“Just until Vera’s back,” she said.
Every night now, as it grew colder, Patrice worked on the house. She remudded the spaces between the logs with clay dug up near the slough, and closed the tiny gaps between the window frames with dried grass. With her waterjack money she had bought boxes of plaster, whitewash, rolls of tar paper, nails, a hammer. She fixed the tar paper to the frame of the roof. She used a heavy mixture of mud and grass to close the eaves. After school and boxing, Pokey came home and helped her spread plaster on the inside of the walls. In the corner where he slept, they used rabbit glue to paste photographs and stories to the wall. Rocky Graziano, Tony Zale, Jersey Joe Walcott, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Archie Moore stared out, over their round gloves, in the soft dusk. These photos and stories were not from the magazines that Valentine passed on to Patrice, but from boxing magazines that Barnes gave Pokey, first a stack and then another and another. Although Barnes implied he’d read these magazines, the covers and pages were stiff and new. Also, he gave Pokey a winter jacket. Not an old hand-me-down coat either, but a brand-new red and black checked winter jacket that reminded Patrice, uncomfortably, of the lumberjack theme at Log Jam 26. The jacket had knitted cuffs, a thick snap-on pile collar. Barnes claimed that someone had given him this jacket and he was just finding the jacket a good home. It was obvious to Patrice that Barnes had bought it, which got her goat. As if she couldn’t have bought her own brother a jacket? As if she wouldn’t have done it if Pokey’s old coat was worn out? Which it wasn’t. Also she could have bought him the hat, brown wool with a bill and fold-down earflaps.
“Barnes give that to you?”
“Yes.”
Pokey beamed and stroked the front of the coat. He brushed the pile collar with his fingers.
“Oh, it’s real nice,” said Patrice, but in a way that made Pokey look at her closely.
“Should I give it back?”
“No,” said Patrice.
After all, how could she spoil her brother’s pride? But also, once kids found out where his nice things came from, they would give him a hard time.
“Pokey, don’t brag Barnes gave you presents, okay?”
“I wouldn’t even!”
“And don’t take anything else he gives you, okay?”
“Okay,” said Pokey.
He looked over at his boots. They were brand-new handsome leather boots with black-and-white marled laces. He thought Patrice might say something, but she was slapping the glue on Zale, using a stick, giving the Man of Steel the beating of his life.
Before sunrise, Vera always came back. As Patrice was floating out of her sleep, her sister would appear. Not as Vera had been when she left for the Cities, wearing high-heeled shoes, stockings, carrying a rose-pink cardboard suitcase. Not with her eyes all lighted up. Not grinning skeptically at something Patrice said, not pausing to gather her laugh. No, that was not the Vera who visited. One morning, Patrice was back in the alley where Jack had probably died. Again, Patrice stopped at the pile of clothing in the wet alley. Again, she pulled away the collar of a jacket. Only instead of Jack’s skeleton smile it was Vera’s twisted gaping face and blood-choked mouth. Another morning she stood in the dust of a room empty but for a chair and a slashed leather collar, a stained and crumpled sheet. There were footsteps and Patrice whirled around. Somebody was in the room, there was scratching in the walls, and Vera said her name.
On more than one morning she was the waterjack, naked in the tank. Wavery customers drifted outside. One was Vera, curiously pressing her face to the glass. These weren’t dreams, but vivid scenarios that flooded her mind. It was as though all that had happened to her in the city had to happen over and over, only with Vera always there, not found but somehow finding her.
“Mama, I have these dreams,” said Patrice one morning, still jangled.
They were eating oatmeal, the baby sleeping in Zhaanat’s lap. There were a few raisins sprinkled in the oatmeal, so they were taking their time, making sure that only one raisin came in every other spoonful, so they could last the entire bowl.
“Wiindamawish gaa-pawaadaman.”
So Patrice told her mother about her dreams. Then she watched her mother’s face grow stiff and still.
“It would be good if Gerald came down here, but he will be tied up with his ceremonies now,” Zhaanat said. “We will have to handle this.”
“Handle the dreams?”
Zhaanat stared at the table, smoothing the edge of the wood with her extraordinary hand, which fell, suddenly limp, into her lap. Before her eyes, her mother seemed to be draining of life.
“Are your dreams about Vera?” asked Patrice.
“They are the exact same dreams.”
“The exact same dreams as my dreams?”
Zhaanat nodded heavily, frowning into her daughter’s eyes. Patrice knew. The trembling started in a place behind her heart, but soon the shaking worked its way to just beneath her skin. Her body was quivering like an arrow that has just struck its mark. Her mother spoke.
“She is trying to reach us.”
The Star Powwow
“Oh, you!”
