“No,” said Wood Mountain, “leave him be.”
She waited for a pulse of life. It was faint, fainter. His spirit quickly puddled at her ankles.
“He’s still here,” she said.
“He’s bad, Pixie.”
She rose. Lifted her feet out of the gentle mud that was Jack’s last trace of consciousness. There was a low gurgle as he seeped away.
Patrice went back into the hotel and stood before the window. The night attendant didn’t move his head, but his eyes rolled toward her.
“There’s a man dying in the alley,” she said.
The eyes stayed fixed on her.
“It’s Jack from next door.”
The man nodded.
“We’ll take care of him.”
She left.
Bernadette peered through the beautiful oval window, opened the oak door. She was wearing a ruffled white pinafore and chopsticks in her hair. There was an air of sober exhaustion.
“Oh good,” she said. “Cal’s gone.”
“Where’s Vera?”
“I don’t have her. Please,” said Bernadette. “I could get in bad trouble.”
She glanced behind Wood Mountain and Patrice before she nodded them into the entry. Bacon was frying and the same flowery steam wafted off Bernadette’s shoulders.
“You hungry?” she asked.
“Always,” said Wood Mountain.
A honey-brown woman came down the stairs into the foyer. Bernadette gestured to her and she unwrapped the bundle she held. The baby was frowning in its sleep. “Give her the baby,” said Bernadette, and the woman handed him to Patrice. The baby was surprisingly dense, like a brick. Bernadette slipped into the kitchen. After a moment, Wood Mountain followed and leaned toward the closed door. Someone was talking to Bernie behind the door. He listened. Then the woman touched his shoulder and gave Wood Mountain a sack of baby things. Bernadette came out.
“Now get the hell out of here,” she said, handing them a package wrapped in newspaper.
After they were settled on the moving train, Wood Mountain unwrapped the newspaper package. A stack of pancakes and bacon. He folded one of the pancakes around some bacon, and handed the roll to Patrice. She held the pancake in one hand and kept the baby cradled on her arm. He’d just sucked down a bottle of milk. There was a tiny line between his brows, where his worry for the future resided. She stroked the line with her finger and tried to smooth it away. But the groove seemed permanent.
“Reach up in my bag,” she told Wood Mountain. “Take out the baby blanket.”
He wolfed the rest of the pancake, stood, pulled a cascade of white mesh from above. He handed it down to her. The blanket was large and stretchy. It fit around the baby twice. The fancy stitches made it look like she and Wood Mountain knew what they were doing with a baby. It made the baby look theirs, which made them look like a couple. Nobody tried to take their seats away. People settled themselves far from the potentially explosive bundle. Patrice wanted to say that she wasn’t the mother and Wood Mountain wasn’t the father and all of this wasn’t what it looked like. But she only said, “Would you fold up that newspaper? Later, I want to read it.”
You could hardly stand up and announce that she wasn’t sure she even liked Wood Mountain, or would like him back if he happened to like her. She wanted to say that she was a working woman with a perfectly good job, that she was returning to that job because she was so good at it. There wasn’t any reason to say these things. There wasn’t a reason to think. She eased herself back, holding the baby, and tried not to take stock of what had happened in the Cities. But her mind kept churning. Were all of the things that happened real? The dog collar? The dog’s words? Her poisoned ox suit? Jack’s eyes of ancient gold? Bernadette with chopsticks in her hair? Who would believe?
“I’ll take care of you until she comes home,” said Patrice to the baby.
Wood Mountain was staring at her.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.” He looked away. It wasn’t his place to argue, and he still couldn’t figure out what those words meant, the ones from behind the kitchen door. Good or bad? He didn’t want to tell Pixie until he knew.
