Night of the Living Rez
NIGHT
OF THE
LIVING
REZ
MORGAN TALTY
CONTENTS
BURN
IN A JAR
GET ME SOME MEDICINE
FOOD FOR THE COMMON COLD
IN A FIELD OF STRAY CATERPILLARS
THE BLESSING TOBACCO
SAFE HARBOR
SMOKES LAST
HALF-LIFE
EARTH, SPEAK
NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ
THE NAME MEANS THUNDER
A NOTE ON PENOBSCOT SPELLING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For Mom (1959-2021)
And for all the women who raised me
BURN
Winter, and I walked the sidewalk at night along banks of hard snow. I’d come from Rab’s apartment off the reservation. Rab—this white guy with a wide mouth and eyes that closed up when he laughed—sold pot. He was all no-bullshit too. I had asked for a gram, and after he weighed it and put it in a plastic baggie and held it out to me, I reached into my pants and jacket pockets looking for the cash among the cigarette wrappers and pocketknife, and he didn’t believe me as I acted the part and kept saying, “Shit shit shit, it must’ve fell out on the walk over here.” He shook his head, took the weed out of the baggie, and put it back into his mason jar. “I ain’t smokin’ you up,” he said, and so then I said, “Fuck you, Rab, I really did lose the money, you’ll see, watch when I come back here in thirty minutes with the money I dropped, you’ll feel stupid then.” He shrugged a Sorry, man, and I slammed his door shut as I left.
At the bridge to the reservation, the river was still frozen, ice shining white-blue under a full moon. The sidewalk on the bridge hadn’t been shoveled since the last nor’easter crapped snow in November, and I walked in the boot prints everyone made who walked the walk to Overtown to get pot or catch the bus to wherever it was us skeejins had to go, which wasn’t anywhere because everything we needed—except pot—was on the rez. Well, except Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond, but those Natives who bought 4K Ultra DVDs or fresh white doilies had cars, wouldn’t be taking the bus like me or Fellis did each day to the methadone clinic. That was another thing the rez didn’t have: a methadone clinic. But we had sacred grounds where sweats and peyote ceremonies happened once a month, except since I had chosen to take methadone, I was ineligible to participate in Native spiritual practice, according to the doc on the rez.
Natives damning Natives.
The roads on the rez were quiet, trees bending under the weight of snow, and when I passed the frozen swamp a voice moaned out. I stopped walking. Nothing, so I kept on going on the sparkling road until I heard it again.
“Who’s that?” I yelled. The moan came again. It was a man, somewhere in the swamp. I got closer, listening. There it was: a low and breathy noise, and with my cold ear I followed it.
The swamp was frozen solid, the snow blown in piles, and so I slid over the ice, looking for the source of the noise. Moonlight through bare tree limbs lit the swamp, and caught among the tree stumps and solid snow was a person sprawled out on the ground. He was trying to sit up but kept falling back, like he’d just done one thousand crunches and was too sore to do just one more.
It was Fellis.
“Fellis?” I said, standing over him.
He tried to sit up, but something pulled him back down. “Fuck you,” Fellis said. “Help me.” He groaned, shivered.
He didn’t say how to help him, so I had to squat down to get a better look. I flicked my lighter and his purple lip quivered.
“Hurry,” he said.
“Fellis, I can’t help you if I don’t know what’s a matter with you.”
“My hair,” he said.
I looked at it with the lighter’s flame. “Holy,” I said, and I laughed. Instead of the tight braid that shined, Fellis’s hair had come undone, and it was frozen into the snow.
“Get me out, Dee,” he said. “Dee, get me out.”
At first I tried to pull the hair out from the snow, tried to chip the snow away. But his hair wouldn’t come loose, so I yanked, and Fellis screamed.
“Lift your head up,” I said. I opened my pocketknife, and at the click of the blade Fellis spoke.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “Don’t cut it.”
“What do you want me to do? Tell the ice to let go?”
Fellis spit. “Go to my house and get boiling water.”
I closed the pocketknife. “Fellis, by the time I got back here the water would be chilled.”
He was quiet. As if something walked around or among us, the ice cracked and echoed somewhere in the swamp. The moon shone bright, and I looked. There was nobody but us.
“I have to cut it,” I said. “You ain’t getting out if I don’t.”
Fellis asked if I had a cigarette, and when I told him no, he cursed. “Fucking bullshit, fucking goddamn winter, what the fuck.”
I laughed.
“It ain’t funny, Dee.”
“Look,” I said. “You want me to cut my braid too?”
Fellis took a deep breath, and he coughed and gagged. “No,” he said. “Just cut it. I gotta get home. I’m sick.”
I opened the pocketknife again, grabbed his hair in a fistful, and cut. When I got through the last bit of hair, Fellis rolled over and away from where he’d been stuck. He rubbed his head like he just woke up.
