“Friend, cousin, it’s me. Thomas.”
Paranteau began to rock like a horse preparing to haul a too heavy load. His feet tried to abandon the lamppost but his hands would not unclench.
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Yes,” said Thomas. “You’re blasted. We’ll take you home.”
“No no no. Not yet.”
Thomas tried to pry Paranteau’s fingers off the lamppost. They wouldn’t budge. Paranteau began to fiercely pant and blow. He strained. His eyes bulged with such desperation that Thomas had to look away. Paranteau could not unlock his fingers. It seemed they were welded to the metal post.
“Oh my niiji,” Paranteau wailed. “See how she loves me! My honey! She don’t let me go!”
He began laughing in hoots and croaks.
“Oh my! Oh my! She got me, cousin!”
“You can get away,” said Thomas. “Just take a deep breath now, let yourself relax, and she’ll release you.”
“Ah, yes,” said Paranteau.
After a moment, Thomas realized that a stream of piss had emerged below Paranteau’s left pants cuff. The stream trickled to the gutter and Paranteau began to weep.
“I was first on the team. Got the high score. Nobody outgunned me, cousin. Couldn’t touch me once I made my break. And three pointers. In the clutch? I was your man. And jump? They called me Pogo. Remember?”
“Yes.”
The basketball team had gone to state that year. Class B. And they had nearly made it to finals.
“You made the last shot. Almost took that game,” Thomas said.
“That’s right. Oh my cousin, I am sick now. I am dying off, me. End of trail.”
Thomas worked away at Paranteau’s fingers again, but it was useless. And they were hot, like all the life force in Paranteau was concentrating in his hands, burning with a contrary will. Finally, Thomas managed to pry up one pinkie. As if he’d raised a magic lever, all the fingers flew off at once and Paranteau sprang away. Leaping the way he used to. Pogo Paranteau. And then his legs gathered under him. He floated up like a buck deer and he was gone down the street, coat flying, tossed fiercely along by suffering.
Let him go, Thomas thought, walking back. Paranteau returning home would have been hell on the rest of the family. Better to let him skid out in Fargo and hope he survived.
X = ?
Barnes felt his fists blur with deadly speed! He was striking so fast that a breeze snapped his hair back and only his molten blue eyes, fixed on the speed bag, maintained an iron steadiness. He saw himself as from above. Then on a movie screen. Then through the wrong end of a telescope. How should he treat this betrayal? This flouting of trust? He’d found out from Pokey that Wood Mountain had helped Patrice bring the baby back to the reservation on the train and thence to their very home. To their yard. If it could be called a yard. The surrounding half-cleared woods.
He paused, sweat stinging his eyes, then punched again.
After all the time that Barnes had sacrificed to Wood Mountain! After all the training secrets that Barnes had lavished on Wood Mountain. After the rides and pickups, the loan of shirts, of robe, of equipment, and the bestowal of his coach’s pride and hope! After all of that, not counting the many meals ferried from Juggie or bought at Henry’s or that damn fateful breakfast with Wood Mountain at the Powers Hotel in Fargo, how had he the gall? And what should Barnes do when the horny boy dog showed up to train with his bighearted chumpish haystack of a coach?
“Oh, say there.”
Barnes stood back and glowered at the quivering bag.
“Hello, coach! Hey, you’re fast!”
Barnes turned. His hands itched. There wasn’t any need at all to wonder what he’d do because he simply said, “Hear you took yourself down to the Cities to step in on Pixie Paranteau.”
“She wants to be called Patrice.”
Rage boiled up.
“Oh, oh does she?”
“Yes. But put your dukes down. She don’t have no time for me, neither.”
Barnes gave Wood Mountain the eye.
“Not like I made a move on her. I just, dunno. Just got the idea she could be getting in trouble. And I know how they pick up girls in the Cities because my half sister is mixed up with that bunch.”
“What bunch?”
“Cal Strosky and them.”
“What do they do?”
Wood Mountain looked at his feet.
