The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  “What should we do with this money?” says Richard.

  “I’m sick.”

  Klaus stretches out his arm, too heavy, and then lets it drop. Unconscious again. Two men come out of the art museum. Surprisingly—what day is this?—one of them hands Richard money too. Coins. Then a group of people emerge from the big doors and skirt the men as they pass talking loudly to one another about where to go for lunch. More people come, the two men go invisible. Some event sponsored by the museum is letting out. No more luck. The streams of people soon disappear into their cars.

  “That was exciting,” says Richard.

  “I’m sick,” says Klaus. “Water.”

  “I wonder if they’d let me in to look at the paintings. Maybe we should make a donation.”

  “Don’t do that!”

  Klaus surges to life and props himself against the steps, a big loose-jointed man doll. His lady love is still there in the back of his mind, standing in a ball of blue light.

  “I’d like a drink of water,” he says to her. She has a glass of water in her hand, too, Sweetheart Calico, but she pours it out in front of his eyes. The molecules dissolve all around him and do nothing for his thirst.

  “Did she do that to you, too? Did she?” Klaus is disappointed, outraged.

  “What?”

  “Pour the water out right before your eyes!”

  “No.”

  “What did she do then, Sweetheart?” Klaus asks, jealous. “Tell me every detail or I’ll kill you right here.”

  “With what?”

  “My bare hands,” says Klaus lazily.

  “Klaus,” says Richard in a fatherly voice, “you’re sick.” Gently, he takes the cigarette from between Klaus’s fingers. He unpeels the wrapping from the cigarette and begins to sprinkle the tobacco on the clipped grass. Klaus and Richard are very quiet, watching the flakes of tobacco fall to earth. Above them, in the trees, a cicada begins. A long drawn-out buzzing whine. Wait, thinks Klaus, it is only April, that can’t be a cicada. It must be the heat in my brain. The day is heating past bearable. When all of the tobacco is shaken onto the grass, they get to their feet. Klaus steadies himself. His knees shake. As they slowly move down the street past the museum, on both sides of the sidewalk the sprinklers set into the sod of the lawn sputter on and then spray out cones of mist. Klaus bends over, puts his mouth on the little holes in the ground, the spigots, and tries to drink.

  A museum guard in a dark uniform, a large woman bland and bored, walks down the steps and tells them to leave.

  “You’re supposed to say,” Richard admonishes, “quit the premises. Better yet, vacate them.”

  The woman shrugs and walks back up the steps.

  “Vacate,” says Klaus, his face beaded with spray, “I’m still thirsty. It’s hard to get much. That spray is thin.”

  “Well, let’s go.” They decide, taking themselves back down the street, to find a Wendy’s hamburgers. Sneak in a side door to their bathrooms. If challenged, show their money.

  “Where is this supposed Wendy’s?” says Richard after they walk in the broiling sun over to the other side of Minneapolis.

  “I’m thirsty,” says Klaus.

  They stand outside a grocery store next to a liquor store on Hennepin and they feel good, laugh, making the choice.

  “Mad Dog or Evian?” Richard asks Klaus.

  “I’m going in there,” Klaus says, pointing up at the grocery sign. “I’m asking for a drink of water.”

  He is in and out the door in seconds and a security guard nodding with satisfaction yells, “Good luck anyway, finding a fountain.”

  “He didn’t want to do that,” says Klaus. They walk into the liquor store. “He was just doing his job.”

  “So was Custer,” says Richard. “I opt for a subtle white.” He addresses the storekeeper. “Something with volume. I don’t get too hung up on the bouquet.”

  “That’s good,” says the clerk.

  “My circumstances won’t permit it.” Richard nods. “I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can’t fool me. Don’t try.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  The clerk scrapes their money off the counter and bags up two bottles, each in its own individual sack, and sets them on the counter for the men to take.

  “You wouldn’t have a cup of water handy, would you?” asks Klaus.

