Morgan Talty

IN A FIELD OF STRAY CATERPILLARS

All the staff—the psych techs, the nurses, the doctors—kept asking if I was searching for an exit. I wasn’t. I had to pee. The ECT waiting room, where I’d been waiting for Fellis and trying to remember the third thing that needed to be done that afternoon, didn’t have a bathroom. There was one around the corner but it was being cleaned, and the janitor took his sweet time plopping the mop in the yellow bucket, and after ten minutes of my waiting for him to finish I pushed off from the wall where I’d leaned and walked the short and narrow and not-too-bright halls looking for another bathroom. As always, I got all turned around. The hallways spread out from the main building in every direction like spider legs, except unlike spider legs they crisscrossed and forked and even intersected a few times, open junctions with numerous paths to outpatient services like Mood and Memory. Every worker I encountered was like, “Are you looking for a way out?” It was a stupid question, because each and every hall ended with a red exit sign above double doors that opened to the bright outside, as if the place knew how confusing it was. If you got turned around, you could burst through those exits and walk around the sprawling building to the main doors and start over for what it was you were searching for.

That was how mental health therapy worked, I was pretty sure. Hallway after hallway, I wasn’t finding a bathroom. A vacant one, anyway. I retraced my steps back to the ECT waiting room, and when I got there the janitor was still cleaning. He was on one knee, and with a dirty white cloth he wiped the silver handicapped toilet bar.

“You going to be done soon?” I said.

“In a minute,” he said, without looking at me.

I tapped my foot. I was used to waiting. For the past four months I was seeing this girl—Tabitha, who I’d met at the clinic—and I stayed at her place in Overtown. One bedroom (always an unmade bed), one bath (makeup everywhere), tiny living room with blue walls (Christmas lights above the couch, even though Christmas was over), and a narrow kitchen (the brown cupboards never stayed shut). She worked retail all day for T.J. Maxx, and so I was stuck at her place watching TV or searching for work on her small laptop (UPS never got back to me). One night I made her dinner—one-pot pasta with broccoli and carrots—and even though she ate it I knew she didn’t like it. “That was pretty good,” she’d said, but with the same voice and scrunched-up face used to say, “That was pretty bad.”

The janitor switched the knee he leaned on. “Almost done,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him, and he started to clean behind the toilet.

Even though I spent a lot of time waiting for Tabitha, it was worth it until that day I brought her to the Social on the rez. Before that, we would stay up late and watch Netflix, eat junk, lie in bed and share cigarettes and read Ask Reddit threads on her laptop. But after the Social, we started to fall apart. She didn’t do nothing—it was me, my attitude, and I knew it. This was about three months back. It had rained that day, so the Social was held in the community building. Drum groups spread out across the basketball court (so many Native dudes wearing baseball caps backward, their braids pulled through the back hole), and small vendor tents circled the out-of-bounds lines. Tabitha loved it all, kept asking me to show her how to dance to this song, to that song. I showed her once. I was never good at dancing. When an honor song played—an elder had died not many weeks back—everyone sang around one drum, and while Tabitha could say a word here and there but didn’t under- stand, she still cried at the end. After that, we walked around some—smoked a cigarette outside—and I bumped into one of Mom’s friends, Cheryl, and she ignored Tabitha, kept asking how I was, how Mom was (which I didn’t know—we barely talked), and then at the end she pinched my arm and said, “You should find yourself a nice Native girl,” and walked away. I bet my mother put her up to it.

After Cheryl said that, Tabitha and I sort of split. Not physically, but mentally. We did our own things. At night, when she’d come home from T.J. Maxx, she would shower and eat in bed and watch Gilmore Girls. I’d usually sit outside and smoke or go for walks until I was tired. That routine started to drag on, but then a few weeks later I started taking Fellis to his appointments, and it saved me, got me away from Tabitha’s and gave me some purpose. His mom, Beth, couldn’t take him. During the summer, she worked at Family Dollar for extra money on top of her teacher’s salary. The only other person who could take him was his aunt Alice, and she did for a little while until her daughter Lily started up at the tribal day care (Lily’s father was a bum, lived up north on some other rez), and Alice got a job as the “secretary to the chief’s secretary” (tribal citizens wondered where our money went), licking envelopes and sealing them shut. When Beth called Tabitha’s place and asked that I take Fellis every other day, I took one look at Tabitha sitting up in bed, plate of Thai Lean Cuisine noodles in her hands, laptop open, and I told Beth no problem, that I’d be there in the morning.