The baby came with six diapers. A tiny pair of pale blue rubber pants elasticized at the waist and legs. Two glass bottles and four rubber nipples. Two cotton shirts with side ties. A warm gray suit that covered him head to toe. He’d been wrapped in table drape glassily embroidered with domes and turrets. There was another bottle of milk that was supposed to last the length of the train ride. The baby had sucked down the first bottle quickly and Patrice thought they’d have to run out for more in Fargo. But he slept and slept. He didn’t seem to want to cause them trouble, said Wood Mountain, touching the whirlwind of hair at the baby’s crown. Patrice propped up her arm, dropped the seat back a fraction, and held the baby across her chest. He clung to her like a warm cocklebur and put her straight to sleep. Later, he woke in a fit. His roaring squall unnerved her, and Wood Mountain stumbled into the aisle as she bore the baby to the train’s bathroom. After he was changed and fed, she rocked the baby endlessly in the swaying corridor between the cars. When he fell quiet, at last, she realized her neck was damp with tears. Her own tears. Her mother would, of course, take care of the baby. Wouldn’t she? Patrice couldn’t do it all. She couldn’t do any of it.
She walked quietly down the aisle and slid past Wood Mountain into her seat, transferring the baby into his arms. Was almost disappointed when he accepted eagerly and gathered the baby to his heart like a natural.
“What are you going to name him?” he asked Patrice.
“Name him? Why? He has a name. Vera named him.”
Wood Mountain thought the baby was staring at him like he knew something.
“This baby likes me,” he said.
“Oh, you think so?”
Patrice looked at him sharply, but it wasn’t a way to get at her. Wood Mountain and the baby had locked eyes in fascination. They ignored her. She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.
Wild Rooster
The sky opened as they drove down to Fargo, passed through Larimore, heading for the meeting that would register their opposition to the Termination Bill. The road stayed wet. As night fell the tar froze slick. Thomas slowed and Louis roared past in the two-tone DeSoto. Four people were stuffed into the backseat. Juggie waved from the passenger window.
“Wish them two would get married up,” said Moses. “Isn’t regular.”
“What do you mean?” asked Thomas, trying to hide his surprise.
“Ay, you. Altar Boy,” laughed Moses.
From the backseat, his wife, Mary, said, “You, think you know so much!”
“Well, you’re the one taught me everything I know,” said Moses, in a fake meek voice.
“Let Juggie be Juggie,” said Joyce Asiginak, who sat in the middle.
Eddy Mink sat behind the passenger seat. Yes, Eddy Mink. Sober, Eddy was brilliant and a shrewd talker, which was the reason Thomas drank with him in the old days. He’d be good on questions as Thomas had him studying up. The trick would be to keep him sober. Joyce and Mary were on that.
“I have nothing to say on the subject,” said Eddy. “Getting married don’t make no sense to me. It’s priest-man talk.”
“The renegade speaks,” said Thomas.
“That’s for damn sure right. I am a wild rooster back here with these two lovely hens. Don’t you turn around, Moses. You’ll see something will shock your mind, boy.”
Joyce and Mary began to bat him around, laughing, but soon they were playacting with such violence that the back end of the car began to sway.
“Whoa!” Thomas shouted.
“Leave off!” Moses ordered.
“We’re the last hope of the great Chippewa Nation,” howled Eddy. “Don’t wanna wreck us.”
“Oh shut up, fool.” Joyce laughed and laughed.
“Fool? I got some wisdom for you
. Listen up. Government is more like sex than people think. When you are having good sex, you don’t appreciate it enough. When you are having bad sex, it is all you can think about.”
“You got a point there, Rooster,” said Moses from the front.
They crawled along and then the road was dry and they made it all in one piece. There was no money to put them up, so Thomas delivered them to addresses near the heart of the city. He was staying with Moses’s cousin Nancy and her husband, George. They lived in a small apartment with a convertible couch and a cot in the kitchenette. In the morning, Nancy, round and cute as a bear, surprised Thomas. He’d fallen asleep like he’d been dumped into a hole. Woke all fogged up. He didn’t have his pants on so Nancy gave him coffee in bed. He drank it propped up on one elbow while she made oatmeal. Claimed he felt like a king.
