After my ma’s boyfriend Gih-rhaggs died, I got farmed out to anyone on the reservation who could and would take me. My ma still needed to bring in whatever bucks she could, cleaning house for the white ladies. The wad Gih-rhaggs left us when he wrapped his car around a tree seemed like it should have lasted us forever by my reckoning, but I was eight. What did I know about bills? We were back to inventing food in no time. Ketchup soup thickened with day-old bread began to taste good after a while.
The most consistent places I wound up were with families that had these high school girls hoping to latch onto my cousin Roland, the star lacrosse player who had made it home from Vietnam, smiling for most as if he had not seen and done the things over there that he had. He hated being named after his ma, Rolanda, but it was her revenge for being named after her father, and even before the United States Army snagged him with its draft, Ike and Tina Turner had already nailed him, and he became Roland on the River the instant that tune hit the Billboard Top 100. I didn’t know of the girls’ interest at the time, of course, and figured it was my own charming self that brought them all to fawning on me, but I figured things out soon enough. After a while, if it seemed like their attention was on the wane, I would casually drop that he’d maybe asked about one of them the last time he’d been over to my ma’s place.
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