“Why you looking for him?” Ralph asked, and I listened but all the police would say was that they wanted to talk to me to find out where Fellis ran off to.

“What that michigun do?” Ralph said.

The officer ignored him. “What’s that over there?” he said.

Like a great eye searching, a flashlight shone down through the peeled-back hide. I pressed against the wall and then Ralph told them to stop.

“Don’t violate the sanctity of this place,” he said.

“We need to look down here,” an officer said.

“You’re not going down there,” Ralph said. “I blessed it yesterday for a sweat I’m running tonight. You’re more than welcome to come later and sweat, but until then no one goes down.”

Ralph flipped the hide back and tied the twine. They walked away, and a cop started asking if Ralph had permits for all that garbage.

“Get off my property,” Ralph said.

I huddled in my shirt and rocked back and forth, breathing hot. How long had I been down here? How long would I be down here? I whispered those questions over and over again until the crinkly tarp and floppy deer hide flapped back and exposed me in the earth’s chest. Ralph said, “You leave at sundown,” and he set something on the stairs.

A glass plate wrapped in tinfoil. Under it, steaming brown rice and hotter-than-hell peas and a slab of tough meat. A spoon, too. I held my hands over the food as if it were a fire and when it stopped being warm, I ate the meat first and then mixed the rice and peas together and ate. I picked at my teeth until the sun was down.

Before leaving, I popped off my shoe and peeled back my sock for a twenty and left it on the plate and set the plate on the top of the stairs. I pocketed the spoon. Out in the woods looking through pine needles I waited for the pure dark and I watched Ralph walk back to the sweat lodge and take the plate and he looked right at me. He fanned the twenty in my direction and I knew I owed him more.

I started for her house. Halfway there the soul-shivers started and when tree limbs brushed me they scared me and my chin trembled and my nose ran as fast as I was right then, trying to get to her.

The light was on but she wasn’t at the sink through the window, and I crept up the hill behind her house and opened the boiler-room door—flicked the light—and I shut myself in with the warmth but I was cold-sweating.