“Yes, sir, for a minute, if I could, if you got a minute.”
“I got a minute,” Tommy told him, in a manner that suggested he might not have two minutes. “Sit down here.”
They sat in the front row and Benny began grimacing and looking at the floor and twisting the leg of his blue jeans with his fingers and jouncing his foot up and down. Tommy watched this display for a few seconds and then said, “I guess this is where you say you don’t know where to start.”
“Well, it’s Little Feather Redcorn!” Benny blurted out.
Oh boy. What dumb bonehead trouble had Benny wandered into now?
Tommy had not himself seen the Redcorn woman on TV, but a lot of the people he knew had seen her, and everybody agreed this was some tough cookie. A hardened crook and a con-woman criminal. Did she have her hooks in Benny Whitefish?
On the other hand, what would she—or anybody else, really—want her hooks in Benny Whitefish for? Moving toward an answer to that question, Tommy said, “Met up with her, did you?”
“Yes,” Benny said, then immediately reddened and jerked upright hard enough to make his chair complain, and cried, “No!” He stared wide-eyed at Tommy, then away, then said, “Uncle Roger told me to watch her.”
Tommy hadn’t expected this. “Watch her? What do you mean, ‘watch her’?”
“To look for her accomplices,” Benny said, then leaned toward Tommy, bug-eyed with sincerity, to say, “But she don’t have any accomplices! Mr. Dog, I think she’s telling the truth, you know? I been following her for days now, and she don’t have any accomplices at all. I think she really is Pottaknobbee.”
Tommy said, “Aren’t they gonna do something in court?”
“Oh, sure,” Benny said, “but Uncle Roger and Uncle Frank, they just don’t want her around. Even if it’s all true, they don’t want her there. They told me so themself.”
I thought they were smarter than that, Tommy thought, smarter than to tell Benny Whitefish anything at all. He said, “I suppose they just like things the way they are.”
“Boy, they sure do,” Benny agreed. Then at last, he got to it: “Mr. Dog,” he said, full of earnestness, “could you talk to them?”
“What, Roger and Frank?” Tommy recoiled from the idea.
“Sure,” Benny said. “Tell them the Tribal Council don’t want to throw Little Feather out, not if she’s really Pottaknobbee.”
Noticing that use of the first name, Tommy said, “I think we all oughta leave that to the courts, don’t you, Benny?”
“But—The Tribal Council’s the law here, isn’t it?”
“Oh, sure,” Tommy said. “We got our sovereignty. But I don’t see there’s anything the Council should do about all this. Let the court decide if she’s Pottaknobbee or not.”
“Mr. Dog,” Benny said, blinking like mad, “would you talk to her?”
Tommy couldn’t believe it. So that was what the woman had in mind; divide and conquer. “Benny,” he said severely, “did she tell you to ask me that?”
“Oh no, sir!” Benny cried, lying very fervently and very badly. “It’s all my own idea, Mr. Dog, honest! I been watching her, and following her, and I just thought, we aren’t treating her right, and maybe if the Council—”
“No, Benny,” Tommy said. “The Tribal Council is not going to get involved. That isn’t our jurisdiction.” He could just see himself crossing swords with Roger Fox and Frank Oglanda. They’d run him off the reservation. A three-month chairmanship of the Tribal Council had not turned Tommy Dog into a complete idiot. “You go back and tell that Miss Redcorn,” he said, “her best hope is the court, and if she wants to talk to Roger and Frank, she should pick up the telephone and make an appointment. And now I got an appointment to take Millicent to the mall.” Rising, he said, “My advice to you, Benny, is to ask your uncle Roger to put somebody else to following your friend Little Feather around, and you keep away from her.”
Going out, Tommy paused in the doorway to look back, and Benny was still sitting there, in profile to Tommy, slumped, dejected, head down, gazing hopelessly at the floor. In that position, he looked exactly like that famous statue of the mournful, defeated Indian, except he wasn’t on a horse and he wasn’t tall and thin. And he didn’t hold a lance with its tip down in the dirt. And he didn’t have the headdress. But other than that, it was exactly the same: the defeated Indian.
28
By Monday morning, May had decided it was like living with a retiree. John had only been back from the North Country since Friday, but he had never been so present before. Everywhere in the apartment she looked, there he was, slumped and leaden, looking surly and bored out of his mind.
She hadn’t known it was possible for someone who didn’t have a regular job, who’d never had a regular job in his life, to sit around exactly as though he’d just been laid off. But here he was, a sodden lump and no fun at all.
Over breakfast Monday morning, before leaving for her cashier’s job at Safeway, May decided to bring it out where they could look at it, discuss the problem, so she said, “John, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. He was slumped over his cereal bowl, looking down into it, at the sugar and the milk and the cornflakes all massing together in there, all in a soggy clump, turning gray somehow. His breakfast had never turned gray before. He held the spoon angled into the gob, as though he might use the stuff to patch a hole somewhere, but not as though he had any intention of eating it.
She said, “John, something’s wrong, you’re not eating your breakfast.”
“Sure I am,” he said, but he still didn’t lift either his spoon or his eyes. Then he frowned into the bowl more deeply and said, “I just remembered. In the orphanage, you know, the bowls they gave us had cartoon people in the bottom, like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and all, and everybody always ate real fast to see what was in the bottom, even when we had pea soup. I usually got Elmer Fudd.”
This was more than John had said in the last three days combined, but he seemed to be talking more to the bowl than to May. Also, he rarely spoke about his upbringing in the orphanage run by the Bleeding Heart Sisters of Eternal Misery, which was fine by her. She said, “John? Would you like some bowls like that?”
“No,” he said, and slowly shook his head. Then he let go of the spoon—it didn’t drop; it remained angled into the gunk—and at last he looked up at May across the kitchen table and said, “What I want, I think, is, you know what I mean, some purpose in life.”
“You don’t have a purpose in life?”
“I usually got a purpose,” he said. “Usually, I kind of know what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, but look at me now.”
“I know,” she agreed. “I’ve been looking at you, John. It’s this Anastasia thing, isn’t it?”
“I mean, what am I doing here?” he demanded. Slowly, the spoon eased downward. Silently, it touched the edge of the bowl. “There’s nothing for me to do,” he complained, “except sit around and wait for other people to scheme things out, and then all of a sudden Little Feather’s supposed to give me a hundred thousand large, and guess how much I believe that one.”
“You think she’ll stiff you?”
“I think she’d stiff her mother, if her mother happened by,” John said. “But I also think Tiny doesn’t like to be insulted, so I figure we’ll get something out of it. Sooner or later. But in the meantime, I’m here, and what’s going on is going on up in Plattsburgh, where it’s cold as hell, and there’s no point in me going up there, because there’s nothing for me to do there any more than there’s nothing for me to do here, which is nothing.”