Love Medicine Part 17

"Why not?" she said at once. "What's wrong with him?"

I saw that I was going to lose this argument no matter what I said, so for once I did the right thing. I threw my coffee in her face and ran.

Later on that day Dot came out of the weigh shack and yelled, "Okay then!" I was close enough to see that she even grinned. I waved. From then on things were better between us, which was lucky, because I turned out to be such a good b.u.t.ton presser that within two weeks I was promoted to the weigh shack, to help Dot.

It wasn't that Dot needed help weighing trucks, it was just a formality for the state highway department. I never quite understood, but it seems Dot had been both the truck weigher and the truck-weight inspector for a while, until someone caught wind of this. The company hired me to actually weigh the trucks, and Dot was hired by the state to make sure I recorded accurate weights. What she really did was sleep, knit, or eat all day. Between truckloads I did the same. I didn't even have to get off my stool to weigh the trucks, because the arm of the scale projected through a rectangular hole and the weights appeared right in front of me. The standard back dumps, belly dumps and yellow company trucks eased onto a platform built over the arm next to the shack. I wrote their weight on a little pink slip, clipped the paper in a clothespin attached to a broom handle, and handed it up to the driver. I kept a copy of the pink slip on a yellow slip that I put in a metal file box No one ever picked up the file box so I never knew what the yellow slips were for. The company paid me very well.

It was early July when Dot and I started working together. At first I sat as far away from her as possible and never took my eyes Retail', mom off her knitting needles, although it made me a little dizzy to watch her work. It wasn't long before we came to an understanding, though, and after this I felt perfectly comfortable with Dot.

She was nothing but direct, you see, and told me right off that only three things made her angry. Number one was someone flirting with Gerry. Number two was a cigarette leech, someone who was always quitting but smoking yours. Number three was a p.i.s.s-ant. I asked her what that was. "A p.i.s.s-ant," she said, "is a man with fat buns who tries to sell you things. A Jaycee, an Elk, a Kiwanis." I always knew where I stood with Dot, so I trusted her.

I knew that if I fell out of her favor she would threaten me and give me time to run before she tried anything physical.

By mid-July our shack was unbearable, for it drew heat in from the bare yard and held it. We sat outside most of the time, moving around the shack to catch what shade fell, letting the raw hot wind off the beet fields suck the sweat from our armpits and legs.

But the seasons change fast in North Dakota. We spent the last day of August jumping from foot to numb foot before Hadj], the foreman, dragged a little column of bottled gas into the shack. He lit the spoked wheel on its head, it bloomed, and from then on we huddled close to the heater, eating, dozing, or sitting mindless its small radius of dry warmth.

By that time Dot weighed over two hundred pounds, most of it peanut-b.u.t.ter cups and egg-salad sandwiches. She was a short, broad-beamed woman with long yellow eyes and s.p.a.ces between each of her strong teeth. When we began working together, her hair was cropped close. By the cold months it had grown out in thick quills-brown at the shank, orange at the tip. The orange dye job had not suited her coloring. By that time, too, Dot's belly was round and full, for she was due in October. The child rode high, and she often rested her forearms on it while she knitted.

One of Dot's most peculiar feats was transforming that gentle task into something perverse. She knit viciously, jerking the yarn around her thumb until the tip whitened, pulling each st.i.tch so tightly that the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.

I thought that the child would need those tight st.i.tches when it was born. Although Dot as expecting mother lived a fairly calm life, it was clear that she had also moved loosely among the dangerous elements.

The child, for example, had been conceived in a visiting room at the state prison. Dot had straddled Gerry's lap in a corner the closed-circuit TV did not quite scan. Through a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in Gerry's jeans they somehow managed to join and, miraculously, to conceive.

Not long after my conversation with Gerry in the bar, he was caught.

That time he went back peacefully, and didn't put up a fight. He was mainly in the penitentiary for breaking out of it, anyway, since for his crime of a.s.sault and battery he had received three years and time off for good behavior. He just never managed to serve those three years or behave well. He broke out time after time, and was caught each time he did it, regular as clockwork.

Gerry was talented at getting out, that's a fact. He boasted that no steel or concrete s.h.i.+t barn could hold a Chippewa, and he had eel like properties in spite of his enormous size. Greased with lard once, he squirmed into a six-foot-thick prison wall and vanished.

Some thought he had stuck there, immured forever, and that he would bring luck, like the bones of slaves sealed in the wall of China. But Gerry rubbed his own belly for luck and brought luck to no one else, for he appeared, suddenly, at Dot's door, and she was hard-pressed to hide him.

