THREE DAYS BEFORE Adam left for university, everyone was home except his father, and they had no idea where he’d gone. His mom had on her purple camp dress with wide white trim and long open sleeves. She was beading jewelry on the opposite end of the couch from her sister, her swollen fingers racing with the precision of a spider’s legs. Aunt Marie Anne sat straight up, intent on a word search in the Apache Scout.
A basketball game blared from the television. Sitting next to Adam on the floor, Verdena crushed an empty beer can with her heel, then straightened it, then crushed it again. “Where’s Dad?” she called. The noise bothered Adam—he couldn’t hear the game—but it did not bother his mother. The winter he’d been born, Lorena had grown feverish in the cold, had battled a month-long pneumonia, and since then was slowly losing her hearing. Half-deaf, she relied on Marie Anne to keep her up to date with the world.
They watched the basketball game until their father came stomping through the back door. Marie Anne didn’t bother looking up from her word search.
Lorena said, “You been gone two days.”
“Home now,” Larson said, his back to her.
“Why don’t you just leave altogether?”
“I should,” he muttered. “Should.”
“You didn’t even leave us any—”
Larson faced her. “I’m home now! Just come back! Why don’t you let a person take his jacket off?”
“Don’t take it off. Get out.”
“Starting this again, Lorena.”
“You even smell like her. Go on, just get outta here. Go on back with her.”
“Say this in front of your own children?” He pointed at Adam and Verdena. Their father had the thickest arms Adam had ever seen.
“You don’t think they know? Wonder where they think you are?”
Adam left the house before it got worse. In the backyard he walked slowly past the swing set. The seesaw, slide, rings, and monkey bars all lay completely destroyed. His dad had bought the set for Verdena when she was eight, down at the Sears in Phoenix, and they had hauled it to the reservation in the pickup, the parts rattling in a box for four long hours. A month later, sleeping with their parents, Verdena had wet the bed, and their father got angry. In the middle of the night Larson went out and smashed the jungle gym. He tore off the pipes and beat the seesaw against the fence, bent it in two and toppled the whole thing, took a hatchet to the plastic seats, and then cursed at the stars until all the dogs of Red Cliff were wailing. Adam watched from the door with his mom, her arm draped around his shoulders. “It’s good,” she had whispered. “Let him do that.”
Outside now, Adam began to shoot baskets in the yard. He followed his old pattern: start from the laundry line and step farther back with each shot, until he was past the ruined swing set and had to heave the ball with a running start over the Joshua trees. He heard his dad get into the pickup, slam the door, and in a whirl of dust and exhaust pull off the property.
Before the dust had cleared, the truck reversed and squealed back up the dirt driveway. His father called in Apache, “Hey, we’re hunting in the morning. Tell your mom to make us food.”
“It’s not season yet,” Adam said.
“I’ll worry about that.”
Adam went in through the back kitchen door and found his mother trembling by the counter, covering her right eye. Aunt Marie Anne sat at the table shaking her head, and continued her word search.
Adam said, “He wants to hunt tomorrow.”
His mom nodded. He helped her find the ingredients, fry up the tortillas, and boil the eggs. She was going to make sandwiches but he told her, “Dad says not to bring meat with us hunting. Elk could smell the meat.”
She smiled and ran her hand over her lean face; her eyes grew moist. For the next two hours she and Marie Anne made the frybread. The kitchen warmed with steam. Adam helped them spread the beans, and together they wrapped the Apache burritos in foil. His aunt rubbed his mother’s hair and kissed her on the forehead, then looked down at Adam and said, “You’ll have lots of food.”
Before dawn he heard his dad come in through the dark, clomping around the house in his boots. He didn’t get up until he felt the warm hands shoving him.
“Hey, you got some whitetail to shoot.”
Adam rose and stretched his palms toward the woodstove next to his mattress. The fire had gone out, but the house was not too cold; he would let his mom light it.
Verdena got up too and joined them in the kitchen where their father was packing the food into the cooler. She watched for a minute as they got ready, but she was curled asleep, a pile of warmth, on Adam’s mattress by the time they left. Adam made sure the screen door didn’t slam and went out into the dim morning.
