The Long Harvest
Short fiction
In June, 1986, during the last day of my senior year of high school in Roseland, Idaho, I castrated a lamb. But I didn’t do all of the cutting. My best friend, Ben, had already made the first slice. He stood nearby as I leaned close to that animal and made my first incision. I tried to be merciful. But I was an amateur with a knife—tentative, awkward, and afraid. I expected the lamb to bleat with agony. But it barely stirred as I cut. It was probably in shock. I don’t think animals believe in God. I doubt they have any need for theology. And, yet, with a knife in my hand, maybe I’d become, in that lamb’s primitive mind, its version of an Old Testament God. I certainly wanted to feel some sense of triumph. But I only felt shame. My incompetence became cruelty.
I knew that a male sheep was called a ram, but I didn’t know anything about ruminant anatomy. I hadn’t volunteered to castrate that little guy. It was required of me as the retiring president of the Roseland High School chapter of the Future Farmers of America—the F.F.A. Because it was my official goodbye, my rite of passage, I had a small audience. Ten or twelve other F.F.A. members, including Ben, watched me cut. I didn’t want to hurt that animal—to torture it. But the blood ceremony was traditional. It was protocol. It was dominion. But I was also lucky. In earlier decades, the retiring F.F.A. president had to use his teeth instead of a knife.
As a departing president, I had a framed photo on the shop-class wall alongside the photos of previous F.F.A. presidents—three generations of crew-cut white boys wearing the official royal-blue corduroy jackets. One of those former presidents was Ben, who’d served his term our junior year. He would’ve easily been re-elected to lead the F.F.A., but he’d chosen to spend our senior year serving as homecoming king and harvest ball king and prom king and student-body president and captain of every sports team. He was tall, handsome, and strong. There are boys like him in every small town. The Undefeated One. His family owned and farmed ten thousand acres. Ben was wheat field royalty and I was a townie who lived in Roseland proper. I’d signed up for the F.F.A. only because most of the girls I liked were also Future Farmers. Those were the white girls who drove grain trucks, bucked hay bales, hit kill shots on the volleyball court, and earned nearly perfect grades. I’d been far more interested in the potential romances than the agricultural education. And I’d only been elected president because of Ben’s endorsement.
I made the last slice and stepped back from that lamb’s partial sacrifice. I looked at the other F.F.A. members who’d been my witnesses. I looked at Ben. He grinned. He might’ve hugged me if I weren’t still holding that sharp blade. Instead, he grabbed my wrist and lifted my knife hand into the air. We faced our schoolmates. They cheered for us.
Ben had blessed me.
The 1986 International Harvester truck had a gross vehicle weight of 22,780 pounds. Or 27,822 pounds. Or 82,027 pounds. Whatever. It was just a number. And I knew the number only because Ben kept bragging about the family’s new grain truck and its gross vehicle weight, maximum payload, and rear-axle weight. He was drunk. I was drunk. It was nearing midnight. And we were sitting in the bed of that big truck along with Ricky, Doug, and Steve. They were drunk, too. Earlier that day, we’d graduated from Roseland High School and now we were loudly celebrating—and silently mourning—the end of our teenage epoch. The five of us were officially known as the Gold Dust Gang. There was even a photo of us on the front page of that week’s town newsletter with the headline: The Last Ride of the Gold Dust Gang.
“Do you know how many bushels we can fit on this big bastard?” Ben asked me about his truck.
I didn’t understand or care. It was farm math.
“How much do you weigh?” Ben asked me.
“210,” I said.
“That’s a lie. You’re more like 180. What’s your maximum bench press?”
“344.”
“You think creating some crazy number out of the air is gonna make it true?” Ben asked. “I say your max is 275, which is still too much. But I’ll give you some grace.”
“O.K.,” I said. “So what?”
“Let’s say you’re the truck,” he said. “And you weigh 180. And the most you can carry is...what was your maximum bench press again?”
“500.”
“Now you’re feeding me new and even bigger bullshit,” he said. “But I’ll use your bullshit number. You just add 500 plus 180...”
Ben closed his eyes and tried to do the math in his head. But he was too drunk for any academic endeavor.
“Okay, okay, you weigh 180, right?”
“That was your guess,” I said.
“So that means 180 is your curb weight and...how much do you bench press again?”
“86 kilograms.”
“Wait, you can’t go metric in the middle of everything.”
“Yes, I can, Algebra Boy.”
“Okay, okay, if your curb weight is...what is it...and your payload is in kilograms then....”
Ben stared at me. He had lost all track of the numbers. He was intoxicated and flummoxed. Sober, he was the best mathematician in town.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m just saying that every truck has a maximum payload. And this truck can’t carry my balls because they’re too big.”
We all laughed.
Ben grabbed my face. We touched our foreheads together like toddlers testing the world and proving it real. He smelled of sweat and beer. In that moment, I learned, strangely enough, that a beer can carry the scent of hope. But that’s also a dangerous lesson because hope’s favorite children are grief and surrender.
“You’re my best friend,” Ben said. “And I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I said.
That was the only time in our lives that Ben and I had ever acknowledged our brotherly love—our philía in the farmland.
“So let me get it clear,” I said. “When it comes to trucks, there’s the load you think you can carry, the load you can actually carry, and then there’s the load too big for you to carry.”
Ben’s face was so close to mine that my eyes crossed and his features blurred.
“Go back to your store and count the broken eggs,” he said.
It made no sense. Therefore, we laughed.
Then Ben raised his face toward the night sky and screamed.
“I’m bored,” he said. “Let’s go find some girls.”
