“MAYBE YOU NEED A name.”
The morning does not bring my mother back. Anni’s eyes are dark red and flickering like a weathered filmstrip. He hasn’t had a cup of coffee in years—even the idea of caffeine addiction makes him uncomfortable—but the smell of the fresh pot woke me up. I slept easily unlike him.
“I’ve made it this far without one,” I say.
“Think of how much easier everything could have been.” His head bobs down and shoots back up, almost rhythmically as he tries to stay awake.
“Does Hazel have a name?”
“Wiijiwaagan, my life partner,” Anni says.
“That’s not a name.”
“Well, fine. She refused a name too. The hell made you Lafourniers so stubborn?”
When I was in middle school Ojibwe class, I first learned the concept of having an Indian name. Or spirit name. The phrase we had to use for our English name actually translates to “pretend to be called.” Marion Lafournier indizhinikaaz. I pretend to be called Marion Lafournier.
But I’ve never had the feeling that I was not Marion. I’ve hated my name before, sure. Going through middle school with the nickname Mary Ann La-Four-Eyes wasn’t the best, especially when I always tried to hide my sexuality but still faced some rumors anyway.
“Indians aren’t complete unless they have a traditional name,” my Ojibwe teacher told us in middle school. “I have two given to me by an elder. One I can share and one I keep to myself.”
Anni insists that I should receive my name, that it’ll stop this haunting or whatever is going on with me.
I once got a test result back from a clinic that made me celibate for months. Chlamydia of the throat. Other than feeling angry with myself on how stupid I’d been, I also felt sick and unclean. I had no symptoms but I had to spend a whole weekend before I could get antibiotics, knowing there were these nasty things inside me that shouldn’t be there.
If what Anni says about dead bodies is true, and if it’s connected to the dog and Kayden Kelliher’s grave, I wonder now if there was some part of Kayden’s spirit living with me all this time, like an infection sitting in my throat.
I take out a cigarette, Marlboro Red, and toss it to him. “Okay. You can name me.”
He catches the cigarette on the filter between his index and middle finger tips, careful not to let the tobacco fall. “That’s not how you gift asemaa.”
“Sorry.” I try to take the cigarette back but he withholds it.
“But I’ll accept it. I can’t actually give you a name, but I can take you to someone who can.”
I resist the urge to roll my eyes, and instead ask him if he wants me to cook him something for breakfast. The chair legs scrape across the kitchen floor and his body wilts down, asleep. I finish my coffee and then drag him to the couch.
Outside, I let the dogs out of their kennel and they take to the yard as if it was new to them again. Unlike Basil at the park, none of them seem interested in the place where the Revenant was. The youngest two mutts run off into the nearby woods, the pit bull paws at the roots of a tree, with the German shepherd circling, and Kuba plops down by my feet on the porch.
My phone still has no text or call from my mother. Anni’s phone is similarly silent. His is a cheap flip phone with no service other than calls, so there’s no real privacy for me to break by checking it.
Turkey Feather is a much quieter reservation than Languille Lake. The biggest town here is no bigger than Geshig, and they have only one casino instead of three. Aside from the padding steps and panting of the dogs, there is not much noise out here. The yard around me is spotless, the kitchen inside spotless, the garden free of dandelions or other pests. I can’t even try to be the good son while I wait, unless I learn how to finish the sweat lodge that Anni is building in the backyard.
Just for the hell of it, I open up my dating app. There isn’t much service out here but the app can be accessed through Wi-Fi. There is no one within ten miles and the closest handful of profiles have no pictures. I scroll down and see Shannon’s profile now has a name: SH. He still doesn’t have a picture but he’s brave enough for initials.
I’d like to say I don’t watch his profile for patterns, but I do. He loves Friday nights and early, early Sunday mornings for fucking. He goes offline after every meeting of ours. He is the only profile I have marked in my favorites.
Shannon still has no description, except the relationship status is now set to “dating.” And he hasn’t been online for a full day. I have to assume he means he is dating me, but that’s too much to hope for from a closet case.
AT THE SOUTH END of Meegwan, the hub of this reservation, there is a giant turkey statue with a stone bench at its talons. Though the largest turkey farm is white-owned, the abundance of these birds gave this reservation the honorable and dignified name: Turkey Feather.
