WHEN I WAKE UP, Shannon’s body and arms are wrapped around me from behind and I’m sweating from the heat of his body. My head hurts and my throat is dry. Too much whiskey and weed. But I feel his chest moving and his breath on the back of my slick neck, and smile.
“You okay to talk yet?” I ask.
“Mmm, can’t we just enjoy this?” He squeezes me tighter.
“I guess, but you’re the one that wanted to come over.”
“And I can still change my mind.”
“Okay. But can we talk about anything?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Tell me about your job.”
“It’s a resort. There’s a lake and there’s woods. Not much to say . . .” Goose bumps rush down my neck and I try to shake away from his wet grip. “Well, actually, we think there’s been a wolf out there.”
“Why?”
We peel our bodies away from each other. “We’re finding a lot of dead animals around.”
I watch Shannon get dressed. He wears tight gray boxer briefs with a shiny waistband and designer label. When we first met he only wore plain boxers with dull checkered designs but as the summer went on his attire became conspicuously smaller and more colorful. His overall hygiene and look improved too. Part of me does miss the smell of the lake and sweat that used to cling to him.
“What do you do with the remains?”
“I just find a spot in the woods and bury them.”
“Has anyone seen the wolf?”
“There’s been a few reports but it’s always on the move. Did you see it?”
“A wolf? No.” Not a lie. When he is fully dressed, he sits back on the bed. Usually he makes his getaway a lot quicker. His fingers are tapping on the mattress and his feet are tapping on the floor. He sighs. “I don’t know what to say.”
I lean over and run my fingers over his hand. “You could say why you keep coming over. You could say what you actually want.”
“No answer for that either.”
“Wife? Kids? Live in Geshig forever?”
“No, fuck no, and yes.”
“What about . . .” I stop myself before I blurt out the word husband. “A boyfriend.”
“That won’t work.”
“Is that an assumption or experience?”
“It’s my family. Some things are better left unsaid.”
I don’t know much about the Harstads but it’s not too far-fetched to imagine them as that kind of family, even on a reservation. Could be Christian, could be secular. If he thinks it’s better to stay closeted to them, he probably knows their initial reaction wouldn’t be good.
“Do you have anything to eat?” he asks.
“Haven’t shopped lately. Just go through the kitchen and try whatever looks edible.”
I drag myself out of bed and put on clothes while he rifles through the cupboards. I let Basil out the front door and then pick up my phone from the couch cushions where I left it last night. My mother has replied five times to my text, called twice, and has left one voice mail. Each message progressively gets more worried in that motherly kind of way that is sweet and overbearing. I call her right away without checking the voice mail.
She answers on the second ring.
“Hey, Mom. I’m doing fine.”
“You need to start answering your phone more, brat.”
Shannon peeks his head around the corner and watches me talk. “Sorry. I meant to reply last night but I was . . .” Shannon smiles. “Walking my dog.”
“You haven’t killed him yet?”
“No. He’s doing fine.”
“Anni says he’ll take it off your hands anytime you want if you can’t handle it.”
“Stop trying to take my dog away.”
“I’m just saying. So why did you ask to come down here? Is there something wrong?”
“No. Just wanted to see you. And Anni, I guess.”
“Honestly, Marion, I don’t know how a child of mine could be such a bad liar.” I hear the loud, gruff laugh of my stepfather, Aanakwad, in the background. “Just head down when you’re free and we’ll talk.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you too, kiddo.”
When I hang up Shannon laughs. “You sounded like a kid just now.”
“Shut up.”
“I’m the same way when my dad calls me. Sometimes he needs help with yard work but it sounds like he’s telling me rather than asking me.”
In the kitchen, Shannon has made two sandwiches with peppered turkey. He has already bit into his. “What the hell kind of bread is this? It tastes like black licorice.”
“Licorice? What? It’s pumpernickel. It doesn’t taste like licorice.”
“Yes it does.”
I take a bite of mine just to see if this loaf was made differently. I buy it from a small bakery downtown. “It’s a sweet bread, but I don’t know where you’re getting the licorice taste. Can you finish it?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. Just weird. We only get white bread, so I’m used to that.”
“Yuck. This is way better.”
In between bites, we sit in an awkward silence and give each other the occasional glance. It always slips my mind until moments like this that beyond the sex, we don’t have much in common and even less to talk about. Probably the second most awkward breakfast I’ve had since moving back to Half Lake.
“Do you have cable? Wanna watch the game?”
“Sure.” I have no idea what game he means. I assume football since it’s that time of year, but it could be something else for all I know.