He climbed behind the wheel of the grain truck. Ricky, Doug, and Steve crammed onto the bench seat next to him. And I sat at the passenger-side window. We were the Gold Dust Gang. The Gold Dusters. We were five kids at the end of our shared childhood, traveling at ten miles an hour in that new grain truck—a stupid farm boy’s version of safely driving while drunk. We cursed and laughed and sang along with the cassette in the dashboard tape deck. In those days, Hank Williams, Jr. mattered more to us than his father did. That was a blasphemy I wouldn't recognize until I was well into my adult years. I mean, Jesus, I don’t think we even listened to Dolly Parton at all during high school. What the hell was wrong with us? She wrote “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You” on the same day. That’s like saying Shakespeare wrote the last act of Hamlet and the first act of King Lear on a rainy Stratford Saturday. But we didn’t know that biographical detail about Dolly. We were unaware of the history of the musical genre we most loved. We were unaware of every kind of history. We just sang along with what we knew. And so, singing, Ben decided he'd drive over to MartyJo’s house. We all agreed. We’d stay on the dirt roads because we were drunk. It would take us longer. But we’d get there intact. MartyJo was only eighteen but her blonde hair was already going grey. It wasn’t an ordinary grey. No, it was the grey of a storm-sky in those moments just before and after a lightning strike. Her hair was the anticipation and aftermath of expressed power. But that’s not what made her special. Her hair color was just the external manifestation of her internal life—of her incandescent joy and pain. She wasn’t like any of our schoolmates. She could’ve been voted Most Likely to Contemplate. She was the daughter of a Lutheran Minister and she didn’t date, but I doubted it was because of her father’s religious suspicions. I just don’t think any of us boys were philosophical enough for her. She was more interested in the details of the soul. She flirted, yes, but she was witty without being amorous. On that night, we intended to stand in her yard and serenade her with whatever church hymns we could remember. She’d mock us and we’d accept her mockery as psalm.
“MartyJo, MartyJo,” I shouted as we traveled down the road in that new grain truck. “MartyJo, we’re the Gold Dust Gang and we’re gonna live forever.”
I leaned halfway out the window. I almost fell. But Doug and Steve pulled me back inside. In a farm town childhood, there are so many moments when Mr. Death says hello. And there are so many moments when farm kids wave and tell Mr. Death they’ll see him next time.
“Damn,” Steve said. “That was close. We barely caught you.”
We just laughed.
“MartyJo,” I shouted again. “We love you. You’re gonna live forever.”
MartyJo! Our Helen!
MartyJo! Our Juliet!
MartyJo! Our Charlotte Bronte!
MartyJo! Our Jane Austen!
MartyJo! Our Emily Dickinson!
MartyJo! Our Madam Curie!
MartyJo! Our Amelia Earhart!
Then I realized that Ben had somehow piloted the grain truck from the dirt road onto pavement—onto a state highway. I hadn’t understood how drunk and disoriented we were. I didn’t know if we were one, five, or ten miles away from Roseland. We had to stop. But before I could say a word to Ben, I heard and saw the siren and the lights of the cop car behind us.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
The Gold Dust Gang panicked.
“What do I do?” Ben asked.
“We’re in big trouble,” I said.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Ben said.
I said, “Pull over.”
Ben eased the truck off the road and stopped.
“Turn off the engine,” I said.
Ben switched off the ignition and pocketed the keys.
I’d never been stopped by a police officer. I was nervous, yes, but isn’t everybody nervous when they’re stopped by a cop? Their authority over us is complete. They can make a speeding ticket feel like a rebuke from God.
Sitting in the grain truck, the Gold Dust gang was illuminated by the red and blue lights of the Idaho cop car. I looked into the passenger-side mirror and saw a dark figure, backlit by his car’s headlights, carefully moving toward the truck.
“My Dad is gonna kill me,” Ben said.
I’d known Ben’s father my whole life. He had two emotional gears: idling tractor or rolling war tank.
“It’s okay,” I said to Ben. “We’re gonna be okay.”
“I hope it’s Smitty,” he said.
Smitty was Roseland’s town cop. There was no reason to believe that he’d be on the state highway that late. But isn’t all hope as irrational as a drunk teen-ager? I hoped it was Smitty because he would’ve cussed us out for being so stupid. He would’ve laughed and told us a story about the idiotic things he did the night he graduated from Roseland High School. He would probably have parked the grain truck farther off the highway and slowly followed us in his cop car as he made us walk back to town. By which point we would have been sober, mostly sober, for our angry parents arriving to pick us up.
But it wasn’t Smitty who stopped us. There would be no empathy. No reminiscing about his escapades as drunk teen. No casual mythologizing of the self-destructive American male. And no walk of foot-blister punishment into town. It was an Idaho State trooper who’d stopped us. And we didn’t know him.
“You in the truck,” he said in his loud cop voice. “Get out of there. All of you climb out the passenger side. Do it slow. And keep your hands up. Do it now.”
I opened my door, leaned out, and said, “We’re just kids.”
“Get out of the truck,” the trooper said.
I heard the rage and danger in his voice. I was so scared that I couldn’t move. That’s why some people are killed by police. They are, in the moment, emotionally incapable of following orders.
“You heard me,” the trooper said. “Get outta the truck and keep your hands up. And do it slow. Don’t make me say it again.”
I didn’t know how we were supposed to get out of the truck and raise our hands at the same time. How do you follow contradictory demands?
“Get out of the truck. Don’t make me say it again. Get out now.”
Keeping my hands in the air, I turned in the seat, and tried to slide on my back out of the truck. But it was too high off the ground and I was drunk. I lost my balance, pitched forward, fell, and landed on all fours.
“Don’t you move, don’t you move,” the trooper shouted. “I will shoot you. I will shoot you in the face.”
