries again. “Pud! Verso!” His voice a whip. Its sound echoes off the metal tools lining the walls.
“Can’t you just speak English?” Tired of his arrogance, but not ready to pick a fight, I add, “Or dog or Michif or Anishinaabemowin or pig Latin.”
“Urn-tay over-way, Ud-pay.”
I flip the leather. Wonder, but don’t ask, what will go on the reverse side. The afternoons—always the same. Watch. Hope. Figure it out. Never any explanation. No promises, no compliments. Here in the nonschool of Wally’s world, I am still the dogsbody, still just do what I am told. Clumsily. Sometimes sun shines on the dirt floor. Shadows appear and disappear as branches blow across the high rectangular windows. Their dance comforts me.
My days, too, have become shadows. Darkened by the X’s on my calendar counting toward release day. The day our trailer becomes full again. My dad takes up space like Wally—like he doesn’t need permission. While I hunch my five-foot-two “pudge,” he sashays his. Work camp won’t change much for him, though it has emptied my mom, emptied me.
I bring my hollow here, and sometimes Wally surprises me. Puts his hands on mine and guides the awl, the needle, the paintbrush. His touch swift and light—like a breeze has found its way through the window cracks.
I don’t know how he learned. These crafts. His attitude. His uncle seems too far gone in booze to take on an oshkaabewis. Wally, too cynical to apprentice.
Whatever. It’s their story.
I’m just trying to fit in somewhere. I bike here most afternoons. Fifteen minutes of furious, fifteen minutes to forget. White schools are white schools, even on the rez. I’m not an it-is-what-it-is kinda person, but at sixteen what power do I have against the “tell us about your culture” Band-Aid teachers put on history books?
At Wally’s, I hang on as long as I can. Watch the pattern emerge. His color choices unexpected. Chokecherry red with aspen green, with mud brown. Lightning-white accents. He caresses the quills, guides them like it matters. In the long making sessions, his face changes. It’s like seeing the surface of a lake come alive in sunlight. Eyes a kaleidoscope of water fractals. In the hot terror of every day, refraction is a dream to fall into.
“Shitstorm, can you help out here?” “Ass-yay!”
II. Lane
In art class, Wally and I become partners by default. Our classmates have us pegged. I’m awkward; he’s angry. The others don’t make eye contact on “project” days. Don’t get me wrong, we prefer it this way. Neither wants to navigate the cliques and social politics of this messy consolidated school. Wally and I went to the same rural grade school and ride the same bus now. Actually, we mostly figure out our own transportation. If you’ve ever ridden on a bus full of jocks, majorettes, and rich farmers, you can understand why.
“You and me, Lanie.” Wally points his lips to the chair opposite him.
Today for life drawing, we alternate between sketching and “modeling.” “Fully clothed,” Wally reads from the syllabus. “As if. In this school?” But Mrs. Warren is nothing if not precise. Petite, gray haired (no dye, thank you), British born, and agnostic, she’s unique enough to be Wally approved.
I hold the charcoal. My eyes pan slowly, boots to bandana; sweat forms on my lip as I try to find the angles inside shapes. Stroke by stroke, I shadow his set jaw. Noses are my nemesis. Once again, I flub even the clear hill of his hawk nose. Not horribly, but it will be part of the “critique” comments. Wally knows I am struggling.
“Lanie, Lanie, wiikaa, Lanie!” I try to tune out the teasing of his eyes while I pencil them in. Askew. Like the maker’s hand slipped. Eyebrow scar? Or is it shaved just there?
Without warning, my lungs constrict. The swim of razors, song of cut cut cut, of pink bathtub water, stops my hand.
“Switch!” The loud command coming from Mrs. Warren rescues me. I piano my fingers, easing an imaginary cramp.
“Freak-show time.” Wally points at me. Playful in our classroom corner.
Art unlocks the kept parts of him. Sweeps away scales and dried bones from the sites of old subsistence. He stretches. Languid. Nothing at stake here. Despite chipped nails, the fingers on the hand he extends for the pencil remind me of sleek dark minnows. Smooth and swimming effortlessly in the freedom of these hours. His arm, too, lengthens. The pencil, a wand over the page. A glide, a curving path. Then something shifts, becomes heavy with intent. The movements no longer those of a minnow but rather of a garter snake in grass, with that edge of hiddenness and surprise. A twist, an unexpected line.
Mesmerized, I forget to worry. Forget the ordinariness of my face, the tip of the scar that peeks out of my sleeve.
“And time!” We both start, each having left the room for our refuge world.
Wally shakes off his daze more quickly than I. Puts down the charcoal pencil, dusts his hands on his black jeans, returns to banter. “Don’t get bigheaded when you see it.” He tears the page off and passes it to me. “Comic-book you—Guardians of the Galaxy and all that.”
