Red Ant House Read online

  She’d noticed.

  Monday, guess who’s Little Miss Prompt. Guess who’s suited up and waiting on the bars before anybody else. She was never on time! She was always the last one to the gym because she always had to kiss Tyrone for about ten minutes after the bell rang and make him late for basketball practice. But there she was, sitting on the low bar. Looked like some kind of parrot in her sweater with those blue bloomers blousing out.

  I took my time going over to spot her. I was a slow walker. She was sitting there singing, “I think we’re alone, now. The beating of your heart is the only sow-ound.” I didn’t know how she got there so fast, had time to get the music going and everything, because they never let the Level 2s out early.

  When Miss Adams yelled, “Switch,” she didn’t. Big surprise. I was just kneeling there, witching her —fall, fall, fall— but, also, I was wondering why Miss Adams didn’t say anything. She was staring straight at us. She had to know that Purple was stealing my turn. She had eyes in her head.

  Tuesday, I was suited up and ready to go when she walked in, prompt again. She stopped dead. From across the room, I could see her evil eyes squinting. Lightning shot through me.

  All week, we played this little game. We were prompt monkeys. It was fun. It was funny. Purple’s face went all twitchy when I beat her to the bars, which was three days out of five, and I was glad I didn’t have a boyfriend I had to kiss.

  Purple didn’t like to be ignored. You could see it. I had been counting the days since Miss Adams last spoke to us: eight. I guess I had contaminated my spotter. I guess she’d turned invisible, too. By day six of her invisibility, Purple was this rabid exhibitionist, much worse than usual. Wednesday, she put on music at the beginning of class while Miss Adams was talking. Miss Adams was telling us that she had arranged for a competition with Tohatchi High School, and Purple started playing old-timey polka music, like something you’d hear at a skating rink—“Waltzing Matilda”—playing it really loud, and she was doing baby somersaults, stopping after each roll to pull her sweater down. Miss Adams didn’t say a word. She just talked louder. Then Thursday, Purple talked to Lily in Navajo all through practice. Carried on this conversation at the top of her lungs while she was spotting me, which, I didn’t care, but Miss Adams always cared and would send people to the office for those shenanigans. Girls, in this school we speak English. And her cheeks didn’t get the two little red spots like they usually did when something made her mad.

  Then after practice, while everybody else was showering, Purple decided to get busy. She started soaking toilet paper and throwing it on the locker room ceiling, wads of it that stuck and made a sucking sound as it hardened. When Miss Adams came in to hurry us up, she just stood there staring at the gray yuck, and then the red dots did come into her cheeks. “Who did this?” Her voice was shaky.

  Nobody said anything. Purple was looking all innocent.

  Miss Adams said, “Whoever did this better clean it up before she goes home today.” Turned on her heel and walked out. Purple was wide-eyed and surprised.

  Well, I don’t know how she got in the building that night, but when I went to suit up on Friday, the entire locker room ceiling was a papier-mâché sculpture, and Miss Adams was in there studying it, her face, fire.

  Purple was already dressed, sitting on the bench, rolling the tops of her socks into ankle tubes. Miss Adams said she’d like to see her in her office. Purple grinned, as if that was just what she’d been hoping for.

  So we were all in the locker room. Miss Adams’s office was right next to us, and you could hear everything because the wall was so thin. We were quiet because Purple was shouting, which was something I had never heard before, and I don’t think, from the look on her face, Lily had either. She was shouting “You can’t make me”—over and over again she said it—and at first Miss Adams wasn’t shouting, but then she was: “Maybe I can’t make you, but I know who can. You will not embarrass this school.” We all looked at each other, because the goo was gross but not embarrassing.

  Miss Adams was nowhere in sight when it was time for practice to start. Purple was sitting on the bleachers, going through records, not even trying to beat me to the bars. I went over and stood around underneath them. Halfway through the period, Miss Adams came back. She went over to talk to Betsy Cohen, then here comes Betsy with Miss Adams following. Betsy told me she was with me now.

  From across the room Purple yelled, “I’m her spotter.”

