into a story about a guy fighting Martians in the Arctic when I glanced up and saw DiMarco standing in the doorway. I slid the magazine under my pillow but realized I didn’t need to. He wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was focused on Billy. DiMarco walked down the dormitory, between the rows of bunks. There were a couple of other boys in the dorm, and they sat up straight and were as mute as posts while DiMarco passed them. Billy didn’t notice him at all. He was busy mumbling to himself and fumbling with something he held in his hands. DiMarco stopped a couple of bunks away and just stood there, glaring. He was big and heavy. His arms and hands and knuckles were black with silky hair. His cheeks were dark with a perpetual stubble. His eyes were little beetles, which at the moment, crawled all over Billy.
“Red Sleeve,” he said.
Billy jerked as if somebody had shot a few thousand volts through him, and he looked up.
“You were talking Indian talk,” DiMarco said.
Which was a terrible transgression at Lincoln School. No kid was allowed to speak his Native tongue. It was a strict tenet of the Indian boarding school philosophy, which was “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Getting caught speaking anything other than English usually resulted, at the very least, in a night in the quiet room. But sometimes, especially when DiMarco did the catching, a strapping was also part of the punishment.
Billy shook his head in feeble denial but said not a word.
“What do you got there?” DiMarco grabbed at Billy’s hands.
Billy tried to pull away, but DiMarco yanked him to his feet and shook him hard. Whatever Billy had been holding fell to the floor. DiMarco let the kid go and picked up what had dropped. I could see it then, a corncob doll with a red bandanna for a dress.
“You like playing with girlie things?” DiMarco said. “I think you need some time in the quiet room. Come with me.”
Billy didn’t move. I figured it had to be because he knew—all of us in the dorm knew—what going to the quiet room with DiMarco might really mean.
“Well come on, you little sissy redskin.” DiMarco grabbed him and started to drag him out.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was up off my bunk. “He wasn’t talking Indian.”
DiMarco stopped. “What did you say?”
“Billy wasn’t talking Indian.”
“I heard him,” DiMarco said.
“You heard wrong.”
Even as I was speaking these words, inside my head a voice was screaming, What the hell are you doing?
DiMarco let go of Billy and came my way. The sleeves of his blue work shirt were rolled up to his biceps, which seemed enormous to me at that moment. The kids in the dorm were statues.
“I suppose you’re going to tell me this is yours?” DiMarco held out the doll.
“I made that for Emmy Frost. Billy just asked to see it before I gave it to her.”
He didn’t even glance at Billy to see if some different truth registered on his face. He glared at me, not like a lion, whose appetite was understandable, but like the monster Windigo of the story I’d told Mose the night before.
“I think you’ll both go to the quiet room with me,” he said.
Run! the voice inside my head desperately advised.
But before I could move, DiMarco had me by the arm, his fingers digging into my skin, delivering bruises I’d carry for days afterward. I tried to kick him but missed, and then he grabbed me by the throat and I couldn’t breathe. I saw Billy looking horrified, probably thinking his turn would come next, and beyond him the other boys standing stone still, terrified and helpless. Although I tried to fight, DiMarco’s choke hold was doing its job, and things began to go gray and vague.
Then I heard a commanding voice: “Let him go, Vincent.”
DiMarco turned with me still in his grip. Herman Volz stood just inside the dormitory doorway, flanked on either side by my brother and Mose.
“Let him go,” Volz said again, and it sounded to me like the blessed voice of the soldier angel Michael.
DiMarco released his grip on my throat but exchanged it for a viselike clamp on my shoulder, so that I was still his prisoner.
“He attacked me,” DiMarco said.
“Did not,” I tried to say, but because of what he’d done to my throat, it came out like a frog croak.
“Red Sleeve was speaking Indian,” DiMarco said. “I was