This is it, I said to myself. Down on all fours in the dirt. This is how I’m going to die.
I was born in Roseland but my mother and father spent their younger years in Seattle. They met at a party in the Central District neighborhood. She liked that he was clean-shaven in an era of epic facial hair. He liked that she wore blue jeans beneath her skirt. He was an only child. So was she. Neither had any surviving blood relatives.
My mother and father were married only a few months after they met and decided they wanted to move away from Seattle. They were tired of the multitudes—of the ease of urban anonymity. They wanted to work hard and give names to every callous on their hands. They wanted to lift and count and reach and stack. So they bought the grocery store in Roseland for less money than it would’ve cost them to purchase a new car. My mother was pregnant with me when they arrived in Roseland. And they operated that store from 1968 to 1998, an even thirty years. When they decided to retire, they tried to sell the business, grocery stock and all, but nobody wanted to compete with the new Walmart, thirty-three miles up the highway. So my parents boarded up the store and retired to their little house.
When I was in high school, Roseland had approximately fifteen hundred residents. The only non white residents were my father and me. My mother was a typical olio of German, British, and French. And, to be accurate, my father and I were mostly white. My father’s father was a half-Hidatsa Indian from North Dakota. That meant I was only 1/8th Indian—not much at all. But, just like my father, I looked more Indian than not. Our hair was dark brown verging on black. Our skin was medium-roast coffee though we both became deep mocha in the summer sun. Ethnically speaking, my father and I were a Starbucks menu.
My father’s Hidatsa father abandoned him when he was just an infant. So my father was raised by his white single mother. He was part Indian, sure, but it wasn’t an identity he inhabited.
I only knew that family history through my parents’s home movies, newspaper clippings, and photographs. I was disconnected from my ancestors, white and Indian. I didn’t know who they were. I only knew myself. And what did I know?
I was an ambiguously brown boy in small town white America.
Down on all fours in the dirt, trembling like a prey animal, I tried to negotiate with that Idaho State trooper.
“Officer,” I said. “I’m just a kid. Please don’t shoot me. We’re just kids.”
“Shut up, shut up,” the trooper yelled. “Crawl toward me. Don’t say a word. Crawl toward me. And the rest of you do the same. Get out of the truck and crawl toward me.”
I did as I was ordered. The other Gold Dusters slid out of the passenger side of the truck, landed on all fours, and crawled with me toward the trooper—toward our dark shepherd.
“Form a line,” he said.
I was confused. I looked at him. His right hand hovered over the pistol in his holster.
“Don’t look at me,” he shouted. “I’m not gonna say it again.”
I realized what to do. I crawled closer, maybe ten feet from the trooper, sat up on my knees, and interlaced my fingers on top of my head. I looked back at the Gold Dusters. They copied me. They crawled up next to me. They sat up on their knees and interlaced their fingers on top of their heads. We formed a police lineup, except we were kneeling in a field beside a state highway. The trooper shone his flashlight at us and laughed. There was no jest in his laughter—only an infinity of contempt.
“Jesus,” he said, “I was worried you guys were gonna be trouble. But you’re just a toilet of little shits. Jesus Christ. Just kids. Did you steal this truck?”
“No, sir,” Ben said. “It’s my father’s truck.”
The trooper walked up close and shone his flashlight in Ben’s face.
“Farm boy,” the cop said.
The trooper was maybe forty years old. A white guy with big arms.
He shone his flashlight into the faces of Ricky, Doug, and Steve.
“All farm boys,” the trooper said.
Then he shone his flashlight in my face.
“What are you?” he asked.
Drunk, scared, confused, I didn’t understand his question.
“You aren’t a farm boy,” he said. “So what are you?”
“My parents own a grocery store,” I said.
“I didn’t ask about your parents. I asked about you. What are you?”
I didn’t understand his question.
“I just graduated high school today,” I said. “I’m going to college next year.”
“I didn’t ask about your future,” the Trooper said. “I asked about your now. These other shits are white farm boys. What are you?”
Then I understood his question.
When my parents first moved into Roseland, they dealt with whispers and stares—the immediate enmity—that the more friendly townsfolk dismissed as “just regular suspicion about new people.” That obvious racism toward my father grew more covert, and eventually became barely existent as my parents ran the grocery store with graceful efficiency. But I think the fact that my parents performed an essential service made it easier for them to assimilate into the community. My father was a brown man who politely fed white people. That’s a traditional American relationship. Nearly all of those white people were kind. My parents were always patient. And the years went by.
I first interacted with all those white kids in preschool and kindergarten. And nearly all of them liked and respected me. Racism is learned. Racism is simple and generic. And I was very specifically their schoolmate. I was Zeke, the kid who’d played an elf in the fourth-grade Christmas play. I belonged.
Mostly, I think I was accepted and loved because Roseland was obsessed with eight-man football and, thirty years after graduation, I still hold the state eight-man records for career rushing yards, passing yards, and touchdowns.
And, yes, there were a few white boy opponents who’d spat racist insults in my face after they tackled me. But I wouldn’t respond. I’d just get up, take the next hand-off, and spin, sprint, and smash my way into the end zone again. And again. And again.
“What are you?” the trooper asked me again. I was too afraid to answer. I didn’t know what he wanted me to be. I didn’t know what he needed me to be.
The Gold Dust Gang kneeled in the dirt like criminal suspects. But I knew I was going to be treated like the ringleader.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” the trooper said. “What are you?”
“I’m Native American,” I said.
He studied my face.
“I know Indians,” he said. “You’re something besides Indian.”
“My mom is white,” I said.
“Are you American?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “You talk funny.”
