Winter Loon(47)

“Hey, Jolene,” the boy said. “We really need a win tonight. How about you do a war dance for us, you know, a little—” He put his hand against his mouth, baffling out a three-note whoop.

The girl raised her eyebrows and smiled, trying to keep a straight face.

“Put your hand down before I break it off,” I said.

His head was shaped like a watermelon. I could smell liquor on his breath as he moved closer to me. “Yeah, you think?”

“Let’s go,” the girl said, pulling the boy by the arm.

He sneered, easing off the adrenaline. “Fucking Indian lover.”

Lester stepped forward from the shadows as the boy turned. “Wanna repeat that, Robbie? What you just said there to my friends?”

Lester stood next to me and Jolene dropped my hand. The three of us, side by side, no one hiding, no one being a hero.

The girl tugged the boy’s arm, pulling him away. “Robbie, let’s go. Everyone’s waiting.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so, Robbie,” Lester said. “Fucking punk.”



WE LEFT THE BONFIRE, DOWNED a case of beer driving around in the boondocks, me holding Jolene’s hand from the back seat. We made fun of the girl and that Robbie, who Lester said was a first-class asshole and drug dealer to boot, destined for jail time down the road. They ribbed me about Kathryn, what I ever saw in her. I was thankful Lester didn’t go too far, though I wasn’t sure whether he was protecting me or Jolene. The beer got me talking and I leaned in, put my arms around the two of them, kissed each on the temple, and declared my love. “I wish I could convert to Indian.”

Jolene doubled over with laughter but not Lester.

“Sometimes you’re so fucking ignorant it hurts, Ballot.”

“Lighten up,” Jolene said. “He’s joking.”

I let myself fall against the back seat. “I’m serious. I wish I was less me and more you.”

Lester pulled up in front of Jolene’s house and cut the ignition. “You know, just once it would be great if you at least acknowledged that you’re just another interloping white man come into this family and taking it like it was already yours.”

Jolene got out of the car and flipped the seat up for me to climb out. I put my head back in, one hand down on the warm leather where Jolene had been sitting, and extended my other hand to Lester. “I meant nothing by it,” I said. But that wasn’t true. I had never felt a part of anything that good and wanted more than anything to not be the thing I was. By day—with Jolene and her family, with Lester even—I let myself believe that my father’s disappearance was on him and not me. But when I climbed into my mother’s bed at night, when my fingertips touched that knife that I still stored in the bed rails, I couldn’t help but think of myself as a person who didn’t belong, a person who could be left behind.

How many times I’ve put my hand out to someone since that night on Bright Lake I can’t even count now. But I wanted Lester to take it that night almost as much as I wanted my mother to the night she drowned. His contempt seemed to wither as I persisted. “Go, Ballot. Jesus. Your girlfriend is waiting.”

I offered my hand again. “Take it.”

He gripped my hand until the bones curled over on each other. “There. Happy?”

I was.





CHAPTER 15

BY MID-OCTOBER, I still hadn’t heard from Topeka. The matchbook that lived in my pocket was worn from my handling of it. Jolene and I were sitting out on the porch roof watching a tangled flock of starlings murmur across the western sky, bursting black fireworks. They whiplashed, then descended on a red cedar like a great black cape, bending its boughs only to lift off as if they might pick up the tree and carry it away. I could hear Jolene’s breathing change to gasps each time the shape shifted. I reached for her hand and wove my fingers through hers.

“It’ll be winter soon,” she said.

“No more porch roof.”

A shadow passed over us and we heard a hundred wings beating. The flock briefly darkened the sky before settling in the trees.

Jolene climbed between my splayed legs. Her back to my chest, she tilted her head so her temple brushed my cheek. “Warm me up.”

I wrapped myself around her, tight as I could. My hands drifted over her wool sweater, along her breasts, over her belly.

Her lips grazed my face, dragging on faint stubble. “Mariah’s in a play tonight. There’s a reception afterward.”

“Do you want me to go with you?”

She looped her arm around my head, touching the velvet spot behind my ear. “I’m not going, Wes.”



I SAID MY GOODBYES, MADE a show of leaving, but I didn’t go home. Instead, I watched from a safe distance as Mariah flew out of the house dressed as a squirrel, Troy and Mona right behind her, then as the three of them piled into Mona’s station wagon and pulled away from the house. The porch light flipped on. Our signal. I watched as, one by one, the other lights in the house went out like flames doused, though I was all fire. Only one light remained on, the one in the window above the front porch. I picked my way carefully through the dark house toward the dimmest light at the back stairs. I tiptoed past Mariah’s bed as if she were sleeping there. Jolene was sitting on the end of hers, hands on her thighs, head down. She was still wearing the jeans and sweater I saw her in that afternoon. Her feet were bare. She had not heard me come in.