I prepare to see myself in skintight leotard, cape, and tiara. But the sketch is the same goofy girl as in my mirror—V-neck T-shirt, wide forehead, low ponytail showing my ear piercings. Except for the steel of my shoulders, the knife glare of my eyes. Except for the scar fully visible on my wrist—a triumphant scar that looks like fire, like a lit sword.
I have no answering words. He cocks his wicked eyebrows. “Don’t hide so much, niijii.”
*
Later, I cut out quilt squares with my mom. Blue, purple, and lilac flower prints—some realistic, some with surreal smiling pansies. Mom pretends not to, but she watches me. Home is a careful place now. My posture, the timbre of my voice, whether I eat or just push my food around—everything under scrutiny, read for signs.
I take careful breaths to remain calm. Make careful conversation about school and babysitting. Compose my face carefully when Mel’s absence is brought up.
“Mr. Walsh called today,” my mom is saying in her gentle you-don’t-have-to-hide-things voice. “Something about Melmo and an episode on the playground?”
“I was with Trish,” I blurt, forgetting to be careful. Then I channel the Lanie who had smooth, scar-free wrists, the Lanie who knew how to make meringue by eight, who won blue ribbons in 4-H for homemaking and animal husbandry.
“We, we were practicing a skit for French class.” I don’t know where that lie came from, but suddenly I believe it too. “Bonjour, mademoiselle. Je m’appelle Lanie. Je suis très fatiguée!” In true melodramatic fashion, I pretend to fall asleep. My mom’s eyebrows arch like crawling caterpillars and then straighten out. Somehow the distraction works—for both of us. We laugh a real laugh together. I steer carefully for the rest of the quilting session. We stay in the “what if ” territory of before. What if I hadn’t fallen for Mel? What if I hadn’t used an X-Acto knife to slit my drug-loving veins? I am that Lanie, and we both love being with her.
That night, with the cicada rasp outside my window, I remember Wally’s drawing. Pushing up my pajama sleeve, I trace the raised edges of my lightning sword. I let the night breeze find it. I hope—carefully.
III. Melmo
The stiffness of my jeans wakes me—almost icy in the predawn. I remember having felt warm and wet, before I passed out. Was someone here with me? There, where the fire was, a body is curled with the grandfather stones. When I look closer, I see it is my twin. We are alone in the mists of morning. Behind the fire circle is an outhouse or a shed. A rusty horseshoe has been nailed above the half-open door. No house in sight, no barn. I look at the wood in the back of my pickup. Half a cord? What was I doing with it?
Never mind, we need wood now.
I check my back pockets for gloves. Not there. I shake my hands to warm them. Then I shake Twin, but he refuses to wake. His body solid as the rocks.
None of this makes any sense. Have I lost him? Again.
Loneliness grows into a cannibal giant that could swallow me; I curl next to the body but feel no less abandoned. Whoever was here—Twin or me or a shape-shifting spirit—has left only this hull. Is this death? Mine, at last? I wonder, but have no way to test this thing. I begin to laugh and find I cannot stop. The sound fills the air, striking my bones and setting them a-shiver as if they were a xylophone. Do the dead become music?
When I was alive, was my life so indistinguishable from nothingness or from damnation that I can’t tell the difference now? If I’m dead, I should feel something—pain or anger. Instead, I am numb, as I have been numb before each needle and after, before the words flung at me, the starving days and the stealing days. Numb and longing for anything, anyone, to make me feel. I remember the stray cat that stayed black-eyed and purring through the nights last fall.
I had broken out my old fishing pole, baited a jig with canned corn. Just as I did at six, eight, even ten; fishing from the public dock at Little Moon Lake or from the banks near the dam. Then and now, I brought home perch, sunfish, sometimes a crappie or a snake of a northern pike. “The small ones are the best eating,” my mom used to say as she scaled or filleted my catch almost before they stopped flopping.
The tiger cat, Winslow, showed just as much delight with my stringer, though she tended to play catch and release before actually eating the fish. Her paws would flash, pinning the gold belly of a sunfish to the grass. Then she’d let them loose again. Her tail would flick—back and forth like a metronome. She’d pause again, hunker down, and sneak up on her prey. I’d smile, watching her, and make my own meal, feeling almost happy. But, too far gone one morning after a night dealing and sampling, I backed over Winslow with my truck, right where she had been napping. After that came weeks I don’t remember. Then one Wednesday, having received another “straighten up” lecture, I left school to find Lanie sitting on the curb. She looked up—at me, not through me—and offered to share her only slightly burned home-ec cookies. The bell of her laugh called me back. It was that simple.
