It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn't rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot.
Mostly Rowdy and I just sat in my basement room, which was maybe five degrees cooler
than the rest of the house, and read books and watched TV and played video games.
Mostly Rowdy and I just sat still and dreamed about air-conditioning.
"When I get rich and famous," Rowdy said, "I'm going to have a house that has an air conditioner in every room."
"Sears has those big air conditioners that can cool a whole house," I said.
"Just one machine?" Rowdy asked.
"Yeah, you put it outside and you connect it through the air vents and stuff."
"Wow, how much does that cost?"
"Like, a few thousand bucks, I think."
"I'll never have that much money."
"You will when you play in the NBA."
"Yeah, but I'll probably have to play pro basketball in, like, Sweden or Norway or Russia or something, and I won't need air-conditioning. I'll probably live in, like, an igloo and own reindeer or something."
"You're going to play for Seattle, man."
"Yeah, right."
Rowdy didn't believe in himself. Not much. So I tried to pump him up.
"You're the toughest kid on the rez," I said.
"I know," he said.
"You're the fastest, the strongest."
"And the most handsome, too."
"If I had a dog with a face like yours, I'd shave its ass and teach it to walk backwards."
"I once had a zit that looked like you. Then I popped it. And then it looked even more like you."
"This one time, I ate, like, three hot dogs and a bowl of clam chowder, and then I got diarrhea all over the floor, and it looked like you."
"And then you ate it," Rowdy said.
We laughed ourselves silly. We laughed ourselves sweaty.
"Don't make me laugh," I said. "It's too hot to laugh."
"It's too hot to sit in this house. Let's go swimming."
"Where?"
"Turtle Lake."
"Okay," I said.
But I was scared of Turtle Lake. It was a small body of water, maybe only a mile around.
Maybe less. But it was deep, crazy deep. Nobody has ever been to the bottom. I'm not a very good swimmer; so I was always afraid I'd sink and drown, and they'd never, ever find my body.
One year, these scientists came with a mini-submarine and tried to find the bottom, but the lake was so silty and muddy that they couldn't see. And the nearby uranium mine made their radar/sonar machines go nuts, so they couldn't see that way, either, so they never made it to the bottom.
The lake is round. Perfectly round. So the scientists said it was probably an ancient and dormant volcano crater.
Yeah, a volcano on the rez!
The lake was so deep because the volcano crater and tunnels and lava chutes and all that plumbing went all the way down to the center of the earth. That lake was, like, forever deep.
There were all sorts of myths and legends surrounding the lake. I mean, we're Indians,
and we like to make up shit about lakes, you know?
Some people said the lake is named Turtle because it's round and green like a turtle's
shell.
Some people said it's named Turtle because it used to be filled with regular turtles.
Some people said it's named Turtle because it used to be home to this giant snapping
turtle that ate Indians.
A Jurassic turtle. A Steven Spielberg turtle. A King Kong versus the Giant Reservation
Turtle turtle.
I didn't exactly believe in the giant turtle myth. I was too old and smart for that. But I'm still an Indian, and we like to be scared. I don't know what it is about us. But we love ghosts. We love monsters.
But I was really scared of this other story about Turtle Lake.
My dad told me the story.
When he was a kid he watched a horse drown in Turtle Lake and disappear.
"Some of the others say it was a giant turtle that grabbed the horse," Dad said. "But they're lying. They were just being silly. That horse was just stupid. It was so stupid we named it Stupid Horse."
Well, Stupid Horse sank into the endless depths of Turtle Lake and everybody figured
that was the end of that story.
But a few weeks later, Stupid Horse's body washed up on the shores of Benjamin Lake,
ten miles away from Turtle Lake.
"Everybody just figured some joker had found the body and moved it," Dad said. "To scare people."
People laughed at the practical joke. Then a bunch of guys threw the dead horse into the back of a truck, drove it to the dump, and burned it.
Simple story, right?
No, it doesn't end there.
"Well, a few weeks after they burned the body, a bunch of kids were swimming in Turtle Lake when it caught fire."
YES, THE WHOLE LAKE CAUGHT ON FIRE!
The kids were swimming close to the dock. Because the lake was so deep, most kids
swam close to shore. And the fire started out in the middle of the lake, so the kids were able to safely climb out of the water before it all went up like a big bowl of gasoline.
"It burned for a few hours," Dad said. "Burned hot and fast. And then it went out. Just like that. People stayed away for a few days then went to take a look at the damage, you know?
And guess what they found? Stupid Horse washed up on shore again."
Despite being burned at the dump, and burned again in the lake of fire, Stupid Horse was untouched. Well, the horse was still dead, of course, but it was unburned. Nobody went near the horse after that. They just let it rot. But it took a long time—too long. For weeks, the dead body just lay there. Didn't go bad or anything. Didn't stink. The bugs and animals stayed away. Only after a few weeks did Stupid Horse finally let go. His skin and flesh melted away. The maggots and coyotes ate their fill. Then the horse was just bones.
"Let me tell you," Dad said. "That was just about the scariest thing I've ever seen. That horse skeleton lying there. It was freaky."
After a few more weeks, the skeleton collapsed into a pile of bones. And the water and
the wind dragged them away.
It was a freaky story!
* * *
"Nobody swam in Turtle Lake for ten, eleven years," Dad said.
Me, I don't think anybody should be swimming in there now. But people forget. They
forget good things and they forget bad things. They forget that lakes can catch on fire. They forget that dead horses can magically vanish and reappear.
I mean, jeez, we Indians are just weird.
So, anyway, on that hot summer day, Rowdy and I walked the five miles from my house
to Turtle Lake. All the way, I thought about fire and horses, but I wasn't going to tell Rowdy about that. He would've just called me a wuss or a pussy. He would've just said it was kid stuff.
He would've just said it was a hot day that needed a cold lake.
As we walked, I saw that monster pine tree ahead of us.
It was so tall and green and beautiful. It was the only reservation skyscraper, you know?
"I love that tree," I said.
"That's because you're a tree fag," Rowdy said.
"I'm not a tree fag," I said.
"Then how come you like to stick your dick inside knotholes?"
"I stick my dick in the girl trees," I said.
Rowdy laughed his ha-ha, hee-hee avalanche laugh.
I loved to make him laugh. I was the only one who knew how to make him laugh.
"Hey," he said. "You know what we should do?"
I hated when Rowdy asked that particular question. It meant we were about to do
something dangerous.
"What should we do?" I asked.
"We should climb that monster."
"That tree?"
"No, we should climb your big head," he said. "Of course, I'm talking about that tree. The biggest tree on the rez."
It wasn't really open to debate. I had to climb the tree. Rowdy knew I had to climb the tree with him. I couldn't back down. That wasn't how our friendship worked.