The Round House Page 18

  She put her hand on my back, an auntielike gesture. She steered me forward. We went into the store and were alone together. She reached behind the counter for what she needed. I didn’t care how elusive LaRose was, I’d question her. I asked her if she was related to Mayla Wolfskin.

  She’s my cousin, lots younger than me, said LaRose. Her dad was Crow Creek.

  Did you grow up with her?

  LaRose lazily lit a cigarillo and snapped out the match with exaggerated wrist swipes.

  What’s going on?

  I just want to know.

  You a FBI, Joe? I told that white guy with the dirty eyeglasses that Mayla went to boarding school in South Dakota, then was going on to Haskell. There was this program where they took the smartest ones to have a special job in the government, something like that. Gave a stipend of money, everything. Mayla got in the papers—my aunt clipped the article. Chosen for an internship. She looked so nice. Wearing a white headband, jumper she probably made in Home Ec, knee socks. I know that much. She worked for that one governor, you know. He did all those bad things. Nothing stuck to him.

  Sonja walked inside and sold LaRose the cigarillos she was already smoking. I looked outside and saw that Whitey was headed for the Dead Custer.

  Ah, shit, said Sonja. That’s no good.

  LaRose said, My tire.

  I’ll fix it.

  She smiled at me—the reflection of a smile. She had a sad calm face that never really lighted up. Her delicate silken brown skin had fine lines if you were close enough to smell her signature rose powder. A silver tooth glinted when she smoked.

  Have a go at it, my boy.

  I wanted to ask her more about Mayla, but not with Sonja around. First I went and found the wrench in the weeds. When I came back, I saw that the women had brought lawn chairs and set them up in a crack of shade next to the building. They were sipping cream sodas.

  Go ahead! Sonja waved. Smoke drifted from her fingers. I’ll take care of customers, if we get any.

  I stared at the lug nuts. Then I got up and went into Whitey’s garage and got the ratchet.

  Oooh, said LaRose when I brought that out.

  Good choice, said Sonja.

  I got the right-sized socket to fit the wrench on the old nut. I poured all of my strength down on the handle. But it didn’t budge. From behind me I heard Cappy, Zack, and Angus take the jump on their bikes and land by the pumps in a swirl of grit.

  I turned around. Sweat was dripping off me.

  What’cha got? asked Cappy.

  They ignored LaRose and, more elaborately, Sonja. They came up to stand around the flat.

  Rusted out, man.

  They each tried the ratchet. Zack even balanced on the handle and gently bounced, but the nut seemed soldered on. Cappy asked for Sonja’s lighter, applied flame. That didn’t work either.

  You got WD-40?

  I showed Cappy where it was on Whitey’s tool bench. Cappy squirted a tiny bit around the base and rubbed dust on the nut and inside the socket. He fit the wrench on, tighter.

  Step on it again, he said to Angus.

  This time it gave, and we left the car jacked up while we rolled the tire into the garage. Whitey had a stock tank set up in there to find the holes in tires, and he was good at putting in a seal, but of course he was over at the Dead Custer.

  I came out and looked at Sonja.

  Maybe you should get him, she said, looking away, and I noticed that she’d taken out her stud earrings.

  We got Whitey out after only three beers. LaRose got her tire fixed. We had a sudden rush and then everything quieted down. We closed the place and got into the truck. Neither of them touched the tape deck. We rode back silently but Sonja and Whitey just seemed tired now, all done in by the heat. At home, things went as usual—I helped Sonja with the chores. We ate, nobody saying much. Whitey drank, morose, but Sonja stuck to 7Up. I fell asleep on the couch with a fan blowing on me and Sonja’s hair swirling gently around her profile in the sapphire light.

  There was a crash. The lights were out and there was no moon. Everything was black but the fan still stirred the air around me. In the bedroom, low vehemence. Steady grating of Whitey’s voice. A heavy thud. Sonja.

  Quit that, Whitey.

  He give ’em to you?

  There’s no he. It’s just you, baby. Lemme go. The crack of a slap, a cry. Don’t. Please. Joe’s out there.

