The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

  “We’ve never lost somebody, in a bad way, from a relocation yet. Most of them come back after a few months.”

  “There’s some staying out there now, too.”

  “Yes, the go-getters.”

  “Don’t it ever bother you,” said Louis, “that we’re losing the go-getters from here at home?”

  “That’s why we worked on getting the jewel bearing plant.”

  “Her job is good. Pixie will come back.”

  “She would not leave Zhaanat. They’re only hanging on because she’s got that good job.”

  “Maybe I should give Grace the go-ahead to work there.”

  “She wants to?”

  “No,” laughed Louis. “She wants to race.”

  “Who’s got the top horses now?”

  “Big place west of Winnipeg, horse named Cash Out.”

  “Who’s your top horse now?”

  “That used to be Gringo. Now we have Picasso and our up-and-comer, Teacher’s Pet.”

  “Can you drive down to Fargo for the information meetings?”

  “Sure,” said Louis. “I can pile eight in the back of my pickup.”

  “Oh, that’s a good one. Say we bring up a heap big show of Indians whooping it up in back of a pickup truck?”

  “I have a feeling those BIAs are maybe expecting that.”

  “We can take my car. I can squeeze in five. Counting me,” said Thomas.

  “Juggie can drive.”

  “She’s got a good car now, I heard.”

  “Bernadette bought her a DeSoto,” said Louis.

  “What, a four door?”

  “Sure enough. A four door. And two-tone.”

  “That girl must be making out good.”

  “You see what I mean, a go-getter.”

  “Juggie was always like that. Nobody could hold her back,” said Thomas.

  “And Wood Mountain. Him too. Someday he’s gonna bust loose and beat Joe Wobble.”

  “I sure want to see that day,” said Thomas. He paused. “You know, Louie, we should be thinking about putting up a delegation.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  “I think so.”

  “Washington?”

  “Like the old-timers.”

  “Can’t get it through my head,” said Louis, lowering his gaze. “My boy put his life on the line.”

  “Like Falon,” said Thomas.

  “Falon,” said Louis.

  “This Senator Watkins is behind the bill.”

  “We should try to figure him out.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. It’s said he wants to teach us to stand on our own two feet.”

  Both men looked down at their feet.

  “I count two,” said Louis.

  “Sometimes I wonder,” said Thomas.

  “Wonder what?”

  “If one of them will ever say, Gee, those damn Indians might have had an idea or two. Shouldn’t have got rid of them all. Maybe we missed out.”

  Louis laughed. Thomas laughed. They laughed together at the idea.

  Ajax

  Thomas and Rose lay side by side in the dim night.

  “I went and had a drink,” said Thomas.

  All the stoppered emotions of the day came up under Rose’s skin. A prickling, burning pressure.

  “Don’t take another one. I’ll kill you.”

  He said nothing, but lay there knowing she wouldn’t even strike at him. He wouldn’t strike at her. They were not like that.

  He turned to her, sinking. It was so much worse than anybody knew.

  The drink had surprised him. He hadn’t thought about it, hadn’t even struggled. Just sat down with Eddyboy Mink and took it. Many years had passed before that drink.

  “You’ll kill me how? Poison?”

  He watched her face. Her eyes glinted. Tears? No. Heat. Then her mouth twitched.

  “You already got poisoned.”

  “You sure?”

  “Remember those biscuits a few mornings ago?”

  “No.”

  “That’s because you were eating in your sleep. Wade made them. He was proud. Later on he tells me he couldn’t find baking powder.

  “‘So I used this,’ he says.”

  “What?” Thomas asked.

  “He was holding up a can of my Ajax scrubbing powder.”

  “That is poison,” said Thomas, impressed.

  “He just used a pinch, or two.” She put her fingers to her mouth. “I told him he could have poisoned you. He’s been watching you close ever since. But looked like it didn’t hurt you, so I didn’t say nothing to you.”

  “I am too tired to die,” Thomas said, but fumed. What? Were they just going to wait and see if he keeled over dead? He was feeling sorry for himself, he realized. And it was a relief to know. He could fight self-pity.

