The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  “This cake.”

  Noodin looks down at the crumbs.

  “You know the story,” she says. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll tell you then.”

  Frank holds his breath.

  “The cake was baked by a man afraid for his life. He put his fear into the cake.”

  The revelation sets Frank back in his chair. If he were to make the cake, say, as he was misdiagnosed with cancer or if someone held a gun to his head only it was loaded with blanks . . . or if you desperately loved a woman and were trying to think how to marry her when suddenly her husband showed up . . .

  Noodin makes significant eye contact with Frank, tips an imaginary bottle delicately to her lips. And there he is.

  FRANK DOESN’T RECOGNIZE Rozin’s husband at first, for Richard Whiteheart Beads is saggy-skinned, drooping like a week-old helium balloon, and he is sick, with a bruise the green of old cooked liver on his cheek, and puffy eyelids. Around his head a frayed red bandanna. A U of MN Golden Gophers sweatshirt from the Salvation Army with its sleeves chopped off and the gopher just a faded ghost gopher. Shorts sagging underneath a watermelon-tight paunch. Shorts held up with rope. Flapping tennies and no socks. He stands before the counter barely holding himself upright and then he turns. Directly, for he knows, he fixes Frank with such a stare, like looking down into the bottom of a dry well. His mouth opens. A powerful wave of sour breath hits Frank as he croaks three times like a raven, “Cawg . . . cawg . . . cawg . . . ,” then stops, gulps dry, and looks even harder at Frank and croaks in a terrible whisper.

  “Nibi . . .”

  Wheeling backward, whirling his arms like a suddenly light scarecrow tossed by a wind in the air, Richard stagger-skips backward to the door. Frank leans toward him in a tangle of conflicted feeling, but he is out, into the street. Frank, Grandma, and Klaus watch his runaway figure round the corner and vanish.

  “That was quick.” Noodin returns to her cake, presses up the remaining crumbs with the tines of her fork.

  “Aawww . . . we just wanted . . . a drink. A drink of water.”

  Klaus is still standing in the middle of the store. He voice is wracked, bone-dry. Klaus tries to speak more words, tapping his throat. He’s in an even worse state than Richard. He sways back and forth making small mewling noises of thirst.

  Frank steps up to Klaus and catches him before he can pitch down. He pulls Klaus’s arm over his own shoulder and drags him back into the bakery. Once behind the swinging steel doors, Frank rolls Klaus gently out on a stainless-steel bread table. Makes him drink a cup of water sip by sip. Turns down the lights. Frank takes an apron or two off the wall hooks and drapes them across his cousin’s arms and chest and bare legs.

  Rozin walks in with Cally and Deanna. Frank can tell from their faces that they missed seeing Richard, and he’s relieved. The girls’ eyes go big when they see Klaus sprawled out on the bread table.

  “Major disinfection needed there,” says Rozin.

  “Klaus needs rest,” says Frank to the girls, his big face steady. “You come on out to the front. Your uncle needs to sleep.”

  For an hour or so, Frank works out front, doing nothing more than checking the ovens in the bakery, the specific one in which he’s got the next blitzkuchen. Fear! What about frustration? From time to time, he makes sure that his relative is still peacefully passed out. Frank mops down the entry floor and even goes outside and sweeps off the spotless sidewalk. Rozin watches him standing there gazing out at street life, massive from behind, casting a shadow around his feet like a little black pool. She blinks, thinks maybe a dog pauses, just for a moment, out of the searing noon sun. The hot and sticky day is the reason Klaus became desperate enough to throw himself into the entry of the bakery shop.

  “They don’t come here much,” says Frank when he steps back in.

  Rustling, groans. Frank starts forward but the steel door barges open. Klaus has thrown it wide. He is staring at them like a confused scraggly coyote who doesn’t know how it got into this body. Or understand why his clothes are covered with filth or what to do with the feet that can’t steady the rest of him. His hands reach out, shaking, his face twists like a rag.

  “Nibi,” he cries, and staggers forward. Frank pours from a plastic pitcher, then gives Klaus the pitcher. Klaus drops the pitcher.

  “Oops.”

