BY THE END OF MAY 2013, winter loosened its grip on the reservation, and people emerged from the dark warmth of their homes, and weekends filled with picnics and softball games, and the lake echoed with pop songs thrumming from the radios of drifting boats. The powwows began in June, first in Twin Buttes, the southernmost segment; and then in Lucky Mound, White Shield, Mandaree, and Four Bears. For many years, the final powwow, in early August, on the bank of the lake, had attracted the best dancers and singers, but on the first weekend of July that year, Mandaree drew a lively crowd as well. Oil companies donated $20,000 to the celebration, which, with private contributions from Mandaree families, amounted to the largest pot of powwow cash in the segment’s history. Dancers and singers came from all over the continent—Arizona, Montana, Wisconsin, Saskatoon—to compete for the generous prizes, and the Mandaree councilman, in a nod to industry, named the powwow “The Heart Beat of the Bakken.” In addition to the dancing and singing contests, there were horse races, bingo games, a rodeo, fireworks, an egg toss, tug-of-war, a basketball tournament, a chili cook-off, a battle of the bands, and a parade of rez cars. There were contests to determine who had grown the biggest turnip or beaded the prettiest earrings, who could rattle her tongue the fastest or war whoop the loudest, who could devour the largest watermelon or fry the most delicious fry bread.
Lissa attended many of the powwows that summer to hand out missing person posters and spread word about KC. Some men and women in her sun dance circle avoided powwows, lamenting the capitalization of spiritual tradition, the conspicuousness of tribal wealth; and indeed, the dancers’ regalia appeared more expensive every year. Still, Lissa liked to go. Her aunt Cheryl had been a champion traditional dancer, and when Lissa was a child, Cheryl taught her how to dance. Lissa came to prefer traditional dancers, who wore simpler clothing and moved more subtly, to fancy dancers, who wore neon ribbons and feathers. “If you watch closely,” Lissa would say, “you’ll see the ones that really have the spirit, the teachings, because they’re the ones with the footwork.”
She enjoyed perusing the stalls that formed a ring around the grounds. She bought gifts for relatives, fabric for a sun dance dress. She tried on turquoise necklaces and ran her hands over leather. The quality of goods had improved since the boom. The vendors, like the dancers, had come from farther afield, since tribal members had more money to spend. Lissa liked to take it all in—bison hides and deer antlers, medicine wheels and packets of herbs, and all the trappings one needed to sew a dress: porcupine quills, feathers, fringe, Venetian glass beads, tin cones for the jingle dresses, cowry shells, bone pipes, abalone disks, fabric, ribbons, needles and thread.
In summer, clouds descended on the prairie like flocks of birds, constantly landing and lifting. The sky weathered to dark gray. The mustard bloomed bright yellow.
Lissa rarely stopped in White Shield anymore but went straight on to Mandaree, where she drove the back roads and sometimes wandered on foot through the draws and wider canyons. Before the boom, it had been easier to wander the reservation, and many tribal members did. They fished, camped, hunted, and gathered medicine. Although fences divided cattle pastures, it had been easy to slip between strands of barbed wire or to lay down a gate. Now hundreds of oil wells dotted Mandaree, and on new roads bisecting allotments, companies posted signs reading OILFIELD TRAFFIC ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT. The companies had little legal ground to keep people off the land, since they did not own it, but the signs, if not the traffic, discouraged tribal members from wandering.
Lissa considered it an act of resistance to wander, and that summer she covered more ground than in any year before. Marks of the boom were everywhere. Even land that remained intact was on its surface changed: creeks and sloughs sucked dry, the water purchased or stolen; the prairie littered with food wrappers, plastic bottles, scraps of carpet, aluminum flashing, jerricans, busted work boots, bullet casings, oily rags, electronics, cigarette cartons, and empty tins of chewing tobacco; and a dense smog overlaying it all. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency had sued a company for failing to properly limit pollution at their well sites on the reservation. One day, Lissa wandered behind the Maheshu shop and came across what looked like a heap of giant condoms. They were filter socks for straining contaminated water after it had fracked a well, before the water was injected, again, into an old well for disposal. Each gram of a used sock contained up to seventy picocuries of radiation, fourteen times the amount allowed in North Dakota landfills. Since the Bakken generated seventy-five tons of filter socks a day, and since the only landfills that accepted the socks were located out of state, the socks were often found stashed in abandoned buildings or dumped in fields.
