“Are those Native American teeth?” I ask, again feeling dumb.

 

“I think they’re mine,” she says, rotating the jar. For a moment, I think she might put them back in her mouth. “It’s so creepy,” she says.   

 

I stand above her and scratch my fingers across her shoulder blade to her spine. I mean for it to be comforting, but instead it feels vaguely anthropological.

 

“Hoona sattande,” she says. We take turns finishing the wine, say goodbye to Jericho, go.

 

It feels unnatural to simply walk away from a burglary, so we run instead. I’ve got her purse. She handles the jar. Arrowheads click against arrowheads, teeth against teeth. The cornfield still smells like honeysuckle as the cockerel directs us north. Across the fallow rows we trek, gaining velocity. We are feeling like field mice. She even squeaks a couple times in excitement.

 

Halfway to the farm road where I’ve parked my SUV, she reaches into her purse, still slung over my shoulder, and she chucks handfuls of arrowheads, bodkin-pointed, as if restocking the field. I throw them too, hear them anchoring to the soil, but imagine them slipping through the morass, to mantle and crust. The people of the muddy river — proto-Iroquoians once cruelly likened to savage stalks — are reunited with their shank tips. She throws teeth too, and I see them land: hard white specks on brown earth. When the last tooth is gone, all of her removed from her father’s house, her escape becomes euphoric.

 

In the car, staring into her lap, refusing to look in the rear-view mirror, where I see what could be any farm in the Susquehanna Valley, she turns the jar over in her hand. When I speed to 65 mph, she lets it fly and fracture off an oak tree.