  Sweetheart Calico slides in and stands behind Klaus as he staggers forward, and in her eyes there is something Rozin can’t name at first. Not kindness, not love. Maybe a savage mercy.

  It is really painful when we self-sabotage, her look says to Klaus. I know where you are at. Sweetheart grabs his arm. Turns him. In her hand there is a plastic cup of water. Stumbling and reeling, he tries to accept. His hand won’t cooperate. He swipes toward the cup and misses. Holds his elbow with the other arm and concentrates. It takes Frank sitting him down on the floor and crouching next to him, holding the cup to his lips.

  And all the time Sweetheart is sitting across from Klaus, looking at him, her eyes fixed in his eyes, their minds locked in some form of knowing. They rise in unison. She somehow imparts her grace to him and they float out the door with their arms around each other. Between them, the pilot light of alcohol, dead blue and steady.

  Gakaabikaang. That’s the name our old ones call the city, place of the falls is what it means from way back when it started as a trading village. Although driveways and houses, concrete parking garages and business stores cover the city’s scape, that same land is hunched underneath. There are times, like now, Frank gets a sense of the temporary. It could all blow off. And yet the sheer land would be left underneath. Sand, rock, the Indian black seashell-bearing earth.

  Part Four

  Niiwin

  The red beads were hard to get and expensive, because their clear cranberry depth was attained only by the addition, to the liquid glass, of twenty-four-carat gold. Because she had to have them in the center of her design, the second twin gambled, lost, grew desperate, bet everything. At last, even the blankets of her children. She won enough, just barely, for the beads. And then the snow fell. Gazing into the molten hearts of the ruby-red whiteheart beads, the children shivered, drew closer, chewed on the hem of her deerhide skirt. First one, and then the other, plucked up the beads from behind her hand. Even knowing they were not food, it was the look of them, bright as summer berries, that tempted their hunger. When her fingers finally closed on air, she turned, saw her youngest quickly swallow the last bead. The mother looked at her children, eyes dazed, fingers swollen, brain itching. All she could think of was finishing her work. She reached for the knife. Frightened, the children ran.

  She had to follow them, searching out their panicked trail, calling for them in the dark places and the bright places, the indigo, the white, the unfinished details and larger meaning of her design.

  Chapter 19

  Wiindigoo Dog

  THE DOG IS standing on his chest again, looking down into his face and grinning the same curious, confiding dog grin that started Klaus on this eternal binge. The dog is a scuffed-up white with spooky yellow-brown eyes and a big pink dragging tongue. The damn thing has splayed wolf paws, ears alert and swivel-based like a deer’s, and no pity whatsoever for Klaus.

  “Boozhoo, Klaus, you are the most screwed-up, sad, fucked-in-the-face, toxic, shkwebii, irredeemable drunk I’ve talked to yet today,” says the dog Klaus calls Wiindigoo Dog.

  “Get off me,” says Klaus.

  Weary. Tired. Klaus had thought wiindigoog were strictly human until this dog came to visit him on a rainy afternoon this summer. Sweetheart Calico has, of course, left him, too. Come back. Then left again. Sent back this dog in her place. Wiindigoo. Bad spirit of hunger and not just normal hunger but out-of-control hunger. Hunger of impossible devouring. Utter animal hunger that does not care whether you are sober or brave or have your hard-won GED certificate let alone degree. No matter. Just food. Klaus is just food to the wiindigoo. And
the wiindigoo laughs.

  “Shit-faced as per usual.” The dog yawns. Its black gums gleam and its ears point straight at Klaus. “I suppose we should have one of our little sessions?”

  “No!” Klaus firmly says. “No!” Louder. “Nooooo . . .”

  But Wiindigoo Dog is dragging his fat blazing purple killer tongue all over Klaus’s face, feet, hands, everywhere. With each tongue lick Klaus shrieks and gags with laughter until he is crying in hysterical hiccups, at which point the dog leans down into Klaus’s face and breathes month-old fishhead dog breath on Klaus.

  When he is utterly immobilized, then, he leans down and tells Klaus his latest dirty dog joke.

