The Round House (30 page)

God help the gophers this week, said Uncle Edward as he passed through the room.

Clemence brought a dish towel and tied it around Mooshum's neck. Between bites, he said, I ever tell you boys about the time I outrun Liver-Eating Johnson? How that old rascal used to track down Indians and kill us and take and eat our livers? That was a white wiindigoo, but when I was young and fleet, I run him down and whittled him away bite by bite and paid him back. I snapped off his ear with my teeth, and then his nose. Want to see his thumb?

You told them, said Clemence, who was intent on getting nourishment into his old gullet. But Mooshum wanted to talk.

Listen here, you boys. People say Liver-Eating Johnson was supposed to have escaped some Indians by chewing through a rawhide that bound his hands. The story had it he killed the young Indian who was guarding him and cut off that poor boy's leg. Supposedly that scoundrel run off with that leg into the wilderness and survived by eating it until he made his way into friendlier territory.

Open up, said Clemence, and filled his mouth.

But that was not how it happened, said Mooshum. For I was there. I was hunting with some Blackfeet warriors when they caught Liver Eater. They planned on delivering him to the Crow Indians because he had killed so many of their people. I was sitting with that young Blackfeet who was supposed to guard him, but he wanted to kill Johnson so bad his hands twitched.

I talked to Liver Eater in the Blackfeet language, which he sort of understood. Liver Eater, I said, half the Blackfeet hate you so much they're gonna stake you down buck-naked and skin you alive. But they'll cut off your balls first and feed them to their old ladies right in front of your eyes.

Say there! said Clemence.

The Blackfeet's eyes just glowed, said Mooshum. I said to Liver Eater that the other half of the Blackfeet wanted to tie him securely between their two best war ponies and then charge the opposite directions. The Blackfeet boy's eyes sparked like candles at that. I told Liver-Eating Johnson that he was supposed to decide which of these fates he would prefer, so that the tribe could make preparations. Then we turned our backs on Liver Eater and warmed our hands over the fire. We left him to work on the rawhide thongs that bound his wrists. His ankles, too, were bound with strong ropes. Another rawhide at his waist fixed him to a tree. He had plenty to work on with his teeth, which were none too sturdy and that's the point. You never saw a white trapper's teeth, but they hadn't the habits we Indians had of scrubbing our teeth clean with a birch twig. They let their teeth rot. You could smell his breath a mile before a trapper came into view. His breath generally smelled worse than the rest of him and that is saying a lot, eh? Liver Eater's teeth were no different from any trapper's. And now he was trying to chew off his cords. Every so often, we would hear him curse and spit—there went one tooth, then another broke off. We panicked him into chawing until he was all gum. Never again could he bite into an Indian. But we planned to make him helpless altogether. This young Blackfeet and me. He had a potion from his grandma that would make your eyes cross. As soon as Liver Eater fell asleep and snored, we dabbed that medicine onto his eyes. Now he couldn't shoot straight. He would have to become a sheriff. That is, if the Crows did not kill him. Still, you don't leave a rattlesnake alive to bite you next time you walk the path, I said to the Blackfeet, even if he don't have fangs.

I wish we didn't have to give him to the Crows, said the young man.

They need their fun, I said. But just in case he gets loose we should make sure he cannot pull the trigger on a gun. We could chop off his fingers, but then the Crow would say we'd stolen some of him.

There is a centipede if it bites a man his hands will swell up like mittens for the rest of his life, the Blackfeet told me. So we made little torches for ourselves and went around hunting for this bug, but while we were away Liver Eater did manage to escape. When we returned all we saw was the chewed straps on the ground surrounded by broken brown teeth. He got away. Then he made up the story about eating the Indian's leg because unless he had a good story who'd believe a toothless cross-eyed old bugger?

Exactly, said Clemence.

Awee, I'm going to miss that Sonja, said Mooshum, winking at me.

What?

Oh, said Clemence. Whitey says she cleared out. She played sick yesterday and he came home to find her closet empty and one of the dogs gone with her. She took off in her old rattletrap car he'd just fixed to run smooth.

Is she coming back? I said.

Whitey told me her note said never. He said he slept with the other dog, he was so broke up. She said he'd best clean up his act. Amen to that.