“It’s only because my sister had told me a few things that I went after her.”
“Was Pixie in trouble?”
“She got herself out. She was dressed up like an ox.”
“A what?”
“Nothing. She was looking for her sister but got the baby anyway, came home. I just rode along. It wasn’t that important of an experience. But I just wanted to let you know I got the feeling that even if I did, which I don’t, she wouldn’t have any interest.”
“Huh.”
“Okay.”
“So.”
“So.”
“So you think I have a chance?” Barnes dropped his voice. Then his voice stuck in his craw, a sobbing hiccup.
“What the hell’s wrong with me,” he croaked, punching at the bag.
Wood Mountain opened his hands, as if to help. His stomach gave a little. Finally, he spoke.
“Nothing wrong with you. She’s—”
“I know,” Barnes lashed out. “Pretty.”
“No,” said Wood Mountain, recovering himself. “Hell on wheels sharp. That’s what she is.”
* * *
Later, as he tried to help his beginning algebra students track down the identity of the mysterious x, as in x + 12 = 23, his mind veered off into the construction of a whole other equation. Call it a love equation. He tried to regard himself dispassionately and assign numbers to his pros and cons. He thought out his chances in life, totaled up how good-looking and pleasant Wood Mountain was against his good-looking pleasantness and paying job and other attributes tangible and intangible. The thing that surprised him in constructing the equation was he couldn’t decide whether his not being an Indian was a plus or a negative in her mind. Thus the equation kept shifting around, refusing to stay equal on both sides, popping up with more x’s and multiple unknowns to solve.
He squeaked out ahead when he posited being Indian as a negative, and gave his hair the same numerical advantage as Wood Mountain’s hair. Then he woke the next morning and found quite a bit of hair on his pillow. Horrified, he pictured his father’s horseshoe of remnant hair and restructured the equation to narrow his window of opportunity and widen Wood Mountain’s. How could he have forgotten age? Hair loss? Or did that matter? Did not being an Indian gain him, or lose him, say, half a decade and half a head of hair? He revised the problem again. And while trying to solve it wondered if the baby figured into it. He dropped his pencil and rested his chin on the top of one fist. He was also wondering whether he had actually heard Wood Mountain say that Pixie had been dressed as an ox.
“This way lies madness,” said Jarvis, when he came into Barnes’s classroom and found the straw-haired teacher staring into an invisible shifting plane of numbers that looked like space.
* * *
Wood Mountain watched Picasso. A flashy brown and white with a map of North America spread across her back and withers. Although he planned on mentioning this clever observation to Pixie (he could not think of her as Patrice, sorry), it wasn’t his but Grace’s. Wiry, tough, unrelenting Grace. She was studying geography. She loved this horse even more than the new filly. Riding him was like riding the top of the world, she said. The paint’s father was part Thoroughbred from down south in bluegrass country, maybe. How the paint markings had come through was a wonder, when the horse was so much else. Along with his boxing, along with the valuable pale horse Gringo, the paint had become Wood Mountain’s stake in the future. Since riding the train alongside Pixie and watching the baby, Archille, sleep in her arms, he’d started thinking about his f
uture. Grace riding the paint had given him an idea. He’d started training as a boxer twice as hard.
During the practice, he talked to Pokey. After the practice, Pokey jumped on Wood Mountain’s back and the boxer took off like a racehorse. Barnes didn’t like it, but he would not have liked it worse had he known that Wood Mountain had decided to run Pokey all the way home. In order to see Pixie, or the baby, or both. To be honest, he had woken up that morning anxious to see how the baby was doing.
He’d had to let Pokey off twice, and it was dark by the time he jogged into the yard with the boy on his back. He tried to keep Pokey there until Pixie came out the door. He’d wanted to see her face when she realized he’d run home with her brother on his back. But Pokey slid off, ran to the door, and only Zhaanat came out anyway. He tried not to ask after Pixie, but of course the words popped out.
