The Antelope Wife Read online

  Chapter 6

  The Antelope Woman

  KLAUS

  I used to make the circuit as a trader at the western powwows, though I am an urban Indian myself, a sanitation engineer. I’d hit Arlee, Montana. Elmo, Missoula, swing over Rocky Boy’s, and then head on down to the Crow Fair. I liked it out there in all that dry space; at first that is, and up until last year. It was restful, a comfort to let my brain wander across the mystery where sky meets earth.

  Now, that line disturbs me with its lie.

  Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. If you chase that line, it will retreat from you at the same pace you set. Heart pounding, air burning in your chest, you’ll pursue. Only humans see that line as an actual place. But like love, you’ll never get there. You’ll never catch it. You’ll never know.

  Open space plays such tricks on the brain. There and gone. I suppose it is no surprise that it was on the plains that I met my wife, my sweetheart rose, Niinimoshenh, kissing cousin, lover girl, the only one I’ll ever call my own. I take no credit for what happened, nor blame, nor do I care what people presently think of me—avoiding my eyes, trying not to step in the tracks I’ve left.

  I only want to be with her, or be dead.

  You wouldn’t think a man as ordinary as myself could win a woman who turns the heads of others in the streets. Yet there are circumstances and daughters that do prevail and certain ways. And, too, maybe I have some talents.

  I WAS SITTING underneath my striped awning there in Elmo—selling carved turtles. You never know what will be the ticket or the score. Sometimes they’re buying baby moccasins, little beaded ones the size of your big toe. Or the fad is cheap neckerchiefs, bolo slides, jingles. I can sell out before noon if I misjudge my stock, while someone else set up next to me who took on a truckload is raking the money in with both hands. At those times, all I can do is watch. But that day, I had the turtles. And those people were crazy for turtles. One lady bought three—a jade, a malachite, a turquoise. One went for seven—small. Another bought the turtle ring. It was the women who bought turtles—the women who bought anything.

  I had traded for macaw feathers also, and I got a good price on those. I had a case of beautiful old Navajo pawn which I got blessed, because the people who wore that turquoise seem to haunt the jewelry, so I believe. A piece gets sold on a sad drunk for gas money, or it’s outright stolen—what I mean is that it comes into the hands of traders in bad ways and should be watched close. I have a rare piece I never did sell, an old cast-silver bracelet with a glacier-green turquoise the shape of a wing. I have to tell you, I can hold that piece only a moment, for when I polish the pattern on some days it seems to start in my hands with a secret life, a secret pain.

  I am just putting that old piece away when they pass. Four women eating snow cones as they stroll the powwow grounds.

  Who wouldn’t notice them? They float above everyone else on springy, tireless legs. It’s hard to tell what tribe people are anymore, we’re so mixed—I’ve got a buffalo soldier in my own blood, I’m sure, and on the other side I am all Ojibwe. Though my name is Klaus, a story in itself. These ladies are definitely not from anywhere that I can place. Their dance clothes are simple—tanned hide dresses, bone jewelry, white doeskin down the front and two white doeskin panels behind. Classy, elegant, they set a new standard of simplicity. They make everyone else around them look gaudy or bold, a little foolish in their attempts to catch the eyes of the judges.

  I watch these women put their mouths on ice. They tip their faces down and delicately kiss the frozen grains. As they sip the sweet lime and blueberry juice, their black, melting eyes never leave the crowd, and still they move along. Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us.

  I take those women in like air. I breathe hard. My heart is squeezing shut. Something about them is like the bracelets of old turquoise. In spite of the secrets of those stones, there are times that I cannot stop touching and stroking their light. In that same way, I must be near those women and know more. I cannot let them alone. I look at my setup—van, tent, awning, beads, chairs, scarves, jewelry, folding tables, a cashbox, the turtles—and I sit as calmly as I can at my trading booth among these things. I wait. But when they don’t notice me, I decide I must act bold. I trade store-minding with my neighbor, a family from Saskatoon, and then I follow the women.