  Doan fucking care.

  Now he was calling her names one after another.

  I got up and went to the door. My blood pulsed and swam. The poison that was wasting in me thrilled along my nerves. I thought I’d kill Whitey. I was not afraid.

  Whitey!

  There was silence.

  Come out and fight me!

  I tried to remember what he’d taught me about blocking punches, keeping my elbows in, chin down. He finally opened the door and I jumped back with my dukes up. Sonja had put the lamp on. Whitey was wearing yellow boxer shorts patterned with hot red chili peppers. His fifties hairdo hung off his forehead in strings. He put up his hands to slick it back and I punched him in the gut. The punch reverberated up my arm. My hand went numb. I broke it, I thought, and was exhilarated. I swung at him again but he pinned my arms and said, Oh shit, oh shit. Joe. Me and Sonja. This is just between us, Joe. Stay out of it. You ever hear of cheating? Sonja’s cheating. Some prick gave her diamond earrings—

  Rhinestone, she interjected.

  I know diamonds when I see ’em.

  He let me go and stepped away. He tried to reclaim some dignity. He put his hands up.

  I won’t touch her, see? Even though some prick she’s stringing along bought her diamond earrings. I won’t touch her. But she is dirty. His eyes rolled toward her, red with weeping now. Dirty. Someone else, Joe . . .

  But I knew that wasn’t true. I knew where those earrings came from.

  I gave ’em to her, Whitey, I said.

  You did? He swayed. He’d had a bottle in the room. How come you gave her earrings?

  It was her birthday.

  A year ago.

  Asshole, what’s it to you! I found those studs in the bathroom at the gas station. And you’re right. They aren’t rhinestones. I think they are genuine cubic zirconiums.

  Okay, Joe, he said. Fancy talk.

  He looked tearfully at Sonja. Propped himself against the door. Then he frowned at me. Asshole, what’s it to you! he muttered. Some way to talk to your uncle. You crossed a line, boy. He held out the hand with the bottle and pointed his middle finger at me.

  You. Crossed. A. Line.

  Well, she’s my aunt, I said. So I can give her a birthday present. Asshole.

  He killed the bottle, threw it behind him, swelled big, and leaned forward. You got it coming, little man!

  There was a splintering crack, and he sagged, his arms clutching his head. Sonja kicked him out of the doorway onto the living room floor and said, Step around him. Watch the glass. You come in here, Joe.

  Then she locked the door behind me.

  Get in, she said, pointing at the bed. Go straight to sleep. I’m sitting up.

  She sat down in the rocking chair and put the neck of the broken bottle carefully on the side table at her elbow. I got into the bed between the sheets. The pillow smelled like Whitey’s tart hair gel and I pushed it away and lay on my arm. Sonja turned the light off and I stared into the lightless air.

  He could be dead out there, I said.

  No, he ain’t. That was an empty. ’Sides, I know just how hard to hit him.

  Bet he says that about you, too.

  She didn’t answer.

  Why’d you say that? she said. Why’d you say you gave me them earrings?

  Because I did.

  Oh, the money.

  I’m not stupid.

  She was quiet. Then I heard her crying softly.

  I wanted something nice, Joe.

  See what happened?

  Yeah.

  It’s like you said.
Don’t touch the money. And where’d you put the earrings?

  I threw them out.

  No you didn’t. Those are diamonds.

  But she didn’t answer. She just kept rocking.

  The next morning Sonja and I left early. I didn’t see Whitey.

  He’s gonna walk it off in the woods, said Sonja. Don’t worry. He’ll be good for a long time now. But maybe you better stay with Clemence tonight.

  We rode to town, no music. I watched the ditches out the side window.

  Let me off right now, I said as we passed by Clemence’s and our turnoff. Because I quit.

  Oh, honey, no, she said. But she pulled over and stopped the car. Her hair was up in a ponytail, a green bow tied around it. She wore a flashy green track suit with white piping, and spongy shoes. That day she had painted her lips a deep carmine red. I must have given her a very long tragic look because she said, Oh, honey, no, again. I was thinking something of this sort: that deep red of her lips, if it were printed on me, kissed on me, would become a burning solidified blood that would brand itself into my flesh and leave a black seared brand shaped like the lips of a woman. I felt sorry for myself. I still loved her, worse than ever, even though she had betrayed me. Her blue eyes had a devious sheen.