A male nurse passed by as I leaned on the wall. He’d stopped me once before. “You haven’t found the exit yet?”

I pointed to the bathroom. He kept on walking.

When I’d gone over that first day to pick Fellis up, he was sitting in bed and watching TV, and it reminded me so much of Tabitha that I started to regret my decision. But he looked so beat up. An ashtray crammed with butted cigarettes sat on his lap. His eyes were half shut, his expressions plain and simply devoid of any life, kind of like if you’d put two black dots and a straight line on an orange and called it a face. But after that first ECT treatment I witnessed, Fellis seemed to be more awake, more alive.

The janitor flushed the toilet and let out a groan as he stood. He put the dirty white cloth in his back pocket. When he came out of the door, he did a double take at me.

“You from the rez?” he said.

I didn’t look too Native, and so I said, “Yeah, how’d you know?”

“Your shirt says ‘Native Pride.’”

I looked down at my shirt, and the janitor started talking again.

“Is it true what they’re saying in the papers?”

“Depends,” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“The caterpillars.” He squeezed dirty brown water out of the mop and into the yellow bucket.

“Yeah,” I said. “Looks cool with them all there on the road, but it don’t smell that great.”

He was saying something about going to check it out—like the rez needed another visitor—but I quit listening. I slammed the bathroom door shut behind me. With my foot I lifted the toilet seat and accidentally smeared dirt on it.

After I peed and flushed the toilet and wiped the mud off the seat with a paper towel and washed my hands and opened the door to the hallway, the janitor was gone. I went back to the ECT waiting room. Except for the woman typing behind the sliding glass window, the room was empty. I sat on the couch and rubbed my hands over my arms. Every five minutes the central air blasted. Some days, I got so cold in that room I had to go to the end of a hall and take an exit, go stand in the sun or walk to the bus stop and bum smokes from those waiting, and it was always awkward when the red bus showed up and I didn’t get on, the driver looking at me like, “Are you coming?”

Five, ten, fifteen—the minutes passed. I grabbed a space edition of National Geographic. I didn’t read it, just looked at the pictures of the purple cosmos and bright stars and pluming yellow gases. I closed the glossy magazine and tossed it onto the table in front of me. I shut my eyes and leaned my head back. After his appointment, Fellis and I were supposed to return Transcendence to Redbox, which we hadn’t even watched yet. And then we were supposed to go to Indian Health Services to get Beth’s Adderall and Alice’s blood pressure meds. There was something else, though. I was sure of it. What the hell was the third thing that needed to be done?

The woman behind the sliding glass scooted her chair back and the noise shook me. I looked up, watched her stand. She disappeared through a door, and someone said, “Go slower.”

The door opened into the waiting room and out came Fellis. A woman in a white coat guided him by the arm into the room and she rubbed his back. In the corner of the room was the wheelchair. I got up and opened it.

Fellis took small steps. I watched his face, the one I’d seen each time his treatment ended. Droopy, but not like he was high or anything—etomidate was the anesthesia, and it was a non- barbiturate since he was on methadone—but droopy and soft yet sharply focused, as if the electrical currents searing across his brain had awoken something, something that had rested for far too long and was now awake with a dedication to look through Fellis’s eyes and relay to the brain everything as pure sparkle and gold, even if what it saw was only a cold waiting room with bland white walls and old magazines and me standing there scratching my ass while I waited for Fellis to get into the wheelchair.

The woman told him to take it easy.

“They need to put your voice on an alarm clock,” Fellis said. “I’d wake up to it every day.”

The woman didn’t smile, crouched down, pulled  out  the footrests of the wheelchair, and lifted each of Fellis’s feet onto them. She said Joan would schedule the next appointment, in a few weeks: he was done with the every-other-day regimen.

Joan came out and handed me an appointment card and as usual the clipboard with the agreement that I would stay with Fellis all night. I signed my name, dated it, and then handed it back.

I pushed Fellis in the wheelchair through the door and he said, “Bye, Joan.” The janitor was back at the bathroom like he’d forgotten to clean something, and we passed him and went around the corner. The hallway declined, and Fellis said, “I’m done for a while, let me fly,” and so I let go of the wheelchair but kept pace alongside him. Before he could crash into the wall, I grabbed the wheelchair and stopped him, but the momentum flung him from the seat and he fell forward onto his hands and knees.