“Fell asleep after work,” said Zhaanat, jiggling the baby, who looked startled to see Wood Mountain. The baby’s sudden light of recognition stopped his breath.
Wood Mountain went to the baby and spoke to him in Dakota, which made Zhaanat’s eyes flash because in her traditions there were lingering scores to settle. He switched to Chippewa, and she relaxed. She even smiled at his infatuation with the baby. Wood became animated, popping his eyes, waving his hands, and the baby’s eyes followed him until, startled, he gave a gurgling laugh. Wood Mountain did the same goofball move. The baby laughed again. The laugh made Wood Mountain so giddy that it bumped Pixie to one side of his heart. The baby held the center, and laughed again. By the time Pixie, rubbing her eyes, was up and around, Wood Mountain was inside the house sitting at the table. The baby in his arms was sucking away at the bottle of oatmeal juice. While he drew effortfully on the nipple, the baby swiped and snatched at Wood Mountain’s face. When the baby got hold of his nose, Wood Mountain gave a soft honk, which made the baby shriek with happiness. This went on until the baby burbled and nodded off. Wood Mountain rose to leave, but Zhaanat made him sit down and eat potatoes fried in deer fat, soaked in gravy. He looked at the ancient rifle over the door.
“Did Pokey bring the deer down with that old gun?”
It looked like his grandfather’s Sitting Bull–era rifle.
“Pokey?” Zhaanat smiled, pointed with her lips at Patrice. “It was her got that buck this summer. Fat. I dried that meat.”
His thoughts switched from the baby to Pixie. Damn. Of course she had to be a good shot.
Wood Mountain remembered the fluffy pemmican and told Zhaanat that they had eaten it on the train, and it was good. While he complimented her mother, Patrice took the baby behind a blanket, into another room. He didn’t stay much longer.
* * *
Barnes had driven Wade home and spent a good hour talking to his father about the meeting down in Fargo. Thomas had taken off work to go, and he still had endless potatoes to get in. He’d put his intensity into pitchforking hill after hill. Wade and the girls would clean potatoes, bury them in the sand cellar. He left them to it, and asked Barnes in for tea.
“I don’t understand why it’s so bad,” said Barnes. “It sounds like you get to be regular Americans.”
They were sitting where Barnes always sat when he drove his boxers home and was asked, inevitably, in for a visit—the table central to eating, cooking, canning, drying, and processing foods, also playing pinochle and cribbage, bathing babies in dishpans, and visiting. The tea was nice and hot in the heavy old white mugs. Thomas was such a thoughtful, quiet fellow that Barnes sometimes saved questions for him because he knew that Thomas would ponder out the answers.
“Lots of people here thought the same as you,” said Thomas. “But then we realized we have been holding out . . . how many years since Columbus landed?”
Barnes did his favorite thing. Mental subtraction.
“Four hundred and sixty-one,” he said immediately.
“Well, closing in on five centuries,” said Thomas. “Holding out through every kind of business your folks could throw our way. Holding out why? Because we can’t just turn into regular Americans. We can look like it, sometimes. Act like it, sometimes. But inside we are not. We’re Indians.”
“But see here,” said Barnes. “I’m German, Norwegian, Irish, English. But overall, I’m American. What’s so different?”
Thomas gave him a calm and assessing look.
“All of those are countries out of Europe. My brother was there. World War Two.”
“Yes, but all are different countries. I still don’t understand it.”
“We’re from here,” said Thomas. He thought awhile, drank some tea. “Think about this. If we Indians had picked up and gone over there and killed most of you and took over your land, what about that? Say you had a big farm in England. We camp there and kick you off. What do you say?”
Barnes was struck by this scenario. He raised his eyebrows so fast his hair flopped up.
“I say we were here first!”
“Okay,” said Thomas. “Then say we don’t care. Since you made it through that mess we say you can keep a little scrap of your land. You can live there, we say, but you have to take our language and act just like us. And say we are the old-time Indians. You have to turn into an old-time Indian and talk Chippewa.”