Uncle Sparky was waiting in the cab of the pickup. “Mr. University!” he shouted. They loaded the icebox and the packs of bullets and the 30-30 and the other rifles.
“Got Adam with us today,” Uncle Sparky said. “Always bring something home when he comes, isn’t it?”
“Kid’s good luck,” Larson said. “Get him an elk before he takes off on us.”
“We don’t miss nothing when Adam’s here.” Sparky squeezed the rim of Adam’s cap and turned it around backward as he always did, so Adam had to fix it.
His dad and uncle slammed the doors almost in unison, and he climbed into the bed of the pickup and sat facing the rear. His father drove west through the gray light, and beyond Indian Ruins the road became dirt; then at Iron Mine they crossed Canyon Creek and turned up a logging road toward Foot Canyon. Adam kept lookout from the bed of the truck. All the roads looked the same, but he could have negotiated the forest as well as his dad did.
An hour into the drive, near Medicine Ranch, he saw two brown streaks of elk and pounded his elbow twice on the rear window. The truck skidded, and Uncle Sparky and Larson were out and looking in their sights. Two blasts. The elk loped in a panicked curve around the road, making for a grove of cottonwood. The men, all blocky legs and heavy hips, chased to cut them off, but at the bend the animals had already vanished up the hill into the dense trees.
They lowered their guns. At the truck his father laughed. “You missed, Spark. You just scared ’em away.” His pockmarked face exploded in a rare smile, and he punched Sparky’s shoulder.
Sparky said, “I never miss when Adam’s with us, isn’t it?”
“You’re full of shit,” Adam said.
“Well,” Sparky looked both ways and winked. “Don’t tell no one about that.”
Another ten miles down the cratered road they pulled off in a clearing beneath the ponderosas, took their rifles, and split up. Adam felt the drizzle and the wet wind on his face. He followed his father’s heavy legs against the wind and knew they were heading the right way. On one hill they sat by the trunk of a low scrub oak and listened for a long time. They hiked back down and Adam watched his father’s boots. When he was little, he used to try to match him stride for stride. Now his legs were already longer than his dad’s.
After a few minutes Larson stopped and knelt next to him. He balanced on his haunches, his right fingers touching the ground. The air was still; the beaded grass and mud smelled both sweet and acrid.
“The secret of hunting,” Larson whispered, “is a prayer you’ll never come home empty handed.”
Again they set off and had nearly reached the truck when Adam heard a branch break. He clicked his tongue and pointed with his lips across the clearing, to where a cow elk and her calf were standing, rigid and alert.
Adam hesitated to lift his gun, but in one swift, gentle movement his father raised his rifle to his shoulder, aimed, pulled, and shot. The calf dropped. Its mother bolted out of sight with two great leaps. Adam stood still. The echo of the blast died off in his head, the rustling sounds of the fleeing elk grew fainter. He stared at the fallen calf.
Larson looked at Adam. “The meat’s more tender,” he explained. They approached the dead animal and his father held back a step. “You know what to do.”
With his left hand Adam grabbed the calf’s warm head and with his other hand the right front leg. His father helped him pull it around, clockwise, so the head faced where the sun comes up. In the truck they found a sharp knife, and by then Uncle Sparky had joined them. First they sliced the stomach and took out its steaming guts and kidneys. They cut parts of the upper legs and hips and the back and the neck. They wasted no meat; that would bring bad luck. They raised the heavy skin and shook it over the meat and prayed four times that they would always be lucky hunting. Adam had to carry the soft head as they hauled the skin back to the truck bed. He packed the dripping red meat into the cooler and wiped his hands in the grass.
They breakfasted in silence. Adam and his uncle leaned against the cold side of the truck, peeling hard-boiled eggs and flicking shells off their fingers into the mud.
That afternoon they fished Canyon Creek, and near dusk they hiked in the rain single file over the hills, looking for whitetail. Manzanita crunched beneath their boots. Above, a single crow dipped and curved in the dark sky. The pale green hills lay empty—the day had yielded all it was going to yield, and his father decided it was time to head home.
