Love Medicine

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.

I had a false view of pregnant women. I thought of them as wearing invisible halos, not committing mayhem.

“I’m gonna bend you out of shape,” she said, flexing her hands over me.

Her hands were small, broad, capable, with pointed nails. I used to do the wrong thing sometimes when I was drinking, and that time I did theW Tong thing, even though I was stretched out on the floor beneath her. I started laughing at her because her hands were so small (though strong and determined looking-I should have been more conscious of that). She was about to dive on top of me, six-month belly and all, but Gerry caught her in midair and carried her, yelling, out the door.

The next morning I reported for work. It was my first day on the job, and the only other woman on the construction site besides me was Dot Adare.

That day Dot ‘just glared toward me from a distance. She worked in the weigh shack, and I was hired to press buttons on the conveyor belt.

All I had to do was adjust the speeds on the belt for sand, rocks, or gravel and make sure it was aimed toward the right pile. There was a pyramid for each type of material, which was used to make hot-mix and cement. Across the wide yard, I saw Dot emerge from the little weigh shack from time to time. I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me, but I thought, by the end of the day, that she probably didn’t. I found out differently the next morning when I went to the company truck for coffee.

She got me alongside of the truck somehow, away from the men. She didn’t say a word, just held the buck knife out where I could see it, blade toward me. She jiggled the handle, and the tip waved like the pointy head of a pit viper. Blind. Heat seeking. I was completely astonished. I had ‘just put the plastic cover on my coffee and it steamed between my hands.

“Well, I’m sorry I laughed,” I said. She stepped back. I peeled the lid off my coffee, took a sip, and then I said the wrong thing again.

“And I wasn’t going after your boyfriend.”

“Why not?” she said at once. “What’s wrong with him?”

I saw that I was going to lose this argument no matter what I said, so for once I did the right thing. I threw my coffee in her face and ran.

Later on that day Dot came out of the weigh shack and yelled,

“Okay then!” I was close enough to see that she even grinned. I waved. From then on things were better between us, which was lucky, because I turned out to be such a good button presser that within two weeks I was promoted to the weigh shack, to help Dot.

It wasn’t that Dot needed help weighing trucks, it was just a formality for the state highway department. I never quite understood, but it seems Dot had been both the truck weigher and the truck-weight inspector for a while, until someone caught wind of this. The company hired me to actually weigh the trucks, and Dot was hired by the state to make sure I recorded accurate weights. What she really did was sleep, knit, or eat all day. Between truckloads I did the same. I didn’t even have to get off my stool to weigh the trucks, because the arm of the scale projected through a rectangular hole and the weights appeared right in front of me. The standard back dumps, belly dumps and yellow company trucks eased onto a platform built over the arm next to the shack. I wrote their weight on a little pink slip, clipped the paper in a clothespin attached to a broom handle, and handed it up to the driver. I kept a copy of the pink slip on a yellow slip that I put in a metal file box No one ever picked up the file box so I never knew what the yellow slips were for. The company paid me very well.

It was early July when Dot and I started working together. At first I sat as far away from her as possible and never took my eyes Retail’, mom off her knitting needles, although it made me a little dizzy to watch her work. It wasn’t long before we came to an understanding, though, and after this I felt perfectly comfortable with Dot.

She was nothing but direct, you see, and told me right off that only three things made her angry. Number one was someone flirting with Gerry. Number two was a cigarette leech, someone who was always quitting but smoking yours. Number three was a piss-ant. I asked her what that was. “A piss-ant,” she said, “is a man with fat buns who tries to sell you things. A Jaycee, an Elk, a Kiwanis.” I always knew where I stood with Dot, so I trusted her.

I knew that if I fell out of her favor she would threaten me and give me time to run before she tried anything physical.

By mid-July our shack was unbearable, for it drew heat in from the bare yard and held it. We sat outside most of the time, moving around the shack to catch what shade fell, letting the raw hot wind off the beet fields suck the sweat from our armpits and legs.

But the seasons change fast in North Dakota. We spent the last day of August jumping from foot to numb foot before Hadj], the foreman, dragged a little column of bottled gas into the shack. He lit the spoked wheel on its head, it bloomed, and from then on we huddled close to the heater, eating, dozing, or sitting mindless its small radius of dry warmth.

By that time Dot weighed over two hundred pounds, most of it peanut-butter cups and egg-salad sandwiches. She was a short, broad-beamed woman with long yellow eyes and spaces between each of her strong teeth. When we began working together, her hair was cropped close. By the cold months it had grown out in thick quills-brown at the shank, orange at the tip. The orange dye job had not suited her coloring. By that time, too, Dot’s belly was round and full, for she was due in October. The child rode high, and she often rested her forearms on it while she knitted.

