I tore my attention from the dark hole over my head. Kyle was watching me closely. “No, it’s fine. Will and I get along fine.”
Kyle’s sight darted upward then came back to me. “Good. You know where to find the sprayer attachments for the four-wheelers. Just let me or Nate know when you’re leaving. Take one of the new long-distance walkie-talkies in case you run into trouble.”
“Sure. Will do.” I stared at the horse in the stall across from me.
“Okay then. You better get going. Don’t want Mama Yellow Horse to yell at me for making you late.” Kyle gave me an easy smile. I peeked upward but saw nothing but shadows and dust motes. Was Will hiding just out of sight so he could hear if I turned him in or not? I should have. Why didn’t I?
You know why you didn’t.
Shit. “Yeah, I’m off. See you later.”
I walked off without another glance up for Will. I stopped to visit with Gemini then Chex and Kima. After my visits, I crawled up into my 1980 Chevy Blazer. I loved the classic black and white truck that my grandfather and I had restored. It had been his for years, and the engine had rolled over twice we were pretty sure, but she kept running. No matter how cold she kicked over. Of course the gas mileage was shit, but I didn’t go anywhere really. Just to the reservation to visit Mom and Kenruh or into Copper Falls to visit the library. The massive engine rolled over, and I fiddled with some old cassette tapes that had come with the truck when I’d bought it. They were mostly Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, George Jones, or Johnny Cash. My grandfather liked the old rebellious country music but had little good to say about the new stuff. I’d grown up listening to this kind of music and now I kind of preferred it. Will was right about me being an old man. Mom liked to say I had an old soul. Guess that sounded better than saying I was a freak.
Singing along to “Luckenbach, Texas” I left the ranch behind for the day. I stopped to fill up the truck at a rundown gas station then sent Mom a quick text telling her I was on the way. The Jante River Reservation was fifty miles—give or take—from Prairie Smoke. We had two point one million acres of land that the US government had graciously bestowed upon us. We’d not go into the fact that it was our land to begin with…
In the late 1800s, the government brought a huge number of the Arapaho tribe to the Shoshone reservation. To say there was some contention between the tribes was putting it mildly but in the end, we all learned to accept each other as we were all pretty much starving. The meager government rations had barely fed the Shoshone let alone a couple thousand new Arapaho. But our pleas for more food to survive the brutal winters never made it to Washington D.C. Funny how that seemed to happen. My grandfather liked to say that there were two things you could count on to bite you on the ass: an angry rattlesnake and a White politician.
I drove along with the hot wind in my face, my thoughts blowing around inside the cab then floating out the window. The tension that Will Abbott stirred up in my soul drifted off. There was something about going home that eased me. Lost in that dreamy place a person goes when they’re driving a well-known road, I was soon passing the sign that read Entering Jante River Indian Reservation.
The landscape didn’t change much once a person crossed into Indigenous lands. If anything, the sights generally got less attractive. Rickety fences holding skinny cows and dusty horses. Chickens pecking along the edge of the road, the paving ending about two miles into the rez then turning to packed dirt littered with potholes big enough to swallow a compact car. If you made the left right before the paved road ends, you’d head into Lead River, a small town of about two thousand people where you’d find a rec center, church, a healthcare center, a cemetery, two schools—one elementary and one high school—and the Lead River Cultural Center and powwow grounds.
Mom and Kenruh lived outside of Lead River, about ten miles to the west, on a small parcel of land that had been given to my family when the reservation had been set up. Ten acres with a well and some decent grassland. That was more than many here had. I pulled up to the blue doublewide with the gently sloped ramp and parked next to my grandfather’s yellow truck. My grandfather sat on the shaded porch with a tall glass of iced tea, a book, and his old boombox. He lifted a hand as I threw open the driver’s side door. Sweat beaded on my neck and brow as I climbed the ramp to the front porch.
“Morning,” Kenruh said, waving at the empty lawn chair to his left. “Might as well sit. She’s on the phone with the powwow committee.”
“Are they canceling the fall gathering?” I asked, dropping down into a plastic Adirondack chair.
“No, just bickering over the wheelchair accessibility as always.” He gave me an assessing look as his rooster Joe appeared with his four hens. “Are you dancing this year?”
“Probably.”
“Good, you young men need to participate in tribal gatherings. You look frazzled.”
“No, I don’t.”
He narrowed his wise brown eyes and poked at the chickens with the toe of his shoe. “Get off the porch,” he told the chickens. “They shit all over everything.”
“You could keep them in the pen that I built,” I pointed out.
“Creatures deserve to be free.” He thumbed a strand of long, silver hair from his craggy face then tossed some toast crust out into the short, dry grass. It had been a dry year and water was becoming a precious commodity. Which was why we’d been digging for a watering system at the Prairie Smoke when we uncovered dinosaur bones. And now I was mentally right back at the ranch and Will Abbott. “See, there’s that frazzled look again. Something brewing back at the ranch?”
“Not really.”
“Did you know that before I met your grandmother I dated a girl named Louisa Milk?”
“If you’d stop feeding them on the porch they’d stop coming on the porch,” I said in the hopes of avoiding one of his old dating stories. My grandfather was quite the ladies’ man back in the day, or so he liked everyone to believe.
“Creatures need to be fed,” he replied then wiggled around in his chair. “Louisa Milk was as White as her surname. Sweet and creamy as her surname too.”
“Please, can we skip the graphic details of your old lover’s charms?” I reached for the plate of kitchen scraps—crusts, stale bread, some moldy grapes—and threw a soft red grape to a black hen. She pounced on it and ran off, the other hens chasing after her while trying to steal the grape from her beak.
“You kids are so sensitive.” Kenruh lobbed a crust with some marmalade on it to Joe. The rooster called the girls over in that deep “buck-buck-buck come see what I found for you ladies” cluck. “Anyway, me and Louisa Milk were quite the item. She drove me nuts. I mean all lovers drive you nuts over time, but this gal pushed all my buttons from day one. Good buttons and bad buttons. I’d go from wanting to kiss her to wanting to tell her to take a hike one second to the next. That woman tied me up into so many knots I didn’t know up from down. Only her and your grandma had ever affected me that strongly.”
This was going somewhere. His stories always did. Joe strutted back and forth as I tossed grapes and listened to the virtues of Louisa Milk for another five minutes. Finally, I had to say something because as much as I loved, respected, and enjoyed my grandfather’s tales, I really didn’t care what Louisa Milk did that night at the roller skating party when she and Daisy Pink—and by this time I suspected he was making up names—got into a cat fight over my grandfather.
“So what happened after the fight?” I prompted as the hens moved on after clearing the scrap dish. Joe was holding out for more.
“We were all arrested for disturbing the peace. Louisa moved off with her family, Daisy went to Jackson Hole to become a dental hygienist, and I met and married your grandmother.”