(September 1995)
ERIN PEDALED HARD, THE ROAD BLURRING BENEATH HER. UP AHEAD, she could see Robbie, standing on his pedals as he crested the small hill. He let out a whoop when he reached the top, then sat down on his seat as he dipped below the horizon.
Erin squeezed the rubber grips on her handlebars and leaned forward in her seat. The muscles in her thighs burned with exertion. She wasn’t far behind him, and she gave it everything she had as she climbed the incline, the sun on her back, the breeze light and feathery, like the gentle tug of her mother’s fingers in her hair.
It was mid-September and still warm, the summer holding on for a little while longer. Today was Saturday, the best day of the week. She’d finished her chores early before riding her bike to Robbie’s. She’d found him in the backyard, hunkered down in front of the maple tree.
“Hey,” she said, walking up behind him. “Whatcha doin’?”
He turned his head and looked at her. It had been three weeks since the fight. The cuts across the bridge of his nose and lower lip were almost healed by now. There was still a shade of a bruise around his right eye, but he looked like himself again, only better.
Erin plopped down beside him. She ran her thumb over the spot at the base of the trunk where he’d been carving his name.
“You forgot the e,” she said.
“Haven’t gotten to it yet.” He turned the pocketknife around in his hand, the blade clasped between his thumb and forefinger. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her. She took it by the handle and let it rest in her lap for a moment before pressing the tip of the blade into the trunk.
“It’s really dull,” he said. “I should get another one.”
She started in on the last letter of his name, sketching a thin line at first, then tracing it over and over, being careful not to slip, not to mess up what he’d already started.
“Curves are harder than straight lines,” he said. “The e is almost all curves. It’s the hardest letter.”
“What about s?” she asked.
“The curves on the e are tighter, like water circling a drain.”
“I tried knocking on your front door.”
“My dad’s sleeping. Mom says he’s got a headache. He was up late last night watching the ball game.”
“Who played?”
“The Twins lost to the Oakland A’s. Brent Gates hit a one-run homer in the bottom of the ninth.” Robbie pressed his index finger into the dirt. “My dad gets mad when the Twins lose. He was pretty mad last night.”
Erin nodded. “Did you catch a beating?”
“No,” he said. “I’m still recovering from my last one.”
“That was different.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That was different.”
They were quiet for a while. Erin dug into the tree with the pocketknife. Robbie was right. The letter e was the hardest, like water circling a drain.
“You wanna go someplace?” he asked.
“I’ve gotta finish the e.”
“Finish it later.”
“Okay,” she said, and folded the blade into the handle. “Where do you wanna go?”
“My grandpa’s place. He lives on the reservation—not in Wolf Point, but on the real reservation. It’s a few miles north of town.”
She hesitated. “I don’t know.”
“Come on. It’ll be fun. He’s old, but he’s real nice. He carves things and sells them to the tourists.”
“What tourists?”
“I don’t know, the tourists. There’s a cultural center in Poplar, a place where people can learn all about Native Americans.”
“Meghan Decker says the reservation’s a scary place. Her older brother drove out there one time with his friends. He said there were dead bodies lying on the side of the road.”
Robbie scrunched up his face. “That’s stupid. There are no dead bodies. He was just trying to scare her.”
Erin turned the pocketknife over in her hands. “They don’t have any laws or anything. People can do whatever they want.”
“What are you talking about? Of course they have laws, just not the same laws as the rest of the country. There’s a tribal government. We have our own courts and jails and stuff.”
“Is your grandfather Native American?” She paused as a thought occurred to her. “Wait,” she said, “are you?”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “My last name’s Tabaha. What do you think?”
She shrugged.
“My family’s from the Lakota tribe. That’s Sioux. We’ve been living here a really long time.”
“How long?”
“Nobody knows for sure. We were here long before the settlers came to America.”
She nodded.
“You don’t know much about Native Americans, do you?” he asked.
“They teach us about them in school.”
“Yeah, but not everything. You know the Battle of Little Bighorn? Custer’s Last Stand? That was the Lakota tribe. They teamed up with some other tribes to beat the U.S. Army.”
“They killed a lot of soldiers.”
“We were protecting our people. My grandpa can tell you all about it.”
“I don’t know if I’m allowed to go all the way out there.”
“Geez,” he said. “You wanna go home and ask your parents? Fine with me.”