Their old Nissan had only two-wheel drive, so running up the muddy trails was difficult, and they sometimes slid going down. At the bottom of one hill the truck reached a flooded wash where the monsoon water crashed over polished white stones. Larson didn’t hesitate; he raced the engine, threw it into first, and crossed half the churning river before the water exploded against the door and came leaking into the cab.
There was no choice but to climb out. They splashed into the freezing current, carrying guns and ammo high over the water. In a defeated line, the rain sliding down their necks, they retreated a mile back to Indian Ruins and found an abandoned trailer. They left the guns there to dry and returned to the truck to get the food and blankets and to cover the hide. By then the rain was letting up.
Back in the trailer Uncle Sparky scratched his crooked nose. “Nobody knows where we’re at.”
“Game warden’ll be around by morning,” Larson said. “He’ll see the truck.”
“The fucker’s gonna fine us.”
“I’ll take care of it.” His father turned to Adam and said in Apache, “Always tell someone where you’re going, or else you get lost like us.”
Late that evening the plastic tile of the trailer floor grew frigid, and the men spread two damp wool blankets to share among them. They stretched out, hands beneath their heads, and gazed up as the ceiling darkened. Uncle Sparky teased Adam about how many bottles of Miller he could drink and how many girlfriends he had. “You know Apache love?” he kept asking. “A hickey and a black eye. You ever do it? You will soon enough.” Adam remained silent while the two adults laughed at him. He felt the blood running to his face, and he heard his dad’s laugh, so loud the floor of the trailer shook. Sparky gave up on Adam and said to his father, “Lorena’s gonna be worried ’bout you boys.”
“She’ll worry about him,” Larson said.
Sparky sucked in a long breath. “Not a bad thing, having a woman worrying ’bout ya.”
Adam said, “Mom don’t worry about Dad ’cause he’s never home anyway.”
The blow came out of the darkness, the shot of his father’s hard hand, once across the lower forehead, then again across the bridge of his nose. His head smashed into the metal base of the wall. The scuffling of shadows. His uncle pulled his father off him. “Leave it, Larson. Kid’s right. Leave it!”
“Kid doesn’t know. Needs to—”
“Leave it.”
With the pain the room around Adam collapsed into white blank space. He kept his eyes clenched shut and lay immobile, refusing to check the size of the pounding welt on his forehead or to wipe the warm wetness spreading in back of his head. He disappeared into the wilderness of pain, amazed by the expanse of it all, by what it was possible for one body to take.
Some time later the pain wore down. His eyes were sticky when he opened them, and he reemerged from the distance to hear his uncle and father discussing someone. Did they think he was asleep? They talked about her as if he didn’t know. A white teacher from off the rez. Not his mother.
It would be easy, he thought. He would wait for both of them to sleep. He would rise and take the long serrated deer knife from the cooler. He’d slice open his father’s stomach first, then pull out the steaming guts and kidneys. After, his mother would be better off. She wouldn’t worry; she wouldn’t have to fight anymore. He thought he could do it. Everyone thought Adam was quiet, harmless, but he knew he had it in him.
Then he questioned it, and told himself he was too young to kill anyone. He hadn’t even started college yet.
In Flagstaff, after a week of tryouts, Adam managed to walk on to the NAU basketball team. He never expected to start; the recruits were too strong. The Lumberjacks had won their division each of the past three years and had played on national television in the March tournament. It was a thrill just to make the team.
Adam had learned basketball from his father. Like most Red Cliff families, the Dales had set up a makeshift plywood goal on their camp, and Larson had shown him how to shoot—first underhand, standing straight beneath the rim, then a two-hand push shot, banking it off the shaky backboard, and at last a set shot, which Adam practiced with his cousin Levi defending him.
Larson sometimes joined the boys in the backyard for a game of horse. They tried to outdo one another’s unlikely shots. They played with different words, such as frybread and Geronimo, and even Apache words like llkaad dijege, which meant candy and had no real spelling and made the game funnier. They played a version of twenty-one—one person took foul shots while the others rebounded and put the ball back into play. By age twelve Levi was already a strong young point guard. Despite his weight he had naturally quick hands and rarely missed from the baseline. Adam surpassed him, though: he could do just about anything with the basketball, and he was faster than anyone in town, much faster than his limping father.
