WHEN GERLY FINISHES, SHE smiles and shrugs. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Kayden, but if it’s real . . . you can understand, I don’t want to be a part of it.”
“Understand completely. I don’t even want to be a part of it.”
“That’s life, kid. Look, I’ve already shed my tears for Kayden. Now and then I wake up after dreaming of him and maybe there’s a small tear or two. I know I’ll never be over it but I’m comfortable where I’m at with him. I don’t need to revisit.”
“Thank you for telling me all that, Gerly. I’m sorry you had to though.” I laugh. “If all this is real, he probably planned this, so maybe it was inevitable.”
“Spirits can be bitches like that.”
She stands and walks to the front of the room. The crucifix hangs above like it’s waiting for her. “So, your turn. Tell me about Gordon.”
“It’s stupid. Nowhere near as . . . meaningful as your story.”
“Tell it anyway, kid.”
“Do you remember I used to live in Minneapolis?”
“Yeah.”
“He’s why I moved back to Geshig.”
It started in my second year at a tech college. I was going for a general business degree, but didn’t have a lot of passion for it. I was good at the accounting courses but even that late into the program I wasn’t sure if it was what I really wanted.
There was a lot of want from me in those days. Pining for something more out of life. Then I discovered meeting men through the Internet, through phone apps, and I thought my calling had been found. I wasn’t destined to be a businessman. I was destined to do business with men.
In my first semester of college, I met a man named Gordon through one of the apps. He was a bit older than me, thirty when I was still eighteen. He was my first boyfriend, but I left him the night after we first had sex because it freaked me out. I’d only been out to my mother, no one else, and being that sort of intimate with a man was a big step I wasn’t ready to take.
Two years after I left him, I saw his obituary. Meth overdose. I had no one to tell this to, not my mother, not a friend in the world who would understand.
I couldn’t be in the city that introduced me to him so I fled back home to Geshig. It’s been five years and I’m still in this town.
Gerly listens to me silently and smiles when I finish. “I’m a lifer here. I got no reason to leave, and I don’t want to. But you don’t belong here. You don’t even live in Geshig, but it seems like Half Lake ain’t your town either, kid.”
“I’ve wanted to leave for a while now.”
She pats me on the shoulder. “You’ll have to say goodbye to Maya first.”
“You sure? Do you trust him?”
“Not entirely. But I’m not worried.” Gerly walks to the altar and lights a branch of sage and sweetgrass in a cowrie shell. “I know she’ll be safe.”
OUTSIDE AT THE PARK, Gerly sits down on a bench. Maya runs over from the basketball court. Her breathing is quick, but she doesn’t look tired out. She holds a faded black basketball between her forearm and her hip.
“Uncle Marion is out of practice,” Gerly says. “You should show him how to play twenty-one.”
“But he’s taller than me!”
“Your dad wasn’t that tall and he was the best.”
“Okay. You ready, punk?” Maya says. Suddenly her voice isn’t soft and cheery, but a commanding bite.
She quickly goes over her rules for twenty-one—Kayden’s rules, which her older cousins taught her—and we begin.
I don’t like basketball. Or most sports really, but something about basketball is particularly boring to the point of contempt. Maybe it’s because I never played but went to a high school that revolved around it. Or maybe it’s because I don’t like fish tanks. I find nothing entertaining in staring at living things moving back and forth in an enclosed space.
But clearly I’m in the minority. I’ve seen enough enthusiasm on the rez to know that. Did you know you can just order a trophy from a company and engrave it however you want? I ordered myself a trophy in the exact size, shape, and fake plastic luster as the one state basketball championship trophy that sits in my high school’s awards cabinet. Except instead of being about basketball, my trophy says Marion Lafournier, World’s Biggest Cynic. And really, who could blame me?
A billboard in the middle of this town tells the children PLAY BALL, DON’T SMOKE METH.
As if basketball ever really saved any Indian from it. Near as I can tell, all it does is build up expectations and make the desire for mental escape even stronger when those expectations fail. A state championship near loss is still a loss. Tears are on the court. A small town puts on the face of pride, but everyone is filled with shame and regret. The star player enters adulthood at a loss for purpose, gets a job at the casino or tribal office, drinks, smokes, and breeds. Repeat.
A more accurate message on the billboard might be PLAY BALL, DEFINE YOUR LIFE BY YOUR LOVE OF IT, AND THEN TURN TO METH WHEN THE COLD, HARD FACTS OF LIFE SHATTER YOUR DREAMS.
Yes, I’ve earned that trophy. And Kayden earned his.
Kayden Kelliher spent years playing basketball. He trained his whole life for the championship and earned the first-place ribbon around his neck. And in the end, none of it mattered as he bled out in his backyard. Jared Haltstorm will only return to this town to be buried. Basketball did nothing to save either of them.
Maya scores the first point easily. I stumble around awkwardly, partially out of fear of tripping and falling into her small frame. After each point, the opposing team gets the shot, but they have to start at the half-court line and make the same shot as the previous one. Kind of like horse, but no penalties for missing, nor are there any breaks. The other team has to get the ball and defend quick as they can, no mercy. Eventually, there seem to be no rules at all.
And I miss. I miss every shot until Maya gets to ten points, basically halfway over with.
I am out of breath. I am hacking my weed-coated lungs out. I am . . .
The first point that is not Maya’s is scored. The ball falls through the net with a crisp swish. It rebounds to the girl’s hands and she sets the next play with a shot from the three-point line, and it just barely swirls into the rim.
The next shot leaves these hands from the same line and glides into the hoop, and again, and again. The two combatants circle around and around the half-court and soon they are neck and neck: twenty points to twenty points. And the final point goes to the girl after she narrowly misses a block by the boy who stares at her in fierce admiration.
“That’s game,” Maya says, turning back to the boy.
And then the basketball champion kisses his daughter on the forehead.
The black dots, the kind of fuzzy vision you get when standing up too fast, that’s what happens to me when Kayden leaves. I can’t see where he goes but I know he is no longer with me, and not with Maya, or with Gerly, who stares at us with tears in her eyes.
“That was . . . a good game,” she says. “A damn good game.”
I grab my stomach. “I need water. Or a stretcher.”
Gerly grabs Maya’s hand and they walk back to the church. I wave them off and take a short walk around the park to catch my breath.
On the far side, the merry-go-round is gone and left behind is a small patch of thin grass. No skeleton underneath, no dog, no Kayden.
Just a forgotten rumor.