I follow Anni’s truck through Meegwan, past the statue, and farther into the reservation. On this side, the woods have faded away and now there is only open pasture and gray cages filled with turkeys, the ground more shit than soil.
Anni’s medicine guy lives out here. At first, Anni was insistent we drive only one car—probably wants to talk more about spirits—but I don’t like being anywhere I can’t get away from on my own time. So, with a rare show of some contempt, Anni let me drive myself.
The first time I had ever gone through this reservation it surprised me. Because of the abundance of trees in Geshig, I had just assumed all Ojibwes only ever lived in the woods. Out here, though, it’s miles of open land with the occasional copse of trees. I follow Anni’s truck nearly ten miles through backroads until I come across the house.
While driving around this state, and a few others years ago, I noticed there is always that house, that one house in every county background. It’s surrounded by fields. White, two-story, with a long driveway and a station wagon out front. A perfect oak tree off to the side of the house, tire swing optional. Timeless in a way, like it would fit in any county’s history-in-photographs book. It’s probably in the same location in every plat map in the country. That’s the house that Anni brings me to.
Except instead of an oak tree, there is a sweat lodge. It’s a big dome, about the size of one storage unit, and covered in a pale tan canvas. Nearby is a small flickering firepit surrounded by rocks. Anni parks next to the owner’s station wagon and I park behind it in case he wants to leave before me.
We both step outside and wait. I expect the guy to walk out of the sweat lodge wearing all buckskin but instead he walks out the front door in flannel and jeans.
It’s hard not to react to the sight. This guy is like an Indian Grim Reaper. His skin is coarse, dark brown with liver spots like a loaf of raisin bread. Tufts of white hair hang out from a navy baseball cap like out-turned pockets. He smiles, but the few teeth he has left are toffee brown and do nothing to improve the unsettling look.
The eyes are the worst. Clearly bloodshot, but the whites are more like yellows, only visible at the edges of his giant irises. They look like they dried out years ago and he covered them in layers of clear nail polish to hold them in. If I met this man anywhere else, I would assume my time had come.
“Aaniin, noozhis.”
His voice is as friendly as any Indian grandpa’s. “I’ll leave you to it . . .” Anni shakes the man’s hand and walks inside. I assume he’s going to fall asleep or watch the ball game.
The old man approaches me slowly, a regular walk that doesn’t hold any sign of age. I expect him to offer a handshake but he waits.
“Oh! Right, um, here ya go.” I hand him a bag of cherry-scented tobacco that Anni had at his house. “My stepfather told me a phrase to say in Ojibwe but I’ll be honest, I completely spaced it out.”
“That’s okay, noozhis. He told me a little about why you’re here.” The man pulls out a phone from his pocket and reads a text message. It’s a smartphone. Even more technologically advanced than Anni’s.
“I didn’t catch your name, sir.”
“Ask me then.”
“What’s your name?”
“In Ojibwe. Try ‘Aaniin ezhinikaazoyan?’”
“Oh yeah, sorry. Aaniin ezhinikaazoyan?”
“My colonial name is Carey. Ataage indizhinikaaz.”
“Okay.” My Ojibwe may be rusty, but I believe he said Ataage is my traditional name.
“No use wasting time,” he says as he takes off his hat and starts to undo the buttons on his flannel. “Young Aanakwad tells me you have some maji-manidoo following you.”
I suppose a guy that looks like Carey could call anyone young. “Yeah, a ghost or a zombie, something like that.”
Carey starts to laugh and fully remove his shirt. “Children always have the biggest imagination. Ghosts aren’t real, noozhis. That’s white-people shit. What you’ve seen is a manidoo.”
“Um . . .”
“You’re not undressing,” he says. “I hope you’re not uncomfortable. The young bucks today all seem to live inside their clothes like turtles.”
I pull my shirt off without hesitation. “Trust me. I have no problem taking my clothes off in front of men.”
I stand there naked as he carefully places a basket of hot rocks inside the sweat lodge, next to a small fire in the center. He gestures for me to join just as he pours water over the rocks from a faded ice cream bucket. The steam fills the dim enclosure and instantly my skin is slick and warm, like a humid summer night washing over me all at once, except there’s no tent, river, or ex-boyfriend.