The news made me dizzy and I told Cappy we needed to go somewhere. He said his usual polite and traditional thank-you to Clemence and then we biked away together, slow. Finally we got to the road that led, though it was a long ride off, to the hanging tree where Sonja and I had buried the passbook savings books. We stopped our bikes and I told Cappy the entire story—finding the doll, showing it to Sonja, her helping me stash the money in those bank accounts, and then where we put the passbooks in the tin box. I told him about how Sonja insisted I keep quiet so as to not put him in danger. Then I told him about Sonja's diamond stud earrings and the lizard-skin boots and about the night Whitey beat on her and how it looked like she was planning to get away from him and I told him how much money I had found.

She could get real far on that, he said. He looked away, offended.

Yeah, I should have told you.

We didn't talk for a while.

We should go dig up the little box anyway, he said. Just to make sure. Maybe she left you some money, said Cappy. His voice was neutral.

Enough for shoes like yours, I said as we rode along.

I offered to trade, said Cappy.

It's okay. I like mine now. I bet she left me a goddamned note. That's what I bet.

We both turned out to be right.

There was two hundred dollars, one passbook, and a piece of paper.

Dear Joe,

Cash is for your shoes. Also I am leaving you saving acct. to spend on an IV education out east.

I looked inside the passbook. It was ten thousand.

Treat your mom good. Some day you might deserve how good you grew up. I can have a new life with the $. No more of what you saw.

Love anyways,

Sonja

What the hell, I said to Cappy.

What's she mean, what you saw?

I struggled. I wanted to tell the whole dance, every howl, every gliding move, and show him the tassel. But my tongue was stopped by obscure shame.

Nothing, I said.

I split the cash with Cappy and put the passbook and letter in my pocket. At first, he wouldn't take the money and then I said it was so he could get a bus ticket to visit Zelia in Helena. Travel money, then. He folded the bills in his hand.

We started back home and halfway there we scared up a pair of ducks from a watery ditch.

After a couple miles, Cappy laughed. I got a good one. How come ducks don't fly upside down? He didn't wait for me to answer. They're afraid of quacking up! Still happy with his wit, he left me at the door to have dinner with my mother and father. I went in and although we were quiet and distracted and still in a form of shock, we were together. We had candied yams, which I never liked but I ate them anyway. There was farmer ham and a bowl of fresh peas from the garden. My mother said a little prayer to bless the food and we all talked about Cappy's run. I even told them Cappy's joke. We stayed away from the fact of Lark's existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.

Chapter Ten

Skin of Evil

L
inda Wishkob rolled out from her car and trudged to our door. I let my dad answer her knock and slipped out the back way. I'd finally worked out my thoughts in regard to Linda and her banana bread; although these thoughts did not make sense, I couldn't argue myself out of them. Linda was responsible for the existence of Linden. She'd saved her brother, even though she knew by then he was a skin of evil. She now repelled me like she'd repelled him and her birth mother, though my parents didn't feel the same way. As it turned out, while I was in the backyard running this way and that with Pearl, playing tag, though we never touched but whirled around each other in an unceasing trot, Linda Wishkob was giving my father information. What she told him would cause him to accompany my mother to her office and back home for the next two days. On the third day my father asked her to write him out a list for the grocery.

He insisted that we go instead of her and that she lock the door behind us and keep Pearl in the house. From all of this I gathered that Linden Lark was back in the area. My mind wouldn't go any farther. I wasn't thinking about it—I couldn't stand thinking about it. It was out of my mind entirely when my father asked me to go to the grocery store with him. I had been on my way to meet up with Cappy and carve out a newer and faster series of jumps in the dirt. I resented going with my father to the grocery, but he said it would take two of us to decipher and find all of the exact things my mother wanted—which, when I saw her slanted script with even the brand names listed and tiny bits of advice in choosing properly, looked like the truth.

That we have a real grocery store on our reservation is no small thing. It used to be that, besides the commodity warehouse, food came from the tiny precursor store—Puffy's Place. The old store sold mainly nonperishable items—tea, flour, salt, peanut butter—plus surplus garden vegetables or game meat. It sold beadwork, moccasins, tobacco, and gum. For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt. But with our own grocery now, run by our own tribal members and hiring our own people to bag and stock, we had something special. Even though the pop machine out front was banged in, the magic doors swished shut on slow grandmas, and children smudged the gumball machine until you couldn't see the colors of the candy, it was our very own grocery. Trucks came to it, like a regular store, stocked it, and then drove away.

My father and I walked in past the wall of tattered powwow posters and ads for cars to sell. We got a grocery cart. Dad unfolded the list.

Dried pinto beans.

