Summary
At the local Indian bar, Maggie has a beer with her sister and friends, and she announces that this is her last term as chief. The other women are mildly saddened—it’s nice to have a woman in charge—but they’re mostly interested in talking about how hot John is. John appears as if summoned, and he asks Maggie to have a picnic with him tomorrow evening. Maggie says yes, but she worries about Virgil—she sensed some tension between him and John, although that’s normal with a new man, she supposes.
Maggie has a third beer after John leaves (this much drinking is rare for her). She and the other women are infatuated by John, though Maggie notices that his eyes are hazel now, and she could have sworn they were green before.
Virgil paddles two hours to his Uncle Wayne’s island, where he sees Wayne for the first time in months. He is 32, wiry, strong, but relatively average looking. Wayne is annoyed that the boy and everyone else seems to be afraid of him. Virgil learns that his uncle is a martial artist, though Wayne is reluctant to elaborate on that, saying he is “training.”
Virgil tells Wayne about John—the dancing, the animal calls, the multiple names—but Wayne isn’t very impressed, telling him it’s normal for a boy to not like it when his mother is dating. However, he’s swayed by two pieces of information: John made out with Lillian, and the petroglyphs John carved show the man and the woman going West, toward the setting sun. Wayne agrees to return to town with Virgil, and he tells him that tikwamshin basically translates to “bite me.”
Maggie drives to Sam Aandeg’s place for her picnic with John, and she finds that he’s been carving phone poles into totem poles and making an inukshuk out of Sam’s beer cases. Sam himself is weird to Maggie, but when she mentions Lillian, he gives her a piece of toast with jam on it. They ride John’s motorcycle to the lake, where he serves her wine, moose chili, Greek salad, and buns.
One of the first things they talk about is the land, which Maggie admits she wishes would stay in its natural state rather than be turned into anything else. She is surprised when John agrees and says it is better that it is not a theme park or a casino; how does he know these proposals? He tells her people in the community talk.
Maggie learns more about Sam, which John had learned from the man himself. What sounded like gibberish Anishnawbe was mostly about Shakespeare and was uttered in iambic pentameter. John learned he went to residential school and there was a man named cruel Father McKenzie who loved Shakespeare and taught it to the boys. Sam was beaten often for not speaking English, but he refused to give in. John insinuates Sam was probably sexually abused as well. This way of speaking is thus Sam’s way of resistance, and John admires him for the “self-discipline and intelligence that it would take to do this day after day” (172).
An hour and 75% of a bottle of wine later, Maggie is feeling good. She asks John what he’s learned in his travels, and he talks about boobs and his appreciation of their uniqueness. His eyes seem to change color randomly. He tells her that Lillian used to skinny dip in this lake, when she was a young girl, and asks Maggie if she’d like to skinny dip now, too; she kisses him. From across the lake, Dakota watches John and Maggie “kissing and doing stuff” (185) through her binoculars.
Wayne and Virgil go to Lillian’s tombstone so Wayne can say goodbye to her. They then go to Maggie’s, and she’s not home, even though it’s 10:30 p.m. Virgil leaves her a note, and they go on to Sam Aandeg’s house, where Sam and Wayne yell at each other in Anishnawbe—apparently, John gave his name as John Matus, but Sam has decided to call him Caliban.
They begin walking back toward Beer Lake to see if Maggie and Sam are there, but they hear a motorcycle approaching; they hide in the bushes, and then hide again when Maggie drives by alone, and then again when John passes alone on his motorcycle. Wayne is extremely unimpressed by this adventure, saying he now remembers why he lives alone. He does, however, enjoy seeing two raccoons standing in the middle of the road.
John had a good night; he’d missed the touch of a woman. He rides to Beer Lake, where he stands on the dock and waits for the moon. After midnight, Wayne and Virgil finally arrive at the lake and see John standing alone—they also see him have a lengthy, curse-filled argument with over a dozen raccoons. Virgil wants to stay, but Wayne makes him leave.
They go to a secluded hangout spot, where Wayne tells Virgil in a near state of shock that he believes this is Nanabush, the Trickster. His mother had always talked about him like he really existed, and it seems like he does. Virgil is not convinced at first and protests that those were only stories, and this is a white man. Wayne explains Tricksters can change their shapes and they love irony. They need to be careful, since Tricksters are very dangerous. Maggie is in danger and other people might be as well.
Virgil reminds Wayne of the petroglyph that shows him going West with a woman—maybe Lillian, maybe Maggie—and West represents the afterlife. Wayne and Virgil decide they have to convince John/Nanabush to move on from Otter Lake before doing any damage.
In her bed, Maggie giggles as she remembers having sex with John, unaware there’s a raccoon watching from her window. Across the lake, Dakota falls asleep on her binoculars on the dock, and she doesn’t notice the sound of the motorcycle pulling up to observe her.
