Love Medicine

A

That picture. I never look at it anymore. A few months ago, I don’t know why, I got his picture out and tacked it on the wall. I felt good about Henry at the time, close to him. I felt good having his picture on the wall, until one night when I was looking at television. I was a little drunk and stoned. I looked up at the wall and Henry was staring at me. I don’t know what it was, but his smile had changed, or maybe it was gone. All I know is I couldn’t stay in the same room with that picture. I was shaking. I got up, closed the door, and went into the kitchen. A little later my friend Ray came over and we both went back into that room. We put the picture in a brown bag, folded the bag over and over tightly, then put it way back in a closet.

I still see that picture now, as if it tugs at me, whenever I pass that closet door. The picture is very clear in my mind. It was so sunny that day Henry had to squint against the glare. Or maybe the camera Bonita held flashed like a mirror, blinding him, before she snapped the picture. My face is right out in the sun, big and round.

But he might have drawn back, because the shadows on his face are deep as holes. There are two shadows curved like little hooks around the ends of his smile, as if to frame it and try to keep it there-that one, first smile that looked like it might have hurt his face. He has his field jacket on and the worn-in clothes he’d come back in and kept wearing ever since. After Bonita took the picture, she went into the house and we got into the car. There was a full cooler in the trunk.

We started off, cast, toward Pembina and the Red River because Henry said he wanted to see the high water.

The trip over there was beautiful. When everything starts changing, drying up, clearing off, you feel like your whole life is starting.

Henry felt it, too. The top was down and the car hummed like a top.

He’d really put it back in shape, even the tape on the seats was very carefully put down and glued back in layers. It’s not that he smiled again or even joked, but his face looked to me ONUA

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)