“If he had, we wouldn’t’ve split up,” said Kat.
“But you use Danhoff. The name I mean. How I found you.”
“Yeah. Clips, you know. I wanted it to be consistent.”
“Yeah? Huh. So you married again, or what?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the dude’s name?”
“Justin Lake.”
“Jumps in Lake? Sounds like a step in the wrong direction, girl. Lake. Almost could be an Injun name, you know?”
“I kept Danhoff.”
“Yeah? I guess I know that. I found you. And how’s Jumps in Lake feel about that?”
Kat paused for a second while it occurred to her that she didn’t know. She said, instead, “How’s the rez?”
“Same old shit. Fighting over bread crumbs. Tribal cops running wild.”
“What about the casinos?”
“Yeah, right, the golden goose. I’ll tell you. That thing I wrote you about? Tip of the iceberg, you know? Everybody gets this whatchamacall, balance sheet, every six months? Tells us how all these millions of dollars are coming to us. Two percent kickback, they say. But the school’s still shit. The government houses are still shit. The roads are still shit. The health center’s still shit. Everything’s shit. Where’s that money going, you know?” Kat didn’t. “Anyways,” continued Becky, “that’s kind of why I wrote you. That whole big sell, and it’s all a bunch of crooks. Thieves on top of thieves on top of thieves, you know? And then I see the guy who’s stealing from the guys who’s stealing, pretending he’s something he ain’t. Just pissed me off.”
Kat glanced at the clock and then opened her notebook. “How was it you were working up at Manitou Sands if you’ve been back in Nebising for five years?”
“Oh. Yeah, well, it was a guy. Come on up, things’ll be better kind of thing. Didn’t go for Brandon, though. Thought it was like having a dog; you could put him out at night or something. Soon’s he laid a hand on him, we got the fuck out of there.”
Kat began to question her more formally, although she was careful to keep her tone conversational. Who knew what resentments her behaving like a journalist might stir up? In contacting her, Becky had reached up out of the aggrieved tumult of her emotions for the closest thing to an authority figure she had within her grasp. Or so Kat figured. She was a “connection.” On the other hand, with each question the gulf separating them would have to become more and more apparent: that Kat was an educated person, a sophisticated person, a privileged person, a person living in a great city, talking to her from a big apartment, one filled with books and pictures and music and fancy food that was allowed to sit in the fridge until it went bad, while Becky was living at the margin of things, exactly where she’d begun. Bucket of fried chicken on the counter and a framed NASCAR poster over the couch. So she treaded lightly. Becky told her that in the cage transactions were ordinarily recorded the instant that they took place, but the chief cashier had instructions to skim a certain percentage from the receipts. None of this money was on paper or in the system, though it existed in the piles of cash that were under constant video scrutiny. Its existence was referred to as “the ready box,” although there wasn’t actually a physical box. Becky didn’t quite understand the sleight-of-hand, but once a month Saltino would come into the cage with a briefcase. He would open the briefcase and remove some papers. This was just for show. It got kind of ridiculous sometimes. One time he opens the briefcase and takes out a bag of doughnuts and gives them to the cashiers. Not that he was this nice guy or anything. He always knew exactly how much money was supposed to be in the ready box. The chief cashier told Saltino the amount of the previous twenty-four hours’ ready-box receipts each morning. Nothing was on paper. Saltino kept a running tally in his head. And he would know if they were short. And he knew where everyone lived. He would look at you and rattle off your address, the name of your wife, your kids, then smile. It scared the shit out of everyone. They all figured he was Mob. Anyways, he would come in and somehow when the money was getting moved or about to get moved to the vault by the security detail he’d take the ready-box cut and leave with it. No one would see him for a few days. Sometimes he’d take other stuff; the occasional piece of illegally accepted collateral like a Rolex or a diamond ring. On the Tuesday after the Final Four or whatever it is, Saltino had come in with a bigger briefcase. It was a huge amount of money, more than Becky had seen him collect before. $450,000, about. But he took the money in the usual way and so nobody thought anything about it. But soon certain folks started getting twitchy, this guy Argenziano, a first-class ballbuster to begin with, paranoid, had his nose in things quite a bit, everybody got asked weird questions. Nobody told them nothing about what was happening or anything, of course, but word gets around. They find Saltino’s car parked along a dirt road