1
We Just Know
Early Years
US 93 transects the mountainous part of the state of Montana west of the Continental Divide in a line that moves more or less south to north. At the Idaho border it drops from steep mountains into the Bitterroot Valley, a verdant river corridor between two ranges. The word frontier is popular here. Between the towns of Hamilton and Stevensville—known locally as “where Montana began”—you can find Frontier Guns & Ammo, the Frontier Cafe, Frontier Lighting, Frontier Windows and Doors, Frontier Office Plaza, even Frontier Internet. Past the town of Lolo, US 93 rises with train tracks toward Missoula, a quickly growing college town. The road crosses through an expanse of malls and past a golf course near ground that was once full of bitterroot, a medicinal tuber capped with a striking pink flower. Here the road passes Interstate 90, near where a sign advertises Glacier National Park and Kalispell, prominent northern points on the tourist map. It makes no mention of the places in between.
Past a cluster of hotels and gas stations, 93 curves around a hill. The timber closes in, then opens to reveal a field bordered by an aspen draw. Above it, to the north, shines Gray Wolf Peak, rising white out of the Mission Mountains. This is Evaro, the southern entrance to the Flathead Indian Reservation. Two hillsides push in on the road, funneling it toward a narrow point, and the mountains briefly disappear. A casino glints on the left; beyond it a bridge for migrating wildlife creates a small tunnel over the highway. Just past the tunnel the land yawns open to reveal jagged peaks, rolling hills, and handsome ranchland in the Jocko River Valley. Small roads jut like tributaries into 93, bearing names such as McClure Road, Couture Loop, and Lumpry Road. To visitors, they mean little; to residents, they speak of family. For about a quarter of a mile the highway briefly splits to accommodate Arlee’s downtown. A handful of businesses line the northbound side of the road: a huckleberry-themed restaurant and coffee shop, a feedstore, a pizza joint, a bar, and Wilson Family Foods, or, as everyone calls it, the Store. Visitors do not always realize they are guests of a sovereign nation: the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT). One mile later Arlee is gone.
Two blocks to the east of the Store sits Arlee Schools, a series of one-story buildings spread between fields and basketball courts where kids study from kindergarten to twelfth grade. Many of the buildings are modest, built with asbestos decades ago. But one structure catches the eye first: a $3 million gymnasium with a peaked roof rising into the sky. The gym has retractable baskets that descend from the walls with a push of a button and a high-performance floor that refracts the light pouring through tall windows. You can look down and see your reflection. The school doesn’t often hold graduation ceremonies inside, out of fears that high heels might scratch the wood. Zanen Pitts, the Arlee Warriors coach, usually walked into the gym as though he were entering a film set. He often wore cowboy boots. “I believe,” he once said, “you can’t stop me.”
He took coaching very seriously. His team was made up of many boys, each of whom had his own choices and stories. Two of those players were cousins whose names rhymed, and they would shape the path of things. Until high school, they rarely hung out off school grounds, but at recess, in the fields and on the courts at Arlee Schools, they connected. Whether they were playing football or basketball, they always ran one play because it was so fun, and because they were so fast: the Hail Mary. One of them would glance briefly at the other, and his cousin would take off, sprinting past everyone, then looking back for the long, soaring pass. “Me and Phil,” Will said, “we just know.”
* * *
Will Mesteth Jr. was a child of the new millennium who owed his existence to the game of basketball. His parents met in middle school on the courts outside Arlee Schools. Chasity Haynes had an astonishing smile and the kind of presence that intimidated girls and attracted boys. Séliš1 and Navajo, she grew up in Sophie and Tapit Haynes’s home with an appreciation of history. She also inherited from Tapit, her síle?, a love of old cars; from both her grandparents, a love of sports. Some in the family thought she was coddled because she was a good athlete, a guard with a smooth outside shot. During coed three-on-threes, she found herself drawn to a gregarious jock named Will Mesteth. A Séliš and Oglala Lakota kid, he was stocky and drove with power to the basket. Even then, classmates called him Big Willie. In the hallways he was a joker, once leaving a roadkilled squirrel in a friend’s locker. At home he carried grief at having lost, at age twelve just years earlier, his father in a car accident. The football field and basketball court were his outlets for expression. He and Chasity started playing together and hanging out. When he was fourteen and she was fifteen, she dove across a volleyball court and felt a pain. That was how she discovered she was pregnant.