I was surprised by that observation. I didn’t speak with a foreign accent. I’d barely traveled outside of Idaho, let alone outside of the United States. If anything, I had a slight version of that faux-Southern twang possessed by a certain kind of white American man who’s never lived in the South. Listen to me, my accent said. My skin is brown and looks darker at night, but I belong here.
“And you’re something else,” he said. “It’s in your face. You’ve got some other kind of blood in you.”
I didn’t say that my Dad was more Italian and Greek than Hidatsa Indian. Or that my Mom was only white. I didn’t say that I was more white than anything else but that I was never white enough to be completely white. I don’t think it would’ve mattered to him.
“Tell me what else you are,” he said. I could hear the violence in his voice. I didn’t know if he’d hurt me for my silence. If he’d be able to read my silence as a lie. That’s what cops do, right? They punish liars. But he might become even more violent if I told him the truth.
“What are you?” the trooper asked.
I didn’t know what to say, I was only white and Indian. That’s it. My white friends knew I was biracial. But it didn’t matter to them. Our friendships weren’t based on genealogy. There were no secrets. There was nothing for me to reveal to the cop. My pride, fear, shame, and confusion blended
“I bet you go some Mexican blood,” he said. “And something else, too. Tell me. What are you?”
He was smiling. He didn’t really care what I was. It only mattered that I wasn’t like him. He just wanted as many reasons as possible to see me as a lesser being. I was terrified of the cop—of his power over me. And my fear gave me stupid courage.
“I’m nothing,” I said. Too loudly. “And I’m everything.”
I’d challenged the trooper. I’d raised my voice. The trooper leaned down close and got in my face—his nose almost touching mine—and my pride and courage vanished. The trooper’s breath smelled like old coffee and cigarettes—sour and acrid. I had the thought that everything in farm country is sharp.
“Ah, yeah, brown boy, you’re a lot of things,” the trooper said. “I knew it. I can see what you are. I knew you were a goddamn mongrel.”
I felt like I’d been kicked in the ribs. He said that word in such a way that it contained all the other terrible things to call a human.
I heard my friends react—their gasps and curses. Their surprise. They had never truly understood, or ever expected, the way a white stranger—a cop—might decide to hate me.
“Hey, mongrel,” the trooper said. “Have you been drinking?”
“Yes,” I said, hoping my honesty would save me.
“We’ve all been drinking,” Ricky said.
Doug and Steve agreed. But Ben didn’t say a word. He stared straight ahead. I think he was more scared than I was.
“Were you driving?” the trooper asked me.
Oh, man. The trooper had seen me climb first out of the passenger-side door. He knew that I wasn’t the driver.
“Zeke wasn’t driving,” Doug said, not realizing that the truth didn’t matter anymore. “Zeke wasn’t driving,” he said again. Bravely defending me.
The trooper walked over to Doug and rapped his flashlight on his left thigh. Doug gasped with pain and fell sideways into Ricky.
“This is between the mongrel and me,” the trooper said. “All you white boys need to get down on your faces now.”
Ricky helped the injured Doug, and both dropped facedown into the dirt. Ben and Steve did the same. Then the trooper turned his attention back to me.
“Zeke?” he said. “Is that your name?”
“Yes,” I said. “Short for Ezekiel.”
“Ezekiel helped write the Bible,” the trooper said.
“Yes,” I said. “The Book of Ezekiel. Old Testament. He was a prophet.”
“It’s always amazed me how much mongrels love the Bible. Do you love the Bible, mongrel? Are you a Christian?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
That was a lie. But I think Jesus would’ve forgiven me for that one.
In October, 2016, I was home in Seattle when I received a phone call from Roseland City Hall. From the mayor herself. Mayor MartyJo. I wondered how she got my mobile number. She asked if I remembered her. How could I’ve forgotten her? She of the grey-lightning hair. As we talked, I remembered that I used to love her. I ached with distant and unrequited love.
I wanted to ask her if her hair had grown more grey over the years. I wanted to ask her if she now wore it so long that it looked like a herd of grey ponies rolling over her shoulders.
But I didn’t ask her about her hair. It would’ve been too forward. Too familiar.
“Oh, I’m so happy you remember me,” she said. “I remember you always sprinting around town and dropping to the ground, anywhere and everywhere, to pump out pushups.
I was embarrassed by the memory of my teenage athletic immodesty.
“I thought you were gonna play for the Seahawks,” she said.
“I thought so, too,” I said.
“What did John Lennon sing?” she asked. “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans.”
I’d heard that MartyJo has gently broken away from her Lutheran pastor father and had started her own church. So, in addition to being the mayor of her hometown, she was also the leader of a new Christian sect. Other plans, indeed.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Just talking and talking away from why I called you. Zeke, I have bad news.”
She told me that my parents’ former grocery store had burned down. I felt dizzy. I leaned against a wall for support. I’d been in Roseland only three times in the thirty years since high school, and the last time had been for my parents’ shared funeral. They’d died in a mid-afternoon single vehicle wreck. Their car had slid off the road during a rainstorm, rolled down an embankment, crashed into a stand of trees, and killed them. At the funeral, I knew the Roselanders wanted me to mourn my parents with them. To collectively share our grief. To create the ceremony together. But I sped away from Roseland only an hour after we’d buried my parents and I hadn’t planned on ever returning. I wondered if MartyJo thought less of me because of my absence from Roseland—from my parents.
I wondered if shame can be transmitted through mobile networks.
“I gave that building to Roseland,” I said. “And my parents’ house as well.”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “You have no legal responsibility. We’ve been meaning to demolish the building for years. It had become a hazard. We had to chase kids out of there all the time. It hasn’t been occupied since your parents closed up shop.”