  Miss Adams asked Betsy and me which one of us wanted to go first. Betsy shrugged. Me, I was standing there and my arms and legs felt rubbery, and my heart started thudding.

  Purple was walking over, her hands in her pockets. She said it again: “I’m her spotter.” Lily was just watching. Everybody was.

  Miss Adams said, “Evangeline, Mr. McGilly would like to see you in his office.”

  Purple started chalking her hands, and she was glaring at me. She said, “I’m your spotter.”

  I got that thick feeling in my throat. She tucked her chin. Her eyes rolled to the top of their sockets; she was just glaring at me from under tight eyebrows. I could feel everybody’s eyes, all of them, and my throat was closing. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, vomit or something might come out. Purple, she laughed.

  It was a terrible laugh.

  She turned around and stomped off toward Mr. McGilly’s office. After a minute, Lily went, too.

  Lily came back while we were all showering. She said Mr. McGilly kicked Purple out of school, and that Purple took her sweater off and threw it at him.

  I waited for her that afternoon. I sat there staring at the pa-pier-mache sculpture, and at her school clothes hanging on their hook. I figured she’d have to come back and get them. Sooner or later.

  I didn’t know what I was going to say. I wanted to tell her I can’t talk in crowds. I wanted to ask her why she always had to be such a showoff. I don’t know. I sat on the bench, staring at the ceiling. It was a solid wall of gunk. I looked for holes, some little spot of plaster showing through. I figured there had to be some place she missed, and I thought about how long it must’ve taken to cover the whole ceiling. I bet she didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. I wished I had a magnifying glass so I could find that one spot she missed. When she came in I planned to say, “Hey, you missed a spot.” That’d get her. I’d say, “Hey, what about this spot here?” and watch her face go all twitchy.

  For a long time, I listened to the tick-tick of the locker room clock and stared at the sculpture. It looked like vomit. The whole ceiling did.

  She never came.

  So I’m cutting through the gym toward the door, and she’s there. In the gym. The lights are off. There’s just the late-afternoon sun filtering through the high, smeary windows. I see her before she sees me. I step back into the shadow of the doorway. She looks odd without her sweater, like some little girl playing at acrobatics. But she has this round ball of a belly. I’m thinking that ball’s one of her jokes. Like she’s tumbling with a ball under her uniform, but, too, I feel sick because it’s not a ball. I know that. She takes a short run, does three front handsprings. She looks like she’s been practicing for a while. I mean, she’s reeling. Now she starts cartwheels. One, two, three, four wobbly, crooked-legged cartwheels. Ends with a round-off, doesn’t stop—she’s tossing herself every which way, and suddenly I want to scream at her: YOU DID THIS TO YOURSELF! In my head I’m screaming it.

  She’s just throwing herself all over that bare sticky floor, like she’s trying to shake that baby out of there.

  I guess there’s something wrong with my eyes. I mean, all that fall I had my eye on her, watched her twirl and flip, and I never even saw the biggest thing, that belly. She didn’t want me to see it, I know that. I don’t even think Lily knew. It’s like she pulled the shade over all of our eyes. Everybody she looked at, she probably witched: This baby is invisible. Except Miss Adams, who must have eyes in the back of her head.

  Mama has ey
es all over her head. She can see the future. She has visions. “Mark my word,” she told us that next summer, “this place is going to explode.”

  Ronnie and Tyrone graduated in May. Tyrone enlisted in the army and went off to Vietnam. Ronnie got a one-year tuition waiver to the Colorado School of Mines. And Mama convinced Daddy to move us off the reservation, to get the little ones into Catholic schools. “Karen doesn’t care where she finishes high school, do you, honey. It’s six of one, half a dozen of the other to her.” She figured I wasn’t popular anyway. Me, I have no opinion about it.

  So we moved up the Bloody Thirty to Farmington, and Daddy started to commute. Then that next fall, things on the reservation started to explode. Just like Mama’d predicted. For one, the Red Power Indians came in from the north. They took up residence inside the uranium mill. They brought rifles and guns and Daddy wasn’t on shift, but Officer Chris went to investigate, and a sniper in the office shot that handsome cop dead.