In the living room he grabs the remote, falls back on the couch, and flips through the channels. I let Basil back inside and he begins to pad around the house restlessly. At first I sit on the farther end of the couch, but Shannon motions for me to scoot closer. He pulls me over him so that the front of my body is on his and my head is between his chest and his arm.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I tell him as the men on the screen pile on each other.
“Do you want me to explain?”
“You can.” I bring my arm over his body and pull closer. “But I probably won’t listen.”
During the entire game the only thing I can pay attention to is the sound of his breathing.
“I’LL SEE YOU IN a few days, boy.” The rank smell of dog breath fills my nose as Basil licks my face. “Be good for Shannon . . . Or shit on his floor.”
“If he does, I’m putting it in your mailbox,” Shannon says from the truck. I pet Basil one last time and shut the passenger door. It’s one in the afternoon and cloudy, but still too bright to expect a nice goodbye from Shannon. He offers only a slight nod and then pulls away.
Less than twenty minutes later, I’m in my car and on the way to my mother’s house. She lives two hours south of Half Lake. I would have brought Basil with me but I know the moment we get there we would be subject to a close inspection by Hazel and Anni. They’d question everything, how he’s eating, if he’s happy, his fur quality. Anything they can to make me look like a bad pet owner. Anni has been a dog trainer for years, so his way is the best way. As for Hazel, it’s just her job to second-guess me.
It’s been that way since the first dog we got, when I was old enough to actually take care of it. It was another mutt, a slim-faced and fluffy-furred yellow collie mix she got from one of her co-workers. It was sleeping on my pillow as a surprise when I got home. The real surprise was the wet stain that left me without proper head support for the night, but the pup was too adorable to be mad at.
My first name for her was Cassiopeia.
“That’s too long for a dog’s name, kiddo,” my mother said.
“Fine. How about Eurydice?”
“That’s only one syllable shorter.”
“Persephone?”
“Why are you choosing these awful names?”
“They’re not awful. They’re Greek names. Goddesses.” I held the dog up to my mother’s face. “She’s too pretty for a normal name.”
“Your last dog name was better.”
“Doggy? I was like nine.”
“Yeah and it was cute. Simple. How about just Cassie?”
“You call her that. I’ll call her Cassiopeia.”
Just like with Basil, I spent most of my summer with Cassiopeia. She was much harder to train and wouldn’t learn anything unless I tempted her with chunks of hot dog. I had barely taught her anything, just sitting and laying, by the time she left the yard and never came back. Even though I was in school when it happened, my mother seemed to think I had done something wrong. One of the many incidents that convinced her that I’m irresponsible.
When crossing into the reservation where my mother lives, and any reservation really, there is an interesting transformation. The land becomes a mix of feral beauty and man-made blight. On one side of the highway you can see nature at its finest and on the other, humans at their worst. Anni told me once that the colors of autumn were like paintbrush strokes and every year they convince him a little more that the Creator is real. The colors make up for the yards filled with broken-down cars, heaps of garbage, boarded-up windows, burned trailers, and basketball hoops held steady by cinder blocks.
I was fortunate enough to not live in those kinds of conditions growing up. My mother had inherited her mother’s property on the south side of Lake Anders and all our neighbors were rich white snowbirds. Because her mother’s side of the family had grown up in typical reservation fashion, my mother was obsessed with keeping a nice yard and house. I’m not sure if it was to impress white people or gloat to the family, but it gained her a bit of resentment from both.
It’s early evening when I arrive at her house. A horde of five dogs run out from underneath a tall porch and surround my car. I step out to a chorus of barks that quiet as soon as Anni and my mother step outside.
The house is filled with the smell of Anni trying too hard to be Native. His meal consists of wild rice with blueberries, smoked venison, and frybread. Harvested the wild rice and blueberries himself and the deer meat is from the previous year’s hunting season. Only the frybread’s ingredients are store-bought. And the most amazing part to me is that my mother is not ashamed of the meal.
“We’re not a frybread family,” she would tell me growing up. When we would go to family gatherings, funerals, even school functions, she preferred that I did not eat it. To many, Indian and non-Indian, frybread is an endearing aspect of our culture. Indian tacos, frybread burgers, all those kinds of novelty foods found at powwows. She hated them.
“How did you get her to agree to this?” I ask Anni.
“I use olive oil. Makes it a little less bad.”
I take a bite of the squishy bread and the taste is definitely not “less bad.” It’s rather bitter from a mix of the whole wheat, olive oil, and chia seeds. But if my mother approves of it, I would be rude not to finish.
“How is Basil?” she asks.
“He’s great. No problems at all.”
“Last time you called he was chewing shoes.”
“Don’t worry. I took out his teeth. He uses dentures now.”