Chasity was still living at Sophie’s when Will was born, in August 2000. For the first fifteen months of his life, little Will followed Sophie’s husband, Tapit, around like a deity, crawling after him. The old man passed in November 2001, and from then on it was Sophie and Will. At home she only spoke Séliš; he didn’t start regularly speaking English until age five. They sat together on the bleachers in the old gym at Arlee High School, the one with dead spots on the floor, Will watching studiously while his mom played high school ball. Chasity thought that, had she stayed in school, she might have had a chance to play in college. But, she said, “I still wouldn’t have been able to choose that path because I had a little guy at home.” She dropped out, entering a job-training program.
By that point, her relationship with Big Will had gone the way of most teenage romances. He became a football star, running over people’s backs and fielding interest from Division I colleges. He didn’t do a lot of parenting back then, even when he moved to Missoula to play for the University of Montana Grizzlies. On the weekends when he was to care for his son, he’d drop the boy with his mom, Kelly Pierre, and her husband, Allen, and take off. Kelly was strict and worked for the CSKT Tribal Health Department; Allen Pierre, Will’s papa, was a respected cultural specialist who stayed up late making art and regalia, bustles and jingle dresses and bonnets. “This thing called time,” he once said, “I got no use in my life for time.” Allen, Q’lispé and Kootenai, sewed little Will’s regalia and they sat up together, listening to drum groups on a cassette tape. Allen’s voice sounded as if his throat were full of marbles, and Will Jr.’s emerged throaty and deep. In the summer they traveled from Browning to Usk, Washington, for powwows, and Allen gave the boy the claw of a black bear, for protection.
When Will was five, a group of Arlee parents started a youth basketball program called Little Dribblers. The setting was the Arlee Community Center on Pow Wow Road, which the Tribes had recently opened. If you went to the center on any given Saturday, you’d smell fresh fry bread—Indian tacos were a regular fundraiser—and hear a chorus of rubber soles and laughter, then enter to find about 130 kids tearing around the court. Kids on balance beams, kids hopping on one leg, to develop agility and balance. Even back then, when the kids were waist-high, one of them stood out from the rest, on account of his quickness. He was Will’s cousin. Everyone just called him Philbert.
* * *
Phillip John Malatare had an imprecise memory and little desire to look into the future. Even as a boy, his ascent to stardom seemed a foregone conclusion. Whether he was tearing around the house with a blue light-up sword or hitting rocks with sticks in the yard, he showed an easy coordination. He ran at full speed in the sort of loops a child might draw if asked to represent the movements of a bee. In baseball he struck everyone out; in soccer he scored goals at will, once causing his mom, Becky, to scold him for making others feel bad. Her husband, John, a Séliš and Cree wildland firefighter, told her not to hold him back. When Phil was six, he told his parents he’d be a professional athlete, so they wouldn’t have to work anymore. Phil’s dad, John, just laughed, but those words stayed in his mind. “Dream big,” he said.
Phil was John and Becky Malatare’s youngest child. His older sisters both had dark hair. Phil had a sandy cowlick jutting from his forehead. Following Phillip’s birth Becky’s grandmother said that at last one of the kids resembled their side, because Becky was white, tall, with sandy hair, descended from Norwegian homesteaders and raised in Hot Springs, on the reservation’s northwestern side. But when Becky looked at her son, she saw a small version of her husband: the smile, the motion, the drive.
When Phil was born, the Malatares lived in a trailer on leased tribal land in Evaro. Money was tight then, back before they were established in their careers, John fighting fires and Becky handling accounts for a Missoula hospital. Timber closed in all around, casting shadows. Shortly after Phil’s birth, Becky saw a bear in the backyard and announced she would be moving. John convinced the Tribes to let him switch leases, and soon the couple moved closer to Arlee, near his sisters and their children. They sold the trailer and bought a modular home, placing it on lease ground not far from a road sign that bore his mother’s maiden name. They owned the house but not the ground; that belonged to the Tribes, which provides leases of communally owned land to enrolled members. John and Becky planted a garden that was more like a farm, with squash and strawberries and tomatoes. The couple’s two incomes and a loan enabled them to build a foundation underneath their house. They lifted it off the ground, creating a two-story place in the world. Out front they erected two basketball hoops near a pasture big enough for soccer. “The field of dreams,” they called it.