  “Not really,” says the clerk.

  “Did he mean not as in reality or really not,” asks Richard as they go out the door.

  “He meant they don’t have a glass of real water,” Klaus says, gazing back into the window with longing, “just those cardboard pictures on the walls.”

  “That’s all you need,” says the Blue Fairy, holding up the bottle before his eyes. Twice, with her glass hoof, she strikes the hollow ground. “Let’s mogate.”

  “To the big water. Gichi-ziibi.”

  “Howah!”

  They walk. Hotter. Hotter. A few times they take a drink from their bottles, but mainly they want to get to the Mississippi, so they walk. Shaking a little, hungry. Go around the back of a pizza place where the manager leaves unclaimed orders every once in a while. Past the Deja Vue Showgirls. SexWorld. Fancy café garbage Dumpster and outdoor bar. Nothing there. A woman exiting an antique store holds out a dollar and the moment Richard touches the bill she drops it like he’d run an electric wire up her arm. She darts away.

  “It’s that sex thing,” says Richard, his look sage. “I have that effect on women.”

  “They run like hell.”

  Klaus laughs too hard, furious, thinking of how his antelope girl could take off and sprint.

  They reach the broad lawns and paths beside the river, go down the embankment and edge along the shore until they find a clump of bushes, familiar shade.

  “We were here a while ago. I remember this place,” says Richard. “We should put down some tobacco.”

  “Or smoke it.”

  “We just got two cigarettes left.”

  “Let’s smoke it like an offering then. It don’t mix with wine, not for religious purposes.”

  “That’s true,” says Richard. He slowly decides, and then he speaks. “This afternoon, let’s just regard our tobacco as a habit-forming drug.”

  Klaus sways to his knees and then painfully, slowly, he inches down the bank of the river, leans over the edge to where the water begins. At that place, he lowers his face like a horse. He puts his face into the water, sucks the river into himself, drinks it and drinks it.

  “That’s Prairie Island nuclear water,” Richard yells.

  Klaus keeps drinking.

  “He can’t hear me,” Richard says to himself. “Besides, that plant is down the stream farther.”

  Richard lights a cigarette, takes a drink of wine.

  “Or Xcel shit. Or some beaver might have pissed up near Itasca.”

  Klaus keeps drinking and drinking.

  “For sure,” says Richard, worried.

  Klaus doesn’t stop.

  “Wowee,” says Richard, taking a drink of the wine, swishing it around on his tongue, “full-bodied as my sour old lady.”

  “How about you?” Richard yells to the river. “Klaus?”

  Klaus is still face in the water, drinking, drinking up the river like a giant.

  “What do you think he sees,” says Richard, helpless without an audience, wishing he could open Klaus’s wine already. “What do you think he’s looking at? What do you think he sees?”

  After another drink, Richard answers himself.

  “To the bottom.”

  And he is right and she is down there. Klaus is watching her float toward him—his special woman—the Blue Fairy, merlady—a trembling beauty alive with Jell-O light, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales. The water is medicinal, bubbling, hot turquoise. She stops for a moment, flying backward in the great muscle of the current pushing
south. It tugs at her hair. She has to go, Klaus knows. Longing for her scorches him through and through. He stretches toward her with all of his soul, but she only looks back at him over her shoulder with her hungry black eyes. Gives a flick of her white-flag tail.

  Chapter 18

  Finding Sweetheart

  ROZIN FLIPS THROUGH a pile of mail, two paper bags at her knees. One for glossy junk mail and one for plain envelopes and letter paper. Gakaabikaang insists that its citizens sort their business out, and Rozin does this with even more devotion than she used to before her husband created a toxic waste dump in the barn of innocent old people. A story that has been reported in the newspapers she recycles.