My mother’s eyes widened. I forgot that Anni uses dentures. Luckily, he laughs about it. She shakes her head and a small smile forms. “So, if it’s not your dog, what is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You wanted to talk about something.”
“I did. But now I don’t.”
“Is it a guy?”
I take big bite of the wild rice and glance at Anni. He doesn’t have a typical Indian look. His hair is short and silver, and his skin is light. I’ve heard it said that this reservation has a lot more light-skinned members than most because of a lot of intermarriage during the relocation period, and if there is any truth to it, Anni is proof. Despite that, he’s about as close to a traditionalist as I’ve met before, which is why I was surprised when she first started dating him a few years ago. I’m not close to him but I have no qualms about talking about men in front of him.
“Two boys, actually.”
She sighs. “Marion . . .”
“Not what you think. So, I’ve been sort of seeing this guy . . .” I hesitate, not sure if I want to say his name. “Shannon.”
“Shannon Harstad?”
Her remembering him makes me cringe. He would not be happy if he knew. “Uh, yeah. We’ve been hanging out on and off all summer but he won’t—he’s not, like, out to anyone.”
“Why not?”
I shrug. “He never really says why. Family, job, who knows.”
“And the other guy?”
Black marble glitters behind my eyes. “It’s his roommate.” I haven’t said it out loud yet. “I think he’s like, abusing him.”
I explain to her the details, best as I remember them. Almost everything he has told me except for some of the anatomical specifics. “So, I don’t really know what to do because Shannon won’t talk about it. But he shouldn’t be living there, should he?”
Before my mother can respond, Anni speaks up. “Marion, have you considered just staying out of the situation?”
“I—no. What good would that do?”
“Well, is there any good you should be worried about? It doesn’t sound like Shannon thinks it’s any of your business.”
I pause and stare at my stepfather. “He all but admitted he was raped. By his roommate. Does it matter if that’s not my business?”
“They’re both grown men. They can work it out themselves.” Anni continues eating as if what he said is completely fine.
“I think I agree, Marion,” Hazel says. “About you not getting involved, I mean. These two sound dangerous.”
I shake my head. “Forget it. Probably doesn’t matter.”
The conversation settles back to small talk about the dogs, Hazel’s job, my job, Anni’s latest project, things I don’t mind changing the subject to. When the plates are cleared, Anni gets the dogs ready for their nightly walk.
“You two wanna join?”
“No thank you, dear. We’re gonna catch up a little more,” Hazel says.
“I understand.” Anni nods and leaves us alone.
MY MOTHER TRIED TO hide her frequent pot smoking from me until I was sixteen. One day I had planned to stay at Amos’s house for the night but that was around the time he and I had started drifting apart. I think I remember sitting in his basement, watching a movie, and having nothing to say to each other. He drove me home and made some half-hearted plans for a night that never happened.
When I walked onto the backyard patio overlooking the silvery-black stain of Lake Anders, she was blazed out of her mind and still rolling another joint.
Her voice was slow and monotone and she barely looked at me as she said, “You can try some if you want. I won’t get mad at you.”
I hesitated for maybe ten long seconds in shock. It was not that I had never seen her high before. It was that after years of pretending she was the perfect white soccer mom, at least as close as an Indian woman could get, she asked me to join instead of trying to shelter me.
“Sure.”
So, we smoked. First, I felt it in my chest. Not the smoke—I was used to tobacco smoke after a few drum groups and ceremonies during my “connect with my ancestors” phase—but the high. Something weird and shaky like my lungs being tickled from the inside. Then my mouth went dry and I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t even form a full sentence. “How do you like it?” my mother asked. I fell silent and just stared out at the dark water until out of nowhere with no sort of buildup she said, “It’s okay if you’re gay, Marion. You can tell me.”
Maybe because I had found out what she thought was her secret, she thought it was okay to bring up what I thought was mine. But she’d always known.
I didn’t say anything. Even through the new sensation swirling through me, I felt my body start to shake. But the sight of the lake and the trees was calming and I felt my head nod up and down, slow as a rusty seesaw.
Since then, I’ve known that if I want her to talk about something serious, it’s easiest if we’re both high. She only smokes when Anni isn’t around. It’s not a secret, just a courtesy to him.
I don’t smoke as much as she does, so I still have trouble speaking sometimes. “Mom, do you, uh. Um. Remember—much about Kayden Kelliher?”
She takes a big bite of the weird, hipster-ish frybread, now cold and soggy like a half-eaten placenta. “He’s dead.”
“Well, yeah. But do you remember stuff about him?”
“Does it matter? It’s all just memories.”
