Mapping the Interior

Junior, a twelve-year-old Native American boy who lives off the reservation with his mother and younger brother Dino, is a chronic sleepwalker. One night at 2:49 a.m., standing barefoot by the living room window, he catches a figure crossing from the kitchen toward the hall. He recognizes it by silhouette: spikes from the lower back, bulging calves, a top-heavy undulating head. It is a fancy dancer, a competitive pow-wow performer in full regalia of feathers, beadwork, and bustles. The figure is his father, who died when Junior was four, either by accidental drowning or by being drowned. Junior's aunts told him their father was obsessed with watching dancers as a boy and could have been the best of them all. In death, he has become what he never managed in life. The emotion in Junior's chest is not fear but hope.

The family rents a modular home set on cinderblock pylons with a crawl space beneath. Junior's mother works shifts. Dino, a third-grader, has developmental delays and growing difficulty with numbers and letters. Junior scours the house for proof of his father's visit and finds nothing. Over dinner, he asks his mother about his father, collecting small stories.

Hoping for a second sighting, Junior stations himself at the window the next night. Drawing on a schoolyard belief called "deadfooting," which holds that walking on numb feet lets a person step into another world, he ties a jump rope around his thighs to cut off circulation. Something brushes his bare back, but nothing is there when he turns. Later, he finds Dino seizing in bed. After the episode, Junior's bare foot kicks a small object across the dark kitchen; it drops through a floor vent. A bead. To him, it is proof.

The seizures worsen. Junior's mother realizes he used a superhero action figure as Dino's bite guard during a previous episode, and the toy's boot is missing. An x-ray confirms Dino swallowed it. That night, Junior drops the one-footed figure down the same vent as an offering.

Over the next week, Junior digs in the front yard, theorizing his father's old truck might be buried there as a ghostly anchor. Instead he unearths a tetherball pole. When he looks back at the house, the curtain is settling into place, though his mother is at work. He sprints inside to find Dino seizing and holds his brother until the shaking stops. That evening their mother comes home to find the boys playing with the rigged-up pole, and for the first time Junior feels happy where they are.

The feeling does not last. Junior tells his mother he has seen their father dressed as a fancy dancer. She responds with gentle skepticism, then tells him for the first time that he looks like his father. Recalling the crawl space, Junior pries open a section of the corrugated metal skirt around the house's base and whispers into the darkness. A voice answers: "Look." One of the neighbor's dogs charges, and Junior kicks through the skirt into the crawl space.

Trapped with four dogs clawing outside, he crawls to the farthest corner and finds a burst-open chrysalis, a nest of compacted trash and saliva large enough for three of him. He theorizes his father's spirit entered a dying animal under the house, then accumulated more creatures into a body. Inside the nest lies Dino's superhero action figure, whole again, its boot restored.

Heavy footsteps cross the floor above. The front door opens and shuts. The dogs begin squealing. Junior panics, strikes his head on a pipe, and blacks out. He wakes to his mother holding him. The dogs lie destroyed, each blindfolded with strips of black fabric. The official theory is that Junior, sleepwalking, killed them. He knows it was his father.

A sheriff's deputy begins driving the boys to school and starts a quiet relationship with Junior's mother. Junior notices a dark, rough mark behind Dino's ear, too deep for schoolyard bullying. Angry and confused, Junior pushes his mother's cigarette butts through the house skirt as offerings to his father and charts Dino's seizures in his notebook. One night, sitting in the deputy's unlocked truck, he finds a concealed revolver in the glove compartment.

Carrying the gun inside, Junior sees his father leaning over the sleeping Dino, wet-dark eyes shining with animal intensity, smoke curling from his lips as residue from the offerings. The truth strikes: His father is not healing Dino but feeding on him. The mark behind Dino's ear is a spigot. The seizures and developmental regression correspond to his father's growing solidity.

Junior paints the wound with liquid from cinnamon toothpicks rumored to contain mace. On his thirteenth birthday, he confronts his father, who is now solid enough to creak on the floorboards. His father enters Dino's room and reels out, burning from the cinnamon. Junior shoves him through the back door, but the figure rises and advances. In the kitchen struggle, Junior's hand finds the superhero and plunges it into the dishwater.

The water becomes lake water. Junior finds himself in the body of a grown man, also named Junior, standing in the shallows of the reservation lake years in the past. This man loaned his truck to Junior's father, who returned it with the engine destroyed. Junior's father sits by a dying campfire, young and recognizable. The inhabited man beats him, pushes him into the shallows, and holds his face under until the body goes still. Quills, feathers, and beads float up as the regalia dissolves.

Junior snaps back to the kitchen. His father lies facedown in the dirt outside. Dino appears and counts to four, pointing at shapes beyond the body: the four neighbor dogs, returned from death with mismatched limbs. They tear into the father, peeling away regalia that is not ornament but flesh, and drag the remains into the night.

Inside, Junior fires the revolver five times into the darkness. He has killed not his father but the neighbor, who returned with a shotgun as promised. The deputy, in the house with Junior's mother, beats Junior until she pulls him off. By morning the neighbor's body is gone; drag marks lead to the crawl space. The deputy files no report, since the weapon was his own concealed gun.

Junior's mother gathers both boys and tells them they are the most amazing things she has ever seen, that despite everyone warning her about their father, they were worth it. Years pass. She dies at 63, worn down by isolation from her reservation community. Dino, his losses never reversed, lives in a care facility. Junior, who acquired fancydance regalia in high school, travels the pow-wow circuit. The first time he wore it, he felt lake water rising in his throat, but he learned to dance it away. A son he accidentally fathered at a pow-wow, Collin, grows into the image of his grandfather and dies when his car rolls into tall grass.

Junior checks Dino out of the facility and drives to the old property, where the house burned down but the tetherball pole still stands. He brings roadkill for body mass and four cats in traps, four being what Junior calls "the Indian number," to serve as hosts a spirit can enter. He has reopened the wound behind Dino's ear with a razor; Dino turned his head without being asked, as if he already knew. His plan requires Dino to choose the original superhero from among four action figures, bite off its foot, and swallow it, replicating the cycle. Junior will dance in regalia, his moccasined feet waking whatever sleeps below. For Collin to become solid, he will need what Junior's father needed, what is already seeping down Dino's neck. When he was twelve, Junior mapped the interior of their home. Now he maps the interior of the human heart, finding more dark hallways than he knew and rooms he never thought he would have to enter. For Collin, he will walk in, pull the door shut, and never come back out.