  Tiptoeing just behind at first, then trotting faster, I almost lose them, but I am afraid to get too close and be noticed. They finish circling the arbor, enter during the middle of an intertribal song, and dance out into the circle together. I lean against a pole to watch. Some dancers, you see them sweating, hear their feet pound the sawdust or grass or the Astroturf or gym floor, what have you. Some dancers swelter and their faces darken with the effort. Others, you never understand how they are moving, where it comes from. They’re at one with their effort. Those, you lose your heart to and that’s what happens to me—I sink down on a bench to watch these women and where usually I begin to drift off in my thoughts, this morning I am made of smoothest wood. They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.

  Their hair is fixed in different ways. The oldest daughter pulls hers back in a simple braid. The next one ties hers in a fancy woven French knot. The hair of the youngest is fastened into a smooth tail with a round shell hairpiece. Their mother—for I can tell she is their mother mainly by the way she moves with a sense of all their consolidated grace—her hair hangs long and free.

  Dark as heaven, with roan highlights and arroyos of brown, waves deep as currents, a river of scented nightfall. In her right hand she holds a fan of the feathers of a red-tailed hawk. Those birds follow the antelope to fall on field mice and gophers the moving herd stirs up. Suddenly, as she raises the fan high, my throat chills. I hear in the distance and in my own mind and heart the high keer of the stooping hawk—a lonely sound, coldhearted, intimate.

  BACK AT MY TABLES, later, I place every item enticingly just so. I get provisions of iced tea and soda and I sit down to wait. To scout. Attract, too, if I can manage, but there isn’t much I can do about my looks. I’m broad from sitting in my foldable chair, and too cheerful to be considered dangerously handsome. My hair, I’m proud of that—it’s curly and dark and I wear it in a tail or braid. But my hands are thick and clumsy. Their only exercise is taking in and counting money. My eyes are too lonesome, my lips too eager to stretch and smile, my heart too hot to please.

  No matter. The women come walking across the trampled grass and again they never notice me, anyway. They go by the other booths and ponder some tapes and point at beaded belt buckles and Harley T-shirts. They order soft drinks, eat Indian tacos, get huckleberry muffins at a lunch stand. They come by again to stand and watch the Indian gambling, the stick games. They disappear and suddenly appear. The mother is examining her daughter’s foot. Is she hurt? No, it’s just a piece of chewing gum that’s stuck. All day I follow them with my eyes. All day I have no success, but I do decide which one I want.

  Some might go for the sprig, the sprout, the lovely offshoot, the younger and flashier, the darker-hooded eyes. Me, I’m strong enough, or so I think, to go for the source: the mother. She is all of them rolled up in one person, I figure. She is the undiluted vision of their separate loveliness. The mother is the one I will try for. As I am falling into sleep I imagine holding her, the delicate power. My eyes shut, but that night I am troubled in my dreams.

  I’m running, running, and still must run—I’m jolted awake, breathing hard. The camp is dark. All I’ve got is easily packed and I think maybe I should take the omen. Break camp right this minute. Leave. Go home. Back to the city, Gakaabikaang, where everything is set out clear in lines and neatly labeled, where you can hid
e from the great sky, forget. I consider it and then I hear the sounds of one lonely passionate stick game song still rising, an old man’s voice pouring out merciless irony, no catch in his throat.

  I walk to the edge of the rising moon.

  I stand listening to the song until I feel better and am ready to settle myself and rest. Making my way through the sleeping camp, I see the four women walking again—straight past me, very quickly and softly now, laughing. They move like a wave, dressed in pale folds of calico. Their pace quickens, quickens some more. I break into a jog and then I find that I am running after them, at a normal speed at first, and then straining, putting my heart into the chase, my whole body pedaling forward, although they do not seem to have broken into a run themselves. Their supple gait takes them to the edge of the camp, all brush and sage, weeds and grazed-down pastures, and from there to alive hills. A plan forms in my mind. I’ll find their camping place and mark it! Go by with coffees in the morning, take them off guard. But they pass the margin of the camp, the last tent. I pass too. We keep looping into the moonlighted spaces, faster, faster, but it’s no use. They outdistance me. They pass into the darkness, into the night.

