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AVAJO CLERKS AT THE Circle Ks wouldn’t look Danny’s way if he took a couple of hot dogs from the rotisserie. They’d let him take big pretzels too, even the ones dripping with cheese and jalapeno peppers. He could have all the fountain drinks he wanted and flavored coffees with names like French Vanilla, Mocha Latte, and Pumpkin Spice Cappuccino—white man names. He could probably take cigarettes if he wanted them, but he didn’t like the way they smelled, and he couldn’t sell them because no Indian on the Big Rez would buy smokes from a boy who might be a witch—not even Marlboros. Danny liked to pace himself, steal from different convenience stores so his invisibility didn’t wear thin, but the Rez was pretty big, and Circle Ks were kind of far apart. He didn’t have a car, so some of the clerks got so they could see him pretty well. He brought his own big green plastic sack borrowed from the trashcan outside his mother’s Airstream Trailer. Twenty-gallon size, lots of room for chips. The big Fluffy Cheetos were his favorite, but he liked Fritos and Doritos too, especially the ones that tasted like BBQ sauce. He took cans of Starkist
tuna, two-liter bottles of Mountain Dew, and tins of Vienna sausages for Queenie. Who’d have thought a gray Timber Wolf would like Vienna sausages? Danny watched the clerks ignore him as he loaded up his grocery sack. They weren’t talking about witches now, but they would as soon as he was gone. Danny knew, because sometimes he’d hide and listen. That’s how he found out he was a witch. The locals figured it all out after Nathan Balance disappeared. “He didn’t want that boy around no more,” is how the conversations always started. Then nobody saw Nathan anymore. Nobody saw his truck either, but lots of people saw wolf tracks, and lots of people saw Danny Riley roaming the desert after the sun had set. Dark spirits looked for company. That’s how a twelve-year-old Laguna Pueblo boy becomes a witch on the Navajo Reservation. His mother’s no-good diabetic boyfriend chased him into the desert without thinking about his insulin and then couldn’t find a way back home. Put that together with Queenie and you’ve got