John made his living as a sawyer for the US Forest Service, using hand tools to clear understory down to the mineral soil in order to cut off or redirect wildfires. Back then, he was one of the few Natives on the job, and his position represented a complicated mobility: economic opportunity that also meant uncomfortable distance from home. He had family spread throughout the Jocko and Mission Valleys. His t?úpye? had fifty-two great-grandchildren and said that made her the richest woman on the reservation. He loved his home, but he also resolved that his kids would never know the taste of commodity beef, the fatty canned stuff the government provided tribes. To prove he belonged on the job he outworked his colleagues. “I’d like to get to the thickest, the heaviest patches I could get into,” he said.
John and Becky had connected through softball and shared a deep love of athletics. “We’re sports junkies,” she said. In the early days of their marriage, when they were still getting to know each other, sports was a unifier. Becky did not intuitively understand the complex web of familial relations on the reservation. She knew little about Séliš traditional practices, the way wakes went on for days, with food and singing. John was patient with her, but he was also gone in the summers, sleeping in fire camps across the West. Upon his return, he’d show photos from the fire line. “I’d be like, ‘Great, it was nice talking to you about your trip,’” Becky said, “‘but I don’t give a shit. I gotta go to Costco. Spend a day, rest up, then contribute to the family.’”
But they had sports. In 2005, when Phil was five, they partnered with other parents to start Little Dribblers, to give kids something to do on the weekends. “All of a sudden,” said John, “it went off like a fricking rocket.” John bought a book on basketball technique. Early on, he and the other coaches focused on fundamentals: chest passes and defensive posture. They did not run plays, save for one: the full-court outlet pass. At a young age it was simply the heave and sprint; later, the coaches taught the finer points of the play. How to contest a shot, then release and look back just as the rebounder secured the ball, whirled, and sent it flying.
The following year, more courts arrived in town, this time on account of tragedy. That March, in a car accident on a country road, a boy named Thomas Lyles died. He was a basketball player who loved the game and thought about it like a coach. Following Lyles’s death, the community raised funds to put outdoor courts near the entrance to the Powwow Grounds. Often, people saw Phil there, his cowlick leading the way as he tore around with cousins, dribbling for hours. And sometimes, at night, people saw a white Buick by the courts: Sophie Haynes, sitting with the engine running as Will hurled shots into the night.
* * *
When Chasity was twenty-three, she bought a modular home she placed near Sophie’s. By then she was working a full-time job in the CSKT enrollment department, a position that offered stability. Near Chasity’s place was a trampoline between two baskets where Will and his cousins went at it. The family ate together, and every summer Will accompanied Chasity to Spokane Hoopfest, America’s largest three-on-three tournament, to watch her play ball.
But Will slept at Sophie’s. “I knew that they had a close bond,” said Chasity. “So I let him stay with her then.” Sophie taught the boy his history—about how an aunt had accompanied the great chief Charlo on the forced march north from the Bitterroot Valley. She taught Will round-dance songs on her hand drum, and he learned to store knowledge precisely in his head. He didn’t talk much. During lunch at Arlee elementary, he often wouldn’t eat with the other kids. Whenever he got off the bus at the end of the day, Sophie was waiting with Cream of Wheat, his favorite. They shot baskets together on a minihoop in the house. And at night, before bed, his t?úpye? prayed, first in Séliš and then in English, giving thanks for the day and saying, “You’re never promised tomorrow.”
* * *
“Mom!” said Phil’s sister Whitney. “There’s a hole in the window!” Phil was about nine, and with John gone during the summer, Phil had taken down his BB gun and shot out the front window of the house. Then, as if on cue, his cousin Alex Moran, who lived down the way, did the same at his house. Al was a son of John’s sister Lynette, and he and Phil did everything together back then, along with another cousin named Tyler Tanner. Al and Ty were both stocky ranch kids. The three boys were inseparable, all of them dribbling to one of the hoops in town and returning only for meals. Ty was of Filipino and Finnish and Séliš descent, and had an air of quiet responsibility. Alex was quick to laugh with those he knew well, but sometimes carried anger, because his mom had been diagnosed with leukemia when he was young. On the court, the three boys learned to anticipate one another’s movements. Before they were out of elementary school, Phil, Ty, and Al twice won their age division at Spokane Hoopfest. Lynette loved to watch those games, sometimes coaching, sometimes videotaping and calling out traps. She promised the three boys that they would one day win state together.