  Come on, she said. I’m onna need help. Please?

  But I got out of the car and walked up the road.

  The back kitchen door was open. I walked in and called out.

  Auntie C?

  She came up from the cellar with a jar of Juneberry jam and said she thought I had a job.

  I quit.

  That’s lazy. You get back there.

  I shook my head and wouldn’t look at her.

  Oh. They at it again? Whitey’s back at it?

  Yeah.

  You stay here then. You can sleep in Joseph’s old room—the sewing room now, but anyway. Mooshum’s in Evey’s room. I set up a cot for him there. He won’t sleep on Evey’s soft bed.

  That day I helped Clemence out. She kept a nice garden like my mother used to and her snap peas were in already. Uncle Edward was working on his backyard pond, trying to get the drainage and flowage just right, measuring mosquito larvae, and I helped him too. Whitey dropped my bike off, but I never went out and saw him. We ate fried venison with mustard and browned onions. Their television was as usual in the repair shop sixty miles away and I was sleepy. Mooshum tottered off to Evey’s room and I went to Joseph’s. But when I opened the door to the room and saw the sewing machine wedged in next to the bed and the folded stacks of fabric and the wall board covered with hundreds of spools of bright thread, when I saw the quilt pieces and the shoe box labeled Zippers and the same heart-shaped pincushion only Mom’s was dusty green, I thought of my father entering our sewing room every night and how the loneliness had seeped from under the door of the sewing room then spread across the hall and tried to get to my bedroom. I said to Clemence, You think it would bother Mooshum if I bunked with him?

  He talks in his sleep.

  I don’t care.

  Clemence opened Evey’s door and asked if Mooshum minded, but already he was lightly snoring. Clemence said it was fine, so I shut myself in the room. I shed my clothes and crawled into my grown-up cousin’s bed, which was plush and saggy and smelled of dust. Mooshum’s snore was a very old man’s hypnotizing purr. I fell immediately asleep. Sometime right after moonrise, for there was light in the room, I woke. Mooshum was talking all right, so I rolled over and stuck a pillow over my head. I dozed off, but something he said hooked me in, and little by little, like a fish reeled up out of the dark, I began to surface. Mooshum was not just talking in the random disconnected way people do, blurting out scraps of dream language. He was telling a story.

  Akii

  At first she was just an ordinary woman, said Mooshum, good at a number of things—weaving nets, snaring rabbits, skinning out and tanning hides. She liked the liver of the deer. Her name was Akiikwe, Earth Woman, and like her namesake she was solid. She had heavy bones and a short, thick neck. Her husband, Mirage, appeared and disappeared. He looked at other woman. She had caught him many times but stayed with him. He was a resolute hunter in spite of his ways and the two of them were good at surviving. They could always get food for their children, and even extra meat would come their way, for she especially, Akii, could make out in dreams where to find the animals. She had a shrewd heart and an endless stare, with which she kept her children in line. Akii and her husband were never stingy, and as I say they were always very good at finding food even in the dead of winter—that is, until the year they forced us into our boundary. The reservation year.

  A few had broken soil like the white man, and put some seeds in the ground, but a real farm takes many years to build until it keeps you alive in winter. We hunted all the animals before the Moon of Little Spirit and there wasn’t even a rabbit left. The government agent had promised supplies to tide us over for the loss of our territory, but these never came through. We left our boundaries and ranged back up into Canada, but the caribou were long gone, there were no beaver left, no muskrats even. The children cried and an old man boiled strips of his moosehide pants for them to chew on.

