As she was thinking this, a group of boys about their age came out of one of the houses and started walking down the street toward them. They were staring at the police car, mumbling, laughing. Hilda turned to face them, her knees on the seat, and waved them closer. They stopped beside the car, looking around for the policeman that the cruiser belonged to, and, failing to find him, loitered uncomfortable on the sidewalk like they were lost in their own neighbourhood. They were all smirking, mumbling out one-liners that neither of the girls could hear.
“Hey,” Hilda yelled into the glass, her breath spray-painting a misty halo in front of her mouth. “Could you guys open the door? I have to talk to my grandma. Can you hear me? My grandma. She's in that house there.”
After a moment, the coast still clear, the entire group of them felt confident enough to bend low and peer through the windows, as if they were looking at animals in a zoo. They were pretending that it was impossible to hear what Hilda was saying, one of them feigning to clean out his ears, another cupping his fingers into a dish on the side of his head, all while they continued to murmur their snide jokes, letting out hissing bursts of laughter every now and again. Brandy wished Hilda would just be quiet, would stop making everything worse than it had to be.
She looked beyond the boys, at the bungalow looming behind them, and found herself also wishing that her grandmother was actually inside. Both Brandy and Hilda had spent every summer of their lives at their grandmother's house. The fact was that both of their mothers drank quite a bit, and their grandmother, who lived alone, liked to get them out of the house whenever she could, along with genuinely needing the help, keeping the girls busy with jobs like getting her water, driving her around on errands and visits, and cookingâfried baloney and bannock, Kraft Dinner and fry bread.
Recently, her grandmother had been going out of her way to keep Brandy out of trouble. In her own manner, that is. For starters, she'd taken to gathering medicinal plants from different parts of the reserve, instead of the short walk around her home that had always sufficed before. Her grandmother insisted that Brandy drive her to these new places, and she soon got the feeling that finding plants had little to do with the excursions, as sometimes they wouldn't even come across any calamus root for her toothaches, or yarrow for her stomach, sagewort for her arthritis. Instead they would find a cairn where, her grandmother would tell her tangentially, it was said that archaeologists had found arrowheads five thousand years old; or they would stumble upon a teepee ring with a story to it, a family, perhaps, who didn't want to live with the tribe after the reserve broke up, or a camp from the great battle of 1870, when the Blackfoot defeated the Cree; or sometimes it would just be an old landmark that was newly explained, like The Little Hill, with its soil as red as the buttes in Brandy's backyard, where in only thirty years, almost three-quarters of the reserve's population died of small pox, measles, and scarlet fever. When they left the hill, her grandmother had called it by a different name, pointing back at it with her wrinkled hand, her fingers unable to straighten,
“Ab-ki-e-nab Es-koo.”
The Graveyard.
Her grandmother had also set her up with a job, something hard to come by on the reserve. One of her neighbours had been commissioned to make handicrafts and beadwork for the tourists that were passing through the area on the national-park circuit, on their way to Waterton, and she offered Brandy a small wage to lend a hand. The commission was a private one, from a white and tidy man who ran a bright and tidy souvenir shop in Cardston. Twice a week Brandy walked the two and a half miles to the woman's house and would sit at a white table with long dishes of vibrant beads splayed in front of her like the rays of a prism. While she worked, the woman, who was about the same age as her mother, talked incessantly, rolling through her array of opinions, often looking up and waiting for Brandy to acknowledge that she agreed in some way or was at least listening.
“I'll tell you something: life on the reserve,” the woman said one day, speaking in Blackfoot but mixing English words into her sentences without much rhyme or reason, “it's changing. And people who can't keep up with it, they'll be left behind. That's just how it is.”
Brandy stopped to watch her as she slipped the beads down the string, threaded the needle through a piece of leather, and pulled it tight.
“You know, the other day, an old womanâI won't tell you whoâsaw the work I'm doing here, and do you know what she told me? She said it was wrong. The colours, the patterns, they're not right. That's what she said, âNot right.' But I'll tell you something: I'm making money. My own money, not just what I get from the treaty payments; like other peopleâlike her.”
