at grin that
made you think about making your own law, rather than following somebody else’s.
“What the heck you get us into, Amundson?” Sonny
said.
“What we got here, son, is a real honest ad-ven-shur.”
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“Yeah, well, we better come up with a way to get back in without getting caught, there, cowboy, ” Sonny said.
“Piece of cake,” Amiq said. “Piece of cake.”
Amiq was not the best stepladder—his shoulders were bony, and he swayed a bit under Sonny’s weight. But even with all that weight on his shoulders, he was still acting like everything was easy, like everything would always be easy. He was going to push Sonny right up into the dorm window, and then Sonny was supposed ro lean down and yank him up.
“It’ll be a piece of cake,” Amiq says.
Sonny doesn’t think this is what you would call a brilliant plan, but he doesn’t have a better one, and time is running out. He gazes down the length of the shadowy gray wall from his uncertain perch, his eyes wary.
“See,” Amiq whispers, “all the windows are all dark. Everyone’s at dinner.”
“And why aren’t we at dinner, again?” Sonny asks.
“Th
e dogs,” Amiq says. “Th
e dead dogs.”
Sonny grins at the thought of the dogs with their Siberian measles. “Somebody’s gotta bury them,” he says with a little laugh. But he knows what Amiq’s really thinking. Amiq thinks they’ll tell Father that they lost track of time doing homework. Now that one’s really funny.
Amiq hangs on hard to Sonny’s sharp ankles while Sonny tries to pull himself up and wiggle into the partially opened window. In the fi nal moments, Amiq has to push up on Sonny’s feet because Sonny is just too darn long to fold up easily 133
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into a space like that. But fi nally his feet fl ap into the window, fi shlike.
Sonny glances sideways at the darkened hallway, and seeing no one, he pokes his head back out the window to give Amiq the all-clear sign. “Come on, hurry,” he says, reaching down.
Amiq’s arms are skinny but hard as birch saplings. His hands clamp onto Sonny’s wrists, and he pulls harder and harder, walking his legs up the wall.
Now they’re standing in the darkened space, the two of them together, feeling pretty proud of themselves, their laughter hushed but triumphant. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad plan after all.
Th
at’s when they hear the voice hissing in the shadows.
Th
e sound of it makes their blood run cold .
“You boys think you’re pretty smart, don’t you.”
Father Mullen.
Smart is not at what they feel, following Mullen down the dimly lit halls, knowing they managed to pick the wrong time and the wrong window. Knowing it’s a mistake that’s going to cost them. Big-time.
And now Father is standing there in his offi
ce, telling them
that evil has consumed them, spawns of Satan. His words seem to vibrate in the air around them, like a deadly swarm of black mosquitoes. Father is so angry that whole sentences are rattling in his throat, just waiting to get out. Like wasps.
Th
e sound is so terrible, all they can do is stand there, in the middle of it, watching the way Father fondles that two-by-134
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“Spare the rod . . .” Father rattles, swinging hard.
It stings like hell, that two-by-four, swinging back and forth, fi rst to Amiq, then to Sonny, burning hot with every crack. Neither of them makes a sound, though—even when it feels like it’s crushing bone—because it’s the words Father says that sting worse than the blows. It’s the sound of Father Mullen’s voice, rasping like bees as he tells them both that they’re nothing more than dirty little savages and there’s no way in Hell either one of them could ever— ever—get into Heaven.
Nobody cares what happens to them except for Father, he hisses, because their people, their Native People, are as loose as rabbits with their kids.
Father is swinging that two-by-four back and forth like it’s a hammer, and the pain bites harder with each swing as he sinks his words—sharp as nails—right into them. All of them are doomed to Hell, he says, nearly out of breath— all of them: Sonny and his uneducated heathen mother along with Amiq and his no-good, drunken dad.
Amiq’s got a hard look on his face, and you can tell he’s shut Father out and gone someplace else, someplace mean and angry. You can tell he’s decided he wouldn’t go to Heaven even if they gave him a gold pass for the place.
Sonny’s thinking about his mom, who wouldn’t be at all proud to see him now. His mother, sewing slippers for the general’s wife, slippers with those tiny designs that make her eyes sting in the smoky light of the kerosene lamp. Sewing 135
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