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 "What the fuck are you laughin' at shithead!" Gerry screamed.
Stacy wagged his braids and laughed so hard he had to rest his forehead on the steering wheel of his van.
The vein in the middle of Gerry's forehead was swollen and cast a blue shadow as he picked his clothes up off the grass in the little yard outside his apartment building. A pair of his jeans had fallen in dogshit. Stacy did not have to be told what happened. Gerry had been kicked out by his girlfriend before. Stacy had been kicked out by girlfriend before. It didn't make it any less funny.
Gerry was a Masshole, a bona fide Irish-Italian mutt with a thick Somaville accent. He wore the same thing every day-baggy brown cargoes and a black surplus t-shirt. His head was shaved, he had a thick beard, and his arms were sleeved with ink. For all that his eyes were so like a kid's that people always wanted to take care of him. Stacy knew it as well as anybody. He had been best friends with Gerry since freshman year at Somerville High. At that point Stacy had been a skinny little Jamerican boy with Walmart clothes. Now he was a Big Black Man with Braids and Gold Teeth, an object fear, but Stacy, like Gerry, was naturally gentle.
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 “Dang, Casey. I’m wondrin’ how many times I’m ‘on tell you to fix this knot fore you figure out how ta tie it right.”
By way of response, the smaller boy looked up from the exposed tree
root he sat on and spat. His older cousin, Darnell, untied the line
that attached their aluminum skiff to a pine tree and retied it
properly.
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 “Casey, come on down here!”
Maurice’s voice broke Casey’s trance. Since they left the ICW and pointed out to the open water he’d been staring over the side at the waves, getting lost in counting their rows as far out to the horizon as he could. He pushed himself up off the rail and walked down into the hold. Maurice held the wheel with one hand and with the other he ran his fingers over the chart next to him. He did not look like a man who had just killed somebody. He looked in tune with his surroundings, focused, a little bit exhilarated. When he heard the door to the cabin click shut, he spoke over his shoulder.
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 The days are long on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, especially on the weekends when you live in the teacher housing. Only the packs of dogs move around with any sense of urgency. I was nervous getting in the car. I’d only been in Kyle four months and it had been my habit to drive up to Rapid City on the weekends to do my food shopping, catch a movie, and have dinner at the Outback Steakhouse. The contact with other white people—even an unrecognizable Western Dakota version of them—was enough to dull the edge of my homesickness. It was late morning on a warm early November Saturday. Instead of driving to the city, I had decided to visit one of my students at his home. The earth was dry. Only one snow had fallen so far and that had just been a dusting. The light was brittle and clear and the clouds moved high and fast in the sky.
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 The monk looked up from his bed to the bright ring of light that shone through the heavy plastic cover on the fluorescent overhead in his hospital room. The light had a rough metallic texture, its weight pushed on his eyelids. He was very weak and he was not sure whether his eyes were open or closed, or how opened they were if he was actually seeing what he was seeing. He tried to blink, but remained unsure that he had succeeded. The ring of light darkened for an instant and then it seemed to be closer, stronger, brighter. He did not have time to think about why the light had gotten brighter when a cool dark shadow cut a dark wedge into the circle that had been his frame of vision. It was the head and shoulders of a person, the hair curly and thick could have been a man’s or woman’s. The skull was wide around the crown but thin at the chin. The person bent closer to him, and the monk saw clearly that the muscles in the shoulders were definitely a man’s, ropes of muscles, higher on one side than the other from hard use. So the new visitor was a man. But who? He could not distinguish the features clearly because of the back light. Now the face grew, came close. As it filled the monk’s range of vision a new light came from below and illuminated the face plain as day, not the hard light of the fluorescents but a rich and soft light like the light of a reading lamp.
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