as if trying to decide the best way to sketch my features. He looked at me then, not staring exactly, but with concentration. “She’s here,” I told Martin Lundstrom, and he smiled. “She stopped.” he said, to no one in particular. I squeezed the drawings too tightly, and they crumpled in my hand. I heard him say, with his mouth quite full, “She’s coming over.” I paused.
He was alone, as usual, staring at nothing as he ate a slice of yellow cake.
Martin Lundstrom occupied the seat closest to the garbage cans. I looked up and up at the high ceiling, determined to keep my destination a secret until I arrived. I approached him in the school cafeteria, painfully aware that my footsteps echoed in the great room, which had once been a chapel. I followed a trail of these drawings straight to the source after weeks of collecting them, smoothing them out, memorizing their lines. I liked the way he drew horses, capturing the weary, cynical posture of stocky farm horses, their heads down and muscles straining, while his elegant, slim-ankled Indian ponies reared at the edge of the page, poised to leap off the paper. He was forever ripping them out of his binders and throwing them in the wastebasket, from which I retrieved them when no one was looking. I admired Martin Lundstrom from afar, considered him a talented artist and coveted the sketches he scribbled in notebooks. Their disapproval was so potent I could smell it, a metallic odor like scorched gunpowder, but after it passed in a smoky cloud, all I smelled was the soap on their skin. You better aim them somewhere else.” I heard her gasp, and very quickly Regina Red Horn and her graceful flock migrated to the other end of the hall. I squeezed so hard I could feel the spiky metal jacks. When Regina resumed her aloof surveillance, I went up to her, clutching the pouch in my hand. In exasperation I dug out the leather pouch containing my old jacks and rubber ball, and wore it to school. Her faction of wistful cheerleader candidates- pretty, athletic girls too swarthy to be selected, but persistently hopeful-pointed at me as they whispered, until I felt speared in the back by their sharp fingernails. Regina Red Horn became a rude, annoying shadow, and would stare at me in the hall as she sucked on the end of her black braid. We avoided them as much as possible.īy the time I was a senior at Saint Mary’s High School, I was a misfit myself, shunned by tribesmen because my mother had too many boyfriends and was rumored to practice Indian medicine. We Indians were outcasts on our own turf, and left the Germans and Scandinavians to torture one another as they saw fit. When I say “the others,” I don’t mean the Indians, the Dakota students from our reservation.
The others called him “Tiny Tim,” because he walked with a pronounced limp, only partly corrected by a thick orthopedic shoe. His face was attractive ( I found it pleasing), nearly sharp-featured, but softened by beauty marks at his temple and chin, and when he smiled, seldom though it was, a delightful dimple puckered his left cheek. He had not one cowlick but three, a trinity of bristling tufts of hair rising from his brown head like three horns. MARTIN Lundstrom was white, a North Dakota Swede in the heart of farm country, but he was nevertheless an outcast.