JW tried calling Carol on the greasy antique pay phone outside Big Al’s garage. “You’ve reached the White house, leave a message!” He hung up, frustrated.
Inside, they hadn’t even looked at his car.
“I figured you weren’t coming back for her,” Big Al said. This from a man, JW thought, who was always late on his loan payments.
“Why would you think that?” he asked.
Big Al shrugged. JW stood in the garage’s storefront, dressed in his finest gray suit and a crisp white shirt. Cream-colored metal shelves smudged with swipes of black grease held Interstate car batteries, and stacks of Michelin tires covered the bare concrete floor, topped with cardboard cutouts of a tire man. A foggy-globed gumball machine stood by the door, full of faintly visible colored orbs. A smudged, olive-green cash register sat on the glass counter, and the air was pregnant with the smells of body odor and motor oil.
“What you drivin’, anyway?” asked Big Al, peering out the window at the truck Eagle had lent him. It was hand-painted with a round Native-looking logo and lettering along the bed that read Native Organic Wild Rice.
“It belongs to a friend,” JW began, then raised a hand to revise his answer. “An acquaintance. I rented it.”
Big Al raised an eyebrow. He turned away to grab a shop towel for his greasy hands. “Let’s take a look up under her skirt.”
He walked around the counter and shoved the glass door open. A string of brass bells smashed and swayed against it as he passed. Outside, he led JW through a gate in a chain-link fence that ran around a weedy gravel yard east of the shop. It was filled with old junkers that Big Al used for spare parts.
The Caprice sat amid some weeds near the street. Big Al walked up to it, spread a dirty hand on the hood, and lowered his bulk to the ground.
“They ever catch the drunk Indian that run you down?”
“They were just kids.”
Big Al grunted and stuck his head under the car.
“Well, those drunk Indian kids cost you about twelve, fifteen hundred. Hub’s shot, axle’s bent, maybe I can straighten it but it’s probably not worth it. Steering, tie rod maybe. Boots. Who’s your insurance?”
JW had dropped his collision and comprehensive coverage a few months back, when he was in the thick of the cloud. He hadn’t had an accident in fifteen years, and at the time he thought he could leverage the savings into winnings that would pay the premiums for a whole year. He would double that, then repurchase them and add the rest to his nut. Looking back now, it seemed crazy. Big Al poked his head out from beneath the car to see if JW had heard him.
“I only have liability,” he said.
The mechanic got to his feet, brushing his hands off on his soiled blue coveralls.
“Seriously? You got no insurance. The guy that makes me carry it on every goddamn thing just to keep my loan.” He laughed bitterly, then led JW back toward the shop.
The door chimes banged around JW’s head as they crossed back inside. A fat kid in a blue jumpsuit was rotating tires with an impact wrench, filling the building with harsh metallic chatter.
“Well, JW, what you gonna do?” Big Al yelled over the noise. “I said fifteen hundred to be good to you since we go back to high school. But when I get into it, it could be more. And that doesn’t include the airbag. You want that done, that’s another grand.”
“It is what it is,” JW said. “Go ahead. Except the airbag.”
Big Al nodded tentatively. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll need cash up front.”
JW looked at him. He realized he was clenching his jaw, and let it loosen before speaking. “I pushed through the loan so you could buy this place,” he said just loud enough to be heard over the noise. “You didn’t have the credit.”
“And I appreciate that. But now I gotta pay on that loan, so I gotta have cash. I’m sure you understand.” He nodded as he spoke, but his gaze was firm.
JW nodded, visibly angry. “It’ll be a couple days then. Payment schedules,” he said over the noise.
Big Al nodded in return. “I understand. I’ll leave her sittin’ there for another week or so.”
“A week?”
“Two. Whatever. But I can’t have it here forever. You know that.”
JW nodded, then walked out without saying a word. The sun was hot. He got into the pickup and slammed the door, rattling the change that had reappeared in the handle. As he turned the ignition he became acutely aware of the feathers, the beads, and the dream catcher hanging from the rearview mirror. There was a cassette tape of Eric Clapton’s Unplugged stuck in the player, and it played over and over. He punched it off. As he backed out, he saw Big Al take in the truck’s tribal license plate, then shake his head as he turned back to the car bays.