Over the years, Roseland’s population had dropped from fifteen hundred to under a thousand. Another small American town that was terminally ill.
“The reason I’m calling,” she said, “is because we found a safe in the remains of your parents’ old building.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember the safe in the stockroom.”
“No, we removed that safe and sold it five years ago,” she said. “We found another safe. Fireproof. It must have been hidden in the wall. It’s smaller.”
“I didn’t know about another safe,” I said. “And since I gave you the building, I would think that the contents of that safe, if there are any, would belong to Roseland.”
“Perhaps that’s true, legally speaking,” she said. “But we wouldn’t feel right about opening the safe without you. And we absolutely believe that anything in the safe belongs to you, Ezekiel.”
“That’s very kind,” I said.
“Honest to God,” she said. “Everybody in town is dying from the mystery. You’d think we’d found pharaoh’s tomb.”
“Maybe you did,” I said.
“Answer me this, mongrel,” the Idaho State trooper said to me. “Do you know it’s illegal to drink and drive?”
He knew I hadn’t been driving. But if he wanted to pretend if I’d been driving the grain truck, then I was going to join his act.
I wanted to live. I was on my knees and had to resist the urge to stand and run. I didn’t turn my head but I knew the rest of the Gold Dust Gang was lying facedown in the dirt.
“I asked you a question,” the trooper said to me. “Do you know that drunk driving is illegal?”
“Yes, I know,” I said.
“Then why’d you do it?” he asked.
“Because I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”
“All right, all right. I’m going to have to administer a field sobriety test. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
As my white friends watched, the trooper put his flashlight even closer to my face. It was a powerful beam. It hurt. I looked away but the cop barked at me.
“Face forward,” he said. “Now follow the flashlight with just your eyes. Keep your head still.”
I tried to do it. He moved the light left and I tried to follow. He moved it right and I tried again. Left, right. Left, right. Left, right. I moved my eyes. I moved my head, too. That was against the rules, so the cop yelled at me. The light went left. My eyes went left. The light went right. My eyes went right. This went on for hours or minutes or seconds. I forgot how to keep track of time. I tried to keep my eyes open because the cop screamed at me to keep my eyes open. But the light was so close and bright that it felt like staring into the sun. My eyes watered and involuntarily closed. I wondered if I was going to go blind.
Years later, I did some research on flashlights. Back then, a typical cop flashlight could burn as high as five hundred lumens. In a YouTube video, a man shone his five-hundred-lumen flashlight into the night sky. “Damn,” he said. “It’s bright enough to land a U.F.O.”
“Open your eyes,” the trooper screamed at me. “Open your eyes.”
He growled at me. Like he was the real mongrel—an abandoned, tortured, vicious stray. My tears turned into sobs. Eyes closed or not, all I could see was an implosion of light.
“Please,” I said. “Please stop.”
“Follow the light,” he said.
“I can’t anymore. I can’t.”
“Follow the light, mongrel.”
I couldn’t open my eyes anymore. They’d locked themselves shut. Then the cop lowered his light. I wept. I silently praised the relief provided by the darkness. I held my hands up and open toward that trooper.
I’m not sure why I did that. Was I trying to show him that I wasn’t armed or dangerous? Was I asking for mercy? Was I praying to him like he was a new god?
I hoped he would let me go. I hoped he would let all of us go home. I wanted to be home. I wanted to tell my mother and father how thankful I was that they’d created me.
“O.K., mongrel,” the trooper said. “Now you need to stand up.”
A few days after I spoke to Mayor MartyJo, I drove from Seattle to Roseland. I could’ve stayed away and given the contents of the safe to my hometown. Or I could’ve paid for them to be shipped to me. But my shame had motivated me. And I’d hope my shame would lessen if I returned to Roseland one last time. As I slowly drove through my hometown. I noticed that many businesses—the health clinic and pharmacy, the toy nook, furniture store, and Meg’s Clothes & Things—seemed to be closed. Permanently closed. But the Roseland Cafe was open. Seed & Feed, of course, was the same as always. So were the Roseland Bank and Teddy’s Tavern. I drove past the antique business that now occupied my former family home. There were Trump/Pence 2016 posters in most of the windows. The election was only a few weeks away. There was a Trump sign in my former bedroom’s window. Roseland and its surrounding county had always voted more than ninety-percent Republican. I don’t know if any white liberals had lived in Roseland during my childhood. Nobody had identified themselves as such. Did any white liberals live in Roseland now? Would I still be a liberal if I’d stayed in Roseland? Certainly. But I’d probably be the kind of small-town liberal who sat in living rooms, taverns, cookouts, and restaurants, and shrugged his shoulders at the conservative comments of his friends and neighbors. And they’d shrug their shoulders at me. It would’ve been the Lincoln-Douglas Debate of Small Gestures.
But those small town political considerations were easy for me. I was still a Roselander, however many decades removed. But if I were a dark-skinned stranger, I wouldn’t have stopped in a little white town like Roseland, ablaze with so many Trump signs. I remembered that my mother and father loved to wear hats and T-shirts with the American flag. Huge American flags flew at our house and grocery store. Was it purely because my parents were patriotic? And I promise you they were competitively patriotic. Or did my parents know, on some subliminal level, that clearly-visible patriotism would be an effective cover for my father’s brown skin? Was it a conscious or subconscious use of camouflage? Was it both?
