The Round House

by Louise Erdrich

  I don’t think you’ll make it, you two, said Angus dreamily. You guys can’t get in now with that mortal stain.

  It was like an icicle jabbed into my thoughts. The subject hadn’t come up with the four of us. We hadn’t spoken of Lark’s death. The cold spread. My brain was clear, but the rest of me was just too comfortable. Cappy handled the moment and melted the fear out of me as usual.

  Starboy, said Cappy, holding out his hand. Angus clasped it in a brother shake. The truth is, none of us will get there. They only take you stone-cold sober.

  All your life? said Angus.

  All your life, Starboy, said Cappy. You cannot slip even one time.

  Ah, said Angus, we’re screwed. My whole family is screwed. No rapture.

  We don’t need no rapture, Zack said. We got confession. Tell your sins to Father and you’re wiped clean.

  I did that, said Cappy. Father tried to clock me.

  We all laughed and talked for a while about Cappy’s run. Then we fell silent and watched the flickering leaves.

  Zelia probably confessed at home, Cappy said after a while. Zelia probably got wiped clean.

  Unless she got pregnant. I hadn’t meant to say a thing like that, but I could not stop the Star Wars quote: Luke, at that speed do you think you’ll be able to pull out in time?

  If only I hadn’t, said Cappy. If only she was. We would have to get married then.

  You’re thirteen, I remembered.

  Zelia said so were Romeo and Juliet.

  I hate that movie, said Zack.

  Angus was asleep, his breath whining evenly as a cicada.

  Food. My voice again. But the others were sleeping. I stood up after a time because someone was moaning. It was Cappy. He was weeping, heartbroken, then frightened, shouting Please, no, in his sleep. I shook his arm and he passed on to some other dream. I watched over him until he seemed more peaceful. I left them sleeping there and wobbled home on my bike, but when I got into the yard the space under Pearl’s bush looked so comfortable that I crept into the dark leaves with her and slept until the sun faded. I woke up, alert, and walked in the kitchen door.

  Joe? Where you been? Mom called from the other room. I felt that she had been waiting for me the whole time.

  I grabbed a glass and poured some milk and drank it fast.

  Out biking around, I said.

  You missed dinner. I can warm up some spaghetti.

  But I was already eating it cold, straight from the refrigerator. Mom came in and shooed me aside.

  At least can you put it on a plate? Joe, have you been smoking? You stink like cigarettes.

  The other guys were.

  Same old line I gave my folks.

  I like spaghetti cold.

  She made me a dish and begged me not to smoke.

  I won’t anymore, I promise.

  She sat down watching me eat.

  There’s something I wanted to tell you this morning, Joe. You called out in your sleep last night. You yelled.

  I did?

  I got up and I went to your door. You were talking to Cappy.

  What’d I say?

  I couldn’t make out what you said. But you called Cappy’s name twice.

  I kept eating. He’s my best buddy, Mom. He’s like a brother to me.

  I thought about him crying in his sleep out at the construction site and put my fork down. I wanted to leave our house, find Cappy again. I felt that I should not have left him sleeping. The crack of light beneath my father’s door widened and he came out and sat down at the table with us. He had stopped drinking coffee from dawn till dusk and on into the night. My mother gave him a glass of water. He was neatly shaven, never in his bathrobe anymore. He kept reduced hours at work.

  I started today, Joe.

  Started what? I was still distracted. If I called Cappy’s house, maybe he could get a ride over here and stay the night. We’d be together in the dark. My father kept on talking.

  I started my walking regimen, around the high-school track. I made it a half mile. I’ll be going every day. You’ll be out running too. I guess you’ll lap me a few times.

  My mother reached out and took his hand. He smoothed his hand over her fingers and touched her wedding ring.

  She won’t let me go alone, he said, looking at her. Oh, Geraldine!

  They were both thinner and the lines along the side of their mouths had deepened. But the knifelike mark between my mother’s eyebrows was gone now. I had stopped them from living in the fear cloud. I should have felt happy watching them across the table, but instead I was angered by their ignorance. Like I was the grown-up and the two of them holding hands were the oblivious children. They had no idea what I had gone through for them. Or Cappy. Me and Cappy. I stubbed my foot sullenly against the table leg.