The Malatares eventually took in the Morans’ dog, a black Lab named Pepper, because Lynette couldn’t have it in the house when she was sick. John took Pepper hunting and the dog hid when he shot a gun. Phil took Pepper hunting, shot his first grouse, and Pepper brought the bird right back to his feet. “Just like in a storybook,” Becky said. After that, Pepper was Phil’s.
Around 2009, Thomas “Bearhead” Swaney, an elder to Phil, fell ill with cancer. Swaney was a former Tribal Council Chairman who’d fought to preserve the reservation’s wildlands. He also loved basketball—but only one kind. He often said he couldn’t stand white man’s ball. He and John’s father, Bear, were best friends, and Swaney was a grandfather of Thomas Lyles, the boy for whom the courts on Pow Wow Road had been named. Before he passed, Swaney announced that he wanted his .220 Swift rifle to go to Phillip. John asked Swaney’s son, Bill, why the old man wanted Phil to have the gun. In John’s recollection, Bill Swaney said, “I can never answer that question for you.”
Two years later, Al’s mother and Phil’s auntie Lynette passed away. Al watched old videotapes of Hoopfest, hearing his mother’s voice calling out traps, remembering her promise that he and his cousins would win state. Shortly afterward, when Phil, Al, and Ty were in junior high, John drove them to watch the state tournament in Billings. There, in the Metra, an arena that holds ten thousand, John walked them out under a human roar and told them they would one day bring Arlee its first state championship.
* * *
In junior high Will walked dirt roads at night with a group of cousins. “Full-on rez kid,” he said. “Huh-heh!” In class he found a place in the back. He heard China was directly beneath White Coyote Road, where an organization funded by a hotel heir had bought up a sprawling property to build a spiritual retreat called the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas. He learned that land was more valuable than money; Sophie made it clear to her family that Haynesville was not to be sold. One summer Will walked the entire Jocko River with a fishing rod. Even though Will didn’t live at Chasity’s, he thought of himself as the man of the house. Once, Chasity dated a man whom Will really liked. But then the man left. It was not a good split. Will texted the man, telling him not to return. “He just at times wasn’t being a man,” Will said later. “He was being immature. That’s all I gotta say about that.”
Will thought he knew what it meant to be a man. He’d learned from his papa Allen Pierre. Will listened when Allen talked about the importance of art and culture. Will watched the way Allen prepared to dance at powwows. The seriousness of his expression, the silence as sweat beaded on his brow and he arranged his regalia. He listened when Allen talked about how alcohol could haunt you. Will learned to hunt from his uncles, including Big Will’s brother Sean, who knew pretty much everything about whitetails. But Will wished his dad would take him to chase those big bucks.
Then, when Will was in junior high, his dad showed up. They went hunting in the hills, driving around in Big Will’s truck. It was fun, and they kept doing it on the weekends. Big Will had a good job by this point as a policeman on the Tribes’ force. One day, they rolled around looking for whitetails by Saddle Mountain. Up high, snow was on the ground. Big Will felt something bubbling up inside him. He wanted to tell his oldest child that he was sorry—that he had not been ready. That he had grown up without a dad, too, and that it had been hard. That as a teenager he was overwhelmed by what he once called “just pain. Just that.” His dad was left-handed, too, and loved soda; Will Jr. looked a lot like him when he smiled. Big Will wanted to say that he was going to try to make it better. How it all came out was another matter. Later on, Big Will just remembered saying, “You don’t want to mess around with girls like that. Could you imagine having a child?” His son didn’t react. They cruised the hills, looking for bucks.
* * *
Phil darted over the snowdrifts. He was thirteen and finally starting to grow. He’d been tiny forever, so small he’d worn the same Halloween costume—a ninja—for three years running. When he was a boy, Becky had to hide the butter knives. Otherwise, Phil would saw the legs of chairs, mimicking his dad skinning a deer. Phil grew up hunting and fishing, shooting his first bull elk at age eleven. Now John wanted to get him into horn hunting. John was nearly fifty, his close-cropped hair silver, a goatee flecked with red hugging his chin. He had hunted for antlers for years, walking the hills to find the sheds that bull elk drop every spring, then selling them to supplement his income. John loved the cold in his lungs, being away from the noise of the world, seeing the land as it thawed and before everything turned fat and green. Although middle age had brought with it a new paunch, he could still outhike firefighters in their twenties. Sometimes he crunched through the snowy crust. His son just floated over the top, easy as anything.
