Love Medicine Part 14

Three empty gunnysacks were laying on the floor, crumpled like drawers a man had stepped out of in haste.

"Why'd you do that?" he said.

I only looked at him. I shrugged. He shrugged. He was Nector's son. I thought to myself, he wouldn't go after Nector and bring him home. I was sure Gordie wouldn't do that, even though, like with Zelda, there was a time we had been in the same body. He wouldn't go, even though I had nursed him. We were closer when I carried him, when we never knew each other, I thought now. I did not trust him.

"It's too hot in here for more fire," I said. "Make one outside and roast your birds. I'm washing my floor."

"At night?" he said, The sun was going down very fast.

"You heard me."

He went out and made a fire in the backyard where we had an old field stone range made to cook on in the summer. They all stayed out there. I fed Patsy a mashed potato. I fed her milk. I let the baby play and roll across theflOOL I sat and watched them while I decided how I would wash the flOOL I looked at my linoleum carefully, all the worn spots and cracks, all the places where the tin stripping had to be hammered flat. It was one of my prides to keep that floor shined up.

Under the gray swirls and spots and leaves of the pattern, I knew there was tarpaper and bare wood that could splinter a baby's feet. I knew, because I bought and paid for and put down that linoleum myself. It was a good solid covering, but under it the boards creaked.

V,j There wasn't any use in thinking. I put the baby to sleep. I filled the tin bucket with hot water and spirits. I hauled the potatoes out of my way. Then I took up my brush. Outside they were talking.

They had a fire. They could stay there. I never went down on my knees to G.o.d or anyone, so maybe washing my floor was an excuse to kneel that night. I felt better, that's all I know, as I scrubbed off the tarnished wax and dirt. I felt better as I recognized myself in the woman who kept her floor clean even when left by her husband.

I had been on a high horse. Now I was kneeling. I was washing the floor in my good purple dress. I never did laugh at myself in any situation, but I had to laugh now. I thought of cutting up a shroud.

The nun was clever. She knew where my weakness had been.

But I was not going under, even if he left me. I could leave off my fear of ever being a Lazarre. I could leave off my fear, even of losing Nector, since he was gone and I was able to scrub down the floor.

I took my wax. I started polishing a little at a time.

Love had turned my head away from what was going on between my husband and Lamartine. There was something still left that Nector could hurt me with, and now I hurt for love and not because the old hens would squawk.

They would say Marie Kashpaw was down in the dirt. They would say how her husband had left her for dirt. They would say I got all that was coming, head so proud. But I would not care if Marie Kashpaw had to wear an old shroud. I would not care if Lulu I.Amartine ended up the wife of the chairman of the Chippewa Tribe. I'd still be Marie.

Marie. Star of the Sea! I'd shine when they stripped off the wax!

I had to laugh. I heard the dogs. I had waxed myself up to the table.

I knew that I was hearing Nector and Zelda come home, walking in the yard. I wrung my rag out. I had waxed myself in. I __mow thought of the letter in my pocket. Then I thought very suddenly of what this Marie who was interested in holding on to Nector should do.

I took the letter. I did what I never would expect of myself. I lifted the sugar *ar to put the letter back. Then I thought. I put the sugar down and picked up the can of salt. This was much more something I would predict of Marie.

I folded the letter up, exactly as it had been found, and I put it beneath the salt can. I did this for a reason. I would never talk about this letter but instead let him wonder. Sometimes he'd look at me, I'd smile, and he'd think to himself salt or sugar? But he would never be sure.

I sat down in a chair. I put my legs in another chair, off the floor, and I waited for him to walk up the steps. When he did, I let him come.

Step by step. I let him listen to hear if I was inside.

I let him open the door. Only when we saw each other did I stop him.

"I just put the wax down," I said. "You have to wait."

He stood there looking at me over that long, shiny s.p.a.ce. It rolled and gleamed like a fine lake between us. And it deepened.

I saw that he was about to take the first step, and I let him, but halfway into the room his eyes went dark. He was afraid of how deep this was going to become. So I did for Nector Kashpaw what I learned from the nun. I put my hand through what scared him.

I held it out there for him. And when he took it with all the strength of his arms, I pulled him in.

burn.A BRIDGE S a S (1973) It was the harsh spring that everybody thought would never end.

All the way down to Fargo on the jackrabbit bus Albertine gulped the rank, enclosed, pa.s.senger breath as though she could encompa.s.s the strangeness of so many other people by exchanging air them, by replacing her own scent with theirs. She didn't close her eyes to nap even once during travel, because this was the first time she'd traveled anywhere alone. She was fifteen years old, and she was running away from home. When the sky deepened, casting bleak purple shadows along the snow ditches, she went even tenser than when she'd first walked up the ridged stairs of the vehicle.

She watched carefully as the dark covered all. The yard lights of farms, like warning beacons upon the sea or wide-flung constellations of stars, blinked on, deceptively close.

The bus came upon the city and the lights grew denser, reflecting up into the cloud cover, a transparent orange-pink that floated over the winking points of signs and low black buildings.

The streets looked slick, deep green, from the windows of the bus.

