The Deed (16 page)

“Is something wrong with your ass?” Amanda inquired, noticing Jason’s hand still cupping the injured buttock.

The wound turned out to be slight, of course, though not embarrassingly so. Blood had been drawn, and Amanda went off to procure some iodine, leaving Jason alone to inspect the room. White linen curtains, together with broad, dark wood beams that striped the low ceiling, set a tone of rustic simplicity; the wide wooden slats of the floor, indifferently covered with a few area rugs, creaked to the step. Here and there the bucolic charm was interrupted by pieces of modern art: iron and stone twisted into elegantly idealized animal or abstract shapes, and paintings that followed similar themes. It was the home of an artist or aficionado: part living space, part gallery.

As Amanda rifled noisily through kitchen drawers, Jason turned his eyes to the long wall along the back of the house, dominated by an old stone fireplace, where irregular cantaloupes of river stones clustered together beneath a wide, dark wooden mantel. He crossed to it at a respectfully idle pace.

The mantel itself was an asymmetric, rough-hewn slab of soot-blackened timber, the very keel of some ancient warship put to the torch, perhaps, and its horizontal upper surface was festooned with an assortment of knickknacks: an oil lamp, a pair of Remington-style rodeo statues, and, on a velvet pillow, a smooth blue marble globe veined with gold.

Above the fireplace, the broad chimney was sheathed in painted plaster; pinned a few feet upward of the mantel by four concrete nails hung a bare, stretched, mustard-colored skin, roughly two feet square. Onto this had been dyed or painted a map he recognized almost instantly as the island of Manhattan. It looked ancient.

“This is gonna sting,” warned Amanda from behind; he turned to find her armed with an uncapped bottle in one hand and a dabbed square of gauze in the other. Her eyes twinkled mischievously. “Drop ’em and bend over.”

“Thanks but no thanks, Nurse Ratchett,” replied Jason, seizing bottle and cloth. Amanda watched with indiscreet glee as he wincingly attended to his wound through the tear in the cloth.

Amanda’s mother, when she appeared, was dressed casually, in a loose black shirt and jean slacks, and surveyed the pair through a pair of rosy sunglasses. She wore her salt-and-pepper hair straight and long, like Amanda, but her face was rounder, having shared in the comfortable middle-age spread of her hips. Smiling thinly, she approached and threw her arms around her daughter.

“Hi, Mom,” said a newly cheery Amanda. “Jason, this is my mom, Mary. Mom, this is…Jason.”

He smiled and offered a hand, which Amanda’s mother accepted, still smiling, and they exchanged greetings. “That map…it’s beautiful,” he said.

“The island,” she replied in a thick, measured Native accent, inclining her head toward the fireplace. “But it’s just a map.” She searched his eyes with a hawklike intensity, and Jason found himself mentally plotting the room’s exits.

“So are you the one my daughter’s been looking for?” she continued at last. “Last child of the Haansvoorts?”

“That’s what I’m told,” replied Jason, flashing his charmer’s smile.

The old woman’s lips parted slightly, as if she were about to add something, but she only licked her lips.

“Who were those guys with Dad?” Amanda asked, hooking a thumb toward the front door.

With a dismissive wave, Mary turned and headed toward the kitchen. “Ask him,” she sniffed. “They want us to build a casino. Come on, let’s have a drink.” Without waiting to see whether they’d follow, she slipped quietly across one of the rugs and onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor, with barely a whisper to mark her passing. Jason was surprised to note that she was actually wearing moccasins.

“A casino?” pressed Amanda, two steps behind her mother. Roused from his inertia by some latent herd instinct, Jason followed meekly.

The kitchen was immense, a palace of white Formica, but cluttered and homey, with a card table and chairs by the door, twin sinks full of dishes, knickknack-cluttered countertops.
Like mother, like daughter,
he thought.

“Yes, a damn casino,” said Mary, passing the table en route to the far counter. “Here on the Lenape.”

“Really,” said Amanda, surprised, seating herself at the rickety little table. “Why didn’t he bring them inside?” Taking his cue, Jason sat down across from her. It felt cramped and mildly unsanitary: a booth at a low-end diner.

From a cupboard above the sink, Amanda’s mother withdrew a handful of assorted mugs. “Because he knows better. Jason, do you drink coffee?”

“Uh, no,” he replied nervously. “I mean, yes. Thanks.”

The three sat together in the kitchen for over an hour, drinking coffee and drifting in and out of lazy conversations. Jason wanted nothing more than to curl up and let the little family visit unfold around him, and for a while, at least, the women seemed inclined to let him. It had apparently been a month or so since Amanda’s last visit home, and Jason watched with detached amusement the textbook volleys of mother-daughter interaction.

Intense and confident, Mary enunciated her speech with meticulous care, as if test-driving each word for safety and maneuverability.

Eventually, the conversational wind began to shift, and Jason found himself fielding questions. Mary’s gentle inquiries seemed quite innocuous, taken individually, but on the whole, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that he was being…probed. In particular, he found himself more than once dodging the subject of his parents, which he’d always felt uncomfortable talking about, but never more so than in times like this, when he wasn’t physically and mentally running on all cylinders. Jason tried to dismiss his anxiety, but couldn’t escape the notion that he’d been led into some sort of trap.

Amanda said little throughout the inquisition, and Jason wondered when exactly she planned to get around to asking for the piece of information or whatever it was she expected to get out of this trip. The extent to which the success of this little enterprise hinged on his presence remained unclear. He was working blind, knowing neither the ground rules nor the objective, and it was starting to make him edgy. Eagerly, desperately, he awaited an opportunity to quiz Amanda, if she could at some point be removed from her mother’s watchful gaze.