  Something’s fighting in me, Joe, my father said.

  My foot stopped kicking.

  Maybe you’ll understand if I talk to you about it?

  Okay, I said, though I was jumping out of my skin. I didn’t want to listen.

  I feel relief at Lark’s death, my father said. Just like you said when you first heard, I feel that way too. Your mother is safe from him, he will not show up in the grocery store or at Whitey’s. We can go on now, can’t we?

  Yeah, I said. I tried to get up, but he spoke.

  Yet the question of who killed Lark must be asked. There was no justice for your mother, his victim, or for Mayla, and yet justice exists.

  Unevenly applied, Dad. But he got what he deserved. My voice was flat. My heart sickly pounding.

  My mother had dropped my father’s hand. She did not want to listen to us argue.

  I feel that way too, said my father. Bjerke will interview us tomorrow—it’s routine. But nothing is routine. He’ll want to know where each of us was when Lark was killed. Here is my fight, Joe. I ask myself in this situation, as one sworn to uphold the law in every case, what I would do if I had any information that could lead to the identity of the killer. Last time I talked to your mother about this, I wasn’t sure what I would do.

  I looked at Mom and her lips were pressed together in a straight dark line.

  But I’ve decided that I would do nothing. I would offer up no information. Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. It was no lynching. There was no question of his guilt. He may have even wanted to get caught and punished. We can’t know his mind. Lark’s killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma. It threads that unfair maze of land title law by which Lark could not be prosecuted. His death was the exit. I would say nothing, do nothing, to muddy the resolution. Yet—

  My father stopped and tried to give me that old look he used to fix on me, and others, from the bench. I could feel it, but I would not meet his gaze.

  —yet, he said gently, this too is an abandonment of my own responsibility. That person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life. As I did not kill Lark, but wanted to, I must at least protect the person who took on that task. And I would, even to the extent of attempting to argue a legal precedent.

  What?

  Traditional precedent. It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

  I felt my mother’s attention on me keenly.

  I just wanted you to know that, my father prodded.

  Lots of people had it in for Lark, I said.

  I looked from one of my parents to the other. Behind them in the next room the shelves of old books stood mellow in the dip of shadow at twilight. The scuffed brown leather. Meditations. Plato. The Iliad. Shakespeare in sober dark red and the essays of Montaigne. Then below, a matching Great Books collection they subscribed to by mail. There was a free Book of Mormon from a passing LDS missionary. There was William Warren, Basi
l Johnston, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner, and everything by Vine Deloria Jr. There were the novels they read together—fat paperbacks thumbed and stacked. I looked at the books as if they could help us. But we had moved way far past books now into the stories Mooshum told in his sleep. There were no quotations in my father’s repertoire for where we were, and it was beyond me at the time to think of Mooshum’s sleeptalking as a reading of traditional case law.

  So if you hear anything, Joe, said my father.

  If I hear anything, yeah, Dad. He’d gotten my attention. There was some relief for me, even, in what he said. But my father was also wrong, and about one thing in particular. He’d said I was now safe, but I was not exactly safe from Lark. Neither was Cappy. Every night he came after us in dreams.

  We are back at the golf course in the moment I locked eyes with Lark. That terrible contact. Then the gunshot. At that moment, we exchange selves. Lark is in my body, watching. I am in his body, dying. Cappy runs up the hill with Joe and the gun, but he doesn’t know Joe contains the soul of Lark. Dying on the golf course, I know that Lark is going to kill Cappy when they reach the overlook. I try to call out and warn Cappy, but I feel my life bleed out of me into the clipped grass.

  I either have that dream, or one where I see the backyard ghost again. The same ghost Randall saw in the sweat lodge—his sour gaze and rigid mouth. Only this time, like with Randall, the ghost is leaning over me, talking to me through a veil of darkness, backlit, his white hair shining. And I know he’s the police.

  As always I woke shouting Cappy’s name. To muffle sound, I’d stuffed a towel at the base of my door. I peered out in the fresh light hoping no one had heard me. I listened. It sounded like Mom and Dad had gone downstairs already, or gone out. I lay back in the covers. The air was cool but I was sweating and still full of adrenaline. My heart was jumping. I rubbed my hand on my chest to calm it and tried to slow down my breathing. Each dream was more real every time it occurred, like it was wearing a track into my brain.