The driver made a small rasping sound into the microphone and announced theiTarrival at the Fargo terminal.

Stepping into the bus station, the crowd of people in the hitched, plastic seats looked to Albertine like one big knot, a linked and doubled chain of coats, scarves, black-and-gray Herbst shopping bags, broad pale cheeks and noses. She wasn't sure what to do next. A chair was open. Beside it a standing ashtray bristled with b.u.t.ts, crushed soft-drink cups, flattened straws. Albertine sat down in the chair and stared at the clock. She frowned as though she were impatient for the next bus, but that was just a precaution. How long would they let her sit? This was as far as she had money to go. The compressed bundle of her jeans and underwear, tied in a thick sweater, felt rea.s.suring as a baby against her stomach, and she clutched it close.

Lights of all colors, vaguely darkened and skewed in the thick gla.s.s doors, zipped up and down the sides of buildings. She glanced all around and back to the clock again. Minutes pa.s.sed.

Slow fright took her as she sat in the chair; she would have to go out soon. How many hours did she have left? the clock said eight. She sat stiffly, counting the moments, waiting for something to tell her what to do.

Now that she was in the city, all the daydreams she'd had were useless.

She had not foreseen the blind crowd or the fierce activity of the lights outside the station. And then it seemed to her that she had been sitting in the chair too long. Panic tightened her throat.

Without considering, in an almost desperate shuffle, she took her bundle and entered the ladies' room.

Fearing thieves, she took the bundle into the stall and held it awkwardly on her lap. Afterward, she washed her face, combed and redid the tin barrette that held her long hair off her forehead, then sat in the lobby She let her eyes close. Behind her eyelids dim shapes billowed outward. Her body seemed to shrink and contract as in childish fever dreams when she lost all sense of the actual proportion of things and knew herself as bitterly small, She had come here for some reason, but couldn't remember what that was.

As it happened, then, because she didn't have anything particular in mind, the man seemed just what she needed when he appeared.

He needed her worse, but she didn't know that. He stood for an instant against the doors, long enough for Albertine to notice that iL his cropped hair was black, his skin was pale brown, thick and rough.

He wore a dull green army jacket. She caught a good look at his profile, the blunt chin, big nose, harsh brow.

He was handsome, good-looking at least, and could have been an Indian.

He even could have been a Chippewa. He walked out into the street.

She started after him. Partly because she didn't know what she was looking for, partly because he was a soldier like her father, and partly because he could have been an Indian, she followed.

It seemed to her that he had cleared a path of safety through the door into the street. But when she stepped outside he had disappeared.

She faltered, then told herself to keep walking toward the boldest lights.

Northern Pacific Avenue was the central thoroughfare of the dingy feel-good roll of Indian bars, western-wear stores, p.a.w.n shops, and Christian Revival Missions that Fargo was trying to eradicate. The strip had diminished under the town's urban renewal project: asphalt plains and swooping concrete interchanges shouldered the remaining bars into an intricate huddle, Ah-nod ILMN= lit for action at this hour.

The giant cartoon outline of a cat, eyes fringed in -pink neon, winked and switched its glittering tail. Farther down the street a cowgirl tall as a building tossed her lariat in slow heart-shaped loops. Beneath her glowing heels men slouched, pa.s.sing bags crimped back for bottlenecks.

The night was cold. Albertine stepped into the recessed door stoop of a small shop. Its window displayed secondhand toasters.

The other side of the street was livelier. She saw two Indian men, hair failing in cowlicks over their faces, dragging a limp, dazed woman between them. An alley swallowed them. Another woman in a tiger-skin skirt and long boots posed briefly in a doorway. A short round oriental man sprang out of nowhere, gesturing emphatically to someone who wasn't there. He went up the stairs of a doorway labeled Rooms.

That was the doorway Albertine decided she would try for a place to sleep, when things quieted down. For now she was content to watch, shifting from foot to foot, arms crossed over her bundle.

Then she saw the soldier again.

He was walking quickly, duffel hoisted up his shoulder, along the opposite side of the street. Again she followed. Stepping from her doorway she walked parallel with him, bundle slung from her hand and bouncing off her legs. He must have been a little over six feet. She was tall herself and always conscious of the height of men. She stopped when he paused before a windowful of pearl b.u.t.ton shirts buff Stetsons, and thick-nosed p.a.w.ned pistols. He stayed there a long time, moving from one display to the next. He was never still. He smoked quickly, Littering, dragging hard and snapping the cigarette against his middle finger. He turned back and forth, constantly aware of who was pa.s.sing or what was making what noise where.

He knew the girl had been following and watching.

He knew she was watching now. He had noticed her first in the bus station. Her straight brown hair and Indian eyes drew him, AWL even though she was too young. She was tall, strong, twice the size of most Vietnamese. It had been a long time since he'd seen any Indian women, even a breed. He had been a soldier, was now a veteran, had seen nine months of combat in the Annamese Cordillera before the NVA captured him somewhere near Pleiku.

