He woke up in the middle of the night in the middle of a dream and listened for the sound that had taken him from sleep. He heard the creek up close and further away the river, both big from recent storms, and if a tire hadn’t rolled over a rock just then, flung it into the underbody with a clunk, he would have gone back to sleep and not realized that a car was coming down the drive with its lights off.

The lodge was a half-mile of dirt road from the highway, the road tracing the creek until it shifted sharply away. He had only been sleeping there, alone, for a month, and in those first weeks he had had visions of intruders breaking through the flimsy outer doors or climbing in through one of the low windows or even lowering themselves down the chimney of the giant fireplace, kicking out the flue, and bursting into the big room covered with soot and brandishing a bowie knife.

He got out of bed and grabbed the spotlight from the nightstand and the rifle from where it leaned against the wall and threw open the front door, snapping on the spot and playing it on the drive as he crossed the porch. The light bounced off the overhanging tree branches and fell flat on the roof of the car, glinting colorlessly. The driver shifted into reverse—he could hear the transmission—and the car, a roughed-up Dodge Charger from some earlier decade, started to whine its way backward up the drive.

“Hey. HEY,” he yelled, and ran after, still carrying the spot and the gun, part of his mind thinking it might be better to leave well enough alone. But he didn’t. He got in his own car, grabbed the keys from the dashboard, and, with the gun across his lap and the spot on the seat beside him, drove after the speeding roughed-up Charger, caught up just in time to see it miss the sharp turn and drive backwards off the road into the creek.

He pulled up the parking break and turned off the engine, leaving no sound but that of the creek, louder now, angry about the half Charger diverting it from its path. With the high beams still on, he got out, gun raised and pointed at the driver’s side of the windshield. “Who’s that? Now. Who is that?”

The driver’s door opened, and the driver stuck his head out. It was Rafe, and he was drunk. “Don’t be mad,” he said.

“What the fuck?” James lowered his gun.

Rafe swung himself the rest of the way out of the car, walked through the water to the bank, and climbed up to the road, heavy but sure. “Don’t be mad,” he said again. “I just need to talk to you.” He walked around the hood of James’s car, opened the door, and sat in the passenger seat, the creek-soaked legs of his jeans making sloshing sounds as he settled in. As if to show James he was in no hurry, he untied the end of the long braid that hung down his back, which had somehow gotten wet from the creek, combed out the last few inches with his fingers, and began re-braiding it.

James stood beside the car, hands on hips, and felt his heart bouncing against his ribs like a jet-propelled racquetball in a birdcage. If he had had a cigarette, he would have smoked the whole thing before getting in the car with Rafe, but he didn’t, so he settled for putting the safety on the gun and thinking about what he would have to do to get the Charger out of the creek. He would have to hire a wrecker, and a wrecker wouldn’t fit between the cement markers that his grandfather had placed on either side of the drive just past the orchard. He didn’t know why his grandfather had placed the markers there, 200 yards from the highway, but they had always been there and now he would have to knock them down to get some stupid Charger out of his creek.

“Jesus fuck, Rafe.” He opened the rear door and laid the gun on the back seat and then opened the front door and got in behind the wheel, looking straight ahead at the windshield and not at Rafe, soggy and sorry on the seat beside him. He watched the creek break around the rear tire and back bumper of the Charger. Lucky thing Rafe hadn’t decided to drive into the creek last week when it was chest high and moving boulders and twenty-foot hunks of madrone around. The car might have been in the river by now. “Whose car is that?”

“Someone left it at the shop.”

James felt a rush of panic that ebbed quickly into dread. He always felt this way around Rafe. Rafe wanted to live off the land, but Fish and Game regulations and the taming of the river at the expense of the salmon had made that practically impossible, so he fixed cars, his “shop” a trailer parked at a crossroads on tribal land, an eyesore that neither Fish and Game nor the Tribal Council were particularly happy about. James looked at the car again, rapidly assessed how much obvious damage the creek, given its current position, could do. “You borrowed that car from a customer?”

“Fuck you.” Rafe rolled down the window, hawked, spat, and rolled the window back up again. “I don’t ‘borrow’ my customers’ cars, James. They left it for dead. For scrap. I got it running. It’s mine.”

“I didn’t mean—“

“I know what you meant.”

It was Rafe’s turn to look straight ahead, to show James his prizefighter profile, the beaten-down nose, the lifted, go-ahead-try-and-give-me-another chin. His mouth said he wanted to talk but his face said he wanted to fight and all of a sudden James felt tired. He had slept only a few hours this night, and he hadn’t been sleeping well in general. “All right, then. What the fuck do you want to talk about? What’s so important that you had to come up here in the middle of the night and put your new car in my creek?”
“It’s not your creek.” Rafe turned to look at him and seemed abruptly less drunk, soggy, and sorry. “You know it’s not.”