Barnes grinned, thinking of Zhaanat.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“That’s natural,” said Thomas. “Good thing you don’t have to. I can’t turn all the way into a white man, either. That’s how it is. I can talk English, dig potatoes, take money into my hand, buy a car, but even if my skin was white it wouldn’t make me white. And I don’t want to give up our scrap of home. I love my home.”
“I see,” said Barnes. He thought about it. “But I heard you get to be citizens. Don’t you want to be a U.S. citizen?”
“What?” said Thomas. “We are citizens.”
“Vote? You already can vote?”
“Sure, back in 1924 we got the vote. After the black man, after the women. But we got the vote.”
“Oh. Who did you vote for last year?”
“Not Eisenhower. Everything came out Republican anyhow. Both houses. That’s why they passed this bill here. It’s dishonorable to Indians.”
Barnes blurted out, “Is it that you don’t want to start paying taxes?”
“No,” said Thomas, patient, “we pay taxes just like you. If we make enough a year, we pay taxes. Only difference, not on our land. You’re not gonna charge us taxes to live on the ishkonigan land that is left over after your people stole the rest of it, are you?”
That didn’t sound right to Barnes.
“This thing will break our land up, see,” Thomas continued. “We keep it in common now. That’s the way it works. We can sell to one another but it stays in the tribe that way. So this bill would break up our land and let the BIA sell it off. They’d probably take a nickel on the dollar for it. Then we’d get relocated. Shipped off to the Cities. That’s where we’d end up. Living in those little rooming houses, what do you call them?”
“Apartment buildings.”
“Those. Visiting around in little rooms. Streets with lights. I’ve been there. Rose and yours truly wouldn’t like it. We would feel very gloomy about it.”
“I can well understand,” said Barnes. And as he sat in the little house, with a gentle fire in the wood range throwing out just the right amount of warmth, with the mug of cooling tea on the richly scarred and polished wooden table, and a couple of doves calling tenderly in the pine tree outside the window, he began to feel gloomy too.
“If I married an Indian woman,” said Barnes, “would that make me an Indian? Could I join the tribe?”
He was awed at the possible sacrifice he could be making.
Thomas looked at the big childish man with his vigorous corn-yellow cowlicks and watery blue eyes. Not for the first time, he felt sorry for a white fellow. There was something about some of them—their sudden thought that to become an Indian might help. Help with what? Thoma
s wanted to be generous. But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire.
“No,” he said gently, “you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.”
Barnes’s shoulders slumped, but what Thomas said was a comfort to him. They could like him anyway. He’d be acknowledged, liked, and that was important because he didn’t have his heart set on any other woman in this world but Pixie. Oh, it was Pixie and Pixie alone. He had to fight every day to convince himself that she might, somehow, against the ever more perfect image of Wood Mountain, turn her sumptuous melting gaze upon him and reward him with the sort of smile he’d never seen turned his way, but had witnessed, once, when she’d laughed at and appreciated something Pokey had done.
“Appreciate me with your eyes,” he thought as he drove home, her image bobbing up in the darkness. “Oh Pixie, only once, just appreciate me with your eyes.”
The glowing lights and even the numbers on the dashboard cast a lonely glare. The equation of love balanced and rebalanced in his thoughts like a playground seesaw. Could he load his side with better attributes? Modest changes to his wardrobe? A subtle swirl in his hair to hide thin areas? And gifts. What woman doesn’t like a gift? Well, maybe Patrice. A gift might prick her suspicions. But how about a gift to her younger brother, Pokey? Evidence of Barnes’s generosity, but no strings attached. What would be wrong with that?
Twin Dreams
Women’s bodies make such miracles. After a week of intense suckling by the baby, there was a trickle of milk. Patrice had believed her mother, but she was still surprised. Zhaanat told her with some assurance that in starving times a man had even been known to give milk, and insisted that by the change of the moon she would have a normal amount.
The Night Watchman Page 17