Copyright © 1996 Louise Erdrich.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-06-017605-9
Chapter One
"Oh, Christ, don't tell me." But he was unaffected, feeling the pain but not caring anymore. There was just a buoyant ease he'd have to monitor, control so it did not shoot him skyward too quickly. So it did not send him whirling, like the cat.
"I have a cat."
"What's its name?
"Doesn't have a name."
"If you had a cat, it would have a name.
She took a long drink, held the liquor in her mouth, swallowed.
"I have a son, " she said, after a few moments.
Jack didn't want to touch that.
"We'll go back to my motel. The cat's lonely there. I've got a whole, ah, suite--we'll visit him. He clawed my leg this morning." Jack pointed.
"Where?" She laughed suddenly, a little painfully, too hard. Stopped when Jack stared overlong at her.
"Come on, let's go check the cat. "
"No way." She looked serious, put down her drink. "I've got a bus to catch."
"Where you going?
Her gaze flickered up to his and then held steady.
"Home."
It was later, much later, the dental appointment missed. She refused again to visit the cat but went along with him as he made his rounds. One bar, the next. By then she maybe knew who he was although he lied and said that he did not know his mother's maiden name, or his grandmother's. His family would say too much to the woman, make her wary of him. So he pretended that he was adopted, taken out of the tribe too young to remember.
"Raised white?" She frowned.
"Don't I look it?"
"You act it. How's your tooth?
It came to life, a flare of anguish.
"I need another drink. A double. I drink like an Indian though, huh?"
Mistake. She didn't think that was funny, didn't laugh. After a bit, she asked somebody next to her the time and frowned gently, troubled.
"I missed my bus, Andy."
"My fault." He had given her a fake name. "Here, you need a refill too."
Her hair was long, fine, slightly wavy, caught up in a cheap clip. He reached around and undid the barrette. At once, electric, her hair billowed around her face in a dark cloud. Storm's rising. He closed his eyes, imagined it falling in blowing scarves around his own face as her mouth lowered to meet his. Her hidden mouth. He kept wanting to press his finger on her tooth, line it up with the others. It would require an ever so slight tap. Her mouth was even prettier than when she first smiled--as she relaxed a deep curve formed in her lower lip. Very sad, though, her eyes watching him so close sometimes. He put away his money.
"Hey," she mumbled, once. "You got to be."
He did not want to ask her what, but he did, tightening his arm around her. She would have told him anyway.
"You got to be different," she breathed.
He pretended not to hear.
"I know you," she said, louder. "You're the one. You're him.
He shrugged off her words. The afternoon darkened and the beer lamps went on--bright colors, wagons and horses, fake Tiffany. Still, they kept drinking. They kept drinking and then they met up with some people. They got hungry, or needed something to do, anyway. They went out to eat. Steak, baked potato, salad with French dressing. She ordered these things in a shy voice, polite, say-ing thank you when the waitress set them down before her. As she put the first taste of meat in her mouth, she sighed, tried not to gulp it too quickly, put her fork down every second bite. She was hardly drinking anything by then. He caught her gaze once. His face was falling toward hers. Falling. Her face was still, a waiting pool, regarding him with kindness. The hard lines around her eyes had smudged into a softer mystery. Eyes half closed, she smiled over at him, and, suddenly, he realized she was the most precious, the most beautiful, the most extraordinary treasure of a woman he had ever known.
"Jack." A buddy of his, a roommate sometimes, nudged him. "Your squaw called you Andy.
"Shut up. You're an asshole."
Laughter. Laughter.
"We're leaving."
"Aw, c'mon."
"No hard feelings."
"Just a joke."
"We're getting married." He spoke into his buddy's face, put his arm around the woman's shoulders, very carefully, underneath her hair. He felt her thin shoulder blades, stroked her slim arm. Her hand went up to his immediately, clasped his fingers in what seemed to him a very sweet, a childlike way, as if he were somehow going to protect her. "Is there a reverend in the house?" Jack bawled, crossing over to the bar. "Ship's captain? Priest?"
Immediately beside him, a man sitting on a padded stool answered in a soothing voice, half sloshed yet genteel.
"I'm available. Would you like to see my card.
Card produced. Certified reverend. Be double damned.
"Yo. Best man? Where are you?"
A false power surged up in Jack. He tossed back another drink, bought one for his bride, too, a double. Yet another. Then they both were laughing and the people they'd met up with were engaged as witnesses. Jack held a twenty in the fork of his fingers for the reverend. They were put into formation, weaving, vision tunneling into dark space so they could hardly fit their fingers into their beer-can pop-top wedding rings. The certified reverend adjusted his glasses and rumpled his hair and said the words, made them answer, said the words again. Slurred and solemn, but legal to a certain degree. Hold up in court! he promised more than once. Jack lurched. Andy, he regave the fake name. Hers, what? May? June? Some month. The matchbook preacher's smile twitched as he pronounced them man and wife.
