The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  That’s the question.

  What do you think?

  I think not, he said softly, looking down at the floor.

  I looked down at the floor, too, at the swirls of cream in the gray of the linoleum. And the darker gray and the small black spots a vertigo surprise once you noticed. I perused that floor, memorizing the randomness.

  Why would he kill her? Dad?

  He put his head to the side, shook his head, stepped forward, and put his arms around me. He held me there, not speaking. Then he let me go and walked away.

  When I got to Whitey and Sonja’s station I parked my bike beside the door, where I could see it, then I started my chores. Whitey had a short-wave receiver that picked up signals all around the area. It was always crackling on and burping garbled messages in the vicinity of the garage. Sometimes, he turned it off and pumped out music. I picked up all of the candy wrappers, cigarette butts, loser pull tabs, and other trash that had accumulated in the gravel gas station yard and the weeds down to the road. I got the hose and watered yet another tractor-tire flower bed, this one painted yellow, ringed with silvery sage leaves and red-hot poker flowers, same as I had planted for my mother.

  Whitey pumped gas when customers came, checked oil, and gossiped. I washed the car windows. Sonja had bought a Bunn coffeemaker and Whitey had built two wooden booths in the eastern corner of the store. Sonja’s first cup of coffee was a dime and the refills were free, so the booths were always filled with people. Clemence baked for the store every few days and there was banana bread, coffee cake, oatmeal cookies in a jar. Every day at lunchtime, Whitey asked if I wanted a rez steak sandwich and then he made us baloney-whitebread-mayo sandwiches. In the afternoon, Whitey took his break and when he came back Sonja left to go home and take a nap. They’d both work until seven p.m. They were saving payroll for the first couple of years, just to start with. Later on, they planned on hiring a full-timer and staying open until nine. I was paid a dollar an hour, ice cream, soda, milk, and cookies off the bottom of the jar.

  When I got home, my father was waiting for me.

  How was work?

  It was good.

  My father looked at his knuckles, flexed his hand, frowned. He started talking to his hand, which was a thing that he did when he didn’t want to be saying what he had to say.

  I had to take your mother down to Minot this morning. To the hospital. They’ll keep her a couple of days. I’m going back down tomorrow.

  I asked if I could go, but he said there was nothing I could do.

  She just has to rest.

  She sleeps all the time.

  I know. He paused, then finally looked at me, a relief. She knows who it was, he said. Of course, but she still won’t tell me, Joe. She has to overcome his threats.

  Do you have an idea?

  I can’t say, you know that.

  But I should know. Is he from around here, Dad?

  It would fit . . . but he won’t show up here. He knows he’ll get caught. There will be someone for your mother to identify, he said, pretty soon. Not soon enough. She’s going to be better once that begins. I feel certain she’ll remember where, too—where it happened. The shock of telling. But then some resolution.

  What about Mayla Wolfskin? Did he keep her with him? And that baby? Was that the baby that the governor was trying to adopt?

  My father’s face told me yes. But what he said was, I wish you hadn’t heard all that was said, Joe. But I couldn’t stop your mother. I was afraid she might stop talking.

  I nodded. All day my mother’s words had seeped up through the surface of all I did, like a dark oil.

  In her right mind, she never would have described all that happened in front of you.

  I had to know. It’s good I know, I said.

  But it was a poison in me. I was just beginning to feel that.

  I’ve got to go back down there tomorrow, said my father. Do you want to stay with Aunt Clemence or Uncle Whitey?

  I’ll stay with Whitey and Sonja. That way they can bring me to work.

  Next day after work, I rode back to the old place with Sonja and Whitey. We had Pearl with us. Clemence was going to check in on the house and water the garden, so everything was locked up and I didn’t have to go there for a while. And that made me happy. Soon we’d have Mooshum’s birthday. Everyone would come for that. I’d see my cousins. But for now, staying with Sonja and Whitey seemed like a vacation to me. Things could be normal. At their house, I would sleep on the couch and watch television. There were different sorts of food that Whitey cooked because he’d been a professional cook; there was the wine or beer at every dinner and the drinks after dinner and music. Noise. I didn’t know how bad I’d needed noise.

