Dance Boots

Ojibwe Boys

Setting pins at the Palace Bowl was repetitious work.To do it took rhythm, but not the kind of rhythm that let you forget about what you were doing and think of other things—that was Punk’s advice. A lot of guys had gotten hurt that way, he told us that first night. “It’s easy to let your mind wander away, but you gotta be careful. Work with the rhythm but just make sure you pay attention, and you’ll be all right.” After a while I was able to do that, work with the rhythm but pay attention,yet my mind wandered just the same, and I began to think of other things. Before I got the rhythm I smashed my fingers and knuckles a few times, and my body ached to where it was just about unbearable ,then all of a sudden I felt it,almost heard it,and gave in to the beat. I would be all but dancing to the pattern of the Palace Bowl beat,shuffling,bending,picking up two,three pins at a time in each hand, and over the sound of balls rolling down the lanes right at me and on both sides of my pit and hitting pins and pins hitting each other and the floor as they fell, I could hear that click-click ojibwe boys ojibwe boys 101 as the pins in my hands touched heads and bodies and feel their smooth cool necks between my fingers. I bent and rose, swinging, using the muscles in my hips, shoulders, stomach, and back for strength, those in my hands and feet for the more detailed work of picking up pins and dancing out of the way of the scramble of rolling wood on the floor of the pit. And once my body began to dance to the rhythm, my mind did, too, and I began to hear it, the melody of past and present, and see the other dancers all round me—Vernon and Punk and Biik in the pits,the bowlers who looked so tiny down at the approach ends of their lanes, Mr. Mountbatten at the bar, Ingrum at the counter, and Miss Winnie smoking at her table, flirtatiously blowing smoke rings—the playing against that the harmony of everything that was happening back home in Duluth and everything that happened before that, too. My mother and dad—he was dead for sure and I suppose she must have been, too—and my sisters, Violet lost and Sis on her own, the federal boarding school at Harrod, and my dreams. My recurring dreams of horses in fields, one brown with white spots, one almost black with a white blaze down his forehead, a round and short-legged pony, an old faded gray blind in one eye, a light brown with eyes as purple and sad as a moose’s. My dreams, the same ones I have to this day: Two girls in dresses and boys’ high-topped work boots riding bareback in a field bounded by a fence and forests, gripping the manes of their horses. The slender girl sits regally, holding the purple-eyed brown’s mane with both hands,her chin high; she half smiles,watching her sister,round faced,with a laughing mouth full of teeth,lift one hand to wave at the sky.In my dreams,the woman in the green-checked apron is holding my hand,her thumb and three fingers circling my wrist in a firm bracelet, her forefinger wrapped around my thumb, so that her dry cool hand is a mitten. “Lookit, Sam. See, there’s your sisters.There’s Violet, there’s Sis. Look, they don’t even see us, them girls!” I wave to my sisters, and laugh with 102 oj ibwe boys them, although they don’t know it; the woman bends to stroke my head,which is resting against her green-checked hip,with her bony and tender hand.“Them girls, they don’t even know we’re lookin’at them,do they,Sam?”My mother,I suppose she must be,before she took off for wherever the hell she went. Next I dream of Harrod. When I run away to Maggie’s, I wake up when I get caught by the disciplinarian and brought back to boarding school. Whenever I sleep it starts all over again. I am an old man now, my...