comment. But she startled me.
Listen, Joe, I’ve got to tell you this. I am sorry that I saved my brother’s life. I wish that he was dead. There, I said it.
I paused a moment, and then said, Me too.
Linda nodded and looked at her hands. Her eyes popped again. Joe, he says he’s gonna get rich. He says he’ll never have to work again. He’s sure he’ll have money in the bank now, he says, and he’s going to fix up the house and live here forever.
Oh? I was dizzy at the thought of Sonja.
That was all in a phone message on my machine. He said a woman would give it to him in exchange for something, and he laughed.
No, she won’t, I said. My brain cleared and I saw the broken bottle on Sonja’s side table. I saw the look on her face when she threw her Red Sonja bag down. Lark would not get to her.
These are grown-up things, said Linda. They probably make no sense to you. That don’t make sense to me, either.
Our shrimp baskets came and she tried to put ketchup on the side. She shook the bottle with both hands like a little kid. I took the bottle from her and hit the bottom carefully with the heel of my hand, the way my father did, setting a precise glop of ketchup down.
Oh, I can never do that, said Linda.
This is the way. I put some ketchup on my plate. Linda nodded and tried the technique.
You learn something new, she said, and we started eating, piling the little plastic-looking pink tails at the sides of our baskets.
What she’d said about her brother was so full of adult complexity that it threw me off. This was not the way I’d meant to bring up Linden Lark. I didn’t know if I could take any more information. So I said the safest thing to deflect her honesty.
Wow, it’s hot.
But she wouldn’t go to the weather with me. She nodded, closed her eyes, and said, Mmmm, as she ate her birthday shrimp.
Slow down, Linda, she told herself. She laughed and dabbed her lips.
I’ve got to do this, I thought.
Okay, I said. I get it about your brother. Sure. Now he thinks he’ll be a rich piece of scum. I’m just wondering, though, could you tell me when he plays golf? If he does play golf? Anymore?
She kept her napkin at her lips and blinked at me over the white paper.
I mean, I said, I need to know because—
I crammed a fistful of fries into my mouth and chewed and thought furiously.
—because what if my dad wants to golf or something? I was thinking it would be good for him to golf. We can’t run the risk of Lark being out there, too.
Oh, gosh, said Linda. She looked panicked. I never thought about that, Joe. I don’t know how often, but yes, Linden does golf and he likes to get out there very early, right after the course opens at seven a.m. Because he doesn’t sleep, hardly. Not that I know his habits anymore. I should talk to your ...
No!
How come?
We were frozen, staring across the food. This time I picked up two shrimp and ate each one, frowning, and picked apart their tails, and ate that little bit too.
This is something I want to do on my own. A father-and-son thing. A surprise. Uncle Edward has golf clubs. I’m sure he’ll let us use them. We’ll go out there. Just me and Dad. It’s something I want to do. Okay?
Oh, certainly. That’s nice, Joe.
I ate so quickly, in relief, that I finished the whole plate and even ate some of Linda’s fries and the remains of her salad before I understood I had all I needed—the information and an agreement to keep it secret. Which gave me both a sense of relief and the return of that whirling dread.
Bugger floated by the window. He was riding my bicycle.
I have to go, I said to Linda. Thank you, but Bugger’s stealing my bike.
I ran outside and caught up to Bugger, who was only halfway across the parking lot. He meandered along slowly and didn’t get off the bike, just glanced at me with his wobbly eye. I walked beside him. I actually didn’t mind walking because I didn’t feel so well. I’d eaten so much, so fast, maybe on a nervous stomach like my father sometimes said he did. Plus, after all, those frozen shrimp had traveled a couple of thousand miles from where they had started to land on my plate. I’d had to cover the piled tails with a napkin while Linda waited for the check. Now the walk seemed better than the jolting of a bicycle. I wanted to get away from other people, too, in case I had to puke.
As I walked beside Bugger in the hot sun, I started feeling better and within a mile I was okay. Bugger didn’t seem to have a destination that made any sense to me.
Can I have my bike now?
I’ve gotta get somewhere first, he said.
Where?
I needa see if it was just a dream.
What was just a dream?
What I saw was just a dream. I needa see.
Whatever it was, it was, I said. You snaked out. Can I have my bike?
Bugger was getting too far out of town, going the opposite of the way to Cappy’s house. I was worried that he might swerve into a passing car. So I persuaded him to turn around by talking up Grandma Ignatia and her generous handouts.
True. A man gets hungry from all this bicycling, said Bugger.
We got to the senior citizens and he dropped the bike in front of me. He staggered away like a man in the grip of a magnetic force. I turned around and rode back to Cappy’s. We had planned to practice shooting, but Randall was there, off work early, fixing his bustle at the kitchen table. The long, elegant eagle feathers were carefully spread out from the circle where they joined, and he was working on a loose one. Randall had a handsome traditional powwow outfit, which he had mostly inherited from his father, though his aunties had beaded flower patterns on the velvet armbands and aprons. When he was all fitted out, he was a magnificent picture. All kinds of ordinary and extraordinary things had gone into his regalia. Two giant golden eagle tail feathers topped his roach, his headpiece. Stabilized by lengths of a car antenna, the feathers bobbed on the springs of ballpoint pens. The elastic garters of one aunt’s old girdle were covered with deerskin and sewn with ankle bells. He had a dance stick that was supposedly taken from a Dakota warrior, though it was actually made in boarding-school shop class. Wherever the components of Randall’s outfit had originated, they were all adapted to him now, each feather fixed and strengthened with carved splinters of wood and Elmer’s glue, the soles of his moccasins soled and resoled with rawhide. Randall won prize money sometimes, but he danced because Doe had danced, and also because those moving pieces caught girls’ eyes pretty good. He was getting ready for our annual summer powwow this coming weekend. Doe as usual would be up behind the MC’s microphone making jokes and making sure that things ran along, as he always said, in a good way.
C’mon, let’s go pick grandfathers for Randall’s sweat lodge, said Cappy. We always put down tobacco for those ancient rocks. That’s why they were grandfathers. We didn’t always get the rocks. We liked being fire keepers better, but Randall had promised if Cappy could start his old red rez car, he could drive it.
There was a collapsed gravelly place on their land that filled with water in the spring and had the right kind of stones if you kicked around for them. Randall always needed a specific number dictated by the type of sweat he would give. We dragged an old plastic toboggan out to collect the rocks. They took a while to find. They had to be a certain kind of rock that would not crack too easily or explode when red hot and splashed with water in the sweat-lodge pit. They had to be a certain size that Randall could pick off our shovel with his deer antlers. Finding twenty-eight grandfathers was a good afternoon’s work and more often, especially if Randall was in a hurry, we’d go out to the rock piles in the fields off reservation and load up Doe’s pickup. But this time we needed to be alone.