One of Dot’s most peculiar feats was transforming that gentle task into something perverse. She knit viciously, jerking the yarn around her thumb until the tip whitened, pulling each stitch so tightly that the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.

I thought that the child would need those tight stitches when it was born. Although Dot as expecting mother lived a fairly calm life, it was clear that she had also moved loosely among the dangerous elements.

The child, for example, had been conceived in a visiting room at the state prison. Dot had straddled Gerry’s lap in a corner the closed-circuit TV did not quite scan. Through a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in Gerry’s jeans they somehow managed to join and, miraculously, to conceive.

Not long after my conversation with Gerry in the bar, he was caught.

That time he went back peacefully, and didn’t put up a fight. He was mainly in the penitentiary for breaking out of it, anyway, since for his crime of assault and battery he had received three years and time off for good behavior. He just never managed to serve those three years or behave well. He broke out time after time, and was caught each time he did it, regular as clockwork.

Gerry was talented at getting out, that’s a fact. He boasted that no steel or concrete shit barn could hold a Chippewa, and he had eel like properties in spite of his enormous size. Greased with lard once, he squirmed into a six-foot-thick prison wall and vanished.

Some thought he had stuck there, immured forever, and that he would bring luck, like the bones of slaves sealed in the wall of China. But Gerry rubbed his own belly for luck and brought luck to no one else, for he appeared, suddenly, at Dot’s door, and she was hard-pressed to hide him.

She managed for nearly a month. Hiding a six-foot-plus, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Indian in the middle of a town that doesn’t like Indians in the first place isn’t easy. A month was quite an accomplishment, when you know what she was up against.

She spent most of her time walking to and from the grocery store, padding along on her swollen feet, astonishing the neighbors with the size of what they thought was her appetite. Stacks of pork chops, whole fryers, thick steaks disappeared overnight, and since Gerry couldn’t take the garbage out by day, sometimes he threw the bones out the windows, where they collected, where dogs soon learned to wait for a handout and fought and squabbled over whatever there was.

The neighbors finally complained, and one day, while Dot was at work, Lovchik knocked on the door of the trailer house. Gerry answered, sighed, and walked over to their car. He was so good at getting out of the joint and so terrible at getting caught. It was as if he couldn’t stay out of their hands. Dot knew his problem and told him that he was crazy to think he could walk out of prison and then live like a normal person. Dot told him that didn’t work. She told him to get lost for a while on the reservation or to let his Mother, Lulu, who had a long successful history of hiding men, keep him under cover. She told him to change his name, to let the straggly hairs above his lip grow, disguising his face. But Gerry wouldn’t do any of that. He simply knew he did not belong in prison, although he admitted it had done him some good when he was younger, hadn’t known how to be a criminal, and so had taken lessons from professionals. Now that he knew all there was to know, however, he couldn’t see the point of staying in a prison and taking the same lessons over and over. “A hate factory, ” he called it once, and said it manufactured black poisons in his stomach that he couldn’t get rid of although he poked a finger down his throat and retched and tried to be a clean and normal person in spite of everything.

Gerry’s problem, you see, was he believed in justice, not laws.

He felt he had paid for his crime, which was done in a drunk heat and to settle the question with a cowboy of whether a Chippewa was also a nigger. Gerry said that the two had never settled it between them, but that the cowboy at least knew that if a. Chippewa was a nigger he was sure also a hell of a mean and lowdown fighter.

For Gerry did not believe in fighting by any rules but reservation rules, which is to say the first thing Gerry did to the cowboy, after they squared off, was kick his balls.

It hadn’t been much of a fight after that, and since there were both white and Indian witnesses, Gerry thought it would blow if it ever’ reached court. But there is nothing more vengeful over] and determined in this world than a cowboy with sore balls, and Gerry soon found this out. He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side, because they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you.

Not only did Gerry’s friends lack all forms of identification except their band cards, not only did they disappear (out of no malice but simply because Gerry was tried during powwow time), but the few he did manage to get were not interested in looking judge or jury in the eyes.

They mumbled into their laps. Gerry’s friends, you see, had no confidence in the United States judicial system. They did not seem comfortable in the courtroom, and this increased their unreliability in the eyes of judge and jury. If you trust the authorities, they trust you better back, it seems. It looked that way to Gerry, anyhow.