But it was Amanda who first excused herself, to go to the bathroom, and Jason’s mild dread began quickly to escalate in the absence of her mediating presence. Mary’s pleasant affability seemed calculated to disarm: the B-movie Nazi interrogator coolly reassuring you that yes, you will of course tell her everything, and then she will find you some soup. His wounded buttock ached sympathetically.

“So,” Jason assayed boldly, desperate to change the subject, “why
are
you against the casino? Just out of curiosity.”

Mary took a leisurely sip before replying. “Well, it’s a terrible notion,” she opined, frowning sincerely. “My people have been gravely weakened, Jason, as you may know, by centuries of poverty, alcoholism, and a host of other evils. A casino can bring nothing but further despair to the reservation.”

He shook his head. “I’m confused,” he confessed. “I assumed your…people…would own it.”

“Well, they would,” she confirmed. When he frowned in reply, a maternal smile creased her lips. “You can’t be expected to understand, Jason,” she explained patiently. “Many of the men of our tribe, the women, too, take their paychecks into town and come back with lottery tickets. Not all of us, but a great number. It doesn’t take much imagination to picture what it would be like with a full operating casino in our backyard.”

Amanda had returned and caught the thread of her mother’s answer as she sat down; she continued to listen intently as Mary turned to face her. “Those men are from the island,” she informed Amanda. “Mobsters, maybe. They want to set the whole thing up for a percentage. Your father won’t stop talking to them about it. It’s going to be a battle, I’m afraid.”

Amanda tapped her mug absently. “Well, they can’t do it without you,” she replied confidently, though her narrowed look suggested this was a question.

Mary shrugged and smiled, crossing her legs languorously. “Well, remember, this isn’t our land,” she reminded her daughter. “All they really have to do is convince the Lenape leaders. And there’ll be a lot of support once this idea becomes public, support from both tribes.”

“What if you could make some sort of a rule,” Jason interrupted suddenly, “outlawing the
use
of the casino by the Manahata?”

Amanda and her mother looked at him, then exchanged a glance.

“That way,” Jason continued, “you could reap the financial benefits and the employment that a casino could bring, and avoid the—the
costs
to the community.”

Mary smiled, but shook her head. “It’s not worth the risk, not even in principle,” she replied. “We don’t need the money
that
badly.”

“But you just said poverty was the problem.”

“Poverty is
a
problem, yes, Jason,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t mean money’s the solution.”

“Well, I’m not sure what that means,” Jason responded, ignoring a disapproving look from Amanda. “I mean, this is a tried-and-true formula, here. Do you know how many cities in this country would kill for the opportunity to open a casino?” He paused momentarily, but continued, buoyed by his own momentum. “Think about it. You’d have a steady stream of profits to pay for whatever the tribe needs. Advisers, psychiatrists, lawyers. A new community center, if that’s what you want. Guaranteed college tuition for your grandchildren’s grandchildren. I mean, these things net hundreds of millions of dollars. No, I get what you’re saying,” he added, forestalling Mary’s objection with an upraised hand. “Money and power can corrupt, I gotcha. But surely you can’t be arguing that prosperity itself is bad.”

“No,” Mary acknowledged. “What I’m arguing against is a pathological reliance on money. I’m arguing that this rush to build a casino implies that we
need
help from the outside world if our tribe is to survive in any kind of meaningful way. It means accepting that our culture is not self-sufficient; it makes an unacceptable statement of dependency. It would be a highly symbolic end to the old ways, to everything that defines us.”

“You’re assuming your tribe won’t be able to handle the temptation of having a casino on the reservation because they gamble now,” said Jason. “But if they
owned
the casino, wouldn’t they be less inclined toward risk-taking? Rich people don’t gamble—poor people do.”

“Jason—” cautioned Amanda.

“I just think you should give people a little more credit,” he went on. “I’m sorry,” he said to Amanda contritely. “I’m sorry. Of course it’s none of my business.”

“Jason,” said Mary, with forced patience, “I appreciate your obviously heartfelt input. But you really have no right even to address the question. You’re not a part of this culture; you can’t possibly understand the situation.”

Now he felt challenged. “Well,” he replied, “there’s no need to pull rank on me. You and I may not share the same
history,
but we all live in the same culture, now. It’s called twentieth-century America. Money’s not evil, it’s just a medium.” Seeing Mary’s brow darkening, Jason realized he was going too far. “I’m not arguing you have to have a casino to survive,” he went on. “But just to say, ‘Oh, money is bad, we must never do anything that’s profitable,’ seems a little defeatist.”

“‘The same
culture
’?” Mary repeated, sarcastic and sputtering, no longer disguising her growing anger. “‘The same culture’?”

“Mom, hey,” Amanda tried to interject, but was ignored.

“It’s just infuriating!” said Mary, unexpectedly slamming her coffee mug onto the tabletop and rising to a terrible height. “You take that one-world MTV horseshit back where you came from!”

“Mom!” Amanda yelled, as Jason’s eyes widened in shock.

“We are a
conquered people,
” her mother practically shouted, leaning over Jason as if she indeed meant to devour him; he could not remember having ever been so terrified. “
My
ancestors were the children of the earth and sky,” she went on, in apoplectic rage. “
Your
ancestors systematically
butchered
us. Shot us and hacked us to pieces, man, woman, and child. Tore the heart out of our traditions, scattered us, herded us like cattle onto the most undesirable land you could stick us with and left us there to
die.
Now explain to me again how we live in the same culture.”