I pointed out that Mom had instructed us to shake and examine the plastic bag of beans and make sure it contained no small rocks. We located the beans in the pasta aisle.

A spotted pebble is going to look just like a bean, I said to my father, turning the rectangular package this way and that.

We should stock up, said my father, throwing six or seven bags into the cart. These are cheap. We can spread the beans in a pan and check for rocks when we get home.

Tomato paste, canned tomatoes—Rotel, the kind with chilies—4 cans each. Five pounds of hamburger meat. Lean if you can get it, the list said.

Lean? Why would she want lean?

Less grease, said my father.

I like grease.

Me too.

He threw some packages into the cart.

Cumin, I read. In the spice aisle we found cumin.

She was making extra food to bring to Clemence, to pay her back for all the dinners.

I read. Lettuce, carrots, then onions and we're supposed to smell the onions first to make sure they aren't rotten inside.

Fruit. Whatever fruit is good, said my father, peering over my shoulder at the list. I guess we are able to make that decision, anyway, regarding the fruit. What do you think?

We looked at a pile of muskmelons. Some had spots. There were grapes. All had spots. There was a bucket of local berries and some plums. Dad chose a melon and filled paper bags with plums and a plastic mesh bucket with the berries.

We bought chicken, an anemic-looking fryer, cut up, and we counted all the packaged pieces like she said. We bought another package that contained only thighs. We bought barbecue sauce and Old Dutch potato chips, for me. A couple of cans of mushroom soup went into the cart. At the bottom of the list was milk and butter, a 1-pound box of wrapped sticks, salted, and 1 pound wrapped whole, sweet. Cream.

What does she mean wrapped whole? My father stopped beside me, frowning at the paper. He held a carton of cream in one hand. Why sweet? Why salted?

I was pushing the cart in front of my dad, and so I saw Linden Lark first. He was leaning into the cold light of the open meat case. My father must have looked up just after I did. There was a moment where all we did was stare. Then motion. My father threw the cream, surged forward, and grabbed Lark by the shoulders. He spun Lark, jamming him backward, then gripped Lark around the throat with both hands. As I've said before, my dad was somewhat clumsy. But he attacked with such an instinct of sudden rage it looked slick as a movie stunt. Lark banged his head against the metal racks of the cooler. A carton of lard smashed down and Lark slipped in the burst cream, scraping the back of his head down the lower edge of the case, ringing the shelves. The glass doors flapped against my father's arms as he fell with Lark, still pressing. Dad kept his chin down. His hair had fallen in strings about his ears and his face was dark with blood. Lark flailed, unable to put a similar grip on my father. I was on him too, now, with the cans of Rotel tomatoes.

The thing was, Lark seemed to be smiling. If you can smile while being choked and can-beaten, he was doing it. Like he was excited by our attack. I smashed the can on his forehead and opened a cut just over Lark's eye. A pure black joy in seeing his blood filled me. Blood and cream. I smashed as hard as I could and something—maybe the shock of my happiness or Lark's happiness—caused my father to let go of Lark's throat. Lark kicked upward and pushed with all his might. My father went skidding backward. With a hard jolt my father landed in the aisle, and Lark fled in a scrambled crouch.

That was when my father had his first heart attack—it turned out to be a small one. Not even a medium one. Just a small one. But it was a heart attack. In the grocery store aisle in the spilt cream and rolling cans, next to the Prell shampoo, my father's face went a dull yellow color. He strained for breath. He looked up at me, perplexed. And because he had his hand on his chest, I said, Do you want the ambulance?

When he nodded
yes
, everything went out of me. I went down on my knees, and Puffy made the call.

They tried to tell me I couldn't ride with him to the hospital but I fought. I stayed with him. They couldn't make me leave him. I knew what happened if you let a parent get too far away.

W
e stayed down in Fargo for almost a week and spent the days at St. Luke's Hospital. On the first day, my father had an operation that is now routine, but which at the time was new. It involved inserting stents into three arteries. He looked weak and diminished in the hospital bed. Although the doctors said that he was doing well, of course I was afraid. I could only look in at him, at first, from the hall. When he was moved into his own room, things were better. We all sat together and talked about nothing, everything. This seems odd, but it soon became a kind of a vacation to be there, safe, together, our conversation vague. We'd walk the halls, pretend shock at the mushy food, talk some more about nothing.

