1978 was when I first saw my mother's head bob and ran out of fingers and toes to count my father's hourly lapses of memory. 1978 was still of that era before casinos and gaming profits when we took on actual human dimension, got our alley ways paved and plowed in the winter. 1978 was worse than 1850 in many respects, bloodlines were thinning rapidly, blurring our identities, our people had hardened into upright fossils and were lined up to perish forgotten on the rez. I'd been four years in a white man's school, playing his/my sport, pampered on the luxury coaches that carted us around the Midwest, pampered in the good hotels and restaurants, pampered in the warm dorm rooms and movie theaters. It was hard to come back to Pope County. Fresh off the '78 World lacrosse championships, you see, I had respect. I had won a fleeting glimpse of that rare bird and become somebody. I hated myself for even thinking it, but when I came back everybody on the rez was nobody. I considered my older sister, Minerva, the only entity standing between my parents and demise, who herself would evaporate into thin air when they walked on. I considered my old best friend Neil down the road, how important he'd been, wondered if he could still recite his part of the

Cry of Bwon-diac, wondered why he toiled day-in and day-out at the insane tasks he set himself just to spite the white man and keep alive the old ways that only could lead to fossilhood. We hadn't stayed in touch. I supposed he still lived in his grandfather's double wide and kept beagles named St. Anne and paddled his homemade birch bark canoe on the Straits of Mackinac and steamed bends into ash and hickory and sewed them up with leather webs. I wondered.
      Wondered, as I considered the job off er of a milk truck route from Matti Virkanen, if I could live, if anyone could be truly said to live, on the Pope County Indian Reservation. But a bobbing head, a tongue in knots, an old best friend and an overburdened sister woke me from the lie that I even had a choice. My fl irtation with the white man's world was probably over for good, a transient luxury aff orded me solely by my athletic abilities, the rez was my home. I would take the job from Matti Virkanen, get up at 3 A.M. every day and love it. I would help Minerva tend our elders. My prowess on the white man's lacrosse fi elds would be duly remembered from time to time, mostly at McKeon's sports bar, where too many of my kind already pickled themselves with drink in

order to forget the future.
      Welcome home, Birch Charlevoix, said an echo that led me backwards.
      And then through the window screen I heard her ask, "Is this where Birch Charlevoix lives?" I stood up and saw her, an apparition on our front stoop. This was no long lost relative come to call. The air around me went all electric, and as my polite but bemused sister let her in and showed her to a chair, you could have heard a pin drop. There should have been a halo around her head. I guessed her to be nineteen or twenty, and she off ered so many distractions all at once that I flitted around like a butterfly trying to touch them all. There was a khaki knapsack flashing peace signs of all colors and sizes strapped over her shoulders, and a baby girl thrashed within it, winding her chubby fingers through her mother's brown ponytail and pulling at it like the mane of a horse. My mother asked her just who the hell she was.
      "Marla Langevin," she said.
      Marla wore pink Converse sneakers, a tank top that issued a whiff of sweat and frilly, cut-off jeans revealingly short. Leaning forward in that chair with the fidgety papoose still attached to her back, she had won our undivided attention. We were

quickly taking her measure, both the urgent tangibles on display and also the intangibles of personality for she had charisma, Marla Langevin. A thin upper lip and a pouty lower one, a strong nose and chin, brightly confident hazel eyes, all of these alluring singularities populated her face and in collaboration even unleashed a multiplication of themselves, but the spinning lure that hooked my jaw was a two inch scar in the shape of a smile high up on her left cheek, and it glistened. She kept lifting her hand to it yet always stopped just short of touching it. Fair, fair skin that seemed a hopeless thing in this climate, powerless against the bite of the cold snow moon. She lengthened her neck and turned her head to release the baby's fingers from her ponytail. Her actual appearance was secondary, though, to a higher sense or need. In a single chaotic minute I knew she'd been made for me. It was surely that mythical moment that arrives, that grand suspension of time during which a man recognizes his mate and falls in love.
      My father and I could not take our eyes off her.
      My sister Minerva, examining her mind for reference points, finally marveled, "Wow, this is like an invasion."
      Marla would quickly size up the dynamic of my

family, that my mother, the she-bear, was the one she had to sell.
      "For the love of..." my mother chuckled incredulously. "You show up out of nowhere at my door in your pink shoes and your baby on your back, like some kinda hussy, all sexy in her tiny shorts and her low-slung top. What do you want, missy?" Looking her up and down, she lit a cigarette, inhaled crisply.
      The baby began to cry. Marla hoisted her - did I say it was a girl - from the knapsack, swung her out in front, raised her tank top up over her left breast and released the cup of her bra. The child latched onto the nipple like a shark.
      My father and I followed her every draft. My mother, unfazed, shushed us.
      "Well, Jesus, I never...What's the matter with you two?" she scolded my father and me. "Ogling the poor girl like that. Ain't you never seen a mother's breast before?" Again, she turned to Marla. "What is it that you do want?"
      "Just some water with ice, please," replied Marla, to which my mother responded by getting right up in her face. "No, what do you want? You got some nerve just showing up here and baring your bloated boob in my living room like we're all just

dying for you to flop it out.....