They rode out of town for miles on the highway, then turned, aimless, bounced out farther, slowly on the old road, gravel. She sat right next to him, her hand on his thigh. The cat claw marks stung. He knew that he would make love with her, knew it--well, they were married, right? Honeymoon time. She was so quiet. She seemed smaller next to him, light as a girl. For several hours she'd been drinking slower. She'd nursed her last one along until he gulped it for her. She was older than him, by more than he thought at first. But those years, her overlapped tooth, her sad eyes made him ache for her, painfully, with more than the usual. More. Different. She was right.
She'd take him in like a stray, he vaguely felt, protect him the way she thought he was protecting her. Once he entered her he would be safe. He would be whole. He would be easy with who he was, and it would all turn out. His life. By climbing into her body, he would exist. So when they stopped and when he turned to her he was roaring inside, loud as the heater, his blood burning, hands heavy. Hands slow moving. He pushed up her knitted top and her breast curved warm at his mouth. Then a white screen showed, blank.
With sinking embarrassment, he realized that he was not hard. Then worse. Tears were sliding down his face.
His skin, painfully tender all of a sudden, registered each hot trail. The tears itched and stung. He put his head down, stopped moving, breathed slow. She shook him, but he did not dare move. She called him Andy. All was silent. Then the heater stammered on and breathed hoarse dry air upon them both. He felt her sit up beside him, adjusting, straightening herself. She fluffed up her hair and latched her purse as though getting ready to go to church. She hit the door handle and jumped out. He heard her land, lightly, in the gravel. And then her footsteps crunched twice. He lay there for a moment longer and then sat up in the blast of the heater, turned it low, drew the door shut and put the truck in gear, switching on the headlights. He was going to drive after her, but about a half mile on the headlights caught off the road, disappearing on the other side of the fence.
She was walking over a slight rise, alert, her jacket glowing whiter than the snow. Her step was firm, deerlike, as though she was eager to get where she was going. She kept her footing, moved quickly, never looked back to see whether he followed. He flicked the lights once, then shut them off. She didn't turn or stop. He jumped out of the cab and stood on the margin of the road.
Outside, the dark was rushing, raw, the air was watery with unshed snow. Bright clouds scudded fast in the fresh wind and drove shadows across the moon. Low clouds sheltered her retreating figure. He was going to call her name, but then his throat closed. He'd never made sure and now he could not remember. He turned away, and still the shadows rode across the icy crust of open ranch land, the pastures, pure and roadless, the fields, the open spaces.
The snow fell all night and all the next day, deeper. Holed up in his room, Jack knew what he had done but kept telling himself that he was not the one. He was not the one. Still, he saw her constantly, wherever he looked, in his mind's eye. He threw the pop top in the trash basket, where it haunted him until he folded it small and tried to feed it to the cat. Cat resisted. Jack swallowed the ring. Hating the taste of metal, the tooth swelled and bit him. Pain exploded ever-y time Jack lowered his head to the pillow. Drunk, he watched the tooth on a screen in his head. The root was black hooks. The nerve a thin blue buzzing light. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes and then the pith throbbed' slowly dead. Event-ually, he felt nothing, but her face was there, watching. The direct pity in her look made him repeat his denial and with the cat purring on his chest, he said it out loud again. Not the one. Still the ceiling dragged lower, and with each swallow, lower, so that he was nearly crushed by the time he emptied the bottle and called the local police.
State police, too. The storm had blown in and over with the speed of all spring lapses. The men in sober uniforms fanned forward in mild sunshine. Jack followed her then and so he was one of the ones who found her miles out in the grazing land. She'd gotten tired of walking in those thin shoes, and sat down against a fence post. To wait for the bus, he thought. She was looking to the east, her hair loaded with melting stars. No one had touched her yet. Her face was complex in its expectations. A fist of air punched Jack to earth and he knelt before her with his hands outstretched. But then the officer reached past him, thumbed her eyelids down, took her purse from her lap, knocked off her blanket of snow.
Hot June Morning
1994
Argus, North Dakota
When they tore down the Argus railroad depot with a wrecking ball and a thousand blows of hammers, the gap where it once stood let through a view of the horizon from the main street, a relief of light and space interrupted only by a distant clump of trees and a slanted sheet of roof that glowered in the sun. The stone-walled and shingled convent of Our Lady of the Wheat, a mile away to the south, floated on a watery mirage of unsettled dust. The murk was raised by road equipment. For at the same time the depot was demolished, an interstate highway access was constructed, a connecting artery that would save the town's economy.
