where they had started to land on my plate. I’d had to cover the piled tails with a napkin while Linda waited for the check. Now the walk seemed better than the jolting of a bicycle. I wanted to get away from other people, too, in case I had to puke.
As I walked beside Bugger in the hot sun, I started feeling better and within a mile I was okay. Bugger didn’t seem to have a destination that made any sense to me.
Can I have my bike now?
I’ve gotta get somewhere first, he said.
Where?
I needa see if it was just a dream.
What was just a dream?
What I saw was just a dream. I needa see.
Whatever it was, it was, I said. You snaked out. Can I have my bike?
Bugger was getting too far out of town, going the opposite of the way to Cappy’s house. I was worried that he might swerve into a passing car. So I persuaded him to turn around by talking up Grandma Ignatia and her generous handouts.
True. A man gets hungry from all this bicycling, said Bugger.
We got to the senior citizens and he dropped the bike in front of me. He staggered away like a man in the grip of a magnetic force. I turned around and rode back to Cappy’s. We had planned to practice shooting, but Randall was there, off work early, fixing his bustle at the kitchen table. The long, elegant eagle feathers were carefully spread out from the circle where they joined, and he was working on a loose one. Randall had a handsome traditional powwow outfit, which he had mostly inherited from his father, though his aunties had beaded flower patterns on the velvet armbands and aprons. When he was all fitted out, he was a magnificent picture. All kinds of ordinary and extraordinary things had gone into his regalia. Two giant golden eagle tail feathers topped his roach, his headpiece. Stabilized by lengths of a car antenna, the feathers bobbed on the springs of ballpoint pens. The elastic garters of one aunt’s old girdle were covered with deerskin and sewn with ankle bells. He had a dance stick that was supposedly taken from a Dakota warrior, though it was actually made in boarding-school shop class. Wherever the components of Randall’s outfit had originated, they were all adapted to him now, each feather fixed and strengthened with carved splinters of wood and Elmer’s glue, the soles of his moccasins soled and resoled with rawhide. Randall won prize money sometimes, but he danced because Doe had danced, and also because those moving pieces caught girls’ eyes pretty good. He was getting ready for our annual summer powwow this coming weekend. Doe as usual would be up behind the MC’s microphone making jokes and making sure that things ran along, as he always said, in a good way.
C’mon, let’s go pick grandfathers for Randall’s sweat lodge, said Cappy. We always put down tobacco for those ancient rocks. That’s why they were grandfathers. We didn’t always get the rocks. We liked being fire keepers better, but Randall had promised if Cappy could start his old red rez car, he could drive it.
There was a collapsed gravelly place on their land that filled with water in the spring and had the right kind of stones if you kicked around for them. Randall always needed a specific number dictated by the type of sweat he would give. We dragged an old plastic toboggan out to collect the rocks. They took a while to find. They had to be a certain kind of rock that would not crack too easily or explode when red hot and splashed with water in the sweat-lodge pit. They had to be a certain size that Randall could pick off our shovel with his deer antlers. Finding twenty-eight grandfathers was a good afternoon’s work and more often, especially if Randall was in a hurry, we’d go out to the rock piles in the fields off reservation and load up Doe’s pickup. But this time we needed to be alone.
I told Cappy what I’d learned from Linda about the morning golf.
Cappy kicked his feet around in the grass and bent to dislodge a rounded gray rock.
You gotta move then, Cappy said, before Lark changes his habits. You should take Doe’s rifle while we’re at the powwow.
Just to think about stealing from Doe gave me a black, sinking feeling and those shrimp began to perk around in my gut. But Cappy was