“Of course I won’t.”
“Would you just, please, hold it up to yourself?”
“All right.”
Patrice pressed the rubber suit against her chest, the absurd hooves dangling.
Jack stared at her, sighed, shook his head.
“It looks like it would just fit. Perfectly.”
Patrice thrust it back at him. With great care, Jack arranged the rubber so as not to put strain on any part of the suit. He put the outfit away and opened a large hatbox, which contained a close-fitting blue rubber cowl with small white horns. It fastened under the chin.
“This is okay,” said Patrice, putting on the blue hat. “But I don’t like those white circles on the cow’s chest.”
“Ox. Babe’s an ox. And as things go, of course, the costume is really quite modest, you must admit,” murmured Jack. “Not much skin showing. Not at all. Just a lot of blue rubber.”
“No thanks,” said Patrice. The fifty dollars plus was difficult.
“Well, so look here,” said Jack. “Let’s talk about finding your sister. How are you going to go about that?”
“I’ll just . . . look. Go to the last known address first.”
“And where are you going to stay?”
“I have a girlfriend.”
“A friend from home?”
“Sort of.”
“You could stay here. It would be a room-and-board sort of deal just to tide us over.”
“Sleep under a table? No thank you.”
“We could put a cot in the room.”
She remembered about scum, but Wood Mountain had given no details. Frustrating. Would she be all right if she avoided the liquor?
“Sounds like a trap.”
“And a strong lock on the door. Or, if you want, we have a hotel next door. Regular place. Clean. Just no ceilings on the rooms. Locks there too.”
“I think that I’ll find a cab to the place I was going. Right now.”
“We could help you.”
“Find a cab? One that won’t kidnap me?”
“Again, profound apologies. So uncalled for. No. We could help you find your sister. I mean, this is a nexus.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“A central place. Like a train terminal. Where everyone meets everyone else. Look. It’s about one p.m. right now. I will personally drive you to your address. I will personally accompany you to the door to ask about your sister. And take you anywhere else that you want to look. If during that time you find a place to stay and a good lead on your sister’s whereabouts, then we say so long, goodbye, farewell. If no luck, you come back and do tonight’s show. That’s all.”
“Why would you do all that?”
“You are the waterjack.”
Jack spoke dramatically, looking into her eyes. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, like old paper.
“What’s so great about this outfit? It’s just a cow suit—”
“Ox. Made of blue rubber.”
Patrice shrugged. She was still in the doorway. Jack gazed dreamily past her.
“To get this outfit made? We had to find a costumier down in Chicago. He had to create the molds for the rubber. Had to get the rubber, natural and not synthetic rubber. And the dye. It is difficult to find a dye that will take hold in the rubber and come out so blue—so brilliant! Dramatic. Hard to make it so the dye won’t run, either, while Babe is doing the show. A rubber that positively won’t bleach out or stretch out of shape. Hard to find. A rubber that won’t start smelling gamey—you couldn’t smell a thing, could you? That’s why we use a special powder to dry it and preserve it from the depredations of insects, ensuring the integrity of the rubber. It is a very special suit, Miss Doris Barnes. And you are the first woman I have seen who might possibly do justice to the lady who last wore the suit.”
“Who was that lady?” asked Patrice.
“Hilda Kranz.”
“So why isn’t she here anymore? What happened to her?”
“She fell ill.”
“Oh. Well, so maybe she’ll get better.”
“Gravely ill,” said Jack.
“I’m so sorry.”
They walked back onto the main floor of the bar.
“All right,” said Patrice. “I’ll let you drive me to where I want to go. Then we part ways.”
“Very good,” said Jack Malloy. “We part ways if you find your sister. If not, you do the show. I will get the keys from Earl.”
“He was driving your car?”
“He always drives my car.”
“I don’t like this,” said Patrice.
Her brain was swelling. Her skull felt too tight. She wasn’t tired, but disoriented. It felt like more new things had happened to her in the past hour than in her entire life before.
The Wake-Up Shave
Thomas crossed his eyes, blinked rapidly. Twisted his skin. Gave himself a snake burn. Spoke out loud. The hardest hour. And not even an owl to hear him.
“What else do you want? Us living on the edge of a handkerchief? Done. Dying out as quickly as possible. Done. Dying out with agreeable smiles. Check. Brave smiles. Check. Pledged to your flag. Check. Check. Check. Done.”
Falon flashed into the room in his olive greatcoat. Then strode through the wall like a mist.
The wall looked spongy where Falon had walked through. Thomas went over, put his hands on the painted plasterboard. The dull green-gray was hard and cold.
“You got the best of us,” said Thomas.
He turned from the wall and glanced at the band saw. Roderick was perched there, grinning in a mad way, like he would bite into the doctor’s hand.
* * *
Thomas stood. He’d brought his shaving kit from home. It was an experiment. Perhaps holding a straight razor to his own throat would keep him awake in the final hour before dawn. He gave himself the closest and most perfect shave a man could manage, contorting his tongue in his cheek, finding every whisker. It worked. That morning, and every morning after, he greeted the morning shift perfectly shaved and combed, alert and smelling of Old Spice.