She rolled her eyes. “Can you see what I'm talking about? Now that womanâI won't tell you whoâshe just doesn't get it; no one cares what the colours mean anymore. Not the tourists, not my generation, not yours. And why don't we care? Tell me, why? Because we know: life on the reserve is changing.”
She worked quietly for a long while before pausing to look into the middle distance, nodding to herself. “That's just how it is.”
Brandy walked home that day through a strong Chinook wind, the silt that her footsteps disturbed along the gravel being swept off to the side. She thought about what the woman had said, about everything changing around her. But the truth was that she didn't feel like it was. She looked up at the Chinook arch over the Rockies, bridging one side of the skyline to the other with a ribbon of cloud that was as grey and rounded as bone. No, as far as she could tell, everything was the same: the same road, the same buttes, same river, houses, and all of them enveloped in the same wind, like they always had been. A gust of it whipped her hair into her eyes and she flinched, pulled it out, and tucked it behind her ears, where it didn't stay.
Brandy loved the wind. She loved it because it was like a living thing, like a temperamental creature that had a thousand moods, a thousand voices. She loved how it yowled through the power lines with angry groans that made up the deepest sounds of winter, how it whistled through the cracks around the doors and windows, the pressure filling the room like a rigid lung, the reflections of shapes in the windows bulging, thinning, bulging again. She loved how it could flap cowboy hats off men and untie women's scarves as they walked across parking lots, how it whirled empty grocery bags in the eddying corners of buildings for days, then randomly plucked them into the air and lifted them higher, netting them in the branches of winter trees where they rattled wildly, flailing with a popping resonance that filled your ears, even after the car door was slammed shut and you sat in the vehicle, which jostled on its springs with each gust, and cleaned out the sand and grit that had collected in the corners of your eyes. She loved how that same wind, sometimes only inside of an hour, could become quiet and giving, could turn into a whisper in the grass that moved as fluidly and hushed as a garter snake. But mostly she loved it because everyone else she knewâeven Hildaâhated it, endlessly complained about it, scrambling from one form of cover to the next. It made it hers somehow.
“Come on. Open it. Please?” Hilda continued to plead with the group of boys. “I have to talk to my grandma . . . like right now. Come on, guys. Open the door. Just for a second.”
But the boys were also growing nervous, knowing, as the girls did, that the policeman would be returning within minutes, seconds even. So they eventually stepped away from the glass, and, glancing guiltily up and down the street for a moment, they walked away in a single huddled group.
Except for one of themâthe one who had been gaping around at the neighbourhood while the others were teasing them. He had started to walk away with everyone else, but stopped for some reason, and was now hovering beside the car with a searching look on his face, like he was using this moment, of all moments, to decipher some annoying riddle that had been bothering him for days.
One of the other boys noticed he wasn't following and turned to walk backwards for a few steps. “Come on, Ced,” he called out, his tone disappointed, even bored. “Let's get outta here.”
“Hey, Ced,” Hilda shouted through the glass. “On your way, open the door, will ya? Come on.”
The boy, who was blond, the collars of his short-sleeved shirt ironed crisp, took a step toward the cruiser, hesitating at the door handle. It wasn't quite clear if he was gazing in at the girls or at his own reflection in the car's side window. Either way, he looked satisfied.
“You know, I think you want to open it. Hey?” Hilda giggled, turning to look at Brandy for a moment. “I think he wants to.”
This was how it always was with her cousin Hilda. She could often get people to do things they shouldn't. Especially Brandy. But this was mostly because she never meant anyone any harm. She just had a knack for finding enthralling things to do (climb that tree, hide there, scare him, “borrow” that). And as she'd been Brandy's closest friend for as long as she could remember, there was also an unspoken obligation to follow along. And most of the time, it was fine. Things rarely went this far. The mischief they usually got into was spontaneous and felt like it was over in seconds. Like the last Sundance they were at.
