Lincoln finds that he has nothing to attach himself to up north. Nothing to structure himself around. There is the gas station, the grocery store that sells stale doughnuts and oversees the casual delivery of mail. The bar he has not been in, which acts like a changing room—Boo and Ned enter with their shirts half-open, their jean jackets plastered with fish guts or balsam sap and emerge hours later with studied military bearing, with perfect posture to cover their drunkenness. Lincoln has no anchor, nothing except the tremulous house he and Betty live in with Boo. Simon’s vacated trailer is still out back. The coughing school bus picks up Lincoln every morning. These are the props with which he has been forced to stage his life on the reservation. He isn’t sure where the time has gone. All he knows is that his time up north has been split in two: the ten months they lived there before Simon showed up, and the three months since he disappeared. Lincoln is hard-pressed to say why, but the three short months his uncle stayed in the trailer out back were important to him. Even though Simon seemed to be pained by Lincoln’s presence, he knew Simon didn’t hate or despise him. The conversation was always steered away from stories about the family, was kept at the safe height of skyscrapers. Simon told Lincoln building stories, the history of stone, then brick, and lastly steel, of how men worked the city up from the ground. Tales of men flying from the trusses to land on the pavement unharmed, of falling with loads of beam into the river only to break the surface without a scratch. He shared the myths of tough men, of bar fights and motorcycles. At such times his uncle relaxed and stretched out his legs, and time flew, and Lincoln finally found someone who shared his love of the impossible, the outrageous, things that could never happen out on some dusty dried-up reservation. These were city stories.

After the DNR raid they lived in stunned silence. Boo, Ned, and Jumbo all got away. Jumbo and Ned were fast enough to circle around the three-wheelers and walked back to town through the woods. Boo was too slow but had managed to hide himself in the narrow space of a tortured oak, the inside rotted out. He was squeezed inside overnight, trying not to sneeze, coughing around the punky dust like a deposed king on the run.

Lincoln finished the school year without complaint. Betty isn’t working and spends the days cleaning up after Boo who groans from his hangovers or from the sudden onset of work, sporadic forays into earning money for the next round, sometimes unloading feed trucks, selling illegal walleye, and lately, staggering swollen-headed through poplar stands in search of morels, which he has heard sell for twelve dollars a pound.