Allison had been waiting for Deer Woman to avenge her for more than a year now, and on the day she realized Deer Woman never would, Allison cut her hair.
She cut her hair in the handicap stall at work with lime green scissors taken from the kid’s craft table. The cutting was slow going, the blades dull. As she cut, she wondered what it was about her that made her unworthy of Deer Woman’s protection. She wondered if it was the former Catholicism, if Deer Woman felt Allison had betrayed her culture by being born into a Catholic family. She wondered if it was because she was a mixed-blood—like a horse with a tainted pedigree. The way her hair curled and the red sheen of it and the lightness of her skin made her undeserving. Did Deer Woman subscribe to blood quantum? Require documentation proving victims’ cultural identity before Deer Woman would avenge them? None of the oral stories mentioned a business side to Deer Woman’s actions, but those stories were from the before. Before white men. Before broken treaties and relocation. Before Natives were comparable to horses and dogs in the government’s eyes. Who knew what Deer Woman’s political leanings had become. Maybe she worn a business suit now, sat in a corner office at a strip mall, kicked her hooves up onto her desk, and hired out for the revenges she considered worthy of her time, paid her workers under the table so she didn’t have to deal with taxes.
Or maybe Deer Woman had become a Catholic herself and believed in the teachings: the female body was evil, a gateway to sin. Maybe Deer Woman didn’t do vengeance anymore, believed that women had it coming, should cover up if they wanted to be treated well. Maybe Deer Woman was in the cardigan business now, trying to make enough ugly, baggy clothes that women wouldn’t have to be such a temptation to men.
—
Allison had been taught to hate her body, and unlike Calculus or Geography, it was something she had been unable to forget. She was a recovering Catholic, a disease of colonization. Years of attempts to scrub away the remnants of it were unsuccessful—she could still recite the Apostle’s Creed, still knew when to say, “And with your spirit,” and still knew that women were the root of the world’s problems.
Her attempts at forgetting weren’t helped by her parents’ house. Whenever she visited, there was white Jesus in every room, sitting on his cross and judging her. At times, she swore he held out pieces of candy, trying to lure her back to Christianity like a man with a white van.
She was twenty-six years old and was counting down the days until her body wouldn’t look like this anymore. She wanted the sagging, the wrinkles, the grey hairs. She wanted the sun damage and the humped back and the dentures and the hair loss and the lipstick that was on every part of her except her lips. She wanted to be something that no one would ever lust after.
She worked in the tribal offices, despite not being enrolled—an unspoken job requirement. Her auntie had pulled some strings and gotten her the job three years prior. She worked in the Indian Child Welfare Office, just as the secretary. She wouldn’t have been good in any other role—wouldn’t know how to comfort children coming from bad situations: neglect, alcoholism, sexual assault, domestic violence, suicide. She didn’t even like it when those children came into the office and looked with their big brown eyes at her sitting behind her desk answering phones and filing paperwork. Somehow there was still innocence in those eyes, still hope. It made her sick to think how the world would break them.
Still, she kept the job, because she knew that office was a safe space, one place on the rez that she would never see him, because what reason did he, a white man, have for being in the tribal offices?
She didn’t know how he managed to be everywhere—grocery store, library, bar, casino, bingo hall, woods—but he was. Anytime she left her apartment for anything other than work she would see him, and he would always smile and wave at her, like they were old friends which, she supposed, they once had been. But any sense of that was gone now.
—
Allison studied the split ends of the section she had just finished cutting. The kids craft scissors were not made for haircuts, caused damage even as she tried to cut the damage out of her hair. She took a single strand of hair between her thumb and index finger and used her long nail to separate them further, watched the split travel so far up that the strand looked like two strands, not one.
Her cellphone buzzed in her back pocket. She let the strand fall from her fingers and settle back among the rest of her hair. Scissors still in hand, she pulled out her phone and looked at the screen. Another text from her mother. Did we do something wrong, indaanis? it read.
The message sat right above another unopened text from a different number, from a different person, the text that had sent her into the bathroom to cut off her hair in the first place: haven’t seen you in a while. all good? would love to get together and catch up. ill be in my usual spot today if youre free
The first text he had sent her in over a year. The words as if nothing had happened.
She shoved the phone back into her pocket.
The next snip of the scissors was jagged, several inches shorter than the rest of the hair that she cut to her chin. She peered at it, sitting near the tops of her cheekbones. She couldn’t even turn it into bangs, because it sat in the middle of her head. She could have cut layers or cut the rest of the hair to be the same length as it, but she didn’t. There was no point. She moved onto the next section.
—
Allison didn’t visit her parents anymore, hadn’t seen them in almost three months. She used to go to her parents’ home on the other side of the reservation at least once every two weeks and would see them more often than that at relatives’ homes or at tribal functions. Allison didn’t go to any of that anymore, left her home only for work and for groceries, if that.