  Here’s a funny thing. At the end of the school year, just before we moved, I was cleaning out my locker, and I found this wad of toilet paper at the bottom. It had been wet at one time and had hardened into a gray glob. I was looking at it and thinking, How’d she get in my locker? because I always kept it locked, but she probably had a list of every combination on every locker in school, the thug. Probably spent her spare time shopping in everybody’s locker. I knew she meant it to be mean, the toilet paper rock, and I knew she thought it was funny. Ha-ha. So I tossed it on the pile of trash, but I don’t know. Maybe I had a premonition. It felt weird, like heavy. I picked it back up. I was looking at it, and I saw this little bit of red in the gray. I started tearing at it, and oh, looky here. She had wrapped that ring with its red yarn, a little present in the yuck.

  Maybe I should’ve taken it back before we moved. It would’ve been easy enough. Could’ve rolled it into the rug room when Mr. Slaugh wasn’t looking, let him find it.

  I like having it. I wear it around town. Here, I do nothing but walk. I’m enjoying sidewalks. I’ve walked all over this town. Mama says, “Karen, try out for something.” She says, “Get yourself a little after-school job.”

  I keep thinking I’ll run into her sometime. Purple. One of these Saturdays when the Indians come to town. I’ll be down at Britt Mall, or over in Brookside Park, and she’ll probably have her little baby all dolled up, or maybe in a cradleboard, I don’t know. She’ll be toting around that baby, like she’s got something, making a big deal about her little baby, and I’ll say, “Cute kid,” even if it’s not, and she’ll see this ring, and maybe she’ll say, “Nice ring,” or, I don’t know what she’ll say. Something.

  When Mama saw the ring, she said, “That’s pretty. Where’d you get it?”

  I said, “It was a present from the trading post.”

  Mama curled her lip and shook her head, like she was thinking, I’ll just bet it was. Like, Those Mormons, they’ll try anything.

  The Shiprock Fair

  Over the bridge was the fair. Willa could hear it, and she could see it through the window. She had marched with the band over the bridge that morning, and in the Arts and Crafts tent they had hung her spider painting. Maybe they had put a ribbon on it, she didn’t know.

  Her father was loading bottles in the sample case, and the white man, Del Rink, was staring at her. “So this is your girl,” he said.

  Del Rink was her father’s new boss at the water treatment plant. He was a fat man, sweet-smelling. One eye had stuck in the corner, next to his nose. Her father had not told her about that. He had not told her that Del Rink had one eye stuck in the middle of his face.

  “She’s a pretty girl,” the white man said.

  Willa stared out the window of the water treatment plant. She had helped her father test the river water since her mother died. When she was a little younger, she would ride in the cages with him to the middle of the river, and if her father let her, she would drop the bottles in the water for him. She liked to watch them sink. Her mother would wait for them on the riverbank, and she would write the reports. Her mother died from tuberculosis six years ago when Willa was eight. Since then, Willa had written the reports for her father, who could not read. Willa didn’t mind writing the reports, but today, Willa had a painting in the fair, and the bluff was covered with dust from the rodeo, and she did not know why her father was taking so long, nor why she had to go in to the office with him. Willa thought of her friends walking around at the carnival, riding on the rides. She could hear the music from the rides and she could see the top of the Ferris wheel and the baskets, and she could see the banner on the bridge: SHIPROCK FAIR, 1966. It was the first time she had ever had a painting in the Arts and Crafts tent. It was one she had done over the summer. Her art teacher, Mrs. Penner, had said, “Is that a face in the web?” She had turned it so you could see the face, then turned it back so all you could see was the web. She had said, “Did you do that on purpose? Did you see one like this somewhere? Certainly,” she said, “it has a chance for a ribbon.”

  When her father had finished loading the bottles, he began rummaging in a drawer for labels. He was looking at her funny. “This one,” he said, and laughed. “This girl wants to know what happened to your eye.”

