Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

time?” Tom asked.

      Guy shook his head.

      “Come on, they’re killing you!”

      “Not yet,” Guy said.

      But when the elbows got too sharp and too low Guy finally nodded for the Maxi-Burger. On the next trip down-court the chief offender from the opposing team suddenly got an open chance to block a Pehrsson lay-up. But if Guy came from the right side, Tom sliced in from the left. Somewhere underneath the basket the three players sandwiched together with a crunch. Tom hit low, Guy high, and the opponent hit the floor on his back and head with a sound like a melon dropped from the top bleacher. The game stopped as the opponents dragged their player from the floor. The team managers wiped up sweat and sometimes blood from the floor with towels. Tom took the foul. Then the game resumed in a more civilized fashion.

      Sometimes the abuse took a different form.

      “Hey, Redman!” players hissed at Tom.

      “Hey, Tonto—where’s the Lone Ranger?”

      Guy’s passes usually kept Tom up-court or in the air, away from the mean shit at floor level. If it got too bad, Tom benched himself before he swung at someone. Then Coach Anderson immediately put in Jimi Henderson, a skinny, frizzy-haired guard with thick glasses who played electric guitar not unlike his idol Jimi Hendrix, and who had fingernails to match. Punji nails, it was rumored. Jimi kept his nails a quarter inch long, filed sharp, and, some players said, he dipped them in shit before each game. One swipe across a neck or chest or down a forehead left behind rake-teeth lines of blood.

      Jimi would take the foul. The offender would retire to the locker room, gauze, and disinfectant. For his efforts Jimi was afforded a couple of thirty-foot jumpers, none of which ever came close to the rim. And Tom soon came back into the game.

      That year, except for the first two games, the Flatwater Indians won all the rest. In snowy March the team found itself headed to the state basketball tournament in Minneapolis.

      The caravan of orange buses followed the Mississippi River south through Little Falls, Saint Cloud, Anoka. There began the north suburbs of the Twin Cities, unwinding rows of pastel tract homes each with a jungle-gym swing set in the backyard and a covered fishing boat on a trailer in the front yard. Both were submerged in snow. In the bus, to see better, the boys blew clear, blue ovals on the white frost of the window-panes. Most of them had never been to the city. They fell silent as the houses turned to shopping centers, the shopping centers to sagging white two-story houses of north Minneapolis, and then to old brick warehouses and flour mill silos along the Mississippi. Once Guy saw a brilliant coppery ringneck pheasant poised at the edge of a parking lot; behind the pheasant, trees ran down to the river. Guy twisted in his seat, pointing for Tom to see, but the bus had already passed. The pheasant was a photograph flashed once on a screen, then gone.

      The bus wove its way alongside the gray glass skyscrapers of downtown Minneapolis. The players scraped larger windows in the frost and pressed their cheeks against the glass to look up. The heat of their skin melted the ice and ran water. When from the cold they pulled away their faces, the water wavered and froze again. Then through the thin glaze of ice the tall buildings curved and bent, and stoplights and police lights throbbed like kaleidoscopic mirrors and lights in a fun house.

      “Hey, look at that big nigger in the Caddy!” someone from the back of the bus shouted. The bus swayed as the right-side riders rushed to look out left.

      Guy looked down. A big black man in sunglasses and driving a ’62 Cadillac with a chromed continental wheel waited at a stoplight just below them. A red-haired woman leaned close against him in the seat. The black man slowly looked up at the bus and seemed to meet Guy’s gaze. He held up his middle finger, then looked back to the traffic.

      “You fucker—you bastard,” the rear-seat riders jeered.

      “Pipe down, you guys,” the bus driver called.

      “Fucking rubes,” Guy murmured. But Tom didn’t answer. He was scraping ice and blowing on the glass to keep it clear.

      Leaned against each other, they watched the city pass. Once they saw two policemen with guns drawn push a black man spread-legged against the white police car. Another time they saw an old Indian weaving down the sidewalk holding a sheaf of newspapers under his arm. Tom twisted in his seat to watch the Indian until he disappeared into the crowd.

      ***

      The Flatwater Indians played at the University of Minnesota in William’s Arena. They lost their first game by thirty points to a Minneapolis suburban school that had more students than Flatwater had people. The Indians lost their second game, by sixteen this time, to an all-black team from north Minneapolis. Those players did things with the basketball Guy had seen only on TV. Finally, against a farm town from southern Minnesota whose scoring, like the Flatwater Indians’, came mainly from two players, the Indians won their last game by one point. Early and not unhappily out of the tournament, the boys from Flatwater had a free day to explore the city.

      “I’m supposed to take this to my mom’s cousin,” Tom said, removing a small, tightly wrapped package from the bottom of his duffel bag. “Wild rice,” he said.

      Guy looked at the address. Franklin Avenue. It meant nothing to him. “So let’s go,” he said.

      With two wrong city bus rides, Guy and Tom ended up on Hennepin Avenue, dead center, downtown Minneapolis. The streets were salted and slushy, the traffic fast and loud. Rather than try another bus ride, they walked twenty blocks south to Franklin.

      “Must be the right street,” Tom said. They began to see only Indians. The city Indians wore their hair in long, greasy braids. Tom said hello, but the silent city Indians passed with only a sidelong glance at Guy. In twenty-degree weather they wore layers of old clothes or green army coats. The city walkers hunched over as if they were clutching something to their bellies. Often the gold cap of a wine bottle protruded from a pocket. None of the city Indians wore caps or gloves.

      On Franklin Avenue most of the stores and gas stations were boarded up and closed. Sheets of plywood became street blackboards.

      “BIA Steals.”

      “Red Power!”

      “Custer Died for White Sins.”

      “Red Brother/Yellow Brothers Unite—Save Vietnam from Nixon.”

      “Control Rent—Kill Your Landlord.”

      One word they saw again and again was “AIM.”

      “AIM for All Indians.”

      “AIM for Street Safety.”

      “AIM for Neighborhood Watch Patrol.”

      “White Police Harassment? Call AIM.” Always there was a phone number.

      “What’s AIM?” Guy asked.

      “Beats me.” Tom shrugged. He held up the address to the doorway number of a three-story brick apartment building. The steps were cracked, their edges crumbly and rounded. “This is it,” he murmured.

      They went inside. The foyer smelled of piss. A metal grid of buttons and buzzers hung forward by a snarl of thin wires. On the floor the old carpet was worn to its nap all over. Beneath an iron radiator rusty water dripped with the sound of a ticking clock into the overflowing water of a flat pan.

      They found the stairs to the third floor. The stairwell smelled even stronger of piss. An old Indian man lay sleeping in a nest of rags and torn newspaper underneath the stairs.

      “Jesus . . . ,” Tom said softly.

      In the dim hallway they heard TV game shows and crying kids. Behind one door someone coughed deep and rattling. They found number 387. Behind the door people were shouting, women’s voices. Tom glanced at Guy, then knocked. The arguing stopped. Someone stomped across the room toward the door. The footsteps slowed before the door, which opened only the length of its safety chain. One round brown eye peered out at