leading to the beach. He never turns up at his house. He doesn’t even stop the paper, they just keep piling up on the step. That’s what everyone said anyways. Anyways, that was the last Becky heard of it because in early April she and Brandon came back to Nebising. And she forgot all about it until she was at a school fair in Leatonville and there standing on the auditorium stage with a big straw hat and a western shirt and this hokey silver belt buckle was this dude telling the one about the snake complaining about his skin being too hot and tight and Nanabozho asking the Great Spirit to give him a break. Becky wasn’t paying too much attention at first, it was the usual dumb thing for people who ate that shit up, with a drum and fake sign-languagey gestures, but then she noticed that there was something wrong with the story. Becky couldn’t explain it. She didn’t buy into spooky Indian horseshit but he just didn’t know the story right. It was like he was making fun of it, almost — although that wasn’t it, either, exactly. More like when a white guy sings a blues song he gets the notes right but it doesn’t sound correct, or real? Anyways, she takes a good look at him then and she realized it was Saltino. She could see how he might be able to pass for an Indian somewhere else, but she couldn’t figure why anyone would come to a town like Leatonville if they were pretending to be something they weren’t. Every other person on the street was Ojibway. The rez was right across the damn road. She got a good look at him and then got out of there because she didn’t want him to recognize her.
Kat had questions: Did the casino call the police? How did the cashier tell him the tally every single day if he was sometimes gone for days at a time? Where would he usually go after he’d picked up the money? Who is Argenziano? Did Saltino actually work at the casino? What was his title? Could she tell her a little more about operations inside the cage? What made her certain it was Saltino at the fair? But Becky had started to get a little hazy, digressive. She slurred a bit, as if she’d been drinking steadily throughout the conversation.
“So why’d you come to me with this?” Kat asked.
“Well, for one I just got sick to death of the bullshit. Thieves on thieves on thieves on thieves. And you’re a reporter. I figured on you still being at the Free Press, but that’s OK. Maybe if Chicago ain’t interested you can pass it on to one of your old friends down in Detroit. And for another I kind of thought you’d be into it. I figured you of all people would be real curious about why anyone’d want to be an Indian.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just messing with you.”
“It doesn’t mess with me,” said Kat. “I know what you think, what you’ve always thought. It’s not true. I just have a different kind of life.”
This was something Becky had always tweaked her about, another reason Kat had fallen out of touch. It wasn’t Kat’s fault. She hadn’t done anything to promote misconceptions about her identity. The opportunity to “confess” never came up. People made assumptions and who were you to correct them? If you did, half the time it meant answering dumb questions and confronting the weirdest of notions, the most ridiculous of which had to do with your familiarity with electricity, running water, eating utensils, etc.; the most innocuous of which had to do with spirit names, ghost winds blowing across the prairie, totems appearing, glowing, from out of the virgin dark of another new midnight deep in the forest primeval; and the most repulsive of which were simply repulsive. At the U of M she’d avoided the Native American Student Association like the plague; two reps turned up at her dorm room in South Quad and she told them no thanks. People got the idea that she was maybe Filipina, or Vietnamese, or Chinese, sometimes Latina, nobody asked point-blank, some people probably knew or guessed but never said anything; it was all fine with her either way. Then she left school and entered the zone of adulthood, jarring-enough transition; instant intimacy sheared away and replaced by endless prolonged acquaintanceship, people asked what she did and where’s the copier toner and have you seen that movie; she dyed her hair blond for eight months on a whim and so she was white, an olive-skinned white, maybe one of those Puerto Rican girls who smell of peroxide; then she dyed it back to her normal color and the guessing game began all over again — Asian? South Asian? North African? — but somewhere along the line the Indian had been washed away, and if the subject never came up, she wasn’t going to raise it, wouldn’t apologize for not having hair down to her ass or Sacheen Littlefeather braids, for not wearing denim and buckskin everything, for not being overtly spiritual, for not having huge gaudy enameled silver jewelry and beaded belts, for not cashing her welfare checks at the liquor store and for not having stood in line for free cheese.