She managed for nearly a month. Hiding a six-foot-plus, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Indian in the middle of a town that doesn't like Indians in the first place isn't easy. A month was quite an accomplishment, when you know what she was up against.

She spent most of her time walking to and from the grocery store, padding along on her swollen feet, astonis.h.i.+ng the neighbors with the size of what they thought was her appet.i.te. Stacks of pork chops, whole fryers, thick steaks disappeared overnight, and since Gerry couldn't take the garbage out by day, sometimes he threw the bones out the windows, where they collected, where dogs soon learned to wait for a handout and fought and squabbled over whatever there was.

The neighbors finally complained, and one day, while Dot was at work, Lovchik knocked on the door of the trailer house. Gerry answered, sighed, and walked over to their car. He was so good at getting out of the joint and so terrible at getting caught. It was as if he couldn't stay out of their hands. Dot knew his problem and told him that he was crazy to think he could walk out of prison and then live like a normal person. Dot told him that didn't work. She told him to get lost for a while on the reservation or to let his Mother, Lulu, who had a long successful history of hiding men, keep him under cover. She told him to change his name, to let the straggly hairs above his lip grow, disguising his face. But Gerry wouldn't do any of that. He simply knew he did not belong in prison, although he admitted it had done him some good when he was younger, hadn't known how to be a criminal, and so had taken lessons from professionals. Now that he knew all there was to know, however, he couldn't see the point of staying in a prison and taking the same lessons over and over. "A hate factory, " he called it once, and said it manufactured black poisons in his stomach that he couldn't get rid of although he poked a finger down his throat and retched and tried to be a clean and normal person in spite of everything.

Gerry's problem, you see, was he believed in justice, not laws.

He felt he had paid for his crime, which was done in a drunk heat and to settle the question with a cowboy of whether a Chippewa was also a n.i.g.g.e.r. Gerry said that the two had never settled it between them, but that the cowboy at least knew that if a. Chippewa was a n.i.g.g.e.r he was sure also a h.e.l.l of a mean and lowdown fighter.

For Gerry did not believe in fighting by any rules but reservation rules, which is to say the first thing Gerry did to the cowboy, after they squared off, was kick his b.a.l.l.s.

It hadn't been much of a fight after that, and since there were both white and Indian witnesses, Gerry thought it would blow if it ever' reached court. But there is nothing more vengeful over] and determined in this world than a cowboy with sore b.a.l.l.s, and Gerry soon found this out. He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side, because they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you.

Not only did Gerry's friends lack all forms of identification except their band cards, not only did they disappear (out of no malice but simply because Gerry was tried during powwow time), but the few he did manage to get were not interested in looking judge or jury in the eyes.

They mumbled into their laps. Gerry's friends, you see, had no confidence in the United States judicial system. They did not seem comfortable in the courtroom, and this increased their unreliability in the eyes of judge and jury. If you trust the authorities, they trust you better back, it seems. It looked that way to Gerry, anyhow.

A local doctor testified on behalf of the cowboy's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es, and said his fertility might be impaired. Gerry got a little angry at that, and said right out in court that he could hardly believe he had done that much damage since the cowboy's b.a.l.l.s were very small targets, it had been dark, *and his aim was off anyway because of two, or maybe it was three, beers. That maAe, mate-is worse, of course, and Gerry was socked with a sentence that was heavy for a first offense, but not bad for an Indian. Some said he got off lucky.

Only one good thing came from the whole experience, said L Gerry, and that was that maybe the cowboy would not have any little cowboys, although, Gerry also said, he had nightmares sometimes that the cowboy did manage to have little cowboys, all born with full sets of grinning teeth, Stetson hats, and little b.a.l.l.s hard as plum pits.

So you see, it was difficult for Gerry, as an Indian, to retain the natural good humor of his ancestors in these modern circ.u.mstances. He tried though, and since he believed in justice, not laws, Gerry knew where he belonged-out of prison, in the bosom of his new family. And in spite of the fact that he was untrained in the honest life, he wanted it. He was even interested in getting a job. It didn't matter what kind of job, "Anything for a change," Gerry said. He wanted to go right out and apply for one, in fact, the moment he was free. But of course Dot wouldn't let him. And so, because He wanted to be with Dot, he stayed hidden in her trailer house even though they both realized, or must have, that it wouldn't be long before the police came asking around or the neighbors wised up and Gerry Nanapush would be back at square one again. So it happened. Lovchik came for him.

