The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  Most days, Chuck would follow Leon into the hills and stand by for the chopping or building until he heard something out of range and took off running. More often than not, he’d be running for the house, where Jayne would once again be out on the front patio, having pulled repeatedly, patiently, at one of the glass doors until she could slip through the opening and toddle out onto the cement. Chuck would take up his post at her side, keeping himself between her and the open ledge that fell sharply to the road below as Jayne made a game of it, running from one side of the patio to the other, Chuck sauntering casually beside her. When she got too near the edge, Chuck would wag his tail and sidle up between her and the drop, using his strong body to block her, panting at her with his big smile, tongue hanging out, as she pounded his back and pulled his hair and screamed. So, while Eve did the washing and cooking, the cleaning and sewing, drove the garbage down the hill and planted flowers around the back steps, Chuck did the babysitting.

  The only rule was that Chuck wasn’t allowed inside. So that first winter, during the time of year the Indian souvenir calendar left in the kitchen by the previous tenants called “The Moon of Frost in the Tepee,” as wind whistled through the cracks in the doors and blew falling snow in icy, slanting sheets, Chuck was on the other side of the glass, huddled under the eaves.

  “He’s supposed to be outside,” Eve would tell them. “That’s why he’s got that big fur coat on.”

  Then ice formed on the patio, coated the cement steps, and hung in long, thick cords from the roof to the ground, and ice crusted and dripped from Chuck’s muzzle, and every day there were more bloody pawprints up and down the steps to the driveway. Chuck would lean against the sliding glass doors and cry.

  “We have to let him in,” Leon begged. “He’s my dog. I’ll c-clean up if he makes a mess, I swear.”

  So, finally, Eve put down newspapers and old sheets, opened the door, and let Chuck in. Leon got him fresh water, and Chuck lay by the fire and slept and slept. Leon stayed on the couch day and night while Chuck’s paws healed, and it looked like Chuck had finally found a real home, until one day, having got into something rotten in the woods, he threw up a lake of pine needles, fur, bones, and bile all over Eve’s knitting.

  “And that’s why you do not have animals in the house!” Eve cried. “Goddamn it!” She wrinkled her nose and considered the nearly finished purple sweater with white paper dolls holding hands across the front she’d been making for Jayne, now saturated with brownish-green dog vomit. “I’m just going to have to throw it out. After all that work. Shit!”

  They’d all heard her counting stitches night after night that winter, and they all, Chuck included, stood frozen and shame-faced as she used an old newspaper to shovel the ruined sweater into a paper bag and throw it in the trash.

  “Lord knows I have enough to do without some dumb dog—!”

  So Chuck was back outside. And though he still leaned up against the glass at night, gazing longingly, pitifully, toward the fire and what had come to be his place in front of it, there was no use arguing.

  After the first few cold nights, Eve agreed to let Leon use an old sleeping bag to make Chuck a bed by the door, and from then on, Leon would be the first one up. They’d wake to find him already outside, bundled in his overcoat, knitted cap pulled down over his ears, curled up with Chuck on the ratty dog bed, fast asleep, his long legs, still in pajama pants, stretched out on the frozen cement.

  * * *

  —

  In Rapid, René and Leon both went to General Beadle Elementary, named after William Henry Harrison Beadle, who’d been appointed surveyor general of Dakota Territory by none other than Ulysses S. Grant. General Beadle had come up with a system for setting aside Dakota land for schools and was a lifetime advocate of education, so they were in good hands, the principal said. There was no mention of this “land for schools” having been secured through the government’s policy of cheating Indians out of sovereign reservation territories, so nobody gave it a thought.

  Eve drove them to school every morning in her broken-down Chevy, which went forward by lurches and looked like a parboiled turtle. When they got to the drop-off, René would duck beneath the glove box, then quickly lunge out the door and sprint for class.

  “I don’t want anybody to see me in this junky old car,” she said one day when Eve asked what in the hell she was doing.