“Jesus. Not this again.”

“None of the creeks are yours. You can’t own a creek.”

James just kept looking through the windshield, at the way the car’s high beams bleached out the trunks of the trees, drew shadows behind the pebbles that dotted the dirt road, occasionally caught and refracted through a droplet splashed up by the creek. He touched the knob for the headlights, turned it from high to running to parking to off, then waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness but they didn’t; they didn’t have to because the moon was high and full and bright and colored the trunks of the trees silver and drew shadows around the pebbles instead of behind them and turned the effluences of the creek into prismed mists. “Tell me how to make it right, Rafe. Tell me how to make it right, and I will.”

“You know how to make it right. Sell to me.”

“Rafe—”

“Not the whole thing. Just a parcel. Just the parcel at the confluence with Osprey Creek. You won’t even be able to see me.”

But he would be able to see the smoke from Rafe’s fire. Right after Rafe had asked him the first time, he’d built a fire there and jogged back to the lodge and looked, so he knew. And for some reason, he couldn’t bear it. But he didn’t say that. “That wouldn’t make it right, Rafe. You’re not the only one who wants that parcel. Ginny wants it, and so do Louie and Elsa.”

“Ginny’s an old woman.”

“She wants it for her grandkids.”

“Her son-in-law has land. Her grandkids can have that. I’ve got nothing.”

He turned to look at James again, and James felt his own head turning as if Rafe’s expression demanded it, but when he looked he saw nothing of a demand, just the face of a prize fighter, beaten up but not, after all, beaten down. “Were you ever a boxer, Rafe?”

“Shit, man. Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not. I promise. I just want to know if you were ever a boxer. Just tell me if you were ever a boxer and then we can go back to talking about why you’re more deserving than Ginny’s grandkids.”

“Shit. You think a proud Indian like me needs to look for fights?” He held his nose, thumb on one side, middle finger curled against the other, and ran his index finger up and down the lowered bridge. “I got this for kissing a white girl in high school. Her brother found out about us, and he and his buddies jumped me. Gave me this, too.” He turned his head and with his other hand lifted the long braid, showed James the wide white scar at the base of his skull.

James shivered, imagining the genesis of such a scar. “Looks like they tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t die so easy.” He dropped his braid and raised his chin. “But yet I am not nor have I ever been a boxer. My dad was, though. Champion super-middleweight of his platoon in Nam.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about my family.”

James held the bottom of the steering wheel with both hands. “I’m guessing you’re going to tell me.”

Rafe opened his mouth then shook his head. “Just sell to me, James. It’s not like I’m asking you to give it to me.”

“Look, I sell to you, then Ginny and Louie and Elsa are all going to hate me.”

“Well. At least they’d have something specific.”

“What are you saying?”

Rafe looked out the side window, as if something other than the moon-silvered tree trunks had suddenly appeared there and drawn his attention. He rested his arm on the top of the door beside the window, pressing down the lock with his elbow, on purpose or not on purpose. He said nothing.

But James knew what he was saying. James’s grandparents had gifted him a piece of land that had once been home to at least three indigenous families—Rafe’s and the others who had asked, since he had come up to the land to live, to buy a piece of it. They didn’t even ask for the whole thing. Just a parcel. It made him sick. Yet he wanted it. He wanted to keep it for himself. He didn’t understand why. But the feeling overwhelmed him and had done so since the day his grandparents had signed the property over to him just before his thirtieth birthday. He wondered if Rafe and the others had tried to buy from the previous owner, a lawyer in Portland, or from any of the dozen or so settlers who had laid claims or passed deeds back and forth for a hundred years before him. He wondered if they had known not to bother to try, with the lawyer, the settlers, to get it at less than cost, to work a deal, something they could manage. If they had somehow known that James was soft and only asked him. “They hate me already,” he said.

Rafe slowly lifted a shoulder, slowly let it drop.

James moved his hands from the bottom to the top of the wheel. “You can use it whenever you want. So can they. I gave you all keys to the gate.”

“That’s not the same as living there. That’s not the same as having it be mine.”

