The road curved through more ranchland until eventually she reached their own place, a one-story ranch-style home that hunkered below a timbered ridge rising east of town. The Jocko River flowed through their land.
Marco’s truck sat outside. She parked and got out and filled her lungs with the February air. When she shut her door, another flock of birds—this one huns—dispatched from a hedgerow of tall grass stickingout from the snow off to the side. They darted out at an angle. Lauren watched the flurry of cinnamon-colored, whirring wings and admired how they also all rose of one accord.
An omen, she thought.
Marco was sitting in his lounge chair, chatting on his phone. She’d been wrong: He wasn’t in his red T-shirt yet.
She presumed he was talking to Arlen Whitewolf, who he always spoke to before the games. Arlen’s son was on the team, too. They were discussing one of the players on the Loyola-Sacred Heart team the guys would be playing, someone named Edison Woodward who was known for his speed and a pull-up jump shot that was difficult to guard.
“That’s okay,” Marco said. “Wade’s faster. No one’s gonna read his moves. Trust me, they’re gonna pull it off. Our boys don’t play selfishly like them white boys. Or so boring.” He laughed and winked at Lauren. “This Woodward, he’s obviously their star, but our boys’ll be on him.”
She gave Marco a kiss on the head, went into the kitchen, put the go-box in the fridge, and made some tea. She sat at the kitchen table while she waited on the kettle.
After he hung up, he came in and asked how work was. She said it was a little slow, which was good since she had closed shop early.
He opened the fridge, fished out the container she’d brought him, and looked inside. “Thanks for this,” he said, but only closed the lid and put it back into the fridge.
“Tired of enchiladas?”
“No,” he said. “Too jittery to eat. Theyhaveto win this one.”
“They will,” she said. “Like you told Arlen.”
He smiled.
“I was thinking,” Lauren said with some trepidation. “About that drug rep that Terry told me about. About how he bribed Nalia’s doctor. I was thinking—”
“Lauren.” His lips formed a tight line. “Do you have to do this now?”
She swallowed hard. “I guess not. It’s only something that popped into my mind when I was doing research on the web last night.”
“How many times have I told you to quit going down that rabbit hole? The internet isnotgoing to help you. It’s going to make you more upset than you already are.” He leaned a hip against the counter and crossed his arms. “We need to focus on Wade. How many times I gotta tell you? Native kids got one shot. We need to support him, not dwell in the past.”
Lauren looked down at her hands, one squeezed into a tight fist, the other wrapping around it so Wade couldn’t see how white its knuckles were.
Marco dropped his arms and held his hands out to his sides. “Survive the past. Survive the present, Lauren.”
She was so sick of that saying she could pull out her hair by the roots. It was what everyone had said to her since she was small, partly a reference to intergenerational trauma from colonialization, when the white men forced all their youth into the Catholic schools back in the early 1900s. Back when they told them that the devil was in all of them. But also a reference to all the alcohol, drugs, and suicide so many tribal members dealt with presently, which was, of course, obviously related to all the brutality, policies, and racism that followed colonialization.
Of course, that was all absolutely true and important, butsurvive the past, survive the presentsounded so fatalistic to her. Like her people were just trees, with no choice ever but to face into the storm.
“But,” Lauren said, “I’m not sure all this focus on basketball is the best thing for Wade. What if he doesn’t do well in college? What if he drops out like that Crow player did? What if he gets depressed and turns to—”
“He won’t. And there’s no guarantee he won’t turn to worse things here on the rez.” He doesn’t need to say,Like Nalia did. That’s already in every breath, every word, every breeze, every drop of water, every objecton their land and in their home and headspace. “If he goes to college, at least he’s tried. You want that, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I don’t want him to get lost.”
“Lauren, it ain’t a perfect world. World used to have endless buffalo, but sure don’t now.”
“I know it doesn’t.” She could scream. She didn’t want to think about buffalo or basketball. It was avenging Nalia’s death she wanted to talk about. Why didn’t Marco feel the same way? Why wasn’t he as angry as she was? “But surely, there’s something we can still do to—”
“To what? Get justice? Bring enlightenment to folks who ain’t never gonna get enlightened? Where you even going to start to focus? Whole system’s broken. You’d have to go way, way back to right any wrongs. You’d have to take such a long view, it’d make no sense. None of it.”
Lauren fell quiet.
“Lauren.” Marco’s voice had grown gentle. Tears might well up in Lauren’s eyes on a different day just hearing the kind shift of it. But now, she was smoldering with rage, so she had no trouble damming the deluge of aching sorrow. “So many of us have lost children.”
She knew he was referring to the cluster of suicides two winters ago. More than a “cluster.” Twenty-one. So horrific. So many brokenhearted parents and families.