I stare at her as she focuses on the greasy flap of bread. “You said you watched him when he was little. I thought you might know if he ever had a dog. Like a pitbull or something.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. It was years ago.”
“I guess. But are you sure you don’t remember?” The question leaves my lips without thought.
“I try not to. Is that bad? Does that make me a bad mother? First Jace, then Kayden.”
I have no answer for her.
Our family cemetery is filled with gravestones named Lafournier, Bullhead, Bellerose, and Haltstorm. My great-grandfather Tomas Haltstorm was orphaned after a fire and adopted by a French-Ojibwe man, Baptiste Lafournier. When Tomas grew up, he married a forest woman named Bullhead who refused to take his last name or rename her children from a previous marriage, but Tomas’s children by her took his.
My mother says Tomas was asked if he’d like to keep his birth name and declined. I’m glad he did, not only because the Haltstorm name is rather disliked on our rez but because it’s actually incorrect. Hallström means something like “rock stream” in Swedish but somewhere along the family tree the name was mistranslated into Haltstorm.
There is no name on the grave for Hazel’s first son. He was stillborn at thirty-one weeks, and buried with a blank wooden cross. She did have a name picked out for him, Jace Hiram Lafournier. Just like her mother, she had no intention of giving her children their father’s last name. I don’t really know why.
On the rare occasions when her first child comes up, she always refers to him as “your brother.” I don’t have the heart to tell her that I’ve always hated this. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least. I can’t feel a familial connection to the non-memory of a stillborn child.
Though she was not shy about mentioning her first son, she did not tell me about how, to prepare for motherhood, she babysat her best friend Kayla’s son, Kayden. She did not tell me how many months she spent with the happy and energetic boy who never sat still unless it was dinnertime. She never told me how much he meant to her until after he was gone.
After a few minutes pass in smoky silence, we walk outside. One of the dogs has been left behind, a lazy Saint Bernard named Kuba. Last time I was here, back in July, he was completely shaved after an altercation with a thistle bush, but he has regained his white-and-ginger fluff.
She doesn’t look at me when she speaks, only at Kuba. “I haven’t thought about him in years.”
“Sorry. I should’ve asked you in a better way.”
“Is there such thing when it comes to dead kids?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you remember when I would bring you over to Kayla’s house? Me and her would play cribbage and you wouldn’t leave the kitchen to play with the other kids in the house.”
“I don’t, really. I think I remember the table. And cigarette smoke.”
“After a while I just kind of stopped talking to her . . . It didn’t seem fair. That before, we were mothers and that’s what we would do. Be mothers together and talk about our kids, but then one day, she wasn’t anymore.” She stops petting Kuba and then looks at me with a sad smile. “Kayden did not have a dog. When I was pregnant with you, I wanted to get a puppy to help me prepare. Kayla told me Kayden was allergic, so I couldn’t bring one to their house. Why did you wanna know?”
“Just wondering.”
“Bad liar. What’s going on?”
I choose my words carefully so I don’t raise any serious alarms. “A dog spirit led me to Kayden’s grave and I don’t know why.” Being high helps too.
Before the merry-go-round, I didn’t give a lot of thought to these things. Hazel was always closer to our culture than me, smudging our house with sage every so often and believing in certain signs. An eagle flying above our house or during a powwow. House noises at night meaning ghosts or spirit orbs. And something about a jawbone. But hers was only a basic belief, more going through the motions than truly valuing it all.
“I don’t really know what to tell you other than it was probably stupid to chase a spirit.”
“Gee, thanks. You’re a great medicine woman.”
I thought she would laugh, but her eyes are glazed over and shining. “I used to think it was Bullhead’s curse. You remember?”
I nod. Hazel’s grandmother Bullhead was a mystery among the families she begat. Only Tomas knew where she came from, saying he found her “in a sacred grove.” She had two children; no one knew who the father was, but there was one nasty rumor that few would mention.
“The jawbone, right?”
“Yeah. My aunts, they liked to talk about it more than your grandmother did. No matter who I talked to, it never really changed.”
The story is about some unknown white man who kidnapped her and forced her into marriage. After the birth of the second baby, she slit his throat, cut out his jawbone, and left. When Tomas Lafournier found her later and brought her back to Geshig, she kept the jawbone and fed it small scraps of food every day like a spirit dish, but then after she died no one knew where it ended up.
“Your grandmother used to say that all the Lafournier and Bullhead women were cursed to kill their men. But after Kayden died, I couldn’t help but think maybe that was it. Maybe just by being around him, our bad medicine leaked to him.” She dabs a few small tears from her eyes. “Silly. Silly Hazel, silly Eunice . . .”