Rose’s face relaxed in pleasure. She was fond of them both, especially close to Zhaanat, and she wanted to see the baby. She disengaged him from the froth of yarn and held him, examining his face minutely and coaxing him to smile at her. Thomas was sitting at the kitchen table while the children passed in and out and Noko railed at her daughter. He capped his pen. He had written to Milton Young again, and two other congressmen. He was setting up a meeting between Arnold Zeff, leader of the local chapter of the American Legion, and Louis Pipestone. Louis was going to set before Arnold Zeff the prospect of Indians who had faithfully served their country abandoned to beg in the streets of Zeff’s off-reservation community. He was hoping the Legion would sign on against the bill. Thomas had a morning meeting with the superintendent of the school district. He would propose that they take on the funding of the reservation school once the federal government relinquished support. These ideas were the result of Biboon’s and Eddy Mink’s remarks about how the surrounding communities could be affected by termination.
Patrice and Zhaanat sat down at the kitchen table. Sharlo cleared away her arithmetic papers and Fee took her book into the other room. From her corner, Noko glared. She was wearing a gray wool shawl bristling with stiff white stray threads, and had her arms folded tightly against her chest, holding in her rage. The baby stirred hungrily. Without a trace of self-consciousness, Zhaanat took him back and began to nurse him. Rose made coffee. Noko’s head reared back, a swatch of hair flipped up, her eyes bugged so she looked like a maddened egret. Thomas showed no surprise at all and Rose set down heavy scratched mugs full of scalding coffee, then sat down next to Thomas.
“We need your advice,” said Patrice, giving Thomas a pinch of tobacco.
Then she told about the dog, what the dog said, the empty rooms with the chains fixed to the walls and the slashed leather collars on the floor. She told them only what pertained to Vera. Maybe she would never tell anybody at all about her brief employment as a waterjack. She ended with the train ride back, then fell silent. Finally, Thomas spoke. Tears of shock had swelled up behind his eyes, but he’d not allowed them to spill out. This thing was nowhere in his understanding.
“We have to go to the police,” he said.
His voice was leaden with emotion but what he said was both unthinkable and disappointing to Patrice and Zhaanat. To seek police assistance for an Indian woman was almost sure to put her in the
wrong. No matter what happened, she would be the one blamed and punished. It was for that reason unthinkable to approach the police, and it was disappointing because Thomas trusted their enemies.
“The policeman will never help us,” Zhaanat said at last.
“We’ll have to find another way,” said Patrice.
“Let me sleep on this,” said Thomas, although he knew he would never sleep. And they struggled to talk of other things, of work at the jewel bearing plant, of neutral things that could allow the mysterious horror to sink below their thoughts.
When Thomas went to work that night, he didn’t take his briefcase along. He knew he would not be able to concentrate on the many letters of request and explanation that pressed upon him. Nor would he be able to plan the information meetings to be held in the community hall. He wanted to get the interpretation of the bill right for the meetings. But he knew he would not be able to find those words after what Patrice had told him. Driving to work had become ever more filled with dread. Dread that he would not be able to stay awake. Dread that on the other hand, he might never sleep again. Dread of the situation, ungraspable in its magnitude. Loneliness. The forces he was up against were implacable and distant. But from their distance they could reach out and sweep away an entire people.
And now this.
What Patrice had told him was so extreme an evil that it struck at his fundamental assumptions. He had always, even in the face of hatred or drunken violence, believed that people did bad things out of ignorance or weakness or liquor. He had never known or heard of the sort of evil that Patrice had spoken about—the chains in the walls, the collars, the dog speaking of her sister’s fate. Moses Montrose was right. He was an altar boy. Biboon, who was in his way an innocent, too, had raised him. Thomas couldn’t make the leap of consciousness that would allow him to understand all that was implied by the existence of that room. His thoughts veered off whenever he tried to imagine what those rooms implied. He arrived at the jewel bearing plant, unlocked the door. He walked to his desk but did not sit down. He paced. Between rounds, he stared into the dim corners of the room.
Except the time he opened the basement window for Roderick, but that didn’t count. They had as good as killed Roderick down there. At least Thomas had managed to open a window by using a wire stolen from the Fort Totten machine shop. He’d formed the end into a hook and wiggled it through a crack to pull away a wooden latch—it wasn’t much of a barrier and he’d done it easily. Then he’d thrown down the coat and apples and bread crusts and a handkerchief knotted around a lump of oatmeal. He called down to Roderick that he’d been seen, which wasn’t true, but he had to get away. Roderick was sobbing so bad. Thomas hated that sound of sobbing in the dark.
If he had a wire now, he could poke it through a crack beneath the frosted window, about six feet up, in the women’s bathroom. He would need a ladder or, no, he could drive his car over. He could stand on top of his car. He walked toward it, beating his arms across his body. Inside the car, he rubbed his hands together, started the engine. After a long few minutes the heater roared to life. He warmed his hands for a few moments. Put his head near the fan to warm up his brain. Unfortunately, he kept the interior obsessively clean. There wasn’t a blanket. No extra jacket. But a wire? In the electrical system? No, he’d sooner spend the night in his car than yank a wire from it. The warmth was wonderful. He dreaded leaving it. He began to worry that if he were found dozing in his car outside the building he was paid to protect, Vold might think the job was too much for him. Might think that the stress of being a tribal chairman was too much to take on and still be an effective night watchman.