  We got into Whitey’s Silverado and he immediately punched the button on the tape deck. The Rolling Stones boiled up from his subwoofers and we drove with the windows rolled down and the wind rushing in until we took the turnoff onto gravel. Then we drove the rest of the way with the windows up against the dust. We were in a pod of noise—us three shouting over the air fan and throbbing bass. Everything was funny with Whitey—well, as I knew, funny for about four hours, funny for six beers or three shots—but for that time we laughed over the day’s doings and transactions. Cappy’s aunts were so savey that they’d only put a dollar’s worth of gas in the car at a time. It cost that much gas anyway to come and go. They each took free coffee every time. A young student from the university had come to study Grandma Thunder. She was taking her for rides every day—first Grandma would do her errands and visit her friends and family. Then sometimes she’d let the girl take out her notebook and write down a teaching. She was having a great old time.

  I asked Whitey about Curtis Yeltow and he said, you wouldn’t believe the things that old boy has done and got away with. Smashed into a freight train, drunk, and lived. Used the prairie nigger word for Indians. Thought it was funny. Had a mistress in Dead Eye. Bought gold and stored it in the basement of the governor’s mansion. And guns? He is a gun lover slash freak. Collects war shields. Indian beadwork. Pays homage to the noble savage but tried to store nuclear waste on sacred Lakota earth. Said the Sun Dance was a form of devil worship. That’s Yeltow. Oh, and he’s all tanned up. Vain about his looks.

  We got to the house and Whitey went inside to get dinner going while Sonja and I did the horse chores. As we shoveled out the barn, music blasted from the open windows of the house and we could hear the TV babbling, too. So there was noise while we put the hay out and lightly grained the horses, and noise if we took out the mower, and noise from the dogs anyway as they greeted us joyously and barked to remind us to fill their dishes with food.

  Sonja kept the horses in the barn at night and she checked the dogs for ticks and looked at their gums, eyes, and foot pads critically.

  What you been up to today? she asked each dog. She’d scold. Not the burr patch again. You smell like you ate shit. Who the hell you let bite at your pretty tail, Chain? I’m gonna whip you if you leave this yard, you know that.

  Sonja spoke the same way to the horses as she put them in their stalls, and then Whitey came out and gave her a cold beer. There was a place right outside where the pasture sloped west and the grass turned golden at sunset. Two lawn chairs were set up there, and they added one for me. I drank an orange soda and they had a beer or two more and now the music came from Whitey’s boom box, set out on the steps. Then the mosquitoes whined out in attack formation and we went inside.

  Whitey had traded gas for fresh walleye that day, and he’d cleaned the fish already. The fillets were in the refrigerator, soaking in a pie plate of milk. He’d whipped up a foamy beer batter. There was coleslaw made with horseradish. They always had dessert. Sonja insisted on dessert, said Whitey.

  She’s got a sweet tooth. Have you ever heard of raspberry fool? I made it for her from a recipe once. Or mayonnaise cake? You can’t taste the mayonnaise. But she likes chocolate. She’s crazy for chocolate. If I dipped my dick in chocolate
she’d never let me alone.

  He got looser, of course, as the night went on, said things, and eventually Sonja put him to bed.

  After he was tucked in, Sonja came out and fixed up the couch for me. The couch was old and smelled of cigarettes. It was upholstered in scratchy brown stuff scattered through with tired orange nubs. Sonja tucked a sheet across the cushions and gave me a plaid sleeping bag with a broken zipper. She turned the television on, the lights out, and then she curled up on the other end of the couch. We watched TV together for an hour or even two. We talked about the money, whispered about it because of Whitey. Sonja made me swear again and again that I had not—would not—tell anybody.

  I’m scared as shit. You should be too. Keep your eyes open. Don’t slip up, Joe.

  Then we’d talk about what I should do with the money. Sonja made me promise I would go to college. She said she’d wanted her daughter, Murphy, to go. She’d named her baby Murphy because it could never be a stripper name. But her daughter had changed her name to London. If I could go back in time, said Sonja, I never would have left my daughter with my own mother when I was working. My mother had a bad influence on her granddaughter, if you can believe that.

