Bone Coulee Read Online Free Page A

finally gets to see the girl again, but it’s not under the best of circumstances. He’s not so lucky that he might see her when he’s by himself on a moonlit racetrack. Not that he’s drunk; they haven’t opened their sealers of homebrew yet. But they are drinking beer as they cruise the front street in Pete’s car. He turns up the muddy street, spinning his wheels and fishtailing all over the road.
    “There they are!” Nick says.
    “Hey!” Pete shouts. “Jump in for a ride? Want a beer?” The girls take one look, then take off running up the sidewalk.
    If they were the Bickley sisters, they wouldn’t have refused a ride, but the boys wouldn’t be as free with their talk either. They wouldn’t be talking smoked meat, and gangbang. But the beer, and the thought of Indian girls, gets them talking. It’s all talk anyway. A lot of what they do is just talk.
    “Let’s try out that brew,” Nick says.
    “Not here,” Sid says. “Bad enough we got beer. With the cops in town we shouldn’t be drinking anything in the car.”
    The five ballplayers hide behind the dance hall to sample their homebrew. Sid sniffs the raw aroma.
    “Pheww!”
    “Let me smell it,” Pete says.
    Nick finds a bottle cap on the ground. “Pour a bit in this,” he says. “Light a match to see if it burns. Then we’ll know if it’s safe to drink.”
    “It will be good,” Jeepers says.
    “Even if does smell like sweat,” Sid says. “Eh?”
    “Like a hot woman,” Pete says, and he screws up his face to sniff like a bull at a cow’s ass. “Hey? Hey?”
    Mac hears the throbbing beat of the dance band’s bass drum, steady with the yearning call of the saxophone music of Carolina Moon. He likes the earthy smell of homebrew, and all the other smells of a warm summer night on the fairgrounds outside the dance hall. The wild roses are in full bloom, and their scent carries in the air, as do the lingering smells of the midway concession and the horses, the perfumes wafting out the screened windows of the dance hall and even the smell of sweat.
    He’s back to thinking about the Indian girl. Mac’s not sure who came up with the idea to go to their camp. The topic came up after they had finished the first quart sealer of homebrew. He just remembers that nobody needed any convincing, except perhaps Jeepers. But he’d be even more afraid to hang back in the dark by himself than to throw caution to the wind and join in on the raid.

    Roseanna and Stella sit around the campfire with Kokum, Anne-Marie and Charlie Daniel’s wife, Nancy. Three camp dogs lie off a distance from the fire’s light. Kokum adds a few sticks to the fire to ensure that the soup stays hot. She has added the neck bones and more potatoes. When the others get back from town they will be hungry.
    “Can I see the ladle?” Nancy asks. “It has a story?”
    Roseanna draws closer to the fire, and to her mother. She loves to hear Kokum’s stories. Just in the summer she gets to hear them. The rest of the year Roseanna is away at the Residential School, and Kokum says that stories are best to tell in the wintertime. The fire flickers, and Roseanna hears the hoot, hoot of an owl. From somewhere high up in the trees, the bird swoops down over the tents and just above their heads where they sit by the fire. Anne-Marie hands the ladle to Stella, who holds it close to the fire to see it clearly. The handle and spoon are all one piece.
    “A long time ago,” Kokum says, “When I was eight years old....” Nancy returns the ladle, and Anne-Marie holds it up to the light of the fire. “Even before that…before I was born. Before my brothers were born, my mother and father fled from this country to Montana. When the English were hanging Louis Riel.”
    Stella nurses her baby, rocking in a slow rhythm, side to side, humming under her breath to the faint music from the dance hall in the distance.
    “Mother was Cree,” Kokum says, “but Father was more French than Indian. He