Nothing can call me back now. So, though I know instinctively I am to travel west, I turn instead toward town—to find Lanie. She will understand what has happened, tell me how to find Twin. Lanie will make my death fires. If I am pitiful, perhaps she will come with me across the last river.
But before I can reach the main road, headlights come down the two-track. I sink into the ditch. Watch as men tromp about with flashlights, set up torches. They touch Twin, take pictures, measurements. They cover his body with an army blanket. Soon, I think. Soon he will be warm. Soon I will feel the heat too. We were like that as twins. Connected. That’s why I know he never traveled what the old ones call the “path of souls.” I know he is waiting.
Another car snakes down the road. Stops abruptly. Starts to back up. The blue-clad men holler, “Stop! Stop, or we shoot!” All their lights go out again. I hear crashing and gunfire. Close by, then farther away. Each sound a story I should try to decipher.
Instead, I lie back in the damp ditch grass. Tired. For years, chaos has made me its slave. I could never sort what came my way, now feel beyond trying. I can smell wild mint nearby. I imagine I feel a snake slither past me. I neither hope nor flinch. The noises, more and more distant, no longer matter.
*
Only Lanie bothered to help me sort through what my mother had left behind, sort my days. We swept the rooms. Filled the trash with expired food. “Evicting the mold monster,” she said. I pawned baskets and tools we found, plugged coins from the haul into machines at the laundromat. We washed my mom’s clothes. Her death blankets. Gave all that away because spirits can be tricky. We washed rugs, curtains, couch throws. After a while, I could watch the spinning drums without getting dizzy, without crying like the leaky machine I had become.
I wasn’t bad for Lanie at first. But I needed her to need me too. I knew only one sure way to keep her. Each high, each crash, I helped her. She’d call my name: “Mel? Mel!” I took chokers to pawn, feather fans. I eased her journeys. I took appliances. I didn’t cook anyway. She came more often now. I took the antlers from the wall. The spaces where they had been accusingly bright in their emptiness. I took the rocker from the front porch. She asked about that, but I said the runner was being repaired. Soon we were locked together in our need. But then the pawn ran out.
I had to get my own fix first so I could think about how to get hers. But she couldn’t wait. Didn’t wait. Fuck, fuck, fuck all the hypocrite saviors who took her away. They won’t let me talk to her alone. She still needs me. I am building us a stronghold. Soon it will be ready. Then I will take care of her again.
*
I am trying to find a spot on my mom’s flowered couch where I can’t feel the springs pushing through. Then I realize I am still in the ditch. I must have fallen asleep waiting to make sure the cops weren’t going to return. My back hurts where it has been positioned on a stick, but I wake warm again.
I realize Twin’s warmth has found its way to me. He is whispering. “Go on, Mel. Go ahead. I’ll meet you.”
He has said this before, and I am leery. “Promise?” “Trust me.”
We both know trust is a scab that never heals. Yet he pushes me away from him, onto the path.
I step from the ditch, and immediately the frigid air clutches at my exposed skin.
My muscles spasm. I start to walk east, but something is off. I look down and discover my boots are gone. My feet don’t feel like feet now. They have grown hairy and large.
IV. Trish
In the quiet of the guidance counselor’s office, we sit—four candles burned to a nub. Like melted wax, we are unsightly, mute and spent—dark.
“You must know something about this situation,” Mr. Walsh says, the feigned patience of his voice suspect like all treaty language. He sits with a pen poised, the overhead light gleaming on his close-cropped blond hair, his eyes turned to full power.
How many times had Mel been here? How many times had Lanie and I waited to give him a ride back to his crap empty life?
Pud called Mel Lanie’s “project,” but I knew the relationship was something more. That’s why I made certain to stay with her. Mel was Mel, but Lanie couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see me right in her path, waiting.
In the schoolyard, we would beg chalk from the grade-schoolers, promising them jawbreakers and candy cigs. With the dregs of their twelve-color packs, we made sidewalk kingdoms. Lopsided blue doors, tree swings, and always, the Yellow Brick Road. Lanie has a thing for Dorothy like I have a thing for her. She would draw the winding road. I’d make Dorothy with a baseball cap and Lanie’s doll lips.
But in the movie Dorothy has only Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion. To put all of us in, someone had to be the dog or a witch. I pretended innocence when I gave Mel a witch hat and a jack-o’-lantern mouth. I was here, making my time hers, what could she say?
We didn’t place much stock in Oz, and never drew the Wizard. We didn’t expect to get to the Emerald City anyway. Where we come from, it’s all journey and making the most of what you have. You know—tribe. In the long afternoon detentions, we also wove our Anishinaabe migration story with the bombast of Hollywood and the simplicity of Kansas. Some days the Brick Road became a waterway for our birchbark canoe, and Mel became the water monster Mishibizhii. You can bet Lanie frowned at his horns in that picture.
