On the Rez by Ian Frazier

Author:Ian Frazier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

During a clear, cold spell soon after, I went back to the reservation. Around Oglala the wind had blown the prairie free of snow in most places, except for little drifts on the lee side of bushes and tufts of grass. Next to snow fences and in road cuts, big and frozen snowdrifts overlapped on each other, blue as shaving gel in their creases. The badlands looked even more wrinkled on their rock faces than usual, the snow in their eroded fissures bringing the texture into plain relief. The late-February wind just would not quit. Sometimes I couldn’t get the car door open against it, other times if I opened it a crack it yanked the door open all the way. Wind sent empty plastic soda bottles skittering across the parking lot at Big Bat’s and scattered children as they got off the school buses in the afternoon. Metal clips on the pulley rope kept banging against the flagpole in front of BIA headquarters. Beside the highway tribal policemen sat in their idling cars drinking coffee and chewing sunflower seeds.

On this trip I talked to almost no one. Mainly I read local histories about Pine Ridge in libraries in Custer and Rapid City, and newspaper stories on microfilm at the library at Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska, and back issues of the Sheridan County Star at the paper’s offices in Rushville, Nebraska. One afternoon I went to Oglala and stopped in at Florence’s house. She had gone to her dialysis treatment and no one was home but her son, Rex. He told me that Le had gotten back from California a week or so ago and that Florence had kicked him out of her house over by Loneman because she was afraid he would have some accident with the woodstove while drunk and burn the place down. Rex said Le was now staying at Aurelia’s.

I was angry at Le because of the way I had acted when he visited me—my behavior had been his fault, somehow—and so put off going over to Aurelia’s. The night before I planned to drive back to Missoula, I was sitting in a motel in Custer and I felt a sudden regret that I had not seen him, combined with affection and sentimentality. Instead of heading for home the next day, I went back to the reservation. The morning was sunny and clear, the wind now just a breeze instead of a gale. I drove down the long track across the prairie to Aurelia’s house and found her in her yard getting water from the pump. Le came from the house as I drove up. He looked fine and fit, fully recovered from his accident. He wore black stone-washed jeans, a white dress shirt with three buttons on the cuff, low-cut running shoes, and a blue warm-up jacket with the name of a cinematic lighting company on the back in yellow letters. He had gotten the jacket from a movie lighting technician he met in L.

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