Brandy and Hilda would invariably get dropped off for a few days at Sundance, and sometimes for the entire length of it, having to help out like the other young people there, looking after children, gathering things for the elders, the boys digging postholes for the lodge. During the ceremonies, they would sit off to the side, feeling a little embarrassed, wearing blue jeans and T-shirts, watching the older people dancing around in headdresses and moccasins. It was a strange sensation because there was a part of her that wanted to stand up and join in, ask questions, be taught, and a part that didn't, that felt silly and withdrawn. And these two feelings seemed to rise up in her with equal strength, until the only thing she could do was just sit there, still and awkward.
But then, in the middle of a long dance, the drumbeat rising insistently above the singers, two motorhomes had turned off the road and were driving toward them, looking for a place to park. At first Brandy and Hilda thought they were drunk because a few of the men walked briskly out to tell them they couldn't stay, which is what you did with people who wanted to drink at Sundance, you ushered them away, coaxed them into a car and took them back home. But it turned out that these people were white, with their faces gawking out of the windows as their vehicles turned around. Later she'd heard rumours that they were anthropologists from a university in Edmonton who had driven eight hours in hopes of taking pictures and filming the event, to document whatever they could, before it was gone.
As the motorhomes crawled away, back over the dirt road toward the highway, Hilda had pointed at the ladders that were fixed to their backs. “Let's get on,” she'd said, already jumping to her feet. And they were off, both of them laughing, sneakers kicking up dust. Hilda leapt onto the closest ladder, and as soon as she was secure, she reached an arm back to help Brandy up. They bumped along the road for only a minute before the motorhome slowed to turn onto the highway, where they jumped off before it sped up too fast to do so. Once on the ground, the wide-eyed driver spotted them in his mirror, pulsed his brakes. They waved, smiling, Hilda covering her teeth with the tips of her fingers.
A few days later, in Standoff, Brandy and Hilda had talked to one of the young men who had turned the motorhomes away. His name was Mike, a wiry young man, a bit older than they were, though he kept his hair in two braids like a grandfather. He was among the few people who had continued on with his schooling off of the reserve, and he'd even graduated. After working in Calgary for a year he returned and opened a confectionary in the back of one of the community buildings in Standoff. The location left something to be desired, his only window tiny, tinfoiled, and looking onto an alleyway where two deserted cars were busy rusting, gradually sinking into the soil. But in spite of the locale he had a decent clientele base and was constantly disappearing into the dim of his shop to rummage through the cardboard boxes on the floor, bringing the items out to people waiting in the sun, digging in his pockets for their change. Hilda and Brandy saw him as one of those people who could say things others could not.
“Hey,” he greeted, seeing the two of them walking through the alleyway, “girls come for s'more liquorice?”
Between the collective pockets of both girls they scraped together thirty-five cents and asked Mike for as much candy as that would buy. After seeing that it was really all they had, he gave them an extra Twizzler each, on the house.
After Hilda recounted their daring tale with the motorhomes, she asked Mike about the people driving them. Who were they exactly? Mike only answered with a grin at first, leaning against the granular cinder-block wall outside, arms across his chest. While he thought about how to explain it, he watched the ramshackle cars as if they were important to the process. “I think, in the end, I understand itâor a bit anywayâfrom when I was out there, in the cities and stuff. Sometimes, when you're workin', or in bars and stores, you hear people say things 'bout Indians, like you're not one of 'em, standing thereâlike you can't hear.” He smiled to himself, shook his head. “And I'd say, mostly, they think we're all drunks and dumb and crazy.”
The girls laughed and he crouched down to pick up a pebble from the pavement. “And yeah, sure, we are all that. But we're also more. And that's somethin' most of 'em don't get. Which is why them people in the motorhomes came, cuz they think we're all gonna die away in a few years. Either really die, or become white, like them.”
He watched the tiny stone rolling around in his palm. “But that's just not gonna happen.” Then he closed his fingers around it, bouncing it up and down in the dark of his hand. “Nope. We're a strong people.” Brandy and Hilda ventured a snicker, but he didn't seem to mind, his expression unchanged and serious, until, tossing the pebble at a clump of grass between the two cars, he turned to look at their faces, smiling with them now. “And we're not goin' anywhere.”