Chalk dust stayed on our hands long after we had used up our stock. As we waited, we compared our rainbow fingers and palms. Lifelines are not a subject to dwell on if you’re Indian on the rez, but those sidewalk afternoons with Lanie felt like a promise.
Walsh’s pretend patience has run out, and he claps his hands. “Now then . . .”
“We know nothing about it.” Wally speaks for all of us. “We don’t hang with Melmo.” In the awkward pause that follows, he corrects himself. “Uh, didn’t.”
“I see.” Walsh seems to concede the point, then asks, “Since?”
No one speaks, but we try to work out the answer through quick glances. Finally, Lanie opens her mouth, but I cut her off.
“Mr. Walsh, just because we’re all Native doesn’t mean we’re a gang.” I’m good with teachers’ games. I look down. I know I’ve won the point, but unlike Wally or even Pud, I’m not above pandering. I start again, my words rote like a memorized catechism. “Mel, ah, Melmo had a drug problem, an alcohol problem.” My lips quiver, and I pause. Fuck, even I can’t tell what part of the emotion is put on and what is real.
Mel was only Mel, wasn’t he? Mostly enemy to me. We both felt that, didn’t we? “He . . .” I stumble a little. “He had family issues and we—Wally, Lanie, and Pud, uh, Patrick, and I didn’t have, um, resources to help. We had to back away because . . . because . . .”
Before I can formulate a half-truth to placate Walsh, Wally stands up. “Because he was a prick and tried to pull Lanie into his shithole. We pulled her out. He drowns in the crap. End of story.” The warning bell for the next class rings, but no one moves.
School rules now insignificant—even to Walsh, who stands hands in his pockets, jingling his keys. Like us, the room, the file cabinets, all the college brochures, seem to hold their breath.
Sometimes waiting is a strategy. Sometimes the world is spinning too fast to dismount.
V. Wally
The red swirl of police lights passed the farmhouse window. No siren. That night, they didn’t pause at our driveway, no heavy boots kicked the chickens aside, no badge flashed on the other side of a screen door.
Had I been awake, expecting this? Expecting them? Filling the ashtray, I bide my time between visits. So yeah, maybe I had been waiting.
I wanted Lanie safe. We all did. But did we want it like a tire iron wants peace, like a gun does?
I’m no psychic, but the evening of the playground incident, the air had smelled of scorched skin mixed with fear. I didn’t want near any bad medicine. Didn’t want Lanie near it. Or halo Trish or sad Pud. Not everyone believes anymore, but my uncle Amik’s life proved Bearwalkers exist. He doesn’t talk much when he’s sober, but I’ve seen him watching hard for fireballs when he’s shkwebii.
So yeah, I saw the patrol car and knew Melmo was in trouble. I didn’t know for certain whether it was the kind of trouble he made for himself, like my dad made his, or the kind that comes from a spell, like the trouble that caught my brother. Maybe you think I’m a coward or selfish not to have tried to warn him. But maybe you would feel different if your hands had helped wash blood from your mother’s face, aimed a gun at your own brother. Maybe you would turn toward the little bit of sunshine you could find and let it keep you warm until you were eighteen and what they call free. Maybe you would put a nighttime of whispered prayers between you and the rez hungers that haunted Melmo.
I waited like I had learned to since I was six and my parents were out somewhere. I didn’t expect comfort when they returned, or explanations. I always hid myself at the sound of tires on gravel—listened, and watched. Some things I saw I wished I hadn’t. “Sneaky little turd!” my dad would bellow if he caught me. “Get an eyeful, did you?”
Sometimes it hurt to collect crumbs of knowledge. But as I learned who siphoned gas or where to get bootleg cigs, liquor, hides, I instinctively understood that knowing might keep me safe—keep us safe. I failed my mom; I won’t fail again.
On the night of Mel’s murder, all the farmhouse lights were off when I watched the return procession—the cop car, Melmo’s pickup, and a blue Chevy I didn’t recognize. I couldn’t see the plate, but I memorized the rust pattern on the rear door. It was 3 a.m. Another Sunday when churches would pray for our “lost souls.” The headlines in the weekly paper would read “Another Tragic Teen Suicide.”
Was I the only one awake enough to question that? Was I the only one who knew there would be more?
__________________________________
“Waiting, a Quintet” from Red Ants: Stories. Originally published in The Kenyon Review 46, no. 4 (fall 2024). Copyright © 2024 by Kimberly Blaeser. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company LLC on behalf of Counterpoint Press, CounterpointPress.com.
