Dreaming on the Mounds

A Story

“Hays!”

The bars opened with a slam and the lock clicked loudly.

“HAYS!!” The officer shouted louder.

He jerked awake and rolled, nearly toppling off the top bunk.

“What?” he yelled back, still waking up from whatever dreams of food had been rolling through his head, as he tried to sleep away the days until his next court date.

“Fuck,” he muttered, lower that time, so as to not irritate Sullivan too much. The CO was already mad at him for breaking the phone yesterday when the phone number to his girlfriend never went through, no matter how many times he called.

"Someone here to see you.”

Maybe Trish decided to visit. Doubt it.

“Coming!” Robert rolled off the bunk and ran his boney fingers through his red hair. It was sticking straight up. Oh well. Hopefully it wasn’t the cops again, investigators asking him to give information on his codefendant. Maybe it was his mom.

**

It was.

“Yeah, I got arrested by that big mound, the Indian one,” he drawled. “Fucking Danny sold me out, man. The buyer was a cop.”

Robby always did like to drive and disappear into the Mississippi countryside. Even as a teenager, he never slowed down. I had tried my best to care for him when he landed on my doorstep, courtesy of the State of Mississippi, when my sister’s meth trips caught up with her and the courts said she was unfit to raise a child. He was eleven, then, sensitive, kind even, but with a complete inability to sit still more than five minutes at a time.

He started calling me mom at twelve and I never stopped him.

He had tried to run, but the cops had dogs, he said. He rolled up his pants and hiked his skinny white leg up on the desk, revealing several deep bite marks. “Ha, they enjoyed that,” he laughed shortly. “I put my hands up right away, but they let the dog go on a bit. Said they were gonna teach me a lesson.”

I winced, looking down at his puncture marks, squinting a little through the dirty plexiglass, as he swung his leg back down. Then his voice lowered a bit.

“Do you believe in supernatural shit?” he asked.

“I saw this dude watching me when I got arrested. Old dude. Looked a little like grandpa. I don’t know. Maybe it was just my imagination. But the dude was creepy, man. I keep having dreams about ‘em.

“Last night, he got in my face, real close, and told me all this was a mistake.”

I was only half listening. Robby’s stories were always the same. He was always running, and then usually got caught. I hated that he got hurt, but what could I do? Why couldn’t the kid get a job at Walmart and live with me? I worked at a local bar and the tips were ok, enough to keep my single wide in the park just out of town.

But I heard the word mistake. “What was a mistake?” I asked, wondering if he would finally say something about his own damn responsibility.

“Everything, I guess. This stupid life we lead—the money, the grind, the stupid jobs and stupid cars, spinning around, doing nothing, while the world burns. Maybe that we are even here in the first place.”

“Ya mean here in Mississippi or here on earth?”

He shrugged expressively. “I guess maybe the society we’re in is just fucked up.”

I sighed, looking down at my chipped red nail polish, knowing that I would never get anywhere with the kid. He meant well.

Back in the car, in my red Ford Ranger from 1995 that I spent so much time working on, I cranked up the new air conditioning unit I’d installed and glanced over at the seat. It was from work, a color flyer blurred by shitty printers ink, outlining a six-day trip to Ireland. I worked in an Irish pub and made minimum wage plus tips, but my boss liked to travel. He had invited four of us, the ones who had worked for him the longest, to go on a trip to Galway. I’d never left the continental US, hell, I’d never really left the south. And I’d never been on an airplane.

But my granny used to say we were Irish. Maybe I should go. God knows I’d never get the chance again. And my coworker, Mindy, was all into Celtic paganism and shit and had all these spiral tattoos up and down her arm. She was planning a road trip to some ancient site with a name I couldn’t pronounce not too far from where we would be staying. Shit, that could be cool.

I visited Robby once more before I left and I put a twenty on his books so he could buy some food. He usually gained weight in jail but he said the food had been horrid this time. Cutting costs, all that. Right before I left, he’d leaned in and said; “That grandpa dude came back to me in a dream. He said you’d find something out there.” I laughed.

It was nice to be away. Seventy degrees, partly sunny, Galway had been beautiful. We got a tour of the Cathedral, the grandest I’d ever seen.