I drove to the Roseland Cemetery. Only two hundred or so people were buried there. Some people are afraid of graveyards. But I was only afraid of that small one in my hometown. And I was afraid of it because I recognized most of the last names of the people who were buried there. I knew the dead. So, with fear and grief, I parked and walked to parents’ graves. For six years, somebody had been taking good care of their resting places. Some old white friend of theirs, I imagined. Somebody who would soon be voting for Trump. I laughed out loud. Almost everybody buried in that cemetery would’ve been a Trumper, including my parents. I laughed again. I realized that I’d bequeathed our family store, the family home, and my parents’ graves to the town. The white folks of Roseland had been kinder to my parents than I’d been. And now, in death, my mother and father, who’d lived in respectful service to that town for more than three decades, were being lovingly repaid.
I said goodbye to my parents then drove over to the grocery store—to the burned-out shell—where Mayor MartyJo and other townsfolk had gathered. Old-timers mostly. The parents of my former schoolmates. The uncles and aunts. I remembered some of them well. A few of my high school classmates—barely-friends then who were complete strangers now—showed up. But the Gold Dust Gang was missing. I hadn’t invited them. The Roseland folks who did come to greet me asked if I was still writing books. No, I said, I gave that up, but I was still teaching college in Seattle. They asked if I was a Seahawks fan. You bet, I said, I’d been to a few Seahawks games, including the playoff battle where the fans celebrated loudly enough to register on the Richter scale. I promised the Roselanders that I still hated the University of Washington Huskies and that my football heart remained partly with the Washington State Cougars and mostly with the Idaho Vandals. I wondered if any of them had ever read my book of Native American poetry—quietly published and silently perished. I’d reclaimed my Indian heritage, however small it was, and only a few thousand poetry fans had cared and they’d only cared many years earlier. I imagined a few of the Roselanders had bought my book, read the first few pages, and set it on a shelf somewhere with the other knick-knacks. I shook hands with those old Roselanders. Patted shoulders. They reminisced about the football championships. The glory days of the Roseland High School Wolves. “Alpha Wolves! Alpha Wolves!” was our war cry. I imagined the old men told the same stories when they gathered for coffee and pie in Roseland Cafe. I looked at that old diner across the street and wondered if it would be the last business standing in my hometown. No, I’d thought, Teddy’s Tavern would be the last. Always time for one more round before somebody turned off the last light in town.
I stood close to MartyJo. Her hair was still a miracle of grey. She was Mayor MartyJo! Pastor MartyJo! Minister MartyJo! Shepherd MartyJo! Named for Martin Luther and Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus! She introduced me to the safecracker, an out-of-towner. He was a big man with small hands. I wondered if bigger hands would’ve made his job easier. Or maybe safe cracking was refined work that rewarded refined hands.
“Bill here says it won’t take more than an hour to open that safe,” MartyJo said. “Maybe two.”
“That’s my most optimistic estimate,” Bill said. I could tell by his expression that he knew it would take longer, perhaps much longer. But he’d delivered optimism to a mayor whose own optimism had probably won her election. In a dying town like that, you could run for office only out of rage or hope. And MartyJo wasn’t an angry person. She was calm and loyal and strong and smart and would live in Roseland for her entire life. She was absolutely dedicated to ensuring that every day felt exactly the same as the day before and the day after. And she was definitely a Trumper.
“Bill,” she said. “Can you give us a minute? I think maybe Ezekiel would like some solitude.”
MartyJo plopped a hard hat on my head. She put one on her own head. And then she and I carefully stepped through the ruins of my childhood. We stopped in front of that discovered safe. It was four feet tall. Two feet wide. I sighed. MartyJo took my hand and loosely wrapped her fingers around mine. It was the chaste handhold of parishioners reciting the Lord’s Prayer together. But, despite the casualness of our contact, it still occurred to me that I might’ve married MartyJo if I’d stayed in Roseland. I was briefly sad for that smaller and unrealized life. I was briefly in recollected love. I imagined that we would’ve had political arguments over dinner but never in bed. I imagined our little grey-haired children. Then MartyJo led me closer to the safe. We stood side by side. Impatient, enervated, she held my hand a little tighter. I guess that was her idea of solitude. It was a tender gesture in a cleaved country.
“You must miss your parents terribly,” she said.
“I do,” I said. But I didn’t know how to define my grief. I think I grieved more for what I’d lost when they were alive than for what I’d lost with their deaths.
“O.K.,” she said. “You just let me know when you’re ready for Bill to go to work.”
Then I had another kind of thought. I don’t know if you know much about crossword puzzles. About solving crossword puzzles. But sometimes, after being stumped by a particular clue for minutes or hours or days, you’ll suddenly know the answer. It will arrive like a single raindrop falling onto your forearm.
“Wait,” I said. “I think I know.”
I knelt in front of the fireproof safe and turned the dial left to the first number, right to the second number, then left again to the third number, and then I turned the handle. Success. The safe was unlocked but I didn’t open the door.
“Oh, my,” MartyJo said. “How did you do that?”
“Day, month, year,” I said. “My parents’ wedding date.”
“Isn’t that beautiful,” she said and clapped.
I looked back and saw that Bill the locksmith and the townsfolk had taken a few curious steps into the ruins. Everybody wanted me to open the safe.
I was standing in front of the trooper. It felt like he was a foot taller.
“Tell me, mongrel,” he said. “Are you ever going to drink and drive again?”
“No, sir.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“Sir,” I said. “Please. I won’t do it again.”
He reached out to choke me but his touch was careful, oddly gentle. It was like he meant to leave only the faintest of fingerprints on my neck. He marked me. Like he wanted to make sure he could track me down in the future.
“All right,” he said. “Who has the keys?”
“I do,” Ben said.
Of course he did. He’d been driving. We all knew that he’d been driving.
“Give ’em here,” the cop said.
