For the rest of the morning, Patrice worked silently, trying to decide whether she should risk her job. At lunch break she took out her battered syrup pail and removed a boiled potato, a chunk of bannock, and a small handful of raisins. Sometimes people traded their government commodities for Zhaanat’s baskets. Raisins were prized. She ate them slowly, for dessert, letting each one soften and melt against the back of her teeth.
“Raisins!”
Patrice handed her friend the bucket and Valentine scooped the remaining raisins greedily into her mouth. She glanced at Patrice and caught sight of her dismay before Patrice could hide it.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“But you’re upset.”
“Over Vera. I’m scared to take a leave because if it’s complicated, and I have to stay longer, then I lose my job. I just have three days.”
“Of what?”
“Three days of sick time.”
“Huh?”
“Three days of sick time.”
“Sick time?”
“With half pay.”
“Oh. I didn’t even know we had that.”
Their break was over. Patrice drank the stale coffee at the bottom of her cup. The boiled potato anchored her and she went at her work with the sudden focus that had become habit. She lowered the wand to spread a drop of cement. Her hand was steady.
Later, on the way to the car, Valentine said, “You can have my days.”
“What do you mean?”
“My sick days. Mr. Vold told me that I could give my days to you. Under the circumstances.”
Patrice was so ablaze with relief that she reached her arms out, embraced Valentine, and then stepped back.
“I’m so thankful. What a surprise.”
“I know,” said Valentine. “I’m all contradictions.”
For Valentine to name this quality about herself startled the two of them to silence.
“Contradictions!”
“Is that some kind of a game?” said Doris, stepping up behind them.
“No,” said Valentine, “it’s me. Blowing hot and cold. Naughty and nice.”
“My goodness.”
“But never stingy. Always generous,” said Patrice.
On the way home she told the two of them about the trip to Minneapolis. She had never taken a trip before, so she was making it up as she went along.
* * *
Her family did not own a traveling bag. There was a handsome plaid suitcase for sale at the mercantile. Expensive. Patrice bought a yard and a half of canvas. She cut short lengths of popple, stripped off the bark. She hemmed the canvas, sewed the sides together, sewed the ends around the short poles, then used sinew and brass tacks to fasten two pieces of leather onto the poles to act as handles. The canvas suitcase looked like a workman’s bag but so what? She didn’t need to be fashionable, just get herself to Minneapolis. At the Relocation Office there was a train timetable. Once she found a ride to Rugby, she could purchase her ticket down at the station.
Curly Jay’s sister, Deanna, worked in the small room that served as an office. Patrice sat at a table covered with papers, flipping through a stack, looking for any new information on Vera. Behind her a poster was taped to the wall. Come to Minneapolis. The Chance of Your Lifetime. Good Jobs in Retail Trade, Manufacturing, Government Federal, State, Local, Exciting Community Life, Convenient Stores. Beautiful Minnesota. 10,000 Lakes. Zoo, Museum, Drives, Picnic Areas, Parks, Amusement, Movie Theaters. Happy Homes, Beautiful Homes, Many Churches, Exciting Community Life, Convenient Stores.
Besides love, Patrice thought that Vera had probably gone to Minneapolis for Exciting Community Life and Beautiful Homes. Those drawings of the windows with the ruler-straight muntins.
“Do you want to put in an application?”
“To move to Beautiful Minnesota?”
“You get help with a job, the training, help finding a place to live and all that.”
“Did Vera get all that?”
“Oh, well, yeah.”
“You should really pay me to do your job for you. Going down to find her. Don’t you keep track of where people go?”
“Not after a while.”
“A short while.”
“We have last known address on Bloomington Avenue.”
“I have it too. I’m going to start there.”
“Where you staying?”
“I don’t have a place.”
“Look up my friend.”
Deanna wrote the name Bernadette Blue on a card along with her address and a phone number.
“I don’t know if she’s still at this number. It was for work.”
