Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver

to their feet on the dry grass. The lowest note of Zhingwaak’s cry flattened into a humming. For Guy the humming became a floor upon which he danced. He leaped and soared. He was the Flying Man at the end of his leather thong. Only Flying Man was bound and Guy was free. Guy planed and leaped with Tom as Zhingwaak’s wail came again.

      Suddenly the darkness washed away. They were flooded with a bright light. Guy squinted away from the white beam. The dancers froze in place. Sweat glinted on and then dripped from their chins.

      A voice came loud through a bullhorn. The police.

      “The Flatwater Fourth of July festivities are over, as it is now the fifth of July. The Jaycees have paid the powwow dancers in full. Therefore, the powwow is over. Please disperse at this time.”

      For a long moment there was silence. Then Zhingwaak’s drumstick thudded again. From the crowd something arced, shining, through the beam of the spotlight and shattered against the police car. A beer bottle. Then more bottles flying like falling stars. Crashing, tinkling. Then the harder thuds of stones.

      Suddenly people were shouting and falling. Policemen pushed through the crowd, jabbing with long sticks. One of the officers grabbed away Zhingwaak’s drumstick and broke it over his knee. He kicked aside the drum. “You—let’s go!” He jerked Zhingwaak’s arm behind him. Zhingwaak stumbled and fell. The policeman began to drag him across the gravel. Another Indian leaped on the policeman from behind. A policeman swung his stick. It hit the Indian’s head with a watermelon sound, and the Indian slumped to the ground.

      From nowhere Guy’s mother was pulling him away. Beside her an Indian man retreated into the shadows. Guy did not see his face.

      “Come,” Madeline shouted. She ran. Guy twisted his head back to look for Tom, for Zhingwaak. But there was only the glare of lights and shouting and the glint of the polished wood as the policeman’s sticks rose and fell.

      “Why . . . ,” Guy cried, “why did the policeman come? Why did they take Zhingwaak?”

      In the shadow of the stone beach house his mother held him. They looked back at the fighting. “Because . . . it’s very late,” she murmured.

      “It wasn’t late,” Guy said. He started to cry, burning heaves in his throat and chest. “Not for the Indians it wasn’t late.”

      His mother turned his face away from the fighting. Another police car, its red lights flashing, wailed past them.

      “Yes, it’s late,” she murmured. “Especially for the Indians.”

      3

      One day at the end of July in the summer when they were nine, Guy and Tom were digging in against a panzer attack. All around the farm, dust clouds moved up and down the reservation. The Germans were clever. They had disguised their tanks and halftracks as combines.

      But Guy and Tom were not fooled. By two o’clock in the afternoon their foxhole was nearly ready. Tom was holding and Guy was nailing down the last boards when Guy realized his hammer was striking from sunlight to shadow. A shadow had crept across the yellow sand and up the plank wall so slowly that neither he nor Tom had thought about it. Guy stopped pounding. They whirled and shaded their eyes as they looked up. Above them was the dark, stubby outline of a kid. One corncob grenade could have finished them, so Guy and Tom scrambled out of the hole.

      They stared at the kid. He had short, unevenly sheared blond hair that lay in flat, matted ringlets around his head. His face was melon-round and smudged with dirt. In its center were two blue eyes with black freckles of dirt in their four corners. He wore a gray T-shirt, which long ago had been white, and baggy bib overalls tied at the waist with twine and sheared off just below the knees. The frayed ends of the overalls hung down to brown feet that wore no shoes. Guy stared at the kid’s feet. They looked like saddle leather.

      “You a Nazi?” Tom asked.

      The kid was silent. Tom and then Guy stepped closer. Then Guy could smell the kid. He smelled like the bottom of a calf pen where the piss settled and burned the yellow straw red and when you turned the straw over with a fork the ammonia smell made your eyes water. Guy jumped sideways, up-breeze.

      “Jesus, you stink!” Tom said.

      The kid struck forward low like a snake and took Tom down with an ankle tackle. Guy leaped forward and in a moment the three of them were wrestling on the dry grass. But it was like wrestling a skunk. In another moment Guy and Tom were struggling to get away from the smell. They leaped back into their foxhole and pointed their wooden submachine guns at the kid.

      The kid stared down at them again. In the silence Guy looked at the kid’s curly hair, his short pants, his T-shirt.

      “If you’re not a Nazi, then who are you?” he asked.

      In the silence Tom whispered, “Spies can’t speak English.”

      “You got no name?” Guy said.

      “I gots a name,” the kid said.

      “So what is it.”

      “Maranhutmire,” the kid said.

      “Maranhutmire, what kind of name is that?” Tom said.

      The kid picked up a stone.

      “What I meant was,” Tom said quickly, “is that your first name or last?”

      “Could be both,” Guy whispered. “Like Paladin.”

      The kid said his name again, slower this time. Maran. Hurtmire. Maryan.

      “Mary Ann!” Guy said suddenly. He looked at Tom. They both stared and their mouths fell open. This was no kid. This was a girl.

      Mary Ann Hartmeir was the only daughter, among four brothers, of Jewell Hartmeir. There was no Mrs. Hartmeir. She had died of leu-kemia when Mary Ann, the fourth child, was three years old. When she died, Jewell Hartmeir had moved his children from Georgia up to Minnesota because down south the niggers were taking over. If the weather was cold in Minnesota, at least he didn’t have to work with niggers.

      Later Guy would hear this and more as his father and Jewell Hartmeir talked. Right now he and Tom climbed back out of the foxhole.

      “So where do you live?” he asked her. He knew most of the kids on this part of the reservation.

      The girl jerked her head north.

      “On a farm?”

      She nodded yes.

      “Whose farm?”

      “Ourn.”

      “Whose farm did it used to be?”

      She shrugged. Guy thought of the farms north from his own. There was only one possibility, the old Abrahamson place with the burned-down buildings. The barn had burned, and Abrahamson, who was older than Guy’s grandfather, had gone out west to live with his daughter. When the farm lay empty, the Indians had burned the other buildings.

      “Are the buildings all wrecked and burned?”

      She nodded.

      “What are you going to do for a house?” Tom said.

      “We gots a house,” she said. “A wheel house.”

      “A wheel house,” Guy said.

      Tom began to choke with laughter. “A trailer house, she means. Shit. A wheel house, can you believe it?”

      Mary Ann drew back her arm. She still held the stone. Tom jumped behind Guy.

      “He didn’t mean nothing,” Guy said quickly. “He’s my brother. My retarded brother.”

      Mary Ann’s eyes widened. She leaned over to stare at Tom, who crossed his eyes and let spit roll down the side of his mouth. She snickered. Her teeth were yellowish-green along her gums. Tom hunched over and began to gimp about in a circle and make moaning noises and claw at the air.

      She covered her mouth