  My heart is squeezing, racing, crowded with longing, and I need help. It must be near the hour that will gray to dawn. Summer nights in high country are so short that the birds hardly stop singing. Still, at dawn the air goes light and fresh. Now the old man whose high, cracked voice was joyfully gathering in money at the gambling tent finally stops. I know him, Jimmy Badger, or know of him anyway as an old medicine person spoken about with hushed respect. I can tell his side has won, because the others are folding their chairs with clangs and leaving with soft grumbles. Jimmy is leaning on a grandson. The boy supports him as he walks along. Jimmy’s body is twisted with arthritis and age. He’s panting for breath. They pause, I come up to him, shake hands, and tell him I need advice.

  He motions to his tired grandson to go to bed. I take the medicine man’s arm and lead him over tough ground to where my van is parked. I pull out a lawn chair, set it up, lower him into it. Reaching into my stores, I find an old-time twist of tobacco, and I give it to him. Then I add some hanks of cut beads and about eight feet of licorice for his grandkids. A blanket, too, I give him that. I take out another blanket and settle it around his back, and I pour a thermos cap of coffee, still warm. He drinks, looking at me with shrewd care. He’s a small man with waiting intrigue in his eyes, and his gambler’s hands are gnarled to clever shapes. He has a poker-playing mouth, a head of handsome iron-gray hair that stretches down behind. He wears a beat-up bead-trimmed fedora with a silver headband and a brand-new denim jacket he’s probably won in the blackjack tents.

  I’m an Ojibwe, I say to him, so I don’t know about the plains much. I am more a woods Indian, a city-bred guy. I tell Jimmy Badger that I’ve got a hunting lottery permit and I’m going to get me an antelope. I need some antelope medicine, I say. Their habits confuse me. I need advice on how to catch them. He listens with close attention, then smiles a little crack-toothed pleasant smile.

  “You’re talking the old days,” he says. “There’s some who still hunt the antelope, but of course the antelope don’t jump fences. They’re easy to catch now. Just follow until they reach a fence. They don’t jump over high, see, they only know how to jump wide.”

  “They’ll get the better of me then,” I say. “I’m going to hunt them in an open spot.”

  “Oh, then,” he says. “Then, that’s different.”

  At that point, he gets out his pipe, lets me light it, and for a long time after that he sits and smokes.

  “See here.” He slowly untwists his crushed body. “The antelope are a curious kind of people. They’ll come to check anything that they don’t understand. You flick a piece of cloth into the air where you’re hiding, a flag. But only every once in a while, not regular. They’re curious, they’ll stop, they’ll notice. Pretty soon they’ll investigate.”

  NEXT DAY, THEN, I set up my booth just exactly the same as the day before, except I keep out a piece of sweetheart calico, white with little pink roses. When the women come near, circling the stands again, I flicker the cloth out. Just once. It catches the eye of the youngest and she glances back at me. They pass by. They pass by again. I think I’ve failed. I wave the cloth. The oldest daughter, she turns. She looks at me once over her shoulder for the longest time. I flick the cloth. Her eyes are deep and watchful. Then she leans back, laughing to her mother, and she tugs on her sleeve.

  In a flash, they’re with me.

  They browse my store. I’m invisible at first, but not for long. Once I get near enough I begin to fence them with my trader’s talk—it’s a thing I’m good at, the chatter that encourages a customer’s interest. My goods are all top-quality. My stories have stories. My beadwork is made by relatives and friends whose tales branch off in an ever more complicated set of barriers. I talk to each of the women, make pleasant comments, set up a series of fences and gates. They’re very modest and polite women, shy, stiff maybe. The girls talk just a little and the mother not at all. When they don’t get a joke they lower their lashes and glance at one another with a secret understanding. When they do laugh they cover their lovely calm mouths with their hands. Their eyes light with wonder when I give them each a few tubes of glittering cut beads, some horn buttons, a round-dance tape.

