The Round House by Louise Erdrich

spurted instantly.
    Aah! Aah! He stuck his tongue out.
    Hot pepper, said the others. Special Pueblo hot pepper. They watched Randall dance around the room.
    Man, look at his feet fly.
    We should give him Pueblo medicine next powwow.
    For sure, man. They took long drinks of water. Randall was at the sink with his tongue sticking out under the water tap.
    Randall placed that medicine down on the rocks, said Skippy, but when he threw down four big ladles of water, then, man, it vaporized into our eyes and we were breathing that shit in! It burnt like hell. How could Randall have done that to us, man?
    They all looked at Randall with his tongue under the faucet.
    I hope he puts more clothes on finally, said Chiboy Snow.
    We remembered the aunts when we heard them pull out of the driveway. We looked out. They’d left behind two bags of fresh frybread. The grease was darkening the paper sacks in delicate patches.
    If you bring our clothes in, Skippy said to us, and hand in that feast, I’d pay youse.
    How much? said Cappy.
    Two each.
    Cappy looked at me. I shrugged.
    We hauled their stuff in and as we were all eating Randall came and sat next to me. His face was rugged and raw like all the other guys. His eyes were swollen red. Randall had most of his college education, and sometimes he talked like he was addressing me as a social service case, and other times he treated me like his little brother. This was one of those close familial Randall times. His friends were already laughing and eating. They’d forgotten to be mad at Randall now and everything was funny.
    Joe, he said, I saw something in there.
    I filled my mouth with taco meat.
    I saw something, he went on, and he sounded genuinely troubled. It was before the hot pepper blew things up that I saw it. I was praying for your family and my family and all of a sudden, I saw a man bending over you, like a police maybe, looking down at you, and his face was white and his eyes deep down in his face. He was surrounded by a silver glow. His lips moved and he was talking, but I could not hear what he said.
    We sat there quietly. I stopped eating.
    What should I do about it, Randall? I asked in a low voice.
    We’ll both put down tobacco, he said. And maybe you should talk to Mooshum. It had a bad feeling, Joe.

    M y mother cooked all the next week, and even made it outside, where she sat on a frayed lawn chair scratching Pearl’s neck, staring into the chokecherry bushes that marked the boundaries of the backyard. My father spent as much time home as possible, but he was still called to finish out some of his responsibilities. He was also meeting daily with the tribal police, and talking to the federal agent who was assigned to the case. One day he traveled to Bismarck and back to talk with the U.S. attorney, Gabir Olson, an old friend. The problem with most Indian rape cases was that even after there was an indictment the U.S. attorney often declined to take the case to trial for one reason or another. Usually a raft of bigger cases. My father wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.
    So the days went by in that false interlude. On Friday morning, my father reminded me that he would need my help. I often earned a few dollars by biking to my father’s office after school and “putting the court to bed for the weekend.” I swept out his small office, spray-wiped the glass top of his wooden desk. I straightened and dusted the diplomas on his wall— University of North Dakota, University of Minnesota Law School—and the plaques recognizing his service in law organizations. He had a list of places he was admitted to practice that went all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. I was proud of that. Next door, in his closet-turned-chambers, I did a sweep-out. President Reagan, ruddy cheeks and muddled eyes, B-movie teeth, grinned off the wall in his government-issue portrait. Reagan was so dense about Indians he though we lived on