The Old Muskrat
“What did you all do in the beginning? To keep the land?”
“It was sign or die.”
“How did you keep the last of it?”
“First they gave us this scrap, then they tried to push us off this scrap. Then they took away most of the scrap. Now, what you are saying is they want to push us off the edge of the scrap.”
“How did you hold on?”
Biboon’s breathy wheezing old man’s laughter.
“I was young. But I was part of it. We did hold on. By our fingernails. And toenails. And teeth.”
“How did you finally make them agree to it? The last of the land? What we have now?”
“We got together on it. Stuck together on it. Aisens, Miskobiness, Ka-ish-pa, all of them, Wazhashk too, kept clinging on and clinging on. We had to confront those settlers when they came on our boundaries. We almost went to war on that, but we kept our heads. We knew what would happen if we killed any of those settlers. We confronted them. We stuck together on that. Then we put up a delegation.”
“How did you put up a delegation?”
“We petitioned for it. Don’t forget, we had to go through the farmer in charge and that there Indian Agent out of Devils Lake. But we convinced them anyway. We wrote a letter. We got a school Indian to write the letter. And when we went there, we had, what you call them, signatures.”
“A petition.”
“Eyah.”
“We could start there. Get everyone in the tribe to sign it.”
“That would be something.”
“Then we might have to put up a delegation.”
Thomas blew across the tin cup of scalding tea he’d just made for the two of them. Biboon took a drink of his.
“I’ll take the petition idea to the council. Emergency meeting tonight. Still, we’re just an advisory committee. We have to answer to the B
ureau.”
“Look here,” said Biboon. “This thing is different now. Survival is a changing game. How many people lose out if the government breaks with us?”
Thomas stared at his father. Sometimes he came out with things. As if he’d had his eyes on the workings of the reservation without setting foot in town. His implication . . . other people need us for their own reasons. Neighboring towns need us. That or want nothing to do with us. That or they could be afraid they would be saddled with a lot of poor people. Thomas would have to think this out.
“We’re not nothing. People use our work. You got your teachers, nurses, doctors, horse-trading bureaucrats in the superintendent’s office. You got your various superintendents. You got your land-office employees and records keepers.”
All of these jobs and titles could be expressed in Chippewa. It was much better than English for invention, and irony could be added to any word with a simple twist. Biboon went on.
“Make the Washington D.C.s understand. We just started getting on our feet. Getting so we have some coins to jingle. Making farms. Becoming famous in school like you. All that will suffer. It will be wiped out. And the sick people, where will they go? They sent us their tuberculosis. It is taking us down. We don’t have money to go to their hospitals. It was their promise to exchange these things for our land. Long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.”
“I still see grass. I hear the rivers are running.”
“And they are still using the land,” said Biboon.
“Still using the hell out of it,” said Thomas. “But trying to pretend they didn’t sign a contract to pay the rent.”
The tea was cool enough to drink. The bitterness was comforting.
The community building had a room set aside for gatherings, and that night Thomas convened the meeting of the advisory committee. They used Robert’s Rules of Order, roughly translated into Chippewa. Thomas called the meeting to order and the secretary, Juggie Blue, read the minutes in both languages. Some members of the committee spoke Chippewa or Cree. Others spoke Michif—French and Cree. The languages had bits of English mixed in like salt. So they muddled along, passing the copy of the bill from hand to hand, reading bits of it out loud, arguing about the meaning. As they studied the language of the bill, anxiety seeped into the room.
“It looks to me like they want it all, finally.”
“Relocate us. Haul us out of here.”
“Want the ishkoniganan. Even the leftovers.”
“We had an agreement. They broke it. No warning.”
Louis Pipestone, whose son had barely survived the Korean War, and was still recovering in a military hospital, sat motionless. He stared down at the back of his hands, splayed on the table.
Joyce Asiginak said, “They want to ‘relocate.’ That’s fancy for ‘remove.’ How many times were we removed? No counting. Now they want to send us to the Cities.”
There was silence and the rustle of paper. Moses read the words out loud.
orderly relocation of such Indians
He set down the paper, unable to continue.
“Such Indians. Such Indians are we,” said Louis Pipestone in a slow leaden voice. “Such Indians as can be the wasted in battle. The sergeant waved my son forward. He went alone. Test the water.”
Nobody spoke. Pipestone’s boy had lost his mind, it was said, from being burned. Louis had gone to visit him. Come home and said no word for five days. Thomas broke the silence by suggesting a petition to protest the termination bill. Figure out how to get as many tribal members as possible to sign it.
“I will type out this petition,” said Juggie. “Staple pages to the back for people to sign. We should also get hold of Millie.”
Millie Cloud was Louis Pipestone’s daughter. She was in college. Maybe she could do something, Juggie said.
“And me,” said Louis, “I will bring these papers around to everyone and I will get it signed.”
“Are you sure you want to take it on?” said Juggie to him, quietly.