And Dot now believed she would have to go through the end of her pregnancy and the delivery all by herself Dot was angry about having to go through it alone, and besides that, she loved Gerry with a deep and true love-that was clear.

She knit his absences into thick little suits for the child, suits that would have stopped a truck on a dark road with their colors Bazooka pink, bruise blue, the screaming orange flaggers wore.

The child was as restless a prisoner as its father, and grew more anxious and unruly as the time of release neared. As a place to spend a nine-month sentence in, Dot wasn't much. Her body was inhospitable.

Her skin was loose, sallow, and draped like upholstery fabric over her short, board like bones. Like the shack we spent our days in, she seemed jerry-built, thrown into the world with loosely nailed limbs and lightly puttied joints. Some pregnant women's bellies look like they always have been there. But Dot's stomach was an odd shape, almost square, and had the tacked-on air of a new and unpainted bay window. The child was clearly ready for a break and not interested in earning its parole, for it kept her awake all night by pounding reasonlessly at her inner walls or beating against her bladder until she swore. "Kid wants out, bad,"

poor Dot would groan.

"You think it might be premature?" From the outside, anyway, the child looked big enough to stand and walk and maybe even run straight out of the maternity ward the moment it was born.

The sun, at the time, rose around seven, and we got to the weigh shack while the frost was still thick on the gravel. Each morning I started the gas heater, turning the nozzle and standing back, flipping the match at it the way you would feed a fanged animal.

Then one morning I saw the red bud through the window, lit already.

But when I opened the door the shack was empty. There was, however, evidence of an overnight visitor-cigarette stubs, a few beer cans crushed to flat disks. I swept these things out and didn't say a word about them to Dot when she arrived.

She seemed to know something was in the air, however; her face lifted from time to time all that morning. She sniffed, and even I could smell the lingering odor of sweat like sour wheat, the faint reek of slept-in clothes and gasoline. Once, that morning, Dot looked at me and narrowed her long, hooded eyes. "I got pains," she said, "every so often. Like it's going to come sometime soon. Well, all I can say is he better drag a.s.s to get here, that Gerry." She closed her eyes then, and went to sleep.

Ed Rafferty, one of the drivers, pulled in with a load. It was overweight, and when I handed him the pink slip he grinned.

There were two scales, you see, on the way to the cement plant, and if a driver got past the state-run scale early, before the state officials were there, the company would pay for whatever he got But it was not illicit gravel that tipped the wedge past away withe red mark on the balance. When I walked back inside I saw the weight had gone down to just under the red. Ed drove off, still laughing, and I a.s.sumed that he had leaned on the arm of the scale, increasing the weight.

"That Ed," I said, "got me again."

But Dot stared past me, needles poised in her fist like a picador's lances. It gave me a start, to see her frozen in such a menacing pose.

It was not the sort of pose to turn your back on, but I did turn, following her gaze to the door, which a man's body filled suddenly Gerry, of course it was Gerry. He'd tipped the weight up past the red and leapt down, cat-quick for all his ma.s.s, and silent. I hadn't heard his step. Gravel crushed, evidently, but did not roll beneath his tight, thin boots.

He was bigger than I remembered from the bar, or perhaps it was just that we'd been living in that dollhouse of a weigh shack so long that everything else looked huge. He was so big that he had to hunker one shoulder beneath the lintel and back his belly in, pus.h.i.+ng the doorframe wider with his long, soft hands. It was the hands I watched as Gerry filled the shack. His plump fingers looked so graceful and artistic against his smooth ma.s.s. He used them prettily. Revolving agile wrists he reached across the few inches left between himself and Dot. Then his littlest fingers curled like a woman's at tea, and he disarmed his wife.

He drew the needles out of Dot's fists, and examined the little garment that hung like a queer fruit beneath.

"S'very, very nice," he said, scrutinizing the tiny, even st.i.tches.

"S'for the kid?"

Dot nodded solemnly and dropped her eyes to her lap. It was an almost tender moment. The silence lasted so long that I got embarra.s.sed and would have left had I not been wedged firmly behind his hip in one corner.

Gerry stood there, smoothing black hair behind his ears.

Again, there was a queer delicacy about the way he did this. So many things Gerry did might remind you of the way that a beautiful courtesan, standing naked before a mirror, would touch herself-lovingly, conscious of her attractions. He nodded encouragingly. "Let's go then," said Dot.

