14 The Badlands

LISSA TOLD ME THAT TO find a body in the badlands, I would have to know the landscape in all seasons. I should be there when the snow melted in April, and when the heavy rain in May carved rivulets in the gumbo and washed sediment into the channels that cut around the buttes. I should see the cottonwoods bud in the late spring and, in the summertime, watch the cockleburs grow thick in the coulees. The foliage would not last long, Lissa said. By late summer, the brush would turn brittle, so that a cigarette flicked out a car window might cause it to burn for days. In the fall, the rain would come again, and this, too, I should see: how the bentonite clay would glisten like whale skin, evening its own surface, filling the tracks of animals imprinted during the summer and fall before. The winter was also important, when the snow would bring the land into full relief, and I would notice shapes that in other seasons I had overlooked. The badlands were never the same, Lissa said. They were always slumping, folding in on themselves. The land would reveal what it wanted to us. The point was not to force the land to give up the body but to be there when it did.

I VISITED LISSA regularly in the years after we met. I would fly to Fargo, where she would pick me up at the airport, and where I would spend weeks at a time tracing the paper trail of her life. That first winter and spring of 2015, I stayed with Lindsay or slept on the floor of Lissa’s apartment. Then summer came, Obie moved out, and Micah repainted the spare room for me. In the fall, Lindsay moved back in, and I returned to the floor. CJ found a girlfriend, who also slept on the floor awhile; and Obie came home with a girlfriend, too, and they shared a room with Micah. By then I had decided the apartment was full and rented a room of my own.

I accompanied Lissa to the reservation for the first time in April 2015. We met in Fargo, where I helped pack the car with tents, blankets, changes of clothes, flashlights, Coleman lanterns, Band-Aids, phone chargers, and a set of camouflage radios. We left the following morning after dawn. There was hardly room for Micah or Waylon, Lissa’s cousin, who rode on a mound of Pendletons in the back. Waylon was so skinny his cheeks caved in. He had spent the recent months in jail, and Lissa thought this had done him good. His skin had color, she noted approvingly, and he was sober, praying a lot. He had spent the night before we left binding a fan of sparrow hawk feathers with a strap of leather that belonged to his late mother. “Everything I have of hers I’m slowly giving away,” he told me. He had gifted the fan to Lissa, who stuck it in her visor like a toll ticket. It quivered angelically above her head.

The trees were budding, a green blush along the edges of the highway. Waylon tapped on a drum and now and then burst into song, Lissa murmuring the words. I would soon learn that driving to the reservation put Lissa in her best mood. She told more jokes, smoked fewer cigarettes. “You’ll see,” she said. “I think there’s this nervousness, all this energy. It feels like my insides are tuning up to a higher frequency, so when I get there, I’ll notice things. It’ll happen to you. All these things we’re driving by, they’ll come into focus, and you’ll think, Wow, there’s a million places this kid could be.” She turned to Waylon. “I brought some of that smudge so we can get that evil off you,” she said. Jails were full of bad spirits, and she didn’t want any tagging along.

Waylon nodded and pointed out the window to an embankment. “Look at all those sweat rocks, Cuz! Load ’er up.” He was always collecting from roadsides, he said. Wood. Feathers. The quills of flattened porcupines.

“Have you ever knocked one out with a tire iron?” I asked.

Waylon cackled. “Nah. That’s funny though. Wake up and find out they’ve been rolled for their quills.”

WE BEGAN BY the Little Missouri River, where the bridge crossed north of Killdeer into the badlands of Mandaree. There was a cattle guard at the entrance to the allotment and a red gate fastened with a chain. Lissa woke Micah, who opened the gate and followed us on foot to the riverbank. A dry winter had reduced the river to a trickle. We walked over sand and silt, through grass and the winter skeletons of chokecherry bushes, to where the river parted like loose strands of a braid. There, in a clearing, was a set of wooden pallets, the ground littered with bullet casings. A target had been nailed to one of the pallets and shot through a couple dozen times.

“Oil workers?” I asked. A rig was perched on the cliff above.

“Yeah, probably,” Lissa replied. “Or rez kids playing around.”

She walked the perimeter of the clearing and then cut through the brush into a small grove. I followed and saw that she had paused. “Oh, come look,” she said. At the trunk of a tree were two coyotes, shot and laid like dogs in the shade. They had small wounds above their front legs, each crusted with maggots, but otherwise, they might have been alive. Their coats were glossy and thick, and they lay to opposite sides, their legs extended toward the river so that the spaces between their eyes were touching. Had they arranged themselves to die this way, or had the hunter put them there, I wondered?

