I got him to his mom’s, Beth’s, where he still lived. He walked fine by himself to the door, but I walked with him up the steps.

“I never thought I’d scalp a fellow tribal member,” I said.

“Fuck off,” he said. He fumbled in his pocket for his house key.

“You wanna smoke?” I said.

“Didn’t you listen? I didn’t make it to Rab’s.” He unlocked the door.

“I’ll go for you,” I said. “Give me the cash.”

Fellis looked at me.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. “I’ll run there and back while you warm up your pretty bald head.”

He gave me thirty bucks, and I didn’t ask where he got it from. Yesterday he said he didn’t have any money.

“Twenty bag,” Fellis said. “And stop at Jim’s and get some tall boys and a bag of chips. Any kind but Humpty Dumpty chips.”

Down Fellis’s driveway I imagined the look on Rab’s face when I gave him the money. What I tell you? How about that gram?

“Dee!” Fellis yelled. “One more thing. Bring me my hair, so we can burn it. Don’t want spirits after us.”

“We’re damned anyway,” I said. “But I guess I’ll get your hair.”

I kept going, wondering, Hair or pot first? Pot made the most sense. It would look strange having to set the hair and ice down like a soaked mop on the counter at Jim’s while I reached in my pocket for Fellis’s money. Jim—that old wood booger—would say, “We don’t take those anymore.” I’d look him square in his sagging face and say, “I ain’t trading no hair, you old fucker,” and I’d smack down on the counter a ten-dollar bill for the tall boys and chips. With the change jingling in my pocket, I’d walk to Rab’s and he’d say, “Get that hair out of here, it’s dripping on my floor,” and I’d have to plop the hair on the muddy white floor in the hallway while Rab reweighed the same nugs he’d weighed for me earlier.

No. I’d grab Fellis’s hair from the swamp on my way home. With Fellis on his unmade bed, me on a torn beanbag in the corner, each of us with a tall boy and the pot smoke hazing gray the room, we’d keep poking and squeezing the hair, waiting for it to dry, waiting to burn it.

IN A JAR

I no longer had a fever, but Mom worried I was still sick and told me to take it easy. All throughout my first morning in our new home, she sat me on the couch with a bowl of cereal and half a piece of toast while she unpacked and fixed up the whole house, nailed her brown shelves to the white walls, and spread out atop the shelves all her colored knickknacks, miniatures of larger things like wooden bowls filled with wooden painted fruit, tiny glass soda bottles, little porcelain turtles, and a set of tiny, tiny books with real pages, all blank. When my food was gone, I sat wondering about Mom’s hair. She had gotten a haircut, and I had no idea how she had time to get one. When she finished with the house, we went outside, where I sat on the concrete steps and played with my toy men, the ones I kept in a black plastic tub and the ones my father bought me each time he returned from the casino. I had a lot of toy men. As I played, Mom worked in the shed. She organized and stacked extra boxes from our move to the Panawahpskek Nation. Maybe move was not the right word. All I knew was that we left our life down south with my father and sister. I had asked countless times, but Mom never said if Paige was coming.