  “Still,” said Rose, lower, unwilling. “Please. No more.”

  To even use the word please seemed to gentle her. She raised her hand and grazed his cheek with her hard, warm palm. Thomas was sinking again, but now into the radiant comfort of which she was the center.

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “Let’s put the seal on the promise,” she whispered, and held his face between her hands. He put his hands on her hands and it was like they were both holding him together. Then he dropped his hands and went to her.

  Iron Tulip

  Freckle Face and Dinky lowered her on a rope with a twenty-pound lifting plate at the bottom. Patrice stood on the metal. Just before she went into the water, she took a deep breath and when the plate met the bottom of the tank she glanced at the creamy blobs of faces. They were meaningless. She swung around the rope with one hoof pointed cutely up behind her. She reached back for her tail, but it had floated up over her head and followed her like a blue snake with a head of false hair. She started bobbing up. Remembered there were other weights on the bottom. Props. She reached toward a pink one but at the last moment realized it was a shocking object. Next to it, an iron tulip, which she lifted and pretended to smell, coyly peeking over her shoulder. Suddenly, in joy, she kicked up her hooves and somersaulted backward in an arc. Then she dropped the tulip and surfaced. As she took a breath she heard applause, heard whistles. The noise of appreciation charged the water. She swirled down into a new substance. The moves were in her, easy. Poses out of magazines, but twisted loose from ads for refrigerators, canned peaches, cars, wringer washers. A finger to her lips, a hip switch, a rolling eye, the rope of tail to swing in a slow lasso toward a creamy blob. And by mistake, from the bottom, she plucked a naughty hatchet. Twenty minutes passed easily.

  “You are a sensation,” said Jack, as she dripped by a small electric coil of heat. “Don’t get too close to that. You’ll melt a hole.”

  She was sitting on a wooden stool. Jack had a little color. The sardonic parentheses around his smile had lifted. He said he’d noticed how she flinched from the “implements of pleasure” and that he would have them removed. “We don’t need to be vulgar. And besides, the city could shut us down.”

  “I’d like to stay with using flowers, and maybe I could pretend to chop with that little hatchet, if you’d fix the end of the handle.”

  “An object of regrettable taste,” said Jack.

  “Oh, and I’d like to be paid the same night.”

  “How about in the morning? We could cut you a check.”

  “I’d like cash.”

  “Cash it is,” said Jack, resigned.

  He gave her a cup of hot coffee, but she only took a couple of sips, for warmth. Three more shows. But they passed in a blur of novelty. And then she was removing the suit and laying it out carefully on a sawhorse to dry. In the morning, she would dust the inside with the special powder that Jack said was mixed up to preserve it. Her dinner was brought to her on a tray.

  A hot turkey and gravy sandwich. The thick white bread, soaked with peppered gravy, melted down her throat. There were butter beans and green beans. She could have had a mix
ed drink. But didn’t want to turn out like her father. Instead, a scalding pot of sugared tea. Oh, that went down well. She used the bathroom again. Put her tray out in the hall. Locked the door. Then took her nightgown from her satchel and lowered it over her shoulders. She switched off the light and crept beneath the red blanket, pressing its satin edge against her cheek.

  * * *

  The next morning, she woke late and went downstairs. The bar was wilted and grim. A few heavy drinkers who had closed the place and slept in the street, in their cars, or not at all, were slumped over hair-of-the-dog specials. Their eggs came in whiskey shots. The toast came stacked five deep with butter on the side. Patrice ate her egg over easy, sopping the rich yolk up with buttered toast. She drank her coffee black and plotted her course.

  “I’m going to the post office,” she told the bartender.

  “Heard you did good last night.”

  She smiled and put a fork in her purse. She had taken twenty dollars from her stash. Around the corner, she found a cabstand, took a taxi to Bloomington Avenue. As she got out and paid the driver, she had a sudden thought. She showed him the slip of paper with the Stevens Avenue address.