Still, Larson was tallest, and he showed the boys little mercy rebounding.
“You gotta block me out!” he once yelled at Adam. “You can’t let me get into your area! This space”—he bent over and with his heel dragged a line in the dust where the key would have been— “this area, this, this, this, and this, belongs to you. Why are you letting me get in there?”
On the next shot Adam tried it. He held his father out and grabbed the rebound, and for a second he felt victorious. But with the strength of years of hauling wood, Larson yanked the ball out of his hands and laid it into the basket for his own points. “You just gave me that!”
Adam squinted and stepped away.
“You better protect that ball once you got it. Watch me.” His father tossed the ball against the rusty rim and went up and took the rebound. He came down and covered it in his powerful chest, twisting right and left, his elbows pointed to throw the boys off him.
“More elbows!” shouted his father. “You’ve got to throw those things around. They’re your weapons. Your shotguns. Keep other people away. You give a guy a good shot—pow!—early in the game, they won’t be trying to get the ball off you anymore, isn’t it?”
From that time on Adam went up for rebounds and always came down throwing first his right then his left elbow—even when no one was threatening him. By the time he was in college his game had grown so intense, he felt that the rebound—the spinning globe in the air—was his, and nobody could take it from him. His elbows, his weapons, guaranteed it.
NAU practices were held in the immense white dome on the southern end of campus, sometimes twice a day, mornings and evenings. Substituting did not bother him. He enjoyed the competition of scrimmages, scoring on the starters, occasionally stealing the ball. The other players came from Arizona, California, and even as far away as Michigan and New York. For preseason games he traveled through nearby states on the team bus. As they bumped along, his teammates played cards and traded rap CDs for their Walk-mans. In the long hours of travel Adam gazed out the bus windows at the unfamiliar names of towns, the wide-open spaces and empty roads. Not only was there a world beyond the reservation, there was a world beyond Arizona—there were other lives to be lived.
This he would contemplate while training on weekends in October, getting in shape by jogging three times a week to the top of Mount Humphreys. He drove to the trail in Jeff’s truck and circled ten thousand feet upward through the flaming aspens to the parking lot. From there he paced himself up the shaded trail. The trees ended, the final quarter-mile of boulders could not be run, and he scaled the rocks until he reached the twelve-thousand-foot peak. Standing alone, in cargo shorts and a long T-shirt, surrounded by photographers and day hikers in Gore-Tex jackets and fleece hats, he looked out past the town below, in the direction of the Red Mountains. The reservation was too far away to see. To the north lay the Grand Canyon, on clear days the crack just visible from the peak. Pink streaks of the Painted Desert ran along the dry eastern horizon, across the Navajo reservation.
His mother had once told him that from a mountain like this the Apache crown dancers descended to cure the evil ways of their tribe. As children, at the Sunrise Dances he and Verdena used to scream when the crown dancers got close, and his mom laughed at the two of them. From the highest point in Arizona, breathing hard, he could see the world below as the mountain spirits might have seen it: in miniature, no more than a scrap of wreckage against the surge of land and sky. He would squat for twenty minutes on the cool ground, catch his breath, and begin his descent.
He wrote Jeff once a month from school. Life was easier, he told him, off the rez. He forgot the dangers, the infighting between families, the need to be cool. His head was clearer; the constant pressure and disappointments slowly seeped from his mind. In a single-paragraph letter, in late October, he wrote that he had managed to pass all his midterms.
Uninvited, Councilman Dale appeared on the campus one bright fall afternoon as Adam was walking to his logic and rhetoric class with two of his teammates. His father smacked him on the back of his head and insisted on shaking hands with his two friends. Larson claimed he was in town on some vague tribal business. He walked along with them to class and plied Adam with embarrassing questions about college, then delivered private news from Red Cliff: news of the family, what kind of crossbow he was shopping for, who had gotten whom pregnant. At the classroom door Adam paused while his friends went in and found seats.
