The Round House Read online

  When Clemence came back, I left the house and biked to a slough outside of town. It was shallow all along the edges, and I’d seen a heron there last time I went. All the herons and cranes and other shorebirds were my doodemag, my luck. There was a dock of gray boards, some missing. I lay down on the warm wood and the sun went right into my bones. I saw no herons at first. Then I realized the piece of reedy shore I was staring at had a heron hidden in its pattern. I watched that bird stand. Motionless. Then, quick as genius, it had a small fish, which it carefully snapped down its gullet. The heron went back to standing still, this time on one leg. I was getting impatient for the luck to show itself.

  Okay, I said, where’s the luck?

  With a flare of long, pointed wings, it vaulted into the air and flapped to the other side of the lake, where the round house was, as well as the cliff and drop-off, a place we liked to swim. The prevailing winds drove waves, junk, and scudding foam to this side of the lake. I turned around, disappointed, edged up over one of the missing boards, and looked down into the shadow of the dock through the clear water of the lake. There were usually baby perch, water skimmers, tadpoles, and maybe even a turtle to watch. This time a child’s face stared up at me. Startling, but I knew it was a doll right off, a plastic doll sunk wide-eyed into the lake. Smirking like it had a secret, blue eyes with bits of sparkle in the iris catching points of sun. I jumped up, wheeled around, then kneeled back down for a better look. It occurred to me that if there was a toy there might be a real child attached to it, and that child might be wedged underneath the dock. A cloud passed over the sun. I thought of going after Cappy, but finally I got too curious and looked down again, peering through gaps between the boards. There was just the doll. A girl baby doll floating calmly along the lake bottom wearing a blue checked dress, puffy panties, and that naughty smile. As soon as I’d truly made sure there was no real child to go with it, I fished out the doll and shook it so the water trickled out the seam where the head met the molded plastic body. I wrenched the head off the doll to dump out the rest of the water, and there was my luck. Right there. The doll was packed with money.

  I pushed the head back on the doll. I looked around. All was quiet. Nobody in sight. I took off the head and examined it more closely. The doll’s head was stuffed with neatly rolled-up bills. I was thinking one-dollar bills. A hundred, maybe two. My pack was hanging behind my bike seat. I threw the doll in and pedaled toward the gas station. As I rode along I thought about my luck—there was a feeling of guilt attached. I assumed that the person who’d hidden the money in the doll was a girl, maybe even somebody that I knew. She had saved up her whole life, bills scavenged here and there, little job money, birthday money, dollars from drunk uncles. Everything she had was in that doll and she had lost it. I thought that my luck was probably temporary. There would be a pitiful ad tacked up somewhere or even in the newspaper, a hopeless message describing this doll and asking to have it back.

  When I got to the gas station, I propped my bike up by the door and put the doll underneath my shirt. Sonja was taking care of a customer. I looked at the bulletin board. There were ads for bull semen and wolf puppies, offers to sell blown-out stereo equipment, hopeful snapshots and descriptions of quarter horses, pintos, and used cars. No doll. The customer finally left. I was still cradling the doll underneath my shirt.

  What’cha got there? Sonja asked.

  Something I have to show you in private.

  I’ve heard that one before.

  Sonja laughed and I went red.

  C’mon, in here.

  We went behind the counter to the tiny closet she called her office. There was a small metal desk, chair, cot, and lamp squeezed in. I took the doll from beneath my shirt.

  Weird, said Sonja.

  I took the head off.

  Holy fuck.

  Sonja shut the closet door. She used her long pink nails to tug the roll of bills from the neck. Then she uncurled a couple. They were hundred-dollar bills. Sonja rolled the bills back up, tightly, jammed them into the doll, and put the head back on. She went out, shutting the door behind her, and got three plastic bags. Then she came back in and rolled the doll into one of the bags and wrapped another bag around that one, then used the third bag as the carrier. She was looking down at me in the dim office. Her eyes were round and their blue was dark as rain.

  Those bills are wet.