Ben tossed the keys to the trooper. He caught them easily, even in the dark. I wondered if the trooper had done this kind of thing before.
Then he reared back, took three running steps, and threw the keys as hard as he could into the dark away from the highway. He had a center fielder’s arm. We didn’t even hear them land.
“Now, mongrel,” the trooper said. “I want you to walk in a straight line away from me. Heel to toe. I want you to walk in the direction of where you think those keys landed.”
I couldn’t move.
“Get walking,” the trooper said.
He unholstered his pistol and held it at his side.
I heard my friends begin to cry.
“Start walking,” the trooper said. “Now. Or I’m gonna make your friends walk, too.”
There it was. The bargain. My life in exchange for my friends’ lives. There was no choice. I turned my back to the trooper and walked, heel to toe, away from him.
I wept and waited for the bullet.
I sent out a silent plea to Ben and Ricky and Doug and Steve: Run. Run fast in four separate directions. He can’t chase all of you. At least one of you can escape. At least one of you will be able to testify about what happened tonight.
But my friends were too scared to run. They closed their eyes and dug into the dirt. They’d become utterly primitive. They were cavemen trapped on the open plain as fanged animals howled all around them.
I kept walking into the dark. My limbic system was overwhelmed. As I kept walking, I lost control of my bladder. Urine rolled down my legs.
I was sorry that I would never again see my parents.
And, strangely enough, I marvelled at the dead silence of Idaho. That’s one of the reasons why people live in small towns. They’re in love with silence.
After we’d opened the safe, I said my goodbyes and immediately climbed into my car and drove away from Mayor MartyJo and all the other Roselanders. I stopped at the only controlled intersection in town. Across the intersection, a pickup also stopped.
The other driver waved. A reflexive wave. Every driver waves to every other driver in a small town. Rural etiquette. Everybody has a distinctive way of doing it. This guy raised four fingers. I knew what that wave meant. He was a former teammate—a middle-aged man raising four fingers for the four state football championships that Roseland had won decades ago. The four championships that my team had won during my four years of being a superstar. Four trophies in the high-school display case. I kept my four championship rings in a shoebox on a closet shelf back in Seattle. But this guy probably wore his rings—two on each hand—to the grange-hall dances on Saturday nights.
I knew the man who was waving to me. He’d gained weight and gone bald. It was Ben. We had not seen each other since that summer after high-school graduation. I’d half expected Ben to make an appearance at my parents’ shared funeral, but he hadn’t shown up and I hadn’t asked about him. But there he was in his truck just feet away. Roseland was a small place. It wasn’t surprising to see somebody who lived in a farmhouse a few miles outside the town limits. It wasn’t a coincidence to bump into somebody who’d lived there for almost fifty years.
Ben didn’t realize who I was. He probably had not paid close attention to me. He’d seen a car and a driver. He raised four fingers. I raised four fingers, too. Ben smiled and leaned forward in his seat. To share in the old victories. To get a better look.
Then Ben recognized me.
I can’t tell you how far I walked into the dark away from that Idaho State trooper and his pistol. I can’t tell you anything about the landscape or the shape of the stars in the sky. My night vision had been ruined by that trooper’s flashlight. I do remember my footsteps crunching through that fallow field.
And I remember that I screamed when Ricky, Doug, and Steve suddenly grabbed me. They spun me in circles. Cursed the cop. Celebrated.
“He’s gone,” Doug said. “He just got in his cruiser and drove away.”
“He might come back,” Ricky said.
“No,” Steve said. “Sun is rising. He won’t come back in the daylight. Traffic will be starting back up.”
“I pissed my pants,” I said.
“So did we,” Doug said.
“I mean, I pissed my pants for real,” I said.
“So did we,” Doug said again.
“Where’s Ben?” I asked.
“Looking for the keys,” Doug said.
It took us a long while to find the keys. Then we drove a few miles down the highway and onto a dirt road. We carefully traveled that road until we came to a familiar farmhouse. It was owned by a old farmer who only spoke the minimum number of words possible.
We remained in the truck as Ben, always the most charming, knocked on the front door. He was let inside to use the phone. He called his father who called the rest of our fathers. I don’t know what my friends said to their parents about what had happened to us. No one filed an official complaint.
I tried to tell my parents about the state trooper. But they avoided the topic. They must’ve heard the town gossip about that horrid cop but they never asked me about him. Maybe they just wanted to forget that trooper. I certainly wanted to forget him.
I wanted him gone.
But, of course, he came after me again. Not physically. He was always the wraith hovering in my peripheral vision.
Years later, I did Internet research on past and present Idaho State troopers. I looked up names, events, and photos. But I never saw his face staring back at me from my computer. I wondered if he was even a real cop. I wondered if I had somehow conjured him. Maybe I had needed to bring to life a violent trickster—one who would give me the penultimate reason why I needed to leave Idaho.
In August, 1986, the Gold Dust Gang, and I bumped into one another outside the bank. I hadn’t seen any of them since June, since that night with the trooper. I’d purposely avoided them. My last summer in Roseland had turned out to be a summer spent without the Gold Dusters. I’d mostly stayed in my bedroom and ignored their phone calls. I’d instructed my parents to tell my friends I was sick whenever they came to our door. Ben hadn’t called or knocked at all. But, on the day before I left town for college, I was happy to see the Gold Dusters and they were happy to see me. I was nervous about moving away and I was relieved to be escaping Roseland. I’d withdrawn all my savings. Almost a thousand dollars in cash. I felt rich.
I was the only Gold Duster heading to college—to St. Jerome University in Seattle. I thought I was going to become a sportswriter.
