Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

trying to kill me,” he shouted at Tom. “You niggers you Indians you’re trying to kill me I know that! All of you—you’re trying to do me in well it won’t work, I’ll get even with you sonsabitches!”

      Guy shouted at Tom to step aside. Then he wheeled the little tractor forward toward the Massey. When its nose pushed against the Massey’s big rear wheel, he gunned the throttle. With the Allis he pushed the big tractor two inches upward. Then the wheels of the little Allis began to slip and spin and dig themselves down. He killed the engine and set the brake. Though the Massey was too heavy to push farther, he had taken some of the weight off Jewell Hartmeir. There was a full water bottle on the Allis. He threw it to Tom, then leaped down. “Give him water—I’ll run for help,” Guy shouted.

      “Water,” Hartmeir groaned, and reached up for the bottle in Tom’s hands.

      Guy ran.

      By the time Martin and Helmer arrived with the big John Deere, the sheriff’s car was wailing toward the field. The Massey creaked upward. Jewell Hartmeir’s legs looked like burned steak. Martin and the deputy slid him, mumbling curses, onto the stretcher. Hartmeir groaned something.

      “Shock,” the deputy said. He leaned closer to try and make out the words.

      “Water,” Jewell Hartmeir groaned.

      “Water?” the deputy said. “He wants water. Anybody got any water?”

      Guy turned to Tom. “Is there water left?”

      Tom nodded. He handed Guy the jug. From its weight Guy knew there was a lot of water left. He spun off the lid. The jar was still full.

      9

      Guy and Tom and Mary Ann turned thirteen, then fourteen, then fifteen. Guy grew tall and thin, a sandhill crane with long bony wings and straight, skinny rods for legs. Tom grew wide rather than tall. His shoulders broadened, his chest deepened, his arms and legs thickened with muscle that, when he walked, gave him a springy, cat-like gait. Mary Ann grew not tall nor wide. She grew deep.

      Tits. That’s what Mary Ann grew. By thirteen they were the size of softballs. By fourteen they were large Texas grapefruit. By fifteen they were big cantaloupes verging on watermelons. At fifteen and a half she stopped showing them to Guy and Tom. She wouldn’t even go skinny-dipping with them at No Medicine Lake unless it was pitch dark with no moon.

      “Hey, you shouldn’t feel that way about your tits,” Guy said.

      “Yeah, I thought most girls wanted tits,” Tom said to her. “Now that you got ’em, you don’t want ’em.”

      “I didn’t need ’em this goddamn big,” she said.

      Two junior high boys turned around and giggled.

      “You two look around again and the Indian is gonna tear your scalps off. With his fingernails,” Guy said. Tom made claws of his hands. The two boys’ eyes turned golf-ball size; they turned around and sat straight in their seat without even looking out the window.

      Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sat in their usual seat, midway back, on Bus #33, the Indian Bus. White farm and resort kids sat up front. Indian kids took the rear. Every morning #33 wound its way across the reservation on a circuitous, hour-long trip to Flatwater High.

      The high school was a two-story brick building just off Main Street, a building with a slumped back and acne. To save money on construction in the 1920s, the Flatwater school board voted to use local pine rather than western lumber, and bricks made from local yellow clay rather than the hotter-fired red brick from southern Minnesota. Now, in 1969, the school roof drooped, and chips of yellow brick formed a deep, crunchy ring underfoot around the school’s perimeter. A new school was planned, but a local bond issue failed four years in a row. Maybe when the Vietnam War was over, people said. Then they would build. Right now there were Communists to fight overseas. First things first.

      When Bus #33 arrived at Flatwater High the town kids were already there. They leaned against the flagpole, lounged on the front steps and lockers with spitballs, paper clips, and rubber bands. They formed a gauntlet as the Indian Bus unloaded.

      Guy and Tom and Mary Ann always walked inside together. Because their group of three was not white, not Indian, not boy or girl, the Flatwater toughs did not know what to make of them. Guy and Tom and Mary Ann usually walked unimpeded. Unstung.

      Inside there were fights—a sudden flail of fists, the thuds of bodies against lockers. Usually the fighters were brown and white. But the fights ended quickly when Tom LittleWolf appeared. Like a boxing referee, Tom butted, pushed, sometimes threw the fighters overhead into the crowd. Usually he ended up in the principal’s office for his effort.

      “You fuckin’ apple!” a nose-bleeding young Indian kid once screamed at Tom.

      “Apple. Why did he call Tom an apple?” Mary Ann asked.

      “Think about it,” Guy said.

      Later Mary Ann said she still didn’t get it.

      “Red on the outside, white on the inside,” Guy said.

      In their classes Guy was good at English and social studies but lousy at math and chemistry. Tom got A’s in art but D’s in civics and history. Mary Ann got C’s in math but D’s and F’s in everything else.

      “My mind goes blank,” she said. She was sixteen now. Her tits had stopped growing, but then she had grown rounder all over. Her yellow hair was longer now, which made her look shorter and thicker. She wore excessive lipstick and rouge, plus strong perfume she bought in the dime store, and often she smelled sharply sweet and sweaty. To Guy, Mary Ann began to look like the women he saw at the feed mill. The women with squalling children. The women with sunburned faces and strong arms in sleeveless blouses. The woman with big, chapped hands. The women who came driving their husbands’ pickups that pulled wagons of ear corn and oats and then sat uptown in the cafes while the cow feed was ground. Often Mary Ann skipped her history class and went uptown to watch the soaps in the same cafes.

      “The teacher asks me something and everything in my mind just freezes,” she continued. “It’s like there’s a fuel line in my brain that gets a slug of dirt in it. The engine shuts down. I just sit there. People laugh.”

      “Tell me who laughs,” Tom growled. They were sitting in the school’s basement cafeteria. The tables were crowded. Indian kids sat at the far, corner table where the light was dimmest from a boarded-over window. Guy and Tom and Mary Ann sat at table number three, which was part Indian, part white. White kids took up most of the cafeteria, including the honor society and student council creeps who sat at the table closest to the faculty dining room and its picture window on to the rest of the cafeteria. The tables were crowded but, as usual, there was an empty seat beside Tom. “Just point the fuckers out,” Tom said.

      Mary Ann looked up from her plate of Spanish rice. “You can’t go around roughing up people for me the rest of my life,” she said. She looked away, up through the glass-block basement windows. “Shit, I should quit school and get a job.” She looked back to them. “I could. I’m sixteen. There’s nothin’ anyone could do about it. Get a job, buy a car, say to hell with all this.”

      “What kind of job?” Guy said, glancing at Tom.

      Mary Ann shrugged. “Uptown. Waitressing maybe. Or somethin’.”

      “Or somethin’,” Guy said.

      “Get married maybe too.”

      Tom spit out some milk.

      “Married!” Guy said.

      “You can get married at sixteen,” Mary Ann said, pushing out her red-painted lips.

      “But who to?” Tom said. “First somebody’s got to want to marry you.”

      “I could find someone. Easy,” Mary Ann said.

      Across two tables sat Kurt Fenske, the beefy brown-eyed basketball center. Alternately Fenske stared opened-mouthed