  “And how do you imagine people are going to think you got here, then?”

  “Maybe I just sprung up out of the ether,” René said. “Like a sprite or a fairy.” Her first-grade class had been reading fairy tales.

  “Or a mushroom,” Eve suggested.

  Whenever René got into some kind of trouble on the playground, like with the girl from second grade who wouldn’t give her a turn on the swings, or with Timmy, who made her suck on his marbles to get in the game, then told her he’d peed on them, she ran to the barrier between the upper- and lower-grade playgrounds and called out for Leon. And Leon came down.

  “Timmy peed on the marbles!” was all she needed to say.

  “Okay,” Leon said. “I’ll be r-right back,” he called over his shoulder as the other boys protested.

  “Over here.” She led him to where she and Timmy had been quarreling.

  “Hi, Timmy,” Leon said, towering over the younger kids. “How you doing?”

  René thought Leon was too slow in getting to the point, but he was a diplomat—patient and willing to see all sides.

  Timmy glowered at René and kicked the gravel with his toe.

  “You guys should be n-nice to each other,” Leon finally said.

  Timmy bent his neck to look up.

  “You didn’t p-pee on those marbles, did you?” Leon said.

  “I didn’t do it,” Timmy admitted. “I only said it.”

  “Okay,” Leon said. “ ’Cause René likes you.”

  René glared at Timmy so he didn’t get the wrong idea. Eve had warned her not to play with Timmy because Timmy was Indian and might give her worms or scabies. But Timmy was actually only half Indian. He lived in one of the underground tar-topped houses right across the street from the school, and mostly they were good pals.

  “She steals my marbles,” Timmy said.

  René had won some of Timmy’s marbles, but Timmy was an Indian giver and he wanted them back. They were in constant negotiations.

  “She takes them and she doesn’t give them back,” he said.

  “What if she promises not to take your marbles? Do you p-promise?” Leon looked at René. It was clear he wanted to get back to his game.

  “I don’t take them,” she said, looking at Timmy. “I win them.”

  She’d won a few, and she’d taken a few.

  “If you want to play, you have to p-promise not to take his marbles,” Leon said.

  “Promise,” she muttered.

  “Tell Timmy.”

  “Promise. I won’t take your marbles.”

  “Okay,” Timmy said, looking at his shoes.

  “Okay, g-good job,” Leon said, and he touched Timmy’s shoulder, patted René on the back, then tore off to the upper terrace, where the other boys were calling for him to hurry up before the bell rang.

  * * *

  —

  Eve did her shopping in the Indian part of town, where the dented canned goods were stacked on open plyboard shelves, still in their delivery boxes. It was cheap. She could get an oversized box of powdered milk, an enormous bag of puffed rice, an extra-large block of Velveeta, and a case of pork ’n’ beans for four dollars and twenty-nine cents, so even though these were tough times—with the cost of the move and Al needing to be on the road all the time, taking more and more risk borrowing from the banks to purchase cattle—they had enough. They ate pork ’n’ beans for dinner, sometimes with chicken legs, sometimes with potatoes or carrots or
hard-boiled eggs, depending on what Prairie Market had on sale. They ate puffed rice with watery powdered milk and sugar every morning, and at night, too, if they wanted a bedtime snack.

  On the prairie just below them were a few broken-down trailers set at random in the tall grass. “Don’t you ever go down there,” Eve warned. “It’s all Indians, and they don’t like people coming around.”

  But René was beginning to mistrust everything Eve said, as if Eve were purposely inverting the truth, saying things backward and upside-down just for her. So she’d make a point of sneaking down to the flatlands, following the hill around the house to the little car bridge someone had put up across the deep wash, careful to match her stride to the planks of nailed lumber so she didn’t get a foot stuck in one of the narrow divides. As soon as she reached the meadow, there’d be the rising scent of sage and sweetgrass. There were distant barking dogs and even a shaggy brown pony with a bowed back that seemed to wander at will. She’d hide in the brush like a tracker, trying to see for herself if there were really any Indians down there.