  I need medicine, I said out loud, meaning Ojibwe medicine. Old-time medicine people knew how to handle dreams, that’s what Mooshum had said. But his spirit was far away now, trying to shed the body in the cot by the window. The only other medicine person I knew was Grandma Thunder. Maybe we could ask her what to do. Not tell her details, of course, or reveal what had happened. Just get advice about these dreams. Bugger Pourier, of all people, stepped into my thoughts right then. Probably because the last time I’d thought of Grandma Thunder, I sent him to her, and right before that Bugger had stolen my bike. Something about a dream.

  I sat up. He’d wanted to see if something he saw was a dream. My own dream’s reality, which always clung to me, and Bugger’s intent drunken fixation fused. What had he seen? I had worked on Bugger’s hunger and turned him around so I could get back my bicycle. But I’d never asked him what he saw. I got up and got dressed, ate some breakfast, and went out. To look for Bugger you looked behind places, starting with the Dead Custer. I searched all morning and asked everyone I met, but no one knew. I finally went to the post office. That was where I should have gone first, it turned out. I didn’t think of it, as poor Bugger hadn’t had an address.

  He’s in the hospital, said Linda. Isn’t he? she called back to Mrs. Nanapush, sorting letters.

  He busted his foot stealing a case of beer. Dropped it on his foot. So now he’s laid up and his sisters say it’s a blessing in disguise—could dry him out.

  I rode over to the hospital to visit Bugger. He was in a room with three other men. His foot was in a cast and rigged for traction, though I wondered if that was necessary for his foot to heal or meant to tie him to the bed.

  My boy! He was glad to see me. Did you bring me a drop?

  No, I said.

  His avid face fell into a pout.

  I came to ask you something.

  Not even a little flower arrangement, he grumped. Or a pancake.

  You want a pancake?

  I been seeing pancakes. Whiskey. Spiders. Pancakes. Lizards. Pancakes are the only good thing I see. But they just feed an old man the damn oatmeal. Coffee and oatmeal. It’s a plain breakfast.

  Not even toast? I asked.

  I could have it if I wanted, but I keep asking for pancakes. Bugger looked at me fiercely. I am holding out for pancakes!

  I have to ask you something.

  Ask away then. I’ll give you the answer for a pancake.

  Okay.

  And whiskey. He leaned forward secretively. Bring me a drop, but don’t let those others know about it. Keep the bottle in your shirt.

  All right.

  Bugger sat back, ready, his face expectant.

  Remember when you took my bike?

  His face turned blank. I spoke slowly, pausing after each sentence for him to nod.

  You were sitting outside Mighty Al’s. You saw my bike. You got on my bike and started riding. I came out and asked where you were going. You said you wanted to check and see if something was a dream.

  Bugger’s face lighted up.

  Remember now?

  No.

  I reset the scene five or six times before Bugger’s mind finally turned back and began to riffle through the recent past. He held very still and concentrated now, so hard I could almost hear the gears grind. As his thoughts collected, his expression changed, but so gradually that it was only after I’d looked away impatiently and then looked back that I noticed he was petrified. He stared at something between us on the bedcover. I thought he was having a hallucination, not of the pancakes, which would have filled him with joy, but some sort of reptile or insect. But then his look changed to pity and he gasped, Poor girl!

  What girl?

  Poor girl.

  He began to sob in dry wrenches. He kept crying about her. He mumbled about construction and I knew. She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her. I couldn’t help the picture from forming. Us jumping our bikes, flying back and forth, and her below. I stood up, jolted. I knew, down to the core of me, that he had seen Mayla Wolfskin. He had seen her dead body. If we hadn’t killed Lark, he’d have gone to jail for life anyway. I spun around thinking I should go to the police, then stopped. I could not let the police know I was even thinking this way. I had to get off their radar entirely, with Cappy, disappear. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even I didn’t want to know what I knew. The best thing for me to do was forget. And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream.