Among the places Lissa searched most often was a canyon near Mandaree, where the border of Fort Berthold skirted the Little Missouri River. An allotment there belonged to an uncle on her grandmother’s side and, being so close to the river, reminded Lissa of the bottomlands before the flood. Cattle roads threaded between tall clay bluffs and groves of cottonwood thickening toward the bank. Lissa had chosen the area because it seemed a likely spot for a body to be buried. It was not far from the Maheshu shop, nor from the main road, and yet it felt remote, the topography too varied and too close to the river for it ever to be drilled. A gate guarded the entrance to the allotment, but apart from an earthmover rusting on a hillside, there were few signs anyone went there. The roads cut through sagebrush and canyons formed by sudden rain, one road so impassable that Lissa had to park and cross on foot over fallen logs onto a grassy rise on the other side. There, poking from a vast, green slope, were prairie dog mounds. The rodents stood on their back legs to greet her, sounding an alarm, and if she stayed long enough, they forgot her as they grazed and dug new portals to their underground city.
She was not systematic about the way she searched. She plotted no transects, no GPS points. She considered the distance of a site from a road, the density of the soil. She looked for disturbances in the land—mounds of hardened dirt, concavities in the grass, cigarette butts tossed carelessly behind. Beyond this, she relied on intuition. If she had a feeling about a place, she went, and if the feeling lingered, she went again.
Lissa documented her findings meticulously, like an archaeologist on an endless dig, unearthing the scraps of former lives as the boom chafed at the reservation around her. She often thought of what was being lost to the boom. She remembered the stones on the bank of the lake where she had gone camping with her family years earlier—stones arranged like the constellation Auriga—and wondered what other effigies or burial grounds had been paved over by roads and drilling pads. Once, an oil worker brought her a plastic bag containing bones he found near a well site. He had heard Lissa was searching for someone. “Shit, I ain’t taking them,” she joked with the worker. “That might be some mean old Hidatsa.” She advised him to give the bones to law enforcement.
She found many bones herself, most of cows, horses, and deer. Once, she found a human sacrum in White Shield not far from the lake. It was so old, so soft and porous, that she felt it could have turned to powder between her fingers. Lissa gave it to a police officer, who sent it to a museum in Bismarck, where an archaeologist carbon-dated the bone and learned that the person to whom it belonged had been dead seventy-five years. Lissa wondered if the bone had risen up in the lake after the flood, from a grave that was never moved.
She rarely searched alone that summer. Dozens of people from the reservation and neighboring towns saw her posts on Facebook and offered help. They arrived with sandwiches, water, shovels, and metal detectors, following Lissa wherever she went. Her most reliable companion was Micah, who now rarely missed a trip with his mother. He was fourteen, taller and leaner, not quite skinny, with ears that stuck out like tiny wings. He no longer seemed haunted by KC but rather excited by the prospect of finding him. Micah wondered if one day he might become a detective or a forensic anthropologist. He was, in Lissa’s words, “down for the cause,” and when volunteer searchers complained about ticks or sore feet, Micah shook his head. “I know, man,” he liked to say. “The struggle is real.”
Among her other regular companions were two members of the tribe, Tiny Crows Heart and Waylon Fox. Tiny lived half the time in Sanish, in a trailer not far from the apartment where Lissa lived as a child, and the other half in Twin Buttes, where he was developing a Hidatsa language program. Both men were tall, gaunt, and wore their hair long. Waylon was Lissa’s cousin on her great-grandmother Nellie’s side but had grown up nowhere in particular. This nomadism had crept into his adulthood. Waylon slept under bridges and on the couches of patient relatives. He was a good singer and for years had followed the powwow circuit, hitching rides from reservation to reservation, winning enough money to pay his way in between. Eventually, he had decided powwows were fanning his bad habits and turned to traditional ceremony. This was how Lissa met Waylon, in the sweat lodge on the south side of Fargo. When Waylon was sober, he made good company. He brought his drum and practiced prayer songs as they drove. Often, he thought up his own songs, and the lyrics made Lissa laugh.
It was on these searches of the reservation and of the towns just beyond the border that Lissa frequently encountered oil workers. She would tell several stories from her encounters that summer: In one, she had been driving on a street in Williston, an hour west of the reservation, when she came across a man grilling cheese sandwiches in the bed of a pickup truck. She had noticed him because of a line of workers extending along the street. They were standing in the bright sun, fanning themselves with dollar bills. Lissa had not seen what they were waiting for, at first, so she parked and approached a man in the line. “What are you waiting for?” she asked. When he told her, she walked to the front of the line and called out to the man making sandwiches. “How much are they?”
“Five bucks.”
“What if I wanted another piece of cheese?”
“I’ll give you one more for a dollar.”
Lissa did the math—sixteen slices of cheese cost three dollars; a loaf of bread, one—and suddenly was struck by the absurdity of the boom, by the gross fact of men waiting in the sun to pay five dollars for a grilled cheese sandwich.