A small nurse and this big burly man in flannel came hurrying over. “Is he okay?” they asked, and both Fellis and I didn’t answer them because we were laughing. Fellis got back into the wheelchair and said he was fine, and before the nurse could say anything about what had happened I stopped laughing—or tried to anyway—and said, “We’re looking for the runway. Which way’s the exit?”

Out in the parking lot, I rushed Fellis in the wheelchair to his truck, Einhell. That was what we’d named it. The chassis was green, but the underbelly was red in spots. In order to pass inspection, Fellis had welded sheets of metal from a broken lawnmower over the rust, and the brand Einhell was in fading black right under the driver’s door.

I helped Fellis into the truck, had to give him a boost. “You want me to buckle you in too?” I said, and he laughed.

I’d gotten used to driving. I didn’t have my license—and I was always nervous behind the wheel—but I had no choice. I reversed the truck, slipped it in drive, and took off to the main road. We had to wait over five minutes for the traffic to break away. When a narrow space presented itself between two cars, I gunned it, tires skidding. The person I cut off honked.

Fellis stuck his hand out the window and either waved or gave the middle finger to the honker.

I continued north to I-95 and I didn’t hit a single red light. Off the freeway and down cracked gray roads left and right, we came to a stop and directly across the way arched the steel bridge, the river flowing below, to the reservation. A yellow flashing sign at the beginning read “Drive Slow, Use Caution.” This—not the sign, what lay beyond it—was what that janitor was asking about. Right over the bridge the road boiled with caterpillars. Some were dead, run over by cars and trucks—it sounded like popcorn popping when we drove over it—and others were alive, crawling among the gooey dead in search of trees with leaves that they hadn’t already eaten, or of tree trunks that the Department of Natural Resources hadn’t wrapped in duct tape and smeared with petroleum jelly to save what leaves remained.

I drove slow over the road, which was slick with caterpillar guts.

“Shit, that stinks,” Fellis said.

The place smelled of bait, of something chewed up and spit out or even shit out, and when the wind blew just right the smell moved about the rez. Fellis and I covered our noses.

I parked Einhell next to Beth’s house along the road. When we got inside, the landline phone was ringing. Neither of us answered it. We passed through the living room and into the kitchen, and we poured some iced tea. With our sweaty glasses we went out back of the house and sat in rusty fold-out chairs in the cool shadow cast by an oak tree.

I fell asleep in the fold-out chair for a few minutes, but was awakened by the phone ringing again.

Fellis leaned forward for his iced tea and took a sip. His chair squeaked when he set the sweaty glass back in the sparse dirt-grass at his feet.

The wind blew, bringing with it the smell of bait.

“Jesus,” Fellis said. “I’d rather you hold me down and pigadee in my face for an hour than have to smell that smell.”

Fellis leaned back in the chair and farted. He closed his eyes and put his hands on his head. “What time do we have to get going?” he asked.

I reached for Fellis’s smokes and took one. “Get going where?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t we have to go somewhere?”

I was going to tell him his memory was still shit, was going to tell him where we had to go, but the phone rang again. Fellis got up and walked to the back sliding door. I brought my wet glass of iced tea to my lips, and a burnt blade of grass floated in the murky tea. I set the glass down.

In the blue sky clouds rolled through and grayed the sun. A wind blew again, and with it came the smell of bait.

The glass door slid open and again screeched shut. Fellis walked back over.

“I remember what we have to do,” he said.

The phone rang again.

“For fuck’s sake,” Fellis said. He went back in the house, and he wasn’t gone too long.

“It’s your girl,” Fellis said. He left the door open.

“Isn’t she supposed to be at work?” I said, and then I remembered: today was her day off. There was something else, though.

“How the fuck would I know?” Fellis said.

“Tell her I’ll call her back. Tell her I’m in the bathroom.”

“I already told her you were outside.”

“Well tell her you were wrong, that I wasn’t outside but in the bathroom.”

Fellis went and told her, and when he came back out I got up and headed to the house.

“You’re calling her back now?” Fellis said.

“I need some water.”

I went inside. On the kitchen table Fellis had scribbled some notes, fragments of sentences, on a piece of paper. He’d written addies and blood presure and DVD, then below he had new stuff: gabage and wash dishs. At the very bottom he wrote, Call Tabittha.