They kept him half a year. He was released after an honorable peace was not achieved, after the evacuation. Returning home he had been fouled up in red tape, routinely questioned by a military psychiatrist, dismissed. It had been three weeks, only that, since the big C-141 and Gia Lam airfield.

He examined the p.a.w.nshop window again.

Enough of this, he thought. He turned to face her.

Her legs were long, slightly bowed. jeans lapped her toed-in boots.

She'd be good with a horse. One hand was tensed in the pocket of a cheap black nylon parka. Pa.s.sing headlights periodically hit her face-wide with strong, jutting bones. Not pretty yet, a kid trying to look old. Jailbait. She stared back at him through traffic. She was carrying a knotted bundle.

He had seen so many with their children, possessions, animals tied in cloths across their backs, under their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, bundles dragged in frail carts. He had seen them bolting under fire, arms wrapped around small packages. Some of the packages, loosely held the way hers was, exploded. Henry Lamartine Junior carried enough shrapnel deep inside of him, still working its way out, to set off the metal detector in the airport. He had been physically searched there in a small curtained booth. When he told the guard what the problem was, the man just looked at him and said nothing, dumb as stone. Henry had wanted to crush that stupid face the way you crumple a ball of wax paper.

The girl did not look stupid. She only looked young. She turned away.

He thought that she might walk off carrying that bundle. She could go anywhere. Possibility of danger. Contents of bundle that could rip through flesh and strike bone. It was as much the sense of danger, the almost sweet familiarity he hada"Mod with risk by now, as it was the attraction for her that made him put his hands out, stopping traffic, and cross to where she stood.

He turned out to be from a family she knew. A crazy LamaTtine boy.

Henry.

"I know your brother Lyman," she said. "I heard about you.

How'd you get loose?"

"I'm like my brother Gerry. No jail built that can hold me either.

" He grinned when she told him her name.

"Old Man Kashpaw know you're hanging out on NP Avenue?"

Albertine took his arm. "I'm thirsty," she said.

They walked beneath the cowgirl's lariat and found a table in the Round-Up Bar. After two drinks there they moved down the street, and kept moving on. Somewhere later that night, in the whiskey, her hand brushed his. He would not let go.

"You know any bar tricks?" she asked. "Show me one.

He dropped her hand and she made it into a fist and shoved it in her pocket. She still clutched her bundle tight between her feet, under the table. He got three steak knives and two water gla.s.ses from the bartender and brought them back to the table.

He set the gla.s.ses down half a foot apart. Then he inter lapped the knives so they made a bridge between the gla.s.s lips, a bridge of knives suspended in air.

Albertine looked at the precarious, linked edges.

She was nervous, but she didn't recognize this feeling, because it was part of a whirl in her stomach that was like excitement.

When Henry and Albertine left the bar it was very late, past last call, past closing. The streets were quiet. He put his arm around her and she stumbled once beneath its weight.

A small black-and-white television flickered on a high shelf behind the hotel desk. President Nixon's face drooped across the screen. The night clerk took Henry's ten-dollar bill, and threw it -NOW into the cash drawer and sleepily shoved a pen and lined slip across the counter toward him. The clerk was a mound of flesh tapering into a small thick skull. Waiting for the soldier to sign, he yawned so hugely that tears sprang from his eyes. It did not interest him that the man and girl, both Indian or Mexicans, whatever, signed in as Mr. and Mrs. Howdy Doody and were shacking up for the night.

Whatever. He yawned again.

Mother f.u.c.ker, Henry thought, lazy motherf.u.c.ker, aren't you?

Drunk, he had taken a violent dislike to the man. I could off this fat s.h.i.t, he told himself But Albertine was there. "Advise restraint, " he said out loud. She didn't seem to hear. The place was well off the avenue, and the short upstairs hall was quiet. Henry steered her easily before him, touching her shoulder blades through the bunched padding in the nylon jacket. He shook the thought of the fat clerk away, far as possible.

"Angel, where's your wings," he whispered into her hair.

"They should be here." He pressed the ends of his fingers hard against her jutting bones.

Her laugh was high and soft. He fumbled for the key. He was not used to having keys again and always forgot where he put them.

Groping, patting, he fished the room key from his jacket and put it to the lock. She was poised, half turned from what she might see when the door opened. He waved her in. Once she entered and stood in the hard overhead light, he saw that she was bone tired, sagging from the broad sawhorse shoulders down, her hair wrenched in a clump by the barrette.

He was drunker than she was. She had stopped after a few and let him go on drinking, talking, until he spilled too many and knew it was time to taper off.

There was no table lamp. He turned off the overhead light and left on the one over the bathroom mirror.

"Warma use the head?"

At first she shook her head dumbly, no, and looked at the floor.

But then I can close the door and he'll be out there, she thought.

ME RING.

ML: She walked past him. He heard water rush into the sink. The other sounds she tried to hide made him smile. Women are so f.u.c.king cute sometimes it hurts. It really hurts.

Don't ever want to come out of here. She leaned her forehead on cool tile.

"When angel showers," he was singing to her closed door, come your way.

They bring the flowers that bloom in May."

He steadied himself on the iron bed rails, tried to pull his boots off, went to his knees.