“What are you doing here?”
“Passing through, I told you.”
“Could have called. Told me you were coming.”
Larson glanced into the classroom. “Thought I’d surprise you. See how things are going, schoolboy.” He laid a heavy hand on Adam’s shoulder.
Adam tensed up. “Semester’s just normal. Nothing happening yet.”
His dad dropped his arm and stood with his legs apart. Adam turned to enter the classroom without saying goodbye, but Larson limped in beside him. The seats were arranged in a horseshoe around three long tables. His father squeezed down in the chair next to him, and Adam felt the weight of twenty students’ eyes. At last the young professor hustled in. She was just about to begin lecturing when she paused and asked Larson who he was.
“Adam Dale’s dad. You just go on teaching, Miss. Pretend I’m not here.”
“I see.” The professor looked at Adam, her lips pressed. “I see.”
For the duration of class his father read over his shoulder, first the textbook, then the copy of a student’s paper the professor was critiquing. Adam sat erect, paralyzed with fear that his father would raise his hand. Larson’s shoulder pressed against him; his warm exhalations smelled of last night’s beer, his unwashed jeans stank, and the rise and fall of his heavy chest made it impossible for Adam to think straight. Once, during a particularly oblique explanation by the professor, in a voice entirely too loud, Larson hissed, “Bullshit.” Half the heads in the room turned to face them.
When the lecture ended, Adam was first out of the classroom, and he didn’t say goodbye to his father. The following weekend he spoke to Marie Anne on the phone, but apparently neither she nor his mother had any idea Larson had visited. Adam decided not to tell them.
His father appeared a second time in January. On a blustery winter night, snow whirling around the streetlights outside the dorm, Adam pulled the blinds to go to sleep. A pounding on his door woke him some time later, the sound echoing off the concrete walls of his room. He jumped from bed. In the hallway his father balanced himself against the doorframe, his drenched windbreaker covered in melting white flakes. Thin wet curls of gray hair shone in the fluorescent light, and drops of water clung to his ears and nose. Adam pulled him into the room and Larson lurched forward; the mud on his shoes left brown streaks on the tile floor. The dormitory lay in complete silence, punctuated only by the distant flush of a toilet from a higher floor.
“What the hell you doing?” Adam whispered.
“Come up to see ya.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Thing is,” his father said, “you’re Apache.” He fingered the CD collection on a shelf, twirled and lifted Adam’s Lumberjack backpack, kicked down the whiffleball bat leaning against the closet, and stood transfixed by the poster of Pamela Anderson, her white teeth shining like a beacon in the dim room.
Adam guided his father to the bed, sat him down, peeled off the freezing jacket, and struggled with the knotted, icy boot laces. He undressed him, pushing the large unsteady body back on the bed, unzipping the pants, and tugging the soaked jeans off each powerful leg. Larson’s skin was rough and goosebumped, and a thick purple scar from a sawmill accident lined the bottom of his knee.
“You doing it like this—this all the time?”
“Fuck off, Dad.”
Adam directed his father’s wide limbs into dry sweats and an NAU T-shirt. He waited for him to pass out on the bed, snoring, and he slept that night on the floor, bile in his throat, recalling the trailer on that hunting trip six months ago, the first time he had imagined this man dead.
The dorm was quiet in the morning when he shook his father awake. They had a silent breakfast of western omelets at the Village Inn Diner. He could tell his father was preoccupied, and after Larson polished off his eggs, he spoke. “BIA’s changed its goddamn mind,” he said. He explained how that fall they had reversed policy on building the high school in Red Cliff. The elementary school had reached four hundred children, and taking notice, the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered the town to build its own high school to accommodate the numbers. “Not like I haven’t been trying myself five years now!” his father said. He had protested and pressed his boss, the tribal chairman in Blackriver, not to rush into any outside plans. “If they’ll wait until the casino’s built, we’ll fund the largest damn high school of any rez town in this country.”