  During this time, every day, Akii went out and she always came back with some small tidbit. She chopped an ice hole and with great effort she and her husband kept it open day and night, so they fished there until she hooked a fish that said to her, My people are going to sleep now and you shall starve. Sure enough, she could not get another fish after that. She saw Mirage looking at her strangely, and she looked strangely back at him. He kept the children behind him as they slept and the axe with him in his blanket. He was tired of Akii so he pretended he could see it happen. Some people in these hungry times became possessed. A wiindigoo could cast its spirit inside of a person. That person would become an animal, and see fellow humans as prey meat. That’s what was happening, her husband decided. He imagined that her eyes were starting to glow in the dark. The thing to do was you had to kill that person right away. But not before you had agreement in the matter. You couldn’t do it alone. There was a certain way the killing of a wiindigoo must be done.

  Mirage got some men together, and persuaded them that Akii was becoming very powerful and would soon go out of control. She had cut her arm for her baby to drink the blood, so that baby might go wiindigoo too. She stared as if she might pounce on her children and followed their every movement. And then, when they tried to tie her up, she struggled. It took six men to do it, and they came out the worse for their work—bitten and gouged. Another woman took the children away so they would not see what was to happen. But one, the oldest boy, was left. The only person who could kill a wiindigoo was someone in the blood family. If her husband killed her, Akiikwe’s people might take revenge. It could have been a sister or a brother, but they refused. So the boy was given a knife and told to kill his mother. He was twelve years old. The men would hold her. He should cut her neck. The boy began to weep, but he was told that he must do it anyway. His name was Nanapush. The men urged him to kill his mother, tried to buck up his courage. But he got angry. He stuck the knife into one of the men who was holding his mother. But the man had on a skin coat and the wound wasn’t very deep.

  Ah, said his mother, you are a good son. You will not kill me. You’re the only one I will not eat! Then she struggled so powerfully that she broke away from all of the men. But they wrestled her down.

  He knew, Nanapush, that she had just threatened to eat those men because she was being tormented. She was a good mother to her children and had taught them how to live. Now the men brought her back tied in cords. Her husband bound her to a tree and left her there to freeze or starve. She screamed and fought the straps, but then grew quiet. They thought she must be getting weak so they left her alone that night. But the chinook wind came through and the air turned mild. She ate the snow. There must have been some good in the snow, because with her strong fingers she undid the knots and untied the cords. She began to walk
away. Her son crawled from the tent and decided to go with her, but they were followed and overtaken when they reached the lake. Again, the men tied her up.

  Now Mirage enlarged the very hole Akii had fished, where the ice was thinner. The men decided to put her down into the water, all of them, so no one had to take the blame. They strengthened those bindings and this time they attached a rock to her feet. Then they stuffed her down the hole into the freezing water. When she did not come up, they walked away, except her son, who wouldn’t go with them. He sat on the ice there and sang her death song. As his father passed him, the boy asked for his gun and said that he would shoot his mother if she came out.

  Maybe at that moment his father wasn’t thinking straight, because he gave his gun to Nanapush.

  Once the men were out of sight, Akii crashed her head from the hole. She had managed to kick free of the rock, and breathed the air that sits just beneath the surface of the ice. Nanapush helped her out of the water and put his blanket on her. Then they went into the woods and walked until they were too weak to walk anymore. The mother had her flint and striker in a pocket next to her skin. They made a fire and a shelter. Akii told her son that while she was underwater the fish spoke to her and said he felt sorry for her, and that she should have a hunting song. She sang this song to her son. It was a buffalo song. Why a buffalo song? Because the fish missed the buffalo. When the buffalo came to the lakes and rivers on hot summer days, they shed their tasty fat ticks for the fish to eat, and their dung drew other insects that the fish liked too. They wished the buffalo would come back. They asked me where the buffalo had gone, said Akii. I couldn’t tell them. The boy learned the song, but said he wondered if it was useless. Nobody had seen a buffalo for years.

  The two slept that night. They slept and slept. When they woke, they were so weak that they thought it would be easier to die. But Nanapush had some wire for a snare. He crawled out and set that snare a few feet away from their little shelter.

  If a rabbit is snared, it will tell me where the animals are, said Akii.

  They went to sleep again. When they woke, there was a rabbit struggling in the snare. The mother crept to the rabbit and listened to what it said. Then she crept back to her son with the rabbit.