  They try to melt away. I keep talking. I ask them if they’ve eaten, tell them I’ve got food, and show them my stash of baked beans, corn, fry bread, molasses cookies. I make them up heaped plates and I play a little music on the car radio. I keep on talking and smiling and telling my jokes until the girls yawn once. I catch them yawning, and so I open my tent, pitched right near, so nice and inviting. I tell them they are welcome to lie down on the soft heap of blankets and sleeping bags. Their dark eyes flare, they look toward their mother, wary, but I fend off their worry and wave them inside, smiling the trader’s smile.

  Alone together. Me and her. Their mother listens to me nice and gentle. I let my look linger just a little, closer, until I find her eyes. And when our eyes do meet, we stare, we stare, we cannot stop looking. Hers are so black, full of steep light and wary. Mine are brown, searching, anxious, I am sure. But we hold on and I can only say that for what happens next I have no adequate excuse.

  We get into the van while she is still caught by the talk, the look. I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about, a way that wasn’t the way of the girls’ father. Sure, maybe desperate. Maybe even wrong, but she doesn’t know how to resist. Like I say, I get her in my van. I start to play a soft music she acts like she never heard before. She smiles a little, nervous, and although she doesn’t speak, uses no words anyway, I understand her looks and gestures. I put back the seat so it’s pleasant to recline and watch the dusky sky and then I pamper her.

  “You’re tired, sleep,” I say, giving her a cup of hot tea. “Everything’s all right with your daughters. They’ll be fine.”

  She sips the tea and looks at me with dreaming apprehension, as though I’m a new thing on earth. Her eyes soften, her lips part. Suddenly, she leans back and falls hard asleep. Something that I forgot to tell—us Anishinaabeg have a few teas we brew for very special occasions. This is one. A sleep tea, a love tea. Oh yes, there’s more. There’s more that Jimmy Badger told me.

  “YOU’RE SHIFTY LIKE all those woods Indians,” Jimmy Badger said. “I see that trader’s deception. If you’re thinking about those women, don’t do it,” he said. “Long time ago, we had a girl who lived summers with the antelope. In the winters she brought her human daughters to the camp. They could not keep up with her people as they moved on in the bitter cold, the frozen pastures, scattering across the plains. Don’t go near them if that is what you’re thinking of doing. We had a man who did once. Followed them, wrestled one down. Made love to her and was never the same. Few men can handle t
heir love ways. Besides, they’re ours. We need them and we take care of these women. Descendants.”

  “They might be,” I said. “Or they might just be different.”

  “Oh, different,” agreed Jimmy. “For sure.”

  He looked at me keenly, grabbed me with his eyes, kept talking. His voice was remote and commanding.

  “Our old women say they appear and disappear. Some men follow the antelope and lose their minds.”

  I was stubborn. “Or maybe they’re just a family that’s a little unusual, or wild.”

  “Leave,” said Jimmy Badger. “Leave now.”

  BUT IN MY HEART, I knew I was already caught. The best hunter allows his prey to lead, not the other way around. That hunter doesn’t force himself to figure and track, just lets himself be drawn to the meeting. That’s what I did.

  Suddenly I have her there with me in the van, and she is fast asleep. I sit and watch her for a long time. I am witched. Her eyelashes are so long that, when the light from the outdoor flood lamps comes on, they cast faint shadows on her cheeks. Her breath has the scent of grass and her hair of sage. I want to kiss her forever. My heart’s a panic on my sleeve.

  I drive off. Yes, I do. I drive off with this woman while her daughters are breathing softly, there in the tent, unconscious. I leave the girls all of my trade beads and fancy pawn and jewelry, everything that was stored in the corner of the tent. The miles go by, the roads empty. The Missions rear before us, throwing fire off sheer rock faces. Then we’re past those mountains into more open country. My sweetheart wakes up, confused and tired. I tell her jokes and stories, list for her strange or valuable things people throw away. Trading is my second nature, but garbage supports me. I’m in the waste haul business. Me and my partner, or boss I suppose you’d have to say, contract with the city even, big companies, little ones. I drive through the day. I drive through the night. Only when I am so exhausted that I’m seeing double, do I finally stop.