But already the BIA had taken matters into its own hands. In Blackriver the tribal chairman researched Dome Technology, the fastest and cheapest way to put up a building; then the tribe purchased a plan from an Idaho construction company. The fifteen-ton fabric lining was flown in from France, then shaped in Houston; fiberglass filling and rebar were ordered from Albuquerque, and a Mormon-owned construction company from Holbrook was contracted. By late autumn at the building site the earth had been flattened and the foundation poured, but then funds stalled, bickering over contracts wasted time, and progress slowed. “I didn’t think they’d ever get the goddamn thing started,” his dad said. But now the bulldozers were moving again, and they’d raised a ten-foot concrete stem wall. This spring, when the weather warmed, workers would truck in the fabric from storage, attach it to the stem wall, and seal off the doors and windows. By summer they would inflate the bubble with a giant blower, supplanting with air his father’s vision of a high school.
Larson was agitated, shaking his head and cursing under his breath as he told the story. Adam paid for the breakfast—his father had no money on him, not even an ATM card. After the meal, still wearing Adam’s sweats, Larson climbed into his Nissan and peeled out of the one-way entrance to the parking lot. Though he had said he was heading back to the reservation, Adam didn’t believe him. His father was on a tear, and there was no stopping him.
After the visit Adam threw himself more fiercely into his studies and basketball practice. Like his teammates he declared a communications major. In the last meaningless regular season game, up in Salt Lake City, his coach gave him five minutes of playing time, and Adam hit a twenty-footer. They were his only two points for the season, but they were something.
Late in May Adam drove back to Red Cliff for the first time to work the summer with Marie Anne at the town’s grocery store. Officially its name was the Red Cliff Trading Post, but everyone called it the Tom’s Store. Tom, a Mormon from off the reservation, managed the business and took in the profits. The Apaches sometimes started their own trading posts—but they kept giving free food and clothes to their friends. New stores opened, lost money, and within a few weeks were boarded up. The Tom’s Store, though, was operated by an outsider, and it had prospered. Marie Anne worked the busy counter, and on his first day of stocking, Adam enjoyed seeing her waddle up to shelves to pull off cans of Spaghetti Os, pails of Crisco, and jars of pickled pig’s feet.
The town was smaller than he remembered it. Compared to Flagstaff, the reservation had so little traffic it seemed abandoned, yet within a week the place had swallowed him. Adam found himself out until all hours, drinking beers at the creek, sleeping with old girlfriends, and staying in bed later and later each morning. Disconcerted, he felt the eyes of the houses watching him, as if with a single consciousness. In Red Cliff, barely the slightest instant passed between an action and public judgment.
His first Friday after work he walked over to Uncle Sparky’s house, looking for Levi. On the porch he heard a muffled shouting from behind the cardboard-covered garage door. He knocked, waited a few moments, knocked again. For another ten minutes he continued knocking. Inside the yelling grew louder, but nobody answered. Finally a threatening hush fell. The door opened a crack and a voice he recognized but couldn’t place cursed:
“Get the fuck out of here, schoolboy.”
That night Levi showed up at Adam’s house. Since Adam had been away, his cousin had gotten heavier and blocky, double-chinned, wide-cheeked, yet he had the same blood-red eyes.
“Cuz,” he said, “let’s shoot.”
Out back Levi wobbled and could hardly hold the basketball. They shot in silence for almost an hour. Winded, Levi took a break and staggered around the old swing set. Neither suggested they play any of their old games. Finally Adam sat on the ball, and Levi approached and stood uneasily straight, as if balancing on two legs took his full concentration.
He showed up at the Tom’s Store the next afternoon. Adam was stacking cans of Spam on the uneven counters when, through the window, he saw his cousin pull into the gravel lot in a new purple Ford Ranger, with fluorescent yellow sport stripes—a sixteen-thousand-dollar truck. Levi honked three times. Tom, the owner, was reading a newspaper behind the counter and didn’t say anything when Adam left. Outside he strolled over to the truck and tapped its warm metal hood. He asked Levi where he’d gotten it.
“While some of you schoolboys are off in college, others of us putting food on the table.” Levi patted the dashboard with his palm, sounding two hollow thumps. Adam leaned in through the window, inhaling the stale beer odor of his cousin’s breath. Levi adjusted the side mirror with his lean, muscled arm, now tattooed in black ink with some kind of Phoenix gang sign.