I poured a glass of water and leaned against the counter. Next to the sideboard the garbage was full of old coffee grounds and silver cans and food scraps like rice and peas and broccoli stems and a thick blob of grits that Fellis had nuked too long, and on top of it all was a red liquid. I could smell the garbage, but it smelled sweet like the sugar Beth put in her tomato sauces. I finished the water and set my glass in the sink.

I took the garbage outside to the bins. I washed what little dishes there were—two plates, four cups, several spoons and forks and butter knives with peanut butter glued to the blade—and I set them to dry on a damp white towel. Dishes were a small price to pay when you spent so much time at someone’s house.

I went down the hall and used the bathroom, and when I came out and into the kitchen, Fellis seemed to be looking for something.

“You seen my smokes?” he said, and I told him no.

Fellis leaned over the table and pulled the note to himself, and then he went to the sink and then to the garbage.

“I did them,” I said. “Took the gabage out too.”

“Fuck you, I can’t spell.”

“Go get that Redbox movie so we can take it back.”

Fellis went up the hall to his room, and I hollered after him. “And then we’ll go get those meds!” It was well past lunchtime, and they’d be ready.

Once we left the house, the phone rang again, and it really set Fellis off. “You better call her later,” he said to me. “I don’t want her blowing up the phone all fucking day.” He went to the phone and hung it up. Then he took it off the hook so nobody could call.

We hopped in Einhell—Fellis drove, even though I told him he shouldn’t—and we went to Indian Health Services on the rez for the meds. Fellis didn’t say much—he said he had a headache, and while he drove he leaned his head against the window.

At IHS he parked the truck and got out. He walked to the maroon building and then disappeared through the doors that used to  open  automatically  but  no  longer  did. He wasn’t  in there but thirty seconds before he came back out and said that the pharmacy had faxed both meds up to Save ’n Shop.

“We gotta go there anyway,” I said.

The day grew red hot, and the closer we got to the head of the Island the stronger the scent became. The caterpillars cooked in the sun. The smell was worse at this time of day. People were usually out walking, but nobody was down this way except us.

Fellis passed the first sign that flashed “Caution,” and he drove the truck with one hand on the wheel while he put the other over his nose. The smell was worse than ever. I buried my face in my shirt. The road looked to be moving under us, and I wondered if Fellis put the truck in park and we sat there unmoving, whether the thousands of caterpillars would lift us up and carry Einhell on their backs to our destination.

Halfway through that road the place looked almost seasonless. Some trees were bare, and the limbs swayed naked like trees in the fall, but it wasn’t fall, and the road was slick like packed-down ice, but it wasn’t winter. The area looked half dead like spring, except it wasn’t spring. It was summer, and hot.

The truck tires skidded and Fellis let off the gas. The tires caught, and he pushed the truck on toward the bridge right there in front of us.

Then Fellis gagged, and it made me gag.

“Are you gagging from the smell?” I said. “Or are you sick?”

Fellis waved a hand at me and breathed deep. We were almost by the tribal museum, almost to the bridge and out of that rotting place, when Fellis pulled over.

“Can’t you wait?” I said. Fellis got out of the truck and dropped to the ground, hands and knees among hundreds of dead caterpillars, and he vomited.

The smell took over the inside of the truck. I gagged and went to open the door, but it would not open. I pulled the handle time after time but the door stayed shut. “Fellis!” I said. “Fellis! Open my door, I’m gonna be sick—” But it was too late. I threw up on the floor of his truck, and as I heaved once more Fellis came around the truck and opened my door and he said, gagging, “Oh, man,” and I pushed him out of the way and heaved once more onto the street, which appeared to be squirming.

I sat back in the truck, eyes watering. “We have to clean that up,” Fellis said.

“Drive,” I said. “We’ll clean it up at the store.”

“I ain’t driving with puke in my car.”

“Well if you didn’t lock me in here,” I said.

“I didn’t lock you in here, shithead, you have to jimmy the handle up and down for it to catch the latch in the door.” Fellis spat onto the caterpillars. “You know that.”

“Let’s go,” I said. I tucked my face into my shirt.

“Clean it first,” Fellis said.

“With what?”

Fellis looked in the bed of his truck but found nothing.

“Throw the fucking floor mat out then,” he said.

I grabbed the wet floor mat and threw it on the side of the road.

We drove to Save ’n Shop twenty above the speed limit with the windows rolled down, and every minute or so I’d find a caterpillar crawling up my leg and I’d flick it out the window.