A local doctor testified on behalf of the cowboy’s testicles, and said his fertility might be impaired. Gerry got a little angry at that, and said right out in court that he could hardly believe he had done that much damage since the cowboy’s balls were very small targets, it had been dark, ‘and his aim was off anyway because of two, or maybe it was three, beers. That maAe, mate-is worse, of course, and Gerry was socked with a sentence that was heavy for a first offense, but not bad for an Indian. Some said he got off lucky.

Only one good thing came from the whole experience, said L Gerry, and that was that maybe the cowboy would not have any little cowboys, although, Gerry also said, he had nightmares sometimes that the cowboy did manage to have little cowboys, all born with full sets of grinning teeth, Stetson hats, and little balls hard as plum pits.

So you see, it was difficult for Gerry, as an Indian, to retain the natural good humor of his ancestors in these modern circumstances. He tried though, and since he believed in justice, not laws, Gerry knew where he belonged-out of prison, in the bosom of his new family. And in spite of the fact that he was untrained in the honest life, he wanted it. He was even interested in getting a job. It didn’t matter what kind of job,

“Anything for a change,” Gerry said. He wanted to go right out and apply for one, in fact, the moment he was free. But of course Dot wouldn’t let him. And so, because He wanted to be with Dot, he stayed hidden in her trailer house even though they both realized, or must have, that it wouldn’t be long before the police came asking around or the neighbors wised up and Gerry Nanapush would be back at square one again. So it happened. Lovchik came for him.

And Dot now believed she would have to go through the end of her pregnancy and the delivery all by herself Dot was angry about having to go through it alone, and besides that, she loved Gerry with a deep and true love-that was clear.

She knit his absences into thick little suits for the child, suits that would have stopped a truck on a dark road with their colors Bazooka pink, bruise blue, the screaming orange flaggers wore.

The child was as restless a prisoner as its father, and grew more anxious and unruly as the time of release neared. As a place to spend a nine-month sentence in, Dot wasn’t much. Her body was inhospitable.

Her skin was loose, sallow, and draped like upholstery fabric over her short, board like bones. Like the shack we spent our days in, she seemed jerry-built, thrown into the world with loosely nailed limbs and lightly puttied joints. Some pregnant women’s bellies look like they always have been there. But Dot’s stomach was an odd shape, almost square, and had the tacked-on air of a new and unpainted bay window. The child was clearly ready for a break and not interested in earning its parole, for it kept her awake all night by pounding reasonlessly at her inner walls or beating against her bladder until she swore. “Kid wants out, bad,”

poor Dot would groan.

“You think it might be premature?” From the outside, anyway, the child looked big enough to stand and walk and maybe even run straight out of the maternity ward the moment it was born.

The sun, at the time, rose around seven, and we got to the weigh shack while the frost was still thick on the gravel. Each morning I started the gas heater, turning the nozzle and standing back, flipping the match at it the way you would feed a fanged animal.

Then one morning I saw the red bud through the window, lit already.

But when I opened the door the shack was empty. There was, however, evidence of an overnight visitor-cigarette stubs, a few beer cans crushed to flat disks. I swept these things out and didn’t say a word about them to Dot when she arrived.

She seemed to know something was in the air, however; her face lifted from time to time all that morning. She sniffed, and even I could smell the lingering odor of sweat like sour wheat, the faint reek of slept-in clothes and gasoline. Once, that morning, Dot looked at me and narrowed her long, hooded eyes. “I got pains,” she said, “every so often. Like it’s going to come sometime soon. Well, all I can say is he better drag ass to get here, that Gerry.” She closed her eyes then, and went to sleep.

Ed Rafferty, one of the drivers, pulled in with a load. It was overweight, and when I handed him the pink slip he grinned.

There were two scales, you see, on the way to the cement plant, and if a driver got past the state-run scale early, before the state officials were there, the company would pay for whatever he got But it was not illicit gravel that tipped the wedge past away withe red mark on the balance. When I walked back inside I saw the weight had gone down to just under the red. Ed drove off, still laughing, and I assumed that he had leaned on the arm of the scale, increasing the weight.

“That Ed,” I said, “got me again.”

But Dot stared past me, needles poised in her fist like a picador’s lances. It gave me a start, to see her frozen in such a menacing pose.

It was not the sort of pose to turn your back on, but I did turn, following her gaze to the door, which a man’s body filled suddenly Gerry, of course it was Gerry. He’d tipped the weight up past the red and leapt down, cat-quick for all his mass, and silent. I hadn’t heard his step. Gravel crushed, evidently, but did not roll beneath his tight, thin boots.