“Rose never give you coffee in bed?”
“No!”
“Well, if you try it out on her first, you might get lucky.”
“Oh, criminy.”
“Not lucky that way. You have a bad mind!”
“I was called an altar boy last night.”
Nancy laughed. “I known some wicked altar boys.”
“Can I have a refill?”
“Get your pants on. Maybe then.”
Arthur V. Watkins
If Arthur V. Watkins had been a boxer, which he definitely wasn’t, he would have been a brawler. You wouldn’t think it of such an ideal-looking, respectable fellow. Classic preacher looks, semibald with a virtuous halo of whitish hair, spectacles. An aggressive air of cleanliness and godliness—that was Watkins. Dark tie. Pale suit. He was born in 1886, when Utah was still a territory, and he was baptized by Isaac Jacobs. In 1906, his father, also Arthur V. Watkins, wrote to Joseph F. Smith, “We have filed on land on the reservation for us a home.” This happened during the allotment era, when the Ute people and the Uintah and Ouray Reservation, where the Watkins land was located, were relieved of 13.8 million acres of land that had been guaranteed by the executive orders of first President Abraham Lincoln and, later, Chester A. Arthur.
Arthur V. Watkins grew up on some of this land, which had been stolen by his father. In 1907 he was set apart. From Vernal, in Uintah County, Utah, he was called. He completed a mission in the eastern United States, and then returned to Utah. Eventually, he ran for office, working his way through state office to become a United States senator. During the hearings on termination he was said to “convey an air of rectitude that was almost terrifying.” When expounding on termination he “howled in his reedy voice.” Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn’t even have to get his hands bloody.
Cool Fine
After the train there was the bus and when the bus let them off on the highway near town it was a cool but fine autumn afternoon. Leaves were falling now in gusts. They began to walk. There were few people on the road and none going in their direction. Wood Mountain walked alongside Patrice, carrying her bag and his own. She lugged the baby. As she walked, she prayed, Don’t let him be home. If her father was there, snarling and puking, she might run away. Back down to the Cities. She had the money! Wood Mountain’s thoughts were very different. He had a name in mind for the baby. Archille, for his own father. That was that. He couldn’t help it. He was being thrown around by these things—emotions—still sensations without name and only evidenced by his actions and sudden decisions.
“I thought of a name for him,” said Wood Mountain after they had walked a couple of miles. He rubbed his face with his free hand to muffle his voice, doubting he should speak, unable not to speak. Sneaked a glance at her face. Said, “Temporary name, of course.”
Still, no response.
“Archille.” He could have kicked himself for saying it.
“Archille.”
She kept walking. With every step, she lightly patted the baby’s back. She’d tied the stretchy white blanket onto herself in an ingenious way so that the baby hung in a pouch, held fast against her breast. Her breast! He batted his head as if he were slapping at an insect.
“When my sister comes back,” said Patrice, “we’ll tell her you named the baby, nicknamed the baby, for your father. My uncle’s told me how they rode the rails in their young days. Your dad was a good man.”
She was not without compassion. But here he was, walking her home. Totally out of his way. She told him again that she could make it to her house just fine. But he said no, no, he would not leave her to walk alone with the baby. The satchel and the baby would be heavier by the mile, he said, and she was wearing her good shoes. They didn’t look like the best for walking. He said, however, they were nice shoes.
“They hurt like the devil,” she said. “I’m going to be lame at work tomorrow.”
He took the baby and the luggage while she removed her shoes at a turnoff through the woods. There were paths everywhere and this was one of many paths to get to her main path home. You had to wade through a bit of slough on the way but that was all right. Her toes loved muck. She took the baby back.
