That’s not fair, says Emmaline from beneath the cloth.
LaRose is still fighting invisible foes. Kicking the practice dummy so hard it tips and rolls. This one’s for Tyler, then Curtains Peace, another donkey kick for Brad. LaRose whirls to punch Buggy. They blast backward from the force of his attack. They land stunned, writhing on the mats, try to bumble away. One sneaks up from behind. LaRose can see behind his back! Wham. Cronk. Lights out.
HOW DOES AN eight-year-old boy find out where high school boys hang out? White ones? In an off-reservation town? There is a long highway between them, and a lack of access deep as a ravine. He asks Coochy, but his brother doesn’t know who they are at all. He asks Josette, but she doesn’t care to answer. Or, is there some reason she raises her eyebrows? As does Snow. They keep their eyebrows up together, staring at him in a creepy way like they are frozen, until he backs out of the room.
He asks Hollis.
Those assholes? Why?
LaRose doesn’t have an answer.
Did one of those guys do something to you?
No.
Sounds like maybe something happened.
No.
Come on. You can tell me.
Nothing happened.
So why’re you asking?
I just wondered.
Okay, so nothing happened. Then there’s nothing you need to know about those guys except avoid their asses.
Sure.
I mean it. Hollis watches LaRose closely as he walks out of their bedroom. It’s weird that a little boy would ask about those guys — about Curtains, that freakin’ jerk who tried to hit on Snow by asking if she wanted to go for a drive in his rusted-out conversion van. Or Buggy, that Indian-hating blackout who walked by Waylon after they trashed the Pluto team in football and called Waylon blackout and Waylon laughed and put the hammer on Buggy and Buggy yelped to his friends, He’s scalpin’ me! Blanket Ass is scalpin’ me! And, because he might have killed Buggy and gone to jail, Waylon slung him away and got into his car.
And so on. Tyler, or was it Buggy, one of those guys once called Josette a squaw, so Josette is already intent on killing him, or them, any one of them, but Hollis wants to get there first.
GETTING A BLOCK or spiking from anywhere was all about jumping, crucial if you were not tall.
That’s what Coach Duke told Maggie.
Out in the barn, Peter marked a stall post with chalk. In the beginning, the height she could jump, reaching up with her arms, took her only a couple of inches above an imaginary net. But every week, she gained a tiny fraction. Coach Duke noticed.
Hey, Ravich, come over here, he said after practice. You’ve put a few inches on your jump. Are you practicing?
She told him about her chalked post. He gave her jumping exercises.
He showed her squats, ankle bounces, step-ups, and his favorite, the four-star-box drill. Coach Duke’s heart beat to inspire. It tuned him up when kids worked at getting better. That Maggie had set herself these personal goals, improving her jump to make up for height, got Coach Duke so happy that he called her parents that same night.
Peter answered, and when the coach said who he was Peter’s stomach clutched, sure that Maggie was getting kicked off the team. But no, this was a good call. The first good call about Maggie that her parents had ever received.
Every night after school, now, she got a pass from setting the table. Peter and LaRose set the table as long as Maggie went out to the barn to do her exercises and jumps. The dog sat in the doorway concentrating on her pogo leaps. At first it was hard to jump for five minutes. Then hard to jump for ten. Then fifteen, twenty. Dark came early. She turned on the barn light and massaged her legs. It got cold. She wore a parka and sweatpants to keep her legs warm, so they wouldn’t seize with cramps. Her muscles became hard springs. She practiced serves — running, leaping, at the height of her leap punching the ball just so, at the dog, who politely stepped aside and never got beaned.
Once, as she vaulted toward the dog, she thought that if she’d had a knife sharp enough, and with the height she could now achieve, she could have jumped up and cut the rope. Her mother falls, gagging. Maggie kicks her in despair. Maggie saw it all happen. Then she heard her mother call.
Turn out the barn light. Come in. Come in now, Maggie. It’s dinnertime. Your food is getting cold.
Old Story 2
MEWINZHA, MEWINZHA, SAID Ignatia, right after the first soft snow securely blanketed off the living from the dead. Long time ago. This was before the beginning of time. In those days everything could talk and people had powers. At that time, there was a man living in the woods with his wife and his two little boys. They lived good on what they had; they were doing okay. But then the man noticed, when he was getting ready to go out and hunt, his wife was putting on her whitest skin dress, her quill and bone earrings, all her beautiful things. The first time he thought that she was preparing herself for him, but when he returned with meat on his toboggan, he saw that she was wearing her old clothes again. He was jealous. The next time he prepared to go hunting, she put on her finery the same way. But he doubled back. He hid himself, and when she left their boys behind and went out into the woods, in her fancy clothing, he followed her secretly.
This man’s wife goes up to a tree. He watches her. She strikes the tree three times. Out of the tree comes a snake. A big one. Yes, a big snake. The wife and the snake begin to love each other up then. The man sees his woman and the snake together and oh my, she loves that snake better than she ever loved her husband.
Don’t talk bad!
Oh, shut up, Malvern.
The two women frowned at each other, and at last Malvern nicked her head at LaRose, made some motions with her lips that Ignatia interpreted.
See here, LaRose, the snake and woman they want to hold hands but the snake don’t have any hands. They want to kiss but the snake don’t have any lips. They just have to twine around together.
Ignatia moved her arms around to show LaRose how this could happen.
What kind of story is this? asks LaRose
A sacred one, Ignatia says.
Ohhhh-kayyyyy. . LaRose has learned the okay of a skeptical eight-year-old from wise-ass sitcom eight-year-old boys.
I know this story, said Malvern. It is a frightful story. Not a good story to tell a young boy.
Maybe, said Ignatia. But it is a story of existence. This boy can know it; he is brave enough.
She went on telling the story.
The man was very jealous of the snake. So the next day he went hunting, and when he came back he said to his wife that he had killed a bear. He told her to go and fetch the meat. When she was gone, he put on a skirt and went to the serpent tree. He struck the tree three times, and the serpent appeared. Then he stuck his spear through the serpent, killing it dead. He brought the snake back to his lodge, cut that snake into pieces, and made that snake into snake soup.
Snake soup?
Yes, my boy.
They ate snake soup in the olden times?
The old women frowned at each other.
Ignatia said that in the olden times the kids had no TVs. They just shut up and listened to stories and didn’t interrupt.
Malvern said that his question was good and she would answer it.
They ate the snake soup just this one time, she said.
Okay, said LaRose. I mean, I had to ask. It’s unusual.