He thought about Big Al’s expression as he drove back to the rez. The entire exchange had left him feeling as if he had somehow slipped into an alternate reality, in which people like Al Bakken felt entitled to judge him—not because of his troubles, but because he was living on the reservation. He had somehow become one of Them, and there was now more to prove, more doubts to overcome. He thought he had sensed the same sort of attitude from others that morning. At the gas station, and waiting at a stoplight. No one was any less polite, but there was a coolness. Or was it all in his mind?
He turned onto the lane that ran through the trees, and then onto the barn drive that led up to Eagle’s rice operation, more determined than ever to find the evidence he needed to stop him and his bank. Then he’d see about Big Al and his late loan payments.
As he pulled in by the pole barn, Eagle walked out of the big door and pulled it closed. “Where the hell’ve you been?” he said. “I’ve been waiting for you. Get in the Bronco.”
* * *
WATERFOWL LAKE WAS perhaps the most aptly named lake in Minnesota. As Eagle pulled into the long grass under some trees near the shore, JW could see thousands of birds—landing and taking off, calling and arguing and eating. The lake covered some hundred and fifty acres, and the entire surface was green and tan with the wheat-like stalks of wild rice.
JW stepped out of the Bronco and looked around, dumbfounded. “More than a million waterfowl come through this lake during the fall migration,” Eagle told him. The birds funneled down from vast stretches of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, even the Northwest Territories. The air was thick with black ducks, wood ducks, gadwalls, pintails, scaups, ringnecks, canvasbacks, redheads, mallards, mergansers, and ruddies, as well as the massive honking traffic jams of incoming Canada geese and their great white brethren, trumpeter swans. All colors and varieties of waterfowl floated and squabbled amid the rice, quacking and carping and splashing.
Groups of band members stood on the shore near canoes beached in the long grass. A group was gathered around Hal Charm, a blonde man of about forty-five who wore a floppy cloth cowboy hat and a green-netted vest.
“Hal’s our biologist,” Eagle told JW as they approached the group. “He’s managed to double the rice harvest in the last three years.”
As they neared the group, JW saw one of the Indians glance over at them in a way that was not welcoming. “Apple’s got a white boy with him,” he heard. “Hal, how’s it looking?” Eagle asked as they entered the group.
“Well, as I was telling Black Bear here, conditions look good to me, and you can tell they look good to the ducks, too. The rice committee approved the opener for today, but we’re still waiting for final word from the elders on whether it’s really ready to harvest.”
Just then, an elder stood up in a canoe out amid the rice stalks. He raised his two rice-knocking sticks high in the air to signal the rice opener.
“And that’s it,” added Hal.
The gathered groups of men, women, and children whooped with excitement. They broke up quickly and headed happily for their canoes. Eagle led JW back to the Bronco and popped the ratchet straps holding the Kevlar canoe—a Wenonah—to the racks on top.
“Come on, let’s go!”
Eagle hoisted the canoe onto his shoulders, where it easily balanced, propped up by two blue foam blocks attached to an ash yoke spanning its middle.
“Grab the knockers and the life jackets,” he said. He pulled a long wooden pole off the car rack and headed for the lake. JW looked around the back of the vehicle and found the vests and two three-foot-long, drumstick-like pieces of wood. They were surprisingly light. He grabbed them and followed Eagle, who already had the canoe in the water and was standing ankle-deep.
“Okay, get in.”
JW walked to the stern end and began to step in.
“Hey, hold it!”
He stopped and looked back at Eagle.
“I’m not gonna let you bridge my boat! Just walk out next to it and climb in. Drain your shoes over the edge before you put your feet in.”
JW looked at him.
“I’m serious! They’ll dry. What, you never been canoeing?”
“Fine.” JW waded out over the sandy bottom in his shoes and pants and climbed in, doing his best not to drag too much water in with him. As soon as he was settled, Eagle pushed off with the pole and they glided out into the long grasses.
“What do I do?” asked JW.
“What they’re doing!”
JW took the knockers from his lap and looked around. The Indians were expertly guiding their canoes through the rice plants, each one poled by a man standing in the stern. Those in the bows used one knocker to gently bend the rice stalks over the other and then brushed or shook the rice kernels off into the canoe. Several of them were making fast work of it, seemingly racing.