He was bigger than I remembered from the bar, or perhaps it was just that we’d been living in that dollhouse of a weigh shack so long that everything else looked huge. He was so big that he had to hunker one shoulder beneath the lintel and back his belly in, pushing the doorframe wider with his long, soft hands. It was the hands I watched as Gerry filled the shack. His plump fingers looked so graceful and artistic against his smooth mass. He used them prettily. Revolving agile wrists he reached across the few inches left between himself and Dot. Then his littlest fingers curled like a woman’s at tea, and he disarmed his wife.

He drew the needles out of Dot’s fists, and examined the little garment that hung like a queer fruit beneath.

“S’very, very nice,” he said, scrutinizing the tiny, even stitches.

“S’for the kid?”

Dot nodded solemnly and dropped her eyes to her lap. It was an almost tender moment. The silence lasted so long that I got embarrassed and would have left had I not been wedged firmly behind his hip in one corner.

Gerry stood there, smoothing black hair behind his ears.

Again, there was a queer delicacy about the way he did this. So many things Gerry did might remind you of the way that a beautiful courtesan, standing naked before a mirror, would touch herself-lovingly, conscious of her attractions. He nodded encouragingly. “Let’s go then,” said Dot.

Suave, grand, gigantic, they moved across the construction site and then, by mysterious means, slipped their bodies into Dot’s compact car.

I expected the car to belly down, thought the muffler would scrape the ground behind them. But instead they flew, raising a great spume of dust that hung in the air a long time after they were out of sight.

I went back into the weigh shack when the air behind them had settled. I was bored, dead bored. And since one thing meant about as much to me as another, I picked up her needles and began knitting, as well as I could anyway, jerking the yarn back after each stitch, becoming more and more absorbed in my work until, as it happened, I came suddenly to the end of the garment, snipped the yarn, and worked the loose ends back into the collar of the thick little suit.

I missed Dot in the days that followed, days so alike they welded searrilessly to one another and took your mind away. I seemed to exist in a suspension and spent my time sifting at the window watching nothing until the sun went down, bruising the whole sky as it dropped, clotting my heart. I couldn’t name anything I felt anymore, although I knew it was a kind of boredom. I had been living the same life too long. I did jumping jacks and pushups and stood on my head in the little shack to break the tedium, but too much solitude rots the brain.

I wondered how Gerry had stood it. Sometimes I grabbed drivers out of their trucks and talked loudly and quickly and inconsequentially as a madwoman.

There were other times I couldn’t talk at all because my tongue had rusted to the roof of my mouth.

mm Sometimes I daydreamed about Dot and Gerry. I had many choice daydreams, but theirs was my favorite. I pictured them in Dot’s long tan trailer house, both hungry. Heads swaying, clasped hands swinging between them like hooked trunks, they moved through the kitchen feeding casually from boxes and bags on the counters, like ponderous animals alone in a forest. When they had fed, they moved on to the bedroom and settled themselves upon Dot’s king-size and sateen-quilted spread.

They rubbed together, locked and unlocked their parts. They set the trailer rocking on its cement-block-and-plywood foundation and the tremors spread, causing cups to fall, plates to shatter in the china hutches of their more established neighbors.

But what of the child there, suspended between them. Did it know how to weather such tropical storms? It was a week past the week it was due, and I expected the good news to come any moment. I was anxious to hear the outcome, but still, I was surprised when Gerry rumbled to the weigh-shack door on a huge and ancient, rust-pocked, untrustworthy-looking machine that was like no motorcycle I’d ever seen before.

“She asst for you,” he hissed. “Quick, get on!”

I hoisted myself up behind him, although there wasn’t room on the seat.

I clawed his smooth back for a handhold and finally perched, or so it seemed, on the rim of his heavy belt. Flylike, glued to him by suction, we rode as one person, whipping a great wind around us. Cars scattered, the lights blinked and flickered on the main street.

Pedestrians swiveled to catch a glimpse of us-a mountain tearing by balanced on a toy, and clinging to the sheer northwest face, a scrawny half-breed howling something that Dopplered across the bridge and faded out, finally, in the parking lot of Saint Adalbert’s Hospital.

In the waiting room we settled on chairs molded of orange plastic.

The spike legs splayed beneath Gerry’s mass but managed to support him the four hours we waited. Nurses passed, settling like field gulls among reports and prescriptions, eyeing us with reserved hostility.

