just so on the circle. The rack was tight. “Straight eight?”
Crusty Shoes answered, “We were playing last pocket, but I’ll switch to straight eight for you, doll.”
Doll, my ass. Cash chalked her cue while he postured for the break. Sipped her beer, hip resting on the barstool. Crack. Balls scattered. Her opponent war-whooped as three balls dropped. Two stripes and a solid. Being a gentleman he chose the solids and ran four. Cash made the fifteen and scratched trying for the eleven.
Cash overheard Checkered Shirt say to his girl, “She brought her own cue stick for looks. Can’t shoot for shit.” Cash let the farm boy win the game and put up another pair of quarters. She watched Checkered Shirt lose to Crusty Shoes. When their game was over, Cash smiled to herself, plugged in her quarters and asked her opponent if he wanted to play for beers.
“Sure,” he said. Cash drank for free until closing time. Crusty Shoes was an easygoing loser. Checkered Shirt got more angry and foul-mouthed as the night wore on, complaining to his girl, wondering why the damn squaws don’t stay on the reservation where they belong and how come drunken Indians were takin’ all my money, honey. Cash just played and drank.
When the bartender gave the last call, Cash scratched on the eight, shrugged her shoulders, finished her beer and broke down her cue. As she walked by the boys’ booth, Checkered Shirt’s girlfriend slurred bitch. Cash, though tempted to finish something, steeled her resolve and left.
She lit up a Marlboro before turning the key in the ignition and backing out. She didn’t feel drunk at all and wished she had bought a six-pack for the road. Too late now. As she headed out of town, she checked the rearview mirror more than once to make sure the boys and their girls hadn’t decided to follow her. No headlights appeared. When the jack pines started to line the road on either side, she slowed and scanned for a turn-off road. It was too late to keep driving. She needed to sleep before hitting the reservation tomorrow.
About fifteen miles out of town, her headlights grazed the ruts of a logging road off to the right. She pulled in and drove about a quarter of a mile before backing her truck as close into the trees as she could get. She reached under the seat for her flashlight.
She stood in the dark and listened to the night sounds. In the far distance she could hear a car. A few minutes more, she saw the car continue north on the main road. She was in a good place. No one was going to come down this road tonight. She listened again before switching on the flashlight and scouring around in the truck bed of the Ranchero. After shaking the road dust off everything, she made a bed for herself with the quilt, covering herself with the wool blanket she had stashed there too. She went back into the cab of the truck and pulled her .22 from behind the seat. Made sure it was loaded and went to sleep with it hidden under the quilt with her hand on the rifle butt.
The sun woke her. The fall morning air was crisp. She shoved the blankets back under the two-by-fours, unloaded the rifle, dropped the .22 bullets into her front pocket and put the rifle in its place behind the front seat. She jumped in the cab and turned on the heat full blast. She lit up a cigarette and cranked the driver’s window about three inches to let the smoke drift out. If she leaned forward on the steering wheel, she could see the occasional car drive by on the main road—farmers going into town for a needed part or to pick up feed. She finished her cigarette and crushed it out in the ashtray. No point in starting a forest fire today, she thought, shifting into first and pulling out into the overgrown ruts of the logging road. Her mouth tasted like stale beer and cigarettes. The thermos on the seat beside her had a mouthful of coffee left in it. Cold, but it covered the taste from the night before. Foolish to try the radio, nothing but static up here in the woods.
Cash smoked and drove. The weather was good. Sun was shining with the occasional thin white cloud. No cotton candy clouds today, just streaks of white. She thought about the stand she had seen along the road when she was lying down in her truck bed, the guy dead in the field with knife wounds in his back. Thought about the guys last night and the rugged comments they’d made about her.
There wasn’t a name Cash hadn’t been called: squaw, whore, stupid, heathen. She had heard them all. These days, she mostly just ignored irrelevant behavior. She shrugged and took another drag of her cigarette. Free beer and free games all night. What did she care?
Ahead she saw a sign that read: RED LAKE RESERVATION, NO TRESPASSERS ALLOWED. She laughed. These Red Lakers had all kinds of Indian Pride. Their reservation was the only closed reservation in the state. Meaning they didn’t fall under state jurisdiction. Meaning they fell under federal jurisdiction. Which is what Wheaton meant when he said that as a county law man he didn’t have any jurisdiction up this way. Which explained the feds in the suits standing back there in a cornfield where a Red Laker’s body had been found.
Cash finally reached the main road that halfway circled Red Lake, the lake itself.
She braked at the stop sign. Plain logic told her that if she turned east she would run into the town of Red Lake. If she followed that road farther north, it would take her to Ponemah, where they still practiced the old medicine. About the only people who took that road were folks who lived there.
Somehow that direction didn’t feel right anyways. Cash turned left. She kept the truck in third gear and drove slowly, watching the sides of the road. The stand would be on the north side. She could see it in her mind’s eye.
Here and there a crow flew. There it was. Grey weathered pine boards, probably from an old front porch, had been nailed together to create a three-by-four-foot table. The two legs on each end had branches from a birch tree nailed in an X to steady the table. The ditch grass had been trampled down.
There was a driveway leading to the lake. Cash turned down it. Straight ahead, a fairly new boat sat at the lake’s edge, with nets hanging on a makeshift rack close by.
Animal traps hung from another tree. And there, in the pines, was a rundown government HUD house. Weathered red paint. Weathered, unpainted steps leading to the screen door that had seen too many kids and too many reservation dogs. At one time the window trim must have been painted white, but was now a dirty grey. The picture window had a makeshift curtain, an Indian-print bedsheet. Even from the outside one could tell it was nailed back and that a safety pin held a corner up to let some light in.
The wornness of it reminded Cash of the house where she had spent the first three years of her life. Except her mom’s house had been a two-room tarpaper shack. With no running water or indoor plumbing. Which wasn’t all that uncommon back then. Cash remembered visiting the white neighbor kids, and they had outhouses too. But their houses were painted white. And they had a mom and a dad. Not just a mom living off the county, a mom who tended to drink a bit too much most weekends and ended up in the ditch more often than other mothers seemed to.
Cash remembered that after that roll in the ditch, the county social worker became the constant female adult in her life. She would pull into their driveway and load Cash into her big black Buick and drop her off at a different white farm home.
The farmers’ wives tended to harshness. Cash learned to duck her head out of a slap’s way. She learned to take a beating stoically. She learned that behaviors that had made her mom throw her head back and laugh made these other women go red-faced and shame her into silence.
Cash learned to be watchful. Wary. Not to make too much noise or sudden moves. Do the dishes and sweep the floors when told. She learned these women believed that cleanliness was next to godliness and that her permanently tanned skin was a mark of someone’s sin.
She would go to bed each night in the stranger’s house looking out the window at the stars, wishing for home. Back then, she didn’t have
