The Round House

were surrounded by hummocks of weedy earth, no trees or bushes. The money had run out before steps were built, so people used ramps of plywood or just hoisted themselves in and jumped out of their houses. His aunt Star had moved Angus, his two brothers, her boyfriend’s two children, and a changing array of pregnant sisters and bingeing or detoxing cousins into a three-bedroom unit. Aunt Star managed an epic amount of craziness. It didn’t help that besides no steps the building itself was a low-bid nightmare. The contractor had skimped on insulation, so in winter Star had to keep the oven on all night with the door open and the water in the kitchen trickling, or the pipes would freeze. There were rags stuffed between the walls and windows, because the Sheetrock had shrunk away from the cheap-john aluminum combination storm frames. The windows soon fell apart, lost their screens. Nothing worked. The plumbing kept backing up. I even became an expert in sealing the toilet with wax and duct tape. Star was always bribing us with frybread to do house repairs or rig up satellite reception off a dented hubcap or some such thing.

Actually, once she had taken up with her big love, Elwin, we did manage the satellite. Star had a fancy television bought with the one lavish bingo win she’d managed in her lifetime. Together with Elwin we MacGyvered some old equipment together and got signals from Fargo, Minneapolis, even Chicago or Denver. The satellite was hooked up in September of 1987, just in time for the season premieres of all the network shows. We improved reception to the point where we sometimes even got the shows syndicated out of certain cities, ever-changing according to the weather and the magnetism of the planets. We had to hunt them down, but I don’t think we ever missed one episode of Star Trek. Not the old one, but The Next Generation. We loved Star Wars, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in TNG.

Naturally, we all wanted to be Worf. We all wanted to be Klingons. Worf’s solution to any problem was to attack. In the episode Justice we found out Worf didn’t enjoy sex with human females because they were too fragile and he had to show restraint. Our big joke around pretty girls was Hey, show some restraint. In Hide and Q the ideal Klingon girl jumped Worf and she was grotesquely hot. Worf was combustible, noble, and handsome even with a turtle shell on his forehead. Next to Worf, we liked Data because he mocked white people by being curious about stupid things that the crew would do or say, and because when gorgeous Yar got drunk he declared himself fully functional and had sex with her. Wesley, the one you’d think we’d identify with, our age and a genius, and with a careless mom who let him get into trouble, did not interest us because he was a bumbling white town-baby and wore ludicrous sweaters. We were in love of course with the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troy, especially when the show let her hair go long and curly. Her jumpsuits were low-cut, her red V belt pointed you-know-where, and her big head and short curvy body drove us wild. Commander Riker was supposedly hot for her, but he was wooden, implausible. Better once a beard hid his baby cheeks, but we still wanted to be Worf. As for Captain Picard, he was an old man, though a French old man, so we liked him. We also liked Geordi because it turned out he was always in pain because he wore the eye visor, and that made him noble too.

The reason I go into this is that because of this show we set ourselves apart. We made drawings, cartoons, and even tried to write an episode. We pretended we had special knowledge. We were starting to get our growth and were anxious how we’d turn out. In TNG we weren’t skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about.

The first day I went back to school, Cappy walked me home. It is unusual to see people walking places on the reservation now, except on the special walking paths created to promote fitness. But in the late eighties young people still walked places, and as both Cappy and I lived less than a mile from school, we often flipped a coin to see whose house we’d go to. His was livelier, as Randall always had his friends around, but mine had a television and box so that we could play Bionic Commando, a game we were fanatical about.

Cappy had given me the thunderbird egg in the school hallway, and he told me about it on the way back to the house. He said that when he had found it the tree was still smoking. I pretended I believed him. Without saying anything, it was clear that Cappy was just walking me home and would not go inside. I would not have let him anyway. My mother didn’t want anyone to see her. Although my father was about to take a leave of absence and had called in another judge from retirement, he was still finishing up some paperwork at his office. He had already told me that he’d keep checking in all that day, but that my mother would be glad when I got home.

As we walked up the drive, Clemence came out the front door and said she’d got a call from a neighbor that Mooshum was out in the yard. I assumed from her rush that he’d left his pants in the house. She got in her car and swerved away. Cappy turned around for his own house once we’d reached mine, and I walked to the back door. As I rounded the corner, I saw the twiggy treelets with their shriveled leaves, still laid out in a row on the concrete to die. I put down my books and gathered them up, one by one, and stashed them at the edge of the yard. It was in me at that moment to feel sorry for the little trees and to be aware also that I dreaded going into my house. I had never felt that before. Then I tried to open the door and found it was locked.

I was so surprised at first that I kicked at the door, thinking it was stuck. But the back door was really locked. And the front door locked automatically—Clemence had probably forgotten that. I got the key from its hiding place and went in slowly, quiet, not banging the door and slamming my books on the table as I ordinarily would have. On any other day, my mother wouldn’t have been home yet and I would have felt the sort of elation that a boy feels when he steps into his house knowing that for two hours it is all his. That he can make his own sandwich. That if there is TV reception, there might be afterschool reruns for him to watch. That there might be cookies or some other sweet around, hidden by his mother, but not hidden too well. That he can rifle through the books on his father and mother’s bedroom bookshelves for a book like Hawaii, by James Michener, where he might learn interesting but ultimately useless tips on Polynesian foreplay—but there, I have to stop. The back door had been locked for the first time I ever recall, and I’d had to fish the key from underneath the back steps where it had always hung on a nail, used only when the three of us returned from long trips.

Which was the sense I had now: that just going to school had been a long trip—and now I had returned.

The air seemed hollow in the house, stale, strangely flat. I realized that this was because in the days since we’d found my mother sitting in the driveway, nobody had baked, fried, cooked, or in any way prepared food. My father only made coffee, which he drank day and night. Clemence had brought us casseroles that were still sitting, half eaten, in the refrigerator. I called for my mother softly, and walked halfway up the stairs until I could see that the door to my parents’ bedroom was shut. I eased back down the stairs into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took a big swallow. It was grossly sour. I dumped the milk, rinsed the glass, filled it, and gulped down the iron water of our reservation until the sour taste was gone. Then I stood there with the empty glass in my hands.

Part of the dining room set was visible through the open door, a roan maple table with six chairs around it. The living room was divided off by low shelves. The couch sat just outside a small room lined with books—my father’s den, or study. Holding the glass, I felt the tremendous hush in our little house as something that follows in the wake of a huge explosion. Everything had stopped. Even the clock’s ticking. My father had unplugged it when we came home from the hospital the second night. I want a new clock, he’d said. I stood there looking at the old clock, whose hands were meaninglessly stopped at 11:22. The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud. A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk. I set the glass on the table and bolted up the stairs. Burst into my parents’ bedroom. My mother was sunk in such heavy sleep that when I tried to throw myself down next to her, she struck me in the face. It was a forearm back blow and caught my jaw, stunning me.

Joe, she said, trembling. Joe.

I was determined not to let her know she’d hurt me.

Mom ... the milk was sour.

She lowered her arm and sat up.

Sour?

She had never let the milk go sour in the refrigerator before. She had grown up without refrigeration and was proud of how clean she kept her treasured icebox. She took the freshness of its contents seriously. She’d bought Tupperware even, at a party. The milk was sour?

Yes, I said. It was.

We have to go to the grocery!