“It’s just my mom and me. My dad’s in prison, remember?”
Robbie flinched at that, his face taking on a miserable expression. “Right,” he said. “Sorry, I forgot.”
“He goes before the review board later this month. There’s a chance they might let him out so he can come home to us.”
Robbie reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. “That’s great, Erin. I sure hope that’s what happens.”
“Thanks.” She brought her knee to her chest and wrapped her arms around her shin while she thought over his proposal. “I don’t have to ask permission for everything. I can pretty much go where I want.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go. If there are dead bodies, I wanna see ’em.”
They had ridden their bikes, and it had taken only fifteen minutes to get to the place where Wolf Point ended and the rest of Fort Peck Indian Reservation began. A single road stretched north through the countryside, the brown sunburnt grass standing tall on either side. At first they went slow, weaving back and forth across the roadway. A pickup truck approached from behind, the engine rattling like a washing machine beneath the hood, and they moved over and allowed it to pass.
“There used to be bison,” Robbie said over the rush of the wind. “Back when my grandpa was a kid there were thousands of them.” He swiveled his head to scan the open plains all around them. “Now there are almost none.”
“Where did they go?” Erin asked.
“Gone,” he said. “Hunted by fur traders and the government.” He stood up on his pedals and searched the horizon. “Every once in a while you’ll see one. But most times, no.” He sat down and continued to pedal. “Things that get hunted too much disappear and don’t come back. That’s what my grandpa says.” He looked at her and said something else, but the words were lost in the wind, carried away from the two of them and across the grasslands, where there used to be bison for as far as the eye could see. She could imagine them standing there, scattered across the fields like a collection of dark stones, their massive heads lowered toward the earth, the distinct hunch of their shoulders pressed upward against the blue backdrop of the sky.
Robbie was pulling ahead of her now, standing up on his pedals and putting some muscle into it, as her father liked to say. She tried to keep up with him, standing up on her own pedals and forcing her feet to go faster. The pedals spun in gerbil-wheel circles a few inches above the road, but Robbie was stronger than she was and the distance between them widened. He crested the small hill, let out a triumphant whoop—like the day he rode up behind us, she thought, the day he kicked Vinny off his bike—and disappeared from view as he descended the other side.
She pedaled harder, tightening her grip and leaning forward over the handlebars. Her breath was quick and focused, her eyes on the road. She didn’t know exactly how far ahead of her Robbie had gotten, but she was impressed by how fast he could be when he wanted to. Some people are like that, she thought, normal until you see the part of them you never knew existed.
By the time she was nearing the top of the hill and could finally see him on the other side, Robbie had stopped along the roadside and was looking back at her. He waved his hand and yelled something, but he was too far away and she couldn’t make out the words. There was a rising noise, a steady growl that became louder with every passing second. Robbie cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled again, and this time she heard part of it. “—aaarr,” he said, but a moment later it was upon her, a dark black chassis that reached the summit at the same moment she did.
If she’d been in the middle of the road, it would’ve struck her. The vehicle was going fast, the engine roaring. Erin was on the right side of the roadway, near the shoulder, but she was close enough to feel a blast of air as the car hurtled past. She jerked the handlebars to the right and the bike wobbled, the front tire feeling loose and unpredictable on the pebbled shoulder as she fought for control. She saw a flash of it—the bike coming down on top of her, the crack of her head as it struck the asphalt—but she leaned left and was suddenly back on the roadway as the bike straightened out and picked up speed on the decline.
Erin was vaguely aware that she was sweating. The tiny hairs on the back of her left forearm were bolt upright, as if the gust of air from the car’s passing had blown them to a standing position. She coasted for the remainder of the distance, not hurrying now but simply appreciating the fact that she was still in one piece. Robbie was waiting for her. She slowed as she neared him, pulled up alongside, and came to a stop.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, shaken and embarrassed. “He didn’t even come that close. Just surprised me, is all.”
“It looked close from here.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Right.” He toed a pebble with the tip of his sneaker. “He came close to hitting me, too. Seemed to swerve right at me.”
“He was probably messing with the radio.”
“You saw him?”
She shook her head no. She’d been startled by the car. After that, her attention had been focused on not crashing.
“I don’t know about this place,” she said. “It’s kind of creepy. There’s nothing out here.”