  The trailer closest to the road was a rusty silver bubble with a long-abandoned hitch and seemed to have only one wrinkled old man inside. He’d come out shirtless, in jeans and a black hat with a rainbow-beaded hatband, a single eagle feather trailing down his back on a long leather string. He’d leave the door open on its hinges, sit on his metal trailer step, and smoke.

  “Why don’t Indians like us?” René asked one day as Eve was bent, mopping the kitchen.

  “They like their own,” Eve said. “Everybody’s like that. Everybody likes their own.”

  “Why don’t we like Indians? They were here first. It’s their land.”

  “It was,” Eve said, “but it’s not anymore. And it’s not that we don’t like them, it’s just that they’re different. They don’t take care of things.”

  That wrinkled old man didn’t seem all that different. He was just smoking on his step, looking off to nowhere, like Al sometimes did.

  “And they’re lazy,” Eve went on, out of breath, losing herself. “They’re always looking for a handout. They’re just not willing to work hard like the rest of us. They’d rather drink their firewater,” she said. Then she stopped and looked at René. “How’d you get me on that? Aren’t you supposed to be cleaning your room?”

  René smiled, caught.

  “Just like an Indian,” Eve would scold whenever René balked at her chores. Because wasn’t she lazy? Didn’t she prefer soft, dirty sheets to scratchy clean ones? Didn’t she always argue about making her bed in the first place, since she was just going to get back into it sooner than later, about cleaning out her closet, which was going to be all mixed up again in a day or two anyway? More than once Eve had told her, “You want to live like an Indian? Fine. When you get your own house, you can go ahead and live like a Comanche for all I care. But not in my house.”

  “Go on,” Eve said to her this time. “Get going. And don’t let me catch you down in that valley,” she called as René ran up the stairs.

  “I won’t,” René called back, more than happy to leave it at that.

  9

  Right Foot Out

  Eve found a place for Leon to continue his dance lessons—Lois Mann’s Tap ’N’ Tune—and pretty soon René was in Miss Mann’s dance school, too, in the Tiny Tykes class, learning not just shuffle ball-change but gymnastic moves even Leon didn’t know, like kickovers, walkovers, chest rolls, and one-handed cartwheels. She excelled at anything that involved hyperextending the spine and could memorize steps almost instantly. She’d get bored and tap her way through an entire routine as Miss Mann tried to break it down and explain it—“one more time, all over again”—to the kids who still weren’t getting it. Miss Mann kept telling René to stand still, but she was as frustrated with those stragglers as René was.

  For their spring recital, Tap ’N’ Tune was going to be the special guest on Mabel’s Open House, the local TV talk show, and one day while Leon was busy practicing his solo at home, Eve got a call from Miss Mann saying that René was going to have a solo, too. René figured Leon would be mad at her for “always stepping in his sunshine,” as Eve said, but he didn’t care. He was planning a party for his school friends. They were going to take a record player onto the cement patio so they could dance grown-up style. Eve had been giving him lessons in the waltz and the Texas two-step, and Leon had recruited René to call “Snowball!” so kids would have to change partners. He told her again and again that when she saw him dancing with Cindy, the girl he liked, she shouldn’t call “Snowball!” for a long time.

  “A really long time,” he said, holding her by the shoulders so she’d be sure to pay attention. “Just w-watch me. I’ll t-tell you when.”

  * * *

  —

  When recital day finally arrived, they drove to the television studio and Eve hauled their costumes up a steep flight of stairs to the lobby, where the station had its logo—the rugged profile of a stately Lakota chief in full-feather headdress superimposed over Mount Rushmore and surrounded by bull’s-eyes—painted on a far wall. They were shown to what their escort called the “ladies’-room-plus-dressing-room,” and René put on the glittery pink-checked outfit Eve had sewn for her. Eve pinned an oversized matching bow into René’s hair, then leaned her back in an old barber’s chair and drew on eyeliner, patted her cheeks with rouge, and dabbed on lipstick. When they were ready, they pushed through a heavy black door into the cavernous television studio. There were inverted-washtub lights blazing overhead, and there was Mabel herself, just like they always saw her on TV, now sitting on her sofa, chatting with Miss Mann.

