The binder sloughed off dry leather particles when Vera drew it from the trunk.
“My my,” she said. “What could you be?”
A rawhide thong secured the flaps but tore in two at Vera’s first tug. She set aside the coverings and blinked at the first page. It was — it couldn’t be, but it was — an application for a homestead patent along the Tongue River by someone named Little Trees. And then one of her recent phone calls came back to her with a woman’s voice saying, My name is Camille Little Trees, the great-granddaughter of the first Little Trees, who homesteaded at the mouth of Hanging Woman Creek.
Here it was, the evidence, not of trading but of the land patent applications themselves, completed but never sent to Washington. Here was the evidence of a crime committed against the tribe over a century ago. The documents bore the seal of the Fort Keogh land patent office. The government had received and acknowledged them, then somehow the papers had found their way to the bottom of a white homesteader’s sea trunk in a dark basement and stayed there as whole lifetimes passed above ground.
Vera sat back and knocked her funny bone hard against the steel handle of the furnace. She turned her head to peer fully into the flames for the first time. She had been avoiding them out of her silly childhood phobia. Now she looked for real. The coals were red hot and the fire flickered blue and white at its heart. She felt its ferocious appetite.
From the tall stack of receipts for equipment long since abandoned, seed long since sowed, Vera took a thick wad. She pulled open the furnace and tossed in the papers. They made a satisfying little whistle as the fire rendered them white ash in an instant. She took up more of the pile — advertisements for implements, Norwegian-language newspapers already falling into unintelligible shreds — and threw them in as well, more and more, until her own breath seemed in rhythm with the fire’s, in and out, inhaling everything, exhaling only heat.
At last, her hand fell to the binder. It was light, as if it held nothing at all, but Vera of all people understood the significance of the land descriptions it contained. They were all the neighbors’ riverfront ranches, the oldest and best water rights, flood-irrigated, her family’s old place that cousins still worked, the best land in the valley — even those hay fields Marshall relied on. They had worked that land for generations, learned its sacred secrets, drained their sweat and blood to keep it. No piece of paper could make it any less theirs.
Vera thought of the land, its prairie-dog towns, unmarked burial sites, and crenellated buttes, and of the elders lined up at her conference table that very day. She thought of Jimmy Beck in the hallway, always pushing, so sure of her craven loyalty to the firm, and his implied threat about her partnership review. She thought of the lost baby and Peter’s plane touching down at LAX that night. She thought of boxing up the rest of what she had found and leaving it for another generation to puzzle over. Upstairs, Marshall shouted something at the TV. Soon he would notice her long absence and shuffle to the top of the stairs. Now was the time for decision.
Her hand moving almost on its own, she opened the furnace. The documents she’d fed it had already disappeared like so much steam. There was nothing at the center of the fire but pure heat, pure hunger, avarice itself, like the flame of history that burned everyone, sooner or later. Down deep where she had protected her soul from all the coups counted against it, a few things sheltered. The family. The land. There was no law, no rule, and no duty beyond that, only the primal ruthlessness that won the West. Mine, she breathed.
In one determined movement Vera took the whole stack, leather binder and all, and flung it at the hottest place where the fire swallowed once, just as she swallowed hard while watching, and left nothing behind.
She pushed to her feet and gathered the small stack of papers put aside for saving, including the old deeds from the very bottom of the trunk. She set the lid to without a noise, picked up her sweater and jacket, and carried everything up to the kitchen table.
“Find anything good?” Marshall asked from his recliner. He took his eyes from the game and followed her progress from door to table to sofa.
“Nothing special. I cleaned it out for you.” Vera kicked off her shoes, sat on the far end of the sofa, and curled against the arm. The Packers’ offensive line filled the screen as something unreadable passed across Marshall’s face, another hidden thought in a lifetime of hiding thoughts, nothing he would ever allow her to extract.
“Atta girl,” he said, and turned the volume higher.
Oasis
by Walter Kirn
Billings Heights
Oasis Pizza never closed. It was open all night and it delivered anywhere. That was its edge, the way it stayed in business. Unlike the shops that belonged to national chains, it served the grimmest parts of Billings, from meth-lab motels to pit-bull trailer courts to dirt-floor shanties by the river. The pizza itself was overpriced and awful. The crust was soft and starchy and the red sauce was a smear of tasteless paint. Worst of all, the pizzas had little cheese. Ray Rogers, the owner, who’d bought the place at thirty with money from a personal-injury lawsuit involving a runaway Polaris snowmobile, was too consumed by his video keno habit to buy mozzarella in sufficient quantities. Some nights the shop ran out of cheese entirely, forcing us, the drivers, to buy our own cheese and sprinkle it on en route. People won’t tip for a pizza without cheese, and our tips were all we had. Our wage was six dollars an hour, pitiful, and sometimes — as often as he could away with it — Ray paid us nothing. He gave us pills instead. Adderall. Dexedrine. Soma. Percocet. We took them too, especially the night crew. At four in the morning, lost on a dark street in a car that reeks of grease and garlic, a guy will do anything for a burst of energy, or even for just a new, distracting thought. That was the danger driving for Oasis: You ran out of thoughts. You forgot you had a mind. Except when it ached, which was almost all the time, you forgot you had a head.
In the nine months I worked there, which sounds like a short time to people who’ve never worked jobs that start at midnight and end when the rest of the world is waking up, I only made one friend. His name was Crush. I assume he named himself. I’ve always been drawn to people of that type, the ones who start life as Dale or John or Brad but reach a mysterious crisis point that leads them to retake control of how they’re viewed. But what did Crush mean? He never told me. Was it intended to emphasize his strength? He was certainly broad in the shoulders and chest, and yes, it stuck with you when he shook your hand or clapped you thunderously on the back, but to me his most striking quality was his enormous capacity for pity. He felt sorry for people other folks detested, including Ray Rogers, who treated us like slaves and stole from the world with his cheese-free, doughy pizzas. “I love Ray,” Crush told me once. “I love his cruelty. So afraid he’ll be hurt if he doesn’t hurt you first.”
Crush was a tip monster. He knew all the tricks. He taught them to me during my first two weeks, when he persuaded Ray to let me ride with him rather than learn the business on my own. His best trick was flapping open the pizza box when a customer met him at the door, supposedly to make sure the order was right but actually to stun the person’s nostrils with a warm Italian herbal cloud. Another trick was to show up out of breath, as though he’d sprinted from the car. If it was cold out, he wore a heavy coat buttoned right up to his chin, dramatically shivering as he made change. Quite often, his customers let him keep it. Sometimes his tips were as much as the whole bill, and sometimes they were more. His most generous customers were drunks and stoners, who he learned to identify by the toppings they ordered, which tended to be complex and over-rich. Pineapple chunks and jalapeños, say, or barbecue chicken with Canadian bacon. He scrapped with the other drivers to make these runs, and so did I, once I learned what they were worth. To hungry druggies at their euphoric peaks, a twenty is just a pretty piece of paper. If they pay you in coins, even better. They’ll hand you jars full. And one pound of quarters is a lot of cash.