  “Is there anything wrong with this place?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of,” said the driver.

  “Are you sure? Someone said it was dangerous.”

  “Never had a problem there,” the man said.

  “Thank you.”

  So maybe Jack had been trying to steer her away. She walked up to the front door of the Bloomington Avenue place. The same windows were still cardboarded. The seeping sense of misery. As she slipped around back she realized the dog wasn’t barking. She took the fork out of her purse and went up the broken back steps. She stuck the fork into the rotted wood next to the lock and pried it loose. Then she entered. All was too still. Death was in the house. She edged forward, gripping the fork. Her handbag dangled off her other arm.

  The kitchen was empty, just a few vile cups on the counter, holding cigarette stubs. Stains and splatters everywhere, old grease fuzzy with dust. Leaves had blown into the dining room, the parlor. Everywhere a soft sinter blanketed the floor. Warily, she crept up the central staircase, the spindles broken out like teeth. There was a window, slightly cracked, grand, of stained glass. Another red tulip and green lances of leaves. A frame of gold and sea-blue diamonds. At the top of the stairs, a central hallway of chipped and dirty white paint with five shut doors. She would have to open them one by one. Holding her breath, she entered the first room, where she found the dog. It was at the end of a chain bolted into the wall.

  A pallid thing, all bones, it tried to struggle to its feet, but it collapsed and lay there, too spent to pant. There was an overturned bowl and in one corner a glass jug half filled with water. Here and there, a few dried turds. An open window. She fetched the jug and crouched beside the creature, dribbled water beneath the flaps of its swollen muzzle. After a while, the dog’s throat spasmed. Patrice got up and quickly opened the doors to the next rooms. In each one, a filthy mat, a gnarled blanket, sometimes shit, the smell of piss, a chain bolted into the wall and at the end of each chain an empty dog collar. She examined the chains, the collars. In one room, a line of beer bottles on the windowsill. Behind the last door was a stinking waterless bathroom. Strips of an old sheet. Dried blood. Two wadded-up diapers. She went back to the dog and this time she sat down, dribbled more water into its mouth, put a hand on its ribs. “You know where she is,” said Patrice. “I know you do. Please. I need you to help me find her.”

  “She died on the end of a chain, like me,” said the dog.

  Four more breaths came and went, beneath Patrice’s hand, before dog gave a great rattling sigh. She sat with her fingers on its ribs until its body cooled and a flea hopped across her knuckles. Then she got up and walked down the stairs, out of the house.

  Jack pulled up.

  “I thought you might have gotten yourself over here.”

  Patrice opened the door and climbed into the car. She was not in her body.

  “Let’s go back to the Stevens address,” she said.

  “Oh no. No, no, no. We aren’t going there.”

  “That’s not what we agreed to,” said Patrice.

  Jack insisted on following Patrice as she knocked on every apartment door. A misty-haired blond woman with balled-up features appeared. She didn’t know the Viviers, or Vera Vivier, or Vera Paranteau, or Vera. Had never met her. Had seen no forwarding address. The door shut. Patrice went to the next door. Jack rolled his eyes. At every apartment in the building she got the same answer. No Vera. Patrice walked slowly down the hall, then darted back to one of the apartments. Jack had already gone down the stairs. Nobody had opened the door the first time. She knocked on the door again, this time softly.

  “Come on, let’s go,” called Jack from the stairs.

  “Who is it?” said a voice, very low, on the other side of the door.

  “It’s the waterjack,” said Patrice to the voice.

  The door opened. The woman who opened was gaunt, and bald. Jack came running down the hall. Before the door slammed shut a voice from the next room cried, “Who’s at the door, Hilda?”

  “I said, let’s go!” Jack grabbed Patrice’s arm, pinching her. She pushed him so hard he staggered.

  “Was that the Hilda? What’s going on?”

  “She’s ticked at me,” said Jack.

  “Why?”

  “Professional standards.”

  Patrice fought him away and banged on the door.

  “She won’t answer you now,” said Jack. “We don’t get along.”

