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CHAPTER 1

The Careful Indian

Earl walks alone looked up from the cone of light where his calculus book lay. Through the kitchen doorway, he could see his grandmother at the far end of the living room, watching television and beading. Earl liked to wait until dark to work on calculus, liked the small reading lamp on the kitchen table, the way dark seemed to crowd in upon him and the way the light reflected off the pages, the equations clean and precise there. But he felt restless tonight. The equations jumbled in his brain. Black and meaningless marks. He looked from his island of light through the intervening dark to his grandmother sitting in her own island of light, the soft incandescence of the floor lamp bathing her face.

Her hand dipped, a bird's head, the silver needle a beak, bobbing into the tray of beads, stringing eight of them like droplets of colored ice that slid down the invisible thread. From Earl's view the beads seemed to float in the air, following each other, until his grandmother's hand pulled them taut against the moccasin in her lap, then circled toward the tray again. Earl didn't dance in powwows, but it seemed to him the real dance in those moccasins was what his grandmother did. How could someone not dance well, wearing all that movement she poured into them?

Earl's mother was in her bedroom, preparing to sleep. His grandmother had the television turned so low it was barely a murmur. In the silence Earl heard the wind outside shaking the trees his father had planted around the house. Earl's mother claimed the sighing of those trees was his father's voice. But it sounded to Earl like wind and leaves. What good was a voice you didn't understand? If Earl heard anything at all in that sound, it was just an old, old argument between things that stayed and things that moved. Stone and wind. Inyan and Taku Skanskan. His uncle Norm would claim, of course, that there was no argument. Just different ways of being, the rock that gets kicked into life. But, Earl thought, even if every fall the trees let a part of themselves fly with the wind, rove the world, that part was brown, dead, lifeless. Not a model for leaving a place, Earl thought. Better to leave on your own volition — not pushed, and not dead.

He turned back to his equations. The green line on the graphing calculator his mother had bought him curved upward through its matrix. A green and curving road, approaching something, never reaching it. And the never-reaching was the solution. Everything just an infinite approach. Earl touched the OFF button with the eraser of his pencil. The line dimmed, disappeared. Its reddish afterimage floated for a moment in the air. With the eraser Earl pushed the calculator around, back and forth, then in circles, then in opposite circles. The wind blew, the leaves chattered. It all made Earl restless. He glanced sideways at his grandmother again, far away in her litde light.

"I'm going to go out," he said.

His voice carried across the room. His grandmother turned her face to him. The lenses of her black-rimmed glasses were glazed blue by the television's light, then cleared in an instant as the angle of reflection changed, and her dark eyes shone through. She nodded. Her hands swooped again into the tray of beads. Eyes of their own.

Earl's mother appeared in the living room, holding a hairbrush, a shadow in the darkness. She heard whatever she wanted to hear, no matter where she was in the house. Her long black hair was spread about her shoulders. Earl could barely see her face. She lifted the brush over her head, swept it down and then outward. Earl heard the faint, static sizzle and in the dark saw the myriad sparks within her hair. Then it fell from the end of the brush.

"Be careful, Earl," she said.

Earl closed the calculus book. Careful: that should be his name. Careful Walks Alone. Who else in the senior class, Indian or white, was doing homework on a Friday night? And not even homework he had to do, but extra work because he felt like it. He picked up the book, stuffed the calculator into its case, stood, walked into the living room and past his mother without looking at her. He kept his face impassive. In his bedroom he found a nylon windbreaker, shrugged into it, slipped on Nikes. The wind gusted harder. His mother brushed her long, dark hair every night, but sometimes Earl wanted to ask her why. What was the point? Who was she brushing it for? He knew: his father. Cyrus Walks Alone. Earl knew roads could have sudden endings. He knew if light grew bright enough it could be the hardest thing in the world. But he wanted to tell his mother, sometimes, not to be so careful. And not to expect it so much from him. As far as Earl knew, his father had been careful. What good had it done him?

Earl stopped his thoughts. He meant no disrespect by them. He just got tired of his father's residence in his mother's eyes, his father's story in everything his mother said. Why couldn't Cyrus just be his father — absent father, dead father, even unremembered father if he had to be — instead of always a lesson?

Earl walked back out to the living room. His mother was still standing there. She watched him go to the door. Earl turned the knob, then stopped. Couldn't go out like this.

"I'll be careful, Mom," he said. "I just got to get out, you know?"

