just about bought it there,” he gasped when he was free, sitting on the side of the ditch. “I never realized I’d get so low on air.”
I just couldn’t completely register what was happening. After a while he straightened out and took a little brush from his pocket and put his hair back smooth and sleek in its tail. There was a sharp sweat on him.
I realized how scared he had been, and when I opened the car door, I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him in, These things had took their toll. He couldn’t talk for a long time, so we let the road take us along.
It was miles and miles before he roused himself to ask if I would take the next right-and turn I came to and drive until I hit Canada. He said he’d be obliged if I could let him off near the border.
“I got a wife and little girl up there,” he said. “I’m going to visit them.”
“You’re gonna make it this time,” I said. “Home free.”
“No,” he said, stretching his arms out, evidently feeling better,
“I
won’t ever really have what you’d call a home.”
He was right about that, of course. I’d never seen. He could not go back to a place where he was known and belonged. No matter where he settled down he would always be looking behind his shoulders. No matter what, he would always be on the run.
We talked a good long time about the reservation then. I caught him up on all the little black listings and scandals that had happened. He wanted to know everything about Lulu, his mom, so I told him how she’d started running things along with Grandma Kashpaw. I told him how she’d even testified for Chippewa claims and that people were starting to talk, now, about her knowledge as an old-time traditional.
“Times do change,” Gerry laughed. “She was always damn good in front of an audience.”
“She had her picture in the paper in Washington,” I said.
“I saw it.” He was silent. I guess he missed her pretty bad.
After miles of driving I asked.
“Did you know June?”
That question took him altogether by surprise. We were driving the small roads, the less traveled and less well kept. The dark was vast and thick. I had to drive slower and more careful than before.
After a moment Gerry said he knew June, way back when. A little while after that he blurted out,
“Hell on wheels! She was really something so beautiful.”
“You sound like you was in love with her,” I promptly said.
“In love with her like everybody else,” he told me. “I know she burned out young. I heard that. But I always keep seeing her the way she was at the time of my first incarceration.”
“Slim.” “But not too slim. Long legged. Always with a nice, a really nice laugh, but she was a shy one. So far away sometimes you couldn’t touch her.”
“She had a streak maybe, an odd streak.”
“I don’t know about that. She liked order. We’d live in motels.
She would always arrange the room real ri cat put everything away, make the bed every morning even though they’d strip it that afternoon.”
“Something I can’t remember,” I said; “did she have nice fingers?”
“Nice!” he said. “She had the prettiest damn fingers in the world!”
“I was wondering,” I said, “if you killed that trooper.”
If I tell you he said no, you will think he was lying. You will think a man don’t get two consecutive life sentences for nothing beneath the U.S. ‘udicial system. You’ll keep thinking that, too, unless you happen to rub against that system on your own. Then things will astonish you. I promise they will.
If I tell you he said yes, and relate to you how it all happened, it might get used against him. I’m sorry but I just don’t trust to write down what he answered, yes or no. We have entered an area of too deep water.
Let’s just say he answered: “That’s the penetrating mystery of it.
Nobody knows.”
I could feel him looking over at me a long time after speaking.
I concentrated on steering us very straight and put the heater on.
Up until then, I hadn’t really noticed how cold it was.
“Enough about me anyhows,” he said. “What’s your story?”
I told him all the things about me which I owned up to: how I — aid had quit school for the betterment of my mental powers, and learned on my own; how I was took on early by the Kashpaws and remained on the rez to look after the elder ones. I believe that my home is the only place I belong and was never interested to leave it, but circumstances forced my hand. I mentioned the one girl I ever trusted, Albertine. I told how she was a sister to me.
“I knew her too,” said Gerry. “Kind of quiet.”
“She was?” I never thought of her like that.
“You’re one hell of a card player,” Gerry complimented.
“Oh.” I got shy that I had out dealt him. “You must have played a lot in prison.”
“There’s nothing else to fool with.”
Suddenly I blurted out,
“I’m running from the army police.”
“Oh, that’s your problem! That’s your problem! I knew you had a problem!” He started smacking his big knee and shifted around in the bucket seat. He seemed excited.
“Then we’re both as good as cons.”
“That’s the damn truth,” I agreed.
But somehow, since we were splitting up, that did not give me a whole lot of consolation. He slapped his fist a couple of times in his palm and laughed, shaking his head. Suddenly he caught his breath and halted.
“You couldn’t have took your physical yet.”
I said I hadn’t.
“You don’t need to worry about the army,” he said, dropping his hands in his lap. “I’m glad.”
I glanced over at him. But he wasn’t looking at me and he ‘t moving at all. His head was turned. Evidently he was wasn I I watching the same dark scenery that unrolled about us endlessly-spring’s empty fields, standing water, and the signs of human life, the yard lamps, so modest and few and far between.
“Look here,” he said. I didn’t have to go in the army because “Oh,” I said. “Lucky for you.”
“Lucky for you too.”
I kept on steering.
“You’re a Nanapush man,” he said. I could feel him looking at me. I could feel the soft, broad, serious weight of all his features.
“We all have this odd thing with our hearts.”
He put a hand out and touched my shoulder.
There was a moment when the car and road stood still, and then I felt it. I felt my own heart give this little burping skip.
So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt-smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other’s arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. A windbreak swallowed him up. I didn’t want my lights to show, so I cruised for miles and miles in the soft clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before.
I didn’t turn the headlights on until I hit the highways. Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now, so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. I looked down over the rail.