  The doll was in the lake.

  Anybody see you fish it out? Anybody see you with the doll?

  No.

  Sonja took the canvas deposit pouch out of a drawer. I knew about the pouch because she took the money to the bank twice a day. A sign at the register said, “No Money on the Premises!” Another next to it read, “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.” That the camera was fake was a big secret. Sonja got out the tan aluminum cash box that locked with a little key. She thought a moment, then she took a stack of white business envelopes out of a drawer and put them in the tin box.

  Where’s your dad?

  Home.

  Sonja dialed the home number and said, Mind if I take Joe with me doing errands? We’ll be back late afternoon.

  Where are we going? I asked.

  To my house, first.

  We took the doll in the plastic bag, the deposit pouch, and the tan box to the car. Sonja kissed Whitey as we passed and told him that she was making the deposit and was going to buy me some clothes and stuff. The implication was that she was doing for me the things that my mother would have done if she was able to get up and out.

  Sure, said Whitey, waving us off.

  Sonja always made certain that I buckled myself in and rode safe. She had an old Buick sedan that Whitey kept running, and she was a careful driver, though she smoked, flicking the ashes into a messy little pull-out ashtray. The rest of the car was vacuumed spotless. We rode out of town and turned down the road to the old place, past the horses in the pasture, who looked up at us and started forward. They must have known the sound of the car. The dogs were standing at the house, waiting. They were Pearl’s sisters—Ball and Chain. Both were black with burning yellow eyes and patches of cottontail brown here and there in their ruffs and tails. The male dog, Big Brother, had run off about a month before.

  Whitey had put a stairway and deck on the front of the house. It was made of treated lumber that hadn’t lost its sick green color yet. The house was a floaty blue. Sonja said she’d painted it that blue because of the name of the color: Lost in Space. The trim was spanking white but the aluminum storm door and solid-core interior door were old and battered. Inside, the house was cool and dim. It smelled of Pine-Sol and lemon polish, cigarettes and stale fried fish. There were four small rooms. The bedroom had a saggy double bed topped with a flowered comforter, and the window looked out on the sloping pasture and the horses. The pinto and the Appaloosa had come close to the wire at the edge of the yard. Spook whinnied, a love sound. I followed Sonja into the bedroom, where she opened her closet. Perfume wafted out. She turned around with a clothes iron in her hand and plugged it into the wall beside the ironing board. The board was set right before the window, where she could watch the horses.

  I sat down on the edge of the bed, took the doll’s head off, and gave Sonja bill after bill. She carefully ironed each one flat and dry, testing the bottom of the iron often with her finger. They were all hundreds. At first we put five bills carefully in each envelope, and folded down the flap but didn’t seal it, and put the envelope on the bed. Then we got low on envelopes and put ten bills in each one. Then twenty. Sonja gave me a tweezers and I fished the last bills out of the wrists and ankles of the doll. Sonja used a flashlight to peer down the doll’s neck. At last, I put the head back on.

  Put it back in the bag, said Sonja.

  She wiped her wrist across her forehead and upper lip. Her face was covered with beads of sweat although the heat hadn’t reached inside the house yet.

  She flapped her arms up and down, patted her armpits.

  Phew. Go out i
n the kitchen and get me some water. I gotta change my shirt.

  I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The well on the place sucked up sweet water. Sonja always kept a jug of it cold. I poured water into a Pabst Blue Ribbon glass—they collected beer glasses—and drank it down. Then I filled it back up for Sonja. I guess I wanted her to drink out of the same glass as me, though I really wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how much money might be in the envelopes. I went back in and Sonja had a fresh shirt on—pink and gray stripes that pulled wide across her chest. The shirt had a stiff white collar and a buttoned tab. She drank the water.

  Whew, she said.

  We put the envelopes into the cash bag and put the bag in the aluminum box. Sonja went to the bathroom and brushed her hair and so on. She didn’t entirely shut the door and I sat there in the kitchen looking at the bathroom wall. When she came out she had on fresh lipstick, a pink that exactly matched her fingernails and the stripes on her shirt. We went out to the car. Sonja took the doll with her in the plastic bag. She locked it in the trunk.