We spent the whole afternoon like this, no pattern to our searching. Lissa seemed guided by whim, and then by instinct, and then by some mysterious calculation. She dug her boots into the ground to test its softness. She pulled up deadwood to see what was beneath. When she came to a clearing or a coulee, she paused and said, “This isn’t right,” or, “This is the kind of ravine I was telling you about, where the ground is easy to dig.” She was always pointing to anomalies in the land—sunken patches of earth, sticks unnaturally piled so that they had to have been laid by humans. We left the riverbank and climbed a series of draws toward the cliffs, where the silt became clay and the ground hardened. A creek cut around a plateau, forming a ravine into which Lissa descended. She was hardly graceful. Her feet stabbed the dirt like anvils, and she wobbled on steep terrain, but she was quick. I followed her along the creek through a mess of cattails, leaping over mud onto islands of sand. The ground was scored with the tracks of foxes, rabbits, ermine, and raccoons, and the brush along the channel was garnished with bits of fur. It struck me that KC, if buried here, was hardly alone. To the side of the channel, beavers had built and abandoned a lodge, which had sunken into the hill like a grave.

By dark we had covered four or five miles and seen no signs of a body. I had not expected to find KC, but I was surprised that the process soothed me, an enormous task reduced to small movements. It seemed to have a similar effect on Lissa. She was quiet on the drive that evening, pulling thoughtfully on her cigarettes. We stayed the night at the casino, where I made a bed for myself on the floor of our hotel room. Waylon and Lissa were gone most of the night, gambling their free players’ cash and chatting with the guards, and when I woke in the morning, Micah was cocooned in the sheets of one bed and Lissa was fully clothed, lying prone on the quilt of the other. Waylon had not slept at all. After we had awakened, he announced proudly that one of the guards happened to be his cousin and had hooked us up with breakfast at the casino buffet. Waylon ate three steaks and fell asleep in the car.

Snow had fallen overnight. As we drove south along the lake, through rangeland toward the Little Missouri, the sun lifted and the snow vanished. The noise of the casino had fallen away—a couple had been arguing in the room next door. We wound on a dirt road through a shallow valley and came to a bluff overlooking the river.

We walked most of that day, up and down the bluff and through ravines that narrowed toward the cliffs. Micah found a puffball, which he gave to his mother to use at sun dance as a coagulant to heal from piercings. Lissa found a patch of bitterroot on the river’s edge, which she harvested by plunging her arm into the muck. Waylon gathered feathers. His traditional name was Picks Up the Feather, and Lissa liked to call him by variations on the theme. “Hey, Eats Ham Sandwich,” I heard her say at lunch in her lowest medicine man voice. Waylon did not always play along, but this time he taunted in reply, “Shops with Credit Card,” and Lissa laughed. Waylon did not have a bank account, let alone a credit card.

That evening, as we returned to New Town, I asked Lissa if she had ever seen a dead body apart from those of friends and relatives at funerals.

“Yeah,” she said. Briefly, in college, she had enrolled in a program to prepare for medical school, and in class, she dissected a cadaver. “There was this one woman who committed suicide. She drank Drano. Can you imagine? She still had nail polish on her fingers and toes. We weren’t supposed to take the shroud off their faces, but one day I couldn’t stop myself. I brought sage in and wiped her down and thanked her. It was such an intimate thing, you know? I’m going to let you dig through my stomach, through my reproductive system, through my brain matter.”

“What did you think when you saw her face?” I said.

“I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘Why did you do that? What could be so bad in this life?’ You read that someone killed herself with Drano, and you think that behind that shroud you’re going to see this horrible face—twisted, eyes swollen from crying twenty years. You think it’s going to be this terrible life written on a face, and then you lift it up, and it just looks normal.”

Lissa drove slowly, peering past me into the woods alongside the road. The trees grew thickly here, trunks tangled, buds sprouting new green. Every landmark reminded Lissa of something she wanted to tell me: discolorations in the soil, where water collected and evaporated to salt; the year-old tracks of an excavator pressed like fossils into clay; bones, bleached white, of various animals. “If you ever need to clean a bison skull quick, just put it on a hill of fire ants,” she said.

Waylon and Micah had fallen quiet in the backseat. I heard Micah sigh. “Oh my God, Mom. I just want a freaking flush toilet,” he muttered.