The parking lot to the store was full, and Fellis parked far out, the truck facing away from the store and toward a cornfield. I got out of the truck and went to the bed and lowered the hatch and sat on it. I didn’t see Fellis leave the store—I was watching this older woman lift her bags from her shopping cart and into the trunk of her blue car—but I noticed him halfway back to the truck, because he was swearing and waving a hand in the air. He held in one hand two white bags and in the other hand he held the Redbox case.

He got in the truck—so did I—and he threw the white bags onto the dashboard. He slammed the door shut.

“I forgot to put the fucking DVD in the case.”

I said we could go get it and bring it back, but Fellis said no, that we could do it another day.

“What’s one more late fee for Beth?” he said.

At the intersection Fellis turned left, and I asked if he re- membered which way was home.

“I’m taking the highway and then the long loop back,” he said. “Air this fucker out.”

The long loop made no difference. We had to drive through that rotting road again, but before we hit the bridge we stopped at Jim’s and Fellis bought a pack of smokes, two thick cheap cigars, and two tall cans of Arizona Iced Tea. Before he pulled Einhell onto the bridge he parked along the road and we each lit one cigar and let the cab of the truck fill with thick smoke. We drove in a self-made fog that was nowhere but inside this machine, and it helped ward off the smell of bait enough for us not to gag, but we were gagging from the thick smoke by the time we got to his aunt Alice’s, and the clouds of smoke rolled out of the truck as Fellis got out and put the meds in her mailbox. He raised the little red flag.

I called Tabitha when we got back to Fellis’s. I leaned on the wall by the back door. Fellis was looking around the house for the Redbox movie, Transcendence.

“You were in the bathroom long enough,” Tabitha said.

“Fellis didn’t know what he was talking about,” I told her. “He gets like that after his treatment.”

Fellis yelled something at me from the living room, but I ignored him.

“Well, where were you?”

I told her what we did, but she had nothing to say about it.

“When are you coming back?” she said.

“Tomorrow,” I told her.

“Come home tonight,” she said. “I want to talk.”

I switched the phone to my other ear. “I have to watch Fellis. Why don’t you come over here?”

“I don’t want to go over there,” she said.

“They ain’t like that here,” I said. “It’s different in this house.”

“Please come home tonight,” she said. “I just want to talk. We need to talk.”

“Look, I gotta go, I’ll call later.”

“Dee,” she said. “Today’s our—”

I hung up and then removed the phone from the hook.

Beth got home four hours early. Fellis and I were on the couch, watching reruns of The People’s Court and sipping warm Arizona Iced Tea. The sun was still shining, and when I heard the car door bang shut I thought it was Tabitha and I got excited, but then I saw it was just Beth.

She came into the house and clunked her keys onto the table by the back door.

Fellis turned down the TV but didn’t take his eyes from it. “You quit?” he said nonchalantly.

I thought that shit was funny and I cracked up. Quit!

“I didn’t quit, dummy,” Beth said. “The whole store had to shut down for the day. Something’s wrong with the septic, and all the aisles smell like chagook. Worse than those caterpillars.”

“No way,” Fellis said, and he turned the TV back up. A new episode was starting. “Dun nun nun,” Fellis said. “Tktktktktktktktkt, dun dun dun DUN.” I laughed.

“That show’s so stupid,” Beth said, and she left us and went into the kitchen.

While we watched The People’s Court, Beth baked chicken and made a green bean casserole, and while each cooked, she’d come into the living room and watch the show with us. Every case that came and went, Fellis would say, “Guilty!” and he’d slam his hand on the coffee table between us and the TV. “That motherfucker is guilty!” It didn’t matter if the people were innocent or not.

As the cases came and went—as Beth walked back and forth from the living room to the kitchen—Fellis and I said, fuck Judge Milian. We’d deliver the verdicts. A young mother in a pink blouse and jeans was suing her neighbor, a tall pale man, for running over her daughter’s bike. When the judge pulled the young daughter up to the stand and questioned her, the judge discovered that the little girl had left her bike in the road on accident.

“Lock her up!” Fellis yelled.

“Give her life!”

“That young lady’s trouble!”

“Why’s the phone off the hook?” Beth said.

“Hold on, Beth,” Fellis said. “I need to hear all the facts to the case.”

The moment that phone went on the hook it rang.

I hit Fellis’s arm. “Turn that down, I want to know who it is.”

“What the fuck,” Fellis said, and he turned the TV down.