Her second encounter occurred on the reservation, in New Town, on a day even hotter than the one in Williston. Lissa spotted a man on the road on the east edge of town, swinging a bag of candy. He was young, an immigrant from an African country he would name but she would forget. The man wore jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt. When she yelled to him, “Where are you going?” he smiled.
“To the man camp,” he said.
The camp was seventeen miles away, in a northeast corner of the reservation. The man seemed grateful as they drove, and spoke cheerily in English. He had recently immigrated to the United States, he said, and had come to the oil fields to pay off debts. He had no car, but he was accustomed to walking. “In my country” was the phrase he used. Lissa hated this phrase. The refugees who lived in her building used the phrase, and she wanted to shake them, say, “Like it or not, this is your country now,” but to the man she was polite.
They turned south toward the lake. A cluster of trailers appeared, and the man got out. Lissa never saw him again. Later, she would wonder what became of him: “I said, ‘It’s cool to meet you,’ and he said, ‘No, no, the cool all mine.’ He was probably eighteen, nineteen—barely legal to be working. You hear of people blowing up on rigs, dying in car accidents, and here this kid was walking on this dusty, congested road, and he was just happy. Maybe he was one of the ones making twelve grand a month. Even if he was, you could see the sacrifice people were giving for this.”
Her relatives regarded the oil workers who had overtaken their reservation warily, but Lissa found herself feeling more sympathy than suspicion. It seemed to her these workers had been caught up in something beyond even their control. “I hated oil,” Judd Parker, KC’s former housemate, said once. “I never thought in my life I’d do oil. I ended up in the oil fields because I had nowhere else to go.”
One day that summer, Lissa dropped by the house where Judd still lived, tucked into a knoll above Four Bears Village, not far from the casino. It was a nicer house than most on the reservation, with a wraparound deck and large windows and a curtain of trees that hid the houses below from view. Judd came to the door wearing pajama pants. He was in his forties but seemed younger, with blond hair brushing his shoulders and a blond shadow of a beard. He looked a bit like General Custer, if Custer had smoked a lot of pot.
Judd led Lissa into the kitchen and through a corridor into KC’s bedroom. The room was empty. Jill had reclaimed her son’s belongings except for a bottle of vitamins KC had left in a cupboard and a pair of boots, which Judd handed to Lissa. “What was that day he disappeared—the twenty-second?” Judd said. They returned to the kitchen. Judd was meandering and apologetic, rarely finishing sentences, blending one into the next. He was from North Carolina, where his father owned a successful record company that had produced hundreds of albums of Southern gospel music. Judd grew up loving gospel more than anything, until he heard the Grateful Dead. In the nineties, he had followed the Dead “until Jerry died” and then returned to North Carolina, where he worked for his father and sold albums at flea markets on weekends. By then, Judd had a wife and two sons. They needed money, so he took a job in Aspen, Colorado, building a Ritz-Carlton hotel. The recession hit; the work ran out. Judd called a drill foreman he knew in North Dakota whose company had contracts with Steve Kelly, the former tribal lawyer who owned Trustland Oilfield Services. Kelly gave Judd a job, and that was how Judd met KC.
“Did you see him much?” Lissa interrupted. It was a Sunday evening, and the sun was setting. She had to work in the morning.
“KC? Not much,” Judd replied. He had seen him only when they came home to sleep. “I mean, you think you know someone, but you can live with someone your whole life and not know them.”
Judd began another story, and when Lissa glanced over at him, she realized that he was crying. Jeez, these guys are so sensitive, she thought.
“I was following this dump truck back from Williston,” Judd said, “and, well, a car went in front of the dump truck, hit him head-on. I watch him, closer than I am to you. I watch him die. For four minutes, I watch him die.” That evening, Judd called a fellow oilfield worker—“and he’s like, ‘Did you steal his wallet?’ I’m like, ‘Fuck you. I watched this guy die.’ It was emotional for me. It kind of affected me.”
Judd went on: “I swear, with all this money, people turn against each other. My landlord and his sister—they don’t talk. It’s all about mineral rights, this property, that property. I know an Indian lady. She’s got a single-wide trailer that’s trash, but she’s got sixteen oil wells. People say, ‘I don’t see why she wouldn’t build a real house.’ How do you not understand that? Money doesn’t change anything.”
Lissa supposed Judd was an exception to the workers she met in the oil field. Yet every worker she met seemed to have wound up there for a different reason. Or was it the same reason? Even Rick Arey, who had spent his adult life on oil rigs, and whom Lissa now knew better than any oil worker given how often they spoke on the phone, had misgivings about the industry. “This is the only place I’ve seen this kind of carnage go on,” he told her. The longer he lived in North Dakota, the more his pride in the industry had faded.
