The Antelope Wife: A Novel Part 4

A curtain tieback solidly bolted into the wall acts as a hitching post for Sweetheart Calico. A web of makeshift restraints binds her ankles, wrists. There is even a cord around her waist, tied with complicating rosebud cloth and functioning as a sort of sleep sash. Klaus unties her and she rises, naked, yawning. She rubs one ankle with the side of her other foot and stretches her arms. She floats to the bathroom breathing an old tune-she doesn't talk to Klaus but she's always whispering songs much older and more powerful than any powwow or sweat-lodge or even sun-dance song he has ever heard. There are flushing sounds, water, a shower. She loves the shower and will stand beneath it smiling for half an hour and would stay longer if Rozin, wife of Richard Whiteheart Beads and monitor of hot water use in this joint living s.p.a.ce, didn't stop her.

"I need some hot water for cleaning," she calls from the kitchen.

Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Sat.u.r.day and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that n.o.body cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.

We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.

SHE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.

At night, she remembers running beside her mother.

Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.

When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can't get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.

Anama'e-giizhigad Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.

"Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?"

"Bug off, a.s.shole."

"She's mine," he says. "Don't touch her."

Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that n.o.body can recall that it was the war to end all wars.

"I'll be asking the Creator for some a.s.sistance," he says to his father's pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.

"I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will," he says between smokes.

The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.

Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgra.s.s love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.

Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father's sock-all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he's got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.

"You got a lip line a girl would kill for," one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father's lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a red-and-white buckshot bag. He puts the feather back into its fold of cardboard and stashes these sacred items on the highest shelf of the kitchen cabinet. He feels much better. He goes out to talk with Richard Whiteheart Beads. He coughs. A puff of smoke.

"Is that a smoke signal?" Richard says. "What are you trying to tell me?"

"Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?"

"She escaped? That's good. You can't just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women's crisis hotline. I don't want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?"

Klaus coughs.

"Oh, I got that signal," Richard says. "Me f.u.c.ked."

"That is the problem," says Klaus. "She has enslaved me with her antelope ways."

"You one sad mess," says Richard. "Let her go."

But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.

Nitam-anokii-giizhigad First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.

Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from s.h.i.t to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard's fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it's way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.

Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard-white squares and red squares-denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus's foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an a.s.sumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.

"They won't mind. They won't even notice. They never go out to the barn."

"You sure?" asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus's bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet sc.r.a.ps.

We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.

For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.

Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there'd be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.

Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.

Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays to Klaus.

Even if this land is owned by Norwegians it is still Mother Earth, thinks Klaus. Nookomis, please forgive me. I am sorry. I am doing a very tidy job of hurting you, if that makes a difference.

He takes his gloves off and says that a beer would go down good.

"Let's. .h.i.t a bar on the way home," says Richard. And so they do. And they are finished with Nitam-anokii-giizhigad.

Niizho-giizhigad Life is h.e.l.l without her tied up next to me. Klaus mourns all night and dismally wakes on the Second Work Day. All the Ojibwe do is work, you would think. Work and pray. Again the carpet ripping and the fetid stink of concrete underneath and again the thoughtful cerebral work of stacking in the barn. Stacking for the future so that the two can climb onto the neat floor from the stairs up to the hay loft and not die in a carpet quake or be swallowed up in a carpet-roll creva.s.se.

Sweetheart Calico, Sweetheart Calico. My bitter black heart is bursting open. Klaus whispers. His chest still hurts from the intense smoke-praying that he did two days before and from all the secular inhalations in the days since. There's been no clue, no lead, no sighting of the woman he kidnapped-no, she went willingly, didn't she? It's all unclear. He put her in his van at the powwow and took her home and got addicted to her.

Your s.e.x love should be declared a controlled substance, he thinks now. I am experiencing severe withdrawal. He shakes as he stuffs ripped carpet down the seams of the next layer of carpet-roll floor. He should not have done what he did-stolen her, gotten her drunk, loved her, tied her up-except she asked for it with her eyes. Which Rozin will tell him should get him ten to twenty years in Stillwater Pen.

"She never asked for nothing with her eyes," Rozin says when she finds Klaus's sweetheart. "Except for you to let her go. You compartmentalized. You put your mental processes in only part of your brain so you can enjoy yourself. Even when what you are doing is a crime."

"But she tied me up, too," says Klaus. "She tied me up with those same ropes."

"And left you there, right?"

"Yes," says Klaus in a small voice. "I thought something else was going to happen that time. She came back though of her own free will because she loves me."

"She came back because she has nowhere to go. Where did you steal her from? Where are her people?"