  Miss Mann gave René a frantic wink, then Mabel introduced her, and René stepped out under the lights. When her music started, she sang and danced with everything she had.

  First you put your two knees close up tight,

  You sway ’em to the left and you sway ’em to the right—

  René threw herself into the dance section, ending it all with a contortionist’s chest roll—lobbing both legs over her head and rolling on her turned cheek to one knee. She hadn’t dropped a line or missed a step. Mabel and Miss Mann gasped and applauded while Eve, standing behind the camera, gave her a big thumbs-up.

  Leon was next. He stepped out onto the floor in his top hat and vest. He had on a nervous grin until his music started; then he let his top hat tumble down his arm, caught it in his fingertips, snapped it back up onto his head, and made an easy slide into his soft-shoe number. He glided through the routine with so much elegance and grace you’d have thought the studio was a grand ballroom out of a Fred Astaire movie. When it came time for the wings—the new step he’d been practicing endlessly on the kitchen linoleum—Leon nailed it and went straight into a series of barrel jumps, then a grapevine into two double turns, and a sharp finish, hat in hand. He was brilliant and natural, a joyful, generous dancer, and everyone could feel it. Mabel and Miss Mann exploded in applause while Eve, René, and even the cameraman clapped along.

  Miss Mann had already said she shouldn’t be teaching him, that he should move on to another teacher in town, one who could instruct him more seriously.

  “He’s too talented,” she’d said, ruffling Leon’s thick hair as he screwed his face into a goofy smile. “He needs to study ballet. Then he can do any kind of dance he wants.”

  So Eve enrolled Leon and René in Rapid City’s one serious dance school: the Academy of Ballet. There’d be no more gymnastics, no more tap dancing or musical numbers, no breaks for graham crackers and Kool-Aid. From what René could gather, there’d be nothing but hard work and high expectations, but it was the only place to really learn to dance.

  Leon kept saying he was nervous. “It’s gonna be hard,” he’d say. “You w-wait.”

  “Don’t be such a chicken,” René would yell, after she’d made sure she had a good head start. L
eon didn’t like being called chicken, but as long as René could get him to run far enough, the mad would run right out of him. He might catch her and put her in a headlock, but they’d end up racing back to the house, René hollering about how Leon had hit her and him not even bothering to deny it as he reached his long arms to take phony swipes that grazed her ears or mussed her hair, until Eve finally told René to be quiet and quit squealing on her brother.

  “Time to set the table,” she’d say. “Get busy. And Leon, you take out that trash.” To which they’d give a collective groan.

  * * *

  —

  Girls wore dresses to Leon’s party and boys wore ties. Leon wore black pants and a pressed white shirt with a snap-on red plaid bow tie. The record player was out on the patio, along with a table of cheese puffs, M&M’s, raspberry Kool-Aid, and Vienna sausages on toothpicks. Since René had been given an official role, she put on her lime-sherbet-colored party dress over her shorts.

  The girls arrived in a group and stood at one end of the patio while the boys huddled together at the other. Then Eve came out, paired them up, and gave a short dance lesson, and when the music came on, René took her seat by the record player and watched for Leon’s signals. It was fun to call “Snowball!” and see the older kids panic and scramble for a new partner.

  Suddenly Leon was dancing with a blond girl in a bright blue dress. He looked at René and raised his eyebrows.

  “Snowball!” René yelled, and instantly saw her mistake.

  Leon turned sharply and stepped away from the group as he let the girl go.

  “That was her!” he whispered, frantic. “What are you d-doing? I t-told you—”