  Sonja liked the talk shows, the old movies. Sometimes I fell asleep while we were watching, but before I did I tried to suspend myself for as long as possible between sleep and wakefulness. A door might open momentarily into a dream, but instantly I’d shift back to the couch. Her soft weight on the far cushion. The warmth of her that I could feel if I edged the bare soles of my feet from under the sleeping bag, which became my favorite thing to sleep under because it disguised my hard-on.

  Every night, Sonja gave me a pillow off her bed. The pillow smelled of apricot shampoo and also a dusky undertone—some private erotic decay like the inside of a wilted flower. I buried my face to breathe it in. I dozed, dreamed, returning to the flickering TV light. The laugh track, turned low. Sonja tranced in a blue haze, drinking cold water now. Outside, the seething of summer insects. The dogs occasionally rousing to bark once or twice at a deer far across the pasture. And Whitey, thankfully, snoring it off behind the bedroom door. The third or fourth night, when I was passing in and out of heaven, Sonja cupped my heel in her palm and squeezed it. She began absently to rub my instep and a bolt of blind pleasure shot through me too sudden to contain. I came with a gurgle of surprise and she dropped my foot. A moment later, I heard a snap and sneaked a look at her. She was eating a pretzel.

  Whitey loved kamikaze pulps. He had a wall of shelves built just the right height for grocery-store samurai romances, ninja attack plots, spy thrillers, Louis L’Amours, sci-fi, Conan. He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback. As I ate beside him, he read selections aloud, murmuring, her lithe haunches quivered with a predatory anticipation as she fixed on his position in the moonless light bereft of soul and decided exactly how to snap his spine . . . Ragna’s dagger-sharp eyeteeth glinted in the reflected beams of the headlights . . . knowing his life would end as soon as his eyes met that implacable obsidian gaze . . . If he was deeply engaged in a plot, he kept reading as Sonja set down a platter of bacon and a pan of her one breakfast specialty—a mixture of grated potatoes, eggs, diced peppers, and ham, laid out in a baking pan and broiled until the cheddar cheese topping bubbled up and toasted. She called it breakfast casserole. Right after we ate, Whitey marked his page and put the book down. Sonja quickly scrubbed up the dishes, we jumped in the pickup, drove to the gas station, and unlocked the pumps. We opened at seven a.m. There was always someone waiting for gas.

  That day, a couple of things happened that were not good. The first thing was Sonja’s stud earrings, which Whitey said he’d never seen before.

  You have too seen them. She flashed a flirty smile.

  The earrings sparkled in the dim kitchen. She had on yellow rubber gloves and she was vigorously scouring the broiler pan before we took off for work.

  They’re rhinestones, she said.

  Nice rhinestones, said Whitey. He gave an underhanded glance. Then he looked at her boldly, meanly, while she was not looking at him. Her blue jeans also looked brand-new and clung to her in a way that made me think of Whitey’s book, haunches quivering in deadly etc. We got in the truck. Whitey didn’t turn on the music. Halfway to town, Sonja reached over to switch on the tape player and Whitey smacked her hand off the controls. I was sitting in the jump seat behind them. It happened right in front of me.

  It’s okay, said Sonja to me, over her shoulder. Whitey’s feeling low. He’s hungover.

  Whitey’s jaw was still set in that mean way. He stared straight ahead.

  Yeah, he said. Hungover. Not the kind of hungover you’re thinking of.

  Whitey had a jailhouse spit—so sleek, so accurate. Like he’d gone a period of his life with nothing to do but spit. He jumped out of the car, slammed the door, spat, hit a can, ping, and walked away even though there was someone waiting at the gas pump. Sonja just moved over, parked, and unlocked the station. She gave me the keys to the pumps without looking outside and told me I should handle that car. This was the second bad thing.

  I’d seen this person, he was familiar, but I didn’t know him. All of his features were neat and regular, but he was not good-looking. He was a brown-haired, sunk-eyed white man with a slack but powerful build, a big man in neat clothing—a white shirt, brown belted pants, leather lace-up shoes. His longish hair was combed back evenly behind his ears so you could see the tracks in it. His ears were oddly small and neat, coiled against his head. His lips were thin, dark red, like he had a fever. When he smiled, I saw his teeth were white and even, like a denture commercial.