Rick was a decade younger than Lissa, born in Denver, Colorado, the middle of three children. His father had been a truck driver while his mother raised the kids. As a child, Rick had been fond of pyrotechnics. Once, he lit his mother’s can of hair spray on fire and burned a hole in the carpet. On another occasion, while his family was asleep, he set off a firecracker in his bedroom. His mother bought him books on safety and took him to the fire department, but none of this had worked. When an uncle found Rick in a closet with his cousins, lighting matches beneath racks of clothes, the uncle beat him until his bottom was bruised and, for days, forbade Rick from entering the house. Rick and his uncle camped in the backyard, where Rick was to imagine he burned the house down and killed all of his relatives. He never played with fire again.
His mother said that of all her children Rick had the biggest heart, but he did not stop getting into trouble. When he was nine years old, his family moved to Wyoming and then back to Colorado after his mother and father divorced. His mother married six times. Rick attended five high schools before he turned eighteen and dropped out. He was often left alone at home and used a lot of drugs. He got addicted to meth. He stopped eating. A friend rescued him and took him to live with his own mother in Fort Collins. Rick found work as a groundman on a rotomill, walking behind a machine as it chewed up asphalt. He worked that job for two years and then enrolled in the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
It was his mother who made clear to Rick how important money was. She had been raised poor and, at age thirteen, taken out of school and forced to work. All the money Rick’s father earned had never been enough. Rick wanted to make money but did not know how. People told him to use his brain, but Rick had more confidence in his brawn. “I can read like the wind blows,” he said, “but I never had the patience to sit behind a desk.” After less than a year of college, he realized how much debt he already owed and quit. He worked three years for a moving company and then, on his father’s recommendation, got a job on an oil rig in Wyoming. BP operated the well; Nabors Industries, based in Texas, did the drilling. Rick began as a floor hand, “tripping pipe” into the drill hole and keeping the area clean, and worked his way up to derrick hand, one step below the “driller.” When BP shut down the rig—a worker was almost killed—Rick took a job on a Nabors practice rig, training roughnecks how to operate it safely.
By then, Rick was twenty-five years old. He felt proud of his work. Roughnecks, he said, had a reputation for being “the toughest motherfuckers around,” and the money was not bad either. Rick earned $5,855 every two weeks, which he spent haphazardly. In 2004, he got a DUI and, not long after that, at a gas station met a woman whose car had broken down and later got her pregnant. He learned he had a daughter when he received a subpoena for his DNA. After that, between car insurance and child support, drilling was the only work Rick knew that paid enough to cover his bills.
In North Dakota, something changed. Maybe it was KC going missing, or maybe it was the chaos of the boom on a scale Rick never witnessed before. Men were pushed to work so fast that inevitably they made mistakes. Amid so much negligence, Rick felt helpless. “I got to thinking,” he said. “The middle class, we don’t run shit, we’re just herded around like a bunch of cattle, and the powers that be, the people running this country, they’re not doing anything to stop it. They’re not doing anything to find alternative energy. They’re not doing anything to save the environment, but they bitch at all the Americans using plastic, that are going to McDonalds. It’s like, Alright motherfucker, we didn’t really choose this. This is what you’ve given us to survive. You’re the one that built the roads, put up the stoplights, invented the car. Don’t tell me you did it to make my life easier. You did it because you wanted to be a multibillionaire, and you’re power hungry, and this was the fastest, easiest way to do it. Nobody sat down and said, If we go forward with this, what’s America going to look like two hundred years from now? They didn’t fucking care about that. And they don’t care about it now. They tell us to stop using plastic, but that doesn’t mean shit in the grand scheme of things, you know? The only alternatives to save the environment have got to come from the people that made the trillions of dollars. They’ve got to think of a new way, because a guy like me—I know, ‘Don’t limit yourself, Rick’—but I can’t reinvent the fucking wheel. It’s just that I’m not that guy. I’m not that smart. Even for the Einsteins, it’s not that fucking easy.”
In the middle of an oil boom, there was no such thing as choice, Rick believed. Booms obliterated choice. “We’re born into this money machine, and it’s all we know. We go through the motions. We work hard. We retire at sixty. We go golfing or run around a nude colony. That’s the American dream. Quick money. Dodge diesels and women and drinking beers with your buddies. And there’s camaraderie in that. We all felt like we were really doing something. We were contributing to the economy. But that’s what sucks about money. When it’s gone, you figure out it’s not even real. It’s just a dopamine rush. We know what an oil field does. We know what drugs do. We know these things wreck everything about the human spirit, but we keep doing them.”