They hiked over frozen brown hillsides and through mud and into draws where the snow was still drifted, until they reached a hill thick with larch and fir. A little ways farther and they dropped into a secret place. There, the tines glinted, ridged and chocolate brown. John saw the first antler. A short way away Phil grabbed the other one, completing the set. They named the bull “crab claw,” because the antlers were all crooked. When Phil got excited about something, he focused obsessively. He took photos with the antlers, looking tough, mouth pursed. And then he smiled, angular features all turned up, a smile to change the weather.
Phil loved the woods. That was his escape, one he increasingly sought. The Malatare house was full. When Phil was in junior high, John and Becky took in foster children, three boys and a girl who were related to the family through John’s mother. Phil’s foster siblings were astonished to see that he had a television in his bedroom. The middle boy, Darshan, was a year younger than Phil, quiet and sweet and fastidious, always showering and changing clothes. He, too, was an athlete, a talented football player who also shot hoops. Becky suspected that was in order to be close to Phil. Sometimes Phil took Dar to the woods. “He found the elk sheds,” Dar said. “I think he gets lucky.” When the Malatares sent Phil to the river for a dinner trout, he rarely came home empty-handed. And on the court, he blazed past everyone. “Different,” said his best friend, Ty Tanner. “Phil’s different.”
* * *
In August 2013, when Will was thirteen, Chasity’s younger sister died in a car wreck on a country road. The Haynes family went into mourning. Chasity got a series of stars tattooed on her neck, representing her children; next to them was a shooting star, for her sister. Almost exactly one year later, an uncle of Will’s named David passed away in a similar accident. For many in the family, it was almost too much to bear. But Sophie knew what to tell Will about death. “She always told me not to be afraid of it,” Will said. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.” It was almost time for high school.
2
They’re Following You
2013–16
Zanen Pitts grew up in Dixon, on a ranch by the Flathead River, with a keen sense of the importance of sport. His parents were both coaches. His father, Terry, had led the Arlee Warriors basketball team to their first state finals appearance in 1995. Terry often said, “More is better”—more jump shots, more time on the track, more hours on the horse. He felt the world contained two kinds of people: entertainers and those who were entertained. The Pittses fell in the former category. That meant late nights watching Rocky or discussing the exploits of Zanen’s grandfather, who had run track at the University of Wisconsin. Zanen’s older brother, Zachary, was a meticulous reader who woke up at 4:00 A.M. to play basketball, later becoming an all-state player. Zanen was obsessed with film, especially Westerns. He treed bears, raised a pet bobcat and a red-tailed hawk, and announced at age eleven his plans to own his own herd of cattle. Zachary’s athletic prowess earned him a pass from teasing. Zanen, who was tiny and had asthma, experienced no such reprieve. Certain words echoed through him—Smelly Stinky Pitts! Stinky Arm Pitts!—to the point where his parents considered pulling him out of school. But the teasing gave the younger boy a reflexive brashness. In track, he ran until he passed out. On the court he did not possess his brother’s precise skill but wore kneepads because he slid around so much, eventually winning a college roster spot through effort. Zachary was, in Terry’s words, “a little too modest.” Zanen did not suffer that affliction. He put his name on everything from T-shirts to text messages to turn the yoke of it into an advantage, like the Boy Named Sue. “I had a mindset,” he said. “Everyone’s gonna remember that name. When I die, I want people to remember the name.”
Terry helped Zanen get an assistant coaching job at Arlee in 2012, when he was twenty-six. At the time, the community’s emphasis on basketball was beginning to show results. According to available records, the Warriors went 88–34 from 2009 to 2013, twice advancing to the state tournament but never winning the championship. The girls’ team, the Scarlets, meanwhile, excelled from 2011 to 2016, going a reported 105–39, with Phil’s older sister Whitney leading the way early on. A skilled guard, she earned a scholarship to the University of Montana Western, which competes in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA. During those years neither the Warriors nor Scarlets won state, but expectation followed success. In 2012, a school board member formally apologized after cursing at the coach over her son’s lack of playing time. A longtime educator named Tammy Elser, who designed Arlee’s literacy program, said, “We had a school board that was focused almost completely on basketball.”
In 2013, after one year as an assistant, Zanen was hired as head coach, inheriting a team that had finished third in the state. He envisioned a program built off defensive effort, agility, and accountability. He often opened the gym at 6:00 A.M. for early workouts, and on game days he had the Warriors wear collared shirts or bow ties. For big games Zanen wore all black, explaining, “It’s their funeral.”
Copyright © 2021 by Abraham Streep
