It took a long time before Geraldine would even talk to me, longer still before she’d sit down and drink a cup of coffee in my presence. At a conference in Bismarck she finally had dinner with me — I’d maneuvered into the hotel smorgasboard line right behind her and when she walked over to a table I stuck tight. We talked of general and familiar subjects, getting acquainted, but all the while I longed to say, “I’m going to marry you, Geraldine Milk, and you are going to marry me.”
Though impatient, I managed to keep my interest hidden. I heard the Milk girls had tempers, and I did not want to begin by sparking hers. After the conference, when we returned home, I boringly kept an appropriate distance, though sometimes I thought I’d die of all I didn’t dare say in her presence. My love of her uncle’s music helped — I often went to sit with him in the evenings. At other times I dropped by his house early in the mornings, made a pot of strong tea or took him out to breakfast. That was on the weekends. The first time Geraldine showed up at her uncle’s house and found me there, I faked an elaborate surprise. She was not fooled.
“Are you here for a haircut, Judge? I brought my trimming shears.” She drew a pair of scissors from her purse and snapped them in the air. I felt like telling her she could do anything she wanted to me. I am pretty sure she read this in my expression and took pity. She put the scissors down.
“Do you like to fish?” I asked her. Maybe it was an odd way to get to know a woman, but I was suffering.
“No,” she said.
“Would you like to go fishing anyway?”
“All right.”
So the next day we went out together in a cousin of mine’s fishing boat, a little aluminum outboard with a 45-horsepower motor. She had on rolled-up jeans, a starched plaid shirt. Her hair was a curled graceful shape that brushed her shoulders. She wore a deep red lipstick and no other makeup, and I thought that if she let me lean toward her in the boat I would hold her face, graze her lips with the side of my thumb, look into her eyes, and slowly kiss her. I was picturing just what I’d do, when she said, “Watch out,” sharply. We’d just missed a rock, which I knew was there, and she shook her head.
“You’ll hang us up, Judge.”
“I’m not a hanging judge.”
“You know that story?”
“Sure.”
I told her that the two older brothers of Cuthbert Peace, Henri and Lafayette, had long ago saved my grandfather’s life. We reached what looked like a good spot, cast our lines out, reeled them in, cast out and reeled in without talking. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. We knew where we were from. After a while, we began talking in a general way of exactly that. We talked of history, mused a little on the future. Our reservation as it stands now is bordered by three towns — Hoopdance, Argus, and Pluto. That last — being closest, but on the western boundary and so off the most traveled roads — has ended up not benefiting from the slight stability and even occasional prosperity brought to the reservation by light manufacturing. Since the government offers tax incentives for businesses to locate here, we’ve begun to switch our economic base away from farming, even as the towns surrounding us empty out and die. It’s a shame to see them go, but Geraldine and I agreed that we were not about to waste our sympathies. In the winter of our great starvation, when scores of our people were consumed by hunger, citizens of Argus sold their grain and raffled off a grand piano. More recently, when we traveled to Washington to fight a policy that would have terminated our relationship with the United States Government guaranteed by treaty, only one lawyer, from Pluto, stood up for us. That was my father. And in 1911, when a family was murdered savagely on a farm just to the west, a posse mob tore after a wandering bunch of our people. They chased down three men and a boy and hung them all, except Mooshum. The story Geraldine had just referred to. I told her that later on the vigilantes admitted that they probably were mistaken. She hadn’t known that.
“But it happened in the heat of things, one of them said, I think Wildstrand. In the heat of things!”
Geraldine said, “What doesn’t happen in the heat of things? Someone has seized the moment to act on their own biases. That’s it. Or history. Sometimes it is history.”
I caught a few small sunnies, and threw them back. Geraldine got a bite and her pole bent double.
“Bet you it’s a turtle.”
“Reel it in slow, let it swim to you. Coax it along.”
Geraldine, of course, knew how to catch a turtle better than I did. We didn’t have a net, so she was going to have to maneuver the creature alongside the boat. When she dragged it closer, I saw the bullet head and rounded humps and knew it was a giant snapper. I was surprised it hadn’t bitten the line and dived. Big as a car tire, it floated just beneath the water. I carefully stowed my fishing pole and tried to figure just how I would pull the monster out of the lake. I would rather have cut the turtle free than drag it in, not because I had sympathy for it, but because snappers bite with tremendous force. When I suggested we let it go, Geraldine gave me an excited look and said, “No, Clemence will make French turtle soup!” So I resigned myself, flexed my fingers, and hoped I’d keep them.
“Now, now! Reach over and grab onto him!”
Geraldine’s snapper swam alongside the boat and I leaned over, grabbed its shell, but failed to secure my grip. Twice I lost him, which exasperated Geraldine.
“Here, take this. I’ve caught lots of snappers before.”
She set the fishing rod in my hand and pulled it in by the tail, right over the side. It was the biggest snapper I’d ever seen, with olive green slime growing in patterns on its back and that strange, unreconstructed dinosaur beak. The neck was massive, slack, and the nose came to a delicate, creepy point.
“They go back over a million years unchanged,” I said. I planned to whack the turtle with the emergency oar if it attacked, but it lay there passively. Geraldine was staring hard at the shell, sitting stiffly with her hands folded in her lap. Her arrest became prolonged and her face went ash gray.
“Should I throw it back?” I asked. She didn’t answer. I kept talking.
“The one my cousin kept as a pet tried to lay eggs after two years alone in the tank. I guess the female can conserve sperm for quite a long time, if the need arises.”
I tried to stop myself, wondering how idiotic a man could be, but her silence rattled me.
“I know,” she said at last. “My brother-in-law studies reptiles.”
“Is something wrong?” I asked, after we’d both sat for much too long looking at that turtle in the bottom of the boat.
“Don’t you see it?”
The turtle was becoming more responsive now. It opened its muddy eyes and poked its head out like a snake, then slowly stretched its jaws wide. The inside of its mouth was grotesque, ornately fleshy, and there was the low reek of turtle musk.