Robbie rolled his eyes. “There’s plenty out here. You just have to know where to look.”
“People drive too fast. Don’t they know that kids can come out of nowhere? Sometimes you don’t see them until it’s too late.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “He missed us, right?”
“It’s not okay.” She stepped away from her bicycle and let it fall to the ground. “If you run someone over, you can’t take it back.”
He nodded.
“I mean it.”
“Okay,” he said, and grew quiet, watching her.
Erin picked up a rock and threw it. “What’s wrong with this place anyway?”
He straddled his bike and said nothing.
She chucked another rock low and hard, which skittered across the asphalt.
Robbie turned away from her to scan the landscape. “Hey, Erin.”
“What?”
“You see it? Over there to your right?”
She turned. “See what?” There was a small stone still clutched in her hand.
“Jackrabbit,” he said. He pointed and she saw it, a medium-size rabbit in the brush. It stood on its back legs, the front legs held close to its chest. Its black nose twitched as it sampled the air, searching for scents of food and predators.
“Yeah, I see it. So?”
“You said there was nothing out here. That’s something.”
“One jackrabbit. Big deal.”
“What about that big old rattlesnake?”
Erin spun around. “Where?”
Robbie cracked a smile. “I don’t know,” he said, “but you should keep looking because they’re out here, too.”
Erin shook her head. “That’s not funny. I don’t like rattlesnakes. I almost got bit by one when I was younger.”
“You almost got bit by one now. Don’t you see it over there, coiled up next to your front tire?”
“No,” she said with a scowl, “and you don’t, either.”
“You’re right. I see two. There’s another one over there in the grass—”
“Shut up,” she said, although at this point she was smiling.
“—and a third one on top of your head.”
Erin snorted. “I’ll use it as a hat.”
“It looks good,” he said. “I’m gonna get my mom one for her birthday.”
Robbie’s mother was a thin, stern woman whose favorite pastime, as far as Erin could tell, was smoking cigarettes and peering at people through the haze. She imagined her doing this with a coiled and dried-out rattlesnake on her head, a gift from her precious son.
“She’ll like it,” she said, laughing.
“She’ll wear it to church,” Robbie told her, and Erin laughed harder, picturing Mrs. Tabaha standing in the front row holding a hymnal, her heavily sprayed hairdo sagging under the weight of her new snake-hat.
“S-she . . . goes to church?” Somehow it was hard to imagine.
“Not really,” he said. “But she would if she had a new hat.”
Erin wiped the tears from her eyes. “Here,” she said, “you can give her mine.”
“A used hat. She won’t like th . . .” He trailed off, his smile fading.
“What?” she asked.
“He’s back,” he said, and Erin knew what he was talking about before she even turned to look.
The car was facing them now, perched on the summit of the small hill behind them. Sunlight glinted off the chrome of its grille, the vertical lines looking like long thin teeth that stretched from the hood to the jut of its front bumper. The sun reflected off the windshield, too, making it difficult to see through the glass. They watched as it sat there, the black body hunkered over the tires like a panther crouched low against the earth. Erin could hear the steady rumble of its engine, an idling drone of metal and oil.
“What’s he doing?” she asked, but Robbie was silent and unmoving beside her.
The engine revved. Once. Twice.
“Get your bike,” he said. “It’s time to go.”
Erin looked at him. “We can’t outrun that thing.”
“No,” he said, pointing his bike toward the dirt field to their right. “Not on the road anyway.”
She looked out across the open field, a wasteland of shrubs and small stones, nothing large enough to stop a car.
“Come on,” Robbie said, and he started pedaling, the dirt crunching beneath his tires.
Erin snatched up her bike and headed after him. She ran with it a few steps, then mounted it and started pedaling. The front tire bounced over a small rock, the jolt traveling through the frame and into her arms and shoulders. She tried to control her fear and kept her eyes on the space in front of her. Robbie was ahead of her, standing up as he pedaled, the way he’d done when he was climbing the hill. She remembered how he had pulled ahead of her, how fast he could be when he wanted to. He was doing it now, opening the distance between them. If the car came for them—if it hurtled across the stretch of rocks and scrub brush and tried to run them down—she would be the first one to get swept under its grille.
It’s not going to do that, her mind told her. The driver just turned around to make sure the two of you are okay.
