me. I sweated in my sleep and when I woke, my cheek and arm were stuck to the plastic. I peeled myself unpleasantly up on one elbow.
Dr. Egge was across the room talking to Clemence. I could tell right away that things were better, that my mother was better, that whatever had happened with the surgery was better, and in spite of how bad things were, at least for now the picture wasn’t getting any worse. So I put my face down on the sticky green plastic, which now felt good, and I fell back asleep.
Chapter Two
Lonely Among Us
I had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me.
It was five days since we had found my mother sitting in the driveway. I’d refused to go to school before she came back from the hospital. She was anxious to get out, relieved to be home. She said good-bye to me that morning from my parents’ bed in their upstairs bedroom.
Cappy and your other friends will miss you, she said.
I should go back to school, even though there were just over two weeks left until summer. When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.
My other two friends were Zack Peace and Angus Kashpaw. Back in those days, the four of us were more or less together whenever it was possible, though it was understood that Cappy and I were closest. Cappy’s mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father, Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos. For although Doe became involved with women from time to time, he never did remarry. He was both a janitor of the tribal offices and, on and off, the chairman of the tribe. When he was first elected in the 1960s, he was paid just enough money to take his janitor job down to half-time. When too exhausted to run for a term, he picked up extra hours as the night watchman. It wasn’t until the seventies that the feds put money into tribal government, and we started figuring out how to run things. Doe was still chairman, on again, off again. The way it worked was, people voted Doe into office whenever they got mad at the current chairman. But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight. When it got bad enough, Doe would decline to run. He’d pack up his office, including the tribal chairman stationery that he always had printed on his own dime: Doe Lafournais, Tribal Chairman. For a few years, we’d have lots of drawing paper at Cappy’s house. Inevitably, his successor went through the same treatment. Eventually Doe’s contrite and pleading constituents would work on him until he threw his hat back in the ring. 1988 was an out-of-office year for Doe, which meant he did a lot of fishing with us. We’d spent half the winter in Doe’s icehouse, pulling in northerns and sneaking beers.
Zack Peace’s family was split up now for the second time. His father, Corwin Peace, was a musician on perpetual tour. His mother, Carleen Thunder, ran the tribal newspaper. His stepdad, Vince Madwesin, was the tribal police officer who had interviewed my mother. Zack was almost a decade older than his baby brother and sister, because his parents had married young, divorced, then given it a second try and found out they were right the first time they divorced. Zack was musical, like his father, and always brought his