The Round House

I told Cappy what I’d learned from Linda about the morning golf.

Cappy kicked his feet around in the grass and bent to dislodge a rounded gray rock.

You gotta move then, Cappy said, before Lark changes his habits. You should take Doe’s rifle while we’re at the powwow.

Just to think about stealing from Doe gave me a black, sinking feeling and those shrimp began to perk around in my gut. But Cappy was right.

You have to break in between eight and ten on Saturday night, said Cappy. There’s the off chance that Doe or Randall will need to come back for something after they retire the flags. But for sure Randall will be out there pounding his hooves until then. Or snagging. And for sure Dad can’t leave that microphone. So you go in, Joe. And I really mean break in. Leave a mess. You’ve got to take a crowbar to the closet where the guns are. I’ve thought about this. And steal a couple of other things or pretend to. Like the TV.

I can’t carry that!

Just unplug it, knock the junk off it. Take Randall’s boom box—no, he’ll have that—take the good toolbox. But leave it scattered on the porch like a passing car scared you off.

Yeah.

And then the gun. Make sure you get the right one from the closet. I’ll show you.

Okay.

And you bring a couple black plastic bags to wrap it in because you’re gonna hide it.

I can’t bring it home, I said. I’ll have to hide it someplace else.

Like the overlook, in the brush behind the oak tree, said Cappy.

After we piled the grandfathers by the fire pit, we spent the rest of the afternoon marking out the trail I’d use and deciding on a hiding place that I could find in the dark. The moon was going to be three quarters, but of course there might be cloud cover. We wanted to make sure I could do it all without using a flashlight. And also, after that, I would have to make it to the powwow grounds—three miles away—walking fields and trails without using my bike so nobody would see me. I’d camped out for the last two years with Cappy’s family—an RV for the aunts and a tent for the men. A fire. Randall tipi-creeping. Sneaking off. We’d wake up in the morning next to him passed out, scented low with some girl’s perfume. My parents would expect that I’d go again this year. And even if they said no this time, I’d slip out anyway. I had to.

Those shrimp or something else I’d eaten stayed with me all that week. I felt sick when I looked at food and dizzy when I looked at my mother or my father, so I didn’t look at anyone and hardly ate. Mostly, I slept. I fell asleep like I was knocked out and couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. Once, on waking, I picked up the book Father Travis had given me. Dune was a fat paperback with three black figures walking a desert beneath a massive rock. I opened it at random and read something about a boy filled with a terrible sense of purpose. I flung the book across the room and left it there. Many months after that morning I would read that book, once, then again, and again. It was the only book I read for a solid year. My mother said I must be getting my growth. I overheard her. Or listened in on her. Eavesdropping was a habit now. My sneaking came of needing to know that there was no other way, that I had to do this. If Lark moved or skipped out or was poisoned like a dog or caught for some reason, I would be free. But I didn’t trust my parents to tell me any of these things, so I had to slip behind doors and sit underneath open windows and listen, never hearing what I wanted. Of course, powwow weekend came.

Mom and Dad had agreed to let me camp out with Doe’s boys, as they said, and I hitched a ride out with them in back of Randall’s pickup, sitting on my sleeping bag. Five dollars in my pocket for food. Randall drove us so fast on the gravel road that our teeth clacked and we nearly bounced out of the back, but we got there in time to set up in our usual place. Cappy’s family always parked their RV to the south at the edge of the powwow camp circle, right up against the unmowed fields. At that time of the year the hay was usually ready to cut again. Standing at the edge of the grass, I watched it ripple gently up a soft rise, parting and reparting like a woman’s hair. The family liked camping at the edge so they could get away from what Suzette and Josey called “the goings-on.” Doe’s sisters were stout and jolly. They danced women’s traditional, and when they were getting ready in their small RV camper it shook with their heavy movements and bursts of laughter. Their husbands did not dance but helped out with organization and security.

The first thing we did on arriving was lift the webbed lawn chairs out of the back of the pickup. We decided where to dig a fire pit and put the lawn chairs up around the hole. It was important to have a little place where visitors could come and get brewed tea, or drink Kool-Aid from one of the giant plastic thermos jugs Suzette and Josey filled before they came. They also had coolers—one stuffed with sandwiches, pickles, tubs of baked beans and potato salad, bannock, jelly, crab apples, blocks of commodity cheese. The other cooler was full of hot dogs and cold fried rabbit. Soon, around the camp, Suzette and Josey’s married children started pulling up in their low- slung old cars. When the car doors opened, the grandchildren bounced out like Super Balls. They gathered other children from the neighboring camps and moved through the powwow grounds in a tornado of whirling hair and chasing legs and pumping arms. Occasionally an announcement came over the loudspeaker—these were just test announcements. Doe did not come on for real until noon. He did the welcome several times and reminded dancers that Grand Entry was at one.

Put on your dancin’ shoes! His announcer voice was smooth as warm maple syrup. He loved to say Oh mercy, as well as Gee willikers, I’ll be doggone, and Howah! He loved to joke. His jokes were friendly and awful.

Just yesterday a white guy asked me if I was a real Indian. No, I said, Columbus goofed up. The real Indians are in India. I’m a genuine Chippewa.

Chip a what? How come you got no braids?

They got chipped off, I told him. The old word for us is Anishinaabe, you know. Eyyyy. Sometimes you can’t tell a real Anishinaabe woman something. She gives you that look and you got to tell her everything. Eyyyy.

Doe announced lost children. Papoose on the loose! Here’s a little boy looking for his family. Don’t be scared when you come claim him, Mama, he’s not covered with war paint. It’s just ketchup and mustard. He’s been fixing himself to face the Fifth Cavalry over at the hot dog stand.

When he introduced the drums, he rolled one to the next with a good word for each: Beartail, Enemy Wind, Green River. The bleachers started filling with people and Suzette and Josey sent their husbands to set up lawn chairs at the edge of the arena on the south side to avoid the long and blinding brilliance of the sun as it would set, it seemed, forever into the night. Cappy and I set up our tent with its square canopy where Randall could dress and preen. Suzette and Josey loved having a male dancer to fuss over and kept asking Cappy and me when we were going to start. Cappy had danced until he was ten years old.

I’m making you a new grass dance outfit. Josey shook her finger at him.

Cappy just smiled at her. He never said no to anyone. He and Randall had cut young popple saplings on their land and we set up a cooling arbor where the aunties could take the breeze. The day was heating up and their beaded yokes and the tanned hides, the bone breastplates and the woolen shawls, the heavy silver concho belts and figured ornaments and all that long leather fringe must have weighed sixty pounds or more. Suzette and Josey were round but phenomenally strong, so they could move with dignity under the weight of all this tradition, and not collapse. Randall was hardly weighed down at all by contrast, but he was covered with so many feathers Cappy said it looked like he’d rolled in a flock of eagles. He had a pair of red long johns with aprons or breechcloths that hung fore and aft.

Be sure you get your modesty panel set just right, said Cappy. You don’t want anyone to know what you ain’t got.

Shut up, bobtail, he said to Cappy. And don’t you even start, shrimpy, he said to me.

He held up a mirror and painted two black stripes down his forehead to his eyebrows, then continued underneath his eyes and down his cheeks. Randall’s eyes suddenly became impenetrable warrior eyes. He glowered at us from under his guard hair roach and swaying feathers.

Give us your smolder, said Cappy.

That was it, said Randall. Observe its effect.

He went out into the sunlight and stretched beside the cotton candy vendor’s trailer. Randall said his red long johns were traditional, but Cappy and I thought they ruined his look.