Lissa sat up, pinched her eyes in such a way that I knew she was thinking.

“Hey, Mom,” said Micah.

“What?”

“Why’s the lake named Sakakawea?”

“You know who that is.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“She helped Lewis and Clark, remember?”

“Was she Arikara?”

“I think she was from further East,” I said. “She was kidnapped by Hidatsas.”

Micah stared at me, his face unexpressive. “Who taught you history?” he said.

“Then she had a baby with Lewis and Clark,” added Waylon.

“Which one was it?” asked Micah.

“I don’t know. Both?” Waylon said.

Lissa laughed. “And that was when human trafficking all began on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.”*

“Ayyyee!” Waylon cried.

I was laughing now, too. Micah held his head in his hands. Lissa’s cigarette jittered between her lips. We were still laughing when we turned a corner and saw a car ambling toward us—two men, both tribal members, the passenger holding a gun. Lissa slowed to watch the men pass. She lowered her chin, narrowed her eyes at the driver.

“Mom. The toilet,” Micah said.

OUR TIME TOGETHER was often like this. Lissa would say something that made us laugh so hard our bellies hurt, and then she would go quiet, reproachful, as if we had stumbled into danger. Driving with Lissa on the reservation made me feel electrified. Her moods shifted wildly. I rarely knew where we were going, or why we went to the places we did. If I asked, Lissa often would not tell me. She would act as if I should have known, or as if she had said it already. I started asking fewer questions. I stared out the window, answered her demands. “Find my lighter,” she would say, or, “Do I have any more cigarettes?” and I would go rooting through the console, through instant coffee and pill bottles and phone chargers and sage, until I found what she was looking for. With anyone else, I would have felt annoyed, but with Lissa, I felt like a wingman. She made every task seem important, as if we were on some covert mission, which, in a sense, we were.

By then her efforts to find KC were well known on the reservation, and it seemed to Lissa that more people than before were willing to help by joining searches and reposting her announcements on Facebook. She owed this willingness to the fact that James was in custody and Tex no longer in office, but there was, perhaps, another reason: Many families were desperate for the sort of help Lissa could provide, and word of her benevolence had spread.

The winter before I met Lissa, a tribal member named Robin Fox had gone missing, abandoned on a snowy night by a companion. A domestic violence advocate on the reservation had asked Lissa for help, and so Lissa organized a search party. The woman was discovered in a farmer’s garage, not far from the bar where she last was seen. She had climbed into a vehicle, found a key in the ignition, and turned it on, perhaps to stay warm. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Soon afterward, Lissa had founded a nonprofit, which she named Sahnish Scouts. Other families from tribes and cities across the West and Midwest began to contact her, many of them missing their sons or daughters. Though federal agencies collected no reliable statistics, it seemed likely, based on available data, that Native American women disappeared at higher rates than women in any other demographic. In February 2015, the Fargo Native American Commission hosted a forum on missing Indigenous women and invited Lissa to speak. When I met Lissa, she had just begun to develop a public persona, but while she spoke openly about missing person cases, there remained an aspect of her work that most people never saw. In the time I spent with her, I would never hear her tell anyone else about the BEWARE flyers, nor about the messages she traded with Sarah Creveling. Even with loyal volunteers, Lissa shared very little. She compartmentalized her relationships. Often, she would glare at me if I publicly referenced something she did not want others to know. I learned to ask questions in private or in the company of only her children, whom she trusted more than anyone. I knew when she was withholding information from me as well, or waiting to tell me certain things. I listened carefully. Sometimes, she would answer a question with silence and, weeks later, pick it up again, as if no time had passed.

Her secrecy was in deference to her sources, many of whom were fearful. Lissa was in touch not only with victims’ relatives but also with the relatives of an expanding cast of perpetrators. One night, I was riding with Lissa when she received an unexpected call from the stepmother of an accomplice to KC’s murder. The woman had seen Lissa mentioned in an article about the case. She did not understand how her stepson could have done such a thing and sobbed for hours into the phone as Lissa tried to console her.

People told things to Lissa they would not have told police. This was particularly true on the reservation, where there remained a deep distrust of outside law enforcement. Once, in the spring of 2014, an elder had called Lissa with a tip. He refused to share his tip over the phone and insisted on meeting Lissa in person, so they met at a gas station an hour north of Fargo. “You know how Indians are,” Lissa later told me. “We’re going to sidestep what we’re really there for and go all the way around the bush and then come back to the point.” The elder finally told her that he had a nephew in Mandaree who drank and used meth. One night, when the nephew was drunk, he had confessed to his father that he had reburied a person’s body.