She held the brush toward him, made a little circle of concession. He went. Beyond the grove of trees around the house, the wind was snorting through the dark. Huffing. Rising and falling. But here, near the house, the air hardly moved. The trees in their bending took the wind into themselves. Earl glanced up. Even the stars were distorted by the restless atmosphere. He got into his mother's car and drove up the short gravel drive. The moment he left the circle of trees, he felt the wind strike the car, angling across the highway into Twisted Tree. Earl held the steering wheel against it, keeping the car straight. A great blob of white came rolling out of the sky and flattened against the windshield with a sucking sound. Earl jumped, then saw it was only a plastic grocery bag. It reinflated immediately and sailed away, a prairie jellyfish.

Four empty cattle trucks banged down the highway that divided Twisted Tree. North of the highway was county land, south of it the reservation, so that the town lay half-in and half-out of the rez. Earl turned the corner near Donaldson's Foods. His headlights swept over Eddie Little Feather and one of his friends sleeping near the Dumpsters. Meal-and-a-nap, Earl thought. The men were tangled together, limbs askew, breathing each other's sour breath, having shifted in their drugged sleep toward each other.

Earl circled the town aimlessly. Caught in the stunted and dying trees in the cemetery and on the barbwire fence that encircled it and on the stiff stalks of yucca and sage that grew on the hillsides above it, more plastic bags flapped, ballooning away from the wind. A few years earlier, Donaldson's Foods had switched from paper to plastic. It had taken those years for the bags to accumulate, but now they occupied all sharp and jutting edges in the town, leaving nothing for new bags to catch on. Through the closed windows of the car, Earl heard the bags' chattering. Impaled and visible ghosts. From the corner of his eye, he saw them waving in the cemetery, but he refused to look there. He made a U-turn outside of town and drove back in. Another empty cattle truck, clangorous on the potholes. On top of a rusty pile of machinery in the empty lot where someone had once tried to start a manufacturing business, a single plastic bag fluttered. Earl saluted it — a new edge discovered — and drove on by.

He turned onto a gravel side street. Might as well entertain Bambi. A pit bull mutt appeared in his headlights, its mouth moving, its teeth flashing white. Earl drove straight toward the dog. Bambi had once managed to stop a tourist's motor home, the driver afraid to run him over. The story was well-known. When the motor home stopped, Bambi advanced to a position right under the bumper, barking madly, growling ferociously, slobbering prodigiously. The driver tried backing up. Bambi followed, and the driver couldn't gain enough speed to leave the dog behind. Bambi finally cornered the motor home when the driver missed the turn at the end of the block and ended up in Roger Robideaux's yard. Roger, retrieving a beer from his refrigerator, looked up and saw the motor home's back end heaving hugely over the washout at the edge of the gravel street and then catapulting across the dusty yard toward his window. By the time it stopped, Roger could see nothing but white and theILDER of WILDERNESS painted across the back. He heard Bambi's snarling, realized what was happening, and laughed so hard he forgot to open his beer. He walked out his door, around the motor home, and right up to Bambi. Planting his left: foot, he kicked the dog in the ribs with his right. Bambi yelped and slunk away. Roger stepped to the side and with a broad, two-armed sweep-and-bow and a toothless grin showed the terrified driver and his wife their freedom. As the motor home passed him, Roger looked down, saw the beer in his hand, twisted the top, and, greatly satisfied, took a deep drink, already thinking how he would tell this story. With his head still tilted back, he thought of the line he would end it with: "The trouble with being a tourist is you never know which dogs you can kick." The saying had become part of Twisted Tree's folklore.

Earl pinned Bambi between his headlights and maintained his speed. He watched the dog grow in size before him, eyes shining redly, saliva a silver spray in the reflected light. Suddenly the dog snapped its mouth shut and hobbled arthritically to the right. It barely avoided the wheel and disappeared beside the car, then reappeared in Earl's rearview mirror, red in the red dust of his taillights, a wooden dog, joints locked, lumbering and pained and then dust-swallowed.

"Some day, Bambi," Earl spoke to the dust in the mirror, "you won't move fast enough."

Counting cattle trucks and plastic bags, playing chicken with deluded dogs: nightlife in Twisted Tree. Nightlife, at least, for the careful ones. Earl often entertained himself by thinking of his life like one of the documentaries his grandmother watched, as if there were a hidden camera following him and a narrator explaining things. At the stop sign by the abandoned bowling alley he looked up and down the empty stretch of road. The Careful Indian, he thought to himself, stops at all stop signs before proceeding cautiously onto the highway. Trucks can come out of nowhere and run the Careful Indian over. Earl stepped slowly on the accelerator and crept onto the highway. The Careful Indian is also a favorite prey of policemen.