That evening after dinner Adam found his father on the porch, sanding down a handle for a broken ax. Adam watched him work for thirty minutes. Finally he blurted out everything he was thinking—about Levi’s new truck, about how he was picking up Uncle Sparky’s bad habits. Larson continued working, as if he didn’t hear. He finished sanding the wood, laid the head across two bricks, and in powerful strokes close to the metal, sawed off the old handle.
“Do something,” Adam begged. “You’re not gonna let Levi get into all this shit?”
His father lifted the ax head to drive out the remaining wood with a chisel. “What you want me to do? It’s a family thing.”
“That’s why you gotta do something.”
“That’s why I can’t.” Larson took up the new smooth handle and forced it tight through the ax head. “I’m supposed to have your uncle arrested?” He lifted the saw and began cutting off the extra wood on top. “You want me to put your cousin behind bars? That what you want?” He finished sawing, stood the ax straight on the cement step, and with a hammer drove a small wooden wedge deep into the slot. Finally he stopped, breathing heavily, and stared up at the sky. Adam followed his gaze. Stars were sprayed across the summer night. Larson said, “You don’t go betraying blood.”
With the ax lying straight across the bricks, he sawed off the extra inch of the wedge.
A deal went sour. At 1:20 on a bright Thursday afternoon, mid-August, word reached Adam at the trading post: Sparky had been shot.
His uncle had been driving in his red Corvette out to the highway with a new girlfriend, a plump San Carlos Apache woman who had witnessed the whole thing. A rival dealer from Phoenix, a Mexican, was waiting for them at the Turnoff. He strode into the middle of the intersection and pulled the car over, signaling with a shotgun. Sparky was bent over fumbling for the 9-millimeter pistol he always kept beneath the passenger seat when the Mexican blasted twice through the window. Glass shattered across the girlfriend’s lap and bloodied her chest and face. She screamed one piercing note while the Mexican slid calmly into his black Mercedes, and she had not stopped screaming five minutes later when Pastor Wyckoff, heading down to Tucson, pulled over in his minivan and found Sparky dead.
Red Cliff had lost its dealer, and the town went into mourning. Adam’s old friends printed black T-shirts with Tupac Shakur’s “Rebel of the Underground” rap lyrics on the front and a portrait of Sparky on the back. Half the procession at the crowded funeral wore the shirts. Sparky was buried on the hillside cemetery above the creek, inside the barbed-wire fence that kept the coyotes out. The site was surrounded by other graves marked by freshly painted white wooden crosses. Councilman Dale helped lower the casket, his face expressionless, rigid as stone, and Marie Anne bent over the grave, bracing herself with her hands on her knees. Levi was nowhere to be found.
At the Turnoff that weekend Sparky’s friends erected a permanent memorial stone, decorated with pink and red plastic flowers and inscribed with his real name and the dates of his life. To get to Red Cliff, you had to pass it.
There were no fishing trips, no barbecues, no rodeos for the duration of the summer, and the only thing that raised Larson’s spirits was the construction of the casino. Adam drove him up for the final weekly inspection that August, and on the ride back his father seemed pleased. The building stood ready for the slot machines, the poker tables, and the buffet lounge. It would open in late fall, just a few months away. At the Turnoff Adam swung his father’s new Toyota 4x4 onto the paved road, past the memorial. Over the final ridge to Red Cliff he dodged a spotted cow, the truck handling nicely; its power steering responded to the slightest touch. Adam rounded the steep downhill curve, and it was then he saw it—the white pimple on the face of their valley, the bubble. That morning, when he and his father had driven out of Red Cliff, it had not yet been visible in the rearview mirror. Now it shone in the spotlight of the four o’clock sun.
“They’re inflating the dome,” Adam said.
“I see that.”
As Red Cliff’s councilman, his dad should have been able to stop the construction. But it had been forced on them by Washington, by the BIA, by Larson’s boss, the tribal chairman—outsiders, his father called them, outsiders who could care less, outsiders like the man who killed Sparky. Adam stepped harder on the gas.
