after the atrocities took place. Now, José seemed astounded to learn that his people’s nightmare had taken place in the shadow of the historic fort he had visited on school field trips.
“I ain’t gonna lie, dawg,” he said earnestly, “that’s some fucked-up shit.”
Later that day, around midnight, fatigue overtook rage. José’s eyes rolled like greased marbles under swollen lids as we sat in the living room of my apartment. My kids were with their mother that night, freeing me to smoke weed while he downed Coronas.
Eventually I showed José to my bedroom, gave him one of my antianxiety pills, and demanded the Chinese fighting knives he carried in his waistband.
He handed them over reluctantly.
“Gotsta have those knives, bro,” he said, following me into the kitchen. “I ain’t about to walk the streets without them.”
When I questioned his need to bring the weapons to bed, he replied flatly, “Sometimes I gotsta back some motherfuckers off.”
I assured him I would double-check the locks, and provide protection while he slept. He hovered nearby as I set the ornate chrome blades in the cupboard above the sink. Then we both crashed.
I awoke on the couch just before dawn. I lay listening to the thump of my heart, feeling my blood pulse like acid through my body. I flipped on the light in the bathroom. My cheeks were lined and my eyes subsumed in puffy sockets. In the past four months I had lost 25 pounds, and I looked as if I had aged five years.
I lay back down and stayed there, excruciatingly aware of the crescent moon slicing the jagged rooftops across the street until sunrise. It was then that I heard José tiptoe down the stairs. He paused at the edge of the couch, seemingly surprised to find my eyes open. He complained that he hadn’t slept, then went to the kitchen cupboard, jammed the Chinese fighting knives into the waistband of his jeans, and headed for the front door.
I knew José was lying when he claimed he was “funna bus it home, back to the crib to get a clean ’fit.” Even after a terrible night, his Enyce shirt was nicely pressed, and his jeans still held the pleats he had ironed in the day before.
I insisted on driving him home.
As we glided silently to Sibley Manor, it was increasingly clear to me that José was about to make a life-altering mistake. When we arrived outside his building, he tried to slip away quickly. “Alright then, dawg,” he said, pulling the door handle.
“Are you coming back?” I asked.
He pulled his leg inside, clicked the door shut, and spoke with surprising directness. “The people I’m from, we use violence to settle things. It’s just the way it is. What we know.”
I threw his logic back at him. “You’re not crazy if you know you’re crazy. You don’t have to do that. You can forgive Joan.”
José paused, then admitted that he still loved Joan. But, he added, he would never be able to forgive her.
“You knew Joan had a thing with Sonic when you two were split up, and a couple nights ago you still loved her enough to marry her,” I said. “If you really loved her then, you would still love her now.”
José took this in silently. He wondered aloud if Joan might agree to give up “that little hasapa,” Lakota slang for a black baby. Then he asked to use my phone to call her.
Joan answered.
José said he loved her and needed to talk. He said he could forgive her, and wanted to try again. His apparent transformation from juvenile thug to mature young man was convincing. I drove off from Sibley Manor believing him, a state of delusion that would last until he appeared at my door a few nights later, out of breath and trembling.
He explained quickly that he had just sprinted across Interstate 94 from Frogtown, after “blasting that Sonic motherfucker with a sawed-off.” I would later learn that he had waited for Sonic outside Joan’s mother’s house, where she and the baby were staying. When Sonic appeared, José shot out the rear window of his Oldsmobile 98.
I pulled José into my apartment, looked up and down the street, and bolted the door.
The nights following this drama with José were stormy, with violent winds that lulled me to sleep the way unsettled weather always has. I didn’t hear much from him after the night he went after Sonic and crashed at my place, and I prayed that no news was good news.
In the meantime, I had decided that I was going to Hudson Bay, and José had agreed to join me. Planning for the expedition was still in the early stages when, on a morning that smelled like lightning and damp earth, I received a call from my friend Greeny, whom I had known since nursery school. He reported that a massive branch had fallen and smashed through my canoe, which was resting on sawhorses behind his house in Minneapolis.
I exhaled in a vaguely accusatory way. “Now what the hell am I going to paddle to Hudson Bay?”
I sped across the Lake Street bridge to his house on the other side of the Mississippi. The canoe, a 17-foot Royalex hull with ash seats, thwarts, and gunwales, had been with me since my sister Hawk gave it to me more than a decade earlier, when she moved to Colorado.
Growing up, Hawk was my idol. As a boy I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, Adam, but I preferred to sleep in Hawk’s room, on the floor beside her bed.
When I was 11 and Hawk was 13, she registered for a two-week session at a YMCA canoeing camp on West Bearskin Lake, along the Minnesota-Ontario border. I tagged along.
In subsequent years we camped with groups of kids our own age, but that first summer we went into the woods together. Sitting on a piney point on West Bearskin Lake, Hawk taught me how to smoke cigarettes and weed. She shared secrets that boys my age weren’t supposed to know, and showed me menstrual blood as it traveled down her leg following a midnight swim. Out on trail in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, she was always much tougher than me. She paddled harder and complained less about grueling portages, hunger, mosquitoes, and wet sleeping bags. I had always looked up to her, and the canoe she gave me had special meaning.
Greeny and I used handsaws to extricate the mangled boat from the leafy fist that had impaled it through the stern. When we yanked the offending branches from the hull, the gashes, two jagged wounds the size of apples, appeared to be terminal. Nearly certain that Hawk’s canoe would never float again, we gently loaded it onto my car.
I drove along River Road to downtown Saint Paul, and parked next to an unmarked loading dock behind an old brick warehouse. I climbed up a crumbling concrete lip and pounded on the garage door. Behind it I heard the proprietor of this underground repair shop bark impatiently, “Coming!”
Old Hal maintained no particular schedule, so I was thankful to find him at work. He opened the door and glared at me as if he were looking into the sun. The previous summer he had replaced the rotted gunwales on Hawk’s canoe, so I knew this was just his gruff way.
I wandered around the shop while Hal examined the canoe. There were three wood-strip canoes on the floor in various stages of completion. These were Hal’s projects, and they would eventually join the curvaceous masterpieces hanging on ropes from the ceiling. I couldn’t