  A letter with a handwritten address. BIA boarding school script, thinks Rozin. An elder. Indians of the boarding school era have beautiful handwriting—flowing, spikey, and precise. The capitals are rounded and tailed. Rozin looks at the letter and thinks: swollen fingers whacked by rulers and many tears made these letters. These are the well-formed and perfected small triumphs of shame. The name where there should be a return address is Jimmy Badger. The letter is addressed to Klaus.

  Rozin opens it because Klaus is gone, and reads:

  Bring her back to us. Her daughters are going crazy and are running through our men. They have broke up every marriage and punched out every wife. Our tribal leaders are again locking each other up and the school board is devouring the administration. Gangs are here, the drugs are getting harder, the drinking bloodier. Nobody stops at the gas station and the casino deal is stalled. Birds are falling from the sky. An eagle died in my yard. I have made its tail feathers into a white fan for the woman with the blue beads, the one you stole. Bring her back to us! Bring her back!

  Rozin drops the letter on the table. That’s it. Cecille is right. History won’t let up. Sweetheart’s presence has meaning and from Jimmy Badger’s letter Rozin now understands that is true. If only the BIA had been more careful about teaching details like a return address! It seems Sweetheart Calico is throwing our world out of whack. She belongs where she was—the stamp is canceled Montana. Since Klaus stole her and brought her here, thinks Rozin, everything there and here has gone downhill. That carpet scam went bad. Klaus and Richard disappeared. I got happy with Frank, but the twins were spirited off by Sweetheart and I lost my job. Then I took them north and they got sick. Finally, they jump in Cecille’s car and end up here. At least they’re back in school. But we should figure out what to do with Sweetheart Calico.

  It seems that Sweetheart doesn’t want Rozin to find her, because she won’t be found. She has stopped coming to the house since Rozin came back. That is because Sweetheart is busy stalking Klaus and Richard, just out of sight. When they fall asleep, she steals whatever they’ve rustled together in their day of foraging. She takes it all. The dog has run away to live with her, hunting rabbits in the melted underbrush and through the new spring yards. It’s not a bad way to live although it is sometimes so repetitious. Klaus and Richard walk to the same places, collect the same change, buy the same bottles, sleep curled in the same smelly mess of sleeping bags and blankets.

  Sweetheart has two sleeping bags. She knows the most deserted hiding places. Finds a house. Creeps into the bag with the dog and both stay warm and also they have scored another old forsaken pizza. Inside the sleeping bag with pizza dog farts, Sweetheart sleeps deeply, happily, even profoundly. She is dreaming of the open spaces, of running and running. She is laughing with her daughters as they charge up and down the hills. She goes to visit Jimmy Badger in her dream and he blesses her with an eagle tail fan and tells how glad he is that she’s come home.

  Ziigwan

  As the days slowly grow warmer, Rozin rises earlier and earlier. She is looking for a job. It isn’t going well. She has moved back into her house and Frank keeps bringing by the unsold goodies at the end of every day. Rozin knows she can balloon up fast on day-old muffins, so sometimes she tries to go running with Cecille. The jogging suit Cecille wears, made out of the same silk as a parachute, bright yellow, flares up and down the street and over to the river, her route. With her hair in a ponytail and neat black ribbon, she is a fixated bee. Shadowboxing. Leaping. Posing with her hands cocked and her eyes steady. Man-eating tiger eyes. Irish-Anishinaabe masterpiece woman. Rozin sweats like mad as she bounces slowly along behind her cousin, feeling heavier and madder and more resentful of her joblessness and lack of power in the system. Perhaps I will go back to school, she thinks. Become a lawyer. Hit Richard up for child support. How would that work? You can’t hit up a man who has made himself into a wino. You can’t garnishee his panhandling take, but I would like to.

  She works in the bakery sometimes, but only when Frank is busy. She doesn’t sit or have coffee or pass the time of day. Rozin handles the customers and cleans the glass counter and display case of their eternal fingerprints.

