days of Father Travis’s summer program so that we could see Dream Girl. She and Cappy were starting to flirt.
Yes, I think you are Aztec. Cappy eyed her half mockingly. You’d reach right into a man’s chest and rip out his heart.
She looked away, but she smiled.
Zack put his fist out and pumped it with a squishing noise. Padump. Padump. But neither of them looked at him. The three of us knew we had no hope. Cappy was the only one. But we still wanted to be near her and hoped that she would try converting us for real.
At home, my mother’s energy had faded only slightly. She had two streaks of color on her face. I realized she’d smeared on rouge. She was taking iron pills and other pills. There were six bottles of stuff right inside the kitchen cabinet. She had made Juneberry pancakes for dinner. Mom and Dad sat skeptically and listened as I told all about how I had joined Youth Encounter Christ, or YEC, and was due up at the church tomorrow.
Youth Encounter? My father narrowed his eyes. You quit Whitey’s to join a youth encounter group?
I quit Whitey’s because he pasted Sonja.
My mother went rigid.
All right, said my father quickly. What do you encounter?
We dramatize life situations. Like if we are offered drugs. We imagine that Jesus is there to step between, say, Angus and the drug dealer. Or me and the dealer, say, not that it happens.
That’s right, said my father, you’re beer drinkers, as I remember. Does Jesus snatch the cans from your paws? Empty them on the ground?
That’s what we’re supposed to visualize.
Interesting, said my mother. Her voice was neutral, formal, neither caustic nor falsely enthusiastic. I’d thought she was the same mother only with a hollow face, jutting elbows, spiky legs. But I was beginning to notice that she was someone different from the before-mother. The one I thought of as my real mother. I had believed that my real mother would emerge at some point. I would get my before mom back. But now it entered my head that this might not happen. The damned carcass had stolen from her. Some warm part of her was gone and might not return. This new formidable woman would take getting to know, and I was thirteen. I didn’t have the time.
The second day at Youth Encounter Christ was better than the first—we got our T-shirts that morning and put them right on over our clothes, patting the thorn-encircled sacred hearts printed over our own hearts. We went down to the lake and started lip-synching the songs everyone else in the group knew. Neal was our best friend now. The other kids from the reservation, real devout ones whose parents were deacons and pie makers for the funerals, had told Neal that the four of us were the worst bunch in school, which wasn’t even true. They were just trying to help Neal feel impressed with himself as from the beginning he had confessed low self-esteem. Unfortunately for us and for our chances of long-term salvation, Youth Encounter Christ was only a two-week camp. We had been converted with only a day left. So we were in wrap-up sessions. And since they were wrapping up the insights gained over the two weeks, we didn’t have much to contribute.
One girl whose sister we knew, Ruby Smoke, stated that she had been delivered of a serpent. I felt Zack shaking beside me, and I elbowed him hard. Angus knew the score and murmured praise, but Cappy said, What kind of snake was it, in a deadpan voice, and Father Travis bent forward, giving him a sideways stare.
Ruby was a big girl with short, sprayed hair, streaked with dry red, and hoop earrings. Lots of makeup. Her boyfriend, Toast, I don’t recall his real name, nobody did, was there too—very skinny with basketball shorts and a sad slump. He looked over at Cappy not with malice, and said, None of your business. A serpent is a serpent.
Cappy put his hands up, Just asking, man! He fixed his eyes on the ground.
But since you’re interested, said Ruby, it was a humungous serpent, brownish, with crisscross lines. And its eyes were golden and it had a wedge head like a rattlesnake.
A pit viper, I said. You were delivered of a pit viper.
Father Travis looked ominous, but Ruby looked pleased.
It’s okay, Father, she said. Joe’s uncle is a science teacher.
In fact, I went on, encouraged, it sounds to me like you were delivered of the fer-de-lance, which is hands down the deadliest snake in the world. If it bites your hand they chop off your arm. That’s the treatment. Or you could have been delivered of the bushmaster, which can get to ten feet and waits to ambush its prey and can take down a cow. You can’t see it when the fer-de-lance strikes, it moves at lightning speed.
Everyone nodded in excitement at Ruby and someone said, Way to go, Ruby. She looked proud of herself. Then Father Travis spoke: Sometimes things happen very quickly, like that, which is why in this encounter group we work to prepare you for those lightning-fast moments. Those moments aren’t temptation, really. You react on instinct. Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep. You’re tempted then. That’s why we learn strategies to keep ourselves occupied, to pray. But a quick-acting poison, that’s different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you’ve ever imagined.
I sat rooted, struck into an odd panic by his words.
We caught hands all around and put our heads down and prayed the Hail Mary, which you don’t have to be a Catholic to know on this reservation as people mutter it at all hours in the grocery store or bars or school hallways. We did ten, mentioning the fruit of thy womb every time, a phrase that Zack found unbearable and couldn’t even say for fear he’d laugh. The day went on pretty much like that—confessions, pep talks, tears, drama-praying. Creepy moments when we had to stare into each other’s eyes. I say creepy because I had to stare into Toast’s eyes, which were burnt holes, unreadable and belonging to a guy, so what was the point anyway. Cappy got to lock eyes with Zelia. This was supposed to be a soul-to-soul encounter. A spiritual thing. But Cappy said he got the worst hard-on of his life.
The flittering energy that had possessed my mother was burnt out and she was resting—but on the couch, not locked in her room. After I got home, my father invited me to sit alongside him on an old rusted kitchen chair next to the garden. The evening was cool and the air stirred the scrub box elder bordering the yard. The big cottonwood clattered by the garage. My father tipped his head back to catch the slow-setting sun on his face.
I had asked him about the damned carcass, and he was trying to think of what to say.
Who is it?
My father shook his head.
The thing is, my father said, the thing is. He was choosing his words very carefully. There will be an arraignment where the judge will decide whether he can be charged. But even now we may be pushing the envelope. The defense attorney is filing a motion for his release. Gabir is hanging in there, but he doesn’t have a case. Most rape cases don’t get this far but we have Gabir. There’s talk by the defense of suing the BIA. Even though we know he did it. Even though everything matches up.
Who is it? Why can’t they just hang him?
My father put his head in his hands, and I said I was sorry.
No, he said, broodingly. I wish I could hang him. Believe me. I imagine myself the hanging judge in an old western; I’d happily deliver the sentence. But beyond playing cowboy in my thoughts, there is traditional Anishinaabe justice. We would have sat down to decide his fate. Our present system though... .
She doesn’t know where it happened, I said.
My father tipped his chin down. There is nowhere to stand. No clear jurisdiction, no accurate description of where the crime occurred. He turned over a scrap of paper and drew a circle on it, tapped his pencil on the circle. He made a map.
Here’s the round house. Just behind it, you have the Smoker allotment, which is now so fractionated nobody can get much use out of it. Then a strip that was sold—fee land. The round house is on the far edge of tribal trust, where our court has jurisdiction, though of course not over a white man. So federal law applies. Down to the lake,