Gerry hardly spoke. He didn’t have to, I watched his ribs and the small of his back darken with sweat. For that well-lighted tunnel, the waiting room, the tin rack of magaIzines, all were the props and inevitable features of institutions.

From time to time Gerry paced in the time-honored manner of the prisoner or expectant father. He made lengthy trips to the bathroom.

All the quickness and delicacy of his movements had disappeared, and he was only a poor tired fat man in those hours, a husband worried about his wife, menaced, tired of getting caught.

At last the gulls emerged and drew Gerry in among them. He visited Dot for perhaps half an hour, and then came out of her visi room. Again he settled, the plastic chair twitched beneath him.

He looked bewildered and silly and a little addled with what he had seen. The shaded lenses of his glasses kept slipping down his nose.

Beside him, I felt the aftermath of the shock wave traveling from the epicenter deep in his flesh outward from part of him that had shifted along a crevice. The tremors moved in widening rings. When they reached the very surface of him, and when he began trembling, Gerry stood suddenly. “I’m going after cigars,” he said, and walked quickly away.

His steps quickened to a near run as he moved down the corridor.

Waiting for the elevator, he flexed his nimble fingers. Dot told me she had once sent him to the store for a roll of toilet paper. It was eight months before she saw him again, for he’d met the local constabulary on the way. So I knew, when he flexed his fingers, that he was thinking of pulling the biker’s gloves over his knuckles, of running. It was perhaps the very first time in his life he had something to run for.

It seemed to me, at that moment, that I should at least let Gerry know it was all right for him to leave, to run as far and fast as he had to now. Although I felt heavy-my body had gone slack, and my lungs ached with smoke-1 jumped up. I signaled him from the end of the corridor.

Gerry turned, unwillingly turned. He looked my way just as two of our local police-Officers Lovchik and Harriss-pushed open the fire door that sealed off the staircase behind me. I didn’t see them and was shocked at first that my wave caused such an extreme reaction in Gerry.

His hair stiffened. His body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly. Behind him there was a wide, tall window. Gerry opened it and sent the screen into thin air with an elegant chorus girl kick.

Then he followed the screen, squeezing himself unbelievably through the frame like a fat rabbit disappearing down a hole. It was three stories down to the cement and asphalt parking lot.

Officers Lovchik and Harriss gained the window. The nurses followed.

I slipped through the fire exit and took the back stairs down into the parking lot, believing I would find him stunned and broken there.

But Gerry had chosen his window with exceptional luck, for the officers had parked their car directly underneath. Gerry landed just over the driver’s seat, caving the roof into the steering wheel. He bounced off the hood of the car and then, limping, a bit dazed perhaps, straddled his bike. Out of duty, Lovchik released several rounds into the still trees below him. The reports were still echoing when I reached the front of the building.

I was just in time to see Gerry Nanapush, emboldened by his godlike leap and recovery, pop a whee lie and disappear between the neat shrubs that marked the entrance to the hospital, Two weeks later Dot and her girl, who was finally named Shawn, like most girls born that year, came back to work at the scales.

Things went on as they had before, except that Shawn kept us occupied during the long hours. She was large, of course, and had a sturdy pair of lungs she used often. When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated with sugar tits or pacifiers. Dot unzipped her parka halfway, pulled her blouse up, and let her nurse for what seemed like hours.

We could scarcely believe her appetite. Dot was a diligent producer of milk, however. Her breasts, like overfilled inner tubes, strained at her nylon blouses. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, Dot rose and carried them in the crooks of her arms, for her shoulders were growing bowed beneath their weight.

The trucks came in on the hour, or half hour. I heard the rush of air brakes, gears grinding only inches from my head. It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me. I wasn’t lonely now that Dot had returned. The season would end soon, and we wondered what had happened to Gerry.

There were only a few weeks left of work when we heard that Gerry was caught again. He’d picked the wrong reservation to hide on-Pine Ridge.

As always, it was overrun with federal agents and armored vehicles.

Weapons were stashed everywhere and easy to acquire. Gerry got himself a weapon. Two men tried to arrest him. Gerry would not go along, and when he started to run and the shooting started, Gerry shot and killed a clean shaven man with dark hair and light eyes, a state trooper, a man whose picture was printed in all the papers.

They sent Gerry to prison in Marion, Illinois. He was placed in the control unit. He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

Dot and I continued to work the last weeks together. Once we weighed baby Shawn. We unlatched her little knit suit, heavy as armor, and bundled her in a light, crocheted blanket. Dot went into the shack to adjust the weights. I stood there with Shawn.

