Getting from the reservation to the city isn’t difficult. The distance is bridged by cousins or uncles visiting the VA Hospital, aunties looking for work, and everyone else heading down and back for cut glass beads, new bicycles, returning sometimes with only pocketfuls of change (all that is left after threading through the bars on Lake, Hennepin, and Franklin). Burt and Lincoln find themselves at Little Earth Housing, mostly AIMless since the seventies.

Lincoln has been gone from Minneapolis for slightly over a year and a half, but to him it feels like decades.

Once they pass Monticello he glues his eyes to the windshield. Squinting against the August glare and the coils of pot smoke that fill the car, he looks for signs of change: new buildings, the absence of old warehouses, roads pushed through crumbling neighborhoods, or abandoned lots given over to weedless lakes of asphalt. He searches the margins of the road for everything he has been told by One-Two happens in a city, the glacial pace of change quickening since his departure. But he cannot be sure what has changed, or what he is noticing for the first time.

Some of the old buildings he has never seen before look coated in at least twenty-five years of dirt. When they turn off the freeway and onto Franklin the feeling of displacement becomes more acute.

“Hey, Burt, that restaurant always been there?” he asks, pointing at a Lebanese place on the right side.

“How the fuck should I know? I thought you came here to whup up on your uncle, not for a architecture lesson.” Burt speaks lazily, gesturing widely with his hands.

“Yeah, huh.”

Lincoln closes his eyes, sick to his stomach from the weed and the stop-start of the car, city motions he has lost the feel for. The car is driven by a distant relative on his way to pick up an even more remote relation at the train station in Saint Paul. Lincoln closes his eyes and tried to keep them that way past Third Avenue, so he won’t have to see the one thing he did know was new—the Amoco station where his house used to be. He can’t manage it and opens them while they are stopped at the light. Burt lights a cigarette and Lincoln rolls down the window and stares. He’d anticipated change, but not this, not the complete removal of his old home. Not the level concrete, the lack of elevation, the cheap fence and retaining wall around the back edge that separate the gas station from the apartment building on the side and the alley in back.