  I went over to wait on him.

  Fill ’er up, he said.

  I unlocked the gas tanks and pumped gas. I washed his windows and then asked if he wanted his oil checked. His car was dusty. It was an old Dodge.

  Nah. His voice was genial. He began counting fives from a wad of bills. He handed over three of them. My car was thirsty, he said. I drove all night. Say, how are you?

  Sometimes grown-ups recognize a kid and talk as if they know you, but they really know your parents or uncle or were somebody’s teacher. It is confusing, plus he was a customer. So I was polite and said I was fine, thanks.

  Oh, that’s good, he said. I hear that you’re a real good kid.

  I took him in, now, put him together. A good kid? Second white man to say that this summer. My thought was, This could wreck me.

  You know—he looked at me hard—I wish I had a kid like you. I don’t have any children.

  Gee, too bad, I said like I meant the opposite. Now I was put off. I still couldn’t place him.

  He sighed. Thanks. I don’t know. I suppose it’s luck, starting a good family and all. Having a loving family. It’s pretty nice. Gives you an advantage in life. Even an Indian boy like you can have a good family and get that sort of start, I guess. And maybe it will let you draw even with a white kid of your own age, you know? Who doesn’t have a loving family.

  I turned to walk off.

  Oh, I’ve said too much. Come back here! He tried to give me another five. I kept walking. He looked down and turned the ignition key. The engine coughed and caught. Well, that’s me, he called. Always saying too much. But! He slapped the side of the car. Say what you will, you’re the judge’s son.

  I whirled around.

  My twin sister had a loving Indian family and they stuck by her when times were hard.

  Then he drove off, and because of what Linda had told me, I knew I had spoken with Linden Lark.

  I decided that I wanted to quit and go home now. I was mad at Whitey. I’d pumped gas for the enemy. Sonja bothered me too. She came out of the station, chewing gum. As her jaws worked, those earrings twitched and flashed. She’d spun her hair up in a flossy cone held with clips of hot pink enamel. Those jeans fit her like paint. The morning seemed to last forever. I had to stay because Whitey was gone. Then around eleven he returned an
d I realized he’d had a beer or maybe two. Sonja pretended, insultingly, as though she didn’t notice his silence as he came and went.

  At noon Sonja made us the sandwiches out of bread and meat from the cooler, so there wasn’t any joking about how good our rez steak was or if I wanted mine well-done. She just handed me the sandwich and a can of grape Shasta. Later on she gave Whitey’s sandwich to me. His had lettuce on it but I ate it anyway as I watched him changing a tire for LaRose. My mother, Clemence, and LaRose had been inseparable once upon a time. In Mom’s little photo album there were pictures of them in school shots at their boarding school. Mom always talked about going to school with them. LaRose figured in her stories. But when it came to the present, they didn’t visit often, and when they did, it was always just the two of them talking intensely, away from other people. You would have thought they had some secret, except that this had been going on for years. Sometimes Clemence joined in, and again they always went off, the three of them, and nobody else.

  LaRose was always there and not there. Even when she looked right at you and spoke, it seemed her thoughts were elsewhere, elusive. LaRose had had so many husbands that nobody kept track of her last name anymore. She had started out a Migwan. She was a skinny, fine-boned, birdlike woman who smoked brown cigarillos and wore her silky black hair in a glistening beaded flower clip. Sonja had come out to stand by LaRose, so there we were. Three pop drinkers watching a sweaty Indian Elvis try to loosen up a set of rusted lug nuts. He strained. His neck bulged, his arms inflated. His gut was padded by those nightly beers, but his arms and chest were still powerful. He sank his weight on the wrench. Nothing. He knelt back on his feet. Even the dust was hot that day. He smacked the wrench in his palm and then he stood up suddenly and winged it into the weeds. Again, he gave Sonja that crafty look.

  Don’t gimme snake eyes, you bastard, she said, just because you can’t turn a damn screw.

  LaRose raised her curved eyebrows and turned her back on the two of them.

  C’mon, she said to me. I need another pack of smokes.