  “SO KLAUS, NOT too long ago I overhear these three dogs. A Ho-Chunk dog. A Sioux dog. An Ojibwe dog, too. They’re sitting in the veterinarian’s office waiting room talking about why they’re here. The Ho-Chunk dog says, ‘Well, the other day they were eating that good stew they make, just lapping it up right in front of me. That night they put the cover on the stew pot but they forgot to put the pot away. So I sneaked into the kitchen and I took the top of that pot in my teeth, set it down careful, and ate all the rest of that stew. Then I got in the garbage and ate the bones and the guts of everything that went into that stew. Then I wanted to sleep but oh, by that time I had the worst stomachache. I just had to go. I barked, but the Ho-Chunks, you know they sleep good. They never even stirred in their sleep, so, well, I just went caca all over the house. Now, I guess, they’re so mad they’re going to put me to sleep. I guess I'll go easy anyways. What about you?’

  “ ‘Me,’ said the Dakota Sioux dog, ‘I have a similar story. You ever heard of the stew the Dakotas make with guts? It’s mighty good, and my owner had a big plate of that plus all the makings for Indian tacos in his pickup one day. He was driving home and I was proudly sitting in the cab of the truck when he stopped. He get out, left me sitting there with all that good stuff, and I just couldn’t help it. I wolfed it all down. Every bite. Man, was it ever good! But then I waited and waited and my owner, he was having a good time, and he didn’t come back. I tried to hold it for a long time but finally, well, I just had to go. I went all over that cab of his pickup. Boy, when he came back, was he ever mad! He brought me here. I’m going to be put to sleep too. And you, what about you?’

  “ ‘Well me,’ said the Ojibwe dog, ‘I was sitting on the couch one day just dozing off. I was half asleep and my owner, she likes to vacuum her house in the nude, she was doing her usual housework. She was working on the carpet right in front of me and usually, even though I’m not fixed, I’ve got a fair amount of self-control. But then she bent over right in front of me and I just lost it. I went right for her.’

  “ ‘Sexually?’ asked the others.

  “ ‘Yeah,’ the Ojibwe dog admitted.

  “ ‘Gee,’ said the other dogs, shaking their heads, ‘that’s too bad. So she’s putting you to sleep too.’

  “ ‘Gawiin,’ said the Ojibwa dog, modestly. ‘You know us Chippewa dogs, we got the love medicine. Me, I’m getting a shampoo and my nails clipped.’ ”

  “YOU’RE A VERY sick dog,” says Klaus.

  “You’re the blooming picture of health yourself,” says the wiindigoo dog. “I gotta motivate out of here.”

  “Listen.” Klaus tries to look pitiful. “Go get her, will you? Bring her back to me.”

  “Get who?”

  “You know,” says Klaus, very shy, “please. My sweetheart.”

  “Your sweetheart who doesn't love you. Let her go,” says the dog.

  I WONDER IF I am going to change now, thinks Richard, as the ambulance rockets through Gakaabikaang. I am not going to die, which is a disappointment. After he left Frank’s bakery, he walked about a mile, then collapsed on his head. He may have a concussion, but he can’t seem to pass out again. Richard pauses in his thoughts to feel the piercing regret. But there is also an odd pulse of pleasure as his life threads strongly through him, stabilized. His ambulance-ride meditation continues.

  Why not live as if I did die? Why not live as if nothing matters? All the consequences of being the old Richard will land upon me, but perhaps I can endure. After all, I am the last of a family who mostly perished underneath a grand piano that nobody knew how to play. At my grandmother’s funeral a young nun tried, but the piano was ruined by the same rain and snow that had weakened their lungs. Yet here I am, a survivor. This life is heavy, but also, it is nothing.

  The ambulance stops and he is wheeled into a lighted place of shining surfaces. He is obviously an indigent man with no insurance, so he is parked in the hall with no painkillers. When the pain starts, it is fierce. He moans and sobs until a nurse gives him a wonderful shot that erases his disappointment in living.

  Don’t ever forget, says the morphine, how sweet I am.

  The hallway lights dim and a humming hush falls over the actions of the nurses and doctors and trained paramedics and cleaning people and the other patients, too, with their urgent complaints and serious faces. A young girl is wheeled by; she is the age of his daughters. A pale child weeping with fear.

