red-and-white buckshot bag. He puts the feather back into its fold of cardboard and stashes these sacred items on the highest shelf of the kitchen cabinet. He feels much better. He goes out to talk with Richard Whiteheart Beads. He coughs. A puff of smoke.
“Is that a smoke signal?” Richard says. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?”
“She escaped? That’s good. You can’t just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women’s crisis hotline. I don’t want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?”
Klaus coughs.
“Oh, I got that signal,” Richard says. “Me fucked.”
“That is the problem,” says Klaus. “She has enslaved me with her antelope ways.”
“You one sad mess,” says Richard. “Let her go.”
But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.
Nitam-anokii-giizhigad
First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.
Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from shit to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard’s fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it’s way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.
Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard—white squares and red squares—denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus’s foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an assumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.
“They won’t mind. They won’t even notice. They never go out to the barn.”
“You sure?” asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus’s bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet scraps.
We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.
For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.
Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there’d be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.
Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.
Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays
“Is that a smoke signal?” Richard says. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?”
“She escaped? That’s good. You can’t just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women’s crisis hotline. I don’t want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?”
Klaus coughs.
“Oh, I got that signal,” Richard says. “Me fucked.”
“That is the problem,” says Klaus. “She has enslaved me with her antelope ways.”
“You one sad mess,” says Richard. “Let her go.”
But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.
Nitam-anokii-giizhigad
First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.
Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from shit to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard’s fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it’s way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.
Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard—white squares and red squares—denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus’s foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an assumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.
“They won’t mind. They won’t even notice. They never go out to the barn.”
“You sure?” asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus’s bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet scraps.
We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.
For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.
Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there’d be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.
Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.
Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays
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