Suave, grand, gigantic, they moved across the construction site and then, by mysterious means, slipped their bodies into Dot's compact car.

I expected the car to belly down, thought the m.u.f.fler would sc.r.a.pe the ground behind them. But instead they flew, raising a great spume of dust that hung in the air a long time after they were out of sight.

I went back into the weigh shack when the air behind them had settled. I was bored, dead bored. And since one thing meant about as much to me as another, I picked up her needles and began knitting, as well as I could anyway, jerking the yarn back after each st.i.tch, becoming more and more absorbed in my work until, as it happened, I came suddenly to the end of the garment, snipped the yarn, and worked the loose ends back into the collar of the thick little suit.

I missed Dot in the days that followed, days so alike they welded searrilessly to one another and took your mind away. I seemed to exist in a suspension and spent my time sifting at the window watching nothing until the sun went down, bruising the whole sky as it dropped, clotting my heart. I couldn't name anything I felt anymore, although I knew it was a kind of boredom. I had been living the same life too long. I did jumping jacks and pushups and stood on my head in the little shack to break the tedium, but too much solitude rots the brain.

I wondered how Gerry had stood it. Sometimes I grabbed drivers out of their trucks and talked loudly and quickly and inconsequentially as a madwoman.

There were other times I couldn't talk at all because my tongue had rusted to the roof of my mouth.

mm Sometimes I daydreamed about Dot and Gerry. I had many choice daydreams, but theirs was my favorite. I pictured them in Dot's long tan trailer house, both hungry. Heads swaying, clasped hands swinging between them like hooked trunks, they moved through the kitchen feeding casually from boxes and bags on the counters, like ponderous animals alone in a forest. When they had fed, they moved on to the bedroom and settled themselves upon Dot's king-size and sateen-quilted spread.

They rubbed together, locked and unlocked their parts. They set the trailer rocking on its cement-block-and-plywood foundation and the tremors spread, causing cups to fall, plates to shatter in the china hutches of their more established neighbors.

But what of the child there, suspended between them. Did it know how to weather such tropical storms? It was a week past the week it was due, and I expected the good news to come any moment. I was anxious to hear the outcome, but still, I was surprised when Gerry rumbled to the weigh-shack door on a huge and ancient, rust-pocked, untrustworthy-looking machine that was like no motorcycle I'd ever seen before.

"She a.s.st for you," he hissed. "Quick, get on!"

I hoisted myself up behind him, although there wasn't room on the seat.

I clawed his smooth back for a handhold and finally perched, or so it seemed, on the rim of his heavy belt. Flylike, glued to him by suction, we rode as one person, whipping a great wind around us. Cars scattered, the lights blinked and flickered on the main street.

Pedestrians swiveled to catch a glimpse of us-a mountain tearing by balanced on a toy, and clinging to the sheer northwest face, a scrawny half-breed howling something that Dopplered across the bridge and faded out, finally, in the parking lot of Saint Adalbert's Hospital.

In the waiting room we settled on chairs molded of orange plastic.

The spike legs splayed beneath Gerry's ma.s.s but managed to support him the four hours we waited. Nurses pa.s.sed, settling like field gulls among reports and prescriptions, eyeing us with reserved hostility.

Gerry hardly spoke. He didn't have to, I watched his ribs and the small of his back darken with sweat. For that well-lighted tunnel, the waiting room, the tin rack of magaIzines, all were the props and inevitable features of inst.i.tutions.

From time to time Gerry paced in the time-honored manner of the prisoner or expectant father. He made lengthy trips to the bathroom.

All the quickness and delicacy of his movements had disappeared, and he was only a poor tired fat man in those hours, a husband worried about his wife, menaced, tired of getting caught.

At last the gulls emerged and drew Gerry in among them. He visited Dot for perhaps half an hour, and then came out of her visi room. Again he settled, the plastic chair twitched beneath him.

He looked bewildered and silly and a little addled with what he had seen. The shaded lenses of his gla.s.ses kept slipping down his nose.

Beside him, I felt the aftermath of the shock wave traveling from the epicenter deep in his flesh outward from part of him that had s.h.i.+fted along a crevice. The tremors moved in widening rings. When they reached the very surface of him, and when he began trembling, Gerry stood suddenly. "I'm going after cigars," he said, and walked quickly away.

His steps quickened to a near run as he moved down the corridor.