Lissa tried to contact the nephew, but he had deleted his Facebook account, and when his relatives asked about the body again, he denied every part of his story. Lissa began leaving notes for him at the Mandaree store; he never got in touch. She did not press it, but she began to take seriously the possibility that KC had been moved from his original burial site. Case investigators thought this was unlikely—James was far too lazy, they said—but Lissa had not ruled it out. According to a document filed in advance of the trial, Suckow returned to the reservation two weeks after he murdered KC and told James he wanted to rebury the body. “Don’t sweat it,” James had said. Either James did not want to disturb the burial site, Lissa thought, or he had arranged for the body to be moved by someone else.

In the spring of 2015, on another trip to the reservation with Lissa, we stopped at the Mandaree store, where she met with a tribal member. The member had been among the first informants to speak with Steve Gutknecht, the Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent, in July 2012 regarding KC’s disappearance. He had worked with KC in the oil fields and, in his interview, suggested KC was buried in a cattle bone pile near Maheshu. Around the time KC disappeared, the informant had been driving by the shop late at night when he noticed a backhoe digging in a nearby field. Lissa had been trying to meet with the informant for months. I waited with Waylon and Micah in the car while they spoke, and when they were done, Lissa brought the informant—a short, nervous man—to greet us.

“You packing arms?” he asked.

“No,” Lissa said. “I’m a felon.”

Waylon pointed to an eagle feather dangling from the rearview mirror. “We’ve got this for protection,” he said. The informant scoffed.

As we left Mandaree, Waylon shook his head. “These nontraditional Indians,” he complained. “They get scared when they see an eagle feather.”

I laughed, but the man’s fear made sense to me. While James was in custody, not everyone allegedly involved in his schemes had been arrested. There was still George Dennis, who had delivered KC’s body to the burial site; and Justin Beeson, who had watched the door of the shop while KC lay inside. Recently, it had emerged in court records that Ryan Olness, the Blackstone investor from Arizona, was at the shop on the day KC was murdered and had known about it. And there was the hit man James solicited for other unsuccessful murders. When a portrait of this man, Todd Bates, appeared in the news, Lissa recognized him instantly. He was the man she had spotted watching from his car in the Maheshu lot on the day she went with Rick, Jill, and Jill’s husband. Lissa showed me the photograph she took that day alongside the portrait, and, indeed, the man appeared to be the same person.

I felt unsettled that so many men had participated in the murders and not one, in two years, had mentioned it to authorities. But strangely I did not feel afraid. I could not feel afraid with Lissa, whom I believe infected me with her confidence. It was not that she considered herself safe; it was that she considered herself invincible. I knew she did not have the same confidence in me. She insisted that my eyes were not wide enough, that I could not see what was happening around me. After I started spending time with her, I found myself looking more often in car mirrors, memorizing license plates, glancing around to see if anyone was following. I wondered if Lissa was paranoid, her caution a residual effect of the years she spent evading social workers and police, but then something happened that made me sorry for doubting her. One evening, when we stopped in Bismarck for gas, Lissa spotted two white men in an SUV staring at us from across the road. I saw the men and thought nothing of them, but as we prepared to leave, they came and parked behind us. They followed us closely for several minutes, and when at last I turned to look back at them, they fled. “You see!” Lissa said. “And you think I make this shit up.” I never suggested she made shit up, but I knew what she was getting at.

ON THE DAYS I spent in Fargo, Lissa would leave for the welding shop, and Micah and Obie for school, and CJ for various construction jobs, and I would be left alone in the apartment. It was dim and quiet inside. Hours passed without my noticing. I sat in the living room, in front of a television I had never seen on, amid stacks of clean towels and clothing piled in the space between two couches that CJ had claimed as a makeshift closet. On a side table sat a bottle of cologne, which CJ applied liberally each night after he showered. “Take that shit outside,” his mother complained, but he never listened. There was something mindless, sweet in the way they fought—not bitter like Lissa’s arguments with Obie.

By the summer I had sorted through the documents on her computer and moved on to some crates she had also shared with me, which she kept in the garage. Lissa had two of these crates from the storage unit she rented while in prison, containing every record she had saved since the nineties. Here were the police reports from the morning OJ almost killed her, and the transcripts, arrest records, and affidavits that trailed her own slip into crime.

