“Who is this?” I said.

It was a nurse supervisor, and she said her name.

“Well, put my grandmother on,” I said. “Or is she sleeping?”

She said it and I heard it and she asked if I was coming up to Woodlands.

“Are you there?” she asked.

I ended the call and put the phone on the table, and I reached in my pocket for that bottle of pins. But I remembered I lost it—somewhere—and instead I pulled out that key. I stuck it in the safe, which, like the key, didn’t belong to anyone anymore.

Earth, Speak

EARTH, SPEAK

Fellis drove with his knee and lit a cigarette. Over the top of the high hill, morning fog hovered above miles of pines like the nests of fall webworms in the crooks of brown branches. I jerked backward as Fellis let off the gas and we coasted downhill and into the fog.

We were going to see Daryl. Not because we liked him—Fellis hated him for what he’d done—but we were going to see him because Daryl’s uncle ran the tribal museum, and for years he’d let Daryl clean the place on the weekends for a flat rate of twenty bucks. Fellis and I wanted the alarm code. Yet I was convinced Fellis wanted more than that, and the closer we got to Daryl the more I worried that Fellis would mess up.

“You ain’t going to do nothing to him, right?” I said.

“Right.”

We drove past a dirt road that I thought was the turn.

“Don’t ruin it,” I told him.

“Dee, I said I won’t.” Fellis flicked his ash out the tiny cracked window.

It would have been easier to get the code if Daryl hadn’t been banned from the rez. We could have gone up to his place, brought a thirty-rack of shit beer, got him drunk, and talked the numbers out of him. But instead we had to drive an hour north, all the way out to his uncle’s cabin where he was staying.

We drove by another dirt road. “Wasn’t that it?” I said.

“No, it’s up a ways.”

I kicked the blower motor under the glove compartment to shake up the dirt and grime. The fan clicked and rattled and a gentle heat blew from the dashboard vents.

The fog finally thinned down and Fellis slowed the truck. “This is the turn,” he said.

The road led to a borrow pit.

“Next one over,” Fellis said.