Trains still flowed through east to west but the schedules were erratic. Every year there was a cutback, one stop less, a change in schedule, so that now, although the freights hauled cargo, there was nothing aboard vital to the town. The trains carried people, but no one who mattered to anyone in Argus--no relatives, no farm implement dealers, no grain inspectors, seed salesmen, and certainly no tourists. The train's passing was a backyard music in the night and no one noticed if it was an hour, even two hours, late. The feeder road was now the towns lifeline. Everything important to Argus came rolling in on highways, on the piggyback trailers of eighteen-wheel semis that hissed and sank, air brakes groaning, at the first stoplight.
Aboard one such powerful truck, on a still morning in the early drought of spring, Jack Mauser, older by thirteen years since that Holy Saturday when June froze, married three times since, by justices in civil ceremonies, and now married yet again to a woman with red-brown hair, arrived in-town. He didn't touch booze, not anymore, but only since very recently. Two months ago. His features were lucid, strained with a deep and withheld pur-pose, sober. Only a few dark capillaries showed his long, steady, offhand pollution. His body was no longer rebar, a whip of metal, but he was still hard-muscled and tough. As for the marriages, here was the truth he knew: he couldn't hold on to a woman ever since he let the first one walk from his arms into Easter snow.
The company truck stopped. Mauser and Mauser was painted on the door. Jack swung down. In his pocket there was an expensive ring, a blue diamond caught in a claw of white gold and held on a band of the same thick metal. The last ring he would give, he promised. He vowed. He had no luggage. The ring was unpaid for, and would one day be repossessed, but at the time Jack Mauser still owned the truck and employed the man who drove it, pulling away with a small nod.
Jack, fatherless and motherless, had moved around a lot. One year of high school he had spent in Argus--his best year, he always thought. He still had connections there. Football buddies. Business associates. His former wife, Eleanor, too.
She termed herself a professional Catholic, a dilettante, a Dysfunctional Diva, Queen of Ambivalence--she had a lot of names she called herself. She was a difficult person. Although she had subdued her worst habits over the years, she was still her own Reader's Digest Most Remarkable Character, Jack thought, though she would have scoffed at his pedestrian reading tastes if he had ever told her that. He wondered whether he would run into her, and was disturbed at and tamped back the leap in his heart. That was over. She was arresting, dramatic in looks and spirit, unpredictable. Her enthusiasms were momentous, but often short-lived. She was doing some sort of research with local nuns, but Jack wasn't sure where she was staying.
And he wouldn't bother to find out. Absolutely not, he told himself.
For Jack had come full circle, at last. His latest and final wife had also grown up in Argus. Dot Adare Nanapush had refused to sleep with him unless he married her. She hadn't thought he would call her bluff, but he had proposed immediately and then driven to the county courthouse, trapping her. Direct, practical, and fierce, Dot had first caught his eye with her headlong progress across the construction yard. She never strolled or even walked. Dot charged, a purpose in her every move. Even on a calm day she seemed headed into the wind. Dot's energy was much like Jack's and she was sexy in a capable way--she took care of him with firm dispatch. Then, too, she had saved his business with her accounting skills. He liked her square body and thick, tousled hair. Sometimes she was beautiful, sometimes bull-solid, blocky. It was hard to form a picture of someone so formidably restless. She could be bone-tough, but then again so soft. At times, her brown eyes sparked his own. Still, he hadn't gone crazy over Dot the way he had with the others, but that was good. He was through with that form of special madness, he hoped. He wanted someone who could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and take pity on him. He wanted someone who would stick by him in his ruin. Dot was tough. Someone with strict principles. She wouldn't sleep with him. Impressive. He'd had enough of his own fuzzy morals, oh, he'd wallowed 1 He'd had enough of rationalizing--the past thirteen years of his life had been nothing but excuses and disasters, and the last two were the worst.
During those years he'd borrowed and lost a million dollars, run away from his debts, sung to forget in motel lounges, built a dream house he could not pay off. He had divorced the only woman who'd ever borne him a child, and married another whom he'd only known for one month. But he still believed that he was starting over, starting once again with Dot.
In order to give his new wife an hour with her mother, he'd decided to take the long way, to walk. Apparently Dot needed to set the stage. Let off on the sizzling main street sidewalk, Jack immediately sighted through the depot gap and headed south. He moved as though he were invisible to others and greeted no one in his path. The streets were longer, the houses newer and newer as he walked until they were only unfinished model units. Argus had grown evenly since his time, outward from its center, except for the eastern side bounded by the river. Jack paused, wiped sweat from his face, turned entirely around as though to consult the horizon. Through the outskirts, and on, through a minor new development of pastel ranch styles, toward the convent and the surrounding land. Old farmsteads with swayback barns and browning grass. Tiny-windowed homes hunkered square underneath the towering cottonwood and box elder, windbreaks planted when the century turned. He was not interested in these. He was looking for a garden-green house in a blast of lilacs, a place Dot had described to him during their one whirlwind distracting weekend. His new wife also had a gaze of dire intensity. The thought of her stare drew him through the hot air, through the dust.