Free Believing Cedric by Mark Lavorato

upholstery, the material panging with the remnants of urine-soaked pants and bloodied shirts pressing against the fabric, of alcohol-sweat and the hunched-over thoughts of brutal retribution that lingered inside it. She wanted it all to stop, wanted to go back to where people knew her, accepted her, where no one jabbed at her with their hard-judging glances. She wanted the ochre streaks of the Belly Buttes, delineating the soil like contour lines on a map of the way home.
    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.
    â€œHey,” 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 cooking—fried 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.