"They are nomadic."

"Tell that to the cops."

"They roam Montana," says Klaus.

Out where the barns are filled with hay, not carpet. Though he knows from the great rolls of carpet glued to floors of acres of malls all through Montana that this is not true and conceivably there could even be two Indians like Klaus and Richard out there disposing of old carpet on their own federal trust land where special rules apply.

Aabitoose Halfway. How is it that with all the lovely names for the months and seasons and the lyrical possibilities in the origins of this most extraordinary language, the best that can be done for Wednesday is Halfway? To where? To the end of the week or to the day of fun where we wash the floors? Aabitoose is the day Rozin goes to the bakery owned by her cousin Frank. Frank's Bakery is a real old-fashioned independent little bakery, the kind there used to be, with hand-fried doughnuts-not donuts-the ugh makes them Indian and heavier. Rozin goes to the bakery after the girls are on the school bus because she needs a coffee lift before her second job. There is also Frank himself, who has a crush on her. She likes pretending that his flirting annoys her. She doesn't go because she wants to find Klaus's girlfriend, whom he claims in his emotional confusion is part antelope.

But there she is. A dog lolls next to her.

Sweetheart Calico and the dog sit side by side on the curb just outside the shop. A car could run right over Sweetheart's tiny feet. The dog is gray, s.h.a.ggy like a coyote, nondescript. Sweetheart Calico is arrestingly graceful, but tired. She is a tired, tired woman with tangled hair, wearing a huge pair of jeans belonging to Klaus Shawano and a shirt that could belong to anybody in the neighborhood as it is a huge black T-shirt with an airbrushed buffalo stampeding away from an American flag and through a hoop of fire with an eagle screaming at its shoulder and beneath its hooves a wolf and bear also running for their lives and all of the animals surrounded by thunder and lightning. You see that exact T-shirt on every other person on the street but this particular shirt belongs to Klaus.

"Oh, my G.o.d, here you are. Are you all right, Sweetheart? Come and have a coffee with me."

Sweetheart Calico holds in her hands a fragrant, tawny, puffed-up ball of dough with a saddle of lemon jelly that quivers when she takes a bite. She throws half the pastry to the dog, who snarfs it midair. Mouth full, she follows Rozin into the bakery, where there are three tables with two chairs each that fit right against the window. Frank has a Bunn coffeemaker-just decent old-fashioned coffee-one dollar a large mug or free with any pastry.

"You forgot your free coffee," he says now to Sweetheart Calico, though he gave her the pastry too, free, and now gives her another lemon jelly doughnut.

The dog waits alertly right outside the door. Frank just smiles because all of the awkward semisuggestive lines about fresh buns and long johns were used up long ago.

"Niinimoshenh, what can I get for you?"

Rozin ignores that word, which means my sweetheart but which can also mean my s.e.x-eligible cousin. She examines the trays of chocolate eclairs, bismarcks, long johns-no scones or lumpy vegan m.u.f.fins here. She buys a cup of coffee and selects a loaf of bread. Gives it to Frank for slicing.

Rozin and Sweetheart Calico sit down with their coffees at a table in the sun of the window.

"Are you okay? Why did you run away from Klaus? Is that sucker mean to you?"

Sweetheart Calico shrugs and licks sugar off her fingers. I am lost, her look says. I don't know how I got here.

She stuffs the jelly doughnut into her mouth. The lemon filling has real lemon in it, sweet and tart.

"Do you want to come home with me? I'll let you in downstairs. You can sleep. You can shower."

Sweetheart Calico glances out the window at the dog. Rozin makes a face. "Okay, it can come too."

Frank gathers the slices from the machine into a tight transparent bag. He walks over to them holding out the loaf, so fresh it sags between his hands like an accordion.

HALFWAY DAY. If it was All the Way Day things might have gone much differently. But Rozin walks only halfway into the downstairs apartment. The dog, too, halfway in. Then it settles on the floor. Sweetheart Calico is halfway glad to get home. The twins, Cally and Deanna, do halfway well at school and make it halfway home on the bus before they sort of fight and pretty much make up. Rozin halfway wants to quit work as usual, but does not. Klaus and Richard work hard and the barn is half full when they leave. Unfortunately at home the meat is halfway cooked because the electricity has gone out and the crock-pot is cold when Rozin touches it. Then Richard and Klaus are cleaning up at the same time and you can hear them yell halfway through their showers when cold water hits their skin.