“What kind of work?”
“Secretarial.”
“Juggie Blue’s daughter.”
“The bad one,” said Deanna.
Patrice lifted her eyebrows. Deanna said, “Kidding.” But she wasn’t. She kept flipping through the stack of papers. “And here’s another name. Father Hartigan.”
“I’m not going all the way there to see a priest.”
“For an emergency.”
“I’m not going to have an emergency.”
“Vera said something like that.”
“I still think you should pay me.”
That Saturday, Patrice waited until Pokey was gone and Zhaanat out in the woods. Although she trusted them not to take her money, she didn’t quite trust them not to suddenly need to get rid of her father. Her money was buried underneath the eighth green square from the right in the linoleum’s design. That part of the pattern was underneath her bed. She pulled the flimsy bed frame aside. Careful not to crack the linoleum, she pulled it up slowly. She had buried her money box, a dented pink cookie tin painted with dancing cookies, and made certain it was smoothly covered. Now she pushed the dirt away and tugged off the cover. It was all there. One hundred and six dollars. She removed the money, reburied the box, and left eight of the dollars underneath her mother’s sugar can. Doris was driving down to Rugby and would pick her up in half an hour. Patrice had kept the clock wound and figured out how many minutes it had lost overnight. The time displayed was fairly accurate. All she had to do was get on the train. What she had to go on was the unreliable address, and Juggie Blue’s daughter, Bernadette, the bad one.
Zhaanat came back with a basket of pine tips. They stood together, arms around each other, just outside the door.
“He’s down in Fargo, right?” Patrice said of her father.
“He won’t come here now, not for a while.”
Patrice could feel, in her mother’s grip, that her father would not return. Her fear was of letting her go. “Don’t you go disappear on me too,” Zhaanat whispered and clutched her harder. Fear for Pixie. Fear of what she might find. Fear for Vera. But when she stood back, Zhaanat smiled as she took in her daughter’s shined shoes, her bright coat, pin-curl-waved hair, red lipstick. Valentine had even lent her gloves.
“You look like a white woman,” said Zhaanat, in Chippewa.
Patrice laughed. They were both pleased at her disguise.
Pukkons
Thomas carried his rifle on the trail to his father’s house. Maybe he would flush up a partridge. Or surprise a deer. But there was only sere grass, rose hips, seed heads of black-eyed Susans, red willow. Under the stands of oak, heaps of acorns lay in the grass. With a lot of boiling, you could eat them. He thought of picking them up. But along the edges of the grass road there were bushes loaded with pukkons. He filled his hat, then his jacket, with the prickly green nuts. His father saw him coming along the edge of the field and stepped out of his doorway, stooped, leaning on his stick. Biboon, Winter, bone thin. With age, his skin had lightened in patches. Laughing, he sometimes called himself an old pinto. He wore a creamy long-john shirt, brown work pants, moccasins so worn they looked like part of his feet. He could still keep the fire going, and insisted on living alone. Biboon trembled and smiled when he saw the pukkons. They were a favorite food of his, r
eminding him of early days.
“Oh boy, you got some. Let’s smash off the shells.”
There were flat slates at the edge of the yard. Thomas put the prickly green nuts in a bag and struck the bag with a rock, just hard enough to loosen the shells. The late afternoon light slanted low from the west, and he brought out the kitchen chairs and a dishpan. It seemed to Thomas, as they sat in the sinking radiance, shucking bits of shell from the meat, dropping the nuts into a dishpan, that he should hold on to this. Whatever was said, he should hold on to. Whatever gestures his father made, hold on to. The peculiar aliveness of things struck by late afternoon sunlight—hold on to it. And the trees behind them, their shadows, wavering.
Biboon said, “Oh the devil, look here.”
Inside one of the shells there was a golden beetle, like something in a teaching or a fairy tale. Its bifurcated shell was shimmering, metallic. For a moment it rested on Biboon’s hand, then its golden armor parted and it flexed tough black wings. Whirred off into the loom of shadows.