“What the town needs is money,” Larson said, “not some instant school, built on the cheap, like someone bought it with food stamps.”
Adam knew the construction plan: his father had approved it only through pressure from the chairman. The dome would take twenty-four hours to inflate. Once it was up, they would spray an initial layer of fiberglass inside to lend structural support. Over thirty days, layers of concrete would be spiraled to the top, and in a month the instant building would stand on its own.
From ten miles off, the future school seemed to crouch on the hilltop like a UFO. Half-inflated, it already dominated the idyllic valley. Adam hit the gas pedal, the truck flew closer, and over the final five-mile stretch the dome grew higher and wider and more grotesque. Slowing as he entered town, Adam saw that people had climbed onto their rooftops for a better view; they were pointing and chattering.
“Even the neighbors don’t know what we need,” his father mumbled. “Cheering handouts from Washington!”
They found Lorena, Verdena, and Marie Anne watching from the porch outside the house. The high school dome loomed in the west, gleaming in the orange light. Adam drove into the dirt driveway and cut the engine. His father gathered his papers from under the passenger seat, and with the door open Adam heard Verdena questioning their aunt. “There gonna be computers in there? There’ll be a cafeteria, isn’t it? How many teachers they going to need?” His mom held Verdena around the waist while Marie Anne answered patiently. None of them took their eyes off the dome, not even to greet Adam and his dad.
“Our own goddamn family,” Larson muttered under his breath, slamming the truck door.
Verdena was chomping a grilled cheese sandwich, and between bites she pointed with her crumb-encrusted lips and said, “Looks like a big egg, Dad, isn’t it?”
Lorena said, “Supposed to hold five hundred students!”
Larson faced them with a wry smirk, squinting. “Looks like a big old birdshit to me. You gonna go to school in that thing, Verdena?”
Verdena told him she didn’t mind. It was better than the trailer.
Larson laughed. “Going to school in a big ol’ bird turd. That’s all right with my kids. They don’t care.”
Adam glared. Marie Anne said, “What you telling them? You should be happy about this. It’s what you wanted.”
“I wanted a real school for my children!” He turned to Adam and said in Apache, “Never would have seen me in a school like that.”
That night Larson told Adam to get in the truck and they’d check out the dome. They drove through the dark streets up past the Day School to the top of the hill, where his father parked by a power shovel. The high school, illuminated by a sliver of moon, seemed to hover ahead in a white phosphorescence. The generator was grating away, blowing hot air into the bubble, a roar Adam imagined could be heard for miles.
They stepped carefully around the dome to what would become the main entrance. It was sealed with boards to prevent air from escaping. His father pried loose two six-foot beams, then tore them off with his bare hands. A heavy stream of warm air rushed from the hole. The space was just wide enough to squeeze through if they sucked in their stomachs. Inside, the dome was darker than night, a sky without stars, lit only by the faint opaque glints of boarded windows in the stem wall. Adam clapped his hands, and the sound went off like thunder, reverberating off the fifty-foot ceiling and the cement floor, a storm only they could hear.
Back outside, Adam tried to reattach the boards to the entrance, but his father said not to bother. They drove down the hill. At the house Larson kept the truck running and wouldn’t get out.
“Where you heading?” Adam asked.
“Just go inside.”
Behind Adam the truck took off again. In the middle of the night he heard his father crash through the living room and step over his mattress, stumbling past the woodstove. Adam pretended to sleep.
That morning Larson feigned outrage when the town woke to the deflated bubble, to a school that was no longer there. Someone had shot up the inside of the dome, fifty rounds at least, the fabric decimated. As councilman, he vowed to find out who had done it—who had destroyed the future of their town. He promised to get the BIA to replace the fifteen-ton fabric from France. They never did.
Adam told no one on the rez what he knew. To blame his father would only cast suspicion on himself. But in his only letter to Jeff that summer, in two scribbled pages, he unburdened himself.
The next week it was a relief—the relief of escape—to drive Jeff’s truck, loaded with his stuff, back to Flagstaff, where basketball would be starting up soon.