us up, as my mother’s decision to cook had done. When I cleared away the awful dinner and the pie was produced, my mother smiled slightly, just an upward movement of her lips. My father divided the pie into three equal pieces and laid a slab of Blue Bunny vanilla on top of each piece. I got to finish my mother’s. She started teasing my father about the stew.
Exactly how old were those turnips?
Older than Joe.
And where did you get that onion?
That’s my little secret.
And the meat, roadkill?
Oh god, no. It died in the backyard.
I wasn’t particularly worried about missing dinner that night because I knew after Randall’s sweat lodge that Cappy and his sidekick, me, would eat top-shelf. We were the fire keepers. Cappy’s aunts, Suzette and Josey, who had made Doe’s boys their pets, always fixed the food. On ceremony nights they’d leave a feast put up neatly in two big plastic coolers alongside the garage. Farther back, nearly in the woods, the sweat-lodge dome of bent and lashed-together saplings, covered by army-surplus tarps, humidly waited, gathering mosquitoes. Cappy had already made the fire. The rocks, the grandfathers, were superheating in the middle. Our job was to keep that fire going, hand in the sacred pipes and the medicines, bring the rocks to the door on long- handled shovels, close and open the flaps. We’d also throw tobacco into our fire when someone in the lodge yelled for it, to mark some special prayer or request. On crisp nights it was a good job—we’d sit talking around that fire, staying warm. Sometimes we’d secretly roast a hot dog or marshmallow on a stick even though the fire was sacred and one time Randall had caught us. He’d claimed we’d taken the sacredness out of the fire with our hot dogs.
Cappy looked at him and said, How sacred can your fire be if we sucked out its holiness with just our puny wieners? I couldn’t stop laughing. Randall threw up his hands and walked off. It was too hot to roast anything now, besides we knew we’d eat hugely at the end. Food was our pay, besides sometimes driving Randall’s beat-up Olds. It was usually a pleasant enough job. That night, however, instead of cooling off, it grew muggy. There was no breeze. Even before sunset, whining clouds of mosquitoes swarmed us. Their attacks made us sit closer to the fire, in order to take advantage of the smoke, which only made us sweat enticingly. They just kept sucking on us through the salty, smoky layers of Off.
Randall’s friends, who all belonged to a powwow drum or danced like Randall, showed up laughing. Two of them were baked, but Randall didn’t notice. He was obsessive about setting everything up perfectly—the rack for the pipes, the star quilt blanket smoothed out beside the entrance, the abalone shell for burning sage, the glass jars of powdered medicine, the bucket and dipper. He seemed to have a little measuring stick in his head for lining up these sacred items. It drove Cappy nuts. But other people liked Randall’s style and he had friends from all over Indian Country—just that day he’d opened a package from a Pueblo friend which contained a jar of medicine that was now sitting with the others. He was humming a pipe-loading song and putting his pipe together, concentrating so hard he didn’t notice that the back of his neck was covered with gorging mosquitoes. I swiped them off.
Thanks, he said distractedly. I’m gonna pray for your family.
That’s cool, I said, though it made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like being prayed for. As I turned away I felt the prayers creeping up my spine. But that was Randall, too, always ready to make you feel a little uncomfortable with the earnest superiority of all that he was learning from the elders, even your own elders, for your benefit. Mooshum had instructed Doe on how to set up this lodge and Doe had passed it down to Randall. Cappy saw my look.
Don’t worry about it, Joe. He prays for me too. And he gets a lot of girls with his medicine. So he’s gotta keep in practice.
Randall had a stony profile, smooth skin, and a long braided ponytail. Girls, especially white ones, were fascinated with him. A German girl had camped in their yard for a whole month one summer. She was pretty, and wore the first earth sandals ever seen on our reservation, so Randall got teased about them. Somebody got a good look at the label and it was Birkenstock, which became Randall’s nickname.
The heat grew worse and we guzzled dippers of the sacred sweat-lodge water. I envied the guys going into the lodge because they would get so hot that this outside heat would seem like a cool breeze when they came out. Plus the fiercer heat from those grandfathers would wilt the mosquitoes. They all went in. Cappy and I brought the rocks to the door with the long-handled shovels. Randall took them off the shovels with a pair of deer antlers and placed them in the center pit. We handed in all of their stuff and closed the flap. They started singing and we sprayed ourselves again with Off.
We had finished three rounds and passed in the last of the grandfathers. We’d gone up to the house to refill the water cooler and were coming out, standing on the back deck, when there was an explosion. We didn’t even hear anyone yell,
It took a long while, everyone sitting in the house amid the piles of bachelor junk, for the men to emerge from shock and figure out what happened.
I think it was, said Skippy at last, that Pueblo medicine. Remember just before you threw a big handful on the rocks you thanked your buddy down there, then you said a longish prayer?
A long, long prayer, Birkenstock. Then you ladled on that water ...
Oooh, said Randall. My friend said it was Pueblo medicine. I was praying for his situation with a Navajo woman. Cappy, go and get that jar.
Don’t order me.
Okay, please, younger brother, seeing as we’re all butt naked and traumatized, would you go out and get that jar?
Cappy went out. He came back. There was a label on the jar.
Randall, said Cappy, the word medicine has quote marks around it.
The jar was filled with a brownish powder that didn’t smell very strong to us—not like bear root or wiikenh or kinnikinnick. Randall held the jar and frowned. He sniffed it like a fancy wine taster. At last, he licked his finger, stuck it in the jar, and put his finger in his mouth. Tears spurted instantly.
Aah! Aah! He stuck his tongue out.
Hot pepper, said the others. Special Pueblo hot pepper. They watched Randall dance around the room.
Man, look at his feet fly.
We should give him Pueblo medicine next powwow.
For sure, man. They took long drinks of water. Randall was at the sink with his tongue sticking out under the water tap.
Randall placed that medicine down on the rocks, said Skippy, but when he threw down four big ladles of water, then, man, it vaporized into our eyes and we were breathing that shit in! It burnt like hell. How could Randall have done that to us, man?
They all looked at Randall with his tongue under the faucet.
I hope he puts more clothes on finally, said Chiboy Snow.
We remembered the aunts when we heard them pull out of the driveway. We looked out. They’d left behind two bags of fresh frybread. The grease was darkening the paper sacks in delicate patches.
If you bring our clothes in, Skippy said to us, and hand in that feast, I’d pay youse.
How much? said Cappy.
Two each.
Cappy looked at me. I shrugged.
We hauled their stuff in and as we were all eating Randall came and sat next to me. His face was rugged and raw like all the other guys. His eyes were swollen red. Randall had most of his college education, and