Maggie wakes up tingly and with a bit of a hangover, and she’s shocked to find her brother has spent the night on her couch. Wayne tries to tell her his suspicions about John, but she becomes incensed, sending Virgil to school and literally shoving Wayne out of her house. She cannot believe Wayne thinks John is Nanabush, a “charming and inventive character from Ojibway mythology. A symbol. A teaching tool” (214).
At school, Virgil speaks to Dakota, who says John came up to her while she was sleeping last night. Virgil is worried John did something terrible, but Dakota explains that they just talked and he told her all about constellations. She is clearly even more infatuated with John now than she was before, saying she’s jealous of his mom for getting to date someone so amazing.
Virgil is called to Ms. Weatherford’s office, and he knows there’s still plenty of time for his day to get even worse.
Analysis
In this section we meet Wayne, Maggie’s brother and Virgil’s uncle, and learn more about the nature of the Trickster as John further ingratiates himself into Maggie’s life. Wayne is a fascinating character. He is Lillian’s favorite son, everyone knows, but does not come by in Lillian’s last days because he does not want to see his mother dying like that. His siblings have strong opinions on him, becoming peeved when he does not show up to the funeral reception either. Maggie reflects that Wayne has always done his own thing; he is an “isolationist and contemporary Native—mystic, for lack of a better term—[who] led a strange and separate life and there were always rumors about what he did over on his island” (70).
When Virgil decides he needs help with John, he thinks of Wayne because he knew he’d need “another strange guy with unusual talents” and it would have to be Wayne. That thought “made him pull the blankets in closer” (131). When Virgil arrives at the island his trepidation about interacting with his “strange” uncle seems to be warranted. Wayne is up in the trees when Virgil arrives, and though he mostly looks normal, he “was muscular in a wiry kind of way. His body said there was more to being dangerous than sheer physical strength. To his nephew, Wayne’s hands looked oddly calloused” (149). He speaks Anishnawbe better than almost anyone. He claims to be a martial artist, that he is “training.” He surprises Virgil with snapping his hand and cracking a branch off a tree without seemingly any effort at all.
But Wayne isn’t really weird and mystical and misunderstood; in fact, he seems to take umbrage at the fact that everyone has decided he is this way. He protests almost petulantly to Virgil that everyone is afraid of him even though he is a nice guy. He explains, “for some reason, everyone seems afraid of me—even my own family. It’s ‘cause I live here alone, isn’t it? Can’t a guy get some privacy without being branded a weirdo? Geez! It’s high school all over again” (150). He also makes comments to Maggie about his childhood that give nuance to the family dynamic, making us see the saintly Maggie as more human and elevating the strange Wayne in our estimation: “Are you kidding? You used to beat me up. All the time. I still have nightmares of you coming into my room with a bucket of cold water. Of hip-checking me into the lake. Of kicking me in the shins, all the time. Taking my boots away from school, in winter! You were a vicious, mean sister!” (213). Maggie’s response is that her brother was always the favorite and that’s why she and the others got easily mad at him, but that it was childhood and everyone was like that. She tells him that was then and this is now, and now she is angry at his comments about John. She throws him out, which upsets him since he was just trying to help, but Wayne’s fear, love, and respect for his sister remains intact and he leaves. It is clear that this is a family where members love deeply, fight intensely, and forgive sincerely.
As for John, now that it’s clear who he is, the Nanabush characteristics make themselves even more conspicuous. Taylor comments on this fact in a piece he wrote about the novel and imposters: “In the novel, John claims many things, some of them true. His very name is a good example of his state of mind. At first he claims to be John Tanner, then John Richardson, and by the end of the story, he’s gone through half a dozen other surnames, all picked with impish reasoning… Add to that that he has the appearance of a stunningly attractive White man, with long blond hair and a chiseled body. As John says, 'new times, new faces.' All through the novel he gives segments of his false history. The Trickster is back.”
Critics also have important insights into John. Caroline Rosenthal writes about imposters, explaining that their “heightened sense of identity and reality, i.e., how they view themselves and the world around them, is linked to tension between the opposing psychic forces of their extreme narcissism and their need for others… These narcissistic inclinations can include but are not limited to: a need for excessive admiration, the exploitation of others to satisfy their own needs, a strong sense of entitlement expressed in the need for instant success and gratification, and an inflated sense of their own importance, i.e., a high ego ideal.” And Daniel Heath Justice explains that beings like Nanabush “disrupt complacency and order. Often driven by excessive appetites for food, sex, and praise, they break down the established social order, but in doing so also disrupt inequitable power relations, frozen ideologies, and unhealthy traditions. But they remain curious about the People—all peoples, not just the human ones—and recognize the kinship bonds that connect them. They always leave for another adventure, but kinship and community is often what brings them back, and Otter Lake is no exception.”