Right, she thought, and Erin imagined how they would laugh about it later, two kids hauling ass across the open field. What the hell are those crazy kids doing? the driver would think. But right now it didn’t feel crazy. It felt like the car was coming, and it was only a matter of seconds until it ran her over.
“Wait up!” she called out to Robbie, and he stopped when he heard her, hitting his brakes hard enough to send plumes of dust into the air from beneath his tires.
“Come on,” he said. “There’s a ditch up ahead. We should get to the other side of it.”
“Is he coming?” she asked as she barreled toward him, her voice tight and panicked. She brought her bike to a stop beside him and turned to look back at the roadway.
The car had descended the hill and was parked near the spot where they’d taken to the field. She could see the driver standing beside it, an indistinct shape partially obscured by the car itself.
“What’s he doing?”
Robbie shrugged. “Don’t know. Maybe he just wants to say hi.”
“He should go away. How close are we to your grandpa’s place?”
Robbie turned his head to the right, squinting under the glare of the sun. “If we were biking on the road, it’d take us another twenty minutes. Out here, it’ll take longer.”
“I’m not going back to the roadway.”
“Don’t have to,” he said. “There’s an irrigation ditch ahead of us. It brings water to the farms and goes a long way, miles maybe. We should cross to the other side of it. He won’t be able to get to us then.”
Erin turned her head to look for it. She could see it now, another fifty yards ahead of them. She glanced back at the road. The car was still there, its engine idling. The air rippled above the dark black exterior, a mirage of water that shimmered above the long stretch of asphalt.
They pushed their bikes toward the ditch, looking back every few seconds to be certain he wasn’t coming. Twenty seconds later they got to the lip of it, a wide concrete channel about eight feet deep and ten feet across. It stretched in both directions as far as her eyes could see.
“It’s an aqueduct,” she said.
“A what?”
“An aqueduct. A concrete channel for moving water. There’s one close to my father’s farm as well.”
“I call it a ditch.”
“A ditch is different.”
“Whatever,” he said. “We should get to the other side of it.”
“Maybe,” she said, and looked back at the car, thinking.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s deep enough. If we climb down there, he won’t be able to see us. Not from the roadway. We could ride our bikes in either direction.” She looked at her friend. “We could head back into town if we wanted to.”
They were silent for a few seconds, considering it.
Robbie chewed on his lower lip. “It’ll be harder to get away from him if we’re down there. If he catches up to us, we won’t have time to pull each other out.”
“It’s better this way,” she said. “It’s better if he can’t see us.”
“Okay,” he said. “We go down.”
“Which way do we go? Back toward town?”
“Uh-uh. Not a good idea. It doesn’t go all the way to town. It’s a dead end. If he catches up to us . . .”
“Does it go all the way to your grandpa’s?”
“I think so.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. It does.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because you didn’t sound sure a second ago.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “It goes all the way to my grandpa’s. It goes way past that.”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go that way.” She got down on her stomach and held on to the lip of the aqueduct with her hands as she lowered herself into the channel. With her arms fully extended, her feet dangled three feet above the bottom. Erin let go and dropped the remaining distance onto the concrete surface. She landed on her feet, stumbled slightly, and took a half step back to steady herself.
“Here,” Robbie said, lowering her bike into the pit.
She reached up and took it, laid it down next to her, and held her arms up for his bike as well.
“Oh man.”
“What?” she asked.
“This is not good. This is definitely not good.”
“What’s the matter?”
Robbie looked down at her. “He’s coming,” he said. “He’s walking over here right now.”
“Get down here!”
“No.”
“What do you mean no?”
“You go. Bike fast. I’m gonna slow him down. I’ll catch up with you.”
“Robbie,” she hissed. “Robbie, no.”
She couldn’t see him now. When she looked up, there was nothing but a cloudless sky above her. She could hear him talking, though, taunting the guy in a voice that was trying to sound brave and almost succeeded.
“Hey! Hey, jackass, whatcha following us for, huh? Why don’t you leave us alone?”
Erin grabbed her bike and ran with it, wheeling it along. She stopped a short distance down the channel and looked back. It was hard to know what was happening, hard to know anything from this vantage point. There was just the straight, smooth-walled passage in either direction. It seemed to go on and on, the gullet of a concrete beast that had swallowed her whole. A few sticks and small rocks lay in scattered clusters along the floor of the aqueduct. Erin held her breath and listened, her heart walloping in her throat.
