Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

Mary Ann often got rides home with Kurt Fenske.

      “She’s fucking him. For sure,” Guy whispered to Tom. He and Tom, in the back row of biology class, had developed the LittleWolf-Pehrsson Opthalmological Virgin Indicator Theory. It held that a close-up, extended look into a girl’s eyes revealed whether or not she was fucking.

      “What, have I got something in my eye or something?” Mary Ann said, leaning away from them.

      “Thought I saw something,” Guy said.

      Tom leaned forward for a closer look.

      “Yeah, I think you’re right,” he said.

      “Fuck you two,” she said.

      Rather than get a job, Mary Ann decided to become a cheerleader. Her boyfriend, Kurt, mainly by reason of bulk, was the long-standing team center. If Mary Ann were a cheerleader, she could cheer especially for him. Plus there would be the long, dark bus rides home from games in other towns.

      But Guy said, “Nah, you don’t want to be a cheerleader.” He knew she wouldn’t make it. The cheerleaders were all town girls, perky blondes with short hair and little tits and great cartwheels.

      “I can jump as good as any of ’em,” Mary Ann said.

      She demonstrated. “Rah!” Her great tits bounced.

      Tom grimaced. Guy looked away.

      “Cheerleading is really dumb if you think about,” Tom said. “You run around clapping and screaming. And the crowd just wants to see the game, not the cheerleaders.”

      “So why do the TV cameras zoom in on the Dallas Cowgirls all the time, huh?” Mary Ann said immediately.

      Guy and Tom were silent.

      “Tryouts are next week,” she said. “I been practicing for a month. You just watch me.”

      Cheerleading tryouts were held before a school assembly. In the auditorium the bleachers faced the basketball floor. Across the floor, on the high cement-block wall, painted in red and black, was the school insignia, an Indian headdress crossed with a tomahawk. “Go, Fight, Win! Flatwater Indians!” was painted in tall letters below.

      Miss Simpson, a gray-haired, long-skirted history teacher who was also the cheerleading adviser, stood before a microphone. Beside her was a table manned by three other teachers and a record player. The teachers started the same record for each girl, then noted on paper the duration and intensity of the applause.

      The girls waited in a row of chairs to the left side. For uniformity’s sake, each girl had to wear a short black skirt and a red school-letter sweater. Since there were not enough red sweaters, the first girls changed clothes in the locker room and gave their sweaters to the last girls.

      Mary Ann waited near the end of the row as several girls wheeled and bounced their way over the floor. Her turn approached. Guy saw Jennifer Price, a blond senior and already a cheerleader for three years, confer with two other seniors. Jennifer giggled into her hand, then came forward and handed a sweater to Mary Ann. Mary Ann went to change. Guy didn’t see her again until Miss Simpson called her name and the record began.

      As Mary Ann ran onto the floor the boys began to whistle and thud their feet on the bleachers. Mary Ann’s sweater had been taken from the smallest girl, probably Jennifer Price herself; it hung on Mary Ann like a short, orange curtain on a big window. Every time she leaped, the sweater rode up and exposed the white bottom of her bra.

      Intent on her routine, Mary Ann bounced this way and that across the floor. “Jesus, she did practice,” Guy murmured. Her cartwheels were straight and high. She popped up from splits like a sturdy grasshopper. Her sweater rode up each time. Sometimes she remembered to tug it down and other times she didn’t. From the corner of his eye Guy saw Miss Simpson waving her hand at the teachers who worked the record player. But the other teachers stared at Mary Ann with slack jaws.

      Mary Ann’s final series was a cartwheel, then a backflip in a split, something no other girl had tried. She wheeled, flipped. And on the last, scratchy note of the song, she landed in a perfect split—arms out, legs out—except that her sweater came to rest in a narrow band just under her armpits. Unaware, she beamed at the roaring crowd. The bleachers thundered. The boys screamed.

      Miss Simpson scuttled across the floor and yanked down Mary Ann’s sweater. Mary Ann looked down, shrugged, then smiled and waved to the cheering crowd.

      On Wednesday, Guy and Tom waited with Mary Ann for Miss Simpson to post the list. “What about that backflip, huh?” Mary Ann said. “Did you see any other backflips?”

      “No,” Tom said.

      “Listen,” Guy began. Mary Ann had already paid six dollars down on a red and black letter sweater.

      “Did you hear applause like that for any other girl?” she said, grinning.

      “No,” Tom said. He looked at Guy.

      “Listen,” Guy said again. “Miss Simpson . . . she controls the whole thing. She can pick anyone she wants to.”

      “The most applause wins,” Mary Ann said immediately. “That’s the rules. It’s just like Queen for a Day. And I got the most applause.”

      At precisely twelve noon Miss Simpson came through the door of the faculty lounge, posted the list with one jab of a thumbtack, then disappeared back into the lounge. Girls crowded around the list. Alternately they shrieked or walked away in silence.

      Mary Ann did not walk away. She stood staring at the list without her name until she was alone before it. She waited there. She waited as if the paper were a magnet that would gradually draw her onto its surface, or as if it were a window through which she could pass. Guy and Tom stood to the side and waited for her. Finally the bell rang.

      “Come on,” Guy said. He tugged her arm but she jerked away.

      “Next year,” Guy said. “You’ll make it next year.”

      Without turning, she shook her head. “Ain’t gonna be any next year,” she whispered.

      10

      Mary Ann no longer rode #33 to Flatwater High. But then neither did Guy and Tom. As soon as Guy got his driver’s license, which was the fall of his junior year, he bought a car, a black two-door 1957 Chevy with red interior. He bought it from a gray-haired widow woman who had begun to confuse the accelerator with the brake pedal. The Chevy was dented. The woman’s middle-aged son made her sell.

      Guy’s mother helped him buy the Chevy. “I’ve got some egg money saved,” she said without his asking. “You should buy it. Then you could get away from the chores more. Stay after school. You’ve always wanted to play basketball. You and Tom could go out for the team. You could get away more from the farm, from the reservation. You two could take a summer trip, go to Minneapolis, to Winnipeg, to California. Anywhere.”

      By the second game of the basketball season, Guy, who was now six feet four, displaced Kurt Fenske as starting center. Fenske quit the team and began at noon hour to smoke in the parking lot across from school.

      Tom played guard, benching Arnold Granland, who spoke to no one, not even to his girlfriend, Jennifer Price, for the remainder of the school year.

      And the team began to win.

      Guy and Tom, from their years of hayloft basketball, played to each other. Off each other. Guy cleared the rim of rebounds and passed up-court before his tennis shoes touched wood. Tom spurted ahead for twisting, hanging lay-ups. Guy followed up to tip in the few balls of Tom’s that did not fall. They were Pehrsson-LittleWolf, LittleWolf-Pehrsson, depending on the bounce of the ball; any stranger tuning in to the local radio broadcasts of the games would mistake them for one person.

      The team regularly won by twenty points. By thirty. More. There was talk in Flatwater, in the barbershops, in the cafes, of a trip to the state tournament in Minneapolis.

      Opposing teams knew that to