THE SUMMER OF 2013 settled on the prairie, turning everything a languid green. Lissa and Jill were speaking again—Jill had written an apology, Lissa gave her a call—although they spoke less often and less intimately than before. Jill called Lissa whenever she had news or heard from Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent in Williston. Investigators had completed an analysis of James’s and KC’s phone data, finding that on the morning KC disappeared, his phone had been active until it entered the vicinity of James’s phone, at which point KC received messages and calls but no longer answered or made them. That same afternoon, the phones moved in tandem toward Watford City, where they remained until that night, when both traveled to Williston. There, KC’s phone had been deactivated.
The analysis made investigators more certain of James’s culpability but did little to build their case. It was not a crime for a phone to follow another. To indict James for murder, they needed much more than the analysis—a body or, at the very least, a witness.
Lissa was beginning to think their only hope was finding KC, but as the summer wore on, this was seeming even more difficult. She wanted to organize a search of the reservation with support from the tribal council. One councilwoman, Judy Brugh, replied to her inquiry, suggesting that Jill draft a letter requesting assistance from tribal police and a speaking slot at a council meeting. Jill drafted two letters—one to the council and another to Tex asking permission to search his property. Neither the council nor Tex responded.
Lissa urged Jill to come on a search anyway, but Jill considered the trip a waste of time. She had asked Gutknecht for a copy of the phone data, hoping it would suggest a specific location, but he would not give it to her. “I just can’t break the law and get myself in trouble,” he wrote. “Rest assured if there…was a good place to search and not just blind searching it would have been done long ago. Sorry I can’t be of more help with a place to search but if I had that I’d be searching it.”
Lissa disagreed with his suggestion that searching was futile. She knew the chances of stumbling upon KC were low—“Finding a body in the badlands is harder than finding a needle in a haystack,” she often said—but this was beside the point. If they had one good reason to go on searching, Lissa thought, it was to show James that the case had not languished. There was still the possibility that a witness would come forward—that by a tip or a fluke, KC would be found.
Lissa arranged for a professional search team to meet Jill in North Dakota in late June. Jill said she could not come. She believed they should be more “realistic” about their prospects of finding KC, she said, and she was tired, still fighting the defamation suit. Sarah had updated the complaint:
25. I believe the defendant also started to post “Beware” of my husband and I all around town and on the internet. My bank received this poster and Tex Hall received this poster as well. It states that we are con-artists and thieves. These allegations on the poster are untrue. Tex Hall gave me the envelope address to him with this flyer….
26. People in town are constantly asking us if we are involved with Mr. Clarke’s disappearance. Many businesses have stated that they don’t want to do business with us because of these rumors. We are the center of the town’s gossip and live under a constant cloud.
27. As a result of these posters and false allegations, our contract between Maheshu Energy was terminated on March 16, 2013, which was also around the same time the flyer was sent to Tex Hall….We were forced to dissolve the LLC.
Lissa argued with Jill: “It breaks my heart to know that I have invested nearly a year of my time, effort, resources, etc. to make this happen FOR YOU and you are not willing to do what is necessary to find KC. Pushing it off is only giving the person or persons involved with KC’s disappearance more time to tamper with whatever scraps of evidence have been left.” They compromised, and in July, Jill drove to North Dakota.
The search did not go well. They met in New Town—Rick, Lissa, Jill, and Jill’s husband—as they had before, but this time Jill appeared to have little interest in searching. Lissa was impatient; Jill, withdrawn. They rode in separate cars to Mandaree and north along the lake edge, where the shoreline meandered along bays and coves and peninsulas jutting into the water. The day was hot; a haze descended; the prairie crawled with wood ticks. Jill did not want to leave the car. She wandered a short distance through the grass, through coneflower and thistle, and retreated again to the pavement.
When they went by the Maheshu shop that afternoon, Tex was not there. Jill and her husband began to bicker in the parking lot. Lissa lost her patience. “Everyone shut the fuck up,” she said. There was something strange about the lot, she thought. Then she saw what it was: A white man, parked in a red sedan, was watching them. Lissa took a photograph of the man. He looked away. “Let’s get out of here,” she said.