Three blocks away the stoplight at the intersection of the highway and Main Street changed from green to yellow to red and back to green again, regulating traffic that didn't exist, going about its precise and useless business. As he drove slowly toward it, Earl thought of going out to see his uncle, Norman Walks Alone. But even Norm might not appreciate Earl's driving up to his wheel-less motor home at this time of night. Earl stopped at the light, watched the empty intersection change colors. He didn't move when the light went green. The Careful Indian would rather stop than go. He believes that two green lights are twice as safe as one. On the second green he pulled away. As he did, the solution to the calculus problem he'd been working on when he looked up at his grandmother earlier in the evening flashed into his head. He could go back home and start the next problem.

Earl made a U-turn in the middle of the highway and went back through the stoplight on a red. At times the Careful Indian can change into the Mathematical Indian, and when this happens he can lose all caution. This is when his life is most in danger. Driven to do math by forces deep inside himself, the Mathematical Indian will sometimes exceed the speed limit. Earl watched the speedometer rise to 66 miles an hour, then held it there. He approached the grove of trees that marked his place, a dark circle on the prairie. He thought of the parties going on tonight. He was never invited, but he knew of them. Heard the talk. There was one out at Larson's stock dam, mostly white kids, and one on top of Tower Hill, mostly Indian. He slowed down as he approached his driveway, thought of his mother in the house, gone to bed, listening even in her sleep for the sound of the car door, and his grandmother, for whom darkness and light did not correspond to sleep in any established pattern, staring into the TV, her face bluely lit, her hands dancing, ordering beads.

He let the car coast past the driveway. This behavior is something absolutely new. Earl put his foot back on the accelerator. He looked into the rearview mirror, saw the grove of trees diminish. "Why shouldn't I?" he said, watching them.

A few miles later he turned off the highway onto the gravel track that paralleled Red Medicine Creek into Antelope Park. Under the cottonwoods far back from the highway, other cars were parked. Earl stepped out. The drumbeat of music came from the hill above him, filtered by leaves, and the red lights of the television and radio towers blinked on and off high among the stars, disconnected, the towers themselves invisible. A softer, nearer spread of firelight lay along the top of the hill, an orange glow through the trees.

Indistinct voices. The chuckling of the creek. A single frog's clarinet calling. Smoke drifting down the hill, into the smell of cattails and water. Shaking cottonwood leaves. The sharp, clean smell of cedar cutting into the deep and fishy smell of Lostman's Lake from across the highway. Earl kept his hand on the roof of the car and gazed up the hill. He thought of the empty town. He thought of his mother sleeping. Of the cemetery ringed with plastic bags Wasted souls. The expectations of the dead.

Ssshhh. He shook his head. No thoughts like that. No disrespect.

He took his hand from the car and started up the hill.

It looks like the Careful Indian is in unfamiliar territory. Notice how he seems lost?

Earl thought of peeing on a bush. Marking territory. For the camera.

HE STOOD IN THE DARK OF THE CEDARS on top of the hill. About twenty young men and women, many of them in high school, stood or sat on the flat space surrounding the towers, where the NO TRESPASSING signs and the threats of prosecution had been defaced so long ago that even the inspiration to add new layers of graffiti had been defeated. Orange-tinted and shadowed faces bobbed in the rise and fall of flame: Ted Kills Many, Meredith Remembers Him, Gerald Dupree, Angie Long Feather, the Lemieux brothers. The only pure white kid was Willi Schubert, the German foreign-exchange student, who was eager to do anything Indian. As if drinking, Earl thought, was a different experience in Lakota than it was in any other culture. The great leveler: tip a bottle often enough and everyone becomes the same.

Talk and laughter, the Budweiser cans tipped up, set down. Well, Earl thought, here I am. But so was the story that had controlled his life for as long as he could remember. Headlights in the wrong lane, filling all space. That story was here. It was anywhere Earl went. He could defy it, but he couldn't walk away from it. At least not this easily. He thought to himself that he could still turn around, go back home. No one knew he'd come. He could watch, then leave.

Earl remembered the way his mother had looked when he brought home his first driver's license, proud of having passed the test, not a single written answer wrong and only a few points taken off for driving, not looking over his shoulder to check the blind spot once. His mother had taken the license from his hands, holding it by a corner, far from her face. She hadn't smiled. She hadn't even commented on the photograph. She'd just looked at the license as if it were some mildly unpleasant object, an unexpected bill perhaps. Her dangling red-bead and feather earrings shivered as she gazed.

"Just be careful," she said. And handed the license back. Earl shoved it into his pocket, felt its clear rectangular edges there. He'd been going to tell his mother how well he'd parallel parked, how the examiner had praised his precise following of instructions. Instead he'd mumbled, "I will be, Mom."

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Work of Wolves"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Kent Meyers.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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