About a year after Lissa survived OJ’s attack, she had finally left Minneapolis. Shauna had been on the run for two months when, in September 2000, she appeared in school. Irene, who was on her way home from a conference, collected Shauna and brought her back to the reservation. That winter, Lissa followed, staying with her grandmother in White Shield and then in a shelter with Micah and Obie, who were one and two years old. In 2001, Lissa rented a house near her mother’s in Minot. That was where she was living on January 17, 2002, when the train hauling anhydrous ammonia gas derailed. Thirteen people were hospitalized. While Micah suffered damage to his lungs, Obie began to have seizures. Lissa often sat awake at night, afraid her sons would stop breathing. It was their near death, she had told me, that triggered her second addiction. By then, her mother had convinced her to see a psychologist, who diagnosed Lissa with a variety of disorders and prescribed Adderall to treat her ADHD. Something about the Adderall worked, and Lissa had stopped using crack, but after the train derailed, she lost control again. One morning, as she prepared to leave for her job—construction at the time—she noticed her Adderall was missing. Her new boyfriend had taken it. He gave her meth to use instead until she could refill the prescription.

Lissa’s arrest record began the following September, in 2002, when she shattered a friend’s car windshield with a tire iron and attacked another friend with her keys. In a statement, Lissa explained that the second friend had taken CJ to her own house without Lissa’s permission. Two days later, Irene submitted an affidavit:

Lissa seems to have lost interest in caring for herself. She is wearing the same clothes for days, does not take baths, sleeps all day, uses profanities toward the kids. I heard from Shauna that Lissa may be using meth and drugs like that. There is a history of addiction and I think Lissa has been in treatment before but it was in Minneapolis. She…is falling back into a major relapse. I feel she needs long-term psychiatric and addiction treatment and this is the critical time. Lissa is college educated, quite manipulative. It has been very difficult for her to stay on the right track with her children.

Lissa did not go to treatment. That December, she attacked the second friend again, with a baseball bat. When officers found Lissa, she was drunk, screaming obscenities. She spent weeks in jail. Upon her release, Irene arranged to have Lissa arrested again and sent to an addiction treatment facility. Legally, her blood had to be drawn and tested first, but nurses could not get a needle in, her veins collapsing from her drug use. They let her go.

Lissa was arrested many times after that for minor violations, but it was not until the summer of 2005 that she was caught possessing drugs. That July, Irene spoke with an investigator in the sheriff’s department and relayed what Shauna had told her—that Lissa was “not ‘with it’ or coherent”; that she left needles lying where her young kids played; that she had lost weight; that she had sores on her body and face; that strangers were always coming to the house. For three days, officers surveilled Lissa, and on July 22, they arrested her. She was let out on bond. The following March, she was arrested, again, for drug possession, and on January 11, 2007, she was sent to prison.

I had acquired the transcript of her trial from a courthouse in Bismarck, and when I saw her mug shot on the top page, I had hardly recognized Lissa. Her hair was thin, her skin pocked with sores. “Where is she now?” the clerk had asked when she gave me the file, and I replied that she was well and sober. The clerk seemed surprised. “You don’t really hear stories like that,” she said.

Now, as I sorted through the files in the garage, I thought of what the clerk said. Lissa’s sobriety seemed so certain to me, and indeed, enough years had passed since her recovery that others who knew her were similarly confident. “I think nothing is going to make her use,” an addiction counselor who knew Lissa at the halfway house had told me. “In the community we say, ‘You don’t listen to what people say. You watch what they do.’ ”

But as I read the police reports, my confidence in Lissa waned. I saw that addiction had driven her to violence, and yet I recognized her in the reports—her rage, her disdain for authority, her cleverness and knack for manipulation. It was all there, in the documents and in her, it had been there and always would be, and for the first time, it became obvious to me that the line separating Lissa’s past from her present was porous. Sobriety was not a dam. It could not hold back her pain. The fact of her sobriety seemed miraculous, fragile. What had changed in her? I wondered. I thought of all the people I had met through Lissa—cousins, uncles, oil-field workers—who, in the short time I knew them, had relapsed. I wondered if Lissa ever felt lonely, all these people falling down around her, and I realized that the person least certain of her sobriety was, perhaps, Lissa herself. Later, I would mention this to her, and she would reply, “Every day I wake up an addict. It’s something I can’t shake, just like being Indian.”