KC WAS NOT the only one for whom Lissa searched that summer. In the months before and after he disappeared, at least three other men had gone missing from the oil fields. Mike Marchus, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent in Minot, sent Lissa a list of names, which included Ron Johnson—“74 year old male, 5'11", 220 lbs, gray/blonde hair, beard and mustache, wears glasses and has diabetes”—who had last been seen on the morning of October 16, 2011, at the 4 Bears Casino & Lodge. There was also Eric Haider, thirty years old, who had a “full beard” and “multiple tattoos.” He disappeared about three months after KC, on a construction site south of the reservation. Lissa took particular interest in his case, since the circumstances of his disappearance were similar to KC’s, but she found no overlap among the people each man had known. She spoke to Haider’s mother, whom she helped by posting on social media and distributing missing posters on her drives around the oil fields. That was how Johnson’s family heard of Lissa and asked for her help. Lissa created a Facebook page to which she invited many of the same people who followed Jill’s page and, in June, with assistance from law enforcement, planned a search for Johnson. She did not believe he had been murdered. Johnson had intended to stay with his sister in a town east of the reservation the night he disappeared but never arrived at her house. His family said he had a history of depression. Lissa thought it was more likely that he had driven off the road. She planned to walk the edges of the lake and various sloughs and invited Sarah Creveling to join her.
The search was on a Saturday, the prairie blanketed with a still, heavy heat. Lissa met two deputies and some volunteers at the gas station in Parshall. When Sarah arrived, Lissa laughed at how the deputies looked at her, fumbling with recognition. Sarah was more composed than her photographs on the flyer had let on. She was taller than Lissa by several inches, and slender, her hair pulled in a ponytail and eyes darkened with mascara. Her thin lips opened into a confident smile. She wore diamond earrings, a baseball cap, and a blue zippered shirt.
Lissa and Micah rode in Sarah’s truck to the lake, the volunteers and deputies following behind. “She had a really nice truck,” Micah later recalled, “like a Ford F-150, with the big-ass thousand-dollar-apiece tires. Everything she owned was so nice.” Micah was smitten with Sarah and made no secret of it, proposing that if she dumped her husband he would be available. This made Sarah and Lissa laugh. They joked about what James would think. The lake appeared to the west and was lost again behind the bluffs, behind fields of corn and purple flax that formed a loose seam with the horizon. They passed the old Congregational church, the sky showing through the steeple, and a cemetery where Arikara soldiers were buried, its thin white stones stuck like cigarettes in the earth. They turned east toward White Shield, toward the border of the reservation, and south, again, toward the lake’s edge, where roads dropped right into the water. They followed faint tracks, skirting washouts until they came to a ravine. Sarah paused and stared down into it. It was steep on both sides—they could easily get stuck—but Lissa assured her she would make it. All Sarah had to do was give the truck a little gas. Sarah did not seem sure, and for a moment, Lissa wondered if she would go a different way, but then Sarah shifted into a lower gear and, as Lissa instructed, gathered speed. The truck rocked as it plunged, and when they came up the other side, Sarah was smiling, pleased with herself.
“Awesome spending time with you crazy girl! It was a blast!” Lissa wrote her the next day.
“Yesterday was a lot of fun!” Sarah replied. “I had 3 more ticks when I got home OMG I about died ha ha. I threw them on the ground and James was looking for them!”
They would try to meet again that summer but miss each other. Their messages grew friendlier still. One day, Sarah sent a video of her and James cuddling a puppy. She rarely mentioned the flyers anymore, chatting instead about work and weekend plans. She had enrolled in an exercise class called Insanity, which relieved her stress, she said.
“That would be FATALITY for me,” Lissa wrote to Sarah. She had little use for deliberate exercise. It was August, and she was preparing to go to sun dance: “No food or water. Just dance ceremony and prayer.”
“No food or water?!” Sarah asked. “Can you last that long without?”
“Yeah,” Lissa replied. “Once a year.”
Lissa had begun to share more about herself. Though she did not name her kids aside from Micah, they were ever present in her messages, which contained the relentless detail of a family in flux. Obie and Lissa were fighting more and more. One day, he had tried to run away. As soon as he disappeared, Lissa went to the computer in Obie’s bedroom and looked at his Facebook messages, where she learned he had gone to meet up with his father, OJ, who had been out of prison ten years. Lissa called the police, who located and returned her son.
Even as a child, Obie had held OJ against her. The first time he said, “You kept me from my dad,” he had been six years old. “I didn’t keep you from your dad,” Lissa had replied. “Your dad kept himself from you.” They had been living in Minot before Lissa went to prison. Eventually, she had gotten sick of hearing it, loaded Obie and Micah into a car, and driven through the night to Little Earth, the housing complex in Minneapolis, where she pounded on OJ’s sister’s door. “Fuck, Nadia’s here,” she had heard his relatives yell, and when she pushed her way into the apartment, they had begged her not to kill OJ. She found him facedown on the carpet, nudged his face with her foot. “Hey, Dad, get yourself up and talk to these boys,” she had said, and when OJ lifted his head, she saw that his cheeks were bruised, his eyes swollen, his lips broken and bloody. He had been in a fight. “That ain’t my dad,” Obie said. “The hell it ain’t,” Lissa replied. “Damn, Nad,” OJ had said. “Why you got to be so mean?”