  Richard thinks of the young nun who tried to play the piano for his grandparents. Love washes powerfully through his heart.

  Oh, pale child, he thinks, pale child of astounding beauty. Don’t be afraid. But she continues to wail down the hall until heavy doors shut soundlessly.

  RICHARD DRIFTS, SLEEPS, and when he wakes he is stitched up, bandaged, discharged, and walking the street. The morphine leaves his body stealthily, whispering, You want me. And then the pain is outrageous. Richard picks up one foot and then the other until he is at a shelter where they know him. They feed him mashed potatoes, gravy, watery corn, and give him a cot to sleep on. He sinks into a long blackness. But then the ripsaw snore of the man sleeping next to him stabs regularly into his brain, and that night, staring into fuzzy space, Richard understands he can no longer bear the random snores of other winos. In prison, he will be safer from random snores—a roommate, maybe, whose snore he will get used to. He will be warm. He will be fed and there will be lots of other Indians. There will be a television and a routine and maybe he can figure out his next move in life.

  I will surrender myself to justice, he says to the snoring man.

  THE NEXT DAY, Richard walks to the police station, through the doors that open so easily and shut so completely.

  “I surrender,” he says to the desk clerk.

  The desk clerk takes his information and puts it into a computer.

  “Stay here,” he says after a moment, and indicates a line of chairs.

  “Good-bye, random snores,” says Richard, and sits down. He waits for an hour. The officer makes a phone call. Richard waits some more. Finally, a man in a gray suit with no tie walks up to him and hands him a packet of papers. The man walks away. Richard opens the packet. They are divorce papers.

  Richard walks back to the desk clerk.

  “I surrendered to a different thing,” he says. “I disposed of toxic carpet in an ordinary barn. There should be some charges against me sitting in your computer.”

  The desk clerk politely looks Richard up again, but says that there is nothing pending.

  “No warrant? Nothing from the EPA?” Richard can hear desperation in his voice.

  “Not at this time,” says the clerk.

  “This federal administration sucks,” says Richard as he walks out the door. “No concern at all for illegal dumping. And my head hurts like hell.”

  “Wait!” says another officer. “Your name once again?”

  “I was in the newspapers,” Richard says modestly. From his pocket he takes a wine-blurred clipping.

  “So you’re the asshole that screwed that nice old Norwegian couple,” says the officer. “I’m sure there is a warrant somewhere.”

  Richard reclaims his chair and sits back, shuts his eyes.

  Chapter 20

  The Surprise Party

  THE BRUISED PODS of cardamom. Sweet cake flour fine
as powder. Scent of vanilla easing up the stairwell. Frank is browning tart crusts. Makes his own lemon curd to fill them. Juices the lemons, shreds the peel, stirs the pudding in a thick-bottomed kettle with the timeless assurance of a man whose beloved wife is just upstairs. They have finally moved in together, so they are, he figures, married in the old-time Indian way. As in the old-time traditions, he will keep fixing up her house forever. But instead of hunting, he’ll bake. Rozin is at her desk organizing, studying, taking notes, all with the relieved intensity of a born-again student. She has decided to finish her undergraduate degree and go to law school. She breathes the vanilla wafting up the stairs and feels on her skin the slow increasing tension of the baking crusts below her. Vaguely she anticipates the moment of piercing sweetness, the first bite, the taste he will bring her at noon.

  She shuffles her note cards and lets the screen saver—silver bolts of lightning turning purple, magenta, yellow, silver again—streak and snag across the humming face of her computer. Rozin wants to do something special for Frank’s birthday, something memorable, something even a little outrageous so that, in the future, he will remember how much she cared about his birthday. Even if they never get married (she considers this just living together), they will tell each other about it and eventually the birthday narrative will be just as good as, say, a wedding.

  Frank is bored by gestures of storybook romance. Flowers and music leave him blank, even fancy wines. Those things are too predictable anyway. She needs something more, something that will reach toward Frank in a way that touches some essence of who he is, and it will be private, and it will be just the two of them, which will surprise him, because Frank has heard her speak wistfully of gathering together the very people he would invite to, say, a wedding. But she will instead create some sexy private moment, some personal ritual that would be known only to them.