I had begun to notice a certain vigilance Lissa applied to her daily life. She rarely went more than a few days without taking Adderall, making exceptions only for ceremonies and searches, since the drug, she believed, interfered with her spiritual sensibilities. If she ever felt she was spinning out of control, she visited the sweat lodge or closed herself in her bedroom and slept. She had tricks to contain her anger. Once, she called me from an airport, where she had come “this close,” she explained, to punching a customer service agent, but she had taken a deep breath, mustered the funniest story she could think of, and burst into laughter. She was particularly careful about whose company she kept and allowed few people in her apartment. It was no accident she was still single. Among the documents in the garage, I came across a letter from an old friend, Billy, whose windshield she had smashed with the tire iron. He had written to Lissa when she was at the halfway house and visited her when she got out. During his visit, Billy was caught on security camera stealing a jacket from a store and leaving in Lissa’s car. Lissa found this out only when her parole officer called. Lissa called Billy, who posed as his brother and called the store, promising to mail the jacket back. Shortly after that, Obie and Micah delivered a lecture to their mother on “relation-shits.” Lissa filmed their speech, giggling, but her sons meant it. “Boyfriends are out of the question,” Micah told me. “I just don’t trust guys. Guys are assholes.”

Lissa could not control everything—least of all, her children. One evening, I was sitting with her in the kitchen of the apartment when voices rose in a far bedroom. Lissa remained still for a moment, listening, and then got up and knocked on the bedroom door. No one answered. “Open the door,” she commanded, and the door swung open.

Obie and his girlfriend, Caitlin, were fighting. Obie had tried to leave the room; Caitlin had tried to stop him. “I feel like everyone’s obstructing what I’m trying to do,” Obie told his mother. “I’m trying to get some space. I don’t know how that’s not clear.”

Caitlin was crying. “I just wanted to talk to him,” she said. “I’ve had a long day. I just wanted to lay with you and talk to you.”

“We did. We were laying down. Then you started watching TV. You can’t be selfish. You can’t just control me.”

“You always talk about breaking up whenever you’re mad at me,” Caitlin said.

Lissa took a deep breath. “Listen up, Obie,” she said. “You need to quit making this ultimatum that it’s over, because it’s traumatic to her. I can hear it. Okay? If you guys are going to fight, fight right, or don’t fight at all. You need to be more respectful. I don’t want any physical shit in here. Caitlin, you need to stop standing in the way, because if he wants to leave this room, he’s going to leave this room. Let him go. But, Obie, don’t put more fear on top of her fear by saying, ‘Fuck it, we’re done.’ ”

“I need to get out. I need my space,” Obie muttered.

“So when are you coming back?” Lissa said. “Give her a time. How long are you going to be gone? An hour?”

“I was going to wander to the movies. I have no plans.”

“Can you come back in an hour or two?”

“I don’t know.”

“Two hours.”

“Yes,” Obie said.

Lissa turned to Caitlin. “You going to be okay?” she said. Then she shut the door.

On another evening in Fargo, just before Lissa, Micah, and I were to leave for the reservation, Obie and Lissa got in a fight. She wanted to take him out to dinner before we left, but when she asked where he wanted to go, he suggested an expensive steakhouse. Lissa said she could not afford it. Obie became angry. She was always leaving, he said, and she never did anything he asked. We were sitting in the living room, Obie and Caitlin side by side on the couch. Lissa rose silently and walked out the door. I followed, but as soon as we had left the building, Caitlin caught up with us. Obie had pushed her, told her to get out of his way, and fled through the sliding doors. Now we could see him sprinting down the sidewalk, the hood of his sweatshirt flapping as he ran.

Obie moved out of the apartment a few weeks later to live with Caitlin and her family. His departure saddened Lissa. Micah, who sensed his mother’s loss, tried to fill the void. He teased her to make her laugh. One night, in the living room, Lissa asked Micah to show me “that thing with the purse.”

“What, you’ve never seen her man purse?” he asked me. He lifted a red canvas tool bag from a chair in the kitchen, slung it over his forearm, and began to strut. “She’ll walk into Walmart like—” He shot his mother a coy look. Lissa giggled. “She tries to make it look all fancy, too. Then she gets to the register, and the thing’s so unorganized, she pours it out.” Micah dumped the contents onto the carpet, held the bag up to the light. “If she angles it just right—” Lissa was laughing hard now, her cheeks streaked with tears. “Then she tries to sweep it back—” Micah mimed shoveling the contents with one arm while causing them to scatter.

“I hate teenagers,” Lissa said.

“Tobacco, keys, pills, kinnikinnick.” Micah held up a sprig of sage. “Once she finds this, it’s smooth sailing.”