Later, Rozin is halfway through with s.e.x with Richard when she thinks of Frank Shawano holding that bread. She tries to push the picture out of her mind. What's he doing there? Get away, she thinks. No, come back. The picture makes her feel something she was not feeling before. Richard has been drinking with Klaus after work but he is not even halfway drunk. He has been patient about the half-cooked meat. He has listened with half an ear to all that his daughters did during the day. So Rozin should be at least halfway into s.e.x, which is all it really takes to satisfy Richard. But she isn't. She is somewhere else. Afterward she turns away with the sudden feeling that her heart is breaking right in . . . not half-it is shattering into golden infinitesimal fragments. It is bursting and the grains are flying fast against the sun. Her heart is pollen glinting on the wind. No, it is flour, blowing toward Frank's bakeshop wanting to get mixed into his batter with eggs and sugar and formed into a doughnut. Her heart travels faster and faster, toward Frank's deep fryer, and all the time Richard thinks she is asleep, weighted firmly in the dark that will become tomorrow.

Niiwo-giizhigad Pragmatical disappointment! Day Four. And so many other choices for this poetic day-a day near the freedom of the weekend yet not the frantic rush to get your work done . . . not yet. A day that can almost stand by itself because of its special ceremonial a.s.sociations in Ojibwe teachings. Anyway, Day Four. Day of new existence. Day of anything can happen. Day of pollen on the wind. Day of Klaus half awake tied to his own bed by Sweetheart Calico and thinking in his dream that he hears the clatter of her hooves as she runs wildly back and forth bashing into unfamiliar walls and believing that when he opens his eyes his sheets will be covered with her inky cloven erotic tracks.

Actually, she is outside playing with her new dog. Well, not new. That dog is definitely secondhand, thinks Klaus. It is a used dog, a thrift dog, at best a dollar-store animal with its skinny legs, big belly, scraggy pedigreeless fur. And its head is way big for the rest of it, like a sample fur toy that was never ma.s.s-produced but thrown into a discount bin.

I don't like that dog, he thinks. There is definitely something sinister about its big, round, grinning head.

And it growled when he took the rope out last night.

Forget about locking me in the bathroom, its look said. I'll s.h.i.t on the floor.

Then it growled worse and worse until he handed the rope to Sweetheart Calico.

AT LEAST DAY FOUR is about four, the number that the Ojibwe love best of all. Every good and sustaining thing comes in fours-seasons, directions, types of people, medicines, elements. There are four layers of the earth, four layers of the sky, four push-ups to a song, four honor beats, four pauses of the great megis on the way to Gakaabikaang and hereabouts. So why shouldn't today, which partakes of that exquisite number, be an extremely lucky day, thinks Klaus, eyes still shut, although I can feel the cords that bind my wrists and ankles tightly and I remember somewhere in the night that she wrapped her long tense legs around my body and used special antelope knots on me.

"Oh no," Klaus speaks but still doesn't open his eyes. He tries to move but can't. He whispers, "Sweetheart? Are you there?"

DAY FOUR BEGAN so well for Cally and Deanna. Instead of iron-fortified and vitamin-enriched sugarless multigrain cereal flakes, instead of the stinky-boy cackling bus, their mom brings them to the bakery for anything they want and drives them to school in her car. And says, glowing happily, "Girls, we should do this more often!"

Blood sugar peaking from the cracked glaze on the doughnuts and the eclair custard, both of them swear thrillingly that they will become A+ not B- students if this regimen is followed by their mother. Twinklingly, she laughs. They stand on the sidewalk in front of the bank of school entryway doors, waving until her car is down the street.

They look at each other and both say at once, "Is Mom okay?" Then they say in unison, "Get out of my head." They scream with laughter and walk to the doors doubled over. When the sugar wears off and smacks them to the harsh floor of the gym at 9:00 a.m. and they profess to be ill, both are sent to the school nurse, who takes their temperatures with fever strips and gives them each a plastic cup of high-fructose-enhanced orange juice. Jacked up for another few hours, they return to cla.s.s and do a prodigious pile of pre-algebra equations, which they both love. An affinity for numbers! They were born on the fourth day of the fourth month, at 4:00 and 4:04. So no wonder they are not to be mistaken for ordinary twins at all. They are mystic twins, like the twins who created the world. Only those first twins inarguably messed it up and if Cally and Deanna had a chance they would make the world properly. In fact, they make the world up all of the time. It is their favorite thing to do when they get home from school.