Kuba begins to whine and lets out a pitiful bark before crawling underneath Hazel’s seat. Her eyes grow stiff and she stares across the yard.
“Marion. Is that the dog?”
I roll my eyes and sigh. “Seriously?” But sure enough, when I turn and look across the yard, there it is. Standing at the edge of the woods and staring at me.
No. His gaze is for my mother. “I don’t think that’s a dog, Marion.” Her voice is airy and slow, more than usual even for being high. “It’s a wolf.”
Without another word, Hazel stands up, walks to her car, and drives away. The Revenant at the edge of the yard watches her until the lights disappear, and then turns back to me.
In the distance, half a dozen barks crack across the night and the Revenant runs away. When Anni and his pack arrive back at the porch, Kuba finally comes out from under the seat.
“DID THIS DOG MAKE contact with you at all?”
“Yes. It looked really feral at the graveyard, so I approached it slowly with my hand out like this. It let me pet it and then it ran away without a trace.” There is enough truth to that statement. I did play with the dog for a while after it came back to life, so if coming in contact with it means something I doubt the timing of it matters much.
Anni and I are sitting in the kitchen, waiting for a pot to boil. He remained calm when I told him what happened to Hazel, and then, because he demanded to know everything, I told him the full story of the dog.
“Did you know that manidoo means mystery?” he says. “Spirits are that, son. Impossible to understand. You can’t know for sure if this manidoo means you harm or is evil.”
“Wouldn’t it have killed me by now if it was evil?”
“Part of the mystery. What if it’s planning something, needs you alive for now?”
“Then I guess I can’t do much about it.”
“Wrong.” From a glass container on the table, he grabs a tree branch with needles that look like vibrant green chains.
I shrug. “Okay, sure. What kind of magic do you have for me?”
When the tea is done steeping, Anni pours it into a wooden mug and hands it to me. “Back when I was on meth,” he begins, “my family decided for me that I was going to quit. They kept me in their basement and made sure I didn’t get any more in my system. I’m lucky the meth only got my teeth and not the rest of me. To this day, I swear I would have died of withdrawals if it wasn’t for my uncle’s cedar tea. It’s a cleanser.”
I take a drink. It tastes like I’ve licked a pine-needle air freshener.
“She still hasn’t answered.” Anni stares at his phone screen like it is an enemy. “I mean, no offense, kiddo, but since you brought that thing here do you think you might know where your mother went?”
Kiddo.
Ever since Hazel first met Anni, he has called me son or bud or sometimes ingozis. But only Hazel can call me kiddo.
“No idea. Maybe back to Geshig? Back to Lake Anders?”
“My first thought too, but she hated that cabin.”
“I know.”
“I’m not worried about her,” he says. “I just can’t really sleep without her. Around three a.m. I probably will worry.”
“So, what’s this supposed to cleanse me of? Undead-dog rabies?”
“I don’t know, but if there was anything bad from the dog this’ll take care of it.”
“Like, lingering bad-spirit pollen?”
“You and your jokes.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just not into all this . . . tradition.”
“Oh, I can tell you stories about people who weren’t lucky enough to know the old ways. Men killed by wiindigoog. Children kidnapped by the memegwesiiwag. Mothers who touched dead bodies and then cursed their babies.”
I almost choke on the tea. “Wait, what? What about dead bodies?”
“If you touch a dead body, you shouldn’t touch a child before washing your hands in cedar tea. Bad things can happen. The person’s spirit might try to take the baby with them. I’ve seen it. Nothing but a black stain on the bedsheets is left.”
Another memory comes back, not my own, but something my mother told me about.
Kayden was buried in a blue-and-white star quilt, one he’d had since birth, and his funeral was held at the Gizhay Manido Chapel, with a reverend who spoke to Jesus and an elder who prayed in Ojibwe to the Great Spirit. Despite no previous tension between the families, no one related to the Haltstorms showed up, they only sent flowers and donations.
Except for Hazel, the woman who used to babysit young Kayden in preparation for the child she was expecting. As a Lafournier who didn’t really associate with the Haltstorms, she was welcome. She didn’t make me go with her, but she told me all about it.
At the open casket, she kissed Kayden on the forehead and put a beaded medallion on his chest. A gift for his journey. When she came home, she held me in her arms and cried, saying she never wanted me to leave the house again. Never leave Geshig. In my mind, I asked, Why not leave here if this is the town that killed Kayden? Aloud I just said okay, over and over. I would never leave her.
She held me for a while longer, and then, just as she had with Kayden, kissed me on the forehead.
I look at my reflection in the black tea. “Anni, when you say ‘child,’ just how old do you mean?”