Mindy and I drove out to her spot, called Rathcroghan, early morning of our third day there. I was a little hungover, I’m not gonna lie. She chattered non-stop the whole way there about all the research she’d done and about the Irish Queen Mauve (she’d said it was spelled Madb) and her bull and the Irish goddess the Morrigan and the latest she had learned from this website. I just enjoyed the countryside. It was so green. The roads were also the narrowest I had ever seen and Mindy screeched and swerved every twenty minutes when a tractor or a truck appeared ahead. I was glad I wasn’t drivin’.

I guess I fell asleep for the last bit, because Mindy elbowed me just as she was turning into this little gravel parking area surrounded by sheep and farmland. A few plaques were placed around the drive, but otherwise there was nothing. “What, this is it?” I asked, grumbling awake.

“Look at it!” Mindy said.

“What am I looking at?” I asked, looking up at what looked like a grassy hill full of sheep.

The plaques had pictures reconstructing what archaeologists thought this might have looked like a few thousand years ago, and a little story about Queen Madb. It was one of five royal sites of Ireland, it said. “Before the coming of Christianity, the Rathcroghan area was the religious, ceremonial and political focal point for the province…”

I had sturdy boots on, luckily, as Mindy and I trudged up the hill. It had looked a lot smaller from below. By the time we reached the top, I could indeed see over the whole region. There was only grass and sheep, but I got this funny feeling standing there. Suddenly, I remembered Robby’s cryptic story from jail and I felt like someone was watching me. Mindy was off doing some witchy shit, so I just stood there, looking around.

I never actually knew if I was Irish or not, that was something that a lot of people I knew just said. We had lived along the Mississippi for quite a few generations, I knew, although plenty of relatives had headed West over the years and I had cousins from Illinois to California. I’d never spent much time thinking about where we might be from—my granny’s family Bible was all the genealogy shit I knew about.

But for a moment, it felt like I was surrounded by a million people, whispering, surrounding me.

Weird. I sat down on the driest grass spot I could find and wondered.

**

It was a year later to the day that I drove up to another mound, this time in Mississippi. I drove for what seemed like forever, driving up MS-21 and following the signs to Nanih Waiya. I think that was where Robby was talking about that day I visited him. As I saw the mound, I pulled the truck over on the side of the road and sobbed uncontrollably.

Robby was dead. He’d been released on good behavior shortly after I came back from Ireland and of course missed his court date. When the cops had nabbed him again, he was naturally high. He’d died coming down off opiates on that godforsaken jail floor. At least that was my guess from the warden who called me.

Rage and grief nearly blinded me. I’d taken the last few days since I got the call, and I’d remembered that conversation Robby had with me in jail, about his strange dreams. And these Mounds. I’d remembered his serious freckled face, ravaged by hunger and drugs. I’d spent all last night texting his mom and the last boyfriend I remembered. They had talked about hitchhiking to Montana last she texted, but I had no idea where she was. The coroner said there was gonna be an autopsy, but they had to send the body to the city.

It was quiet. No one else was here, this Sunday morning, sunny and beautiful, not a cloud in the October sky.  I squinted up at the sign outside the gated mound. “Built by the prehistoric ancestors of the Choctaw, this site plays a central role in the tribe’s origin stories and is considered the heart of the Choctaw people.”

I felt a tingle not unlike the one I’d felt a year ago in Ireland, but this time I felt like I was trespassing. I stood there for a long while, lost in thought, Robby’s weird questions running through my head. I didn’t have a whole lot of time for deep thoughts, I’d worked my whole life and spent way too much of it chasing around the people that I loved, but who drove me mad most of the time. Now one of them was dead. And I knew that no one but me, and maybe his mama if she ever texted back, would really care all that much. The local newspaper already reported; “Drug dealer dies in jail.” Maybe the world we had here was really fucked up.

Finally, I grabbed my keys and hopped back across the road and into the truck. Fuck, it was musty in here. I glanced over to the side, where a few trees stood and started. He did look a little like grandpa. He looked at me closely. “Robby was right, you know,” he said.