  We’re going to open a bunch of college savings accounts for you, said Sonja.

  First we drove to Hoopdance and were ushered past the teller to talk with a bank manager in back. Sonja said that she was opening an account for me, a savings account, and we both signed printed cards while the woman typed out the passbook in my name with Sonja as a co-signer. Sonja handed over three of the envelopes, and the woman opening the account gave her a sharp look.

  They sold his land, Sonja shrugged.

  The woman counted out the money and typed it into the passbook. She put the passbook into a little plastic envelope and gave it pointedly to me.

  I walked out with the passbook, and we drove to the other bank in Hoopdance, where we did the same thing. Only this time Sonja mentioned a big bingo win.

  I’ll say, said the bank manager.

  We kept going, drove to Argus. At one bank she said I had inherited money from my senile uncle. At another she mentioned a racehorse. Then she went back to the bingo win. It took all afternoon, us driving through the new grass pastures and crops just beginning to show. At a roadside rest stop, Sonja stopped and opened the trunk. She took out the doll in its plastic bags and dropped it in a trash can. After that, we stopped in the next town and got take-out hamburgers and french fries. Sonja wouldn’t let me drink a Coke but had some idea that orange soda was better for me. I didn’t care. I was so happy to be in a car where Sonja had to watch the road and I could glance at her breasts straining at those stripes before I looked up at her face. Every time I talked to her, I looked at her breasts. I kept the cash box on my lap and stopped thinking about the money, actually, as money. But at last when we had deposited it all and were driving toward home I went through each of the passbooks and added the numbers up in my head. I told Sonja there was over forty thousand dollars.

  It was a full-size baby doll, she said.

  How come we couldn’t keep out at least one bill? I asked. Once I thought about it, I was disappointed.

  Okay, said Sonja. Here’s the thing. Wherever that money came from? They are gonna want it back. They will kill to get it back, you know what I’m saying?

  I shouldn’t tell anybody. Duh.

  But can you do that? I’ve never known a guy who could keep a secret.

  I can.

  Even from your dad?

  Sure.

  Even from Cappy?

  She heard me hesitate before I answered.

  They’d whale on him too, she said. Maybe kill him. So you zip it and keep it zipped. On your mother’s life.

  She knew what she was saying. She knew without looking that tears started in my eyes. I blinked.

  Okay, I swear.

  We have to bury the passbooks.

  We turned down a dirt road and drove until we came to the tree that people call the hanging tree, a huge oak. The sun was in its branches. There were prayer flags, strips of cloth. Red, blue, green, white, the old-time Anishinaabe colors of the directions, according to Randall. Some cloths were faded, some new. This was the tree where those ancestors were hanged. None of the killers ever went on trial. I could see the land of their descendants, already full of row crops. Sonja took the ice scraper out of her glove compartment and we put the passbooks in the cash box. She pushed the key into her front jeans pocket.

  Remember the day.

  It was June 17.

  We traced down the sun to a point on the horizon and then walked in a straight line from where the sun would set, fifty paces back into the woods. It took us what seemed like forever to scrape out a deep hole for the box, using just that ice scraper. But we got the box in and covered it up and fit the divots back on top and scattered them with leaves.

  Invisible, I said.

  We need to wash our hands, said Sonja.

  There was some water in the ditch. We used that.

  I get it about not telling anybody, I said as we drove home. But I want shoes like Cappy’s.

  Sonja glanced over at me and almost caught me looking at the side of her breast.

  Yeah, she said. And how would you explain where you’d got the money to buy them?

  I’d say I had a job at the gas station.

  She grinned. You want one?

  Pleasure flooded into me so that I couldn’t speak. I hadn’t realized until then how much I wanted out of my house and how much I wanted to be working somewhere I could see and talk to other people, just random people coming through, people who weren’t dying right before your eyes. It frightened me to suddenly think that way.