Outside, the drumming intensified. Thomas peered through the windshield. It seemed to be coming from somewhere far away. In a wind like this there would usually be clouds. But the sky was clear. The stars hung low and luminous. The drumming came from up there. It seemed to Thomas that the stars were drumming in the moonless deep. Having a fine old time. Wait. He suddenly sprang out, walked around to the back, opened the trunk. In the trunk, there was an old rag rug he’d picked up at the mission bundles. He pulled it around his shoulders. Beneath the rug, there was a reel of wire. A cheap thin sort of wire that he’d bought for snares last time he was in town. It was floppy and droopy, but he thought it might do. He jumped back in the car and pulled it around, right up to the side of the building. Of course he would be all right. Everything would come out fine. He blasted the heater on himself, thinking about the source of the drumming. He could still hear it, a faint thrumming, from above. The drumming made him hopeful and soon he twisted off a piece of the wire. Thinking of the way the window catch worked, he made a loop at the end of the wire. He’d catch the little knob that held the window down, tighten the loop, and lift. He got out of the car to do this.
Twenty minutes later, hands nearly frozen, he climbed down. He’d warm himself up and try again, he thought, but this time when he turned the ignition, nothing. Over and over. Nothing. He waited. Tried again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. And he was becoming extremely cold. So cold his brain was slowing down. Even his armpits were numb and didn’t warm his hands. He was so cold that he knew he must give up and walk toward the lights of town, not walk but run, if he wanted to live.
He stepped out of the car, into the open, off the gravel road into rough pasture gleaming with frost. He fell, went down hard, lay there stunned. It was as if he’d been dashed to earth like a toy. Without warning, they threw you down. That’s how it was to live with them. Oh it was! Thomas had studied them. He had striven in every way to be like his teachers. And every boss. He had tried to make their ways his ways. Even if he didn’t like their ways, he’d tried. He’d tried to make money, like them. He’d thought that if he worked hard enough and followed their rules this would mean he could keep his family secure, his people from the worst harms, but none of that was true. Into his brain like a foul seep came the knowledge of what men had done to Vera.
He could not hold back the pictures. Knowing pierced his mind. Unbearable, what they did to her. And what they were still doing if she was alive and in their power. He cried out and felt that now he was welded by cold to the grass like poor Paranteau and his iron post.
The drumming grew louder and louder. Looking up, he saw the beings. They were filmy and brightly indistinct. How benign they were, floating downward from the heavens. They were formed like regular people, and were dressed in ordinary clothing, shirts, pants, dresses made of glowing cloth. Although he could see through them, they weren’t exactly transparent. And they looked like they’d been hard at work. He had the sense the stars were always hard at work; shining away up there wasn’t easy. One of the shining people was Jesus Christ, but he looked just like the others. They nodded to him in a comical way, understanding his surprise, and all of a sudden nothing hurt. Radiance filled him and he reared up, knowing that the drummers wished him to dance. Up in the clouds, down on earth, they were dancing counter
clockwise, as the spirits do in the land of the dead, and they wanted him to join. So he danced with them. Every time he trod down on the stiff grass his feet pushed a watery brightness into the air. He was wearing an imaginary headdress that spilled light every time he bobbed his head. He looked down and saw that he was holding a dance stick made of wavering northern lights. Eyes glinting, heart roaring as the blood sprang to the tips of his fingers, he began to sing the song they gave him.
When the drumming stopped, Thomas climbed on top of his car, plucked the wire from his pocket, picked the lock to the bathroom window. He hoisted himself through that window and tapped down on the green linoleum floor. Then he walked out of the bathroom to his desk, scooped up his keys, punched the time clock, and raced out to the car. It started right up. He pulled it around to his parking place and he ran back into the building. Sat down. He was only two minutes off on his time punches. He poured himself a thermos cup of coffee and greeted the dawn.
Agony Would Be Her Name
The men smelled of hot oil, liquor sweat, spoiled meat, a million cigarettes, and they spoke in the language of the wolverine. Their beards ground against her face until her cheeks were raw. If she wanted to get away, she’d have to run through knives. If she got through the knives, she would have no skin left to protect her. She would be raw flesh. She would be a thing. She would be agony. Giant motors gnashed behind the wall. Occasionally, like a reverberating gong, she heard her mother call her name.
Homecoming
The leaves gold on green, bright in the soaking rain, padded the trails in the woods. All of the Wazhashks were hard at work. In the sloughs the little namesakes stockpiled green twigs. In the fields, the family pitchforked up the last of the carrots. Piles of squash, warty green, orange, mellow tan, solid little pumpkins, filled the cellar and were piled around the sides of the house. Braids of onions. Pale meek balls of cabbage. Crates of cream and purple turnips. Bushels of potatoes. Thomas hauled wagon loads. Wade and Martin argued themselves into the back, arranged themselves around the vegetables. Still arguing, they unloaded produce at the cafe, at the school, and at last the teachers’ dining hall. Juggie Blue gave orders, telling them where to stack and pile. Tomorrow, there was going to be a parade, a community feed, a football game, and the crowning of royalty. Sharlo was in the Homecoming court.