We listened, and Beth was talking but I couldn’t hear anything.

“Satisfied?” Fellis said, and then he said, “Hey, what’d your girl want anyway? She coming over?”

“Turn the show back on,” I said. Whoever Beth was talking to, it wasn’t Tabitha.

Fellis turned the show back on, and Judge Milian banged her gavel. “Verdict to the plaintiff—”

“Fellis!” Beth said.

“For fuck’s sake, Beth, what?”

Beth stood in the living room, the phone to her ear, its tan cord taut.

“You got your auntie all upset,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Fellis muted the TV.

Beth spoke into the phone. “I’ll come get you and Lily,” she said. “I’ll give you one of my Ativans so you can calm down. Yes, I’m coming right now.”

Beth brought the phone to the hook and hung it up.

Fellis was standing up. “What I do? Why does she need an Ativan?”

Beth slipped her shoes on and grabbed her keys. She opened the front door, and I smelled the dead caterpillars. “You gave her my Adderall,” she said.

Fellis was all worked up while Beth went and got Aunt Alice, yet I didn’t have much to say to calm him down. He wasn’t worried about her health—he just didn’t want her to yell at him, because unlike her sister, Aunt Alice could rip into Fellis.

The phone rang while Beth was gone, and I went to it and picked it up, yet nobody said anything. “I know it’s you,” I said and hung up.

In the living room, Fellis had the TV off and he was sitting upright rubbing his face. I sat down next to him.

“It was an accident,” I said. “Quit worrying.”

“What is that?” Fellis said.

“What?”

“You smell that?”

The chicken and green bean casserole was on fire in the stove, and Fellis went to the cupboard under the sink and grabbed the fire extinguisher, and he squeezed the trigger but nothing came out.

“Remove the pin,” I said.

He did, and he sprayed white into the stove.

The front door opened and then banged shut.

“Is that the chicken?” Beth said. Alice was behind her, coughing, and between the two of them little Lily peeked her head at us.

“It’s out,” Fellis said.

“Get me that pill,” Alice said. She was fanning herself. “I can’t breathe.”

“Oh, calm down,” Beth said. “You’re overreacting. It’s an Adderall.”

“I’m not overreacting, Beth.” Alice picked up Lily and put her on the couch. She turned on the TV but didn’t change the channel from The People’s Court.

“Get your auntie a Klonopin,” Beth said, fanning smoke out of the kitchen and through the back sliding door.

Alice sat down in the kitchen, still fanning smoke from her face while Fellis brought her the pill and a glass of water. She took it, and water dribbled down her chin.

“I’m sorry,” Fellis said. “I should have read the labels.”

Alice set the glass down. “You should’ve, but you didn’t. At least I got my bills done.”

We ate McDonald’s that cloudy summer night. Beth came back with three bags full of double cheeseburgers, fries, three four-piece chicken nuggets, and one fish filet with no cheese that was for Alice. Beth bought Cokes too, which Alice said she couldn’t drink but she drank anyway, and after we ate at the kitchen table among the greasy wrappers—after Fellis bitched and bitched about his treatments, how the nurses said he might have to get a chest port because it was difficult to find a vein—Beth cleaned up the garbage and Aunt Alice put Lily to bed and Fellis went all around the house looking for Transcendence, and when he found it he slid it into the DVD player in the living room, and as he and Beth and Alice sat on the couch—“God, I hate Johnny Depp,” Aunt Alice said, to which Beth said, “Why? He’s a hot Navajo,” and the two argued whether or not he was Native—there was no room for me with them on the couch, and so I told them I’d be right back and went outside to get a chair, but while there in the dark I stepped on something hard. Fellis’s pack of smokes he’d lost. I took one but didn’t have a lighter, and so I stuck the smoke behind my ear and looked at the fold-out chairs in the dark, and I said out loud under the swaying oak, “You should be ashamed of your- self.” I was and I wasn’t. I’d made my choice, knew what I was going to do, yet I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t the right choice either. Keep on with her or don’t—neither was right.

“Movie’s starting!” Fellis yelled to me, but I was already around the side of his house, heading to Overtown, and I wondered if there was a way around those dead caterpillars and the smell of shit, of bait. But I knew there wasn’t.

Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation where he grew up. He is the author of Night of the Living Rez. Named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30,” Talty’s stories have appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, LitHub, and elsewhere. He lives in Levant, Maine.