  Hell, yes! I said.

  You don’t swear on the job, said Sonja. You’re representing something.

  Okay. We drove for a few miles. I asked what I was representing.

  Reservation-based free market enterprise. People are watching us.

  Who’s watching us?

  White people. I mean, resentful ones. You know? Like those Larks who owned Vinland. He’s been here, but he’s nice to me. Like, he’s not so bad.

  Linden?

  Yeah, that one.

  You should watch out for him, I said.

  She laughed. Whitey hates his guts. When I’m nice to him, he gets so jealous.

  How come you wanna make Whitey jealous?

  All of a sudden, I was jealous too. She laughed again and said that Whitey needed to get put in his place.

  He thinks he owns me.

  Oh.

  I was awkward, but she suddenly glanced at me, sharp, with a naughty smirk like the one on that doll’s face. Then she looked away, still smiling with manic glee.

  Yeah. Thinks he owns me. But he’ll find out he don’t, huh? Am I right?

  Soren Bjerke, special agent for the FBI, was an impassive lanky Swede with wheat-colored skin and hair, a raw skinny nose, and big ears. You couldn’t really see his eyes behind his glasses—they were always smudged, I think on purpose. He had a droopy houndlike face and a modest little smile. He made few movements. There was a way he had of keeping perfectly still and watchful that reminded me of the ajijaak. His knobby hands were quiet on the kitchen table when I walked in. I stood in the doorway. My father was carrying two mugs of coffee to the table. I could tell I’d interrupted some cloud of concentration between them. My legs went weak with relief because I understood Bjerke’s visit was not about me.

  That Bjerke was here anyway went back to Ex Parte Crow Dog and then the Major Crimes Act of 1885. That was when the federal government first intervened in the decisions Indians made among themselves regarding restitution and punishment. The reasons for Bjerke’s presence continued on through that rotten year for Indians, 1953, when Congress not only decided to try Termination out on us but passed Public Law 280, which gave certain states criminal and civil jurisdiction over Indian lands within their borders. If there was one law that could be repealed or amended for Indians to this day, that would be Public Law 280. But on our particular reservation Bjerke’s presence was a sta
tement of our toothless sovereignty. You have read this far and you know that I’m writing this story at a removal of time, from that summer in 1988, when my mother refused to come down the stairs and refused to talk to Soren Bjerke. She had lashed out at me and terrified my father. She had floated off, so that we didn’t know how to retrieve her. I’ve read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return. And yet, quite honestly, at that moment in 1988, as I looked at my father and Bjerke at our kitchen table, my brain was still stuffed with money like the head of that trashed doll with manufactured mischief in her eyes.

  I walked past Bjerke into the living room but then I didn’t want to walk upstairs. I didn’t want to walk past my mother’s shut door. I didn’t want to know that she was lying in there, breathing in there, and with her constant suffering sucking all the juice out of the excitement of the money. But because I did not want to walk past my mother’s door, I turned and went back to the kitchen. I was hungry. I stood in the doorway fidgeting until the men again stopped talking.

  Maybe you want a glass of milk, said my father. Get yourself a glass of milk and sit down. Your aunt made a cake for us. A small round chocolate cake, neatly iced, was set on the counter. My father waved me to it. I carefully cut four pieces and put them on saucers with a fork beside. I brought three of the pieces to the table. I poured myself a glass of milk.

  I’ll take that up to your mother later on, said my father, nodding at the last piece of cake.

  So I sat down with the men. And I realized I had made a mistake. Now that I was sitting in their proximity, the truth would pull at me. Not the gas can truth. But when they seemed to wait for me to speak, I threw that out, nervously, asking if it could be evidence.

  Yes, said Bjerke. His no-flinch gaze pierced the scum on his eyeglasses. We’ll do an affidavit. All in time. If we have a case.

  Yes, sir. Well, I gathered my courage, maybe we should do it now. Before I forget.

  Is he the forgetful type? asked Bjerke.