Cally and Deana start to draw the world after school on Niiwo-giizhigad, but the dog brought home by Sweetheart Calico interrupts. It barks as it chases Sweetheart Calico around and around in the weedy yard. The antelope woman laughs silently as she leaps on high heels, evading its teeth and paws. The dog jumps and twists in the air looking like a big gray wind-tossed rag. It isn't a very good-looking dog. Couldn't be called any one particular breed of dog. Yet a sympathy for humans shines out of its eyes and the girls fall instantly in love, not knowing that this very dog is the fourth dog of the fourth litter of the forty-fourth daughter of the dog named Sorrow.

They join in running and playing tag with the dog and with the woman whose great-grandmother on her human side slit the throat of that ancestor dog and boiled its meat so that her daughter would have the strength to travel into the blue west, wearing the same blue beads that Sweetheart Calico hides now as she leaps away from the dog, laughing that wild and silent laugh. She screams noiselessly, even as poor Klaus, whom she has freed to go to work that morning, creeps into the apartment and showers off the greasy grit of random Minneapolis citizens whose shoes mashed every form of personal grunge into the mall carpeting and transferred that human scurf to Klaus, so that he's covered utterly with the invisible populace-including refugees from every tribal and oil war in the world. And it won't wash away. Twin Cities people have entered his very pores and he has breathed them in also, so that Klaus is now inhabited by the world's thousands. Dead and living. Brand-new and ancient. Bargain-hunting ghosts inhabit Klaus on Day Four of the week as Rozin too returns from her work and says, what the h.e.l.l is going on it this madhouse but wearily smiles as her daughters are whirling and chasing and full of life and if Rozin half closes her eyes and watches them through the blur of eyelashes, she sees the inutterable grace of antelope children galloping midair.

Naano-giizhigad Oh please, you wouldn't name this day sacred to the now Ojibwe workplace just . . . Day Five. There are so many other good names for this almost-there day when you wake and think, Tomorrow I can sleep. The morning will bring the rainbows on again like the week before and Klaus can watch them cross the elegant wild structure of her face. Tomorrow for Cally and Deanna there will be drawing and a dog to play with and no more teacher's dirty looks or locker-slamming-on-your-fingers boys who suck dead rats and pretend that Cally and Deanna are Chinese or Hmong or Mexican and sneer, go back where you came from.

"That's just boys," says Rozin. "Go back where you came from! How can you say that to a Native person?"

"I'll fix 'em. I'll go right in there," says Richard.

But here it is Day Five and he and Klaus must pull up the last of the carpet.

"Go then," says Rozin.

The girls watch for a kiss between them but are disappointed. They have noticed that their mother likes to talk to Frank at the bakery and that their father's eyes follow Sweetheart Calico even though she is the girlfriend of Klaus. And all of these grown-up doings make them sick, sick, sick. They'd rather make the world over in girl image. The world would be only girls and animals and no boys or disappointing grown-ups except perhaps their mother visits bringing favorite food once every two weeks and long hugs but I could last a month, says Cally.

"n.o.body mean can live on our planet," says Deanna.

"And the dog will be our brother."

"We won't take husbands."

"Obviously."

WHY CAN'T THIS be the day of the otter, the kingfisher, the coot, the loon, the balsam tree, the moccasin flower, or the trout? The Ojibwe words for all of these lovely animals and plants are original and fluid words but in all probability some lackl.u.s.ter hard-a.s.sed missionary Jesuit like maybe Bishop Baraga the famous Snowshoe Priest put those names down in his Ojibwe dictionary in the hope of making the Ojibwe people into hard-a.s.sed lackl.u.s.ter people like him by forcing them to live every day of their lives working or praying or halfway to nowhere. Many days of the week in English go back to various ancient pagan G.o.ds (Thor's Day, Frigga's day, Saturn's Day, etc.). Naano-giizhigad would be so much better as Nanabozhoo-giizhigad. As Nanabozhoo was a great teacher who taught lessons via foul hilarity and amoral idiocy, so the day could celebrate and commemorate the great lessons learned from fools like Klaus.

For he knows he is a major doof to work for Richard on this scam, which becomes every day more deadly and strange as the carpet mounts in the barn and the checks get written out and Richard signs his name on government paperwork.

"That's government paperwork," Klaus notices.

Richard winks a movie-star wink, an old-time black-and-white-movie lip-hanging-cigarette wink. Thank G.o.d it's Naano-giizhigad and they can get the h.e.l.l out of the barn before the ghost carpet swallows them.

"It's all over, my friend," says Richard. "Let us cash these obscenely fat checks and treat our wives to a fancy dinner."

"My lady don't sit still," says Klaus. "She likes to take long walks. We buy food on the way. We keep walking."

"C'mon, say it, Klaus. She likes to graze."