Rez Life

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David Treuer. Rez Life

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Also by David Treuer

The Hiawatha

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A stack of books and the Bible rested to the left of the chair on the small end table laden with all sorts of other things: two broken watches, glasses, a screwdriver, long and unreadable information about his medication. The chair was empty now. But his cigarettes and lighter were on the table, as though he were about to smoke. Someone had written “Dads” on a Post-it and stuck it on the pack. Without the possessive it made me think of fathers. Dads. Parents and mothers and cousins and brothers and sisters and all of us and how we could have ended up like this. I sat at the table across from the chair and smoked one of my own cigarettes. When I was finished I walked back to his bedroom.

A narrow iron-frame bed. A dresser stuffed with socks, mostly the nonslip hospital kind, and T-shirts. A drawer full of medical supplies. A large oak table mounded with clothes and the weird effluvia that are a product of living in the same place for a long time; a broken printer, two dusty bedspreads, a boom box, and a portrait of my mother as a high school student, painted by his brother-in-law while he was in prison. A small safe served as his night table. When I opened it I found a few bundles of one-dollar bills, banded into stacks of 100, some rolls of quarters and silver dollars, and my cousin Vanessa’s cheap gold necklace. This was the necklace she had been wearing when she got into an argument at a party and drove across two yards, up a ditch, and onto the highway, where she was struck by a passing motor home.

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