Devil’s Lake

We rented our house to a couple of meth-heads. They tore out the wires. Dug little sewage pits all over the yard for their friends’ trailers. It looked like an animal got loose. Walls clawed up. Burn marks on the floor. All the appliances scrapped. None of the neighbors said anything. The fuckers. We were living in Florida by then and too poor to fly back up to check on the place.

The thing was, they didn’t look like meth-heads when we met them. They were in their fifties. He wore glasses.

My husband had to move back. Spent three months rebuilding the house before we could sell it. I went back for a week then I had to get out. I couldn’t stand it. This was 1992. Right when the fracking boom hit. All of a sudden people were fighting in the freeway. Pinedale, Wyoming—the air was worse than L.A. It took two hours to get across town in traffic. There weren’t enough houses to go around. We sold ours for $300,000 when the year before we would’ve been lucky to get $70,000. It’s the only reason we could afford the place we have now.

In Hollywood, just outside Miami, I have six mango trees. One of them has purple mangos. Huge, like footballs. People stop by, asking if they can take one. No. They do it anyway. We have cameras on all the trees now.

Everything you hear about Florida is true. If you don’t see something fucked up look the other way. Rich, my husband, does sheetrock. Every week he finds something in someone’s walls: sex shit, guns, bones.

Liberty City, the real bad neighborhood—the hood—is only a few miles away. My boss gave me a tour. The department wanted me to make some art there. Like a humanitarian mission. White people who think they know best. Two hours in an unairconditioned van, my boss yapping the whole time. I almost got heatstroke. I didn’t see a single fruit tree. Anything will grow there and they have nothing. It’s bombed out, like a war zone. There’s a wall that separates the whites from the blacks. I learned a lot of history. The last thing those people need is a mural.

I grew up in Poplar, Montana, on the reservation. Right up next to North Dakota. Where the wind blows three hundred days a year. You see two girls holding down another girl so a guy can rape her. All I wanted was to leave. I got better grades when I was drunk. Boone’s Farm—the pink one. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. My brother was terrible. He beat me. That’s why I don’t have kids: because of how my brother treated me. He beat his first two wives, too. Went to jail. The criminal little shit. But his third wife, the one he still has, I think she beats him. She won’t let him talk to any of us. Straightened him out.

Last year, their kids came to visit in Florida. Stayed with Rich and me for two weeks over winter break. Miraculous kids. They don’t even swear. Smart. Polite. Both of them got full rides to Dartmouth. They’re half Sioux, so they get lots of scholarships. But still, how does that happen? With parents like that? Growing up in Poplar, seeing what they must’ve seen? Miraculous kids. I think of them and it gives me hope.

It never snows here. Never drops below fifty. The whole city is sinking into the ocean. Fracking, strip-mining, AIDS. All our neighbors are either Cuban or Polish. It’s like a foreign country. The supermarkets are incredible. A hundred kinds of peppers. The things people eat. Every couple years when we’re underwater the neighborhood kids water-ski from the backs of trucks. They sluice around the corners, spraying the mango trees and the cameras. I’m too old to fight. I just stand in the yard up to my knees screaming. Then Rich calls me in for dinner.

How did I get here? A thousand miles from a mountain. With a husband who cooks. He just throws everything into a pot: meat, vegetables, tortillas. I treat him like a bad husband. Rrr, what is this? He’s used to it by now.

He’s dyslexic. I have to read to him. My eyes are going. Soon we’ll both be illiterate. Fumbling in the dark. Listening to Netflix. Holding on to each other. I miss the snow. Skiing. Long, thin tracks along the base of the Big Horns. We’d go twice a day. Not see another living soul. Just white, all around.