  “Then take me to visit Bernadette.”

  “What a life,” said Jack.

  A sneak of flame, a slash of blue, a white tooth, a knife-edge glance at Jack. And then, when Bernadette recognized Patrice, a storm of sorrow and intensity. The outburst chilled her.

  “Oh, honey! Oh, oh, oh!”

  “What,” said Patrice. “What? What? Where’s my sister?”

  “She ran off!”

  Bernadette drew Patrice up the steps of a town house made of orange-pink brick. A curved stone entryway, a door of dark shiny wood with an oval frosted-glass window. Bernadette was not the shy, awkward tomboy she’d been in high school, hunching around in men’s clothes. She was a stunner. Wearing a red silk kimono with pink blossoms. Hair hennaed to a glow and rolled in a certain movie-star way, lips carmine, eyebrows sharp black wings, eyes of an unsettling empty brightness.

  “She stuck me with the baby,” she said to Patrice. “You’re here for the baby!”

  “I’m here for Vera,” said Patrice.

  Bernadette shut her mouth, gave Jack a warning look.

  “What’s she doing here? She working for you?”

  Jack ignored her questions.

  “She just wants her sister.”

  “So sad how she left her baby,” Bernadette sighed, in a different voice. “Wait down here. I’ll get the baby for you.”

  “I’m not taking the baby until you give me Vera.”

  “You think I know where she is? I don’t know. Never have. They don’t tell me. She went off somewhere and got mixed up with some bad people, I suppose. Here, sit down. I’ll get that baby.”

  The house was silent.

  “Get Vera,” said Patrice.

  “Get her out of here,” said Bernadette to Jack.

  “Patrice, let’s go,” said Jack. “Bernie doesn’t know.”

  “I think she does know.”

  “She’s trying to help!” said Jack. He grabbed Patrice’s arm and tried to pull her back through the door. She struck his hand off, tossed his arm down.

  “I really don’t know,” said Bernadette, putting her face so close that Patrice could see the bruises through her makeup. “If you shut up and take the baby, I’ll try to find out where she is. That baby is wearing me out.”

  “So find out. I’ll come back for the baby,” said Patrice. “And Vera better
be here. I think you know where she is.”

  This time Jack gripped her arm so desperately that although Patrice could have shaken him off, she didn’t. She let him pull her through the door.

  Woodland Beauty

  Wood Mountain got off the train and walked the mile to his sister’s town house on 17th Avenue. Bernadette let him in. Threw out her arms and hugged him. The plush flowery steam of a recent bath rolled off her shoulders. From down the hall, a delicious thread of scent—roasting meat. She must be cooking for Cal. In the parlor, a carved wooden pushcart bearing cut-glass decanters filled with amber firewater. A couch to sink down in while his sister, or half sister, paced back and forth in a floaty red gown.

  “She was here,” said Bernadette. “I can’t tell her much about Vera. She said she’s coming back. Cal better not be here. But Jack was with her. Jack, of all people. Wouldn’t tell me a thing.”

  “Jack. She sure took my advice,” said Wood Mountain.

  “Which was what?”

  “Find the scum.”

  “Oh, she did that all right. Jack!”

  Bernadette threw herself down beside him on the couch.

  “He’s still at the new concern. Log Jam 26.”

  “Is it a real place?”

  “Real as any of his other concerns.”

  “What’s he look like now?”

  “Skinnier. Sicker. Junkier. Yellower.”

  “Junkie.”

  “They say he’s been one for years. A controlled habit.”

  “Well, he will slip up.”

  “They always do. But as scum goes, he’s not the worst, you know.”

  “Can you put me up?”

  “I’ve already got that baby. Vera’s. Cal’s not happy about it. Suze is keeping care of the little sweetie. The dad’s in Chicago.”

  “Where’s Vera?”

  Bernadette studied her nails.

  “She got a job somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “Why you asking me for? How’d I know?”

  Wood Mountain dropped it.

  “The baby. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy. Small. Worries me. Don’t cry. But yeah, you can stay.”