Now Obie was fifteen, and his bitterness had sharpened. Once at the top of his class, he was doing poorly in school. He passed tests easily and was popular among his classmates, elected to student council, and recruited to the football team. But he rarely put in effort, and as soon as he joined something, he quit. When Lissa asked Obie what he wanted to be when he grew up, he replied, “An alcoholic. You and Dad are alcoholics, so I guess that’s what I’m going to be.”
For every mistake her children made, Lissa felt a twinge of guilt, driven deeper by the fact that they, too, blamed her for their problems. She worried most of all for CJ. He was whip-smart and acted tough, but Lissa believed he was her most sensitive child. He was often depressed, which she attributed to the traumatic brain injury he suffered while in foster care. A few years earlier, CJ had tried to take his own life. They had been driving together across Fargo when Lissa lost her patience with him, stopped the car, and told him to get out. A few days later, he had called, asking if he could come over. When he arrived at her apartment, he went into the bathroom, and when he emerged, he had tripped, dropping an empty pill bottle. Later, in a hospital room, as CJ’s pulse loosened, a doctor had grabbed Lissa by the chin. If she had anything to say to her son, she should say it, the doctor had said. Lissa did not remember what it was she said. She remembered the way the doctor held her face, looked her in the eyes, and in that moment, Lissa knew the doctor was a mother, too. As machines sang out the rhythm of her son’s dying, Lissa had lost her breath. Shauna and Lindsay stood near, and when a chaplain walked in, he had looked from Lissa to her daughters. “He did this because of her,” Lissa heard them say, and the chaplain, taking her daughters’ hands, commanded them to pray.
Lissa believed her daughters. She believed them even after CJ explained that he had swallowed the pills because his girlfriend broke up with him. “It’s not your fault,” he tried to assure his mother, but the guilt she felt preceded the incident, and there wasn’t much he could say.
It was Micah who consoled her then and every other time Lissa fought with her kids. “I try my hardest,” she told him once.
“I realize that, Mom,” he replied. “Why do you think I stick by your side?”
Micah’s older brothers called him their “bigger little brother” because they thought he had grown up faster than them. Lissa just figured she had been a better mother to Micah than to her other children. Already, Micah was two years past the age at which his doctors believed his lungs would give out, damaged so severely by anhydrous ammonia when the train derailed in Minot a decade earlier. Lissa refused to believe his doctors—refused to allow Micah to believe them, too. In prison, she had come across the book The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer; and later, at a garage sale in Fargo, she found a collection of his books on tape. After that, whenever Lissa drove Micah to appointments at the nearest Indian health clinic in White Earth, Minnesota, she had made him listen to the tapes. According to Dyer, a person had the power to change his own DNA. Do you hear that, Micah? she had said. Do you know what that means? It means that what these doctors are telling us is wrong. If you believe them that you’re going to die, you will die. I don’t want you to listen to these people. I want you to live.
Lissa thought of those tapes whenever Micah accompanied her on trips to the reservation. He was not wholly uncritical of his mother. He often teased Lissa for applying an excessive level of intensity to even the most mundane tasks. Later, they both would laugh when they told a story from one day that summer in 2013, when Lissa dropped by the tribal headquarters to find a map of her land in Mandaree. She had inherited the land from her father. She never would have known about this land had an oil company’s request for a right-of-way not appeared in her mail. She had gone first to the Bureau of Indian Affairs to find a map, since she had no idea where the allotments were located, but an administrator had claimed the information was proprietary and refused to give one to her. Lissa figured she would have better luck at the tribal land office.
She had been inside tribal headquarters a long time when she burst through the doors at a run, clutching a roll of paper. Two men she met in the land office had been reluctant to give her a map. “They wanted eighty dollars,” Lissa later complained. “I’m a landowner. How am I supposed to know where my land is if they won’t give me a map? I had to go half-ass traditional. I’m like, ‘What’s your name? Okay, we’re related.’ I start bringing up names, and this guy’s like, ‘Oh, shit. Here, you can borrow this map,’ and the other guy’s like, ‘Hey, wait a minute.’ I said, ‘No, man, he already borrowed it to me.’ He gets on the phone, starts texting his boss. Then he’s calling security, so I grabbed that map and got the hell out of there.”