“Gwiiwizens,” she said, lifting him to her heart. It was what her people called a boy baby if they didn’t want bad spirits to find him. If there was disease or danger around. Nothing fancy that could attract attention, just Little Boy. Although he knew and approved of that, Wood Mountain also knew that Patrice not using his name for the baby meant something. It meant . . . he stuck on this as he waded through sucking slough mud . . . rinsed his feet and returned his shoes to his feet. Walked up a hill knocking pukkons into his hat. For her. It meant . . .
It meant she wasn’t having any of it.
Oh, but the colors were rich, the golds and yellows of the woods, the ochres, flare of orange and crimson, green and green, all shades of green, setting off the flamboyant shafts and sprays of color that poured through onto their hair and shoulders and walking bodies. Their young bodies free of pain except an aching cheekbone for Wood Mountain and a blister on Patrice’s right toe.
And why shouldn’t she want someone to walk her to her house and become thereby a couple since he might love her and certainly loved the child? He was strong built, good-looking, had prospects in life, and she was attracted to him in spite of that witless smile. Which he hadn’t tried on her again. To fall in love with him was the way of things. Wasn’t it? Still, she did not take his hand, which hung next to her hand, twitched toward hers, but she used her hand to pat Gwiiwizens.
“Pixie,” he said. “Oh, Pixie.”
“Patrice. I keep telling you.”
She gave him a look that would have shaved his face if he’d had whiskers.
He shut up.
She found herself doing the same things as with Barnes. Said things she knew would discourage him. Ignored the dangling hand, avoided the ready clutch, dispensed neutral glances when admiring smiles were expected. During the last mile, she admitted to herself that doing these things was easy with Barnes and far more difficult when it came to Wood Mountain.
* * *
Zhaanat was not like the teachers and the nuns and the priests and the other adults who showed Patrice the world. Zhaanat had a different sort of intelligence. In her thinking there were no divisions, or maybe the divisions were not the same, or maybe they were invisible. White people looked at Indians like her and thought dull stubborn. But Zhaanat’s intelligence was of frightening dimensions. Sometimes she knew things she should not have known. Where a vanished man had fallen through the ice. Where a disordered woman had buried the child who died of diphtheria. Why an animal gave itself to one hunter not another. Why disease struck a young man and skipped his frail grandfather. Why an odd stone might appear outside the door, one morning, out of nowhere.
“The stars sent a message to us,” Zhaanat had said.
Patrice had stared at her mother, who had cer
tainly never heard of a meteor. Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.
Zhaanat was walking down the hill with an apron full of cedar when Patrice and Wood Mountain came to the house. She dropped everything and ran to them, her face wild.
“We didn’t find her yet,” cried Patrice as her mother ran toward them, skirts flapping, braids unraveling, arms out. Zhaanat held her, the baby between them. Wood Mountain lowered his eyes. Pokey came around the corner of the house, carrying an armload of wood. He stood there, frozen.
“I only brought Little Boy home, Mama.”
Patrice put Gwiiwizens into her arms and Zhaanat stared at the baby apprehensively, then critically, searching out Vera’s features. She sat down with the baby suddenly, plopped on the ground as if her strength had given way. She was silent and Patrice knew her mother would be somewhere else, unreachable, until she decided to return.
“You should go now, Everett,” she said to Wood Mountain.
She looked around, carefully. No sign of her father.
Wood Mountain walked over to the door and placed her bag there. He nodded significantly at Pokey, then turned and walked away.
Zhaanat eventually gathered up the baby and herself. Walked into the house. The first thing she did was sit down and nurse him at her breast. Pokey didn’t notice, but this made Patrice uneasy. She asked her mother why she was nursing the baby. Obviously it wasn’t like she would have milk. However, Zhaanat said that sometimes in the old days, when the baby’s mother couldn’t nurse, the older women were sometimes able to take over.
“And I’m not that old,” said Zhaanat. “My breasts aren’t yet hard dried-up old leather pipe bags.” In Chippewa, that was all just one word. They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.
The Night Watchman Page 15