Waiting for the elevator, he flexed his nimble fingers. Dot told me she had once sent him to the store for a roll of toilet paper. It was eight months before she saw him again, for he'd met the local constabulary on the way. So I knew, when he flexed his fingers, that he was thinking of pulling the biker's gloves over his knuckles, of running. It was perhaps the very first time in his life he had something to run for.

It seemed to me, at that moment, that I should at least let Gerry know it was all right for him to leave, to run as far and fast as he had to now. Although I felt heavy-my body had gone slack, and my lungs ached with smoke-1 jumped up. I signaled him from the end of the corridor.

Gerry turned, unwillingly turned. He looked my way just as two of our local police-Officers Lovchik and Harriss-pushed open the fire door that sealed off the staircase behind me. I didn't see them and was shocked at first that my wave caused such an extreme reaction in Gerry.

His hair stiffened. His body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly. Behind him there was a wide, tall window. Gerry opened it and sent the screen into thin air with an elegant chorus girl kick.

Then he followed the screen, squeezing himself unbelievably through the frame like a fat rabbit disappearing down a hole. It was three stories down to the cement and asphalt parking lot.

Officers Lovchik and Harriss gained the window. The nurses followed.

I slipped through the fire exit and took the back stairs down into the parking lot, believing I would find him stunned and broken there.

But Gerry had chosen his window with exceptional luck, for the officers had parked their car directly underneath. Gerry landed just over the driver's seat, caving the roof into the steering wheel. He bounced off the hood of the car and then, limping, a bit dazed perhaps, straddled his bike. Out of duty, Lovchik released several rounds into the still trees below him. The reports were still echoing when I reached the front of the building.

I was just in time to see Gerry Nanapush, emboldened by his G.o.dlike leap and recovery, pop a whee lie and disappear between the neat shrubs that marked the entrance to the hospital, Two weeks later Dot and her girl, who was finally named Shawn, like most girls born that year, came back to work at the scales.

Things went on as they had before, except that Shawn kept us occupied during the long hours. She was large, of course, and had a st.u.r.dy pair of lungs she used often. When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated with sugar t.i.ts or pacifiers. Dot unzipped her parka halfway, pulled her blouse up, and let her nurse for what seemed like hours.

We could scarcely believe her appet.i.te. Dot was a diligent producer of milk, however. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, like overfilled inner tubes, strained at her nylon blouses. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, Dot rose and carried them in the crooks of her arms, for her shoulders were growing bowed beneath their weight.

The trucks came in on the hour, or half hour. I heard the rush of air brakes, gears grinding only inches from my head. It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me. I wasn't lonely now that Dot had returned. The season would end soon, and we wondered what had happened to Gerry.

There were only a few weeks left of work when we heard that Gerry was caught again. He'd picked the wrong reservation to hide on-Pine Ridge.

As always, it was overrun with federal agents and armored vehicles.

Weapons were stashed everywhere and easy to acquire. Gerry got himself a weapon. Two men tried to arrest him. Gerry would not go along, and when he started to run and the shooting started, Gerry shot and killed a clean shaven man with dark hair and light eyes, a state trooper, a man whose picture was printed in all the papers.

They sent Gerry to prison in Marion, Illinois. He was placed in the control unit. He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

Dot and I continued to work the last weeks together. Once we weighed baby Shawn. We unlatched her little knit suit, heavy as armor, and bundled her in a light, crocheted blanket. Dot went into the shack to adjust the weights. I stood there with Shawn.

She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms.

busy, I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load.

But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

da CROWN OF THORNS r U a S (1981) A month after June died Gordie took the first drink, and then the need was on him like a hook in his jaw, tipping his wrist, sending him out with needles piercing his hairline, his aching hands.

From the beginning it was his hands that made him drink. They remembered things his mind could not-curve of hip and taut breast.

They remembered farther back, to the times he spent, with June when the two were young. They had always been together, like brother and sister, stealing duck eggs, blowing crabgra.s.s between their thumbs, chasing cows. They got in trouble together.

They fought but always made up easy and quick, until they were married.

His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and the speed of their striking. He'd been a mom",." boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

They remembered this while they curled around the gold colored can of beer he had begged down the road at Eli's.

"You gone too far now," Ell said. Gordie knew he was sitting at his Uncle Ell's table again because the orange spots in the oilcloth were there beneath his eyes. Ell's voice came from the soft pure blackness that stretched out in all directions from the lighted area around the beer can. Gordie's hands felt unclean. The can felt cold and pure.