She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms.

busy, I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load.

But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

da CROWN OF THORNS r U a S (1981) A month after June died Gordie took the first drink, and then the need was on him like a hook in his jaw, tipping his wrist, sending him out with needles piercing his hairline, his aching hands.

From the beginning it was his hands that made him drink. They remembered things his mind could not-curve of hip and taut breast.

They remembered farther back, to the times he spent, with June when the two were young. They had always been together, like brother and sister, stealing duck eggs, blowing crabgrass between their thumbs, chasing cows. They got in trouble together.

They fought but always made up easy and quick, until they were married.

His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and the speed of their striking. He’d been a mom”,” boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

They remembered this while they curled around the gold colored can of beer he had begged down the road at Eli’s.

“You gone too far now,” Ell said. Gordie knew he was sitting at his Uncle Ell’s table again because the orange spots in the oilcloth were there beneath his eyes. Ell’s voice came from the soft pure blackness that stretched out in all directions from the lighted area around the beer can. Gordie’s hands felt unclean. The can felt cold and pure.

It was as though his hands were soiling something never touched before.

The way the light fell it was as though the can were lit on a special altar.

“I’m contaminated,” Gordie said.

“You sure are. ” Eli spoke somewhere beyond sight. “You’re going to land up in the hospital.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, Gordle struggled to say, but he was distracted suddenly by the size of his hands. So big. Strong.

“Look at that,” said Cordle wonderingly, opening and closing his fist.

“If only they’d let me fight the big one, huh? If only they’d gave me a chance.”

“You did fight the big one,” said Eli. “You got beat.”

“That’s right,” said Gordic. “it wasn’t even no contest. I wasn’t even any good.”

“You forget those things,” said Eli. He was moving back and forth behind the chair.

“Eat this egg. I fixed it over easy.”

“I couldn’t,” said Gordie, “or this bun either. I’m too sick.”

His hands would not stay still. He had noticed this. They managed to do an alarming variety of things while he was not looking.

Now they had somehow crushed the beer can into a shape. He took his hands away and studied the can in its glowing spotlight.

The can was bent at the waist and twisted at the hips like the torso of a woman. It rocked slightly side to side in the breeze from the window.

“She’s empty!” he realized suddenly, repossessing the can. “I don’t think it was full to begin with. I couldn’t’ve. ” “What?”

asked Eli. Patiently, his face calm, he spooned the egg and fork-toasted bread into his mouth. His head was brown and showed through the thin gray stubble of his crew cut. A pale light lifted and fell in the room. It was six A.M. “Want some?” Eli offered steaming coffee in a green plastic mug, warped and stained. It was the same color as his work clothes.

Gordie shook his head and turned away Eli drank from the cup himself “You wouldn’t have another someplace that you forgot?” said Gordie sadly.

“No,” said Eli.

“I’ve got to make a raise then,” said Gordie.

The two men sat quietly, then Gordie shook the can, put it down, and walked out of the door. Once outside, he was hit by such a burst of determination that He almost walked normally, balanced in one wheel rut, down Eli’s little road. Some of his thick hair stuck straight up in a peak, and some was crushed flat.

His face sagged. He’d hardly eaten that week, and his pants flapped beneath his jacket, cinched tight, the zipper shamefully unzipped.

Eli watched from his chair, sipping the coffee to warm his blood. He liked the window halfway open although the mornings were still cold.

When June lived with him she’d slept on the cot beside the stove, a lump beneath the quilts and army blankets when he came in to get her up for the government school bus.

Sometimes they’d sat together looking out the same window into cold blue dark. He’d hated to send her off at that lonely hour. Her coat was red. All her clothes were from the nuns. Once he’d bought June a plastic dish of bright bath-oil beads. Before he could stop her she had put one in her mouth, not understanding what it was. She’d swallowed it down, too. Then, when she’d come home, started crying out of disappointment and shame, bubbles had popped from her lips and nose.

Eli laughed out loud, then stopped. He saw her face and the shocked look. He sat there thinking of her without smiling and watched Gordie disappear.

Two cars passed Gordie on the road but neither stopped. It was too early to get anything in town, but he would have appreciated a ride to his house. It was a mile to his turnoff, and his need grew worse with each step he took. He shook with the cold, with the lack. The world had narrowed to this strip of frozen mud. The trees were stung to either side in a dense mist, and the crackle his feet made breaking ice crystals was bad to hear. From time to time he stopped to let the crackle die down. He put his hands to his mouth to breathe on them.

