Shades of a Warrior

Chapter One

BJ blinked at the middle finger. In fourteen years, he’d observed his share of them. He’d seen them reaching out of the car window way down in Minneapolis. He’d seen them in the stands of high school hockey games. The Native kids at school were particularly skilled at the gesture. Until today, though, he’d never seen one in the clouds. But there it was, as clear as a spring morning in May, fluffy white fingers flipping off the entire world. Sometimes, you had to use your imagination to see something in the clouds. It could be an elephant or a hat. But this time, there was zero doubt. BJ was puzzling this when two bronze faces appeared, staring down at him.

“Is he alive?”

“He’s fine.”

“Think he’ll have brain damage?”

“Like we’ll ever know.”

Laughter.

BJ realized that he was lying in the middle of the school playground. What had happened?

“MAKI!” A third face appeared, this one with lighter skin and a louder voice. “Keep your eyes open!” BJ felt a warm glob of tobacco goo strike him in the temple and run down the side of his head. “In I-rak, the quickest way into a body bag was to daydream! Eyes. OPEN!” He spun and disappeared. BJ sat up and watched his gym teacher stomp away. Bud Davis ran class like he did boot camp for the army, barking in his Boston brogue, chewing tobacco like it was his worst enemy, leaving little brown spots scattered across the ground in his wake. BJ wiped the spit from his temple and turned his face to the lake. He saw a taconite barge far out, low in the water, loaded with ore. It would be headed to Sault Ste. Marie.

His mind hopped all over the town. Gentle waves washed onto the beach, melting into the smooth, penny and golf ball-sized rocks, the color of deer hair in November. A mud-encrusted Ford truck stopped in the middle of the road while an elderly woman crossed with nine movements of her walker. A dog tied outside the post office barked twice, paused, then barked twice more.

“Johnson got you,” said Tony, helping BJ to his feet. “The girl can throw. I think I’m in love! She dropped you like a rock.” Oh yeah, thought BJ. Dodgeball. That’s what they were doing. BJ hated dodgeball.

David grinned, his big white teeth juxtaposed against the mess of sherbet-orange and green hair. “Could of been worse, Niichi. Tony got one in the nuts.”

They all winced.

“You were just staring out at the lake when she hit you,” said Tony.

“Seagulls,” BJ lied. The middle finger was strange enough, but if he told them what else he had seen, they’d think he was crazy. “I was looking at a flock of seagulls in the air.”

“There’s a flock of balls in the air, too, Nature Boy!” shouted Mr. Davis. “Eyes OPEN!” He shot a brown stream onto the ground and blew his whistle.

Ninety-six lockers, twenty-four stairs, and seventeen floor tiles later, BJ arrived at US History. There, he slumped into his seat, his mind clutching onto another number: four. Four more days until summer vacation.

Notebook on desk. Pencil on notebook. Hand on cheek. Hailey Jensen breezed into the room and walked down BJ’s aisle as if she were floating. BJ kept his gaze down. Hailey took her seat behind BJ, then sniffed at the air. Oh no… “Hey,” she whispered, “are you wearing perfume?” BJ shook his head, annoyed. “You know it’s Mom’s oils. Shut up.”

“You smell like a girl.”

“Shut up, Hailey.”

She poked his shoulder and whispered, “Little bitch.”

He swatted at Hailey’s hand without looking back because Mrs. Heikela was entering the classroom, her blond hair pulled into a tight bun and wearing a loose green dress, which exposed her chubby arms and neck. Her heels tapped sharply as she strode past the steely gazes of early US presidents towards the too-tall lectern. Nancy Heikela was, like the Makis, of Finnish descent and whose ancestry on the north shore of Lake Superior went back no further than three generations. She had been teaching World and U.S. History for more than twenty years and ran a tight ship. She was married to the county sheriff. “We will do a quick review of chapter one before Wednesday’s final,” she announced. “Please open your books to page fourteen.”

BJ wondered why the review was necessary. It had, he recalled, been straightforward: Pilgrims meet Indians, America fights for freedom, then builds a nation and all that. He flipped to the end of chapter one, where there was a list of twelve important summary points. “We will take turns reading the summaries and discuss, if necessary,” said Mrs. Heikela. BJ judged that the level of energy in the room would make this quite unnecessary. “Hailey, why don’t you start?”

Hailey cleared her throat and read. “Soon after Columbus discovered America, modern weapons, tools, and clothing began to make their way across the continent.” BJ was half listening—until he realized that this was not what summary number one said on his page. In BJ’s book, it said this: Soon after Columbus stumbled upon America, disease, slavery, and genocide made their way across the continent.

BJ flinched. He glanced at the books around him. Maybe he was on the wrong page. “Page fourteen,” confirmed Mrs. Heikela, noticing him. BJ nodded and looked down again, just as Soren Knutsen began to read. “Guns were prized by the Indians.”

A Native archer could shoot fifteen arrows in the time it took a white man to reload a black powder rifle. What the…?

“The Constitution enumerated numerous ideals,” read another student.

Many of these were learned from the Haudenosaunee People, said BJ’s summary number three.

“Life was difficult for the Indians before…”

They had a four-hour workday, slept in warm beds, and could build a fire by hand in two minutes.

“Westward expansion into open country…”

Westward invasion into populated country…

“Treaties were signed…”

Treaties were broken…

“Settlers…”

Invaders…

“Built…”

Destroyed…

BJ was sweating. He didn’t remember reading any of this earlier. None of the other students gave any indication that their books were acting strangely. Had he sustained a concussion in dodgeball? The next paragraph in BJ’s book nearly caused him to fall out of his seat. It said:

Find the warrior with the red hand. Before the summer is out. Your family is in danger. Your community is in danger. Find the warrior! Oh, and look up. Your teacher is talking to you.

Mrs. Heikela was staring at BJ expectantly. “Go ahead.”

A rather large stone landed in the pit of BJ’s stomach. “What?”

“I said,” Mrs. Heikela spoke slowly, as if to a young child, “Please read the final summary point.”

“Little bitch,” whispered a voice behind him.

BJ rubbed his fingers through the dark cowlick above his right eye and felt it spring back into place, as always. He looked down, bracing for the worst. But the sentences he had just read were gone. The words on the page matched exactly what the other kids in class had been reading. And the final summary point, the sentence BJ was to read, looked harmless. Boring, even. BJ breathed a sigh of relief and read: “Eventually, the United States was built on the principles of freedom and democracy by men of valor and conviction. Women played a role as well, raising children, toiling in the fields, and, when necessary, leveling a gun. None of them, however, was as smoking hot as Nancy Heikela, who I’d love to take out on a date and… and…”

A ringing silence followed. A solitary fly buzzed around and between students with open mouths. Mrs. Heikela stood rigid and pale as if she had been slapped across the face. There was nothing for BJ to say. There was nothing he could say. She pointed at the door. BJ gathered his things and headed out.

*

Minutes later, BJ was sitting at a heavy oak desk and counting the stripes of an impressive lake trout mounted on the wall behind the principal, whose knuckles were white as he gripped the phone and listened. His right eye twitched. Ryan Olafson was a pear-shaped man with receding blond hair and a small mustache. All in all, he was a decent principal and an extremely good fisherman, which earned him general respect from most of the students. BJ liked Ryan. After one minute, he hung up the phone and sighed as he rubbed his eyes with one hand. “Smoking hot? Really, BJ?”

BJ shifted in his seat. He didn’t know what to say.

Mr. Olafson leaned forward, then stopped and sniffed at the air. “Say, are you wearing—?”

“No. No,” he repeated more firmly. “It’s my mom’s...”