And when her mother stopped by her apartment, banged on the door and yelled for Allison to let her in, Allison would go to her closet, shut the door and lay in darkness until she heard her mother’s Corolla with the bad muffler drive away.
She wondered when her mother would stop calling, stop sending her text messages, stop showing up at her apartment and demanding through the locked door what was wrong. She didn’t blame her parents. She had not told them or anyone else. But still, walking into their home and seeing him there, sitting at the blue plastic kitchen table, having coffee with her father had been too much. The way he had greeted her and welcomed her home and asked her how her job was going had been too much. And she hadn’t been able to go back, hadn’t been able to talk to either of her parents since and explain why.
Allison wondered what her mother would think of the haircut she was attempting. She wondered what would upset her mother more: the cutting of her hair or the place she cut her hair. The bathrooms hadn’t been cleaned in over a month, since the janitorial staff went on strike. Allison cut her hair over the toilet and the rim of black inside it. The severed chunks of hair fell into that toilet. Her plans were to flush them down so she would never have to see them again. She knew her mother would be mad about that, because even though she was a Catholic, she still believed in their tribal traditions and teachings. Allison’s mother would not want Allison to cut her hair to begin with, because hair was sacred and meant to be kept long, but if Allison had to cut it, it should be done at ceremony, and the hair should be burned, not flushed, because the burning sent the hair to the afterlife. But Allison didn’t want to be reunited with that hair. She never wanted to see it again. And that’s why she cut it in the bathroom of her office over the toilet with the black rim so she wouldn’t second guess herself and burn it after all.
◆
Allison had kept what had happened a secret, because she thought it was her body’s fault. Her body had been getting her in trouble since she was eight and a half, when she started puberty much too early. She remembered the teachers in her Catholic school looking at the apple size bumps under her shirt with disdain. They started treating her different after that, like she was a naughty child, even though she had once been their favorite.
Her body developed to a point none of her other classmates’ bodies ever would—all of them blessed with the more typical, square shape of pre-motherhood Native women. Allison had grown large on top and round on bottom with barely anything in between for a waist. In another life, in another place, she could have been a model or an actress or a musician with that body. Instead, she had been nothing more than a temptation and a sin waiting to happen.
She had liked her body once, in her early twenties when there was enough distance from Catholic school that she could see her own beauty. She had been proud of her hourglass shape, wore shirts that showed her cleavage and her tiny waist. Vanity. Another sin she was guilty of. Her Catholic, white father had warned her against it, said she was asking for trouble. Her Catholic, Anishinaabe mother had said nothing, just shook her head in disappointment. Still, Allison had worn those clothes, because she felt as if she were reclaiming her body, reclaiming herself. Stealing something back from colonization.
What a foolish thing to think.
◆
The door of the women’s bathroom banged open and then shut. The sudden noise made Allison jump. Her fingers snapped closed, cutting through a section of hair. She watched the hair fall to the stained tiles instead of into the toilet.
The penny loafers of her boss stood directly outside the handicap stall. Allison hated penny loafers, had been forced to wear them as part of her school uniform when she was a child. She didn’t understand why any Native would choose to wear them to an office that allowed moccasins.
“Allison, we need you back in the office. The phone lines are going crazy.”
Allison sat down on the yellowing toilet seat, pants still on. She clutched the scissors to her chest and tried not to think about how she could feel her pants sticking to the seat.
“I’m not feeling well,” Allison said. “IBS.”
She saw the penny loafers shift side to side, knew her boss was trying to figure out if she should call Allison on her lie or let it go. Allison looked down into the toilet bowl, at her hair floating in the water, nearly touching the black rim. She heard her boss sigh.
“Come back as soon as you can,” her boss said. “Performance reviews are coming up, Allison, and I’ll be completely honest with you. This has been a rough year for you. I need you to recommit to this job, so I have something good to say. Understand?”
Her boss waited for her to respond, for her to apologize for being late, for missing shifts without calling in sick, for disappearing for hours when she did bother to show up. But Allison said nothing, just pushed the hair on the ground around with the toe of her brown moccasin.
The penny loafers retreated, the bathroom door opened and shut, and Allison stood up, collected the fallen hair sticky from the floor, tossed it into the toilet, and began to cut again.
◆
Deer Woman had many jobs in the before. In Anishinaabe oral traditions, Deer Woman had a role in fertility and love, helped women to conceive, to carry on their family lines. But most people, Allison included, remembered Deer Woman for the murders. She was said to be a beautiful woman, human on top and deer on bottom, but her victims were always too taken by the upper half to notice the bottom. When do men ever notice anything below the chest?
Deer Woman could convince bad men of anything, so the stories go. Follow me into the woods, she’d say, so we can have alone time and you can teach me things. And bad men will always follow because bad men don’t care about girlfriends or wives or family obligations or anything. Bad men want only one thing.