He touched his cold cheeks. The skin felt rubbery and dead, Finally the turnoff came and he went down to the lake where his house was.

Somehow he gained the stairs and door then crawled across the carpet to the phone. He even looked the number up in the book.

“Royce there?” he asked the woman’s voice. She put her husband on without a word.

“You still drinking?” said Royce.

“Could you bring me some quarts? Three, four, last me out.

I’ll pay you when I get my check.”

“I don’t make house calls or give no credit.”

“Cousin … you know I work.”

There was a pause.

“All right then. Credit’s one dollar on the bottle, and house call’s two.”

Gordie babbled his thanks. The phone clicked. Knowing it would come, Gordie felt much stronger, clearer in the brain. He knew he would sleep once he got the wine. He noticed he’d IPP, landed underneath the table, that he’d brought the phone down.

He lay back restfully. It was a good place to stay.

A lot of time went by, hours or days, and the quarts were gone.

Mote wine appeared. One quart helped and the next didn’t.

Nothing happened. He’d gone too far. He found himself sitting at the kitchen table in a litter of dried bread, dishes he must have eaten something from, bottles and stubbed cigarettes. Either the sun was rising or the sun was going down, and although he did not feel that he could wait to find out which it was, he knew he had no choice. He was trapped there with himself He didn’t know how long since he had slept.

Gordie’s house was simple and very small. It was a rectangle divided in half The kitchen and the living room were in one half and the bedroom and the bathroom were in the other. A family of eight had lived here once, but that was long ago in the old days before government housing.

Gordie bought the place after June left. He’d fixed it up with shag carpeting, linoleum tile, paint and Sheetrock and new combination windows looking out on the lake. He had always wanted to live by a lake, and now he did. All the time he had been living there he both missed June and was relieved to be without her. Now he couldn’t believe that she would not return. He had been together with her all his life.

There was nothing she did not know about him. When they ran away from everybody and got married across the border in South Dakota, it was just a formality for the records. They already knew each other better than most people who were married a lifetime.

They knew the good things, but they knew how to hurt each other, too.

“I was a bastard, but so were you,” he insisted to the room.

“We were even.”

The sun was setting, he decided. The air was darker. The waves rustled and the twigs scraped together outside.

bank, I love you, little cousin!” he said loudly. “June!” Her name burst from him. He wanted to take it back as soon as he said it.

Never, never, ever call the dead by their names, Grandma said.

They might answer. Gordie knew this. Now he felt very uneasy.

Worse than before.

The sounds from the lake and trees bothered him, so he itched on the television. He turned the volume up as loud as possible. There was a program on with sirens and shooting. He kept that channel.

Still he could not forget that he’d called June.

He felt as though a bad thing was pushing against the walls from ‘de.

The windows quivered. He stood in the middle of the outsi room, unsteady, listening to everything too closely. He turned on the lights.

He locked each window and door. Still he heard things. The waves rustled against each other like a woman’s stockinged legs.

Acorns dropping on the roof clicked like heels.

There was a low murmur in the breeze.

An old vacuum cleaner was plugged in the corner. He switched that on and the vibrations scrambled the sounds in the air. That was better.

Along with the television and the buzz of the lights, the vacuum cleaner was a definite help. He thought of other noises he might produce indoors. He remembered about the radio in the bedroom and lurched through the doorway to turn that on too. Full blast, a satisfying loud music poured from it, adding to the din. He went into the bathroom and turned on his electric shaver. There were no curtains in the bathroom, and something made him look at the window.

Her face. June’s face was there. Wild and pale with a bloody mouth.

She raised her hand, thin bones, and scratched sadly on the glass.

When he ran from the bathroom she got angry and began to pound. The glass shattered. He heard it falling like music to the. bathroom floor.

Everything was on, even the oven. He stood in the humming light of the refrigerator, believing the cold radiance would protect him.

Nothing could stop her though.

There was nothing he could do, and then he did the wrong thing.

He plugged the toaster into the wall.

There was a loud crack. Darkness. A ball of red light fell in his hands. Everything went utterly silent, and she squeezed through the window in that instant.

Now she was in the bedroom pulling the sheets off the bed and arranging her perfume bottles. She was coming for him. He lurched for the door.

His car key Where was it? Pants pocket. He slipped through the door and fell down the stairs somehow pitching onto the hood of the Malibu parked below. He scrambled in, locked up tight, then roared the ignition. He switched the head lamps on and swung blindly from the yard, moving fast, hitting the potholes and bottoming out until he met the gravel road.