Rice stalks glided past on either side of the translucent yellow bow. They looked like long stalks of wheat that stood about three feet above the surface of the water. JW tried bending a few with the sticks, but at first he pushed too hard and creased the stems. The heavy stalks folded over, became waterlogged, and started to sink to the bottom. The Indians he saw around them were incredibly fast, but they were bending the stalks more gently over the canoe with one knocker and rubbing the other knocker over the top of them, or lightly beating the grass.
JW tried again, and this time he got a large shower of kernels to fall off into his lap. The rice was encased in purple-green, wheat-like coverings and was full of insects, rice worms and spiders. He brushed some off his lap.
“Don’t worry about that,” Eagle said. “They won’t bite you too much.”
“Easy for you to say.”
“Come on, get your shit together, white boy, they’re putting us to shame. This is what I’m paying you for.”
JW kept at it. As the canoe began moving forward at a more rapid pace, he developed a swiping motion, swaying the sticks rhythmically side to side, and smoothly knocking stickful after stickful of rice onto his lap from both sides of the canoe.
“Now you’re getting it!”
Soon his feet were sprinkled with rice and his pants were crawling with daddy longlegs and wolf spiders. He continued, sweating, as Eagle sought out the richest patches of rice, and then methodically poled the canoe back and forth through them. JW found the work straining but satisfying as the level of kernels steadily grew, first halfway up his shoes, then over and into them, and then up his ankles. The sky was mostly clear, and the carping of waterfowl filled the air. When he disturbed a merganser hiding in the rice, the sudden rush of wings made him laugh out loud.
After another hour the sky gave way to a deep crystal blue and the enriching light of September. The leaves on the trees were just beginning to turn. The ripening rice plants filled the air with a strong grassy smell, and they brushed alongside the canoe with the dry hiss of hay packing into a baler. The two men settled into an easy rhythm.
“Why do they call you ‘Apple?’” JW asked. He pulled a daddy longlegs off his neck and threw it out onto the grasses.
“Trying to get to me,” Eagle replied nonchalantly. “See those guys? We’re gonna show them up.”
JW looked over in the direction he had indicated. Two canoes were working in tandem. In the bow of one was the Indian who had made the remark about Eagle. “I’m in,” he said.
Eagle picked up the pace and JW began to swipe and knock faster and faster. A wordless competition sprang up across the lake. Soon several canoes seemed to be moving faster, matching pace with Eagle and JW, as the veteran ricers worked to put the upstart and his outsider sidekick in their place.
The sun set around six thirty, and the air began to run cool down the hillsides onto the lake. Band members finally turned their heavily laden canoes for shore. JW set his knockers down in relief and rolled his burning shoulders. He had constantly pushed the rice kernels backward in order to keep the canoe from getting bow-heavy. Eagle stood shin-deep, while JW was buried up to his seated thighs. The rice smelled like a rich meadow. JW ran his tired fingers through it as the shining waters glided by.
Eagle poled them, bow-first, up onto the muddy sand bank.
“Day of reckoning,” he said. “Hop on out.”
JW stood and purple-green kernels rained down off his jeans. He shook his legs off over the canoe one by one, still feeling many more kernels inside his shoes, then stepped out into the cool water. He stood beside the heavy canoe and pulled the bow a few more inches up onto the muddy shore.
“That’s good enough,” said Eagle, bracing himself before he stepped out into knee-deep water at the stern. Both men looked around at the returning canoes. None were as low in the water as theirs.
“Don’t quote me on it, but I think we beat ’em,” Eagle said.
JW knew enough about Indians to know that this kind of competitive thinking ran counter to the spirit some elders approached the rice harvest with, but Eagle seemed anxious to show them all up. JW, tired of being judged, was also tickled by the thought.
Several Indians walked past their canoe, heading to their cars to get plastic snow shovels and lawn-and-leaf bags. JW watched them expectantly, noting how each of them glanced into the canoe as they passed. They ignored JW, but one by one they glanced at Eagle and nodded. The man who had made the slur walked by without even looking. Eagle glanced at JW with a grin.
“I think that makes it official,” he said. “Come on, let’s get the bags and pack up our haul.”