Free Motorcycles & Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor

part, of white bread, butter, baloney and processed cheese. He knew the traditional soup and chili would be served later, but a quick shot of carbohydrates was what was needed to take people’s minds off the solemnity of the day. He was off with his cousins of the same age, talking about the stranger. Everybody had seen him ride in but nobody had seen him ride out. Three days had passed since his first appearance and Reena Aandeg, Sammy’s niece, who lived along the main road near the highway, swore up and down that neither she nor her family saw him leave.
    “Then he’s still here on the Reserve somewhere,” reasoned Virgil.
    “Where would a guy like that stay? It would be kind of hard for him to hide,” said Dakota. “I wonder if he gives rides on that motorcycle. That would be so cool.”
    To Virgil, she sounded like a silly girl. You didn’t go for rides with strangers on motorcycles. Everybody knew that.
    “What if he’s a mass murderer or a rapist?” he said.
    Dakota shook her head. “I doubt it. He has kind eyes.”
    “Oh yeah,” agreed Jamie, a cousin of both Dakota and Virgil.
    “It’s always in their eyes. I read somewhere that eyes are the window to the soul.”
    “His are blue! Really blue! So blue” gushed Dakota.
    “Wow!”
    Speaking of eyes, Virgil was busy rolling his. At least he didn’t have to try to get out of going to school today. He knew that was an incredibly inappropriate thought to have at his grandmother’s funeral, but even more so when he could see his mother dealing with band politics across the room. She couldn’t even take a day off for her mother’s funeral. That was really inappropriate.
    Sitting at a scarred wooden table, trying to enjoy the bland-ness of the sandwiches, Maggie recognized that her momentary respite from Reserve political intrigue was drawing to an end.
    “Maggie, I know this isn’t the right place to discuss this but I need to talk to you.” It was Anthony Gimau, a big man with even bigger opinions. Back in the sixties when he was growing up, he’d wanted to be a radical, anything to shake up the system. Being Native automatically gave him ammunition to be an annoying gadfly. Therefore everything “White” was evil, except of course his Jimmy 4-by-4, which he adored, almost as much as he adored his wife, Klara, who was German. In his personal philosophy, there was a yin and yang kind of thing to people who orbited the Native community. There were the “wannabes;” people who were, for one reason or another, fascinated with Native culture and
wanted to be
Native. These types generally annoyed most Native people, including other wannabes. But that was the yin. The yang, Anthony believed, was the “shouldabeens;” those who were unfortunate enough not to be Native but who
should have been
Native. His wife, Klara, though born and raised in Jena, Germany, was a shouldabeen.
    In his earlier years, Anthony used to sport a Mohawk haircut as a statement, but as time passed, his male-pattern baldness reduced him to shaving only the sides of his head, and leaving a one-and-a-half-inch strip of hair on the very back of his head as a somewhat diminished political statement. Somehow, he blamed White people for that too.
    “What is it, Tony? I’m not in the mood to discuss anything.”
    “I know, I know,” he said, nodding, then swallowing. “However…”
    Maggie shook her head. “No however. Tony, we just buried my mother. Now is not the time.”
    Tony’s eyes brightened. “I know. I know. When then?”
    Maggie knew she’d walked into a trap. He wanted to talk about the plans for the new land they’d bought, and now he’d cornered her into setting a specific time and place. Everybody in the room had an opinion and was dying to share it with Maggie. Tony had just beaten them to it.
    Sighing, Maggie said, “I don’t know. Day after tomorrow. Eleven o’clock. How’s that? Can I finish my sandwich now?”
    “Yes, yes, of course. My thoughts