The moon was moving to set, brightening the silver and deepening the shadows on the trees. James imagined Rafe living on the creek. He imagined him throwing out his nets for the few salmon that still came and cooking them on sticks around a fire. He imagined him bringing his ex-wife’s grandmother to collect roots for baskets along the edge of the river, the shiny red roots that had only recently come into view, after the last storm. He imagined learning from Rafe how to process and cook acorns. He imagined a fire surrounded by staked salmon and rings of people sharing food and stories and then he looked into the creek at the Charger and imagined a ring of stripped down wrecks around the rings of people and the fire and he imagined himself and Rafe trading punches by the river when he couldn’t convince Rafe to take the stripped down wrecks away, trading punches the way he and his friends had done it in high school, one punch apiece to the other guy’s left shoulder, if you were a righty, which they all were, in turns, until someone cried uncle. He felt tired again, and then he felt angry, the feelings passing through him like the dark clouds and horizontal lightning of a fast-moving storm. “Why do you have to fuck around with me? Why can’t you just tell me what you think?”

Rafe’s eyes opened very wide. “How am I going to do that?”

“Just do it. Why can’t you? We’ve known each other a long time.”

Rafe shook his head. “Not that long.”

James calculated. He had met Rafe the first time he had come up to the land to live. Just for a year that time. But he had come back every autumn since, and they had fished together at the confluence, and every year James gave all the fish to Rafe except the two or three they ate together. Rafe had asked to buy, back then, before the others, but because James hadn’t been staying it had been easy to forget about it. Rafe only got demanding when he drank, and he didn’t drink often, and James made sure they didn’t drink together. He thought it made their interactions more real. “Seven years,” he said finally. “It’s been seven years.”

Rafe shook his head, once. “That’s not long.”

James shook his own head many times, slowly, his understanding of the world coming apart slightly like a map that has been folded and unfolded so many times the seams turn white and begin to disintegrate, opening up gaps in the landscape, forming chasms and ravines where before was solid ground, separating river from trees, valley from mountain. Seven years was longer than he had known any adult male outside of his own family, beside his high school buddies, and these days he only saw them once a year, tops, and when he did he wasn’t sure he even knew them any more. If seven years wasn’t a long time to know someone, then he had no hope of ever being close to anyone again. He opened his mouth to say, not that, but something, and all that came out was breath, breath with a tiny high bark at the end, like the cry of a fox searching for other foxes.

Rafe turned in the passenger seat at the sound and faced James fully, one of his big knees balanced on the emergency brake, his eyebrows somehow both high on his tall forehead and knitted together low over his broken nose. “Don’t you pull no sensitive white boy shit with me.”

James’s face got hot. “I didn’t say anything.”

“But you want to. What? What do you want to tell me?”

“I don’t want to tell you anything.”

“That you’re lonely because you fucked up your marriage?”

James jerked forward as if he’d been stabbed in the stomach, then blunted his feelings. He had gotten good at it. His grip on the steering wheel tightened and relaxed and tightened and relaxed again. “I didn’t fuck up my marriage.”

“So it’s a coincidence that now you moved up here? Alone? Same as, when was it, the first time? Seven years ago?”

Rage spiked up the hair on his neck, made it impossible to think. “Fuck you.”

“Because, you know, join the club, white boy.”

James turned, only his head, looked Rafe right in the eyes until his eyes looked unreal. “You call me boy again, and I am going to have something to tell you.” He had no idea what he was saying.

“Tough guy, nah?” Rafe snorted. “I should be talking to her. Get her to take you back. Maybe if I really want my land, I should become a marriage counselor.”

James hit the steering wheel with his right fist. “You don’t know shit. I’ve always wanted to be here.”

“Because you’re lonely. You’re a lonely boy.”

“Just tell me what you think, you fucking asshole.”

Rafe laid one hand on the dashboard and with the other poked James in the shoulder, the right shoulder, with one finger, a hard poke that hurt. “You want to know what I think? I think that land was stolen from my family somewhere near the end of last century—sold out from under us for nothing by some BIA official. Ten generations of my family are buried there, that I know of, ten thousand years I’m not sure of, but if we could go back I guess we’d more likely find my family than yours. On Osprey. It’s our place.”

“But what about—”

“Shut up. I’m not done. You know what else I think? I think I am more generous than your Jesus asking to buy a piece of that land from you and not telling you to just give me the whole damn thing.” He poked James’s shoulder again, somehow hitting the exact same spot and hurting even more. “And I think,” Rafe swallowed several times before speaking again, “and I think that I don’t have to tell you that. I think that you know something about it.” Another poke. More hurt. “Don’t you?”

“I—”

“You do. You do. And I think you should be ashamed of yourself. For making me say it to you. Something you already know.” Rafe settled back in his seat, rolled his shoulders, and dropped his head from side to side, cracking the bones of his neck. “That’s what I think. White boy. White boy.”

James found himself once again staring helplessly at the prizefighter profile. And then the moon dipped behind a hillside and left the land in total darkness, as if the world outside the car, the creek and the Charger and the lodge and the river and the mountains and the old trees, had ceased to exist, as if there was nothing but Rafe and himself and the car, their existence confirmed only by dashboard light. “I’m sorry,” he said.

