45 pages • 1 hour read
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Dee and Fellis binge watch The Sopranos, play cards, and do drugs with money Fellis made by quitting college and getting a refund check for his financial aid. Bored with watching television, Dee takes Fellis to a bar, where they encounter Meekew, a drug-dealing college student whom Fellis perceives to be more aligned with white people than with the Penobscot. After leaving the bar, Fellis tries to buy cocaine from Meekew, who refuses to sell in the quantity Fellis is looking for. They have a fight, and Dee comes to Fellis’s aid when Fellis claims that Meekew is stabbing him. Dee hits Meekew over the head with a pack of beer; Meekew collapses. After he and Fellis get home, Fellis confesses that Meekew didn’t have a weapon at all.
In the morning, Dee goes back to the site of the fight. Meekew is gone, but he finds Fellis’s phone there. Dee returns to Fellis’s house, where Beth, Fellis’s mother, is making breakfast. Fellis gets into a fight with Beth, who discovers that Fellis never submitted the paperwork to the college that proves his Indigenous identity and secures his tuition waiver. Fellis angrily tells Beth that he quit college because he didn’t understand what was happening in class. Dee is angered by how rude Fellis is to his mother, and punches Fellis in the face, breaking his nose.
Dee spends the next few days hunting for porcupines, hoping to sell the carcasses to a woman named Clara, who uses the quills in her regalia. While in the forest, he encounters Fellis, who has found a porcupine high in a tree. Fellis brushes past the violence that occurred between them. The two try to throw sticks at the porcupine to dislodge it, but Fellis muses, “I have a feeling that fucker ain’t coming down” (59).
“Get Me Some Medicine” complicates the nature of the friendship between Dee and Fellis introduced earlier in the collection. In “Burn,” the two men, though occasionally critical of one another, are largely supportive of each other’s needs. This story offers a darker take on the consequences of that support. Fellis’s lie about Meekew stabbing him, along with his casual confession of that lie after the fact, suggests that he takes Dee’s friendship and loyalty for granted. It also suggests a fragile masculinity that invents excuses for its perceived failures. Fellis’s belief that Meekew “prefer[s] white people to his own kind” has no apparent basis other than Fellis’s own insecurities (50). Meekew excels academically and is on his way to medical school, while Fellis enrolls in community college only to drop out and collect the financial aid refund. Fellis’s lie is intended to manipulate Dee, but it also expresses a deeper truth: Fellis feels almost physically wounded by Meekew’s very existence as an academically successful, upwardly mobile Indigenous person. He picks a fight with Meekew, using Violence as an Expression of Masculinity, in an attempt to restore his damaged self-image. When Dee intercedes, smashing Meekew’s head with the beer cans, he illustrates another facet of the same theme: A willingness to commit violence on a friend’s behalf is, for some men, a core form of male bonding. Dee’s pent-up frustration with Fellis, which ultimately leads him to punch his friend, demonstrates the undercurrent of violence present in this friendship and lack of less destructive ways to resolve tensions.
The porcupine hunt that ends this story sees the two men coming together to achieve (or, in this case, fail to achieve) a task. On the surface, this seems like a positive movement in their friendship. The hunt, though, only acts as a stopgap for their ruptured relationship. David attempts to create a dialogue with Fellis, but Fellis cuts him short, saying, “Don’t worry about it. Just swing that stick” (57). They find solace not by creating an open conversation but by engaging in a communal act of violence. The lack of resolution to the conclusion of this story creates a feeling of unease that reflects unresolved conflict still simmering under the surface of their friendship. The story’s complete lack of closure creates momentum moving deeper into the collection, suggesting that there will be a later need for resolution between Dee and Fellis.