He leaves and for the second time that day Betty leans against the door and this time she wants it to stay closed, wants to press her back, her aching back, against it. No telling what’ll come popping back through next. The broken bodies of her husband and Caroline. Lester. His sweet face crushed.

Upstairs, Lincoln slides on socked feet away from the banister and crawls across the carpet into bed without getting undressed. Outside it begins to snow.

8

Once Betty squared the house and taught the children their various routes to school—the girls to Andersen instead of Whittier, which was so cramped and dirty she wouldn’t even want to board cattle there, Lester to Phillips Junior High, and Simon to South High to begin the ninth grade—she began to look for work. And kept looking for two years.

Like a blundering forgetful child, once the Bureau of Indian Affairs decided on relocation as a method for dealing with the “Indian Problem” and sent representatives to the reservations with beautiful brochures of San Diego, Chicago, and Minneapolis, it promptly forgot about the program. While the states and private corporations eyed the northern forests and western mineral deposits, as available and temporary as carnival dolls, the government forgot the Indians in the cities.

They forgot their promises of clean running water, of electricity, of sound roofing and roads, just as they would forget the Vista volunteers up north in the sixties, stranded on the reservation without any resources or much in the way of a purpose, strange white fish washed up on the shores of difference. They forgot them because America was in love. It was in love with itself, with the greedy mirror-happy love eyes of a starlet’s double gaze—the outward look at the object and the inward one at what her lover might see. The only worries were of having enough to feed and urge the appetite.

The country was in love and hungry, and so the administration forgot the Indians in the cities. Forgot to tell them how to live in this new cement forest, to teach them the grammar of streets. Forgot its promises, its duty, and the government laughed at the Indians who had moved. Can’t catch a bus. Can’t read a street map. Don’t even know what a résumé is. The government, the city, and the whites were content to map their own fears of inadequacy onto the Indians who relocated. If only Betty had known; the government decided on relocation precisely when the places they sent the Indians to were crumbling.