Louis was a big man, like a buffalo, with a massive head and hunched shoulders. His legs were short and bowed, as if they’d bent under the strain of the top half of Louis. When Louis smiled, his cheeks bunched up like small round apples. His nickname was Cheeks. Now he smiled at Juggie. His big face sweetened.
“I got to do something. Can’t just sit.”
Thomas knew that Louis was not just sitting. He had an allotment on the edge of the reservation, on grazing land. He had help. His young daughter worked it with him, and Wood Mountain came over there to pitch in, but still. A small ranch was a difficult proposition. They kept a racing horse or two. Brought them up to Manitoba. Louis’s son had sent a letter home from boot camp, Thomas remembered. Telling his father that army discipline was easy after Fort Totten. Louis was really saying that even the small amount of sitting he did was unbearable.
“Good,” said Thomas. “It’s important to get this going right now. It looks like this bill—we should call it by its name, House Concurrent Resolution 108, HCR 108—may it go down in infamy—”
“Hear, hear,” said Moses Montrose.
“House Concurrent Resolution 108, we need another copy now. So bring along the one we have with the petition. Explain it, what we learned, how we view it. Would anyone like to move so?”
There was a motion, a second, a vote. The papers were turned over to Louis Pipestone.
“Also,” said Thomas. “I would like to move we refer to House Concurrent Resolution 108 as the Termination Bill. Those words like emancipation and freedom are smoke.”
“Hear, hear,” said Moses, in a lordly way that made people laugh.
The next order of business was getting together a group of people to meet with the BIA in order to have the bill explained. That meeting was going to be held down in Fargo. A distant drive. They had a week to arrange to get down there and attend the meeting.
“It can hardly be done!” said Juggie. “To take off work. To get the people together. Nobody even knows what this thing is.”
“They will start knowing tomorrow,” said Louis.
The Waterjack
2214 Bloomington Avenue was a battered brown three-story house, peeling white paint, broken windows blanked out with cardboard. An assembly of mailboxes hung by the front door. Next to the mailboxes, what looked like a list of inhabitants. Patrice paced questingly in the dead yard. Jack stood on the sidewalk, smoking.
“I’ll stay here and watch for signs of life,” he said.
The front steps had collapsed and there was no obvious way to get onto the porch. Patrice dragged a few things over from the littered yard, then assembled and climbed a makeshift pile of milk crates and boards. There was no name on the list that resembled her sister’s. Patrice knocked on the front door. Abruptly, one of the rusted tin mailboxes gave up and clattered onto the porch, spilling a few envelopes. Even with the loud noise, nobody appeared. But the crash reverberated. Patrice had the sudden sense that the house had warned her. She shook off the feeling, knocked on the window next to the door. Thought she heard a scuffling sound inside. A dog started barking. Its bark was rough, high, desperate to live. She froze. Tears started into her eyes.
“Jack,” she called. He didn’t answer. The dog’s voice weakened until it stopped. Patrice waited. Nothing. She picked up the scatter of envelopes to stuff back into the mailbox. Read the addresses first. One belonged to Vera Paranteau. The letter had come to her only, not to her husband, whom she had followed down to the Cities and who had apparently not married her, as she still had her own name. Patrice kept the envelope and stepped gingerly off the porch.
Standing on the sidewalk next to Jack, she tore open the envelope.
“Felony right there,” he said.
She frowned at him.
“Tampering with the mail.”
The letter was a personalized Last Notice (underlined in red) to inform Vera that her electricity would be turned off. It was dated July, two months ago.
“Next move,” said Jack.
She looked at the house. Someone was in that house. The dog was being strangled or something.
“Jack,” she said, “something’s wrong with that dog.”
“Maybe it doesn’t like people on the porch.”
“Wait.” She walked around back. A strong garbage and piss smell came from the rear of the house. Two more cardboarded windows. But no sign of a person.
“Vera!” she called. “Vera!”
Nothing. Except the dog started up again, furious with hope.
She walked back to Jack.
“We have to go in there,” she said.
“Breaking and entering,” he said. “I will absolutely not flout the law.”
The dog’s rasping bark trailed off. She wavered, waited. Something so alien and wrong. Her skin prickled. Everything was trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t decode the message. A cricket tuned up in the battered grass. At last she shook her head and handed over the second address, on Stevens Avenue. Jack looked at the address and a wince of distaste flicked across his face. He flapped the paper.
“What?” said Patrice.
“I know the building. If you find her there, it won’t be good.”
There were several large square apartment buildings made of dark brown brick. The tiny patch of grass in front was mowed. The low bushes around the foundation clipped.
“This is not so bad,” said Patrice.
“Don’t be fooled by appearances,” Jack said.
She stood on the front steps with Jack. No Paranteau on the list of inhabitants. They walked into the foyer. The small octagonal tiles, set in black-and-white rosettes, had been freshly mopped. Patrice was beginning to feel wobbly again. She might flood through the walls and doors. Still, they went to each apartment. Got no answer. Patrice put her hand to her face. Jack cupped her elbow in his hand.
The Night Watchman Page 10