Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

Zhingwaak said. He closed the wooden lid to the spear hole and sat Tom next to the stove. He pulled Guy closer to the heat.

      “More wood,” he said to Mary Ann. Then he began to undress Tom. Mary Ann filled the stove with dead limbs. The wood crackled and threw yellow light onto the fish house floor.

      “You too,” Zhingwaak said. Guy struggled out of his shirt and pants, then sat naked with Tom. They shivered as the harsh heat washed over them. The sides of the stove turned gray, then dark red, then cherry.

      As they warmed themselves, Zhingwaak looped the decoy line across the ceiling and hung up their clothes to dry. As he worked he began to hum a low song that rose and fell. Guy thought of the starbursts. Of the Fourth of July. In the heat Zhingwaak’s face shone with sweat and he took off his fur cap. His long white hair fell down in a braid.

      When the clothes were all hung, Zhingwaak took the big gray feather from the wall and ran its vane through his braid. He took the little tin man and tied it onto his wrist. Then he opened the leather pouch. He threw a pinch of something onto the flat top of the stove. The stove top hissed and smoked. A sharp, sweet, burning smell filled the fish house.

      Zhingwaak sat again on his stool. He leaned over the now-shut doorway into the lake. With a thin, dead limb he began to tap on the wooden floor as he sang. He closed his eyes. He was like a singing blind man with a cane.

      Guy and Tom watched. The stove’s heat began to work its way through them and they stopped shivering. Zhingwaak sang on, stopping once to throw more sage onto the stove—that was it, sage—Guy thought. His mother used it at Thanksgiving. It smelled good then. It smelled sweet and strong and even better now.

      Zhingwaak sang and drummed on the hollow wood floor until their clothes were nearly dry. Mary Ann had begun to giggle at their nakedness so they stood up and pulled them on. Zhingwaak set aside his sticks. He wiped his face and watched them dress.

      Zhingwaak looked at Guy. “Ningos is a good swimmer.”

      “Tom taught me,” Guy said.

      “Lucky for him,” Mary Ann said.

      Tom did not speak.

      Ningos opened the door of the fish house. Outside, the snow was blue.

      “I’ve gotta go,” Tom said. His voice sounded funny, like he was speaking through a pipe.

      Zhingwaak nodded. Pulling the toboggan they began the walk home. Zhingwaak stood on the ice beside his house. He watched them until they stepped over the ice ridge onto land.

      On the way home Mary Ann talked on about the accident. “Did you see anything under there?” she asked. “What was it like?”

      Both Guy and Tom walked on in silence.

      “You must have seen something,” she said.

      “Just shut up for once,” Tom said. He just kept walking and staring across the purple fields.

      7

      In the spring when they were eleven, in late May when it was finally tennis shoe weather, Guy and Tom were fixing Mary Ann’s bike chain in the farm shop. Suddenly Tom dropped his wrench and stared at Mary Ann.

      “Hey, you got tits!” Tom said.

      Guy looked at Mary Ann’s T-shirt.

      “Jesus,” Guy said. She did have tits. He had not noticed them because they were not the pointy kind. Sometimes in the summer Guy noticed girls in town who were eleven or twelve and had uneven little points under their T-shirts like horns growing on a calf. Sometimes the points were uneven, and once he saw a girl with only one. He began to watch for tits after his grandmother once clucked her tongue at one of the town girls and murmured that the girl was too old to run around dressed like that.

      But Mary Ann’s tits did not come out pointy. Rather, they were wide mounds growing like muscles across her chest.

      “My daddy says they’re going to be big ones too,” she said. She held up her T-shirt.

      Guy knocked over the oil can. He and Tom stared. Her tits were swelled up like two big muffins with a glob of pink frosting in the center of each.

      “Jesus,” Tom murmured.

      “Amazing,” Guy said. He glanced through the open door of the machine shop into the yard. It was quiet and empty.

      “That’s not all I got,” Mary Ann said. Guy and Tom looked at each other.

      They went to the hayloft, to their hay house, to see the rest of Mary Ann’s secret. The hay house was a little lean-to building that Guy and Tom and Mary Ann had built in the corner of the loft out of old lumber; they went there, sometimes slept there, whenever their parents were drinking or fighting.

      But now Martin and Helmer were dust clouds far out on the fields. Etta worked in the garden with her back to the barn. Madeline was gone to town. Sunlight came through the little windows and made a rectangular spotlight on the board floor.

      Mary Ann stepped into the light, then backed out. “This will cost you,” she said.

      Guy and Tom stared at each other.

      “A quarter apiece.”

      Guy and Tom fished into their pockets. Two nickels between them.

      Mary Ann took the nickels. “A nickel apiece and do what I do.”

      Guy and Tom stared at each other, then nodded.

      Mary Ann stepped back into the sunlight. She undid her pants, then pulled them down.

      “Jesus,” Guy said.

      Mary Ann wore no underwear, and between her legs was a triangle of bright red hair.

      “It’s red!” Tom said.

      “What the hell you expect, purple?” she said, pulling up her pants.

      “Wait,” Guy said, leaning closer for a better look at the hair, the tiny pink tongue at the top of her slit.

      “Yeah, give us our nickel’s worth,” Tom said. They dropped to their knees so they could get a straight-on look.

      “Time’s up,” she said soon. She pulled up her pants, then stepped away from the sunlight. “Your turn.”

      Guy and Tom stared at each other.

      “Who goes first?” Tom said.

      “Why not do it together?” Mary Ann said.

      Guy and Tom looked at each other, then stepped into the spotlight.

      They unzipped their zippers.

      “Hey, that’s cheating. All the way down,” Mary Ann said.

      They stared at each other a moment, then undid their belt buckles. Their penises, one white, the other brown, stood straight up; around them neither Guy nor Tom had any hair.

      Mary Ann laughed. Guy and Tom started to pull up their pants. “Hey,” she said, “give me my money’s worth.”

      “You never paid anything,” Tom said.

      “But you got to see my tits too,” she said.

      Guy and Tom stared at each other, then let her look some more.

      “Do you guys?” she asked, and made an up-and-down motion with her fist.

      Guy looked to Tom. Neither of them said anything because they didn’t know what she was talking about.

      “Really?” she said. “My brothers do it all the time. Want me to show you?”

      Tom turned to Guy.

      She stepped between them, spit in first one palm and then the other, then took their penises into her hands. She began to stroke them. She started out slow, soon spit on them again, then moved her hands faster and faster. Guy began to feel a burning sensation. The burning started low