“Shit,” Lissa said, pulling her son into a hug. “Come here. You’ve made me cry, so that’s going to cost you.”

Later, Micah told me, “People use your past as a weapon, but I can see what she’s been through. There’s been times where we got separated, and she was like, ‘I promise that won’t happen again.’ Some of the times haunt me. I remember the first day I saw my mom in jail. She was sitting in that white and black pinstripe. It was fucking upsetting. She’s like, ‘Everything’s going to be okay, honey.’ Another time, I came home, and there was a cop sitting outside the house. He said, ‘You guys are coming with me,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God, again?’ We jump in the car with this guy, and he passed us all a piece of green-apple gum. We went to a house that night, and the whole night I cried. Nothing compares to the parent bond. It’s like a heartbreak. You don’t want to wake up. You can’t go to sleep. Just, every day, you live second by second. I can still remember the pain.

“I don’t know who my dad is. On Father’s Day, I’ll say, ‘Happy Father’s Day, Mom. You were by my side through it all.’ Even if she wasn’t here, she would write to me. I remember when my mom got out of prison. She worked two jobs. The only day she had off was Sunday. She would bike all the way from Centre”—the halfway house—“to the Ridge, where I was with Grandpa Dennis. She’d always go out of her way to come visit. She’s always supported me no matter what. She’s like, ‘You’re capable of doing anything you want.’ My mom is a big inspiration for me. I tell her this: ‘It’s crazy, Mom, people can call you what they want, but you went from selling drugs, using drugs, and completely switched it around.’ I think my mom is one of the most intelligent people I know. Intelligence is something that can’t be measured. You have to be open-minded, and I feel like what my mom has been through has allowed her to be open-minded, which allows her to do what she does.”

LISSA HAD A term for things outside her control—“spiritual warfare,” she called it. I wasn’t sure what she meant at first so I looked up the term on the Internet. I learned it had roots in Catholicism but was popular among evangelical Christians, who use it in describing their prayers as combat against a myriad of evil forces. Lissa had never been inside an evangelical church, skeptical as she was of “white people religion,” and when I asked her where she heard the term, she could not remember. The first time she used it with me was on the day she fought with Obie and he ran away. After we had seen him sprinting down the sidewalk, Lissa had climbed into her car and sat there for a long time. “This is what I was telling you about,” she said finally. “This is that spiritual warfare.”

I came to think of spiritual warfare as something that could be dislodged inside of us, that could drift from our guts into others’ guts, that could shake us like the flu. It was all our pain in spirit form, marauding invisibly among us. If there was ever a time I saw it myself, it was that first spring I began accompanying Lissa to the reservation.

I remember the night clearly. We had arrived at Tiny Crows Heart’s place, a single-wide trailer on the Sanish bluffs flanked by old bed frames, some lawn mowers, and a boat. It was dark, the lights of trucks flickering on the road below. Micah and Waylon had gone inside while I lingered in the car with Lissa, who was finishing a cigarette. We were talking when, suddenly, Lissa looked away. I asked what the matter was. She shook her head. “It was probably just the light,” she said. “I saw blood coming out of your nose.”

Inside Tiny’s trailer, Lissa burned sage in a cast-iron skillet, fanned the smoke across her body, and ordered me to do the same. Then she sat at the kitchen table and lit another cigarette. The trailer was sparsely furnished but felt crowded. There were two leather couches in a V by a window, a jug of water—the utilities were shut off—a table strewn with books and papers, a radio tuned to country, a propane heater that screamed like a blowtorch, and a hologram tacked to the wall of an eagle, which flapped its wings when you moved your head back and forth. Micah and Waylon were asleep. Tiny was telling a story about a time he jumped off the bridge into the lake. He had not intended to jump, he said. He had been walking on the bridge when it just happened. In the air, he had straightened himself into a dive, and when his body pierced the water, he sank so deep that he brushed the bottom with his fingertips. When he resurfaced, he swam to shore, but in those moments that Tiny was underwater, he had felt himself entering a world beyond this world. He had felt himself die and come back to life.