Carey sits with his legs spread as if advertising, but I know attraction when I see it and this is not it. This is just a man of another time, no shame or fear of his own parts. I sit with my legs crossed. Not out of shame but because the floor of this sweat lodge is just old pine boughs that become soft and muddy as the steam slicks every inch it can waft into.
“I’ll begin with a prayer.” Carey begins an invocation in Ojibwe and sprinkles tobacco over the fire in rhythm with his vocal emphasis. His eyes close but I just sit there and wait. The heat inside the lodge is building and I can feel my own sweat joining the mist, like a sauna after a night in a hot tub.
“Have you ever sat and listened to nature?” Carey asks.
“No.”
“Do you pray?”
“No.”
“Do you prefer white men or Indian men in your bed?”
“Um. That’s a little private, isn’t it?”
“We’re naked.”
“Even so . . . Why does it matter?”
“Might explain why you think so much like a white man.” He laughs. “No Ojibwe name, no prayers. I can feel it in your energy. You don’t respect me or this ceremony.”
I shrug. “You got me there.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know—I guess—maybe I’d like to know a little bit about your qualifications? Do you have a degree in medicine?”
“Even better. I’m a card-carrying member of the Board of Shamans. BS for short.” Carey pulls out a card from a bison-skin wallet. “Proof.”
“This is a strip of birch bark.” I turn it over. “And you drew a cock on it!”
“You have what the white folks call a lack of faith.” Carey laughs. “You’re gonna need to trust me.”
“What do Indians call a lack of faith?”
“Being white.”
Carey begins to rattle on for what I think is about fifteen minutes. I can’t really tell because the heat of the lodge is finally getting to me. My breathing is hot and dry, like I’m sitting inside the onset of a fever. I feel my eyes closing, but I make myself sit up straight and listen to his spiel.
“Our people knew that every living thing has a spirit. And when the white men in lab coats looked in their microscopes, they found out humans and animals and plants all share the same kind of stuff in their bodies. Atoms, and carbons. Or what we called spirit. So, you see, Indians knew the truth about the world before any white scientist.”
“That all sounds fascinating, but I don’t feel too good.”
“You’re opening up your mind!” He raises his arms and looks toward the ceiling. “Let the spirits take you away!”
“I need a drink. Do you have any soda?”
“Tough it out, kid. Be a real Indian. Ogichidaa. I know it when I see it, gwiiwizens. You’re a warrior. Like me.”
“You don’t look like a warrior. You look like a dried potato.” Did I say that out loud? I really can’t tell anymore; the heat is too intense.
The old man stared right into my steam-cooked eyes and sat forward. “Do you want to know the finest act of my life? My defining moment as an Ojibwe warrior.”
“I guess.”
“I blew up Mount Rushmore.”
I laugh, and the dryness of my mouth causes it to spurt out like a broken squeak toy. “What?”
“I defaced that ugly rock forever. Would you like to hear that story before we talk about your name?”
“I got nowhere else to be.” I feel my head and shoulders rock back and forth. This feeling . . . it’s not all that different from being baked out of my fucking mind. A ringing starts inside my ears, like I can feel the shape of the canals and the eardrums pulsing with the steam. And then the only thing I can hear is Carey’s voice.
I looked up at those faces and thought, fuck, these white rats are ugly. Great White Fathers? Good thing us apples fell far from the tree. I was with AIM back then.
The American Indian Movement?
Yes, gwiiwizens. I knew all those guys. But I had to prove myself because I had just recently come back from ’Nam. That’s where I learned how to make bombs.
What kind of bomb did you make?
A small one. Like the size of a cherry. I thought it would be funny lighting a cherry bomb on Slave Master Washington’s cunt face. Anyway, I had to prove myself to the honchos in charge so I whipped up a bomb, brought it right to the tip-top of the mountain and I lit it. At first I tried to run away, but when I looked back and saw the wick shrinking, I knew this was how I wanted to go out. I wanted to ride the crumbles of these white rats all the way down until I was crushed to death. I’d be a hero for the ages.
But you didn’t do it.