“It looked like a chunk of gold,” said Thomas.
“Good thing we didn’t crush that son of a gun between the rocks,” said Biboon.
Thomas’s dog, Smoker, came out of the woods carrying a deer’s leg bone. He was a mix of dogs looking like the old-time kind of dogs people had—working dogs with soft gray fur and curled tails. Smoker’s fur was spotted with black slash marks, and his face was half white and half gray.
“Good boy,” said Thomas to the dog.
Smoker crouched down nearby with the bone between his paws, guarding the bone even though it was white and weathered. Soon Thomas began to speak with his father in Chippewa—which signaled that their conversation was heading in a more complex direction, a matter of the mind and heart. Biboon thought more fluently in Chippewa. Although his English was very good, he also was more expressive and comical in his original language.
“Something is coming in the government. They have a new plan.”
“They always have a new plan.”
“This one takes away the treaties.”
“For all the Indians? Or just us?”
“All.”
“At least they’re not just picking on us alone,” said Biboon. “Maybe we can get together with the other tribes on this thing.”
As a boy, Biboon had traveled along the medicine line into Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, and Blackfeet territory. Then his family swung down along the Milk River, hunting buffalo. He had come back to the Turtle Mountains when there was no other choice. They were confined on the reservation, and had to get permission from the farmer in charge to pass its boundaries. For a while they were not allowed to go off to search for food, and one terrible winter the old people starved themselves so that the young people could continue. Biboon had tried farming with the seed wheat, iron plow, and ox that the farmer in charge had issued to him on strict condition that the family not kill and eat the ox. The first year, nothing. They had to take turns sneaking past the boundaries, picking up buffalo bones to sell to the bone dealers. The next year they did not plant the white man’s grain, but corn, squash, and beans. The family dried the crops and cached the food. They didn’t quite starve, but by spring they could barely walk, they were so skinny and weak. It took many years of finding what plants grew best in which soil, liked a wet or dry spot, sun in morning or afternoon. Thomas had learned from his father’s experiments.
Now they had enough, plus the government surplus food, which always showed up unexpectedly. Biboon was happiest about the government’s corn syrup, so sweet it made his tooth stubs ache. He cut it with cold water and added a few drops of Mapleine to make it taste like the old-time maple syrup. He remembered the taste from his very youngest days as a child in the great sugar stands of maple trees in Minnesota. And he loved pukkons roasted in a cast-iron skillet, tossed up and down as the smell of old times filled the cabin.
Perfume
On the way down to Rugby, sitting in the passenger seat that Valentine always occupied, Patrice wondered if Doris Lauder always smelled so good. She wanted to ask whether it was perfume, but wasn’t sure if it was rude to ask. Patrice wondered about the medicines on her skin. She lived with bear root, wiikenh, prairie sage, sweetgrass, kinnikinnick, and all sorts of teas and medicines that Zhaanat burned or boiled every day. The scent of the medicines surely clung to her. Zhaanat had pushed a cloth bag of rose hip tea into Patrice’s hands before she left, a strengthening tonic for Vera. And also cedar. Used to bathe infants. They were in her satchel, which was in the backseat. Slowly the scent of cedar was permeating the car’s interior. But it couldn’t yet compete with Doris.
“I like your perfume,” Patrice said. “What is it called?” She had not been meaning to speak. But the steady background noise of the motor encouraged conversation.
“Eau de Better Than Manure,” said Doris. “The farm girl’s friend.”
Patrice laughed so hard she snorted. Which would have been embarrassing but Doris snorted too. The snorting set them laughing until tears sprang from the corners of their eyes. Doris gasped that she had to calm down for fear of driving off the road.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” she asked Patrice. “Valentine says you do.”
“What? I’d like to know who!”
“People say the boxing coach likes you.”