The air in the trailer was thick with loud heat and smoke from idle cigarettes. I excused myself and went to a back bedroom. I believe I fell asleep, and when I woke, I could not breathe. Something was hovering over me, weighing on my chest. I ran to a window to open it, but it was sealed with plastic and duct tape. I took my bedroll and went outside and lay down on the grass. There was a pit dug in the yard, where, a year earlier, Tiny had built the sweat lodge in which Lissa, Waylon, and Micah prayed. I could breathe again, but I could not sleep. I stared out at the blackness of the lake and at two houses perched on the edge of the bluffs not far from where I lay. I had been to these houses. Once, Jason Morsette, the tribal member I sometimes drove with around the reservation, had taken me there. His aunt lived by herself in the first house, since her grandson, whom she had raised, was in prison. Auntie, Jason called her. She earned oil royalties, but there had been no sign of wealth in her house. As we sat in her kitchen, she had chain-smoked cigarettes and told stories about the spirits who lived on the bluffs. Then Jason had said there was something he wanted to show me, and I had followed him outside. We stood on the porch of the other house, staring down at the lake. Blankets covered the windows. I asked who lived inside. No one lived in the house anymore, Jason said—it was haunted with bad spirits—but only when we returned to Auntie’s kitchen did I realize what he meant. I stepped close to a portrait of her grandson that hung on the wall and recognized his name. He was in prison for prostituting girls, for raping them inside that other house. “He told me his relative did the same thing to him,” was the only thing Auntie said about it. I remember, when she said it, how grief drifted intangibly between us.

LISSA WOULD TELL me there was something strange about Tiny’s trailer that night—that a spirit had been restless or angry, perhaps. Micah and Waylon noticed it too. But months later, when I mentioned the incident in the car to Lissa, she barely remembered it. I still thought of it often; it scared me; and now that it was obvious it meant nothing to her, I felt incredulous. Had she actually seen blood? Was it a trick of the light? Or had she been testing me, in the way—I was beginning to learn—she had tested Sarah?

As I came to know many of her relatives that year, some would express a similar confusion about Lissa’s spiritual insights and beliefs. “Sometimes it’s like, ‘I don’t know about that one, Lisa. That’s maybe a stretch,’ ” Irene said. A cousin with whom Lissa was close, Tony, was even more skeptical: “I’ll be honest, sometimes I think those drugs destroyed her brain, man, because she’ll be saying some crazy shit where it doesn’t make sense.”

Still, everyone in her family would admit there had been times when Lissa was right. Once, she told Tony about a wolf that appeared in her dreams. “She said, ‘This wolf come, and he jumped over the top of us, and he was running in your direction,’ ” Tony recalled. “She said, ‘I think something’s coming, little brother. It’s going to be bad, but you have to be strong.’ I was like, ‘Damn, that’s too much. You might have messed your brain up.’ I tell you, six or eight months later, my girlfriend miscarried our baby.”

Her relatives listened whether they believed her or not. “I tease her about it,” Irene told me, “but everyone sees things differently.” Irene was quieter than Lissa about her spirituality but held many similar beliefs: “My grandmother, Nellie, when I was a little girl, told me that you could speak to the spirits and ask them questions. I trusted what she told me, so I would talk to the spirits. I grew up believing in it. Different things would appear to me. Sometimes, I would tell my mother when I would get scared, and my grandpa would stop by, and she’d say, ‘Tell your grandpa what you dreamt.’ And so I’d tell him. I told him once that somebody had died. There had been a burial. He said, ‘Well, it sounds like somebody is going to die.’ Here, his brother died.”

Irene later suppressed the dreams, but sometimes certain feelings returned to her, and she knew they were spirits. One day, after her brother Chucky died, she had been washing dishes in Madeleine’s kitchen when she sensed someone behind her. “You know who that is, because your mind tells you,” she explained. “I think Chucky saw spirits, too. He always seemed to know something would happen before it happened. I think that’s why he drank. It bothered him. A lot in our family seem to have that ability.”

I DID NOT have that ability, nor could I explain what came over me that night in Sanish. At the beginning of the next winter, Tiny Crows Heart died in his trailer, asphyxiated by a propane leak, Lissa was told. When she called me with the news, Lissa would mention the night we spent there and how the spirits had been angry.

Only once more would I feel something similar, when, one morning, Lissa sent me a message: “You should smudge! I had a dream about you and woke up in tears.”

“What was the dream?” I asked, but Lissa did not reply.

I forgot about the dream. I did not smudge. I never smudged, unless I was with Lissa.

The following week, I cried harder than I have ever cried. There was no reason for me to cry. It came suddenly, violently. I lost control of my body. When it was over, I went into my bedroom and found some sage a man had given me the year before in Browning, Montana. It was old and crumbled in my palms, but I put it on a plate and burned it anyway.