  I needed to find Cappy. Not to tell him. I never would tell him. I’d never tell anyone. There was in me as I rode toward the Lafournaises a disconnect so profound I could think of nothing but obliteration. I would somehow find the means to get drunk. The world would take on that amber tone. Things would soften to brown as if in old photographs. I would be safe.

  Zack and Angus were hanging out in the grocery store parking lot. Their bikes were there, and Cappy’s too, but they were sitting in Zack’s older cousin’s car. They got out when they saw me, and told me that Cappy had gone into the post office to see if there was a letter.

  He should’ve come out by now, said Zack.

  I went to get Cappy and finally found him out back of the building, sitting on a busted chair where the post office employees took smoke breaks in the summer. His hair was flung down over his face. He was smoking and didn’t look at me when I stood next to him. Just held out a piece of paper.

  You will cease and desist from any contact with our daughter. My wife found the package of letters Zelia was hiding. You should have to consider that in this case we may persecute you to the full axtent of the law.

  Also currently Zelia is being punished and also in short order we will be changing residence. You have stolen our daughter’s innocence and wracked our life.

  Cappy’s arms and legs were splayed out, limp and despairing. His face was the color of ashes and there was a c
loud of smoke around his head. I sat down beside him on a cardboard box. There was nothing to say about anything at all. I put my head in my hands.

  Yeah, said Cappy wildly. Fuck yeah. Punish her? I bet they’re keeping her locked up until they move. So she can’t go over to the post office. Wrack their lives! I’ll wrack their lives? By loving their daughter with a true love?

  Look at me, brother, he begged.

  I did.

  Look at me. He threw his hair back, tapped the tips of his fingers on his chest. Would I wreck her life? The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will. Our bodies, too. So fucking what? Every bit of what we did was made in heaven. The Creator is goodness, brother. In his mysterious mercy he gave me Zelia. The gift of our love—I can’t throw it back in the face of the Creator, can I?

  No.

  That’s what her parents are asking me to do. But I won’t do it. I will not throw our love back in God’s face. It will exist for all time whether or not her parents can see that. Nothing they do can get between us.

  Okay.

  Yeah, said Cappy. His hair flopped down again. He set fire to the letter with the burning coal of his cigarette. Watched it catch, flare, and burn to the tip of his fingers. He dropped the scrap and the flimsy films of burnt paper floated down around his feet.

  I’m going home to get that bus money, said Cappy. And then I’m gassing up Randall’s car. I’ll come and get you at your house.

  Where are we going?

  I can’t sit still, Joe. I can’t stay here. And I know there will be no rest for me until I see her.

  We left Zack and Angus drinking pop in Zack’s cousin’s car and went home. My place was empty. I filled a backpack with a change of clothes and all the money I had, which came to $78.00. I still had some from Sonja, and I’d never spent the cash Whitey paid me for the week I’d worked—he’d overpaid me, maybe to try and keep my mouth shut. I took a jacket. Because I was still waiting for Cappy, and because in spite of what I’d done I was still the kind of person who thought ahead and made lunch, I put together a dozen peanut butter pickle sandwiches. I ate one and drank some milk. He still did not come. I remembered how hard it was to start Randall’s car. Engage, I thought. Pearl followed me around. I went into my father’s office. I tried the desk drawer my father had been locking for a while now, and it caught, but he hadn’t quite turned the key all the way and I jiggled it open. In the drawer was a manila file folder. It was filled with greasy Xeroxes. There was the copy of a tribal enrollment form. On the form it said Mayla Wolfskin. She was listed as seventeen years old and the mother of a child named Tanya. Curtis W. Yeltow was listed as the father, just as Linda had said. I closed the file and put it back in the drawer. I managed to turn the lock with a paper clip so it would seem that the drawer had not been opened; what that mattered anyway, I don’t know. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to talk to Bjerke. I took a sheet of writing paper from a leather box. My father kept a cup of sharpened pencils on his desk. I took one and wrote my parents that I was going on a camping trip. They should not worry, I’d be with Cappy and I was sorry for the short notice. I said that we’d be gone for three or four days. I’d call them. I imagined writing: ask Bugger Pourier about his dream. But I didn’t. There was some noise outside. Pearl barked. It was Angus and Zack. They wanted to know why we’d ditched them and so I told them about the letter, and about how Cappy was going to get Randall’s car.