Rafe barked out a laugh. “Are you simple? You can’t apologize for that.” He put his hand on James’s shoulder, the one he’d been poking, gave the shoulder a little shake, and left his hand there. “All I want is a piece. Just sell it to me. Why can’t you share?”

James looked at the hand on his shoulder. He realized he hadn’t been touched by anyone since he’d said goodbye to his now ex-wife. “What are you going to do with it?”

“You know what I want to do. I want to live on it. As close to the old ways as I can.”

“You’re going to take down the road?”

Rafe turned to face him again, his face base-lit and spooky now, its shadows not hiding his irritation. “You trying to out-Indian an Indian? The road stays. I need it to get to my kids. I need it to get to my people. For my people to get to me. Only a crazy white man would want to take down a road once it’s built.” The observation seemed to compose him. He settled back against the door, his left hand still on James’s shoulder. “And, anyway, I don’t see you taking down the road.”

“I need it to get to work,” said James, and felt lame, and added, “and my family. To get to my family in Ashland,” he said, and felt like a liar.

Rafe didn’t notice or didn’t care. “Good. So we agree. The road stays.” He took his hand away from James’s shoulder, causing James to fall toward him, just a little. “So you’ll sell to me.” And he extended his right hand to shake.

James looked at the hand and felt a movement in the muscle of his right shoulder that was cut short by the overwhelming desire for possession that had plagued him since the day the land had become, officially, his. “What do I say to Louie and Elsa and Ginny?”

Rafe withdrew his hand, pressed his palm against the dashboard. “You don’t say anything. They aren’t trying to hear you. Don’t hide behind them. Like I said, they have land. They’re already set up. And you know they won’t keep it the way I will. You know those kids’ll parcel it out for vacation cabins. You know Louie wants to run his business through there. You know it.”

“If I sell to you, will you let them use it at least?”

“Probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll wreck it. Putting speed boats in there. Launching party floats full of people from the city.”

“Then maybe it’s better if I keep it. So everyone can use it.”

“It’s better for it to be all yours so that, really, it belongs to everyone? Yeah, well, and who made you private property king of communalism?” Suddenly Rafe sounded the way he did when he gave presentations to the Tribal Council, at Forest Service panels, at Fish and Game hearings. “You want to be so very fair, why don’t you just turn it over to the Forest Service and have them make a monument out of it? Then everybody can use it. Right?”

It occurred to James that Rafe might not even be drunk. “That’s not what I want.”

“No. It’s not what you want. You want to be the one who says what goes. You want it for yours just like I want it for mine. But I’m willing to share. Why can’t you share?”

“I am sharing.”

“No. You’re not.” Rafe twisted twice, once and he was facing the windshield, twice and he was reaching to raise the lock on the door that he had purposefully or inadvertently locked when the moon was still high. He placed one hand on the door lever and leaned forward, ducking his head in preparation of getting out of the car and looking at James over his left shoulder. “You sleep on it, James.”

He got out of the car and stood up straight, and though James could see nothing but his belly he could tell that Rafe was stretching, his torso elongating, the hem of his flannel shirt lifting until it just touched the waistband of his faded, creek-soaked jeans. Suddenly Rafe’s belly disappeared and his face was framed by the window. He tapped on the glass with the bent knuckle of his right index finger as if he needed to get James’s attention. James turned the key in the ignition and lowered the window. Rafe leaned in. “I’ll bring a wrecker tomorrow morning to pull out the Charger. I’m thinking we’ll have to take out those cement poles by the orchard to get through.”

“All right.”

“You want them moved out of the way or taken down?”

James suddenly remembered his dream. It was a dream about zombies. They weren’t really zombies; they weren’t rotting or falling apart like zombies do. They looked normal. But he could tell they weren’t right. He and the others who had not been turned could fly, and most of the dream was taken up with that, with escape, with he and his unturned allies beating the zombies away with their fists, with broken branches, with axe handles, before flying away, above tree level, to the mountaintops. Near the end of the dream, one of the zombies learned to fly. At that point, one of his fellow unturned ones gave up. He surrendered himself. Let himself be taken. At which point James woke up to the sound of the rock hitting the Charger’s underbody.

“James.” Rafe snapped his fingers in James’s face. “You want me to put the markers back when I’m done or cart them away?”

“I don’t know.”

“They’re not serving any purpose.”

“I said, I don’t know.”

Rafe reached further in the window and patted James’s shoulder, the second time he had been touched since he had said goodbye to his now ex-wife. “You sleep on it. You can tell me in the morning when you tell me about the land.”