And those bad men never make it out of the woods.
Deer Woman had her own bad man from her before, when she had been just a woman, like Allison. And unlike in Deer Woman’s after, the bad man made it out of the woods, and Deer Woman did not. But Gichimanidoo and the other manidoog had given her another life, as part woman part deer.
Allison wondered why the manidoog had done that. Wondered why that woman, in that time, after that bad man. As she struggled to hack her way through a large section of her hair, she wondered what made Deer Woman special, and she wondered why all women couldn’t be given the tools for revenge instead of waiting on one woman who didn’t even seem to have time for them, had given up on them.
Allison knew the stories also taught men how to avoid death by Deer Woman. Look at her feet before she lures you away, know what she is before she tramples you to death as punishment for your sins—it always comes back to sins. Good men can survive with those teachings, but bad men never remember them until it’s too late.
◆
The man was her parents’ friend, even though he was a decade and a half younger than them. He had watched her grow up, watched her transformation from girl to woman. She wondered when he had started looking at her in that way, when she had become an enticement and not just the child that called him Uncle even though they weren’t related.
He was a handsome man of German descent. He was popular on the rez, charmed everyone with his smile and booming laughter. That certain glow of happiness in his blue eyes was what had captured Allison’s attention.
When she had been fourteen, she had had reoccurring sexual fantasies of him. Imagined him sneaking into her room, kissing her, touching her with his fingers calloused from working construction, telling her he loved her, and taking her on her twin bed that shared a wall with her parents’ bedroom. She hadn’t been able to look him in the eye for that entire year. Still, she had found excuses to touch him: hand on his arm as she refilled his coffee, a lingering kiss on his cheek in greeting, a casual brushing of her breasts against his side as she reached around him to grab something. This had gone on until a boy her own age became the object of her fantasies. She wondered now what she would have seen had she looked into his eyes. Would she have seen a spark of interest ignite? Would his gaze have lingered a moment too long on her unbuttoned school polo that exposed just the tops of her breasts? She wondered now if he had pictured something similar to her imaginings, masturbated to the image of her fourteen-year-old self sprawled naked on her purple and pink bedspread.
Maybe her fantasies were why it happened. A punishment for her own lust. The Catholic god giving her a version of what she had imagined. Catholic gods are always looking to punish.
◆
Allison remembered his hands, the way they had touched every inch of her without a second thought—as if she were an animal in a petting zoo, no need for anymore permission than the price of admissions. It had happened against the side of his truck in the dark of a country road. She had blown a tire on her way back from the city. She had been wearing a tight black dress and heels, because she had just come from a friend’s art show opening, and she wanted to look nice so maybe she could go home with him. But the friend had only given her a hug and thanked her for coming and paid her no more attention than that. So, she had driven back to her little apartment on the rez in the dark of a moonless summer night, wondering what it was about her that made her unappealing. Was she not skinny enough for him? Or was it her large face or the color of her hair? Maybe he found her Indigenous nose unappealing and didn’t want to have to look at it longer than necessary.
Allison had been so consumed with trying to figure out what was the matter with her that she hadn’t even seen the branch in her car’s path. She drove over it, and her back right tire popped.
The man came across her trying to remove the tire and replace it, but she didn’t have a jack or a tire iron, so it was a lost battle. She had been crying too. The weight of rejection mixed with the frustration of the tire, and she couldn’t stop herself. When the blue truck pulled over to the side of the road behind her, Allison was happy for the darkness, because she didn’t want anyone to see the tears on her face.
“Everything alright here?” the man called.
Allison felt her body relax, the tension from her shoulders faded at the familiar voice. She stood up and waved at him. “Uncle!” she said. “It’s me, Allison.”
She heard his truck door close, and he walked over to her, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops like a cowboy out of an old western. “What seems to be the trouble?” he asked.
She motioned to the tire. “Busted tire, I think. Can you help?”
When she looked back at him, he was staring at her instead of looking at the tire. He smiled. “That’s quite a dress,” he said. “Coming from somewhere special?”
She told him about the art show but didn’t tell him about the boy or anything else.
“Next time you’re going into the city, just let me know,” he said. “I can drive you there and back, always going that way for work anyways.”
He took a look at the destroyed tire after that, said he would replace it for her. He just needed to grab his tools and his flashlight. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her middle, goosebumps prickled across her skin. He put an arm around her shoulders, leading her back towards his truck. He rubbed a hand up and down her arm and said, “Come on, I got a coat you can put on.”
