“I’ll find a way,” I said. “I can do your chores.”

“I don’t have any chores.”

“You got chores,” I said. “You just don’t do any. Your mom’s always asking you to do shit around here. Take the garbage out, wash some dishes, chop some wood.”

“She don’t ask for any of that,” he said. “She knows I’m busy with school and all.”

I laughed, and so did Fellis.

“For real,” I said. “She asks you to do stuff.” I stood and went to the kitchen counter. I grabbed the white envelope with postage and waved it at him. “You remember Beth asking you to put this in the mail this morning before she went to that teacher’s conference?”

Fellis stacked his spaghetti. “Fuck you,” he said. He went to his room. When he came back he held cash. He always had money somewhere, yet he never said where it came from. I’d asked once, and when he wouldn’t tell me I kept joking, kept saying, “I bet you’re sick in the head and get disability.” He got pissed, started saying shit like, “You’re sick in the head, can’t even apply for a fucking job, can’t even go get an application.” It was all a joke, but he got so upset I couldn’t stop thinking that maybe he was on disability.

Fellis handed me the money. “If you lose you owe me twenty bucks. Deal the cards.”

We played a few hands back and forth, and I was up five dollars. Fellis grabbed the cigarette that was now burned out in the ashtray, and when he relit it the paper flashed giant red. He took two drags and handed it to me, and before we killed the smoke I was up ten. “Hold on,” he told me, and he went to his room for two more fives.

When he returned he asked for the cards. “I’m dealing,” he said.

“You think I’m cheating?” I said.

“It’s just strange you’re winning all of a sudden.” He cut the deck in fours and shuffled two at a time. When he had two piles, he shuffled them. “I think you stacked them,” he said. “That’s some shady Meekew shit.”

“I ain’t cheating,” I said. “And would you shut up about him? He didn’t rip you off.”

“If I’d had a scale I would’ve known. Top of the bag was filled with too much space.”

“It weren’t neither,” I said. “Deal.”

“Bet first.”

I bet ten. He matched and then dealt. I looked at the cards. Nothing. I bet like I had something, though. I raised the pot by ten and then discarded one card. Fellis went to his room and got more money.

“He’s lucky I didn’t go and find him,” Fellis said, sitting down.

“He would have kicked your ass,” I said. Meekew was skinny, sure, but he was wiry and long. He was a few years younger than us, did well at the university—“Dean’s List,” the tribal paper wrote—and he sold drugs to help pay his car loan (that was what I thought, but Fellis said Meekew sold drugs because he was a scumbag). Fellis never liked him. He said Meekew preferred white people to his own kind.