  Still there are times Rozin rises even earlier, and in those blue morning hours, Frank teaches her everything he knows about the attractions of flours to yeasts to butters. He explains the temperatures that make them brown and rise. Rozin learns to skim with serious efficiency the bits of blackened dough from the Jacuzzi-sized deep fryer full of boiling fat and to run the whip cycle on the mixer that froths up lard and sugar. Her favorite part is to add the food coloring in drops. Instant red, blue, lavender. Killer frosting, whipped high.

  All day, people stagger in from the tae kwan do school down the street, exhausted from Cecille’s workouts, craving butterfat icing and reflex-slowing caramel-fudge fritters. They have to touch the cases where these things are displayed on doilies. They press close to the delectables, breathe, smudge, cough the air full of predatory microorganisms. Rozin can see their instant relief, after they have paid. Opening the crinkly white bag, exposing sweet deep-fried dough, biting into the spot on the powdered bismarck that holds the squirt of cherry jelly, they sometimes give out a small involuntary moan.

  The grandmas drive down to stay a week. Noodin comes into the shop wearing a pair of pink-beaded earrings that Rozin gave her. It is clear from the implacable set of her mouth and her blink at the sight of Frank that she is sneaking away for a jolt of sugar. She is small as ever and her face reminds Frank of one of those squashed-in little dogs. Soft round flat cheeks, heavy chin, a grim wide mouth. Her nose is pug round, brown as a knot of tobacco, and her eyes are dark and yielding with a kind of liquid mournfulness. Her big gaze sweeps over the cakes and cookies. The contents of the lighted case seem to her a tragic puzzle. She sighs over all the choices. She slowly opens her purse. And here’s where when Frank knows he is in trouble, not one word yet exchanged. Her little plastic snap purse is held together with a rubber band.

  Those rubber-banded snap purses. Watch out, Frank thinks. You see an old lady slowly draw one forth and you know you are going to pay for her lunch and pay beyond that in ways more than money or time. No way you can spiritually afford to charge an old lady with a broken, old, green-plastic snap purse who has, in her pride, saved and used to close it a blue rubber band off a bunch of broccoli she bought to aid her slow digestion. No way you can charge her a dime. Even if she points at the biggest, puffiest, creamiest, most expensive piece of cake in the case you can’t charge her.

  No way you can get out of marrying her daughter, either. Not that you want to.

  “Please,” Frank says, sliding the piece of cake at her over the counter, already on a six-inch paper plate, with a plastic fork and napkin beside. “It’s on the house.” Grandma Noodin rears back as though suspicious. As though she has just recognized Frank.

  “Frank,” she says, and already her snap purse has vanished.

  “I’ve been hoping you would stop in.” Frank comes around the counter to sit down with her, intent on not letting her out of his sight. It is unseasonably hot, one of those wild April heat waves that tell you humans may not last on this planet. Frank has already closed the door and turned on the air-conditioning.

  “Miigwech,” she growls. “Wha
t kind of cake is this?”

  He tells her, by pulling out a chair and tidying the corner that he is going to try to keep her in. “This is my attempt at the world-renowed blitzkuchen.”

  Grandma takes an immediate bite.

  “Needs something.”

  “What?” he asks.

  Her face goes intent with thought, trying to discover what spice or ingredient the cake is missing. He watches her sit back, solid as a gray lake rock, chewing in meditation. In the window, looking out as she slowly licks the schlag from her plastic fork, she gives a secret little smile. A familiar expression from up north. Frank is the one suspicious of her now. She’s toying with him, this tiny bulldog lady.

  She knows, but she won’t tell.

  “So Nookomis, I’ve actually been looking all over for you,” Frank starts again.

  “Oh?” She opens her eyes in what may even be real surprise. “Good thing I came in here then. What did you need?”

  She asks Frank, right out, what he wants of her. Just like that. And just like that, faced with the question, he asks not for permission to marry Rozin, which requires many gifts and a longer buildup, especially since Rozin is still married; no, he asks Noodin for the secret ingredient.

  “Secret of what?”