“That’s news to me,” said Patrice, though it wasn’t. Even Pokey had mentioned that Barnes was always asking questions about her.
“What about you?” Patrice added.
“I don’t have anybody.”
“You are wasting your perfume?”
“No, I’m just making the air around me bearable.”
They laughed again, but didn’t go out of control.
“I have never bought perfume,” said Patrice. “If I have any money left over on my trip, I might use it on perfume.”
“I bought myself a little birthday present this year. It’s called Liquid Petals. I use it when I go to town, but not at work.”
“I suppose it was expensive.”
“Yes, but that’s not why. I don’t wear it because Grasshopper likes it.”
Patrice absorbed the meaning of that. “You don’t want to encourage him.”
“Of course not. Who would?”
“Mrs. Grasshopper?”
“There isn’t one. For obvious reasons.”
“Isn’t there somebody you do want to use Liquid Petals on?”
“Maybe, to tell you the truth, but he hasn’t noticed me yet.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Have you looked at me? I’m dumpy, sweaty, awkward, and my skin is pasty pale. I am not the blooming farm girl. No roses in these cheeks.”
Patrice was silent in surprise. With her snub features and fluffy red-brown hair, her large bosom and short curvy legs, Doris was pretty. She could be saying these things to get compliments, thought Patrice, so she began giving her compliments. Doris seemed exasperated by everything she said. It seemed that Doris did not want to hear good things about herself. Patrice stopped and they rode in silence. After a while Doris said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. You’re just trying to make me feel better. But I can see right through that. What do you think about Bucky Duvalle?”
It was like she’d poked an electric wire into Patrice’s brain.
“What do I think? You don’t want to hear. You know what he said about me, right?”
“No?”
Doris glanced at her, goggle-eyed, and Patrice gave her the lowdown on how Bucky and his friends had picked her up hitchhiking last summer. How they first promised then refused to take her where she asked to go. How they trapped her, how Bucky threw himself on her, how they took her down the road to Fish Lake and tried to make her get out and have a “picnic” and how she pretended to go along with them. But when they got down to the lake she jumped in and begun swimming toward her uncle’s fishing boat. And they hadn’t dared follow her.
She didn’t tell Doris about ho
w they tried to pile on her in the car, or about Bucky’s face mashed up against hers, his hands on her, everywhere. She said nothing about Bucky’s condition now.
“Did you swim all the way to your uncle’s boat?”
“Did I ever! He was so surprised. Said he was fishing for bass, not young ladies. Anyway, he put down his fishing rod and helped me get into his boat.”
“Lucky he was out there.”
“I could have outswum those boys. They were drunk.”
“Could you tell when you got into the car?”
“Yes, but I needed that ride so bad.”
“Of course.”
They rode in silence for a while, then Doris asked if Patrice knew the other boys in the car.
“I knew a couple. There were four.”
“My brother’s a friend of Bucky’s.”
Doris glanced over at Patrice and from her look Patrice knew that her brother had been one of those boys. She knew that was why Doris had asked her about Bucky. It hadn’t been a real question. She could not trust Doris now. She knew all about Bucky. And her brother must have said something about her.
“What did he say?” said Patrice.
“He said Bucky was a jackass. He said he didn’t know why you went off in the bushes with him.”
“I didn’t! What did you say?”
“I said I didn’t think you’d do that.”
Had Doris really defended her? Patrice was skeptical.
“And what did he say?”
“He looked at me funny. Then he said that Bucky made him swear to say that.”
“Why would Bucky want that? What’s in it for him?”
“Don’t you know? He thinks if he ruins your reputation for nice guys you’ll be softened up so he can get you. Bucky likes you, just like Barnes.”
Patrice said nothing. This sounded completely true. Yet also completely false. Didn’t Bucky think what other people thought? That his disfigurement had something to do with Zhaanat and with her? That somehow they’d frozen half his face and sucked the strength from his arm? That they’d cursed him?
The Night Watchman Page 6