She leaned into him, into the comforting warmth of familiarity. She heard his breathing increase. At the side of his truck, she started to pull herself out of his grip, saying she would help and grab his tools from the bed of his truck. Instead, he used the length of her hair to pull her back to him, and he had helped himself to her. His fingers buried deep in the roots. She had stared up at the sky, looking for at least the comfort of the moon, a sacred thing. But there was no moon that night, only stars. And maybe she was happy about that. She wasn’t sure if she would have been able to look at grandmother moon, Nookomis, the same if the moon had born witness to the way Allison’s body had been used.
When the man was done, he kissed the top her head and whispered into her hair, “Good girl, good girl.”
Then he changed her tire, helped her into her car, and told her to drive safe.
He drove off first towards town, and then she followed behind because she didn’t know what else to do. She knew the police were no help for Indigenous girls, especially when it came to white men. She thought about calling her parents and telling them what had happened. Then she thought about what her father would say if he saw her in that dress. She thought about how he would tell her she shouldn’t wear things like that, that it was no wonder it had happened. She thought about how her mother would say nothing, just stand there in silent agreement with her husband as he berated Allison.
As she drove, she pictured crashing into the man, ruining that truck so completely that it would catch fire and his body would burn to a point beyond recognition. But she didn’t, drove as normal, because she knew she would do more damage to herself and her car than to him and she didn’t want to die smelling of him. So she did nothing but follow his truck back to town and gone into her little apartment and taken a shower to wash away the traces of his fingertips, but she could still feel his hands buried in her hair.
After that shower, Allison had stared into the fogged-up mirror in her bathroom, looking into the eyes of the woman she now was. She hated the thing that looked back at her, but she took a small bit of comfort knowing Deer Woman would come for him, knowing Deer Woman would kill him for her.
But Deer Woman never came, and he walked around town with a smile on his face and with a wave for everyone.
She grabbed another section of her hair, lined up the scissors and began to snip, birthing more split ends. Allison wondered if Deer Woman let him live because he had committed no crimes. If the curves of her breasts, if the way her hips thrust out of her body were the true problem. If Allison and her body had been the real culprits, making him stray from the good path and whoever was his god. There was no forgiving an evil body.
◆
As she started cutting the last section of her hair, she wondered how her body could be evil, but the hair that grew out of it could be sacred.
The lime green scissors cut through the last strand, and she watched it fall into the water. She sat with the lightness of her head for a moment, staring at her hair in the black rimmed toilet bowl. So much red. It looked almost like the bowl was filled with blood, not hair.
Then she flushed, intending to watch her red hair disappear into its depth. Intending to be rid of it forever. But the toilet only sucked down a small section before it clogged, before her hair swirled in the rising water, threatening to overflow. Even this couldn’t go right.
She slammed the door of the handicap stall and washed her hands at the bathroom sink and stared at her reflection, even as she heard the rising water of the toilet. It was still her staring out. No manidoog had come and changed her into something else with the shedding of her hair. She was still Allison, just Allison with an uneven haircut and a cardigan that did little to hide the truth of her body’s crimes.
Her phone buzzed again from her back pocket. She didn’t take it out to look at it this time, just continued to gaze at her reflection trying to find some semblance of difference in her. Her phone buzzed again. Nothing. No difference.
She exited the bathroom, scissors in hand, but instead of going back to her office, she left the building through the emergency exit—the one with the broken alarm—and she walked into the woods that existed behind the tribal offices. As she walked, she listened closely for a beautiful voice to call her name. Follow me, it would say. I have something I want to show you. And Allison would follow that voice and make sure not to look at the feet, and she wouldn’t pray to any god, wouldn’t burn any tobacco, because she did not want salvation.
She found him an hour into her walk. She had never tried to find this part of the woods from the tribal headquarters before, but she had visited her father and uncle’s hunting and sugar bushing spot enough times to know the general direction to walk. He was bent over, setting up illegal rabbit snares, and he was alone. He hadn’t noticed her. She thought about going back the way she had come, of leaving it alone, of letting things go, because it had been her body that had made him do it. She thought maybe it was better this way. Better that she learned this lesson from a man who wouldn’t kill her afterwards.
Then she thought about how he had carried her on his shoulders when she was three. She thought about the games of Candyland they had played together. She thought about how she had leaned into his warmth that night, because she had trusted him. And she thought of the twenty-six years of hair sitting in that clogged toilet and how he had kissed her forehead when he was done and how she could still feel his fingernails digging into her scalp.
Her fingers clenched tight around the scissors she carried, and she said, “I’ve been looking for you.”
The man looked over. They stared at each other for several moments before he said, “Allison, my god. I didn’t recognize you for a second. What happened to your hair?”
She didn’t answer him. She hid her hand with the scissors behind her back and crooked the index finger of the other hand, motioning him towards her. “Come this way with me so we can be alone. And you can show me more things.”
He smiled, and he didn’t hesitate. He abandoned his snares, let her lead him into the woods, and never once looked at her feet.