“You shouldn’t be riding along the road like that.” It was a man’s voice, deep and rough.
“Fine,” Robbie said. “We’re not on the road anymore, okay? We’re just out here playing. My dad’s coming by in a few minutes to pick us up.”
There was a short pause, the space of a single heartbeat. “That’s a lie.”
“It’s not a lie. He’s a cop in Wolf Point.”
“Is that right?”
“’Course it’s right. Sometimes he takes us on patrol with him during the weekend.”
“Hey, girl.”
Erin looked up. The man was standing over her, looking down into the aqueduct. The sun was above him, and Erin squinted into it, making out the general shape of him, a baseball cap with its brim pulled low. She could see stubble on his neck and chin, the slanted upturned corner of the left side of his mouth. The rest of his face was lost in shadow.
“Next time I see you out here I’m gonna take that bike,” he said. “Next time I see either one of you out here, you’re gonna regret it.”
She backed against the far wall of the channel.
The man turned his head and looked at Robbie. “What are you doing out here with a girl anyway?”
Robbie was silent, but the man stood there waiting for an answer, the upturned corner of his mouth never changing, as if he had tasted something bitter and couldn’t decide whether to swallow it or spit it out.
“Hey! I asked you a question.”
“Leave us alone.”
The man laughed, a flat angry sound that was there and then gone in the space of a second. “Leave you alone? Is that what you want?” He looked down at Erin. “What about you? You want to be left alone? You want to be out here all alone with this boy?”
Erin gripped the handlebars to keep from shaking and focused her eyes on the spot where the tips of the man’s boots—brown and scuffed with dirt—protruded past the lip of the aqueduct. Bike fast, Robbie had told her, but Erin couldn’t do it. She stood there frozen, the bike no more useful than the twigs at her feet.
“Okay,” he said, turning quickly, and Erin heard the sound of Robbie’s bike clattering to the ground above her. “I’ll leave you alone if that’s what you want.” The man stepped away from the lip of the aqueduct, disappearing from Erin’s view. “You be careful out here. Don’t go biking on the road again.” He paused. “You hear me, boy?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Yeah, we hear you. We’ll stay off the road from now on.”
The man was silent for a few seconds. Erin readied herself, swinging one leg over the frame of her bike and using her foot to turn the pedal backward to a position where she could get the most leverage. If the man came after her—if he turned around and dropped into the aqueduct—she would bike fast like Robbie had instructed her. She would stand up on her pedals and haul ass down the concrete channel.
What will you do if he goes after Robbie? she asked herself. What will you do if he grabs him and starts dragging him toward the car?
She could hear it in her mind, the sudden scuffle from above, the sound of Robbie being dragged across the field as she struggled to claw her way out of the pit.
“Good,” the man said, and the sound of his voice made her jump. “Just wanted to make sure the two of you were okay, that’s all.” Erin could hear his boots on the dirt, the hard grind of it as he walked away. “Oh yeah,” he said, “and I haven’t seen your father the police officer returning for you yet. I’m sure he’ll be along shortly.”
Erin listened to the receding sound of his footsteps, to the shushing sigh of the wind as it moved above her. Eventually she heard the car door slam, the growl of the engine as it sprang to life. Even then, neither of them spoke. They just stood there silently—one above the earth and one below—waiting until they were alone again.
“What a jerk,” Robbie said, lowering his bike into the channel.
She reached up and took it, then waited as he swung his hips over the lip and dropped down beside her.
“He gets off on scaring kids,” he said. “You could tell that right away.”
“You know who he is?”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so. He was wearing a hat. It was hard to get a good look at his face.”
“What about the car?”
“I haven’t seen it before.” Robbie mounted his bike and started pedaling.
Erin got on her bike as well. There was enough space to avoid the scattered debris as she pedaled after him. They were headed north, away from town, and he didn’t go fast this time, just cruised along at a steady speed. She was able to keep up with him, but Robbie glanced back a few times just to be certain. The sun was high above them, and the shadows they cast were small and shapeless pools beneath the tires. In the years that followed, it was the same with Erin’s memory of that day, her mind condensing it into something minor and inconsequential, until eventually she was able to put it on the shelf with everything else.