OIL.
as if it was clear, more peaceful. It looked as though he wasn’t thinking of anything in particular except the bare fields and windbreaks and houses we were passing.
The river was high and full of winter trash when we got there.
The sun was still out, but it was colder by the river. There were still little clumps of dirty snow here and there on the banks. The water hadn’t gone over the banks yet, but it would, you could tell. It was ‘just at its limit, hard swollen, glossy like an old gray scar. We made ourselves a fire, and we sat down and watched the current go. As I watched it I felt something squeezing inside me and tightening and trying to let go all at the same time. I knew I was not just feeling it myself; I knew I was feeling what Henry was going through at that moment. Except that I couldn’t stand it, the closing and opening. I jumped to my feet. I took Henry by the shoulders and I started shaking him. “Wake up,” I says, “wake up, wake up, wake up!” I didn’t know what had come over me. I sat down beside him again.
His face was totally white and hard. Then it broke, like stones break all of a sudden when water boils up inside them.
“I know it,” he says. “I know it. I can’t help it. It’s no use.”
We start talking. He said he knew what I’d done with the car. It was obvious it had been whacked out of shape and not ‘just neglected.
He said he wanted to give the car to me for good now, it was no use.
He said he’d fixed it just to give it back and I should 17 take it.
“No way,” I says,
“I don’t want it.”
“That’s okay,” he says, “you take it.”
“I don’t want it, though,” I says back to him, and then to emphasize, just to emphasize, you understand, I touch his shoulder. He slaps my hand off.
“Take that car,” he says.
“No,” I say, “make me,” I say, and then he grabs my jacket and rips the arm loose. That jacket is a class act, suede with tags and MIA zippers. I push Henry backwards, off the log. He jumps up and bowls me over. We go down in a clinch and come up swinging hard, for all we’re worth, with our fists. He socks my jaw so hard I feel like it swings loose. Then I’m at his ribcage and land a good one under his chin so his head snaps back. He’s dazzled. He looks at me and I look at him and then his eyes are full of tears and blood and at first I think he’s crying. But no, he’s laughing. “Hal Ha!” he says. “Ha!
Ha! Take good care of it.”
“Okay,” I says, “okay, no problem. Ha! Ha!”
I can’t help it, and I start laughing, too. My face feels fat and strange, and after a while I get a beer from the cooler in the trunk, and when I hand it to Henry he takes his shirt and wipes MY germs off.
“Hoof-and-mouth disease,” he says. For some reason this cracks me up, and so we’re really laughing for a while, and then we drink all the rest of the beers one by one and throw them in the river and see how far, how fast, the current takes them before they fill up and sink.
“You want to go on back?” I ask after a while. “Maybe we could snag a couple nice Kashpaw girls.”
He says nothing. But I can tell his mood is turning again.
“They’re all crazy, the girls up here, every damn one of them.
“You’re crazy too,” I say, to jolly him up. “Crazy Lamartine boys!
He looks as though he will take this wrong at first. His face twists, then clears, and he jumps up on his feet. “That’s right!” he says.
“Crazier ‘n hell. Crazy Indians!”
I think it’s the old Henry again. He throws off his jacket and starts swinging his legs out from the knees like a fancy dancer.
He’s down doing something between a grouse dance and a bunny hop, no kind of dance I ever saw before, but neither has anyone else on all this green growing earth. He’s wild. He wants to pitch whoopee! He’s up and at me and all over. All this time I’m laughing so hard, so hard my belly is getting tied up in a knot.
“Got to cool me off!” he shouts all of a sudden. Then he runs over to the river and jumps in.
There’s boards and other things in the current. It’s so high. No sound comes from the river after the splash he makes, so I run right over. I look around. It’s getting dark. I see he’s halfway across the water already, and I know he didn’t swim there but the current took him. It’s far. I hear his voice, though, very clearly across it.
“My boots are filling,” he says.
He says this in a normal voice, like he just noticed and he doesn’t know what to think of it. Then he’s gone. A branch comes by. Another branch. And I go in.
By the time I get out of the river, off the snag I pulled myself onto, the sun is down. I walk back to the car, turn on the high beams, and drive it up the bank. I put it in first gear and then I take my foot off the clutch. I get out, close the door, and watch it plow softly into the water. The headlights reach in as they go down, searching, still lighted even after the water swirls over the back end.
I wait. The wires short out. It is all finally dark. And then there is only the water, the sound of it going and running and going and running and running.
hill SCAI FS (1980)
ALBERTINE JOHNSON
I was sitting before my third or fourth jellybean, which is anisette, grain alcohol, a lit match, and small wet explosion in the brain. On my left sat Gerry Nanapush of the Chippewa Tribe.
On my right sat Dot Adare of the has-been, of the never-was, of the what’s-in-front-of-me people. Still in her belly and tensed in its fluids coiled the child of their union, the child we were waiting for, the child whose name we were making a strenuous and lengthy search for in a cramped and littered bar at the very edge of that Dakota town.
Gerry had been on the wagon for thirteen years. He was drinking a tall glass of tonic water in which a crescent of soiled lemon bobbed, along with a Maraschino cherry or two. He was thirty-five years old and had been in prison, or out of prison and on the run, for almost half of those years. He was not in the clear yet nor Ak.
would he ever be, that is why the yellow tennis player’s visor was pulled down to the rim of his eyeglass frames. The bar was dimly lit and smoky; his glasses were very dark. Poor visibility must have been the reason Officer Lovchik saw him first.
Lovchik started toward us with his hand on his hip, but Gerry was over the backside of the booth and out the door before Lovchik got close enough to make a positive identification.
“Sit down with us,” said Dot to Lovchik, when he neared our booth.
“I’ll buy you a drink. It’s so dead here. No one’s been through all night.”
Lovchik sighed, sat, and ordered a blackberry brandy.
“Now tell me,” she said, staring at him, “honestly. What do you think of the name Ketchup Face?”
It was through Gerry that I first met Dot, in a bar like that one only denser with striving drinkers, construction crews who had come into town because a new interstate highway was passing near it. I was stuck there, having run out of money and ideas of where to go next. I was twenty-two and knew I’d soon have to do something different with my life. But no matter what that would be, I had to make some money first.
I had heard Gerry Nanapush was around, and because he was famous for leading a hunger strike at the state pen, as well as having been Henry Larnartine’s brother and some kind of boyfriend to Aunt June, I went to look for him. He was not hard to find, being large. I sat down next to him and we struck up a conversation, during the long course of which we became friendly enough for Gerry to put his arm around me.
Dot entered at exactly the wrong moment. She was quick tempered anyway, and being pregnant (Gerry had gotten her that way on a prison visit six months previous) increased her irritability. It was only natural then, I guess, that she would pull the barstool out from under me and threaten my life. Only I didn’t believe she was threatening my life at the time.