Micah sighed when he saw his mother dashing out of tribal headquarters: “I said, ‘Mom, how come every time I’m here with you they’ve got to call in the militia?’ It felt like that movie National Treasure, where they get the Declaration of Independence, and they’re taking off. She was breathing heavier than ever. She just put the car in reverse, and we were gone.”
That same summer, Lissa bought an aluminum dinghy with an outboard motor in which she searched for Ron Johnson and took Micah fishing on the lake. They would head out on one of the dirt roads in White Shield that dropped into the water, lower the dinghy down the bank, and motor toward the depths. Micah could fish all day if Lissa let him. Sometimes Tony, her cousin, and other relatives joined. Lissa liked to fish, as well, though she liked as much to talk and look around. The bluffs looked smaller from out on the water, the prairie almost flat, and if the boat floated into the shallows, it would have been easy to entangle a line on a cottonwood tree. There and along the shore, silver snags protruded at odd angles from the water, the last stubborn residents of the bottomlands.
ONE DAY AT the end of the summer, while driving in Mandaree, Lissa dropped by the cemetery at Saint Anthony Catholic Church. This time, she found her father’s grave.
She had met her father, Leroy, only a few times, and they had spoken infrequently on the phone. The last time he called, he had told her, “You sound just like your mother.” He had not intended it as a compliment.
Lissa had long resented her mother for not staying with Leroy. Lissa knew that her resentment was unfair—that it had not been just her mother’s choice to leave. She suspected her grandmother had pressured Irene to give Lissa up, and she knew it was because of Catholicism—a “white way” of thinking inflicted on her family—that her grandmother believed this necessary. But what, exactly, had changed her mother’s mind? This had never been clear to Lissa, who still wondered about those first seven months of her life in the custody of other relatives. Delphine and Ed had been their names. Had they loved her as much as her mother did? Had they missed her when her mother took her back? After that, they adopted another girl to take Lissa’s place, and years later, when Lissa was in college, this girl had appeared at the door of her apartment. She just wanted to see what Lissa looked like, she had said.
As Lissa grew older and had children of her own, she resented her mother less for leaving her father, but the feeling had not gone away entirely. By then, there were other reasons for her resentment: all the times her mother decided Lissa was unfit to raise her own children, and times before that, when her mother expected her to be something she was not. Clean. Well-dressed. Sober. Was this really what her mother wanted of her, Lissa had wondered, or had she just been worried what white people thought?
For years these questions had trailed Lissa, and then, one day, they simply had not mattered anymore. The change came a few springs after her release from prison, on a road trip with her brother Percy. His own mother lived in a nursing home in Idaho, and Percy had wanted to visit her; so Lissa applied for permission from her parole officer to join him. She remembered most vividly, when they arrived at the nursing home, how small and shriveled Percy’s mother looked. In that moment, Lissa thought of her own mother’s impossible strength. She could summon no more anger toward her mother and decided that day to forgive her.
Forgiveness did not erase all resentment, but Lissa found it easier to let go of her anger now. Irene was approaching seventy years of age and soon would retire and move home. Now and then, Lissa considered moving home to the reservation, as well. In August, her probation had come to an end, and for the first time in seven years, she had no one to report to. The thought of moving unsettled her. She had rarely been so stable as in her years in Fargo, and yet every time she returned home, she felt a pull stronger than before. “The rez is the rez,” she once would say. “Everybody wants to be on an adventure somewhere, but when you run out of resources, you run out of time, you run out of whatever, it’s where everybody goes. It’s the end of the road in a lot of ways. A lot of people from here don’t even live here most of their lives, but they’ll get buried here. It’s home. It’s an unconditional place. You walk in, and it’s exactly where you left off.”
On the few occasions Lissa visited White Shield that summer, she went to the cemetery in the south of the segment where her Yellow Bird relatives, among them Chucky, were buried. She missed Chucky. Once, she had sent a message to his number, and someone replied. Lissa apologized. It had not occurred to her that his number had been reassigned, but the new recipient told her not to worry: “He must have been an awesome guy because a lot of people text and call him still.”
She wondered what Chucky would have said about the boom. He probably would have sued the government over something, because that was what he liked to do. It was as if Chucky had hoped the government would make things right. Or maybe it never had anything to do with hope. Maybe it had been his way of proving that history repeats itself. That was more likely. Chucky had been a cynic. In all the riddles they had tried on each other, Lissa could recall stumping him only once. They had been in his bedroom, her uncle seated at his desk, Lissa in the folding chair. “Chucky, what’s the ultimate ruler of everything?” she had said.
“Money?” he ventured.
“No. Love—unconditional love.”