Steve was soon to leave Roseland for a job in Spokane. Kaiser Aluminum. Those were the days when a blue-collar man could afford to buy a white-collar house. He lost that job as the industry changed. These days, he lives in Spokane with his family. He works at a paint store. He mails me Christmas cards in early December. In return, I send him Happy New Year cards, usually in February.
Ricky is unmarried and is a bush pilot in Alaska. He makes his way to Seattle every now and then. We meet for lunch and talk about the wilderness that he knows so well and that I don’t know at all.
Ben and Doug never left Roseland.
Doug worked for my parents for quite a few years and then he took a job at the Walmart forty minutes north. He married a co-worker and they bought a trailer house ten miles closer to that superstore. He became a Jehovah’s Witness, so he doesn’t send me Christmas cards. But he does send me long rambling handwritten letters about his kids and his misadventures at the Walmart. I send him e-mails that he rarely answers.
Ben went to work for his father after high school, then took over the family farm after his parents died. They’re buried only twenty feet from my parents.
But, in 1986, standing outside the bank, we were just friends saying our goodbyes.
Ben wished me luck.
Then Doug said, “That trooper. I can’t stop thinking about that trooper. It’s really gotta freak you out, Zeke, right? I bet you can’t wait to get outta Idaho.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ben asked Doug.
“Well,” he said. “That trooper was evil. He was like white power or something.”
“It wasn’t about color,” Ben said. “It was just ignorant. That’s what Dad says when people act that way. That trooper was just ignorant.”
“But he called Zeke a mongrel,” Doug said. “And he hit him.”
“You remember it all wrong,” Ben said. “He hit you, Doug. But he only shook Zeke around a little bit. And it wasn’t about race, either. Zeke is barely Indian.”
“But what about the flashlight?” Doug asked.
Ben waved that away. I didn’t understand why he was denying what had happened to me.
“And it’s not nice calling somebody mongrel,” Ben said. “But it isn’t like calling somebody the N-word or wetback or squaw or something. Mongrel ain’t about race. It’s just ignorant.”
Ben sounded like his father. I realized that Ben had indeed talked to his father about that night with the trooper. And that his father had talked Ben through the meaning of that incident. Ben’s father had defined it for his son. And their definition was radically different from mine.
“But, Ben,” Doug said. He pleaded. “That cop pulled his pistol on Zeke.”
“It was a Smith &Wesson,” Ben said. “That cop pulled his Smith & Wesson on all of us.”
Of course, he knew what kind of pistol it was. He and his father were target-shooters. They’d travel to gun ranges and blast holes in human-shaped cardboard targets—targets that were criminals and targets that were civilians.
“That cop didn’t point his pistol at anybody. And he let us go. He was trying to scare us. He did us a favor. I’m not going to drink and drive ever again.”
I stared at Ben. He stared at me.
I saw his pain and guilt. He knew that he was wrong. He knew that he was betraying me. He knew that I knew him. And he couldn’t tolerate my judgment.
“Zeke,” he said. “This isn’t just about you. We were just as scared as you were. I was scared. I thought he was gonna kill me. But you never even thought about that fact. No, it’s all about you. Everything has always been about you.”
I immediately understood that Ben was right. He was right about me being barely Indian. And he right about my vaunted place in Roseland. In a small town, the star athletes always get extraordinarily special treatment. I was a great football player. In Roseland, that made me an icon. If Ben was the Undefeated One then I was his Undefeated Twin. At that moment, as I stared at Ben, I knew that old white men would continually reminisce about the last touchdown of my high school career—about the greatest moment in Roseland history. Their children and grandchildren would tell second- and thirdhand stories about my excellence.
And they’d tell the same kind of stories about Ben. He was a small-town icon, too. He and I were green shoots that had grown more golden than any of the others.
But Ben was wrong about that trooper. Sure, he’d never planned to kill any of us. But he’d seen me—that brown barely-Indian boy—and had impulsively decided to terrify me. Yeah, Ben and the others had been terrified, too. But they were collateral damage. I was the one who had to walk blindly through the dark. I was the one who waited for the bullet. I was the one who still woke with nightmares.
“Fuck you, Ben,” I said.
And I said those three words like I’d carved them into a stone tablet that would be discovered centuries later.
Enraged, Ben stepped too close to me and he said, “Fuck you, Zeke. That cop wouldn’t have treated you like a mongrel if you didn’t act like a fucking mongrel all the time.”
I didn’t punch Ben. Maybe I should have punched him. I probably should have punched him. I think Jesus might have punched him. But I didn’t.
Ben and I sat in our vehicles on opposite sides of that four-way stop. We raised four fingers at each other. Four fingers in memory of the four years that he and I had been minor football gods in that minor football town. I almost stepped out of my car. I reached for my door handle. I thought about the cinematic nature of reuniting with my old friend in that intersection. I thought about reconciliation. I thought about the thirty years of silence. And I assume Ben also thought about stepping out of his car, though I had no clue what he might have been thinking. I didn’t know him anymore.
No, that’s a lie. Of course, I knew Ben. He and I were each other’s first conscious thought. I missed him. I realized that my adult life had always been defined by the absence of my childhood best friend. And I needed to believe that Ben’s life was defined by my absence.
But we didn’t get out of our cars. We lowered our hands. We lowered our eyes. Then we drove through the intersection, passed by each other, and continued on our different paths. He drove back to his farm and I drove back to my city.
I know you’re dying to know what was inside that safe. What had my parents kept hidden inside that safe inside the wall? What were the secrets that had been revealed by the raging heat of a fire?
I discovered only decades-old paperwork, a few photographs of people I didn’t recognize, and a desiccated cigar. I didn’t take anything.
There was nothing in that safe I needed.