Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

day Guy received a postcard from St. Anne’s, Manitoba. That was where her family was. On the card was a picture of a river. On the ninth day Guy awoke in the morning to find his mother in the kitchen making scrambled eggs.

      She did not speak of her absence. Guy did not ask. It was as if time, turning on the little sprockets of the clock, had jumped its chain, had slipped ahead several days, then caught again. Things went on as usual. Except for one thing.

      The LittleWolfs’ blue Pontiac did not come again. Every Saturday Guy watched for its blue speck to appear down the road. But only farm pickups, the milk truck, and occasional tractors pulling grain wagons came along. In the garden Guy hoed potatoes. He trimmed and hauled to the chickens the tomato vines and cabbage leaves and carrots that had run to seed. Soon he hardly looked up at the sound of a vehicle on the road. Around him there were only the endless rows of potatoes, peas, and beans.

      But once when he was head-down, hacking along with his hoe, thinking of nothing at all, which was the best way to hoe potatoes, he heard a scraping noise. The sound of gravel on tin. He looked up. There, out on the road, spinning in dusty circles on an old blue bicycle, was Tom. Tom! Guy flung aside his hoe and raced from the garden.

      Tom would not come into the yard, so they took turns riding and then bucking each other down the road on the bicycle. Later they played in old man Schroeder’s windbreak. Among the close, even rows of pine trees, on the red prickly blanket of dead needles, they played cowboys and Indians. They hid from, stalked, and shot pinecones at each other the rest of the afternoon. And never did they speak of their parents.

      2

      On the Fourth of July, an hour before sundown, the rodeo ended in a pink haze. Guy and Tom sat atop the corral fence, faces into the sun. They were eight years old. Guy was nearly a head taller than Tom, his thin neck was sunburned red, and his hair was as white as the pigeons that dipped and fluttered above the grandstand. Tom had no neck; his black hair, shaved short, ended at his shoulders, wide shoulders that promised strong arms and a deep chest.

      Guy and Tom sat on the edge of their plank perch like two birds near flight. They wanted to watch the cattle jockeys whip the Brahma bulls into the trailers, but they also wanted to be first at the edge of the river for the Big Blast. Already town kids were deserting the corral fence. Already behind them people were filing from the grandstand. Already in the parking lot pickups spun their tires on the gravel and threw plumes of dust into the red sunlight.

      The biggest bull, a tatter of rope dragging between its legs, slammed forward into its trailer; Guy and Tom looked at each other. They leaped from their perch.

      They had no bicycles, which proved they were not town kids, but they could run. They dodged through the crowd. Their shadows weaved and darted among the walkers as they sped down the crowded, unpaved street. When they reached the asphalt streets of downtown the dust of the fairgrounds fell away. At Main Street the day’s heat, trapped by the brick buildings, washed over them like an oven door opening in their faces. The tar was soft underfoot. A block beyond Main Street they smelled water.

      At first the river’s smell was only a faint coolness in their mouths. Then it flowed thicker over their cheeks and foreheads. In another block, the water scent divided itself into sharper layers of smells. Wet willow wood. Green algae. Somewhere a rotting duck. The faint vinegar and iron smell of the municipal sewage plant downstream.

      But they were not first at the edge of the river. Already town kids lined the shore of the Bekaagami River. Tom jerked his head at a big willow tree whose roots snaked into the water. He squatted and made a hand cradle. Guy took a running step, hit Tom’s hands with his right foot, and went up like a pole-vaulter. He caught the lowest limb and pulled himself up. Then he reached down for Tom. White hand on brown wrist, brown hand on white, they scrambled up the loose bark to the crown of the tree until the limbs began to bend under their weight. Above the crowd, they could see everything.

      In front of their willow stretched the bay, a blue two-acre bulge of the Bekaagami River whose slow south side formed the Flatwater Municipal Swimming Beach. A long fly ball’s distance from shore floated the dynamite raft, a rick of brown logs eight feet in length. The logs were made of papier-mâché. They concealed the stick—some said ten sticks—of dynamite. Fourth of July was Dynamite Daze in Flatwater.

      Dynamite was the town’s founding father. In the 1890s Flatwater had grown around the thick peninsula that slowed the current of the river. The great rafts of white pine and Norway logs floating south to the lumber mills in St. Paul always tangled and jammed at Flatwater. There lumberjacks made a permanent encampment on the peninsula. Daily they dynamited the channel clear. Later Guy would come to see Flatwater as a town built on an impediment, see the constricted flow of the river and the town beside it as connected and metaphorical. But he did not understand that now. Right now he turned with Tom to check the height of the sun.

      “Nine minutes, tops,” Guy said.

      “Five,” Tom said immediately.

      “Bet,” Guy said.

      “Nickel,” Tom replied.

      “Shit, you don’t have a nickel,” Guy said.

      “You don’t have a watch,” Tom said.

      “Neither do you.”

      “Do too.”

      “Bet,” Guy said quickly. He knew Tom had no watch. This was easy money.

      Tom held out his arm and turned his palm and fingers sideways to the sun and to the horizon. Guy watched as Tom squinted over and then below his fingers. Tom peeled back two fingers, then a third. Sighted again.

      “Free,” Guy said suddenly, which meant the bet was off.

      Tom grinned. The sun shone on his wide white teeth and through the gap between them wide enough to hold a pencil. “Lucky I let you off,” he said. “See, here’s how I do it.” He squinted over his fingers again. “It’s simple. Every finger’s width is five minutes.”

      “Shit,” Guy said.

      Tom shrugged. “Try it with a clock sometime.”

      Guy was silent for a moment. “So where’d you learn that?” he asked.

      “Zhingwaak showed me.”

      Zhingwaak was the old Indian who lived on the reservation. He sang and drummed at the powwows, and told stories to the children. Guy’s father said that was because Zhingwaak was too lazy to do any real work.

      “Was Zhingwaak a real medicine man once?” Guy asked.

      Tom shrugged.

      Guy turned back to watch the sun. He sighted over his fingers but the light hurt his eyes. Its orange glare shone on the white crown of the water tower, gleamed on the galvanized sides of the town grain elevator. Already Main Street was in shadow, and so were the white houses that ran in even rows like a picket fence down to the city beach.

      On the brown grass near the diving platform stood a circle of tourists. Black camera straps cut across flowered shirts. Inside the circle four or five Indians shuffled to the thudding of a drum. The drumming sounded weak and far away, like a partridge thudding his wings somewhere deep in the woods. The Indian powwows were organized by the Flatwater Jaycees. Guy’s father said that the powwow was to keep the tourists’ minds off the Bekaagami mosquitoes, keep the tourists’ wallets in Flatwater as long as possible.

      Tom followed Guy’s eyes to the dancers. He watched briefly, then looked away.

      Suddenly behind them at the shore an outboard motor coughed alive. Tom whooped. They whirled to face the river. It was time.

      The sheriff’s motorboat left the shore and plowed slowly toward the dynamite raft. In the late sunlight its waves spread like even windrows of wheat across a blue field. The boat slowed before the raft, bobbed sideways toward it. A green-headed mallard fluttered away from the water near the raft. Some people along the shore clapped. The sheriff leaned over the side of the boat and lit the fuse. When he jerked backward into the boat, his deputy gunned the engine.