I helped him stand, and we slipped all over the ice on our way out of the swamp. Through dry heaves, Fellis said he’d missed the bus this morning to the methadone clinic—“No shit,” I said, because I didn’t see him on the bus or at the clinic—and he thought some booze would be good before he got sick from not having any methadone. He’d had a bit of booze left that afternoon when he decided to go see Rab to get some pot, and on the way he’d stopped off in the swamp to feel the quiet that came with too much drinking, and when he plopped down in the snow he’d dozed right off. When he woke up, his hair was frozen in the snow.
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.
I wasn’t at play long before I lost one of my men to a gap between the stairs and the door. It was a red alien guy, and although he wasn’t my favorite, I still cared. Looking behind the steps, my knees were wet when I knelt in the snow, and my hands were cold and muddy when I held myself up. The sun beamed on my neck, and a sliver of sunlight also shone behind the concrete steps, right at the perfect angle, and in the light I thought I saw my toy man. But when I reached for him I grabbed hold of something hard and round. I pulled it out.
It was a glass jar filled with hair and corn and teeth. The teeth were white with a tint of yellow at the root. The hair was gray and thin and loose. Wild. And the corn was kind of like the teeth, white and yellow and looked hard.
“Mumma,” I said. “What is this?”
“David,” she said from inside the shed. “Can you wait? Please, honey.”
I said nothing, waited, and examined the jar. My hand was slightly red from either the hot glass sitting in the sun all afternoon or the cold snow I crawled on.
Mom came out of the shed, squinting in the light.
“What’s what, gwus?” she said. Little boy, she meant.
I held the jar to her and she took it. I watched her look at it, her head tilted and her brown eyes wide as the jar. And then she dropped it into the snow and mud and told me to pack up my toys. “No, no, never mind,” she said. “Leave the toys. Come on, let’s go inside.”
She got on the phone and called somebody, whose voice on the other end I could hear and it sounded familiar. “I’ll be by,” he said. “I can get there soon. Don’t touch it, and don’t let him touch anything.”
Mom hung up the phone and lit a cigarette.
We waited for a long while. Mom stayed quiet, and with no talk or toy men to occupy myself with, I tried to remember the move to our new home, which was not some faraway memory and was only a day back. But because of the fever, I remembered only fragments. Miles of highway, miles of pine trees. I remembered riding in the front seat of our white Toyota as I burned up. Mom had held her long Winston 100 up to the cracked car window, and at eighty miles per hour the passing air sucked the smoke out. “We left Paige,” I kept saying. “We left her, Mumma.” Mom took her eyes off the road and looked over at me. She held her hand to my sweaty forehead. “You poor thing,” she said. Mom had driven fast. Real fast, and she watched me most of the time during the drive, as if I had been her road the whole way to our new home.
Mom’s voice startled me. “Stop biting your fingernails,” she said. She lit a second cigarette while we continued to wait. “He said not to touch anything—that includes your mouth.” For quite some time I tried to remember our arrival, tried to find the exact memory of my mother putting together a bed, making it, and putting me under the blankets. But I couldn’t remember any of that. All I remembered was that at one point the night before I had a dream where I crawled out of bed and into the darkness of the unfamiliar house, and I grabbed at a doorknob that wasn’t there, tripped over boxes that cluttered the short and narrow hallway that led straight to the kitchen and small living room where a man’s voice spoke to me, telling me to go back to bed. I’d asked who he was but he didn’t answer. He guided me back to my room, his boots echoing down the hallway.
At the noise of a truck and its engine cutting off, Mom said, “Finally,” and she stood from the table. When the man came down the driveway and up the stairs and stepped over that gap, I knew at once it hadn’t been a dream. The man Mom called about the jar was the man who put me to bed last night. He was dark like Mom, and unlike Mom he had long black hair, and little black whiskers on his upper lip. He wasn’t fat, but he had a pudge to him I hadn’t noticed in the dark, and his jeans were faded and baggy. He wore a red-and-black flannel button-up.
“Gwus,” Mom said. “This is Frick. He’s a medicine man.”
“He was here last night,” I said to Mom, and then to Frick I said, “I saw you.”
“Who do you think hooked up the woodstove?” Frick asked.
I thought Mom.
“Let me see your hand,” Frick said.
I held my hand out to him and he took it and rubbed my palm. He let go and talked to Mom about the jar. “It’s bad medicine,” he said, and Mom wondered who would put it here. Frick had no answer. “Could have been anyone on the rez. I’ll take care of it.”
He left the house. I wondered why you couldn’t throw it away, wondered how Frick would handle it. I asked Mom, and she got all annoyed.
“You can’t throw it away,” she said. “Frick’s a Native doctor. It needs to be properly disposed of.”
I asked why again, and she said that what I’d found had been meant to hurt me. To hurt us.
“But I feel fine,” I told her, to which she said, “Just in case.”
Soon Frick opened the door and said he was ready for us. Mom took me outside and to the back of the house and down into the woods where a tree had four cloth flags hanging: red, white, black, and yellow.
“It’s the four directions,” Mom told me.