At night, my mother and I went back to the room we shared at the hotel. We had twin beds. On other trips, the three of us had always bunked together, Mom and Dad in a double. I would sleep on a rollaway in some corner. This was the first time I could remember staying alone anywhere with just my mother. There was an awkwardness; her physical presence bothered me. I was glad she'd brought Dad's old blue bathrobe made of towel cloth, the one she'd kept pestering him to get rid of. The nap was worn down in places, the sleeve unraveling, the hem frayed. I'd thought that she brought it for him, but then she put it on the first night. I imagined she had forgotten her own robe, which was printed with golden flowers and green leaves. But the second morning I woke early and looked over at her, still sleeping. She was wearing my father's robe. I checked that night to see if she was wearing his robe on purpose, and sure enough she got into bed wearing it. The room wasn't cold. It occurred to me the next day, as I was wandering around the park outside the hospital, that it would feel good if I had something of Dad's to wear, too. It would tie us together somehow.

I needed him so much. I couldn't really go into it very far, this need, nor could my mother and I talk about it. But her wearing his robe was a sign to me of how she had to have the comfort of his presence in a basic way that I now understood. That night, I asked her if she'd packed Dad an extra shirt, and she nodded when I asked if I could wear it. She gave it to me.

I still have many of his shirts, and his ties as well. He purchased everything he wore at Silverman's in Grand Forks. They carried the very best men's clothing, and he didn't buy much, but he was particular. I wore my father's ties to get me through law school at the University of Minnesota, and the bar exam after. For the time I was a public prosecutor, I wore his ties for the last week of every jury trial. I used to carry around his fountain pen, too, but I became afraid of losing it. I still have it, but I don't sign my tribal court opinions with it the way he did. The unfashionable ties are enough, the golden tassel in my drawer, and that I have always had a dog named Pearl.

I was wearing my father's shirt on the day he stopped being vague, the second-to-last day we were there. He saw his shirt on me and looked quizzical. My mother left to get some coffee and I sat with him. This was the first time I was really alone with him. It did not surprise me that even while his incisions were healing he chose to revisit the situation, to ask if I knew anything of Lark's whereabouts. I had been thinking the same way, but of course I didn't. If Clemence had told my mother in their phone conversations from the hotel room, I didn't know about it. But then that night I did get a call; it was while my mother was out buying a newspaper. It was Cappy.

Some members of our family paid a visit, he said.

I didn't know what he was talking about.

Here?

No,
there
.

Where?

They brought him around.

What?

The Holodeck, dummy. It was a situation like when Picard was the detective. Remember? The persuasion?

Right. I was flooded, tingling with relief. Right. Is he dead?

No, just persuaded. They messed him up good, man. He won't come around you. Tell your mom and dad.

After the call, I was thinking how to tell them. How to make it sound like I didn't know it was Doe and Randall and Whitey, even Uncle Edward, who went to Lark's, when another call came in. My mother had come back. I could tell the call was from Opichi when my mother asked if there was something wrong at the office. The cadence of the voice, tiny in the receiver, was shrill and intense. My mother sat down on the bed. Whatever she heard wasn't good. Eventually, she put the receiver in its cradle, and then she curled up on the bed, her back to me.

Mom?

She didn't answer. I remember the buzz of lights on in the bathroom. I walked around to the other side of the bed and knelt down beside it. She opened her eyes and looked at me. At first she seemed confused and her eyes searched my face almost as if she were looking at me for the first time, or at least after a long absence. Then she focused and her mouth creased in a frown. She whispered.

I guess people beat him up.

That's good, I said. Yeah.

And then, Opichi says, he drove back all crazy and blasted up to the gas station. He said something to Whitey about his rich girlfriend. How Whitey's rich girlfriend had herself a nice setup and he was thinking of joining her. He drove through, yelling, making fun of Whitey. He got away. Whitey chased him with a wrench. What was he talking about? Sonja isn't rich.

I sat there with my mouth open.

Joe?

I put my head down in my hands, my elbows on my knees. After a while, I lay down and put a pillow over my head.

This room's hot, said my mother. Let's get the blower going.

We cooled off and went to a little restaurant called the 50s Cafe for hamburgers, french fries, chocolate shakes. We ate silently. Then all of a sudden, my mother put down the hamburger. She laid it on her plate and said, No.

Still chewing, I stared at her. The slight droop of her eyelid gave her a critical air.

Is there something wrong with that burger, Mom?

She gazed past me, transfixed by a thought. The knife crease shot up between her eyebrows.