Of course I did, gwiiwizens! I just survived, and then ran away before the park rangers could arrest me.
That’s a neat story. Except for the part where Mount Rushmore is still there, but, ya know, a good story.
Carey’s eyes bore into mine with cherry-red lines on the yellowing whites. “So, you’ve been there? You’ve been to Mount Rushmore and know it’s there?”
“No. But—”
“Then how do you know it’s there?”
“Because . . . I mean, it’s not exactly something you can hide. I don’t buy into conspiracy theories.”
“Ah. So that’s what you’re taking from this, you can only trust what you see with your own eyes?”
“I don’t feel good. You sure you don’t have like a Sprite or a Heineken in here?”
“Tell me what you saw. Again. Tell me what you saw.”
I try to speak but my throat is burning, and the headache has spread all across my forehead and through my eyes. “I saw a dog. It came back to life from underneath some playground equipment. And it led me to Kayden Kelliher’s grave.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know!”
“Why?” he shouts.
“I don’t fucking know, asshole!”
“Why?” His scream echoes across the sweat lodge like a cannon and then his voice changes. His mouth moves but it’s not his voice. The dead marble eyes glower like a spinning nickel.
“There are four. Worlds. The Ojibwe walk in. But it is not. You. That is walking now.”
Fuzzy orange lights overtake my eyes and I run out of the sweat lodge. My tongue tastes the sour green grass before my lungs begin to heave and I throw up a rancid mix of bile and coffee.
After a few minutes of suffering, I feel a jet of moisture across my face. Above me, the medicine man is holding a garden hose and spraying it right into my face.
“You need to sweat more. Like a real Indian.”
I snatch the hose from him and inhale as much as I can without drowning myself.
THE WOULD-BE MEDICINE MAN can’t make a good cup of coffee.
Inside his house Anni and I are eating bowls of potato soup with specks of disintegrated corned beef. His coffeepot needs a cleaning, for the taste resembles a mix between burned bread and a mouthful of coins. I remember when I was a kid, pennies tasted the worst.
Anni and Carey are talking about the Vikings season while I sit in silence and wait for words to form. I really can’t speak. It feels like there is a chain-lock on my throat whenever I think I have something to say. The creamy soup is helping but the coffee seems to reset the progress.
I finish the last bite and take a breath. “Did you shop at Jake’s Hot Springs or Northern Spa Solutions?”
Carey throws his head back and a laugh like a backfiring car spurts from his throat. “Jake’s. They offered a better interest rate. How could you tell?”
Back in the sweat lodge, while he was going on about spirits or some shit, I noticed a logo on the side of the benches. It was the logo of a line of spas that rich white people buy to host swinger parties or just because they’re bored with their disposable income, I guess.
I know this because I sat in a similar sauna and hot tub when a pair of older married men invited me over, gave me champagne, and relived their wild days of youth all over my body. Really makes me question that degree in BS Carey claimed he had.
“I’m building my own house,” I reply. “Thinking about what kind of spa I’m gonna put in it.”
Anni knows I’m lying but he knows me well enough to just nod.
“Well, ya got me. I cut a few corners, but no one should lose faith over it. I am still willing to dream your name, noozhis.”
“Miigwech. You can just text it to me when you find it.”
Carey begins a retort but just then my cell phone rings. The screen lights with Shannon’s scruffy face. He never calls, so this must be important.
I excuse myself and answer.
“What’s going on?” No use pretending that something isn’t wrong. “Is Basil okay?”
“I’m sorry, Marion.” Shannon’s voice is flatter than usual. “I—I can’t find him.”
“Okay. How did that happen?”
I feel guilty that what he says next affects me more than knowing Basil is gone.
“My—uh. My girlfriend let him outside this morning. She didn’t think he’d run away.”
“I’ll be back today.”
“Marion, I’m s—”
I hang up the phone and take a deep breath. The red eyes of the Revenant stare into mine again, this time in my stupor from the sweat lodge. Other images flash, ones I couldn’t have ever seen before. A cabin made of red pine. A young girl drinking liquor while her sisters watch.
A gaunt and tough-faced woman, putting pieces of food on a blackened jawbone.
I text Shannon. Meet me at my place in two hours. I know exactly where he is.