  Willa flushed. She could feel the white man looking at her. She stared at the floor.

  “She does, does she. Well, when I was a boy, my brother stabbed me in the eye with scissors. Do you believe that?”

  Willa pressed her lips together nervously and tried not to smile. Her father laughed again. Then he announced loudly, “Her name is Willa Claw.”

  They drove north along the east side of the river. The river was full of mud, and little islands had come up through the water. On the other side of the river pickups stood in the bushes, and people eating melons sat on hoods and tailgates. Tonight they would sleep there. They would cross the bridge and go to the fair and cross back, and they would build fires on the riverbank and cook. She had not eaten anything that day, and she was hungry.

  She turned the radio on—the Navajo hour; the announcer was talking about the fair, his voice crackling from the static raised by bumps in the road, by her father racing over the dried rain welts in the dirt road. The brown case that held the sample bottles sat on the seat between them. Cotton from the trees floated on the top of the river, and cotton balls had formed in the stagnant water near the bank.

  “You see his kids in school?” her father said.

  “Yes.” He didn’t have to say whose kids. She knew he was talking about Del Rink.

  “Boy and girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “They fat like him?”

  She shrugged.

  “They in your grade?” her father said.

  “The boy.”

  “Smart?”

  She shrugged again.

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but then she said, “Tom.”

  Her father took his hand from the wheel and looked at his thumb. “Tom Thumb?” he said. He laughed without making a sound.

  She looked out the window.

  The cages were placed five miles apart along the river. There were three in all. They were each chained to a wooden post—tall cages, high enough for her father to stand in. Cables that served as runners stretched across the river and were hooked on each bank to metal frames. The cages looked like birdcages except that the bars were wide apart. The cables ran through a pulley wheel that was attached to the cage tops.

  To ride in the cage was to have a roller-coaster ride. Once the chain was released, the cage would sail two thirds of the way across the river and then drift slowly back to the middle where the cable sagged. Her father would take the first sample from the middle of the river, then make his way back, using a black wrench that hooked to the cable, and pulling himself. He had to work quickly when using the wrench, or the cage would slide backwards to the middle of the river, and when he stopped to take his second and third samples,
he had to hook the wrench behind the pulley wheels and fasten it quickly; the wrench was also the brake.

  At the first stop, just outside the village, the river was wide and shallow, so they could drive right to the bank. Even in the spring at this spot, when the snowmelt was running, the sample bottles filled with mud from the river bottom. Willa’s first job was to hold the cage. Now, she stood on the bank, planted her feet in the mud, and held the cage while her father unhooked the chain. She waited for him to get in and latch the door, and then she let go. The pulley wheel screamed along the cable over her head, trailed off into a thin wail, stopped finally, and squeaked back toward the middle of the river. Her father held the bars, turning his head, looking at things, and when the cage swung to a stop, he squatted and hooked a bottle to a long-handled scoop.

  Willa walked back to the pickup, sat sideways with her knees sticking out, reached behind her, and turned the key one notch. Loretta Lynn was singing “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” She looked downriver toward where the fair would be. She could see no trace of it. She would ask her father to drive to the fair when they got finished. They’d eat in the Knights of Columbus hamburger tent, and they’d throw scraps to the little red dog, the little red dog the priest owned—a dog like a rat who ran on her belly and ate the dirt off the bottom of her paws. Willa liked that dog because she was so ugly.

  Her father had begun to haul his way across the cable. He would stop halfway between the middle and the bank to take the second sample, and then, near the water’s edge, he would take the third. The wrench rang each time it hooked into the line, and the pulley wheels squeaked. His face strained with the effort—every muscle in his body pulled. Willa did not take after her father. Each day she looked more and more like her mother, tall and thin-faced. Her father was a small, muscular man whose body was made of rock. He looked like he had drawn his own face. He had a scar coming out the edge of his lip, curling down, and his nose was darker than the rest of his face because he’d gotten it smashed in a fight. He wore his hair in an army burr and always had. He had a stripe across the middle of his forehead from his hat, and it looked like his face began an inch below the hairline.