At first he was so relieved to escape that he forgot how sick he was.

He drove competently for a while, and then the surge of fear that had gotten him from the house wore off and he slumped forward, half sightless, on the wheel. A car approached, white light that blinded.

He pulled over to catch his senses. His mind lit in warped hope on another bottle. He’d get to town. Another bottle would straighten him out. The road was five miles of bending curves and the night was moonless, but he would make it. He dropped his head a few moments and slept to gain his strength.

He came to when the light roared by, dazzling him with noise and its closeness. He’d turned his own lights off, and the car had swerved to avoid him. Blackness closed over the other car’s red taillights, and Gordie started driving. He drove with slowness and utter drunken care, craning close to the windshield, one eye shut so that the road would not branch into two before him. Gaining confidence, he rolled down his window and gathered speed. He knew the road to town by heart. The gravel clattered the wheel wells and the wind blew cold, sweet in his mouth, eager and watery. He felt better. So much better. The turn came so quickly he almost missed it. But he spun the wheel and swerved, catching himself halfway across the concrete road.

burns, _MA just there, as he concentrated on controlling the speed of the turn, he hit the deer. It floated into the shadow of his head beams

The lamps blazed stark upon it. A sudden ghost, it vanished.

Gordie felt the jolt somewhat after he actually must have hit it, because, when he finally stopped the car, he had to walk back perhaps twenty yards before he found it sprawled oddly on its belly, legs splayed.

He stood over the carcass, nudged it here and there with his foot.

Someone would trade it for a bottle, even if it was a tough old doe.

It was surprising, Gordie thought, to find one like this, barren from the looks of her, unless her fawn was hidden in the ditch. He looked around, saw nothing, but then the brush was tall, the air black as ink.

Bending slowly, he gripped the delicate fetlocks and pulled her down the road.

When he reached the car, he dropped the deer and — fumbled with his pocket. He found the only key he had was the square headed one for the ignition. He tried to open the trunk, but the key did not fit. The trunk unlocked only with the rounded key he’d left at home.

“Damn their hides,” he shouted. Everything worked against him. He could not remember when this had started to happen.

Probably from the first, always and ever afterward, things had worked against him. He leaned over the slope of the trunk then turned onto his back. He was shaking hard all over, and his jaw had locked shut.

The sky was an impenetrable liquid, starless and grim. He had never really understood before but now, because two keys were made to open his one car, he saw clearly that the setup of life was rigged and he was trapped.

He was shaking dead sick, locked out of his car trunk, with a doe bleeding slowly at his feet.

“I’ll throw her in the back then,” he said, before confusion smashed down. The seat was vinyl. It was important that he get a bottle, several bottles, to stop the rattling. Once the shaking got a A good start on him nothing would help. It would whip him back and forth in its jaws like a dog breaks the spine of a gopher.

He opened the rear door and then, holding the deer under the front legs and cradled with its back against him, ducked into the backseat and pulled her through. She fit nicely, legs curled as if to run, still slightly warm. Gordie opened the opposite door and climbed out.

Then he walked around the front and sat down in the driver’s seat. He started the car and moved onto the highway.

It was harder now to see the road. The night had grown darker or the shaking had obscured his vision. Or maybe the deer had knocked out a headlight. Clearly, he was sure of it, there was less light. He tried to accommodate the shaking. To keep it under control he took deep shuddering breaths that seemed to temporarily loosen its hold, but then it would be back, fiercely jolting him from side to side in his seat, so that the wheel twisted in his hands. He drove with impossible slowness now, hardly able to keep his course. A mile passed slowly.

Perhaps another. Then he came to the big settlement of the Fortiers.

Their yard blazed with light. He drove a few yards past their gate, and then something made him even more uncomfortable than the shaking.

He sensed someone behind him and glanced in the rearview mirror.

What he saw made him stamp the brake in panic and shock.

The deer was up. She’d only been stunned.

Ears pricked, gravely alert, she gazed into the rearview and met Gordie’s eyes.

Her look was black and endless and melting pure. She looked through him. She saw into the troubled thrashing woods of him, a raffling thicket of bones. She saw how he’d woven his own crown of thorns. She saw how although he was not worthy he’d jammed this relief on his brow.

Her eyes stared into some hidden place but blocked him out. Flat black.

He did not understand what he was going to do. He bent, out of her gaze, and groped beneath the front seat for the tire iron, a flat-edged crowbar thick as a child’s wrist.

Then he raised it. As he turned he brought smashing down between her eyes. She sagged back into the seat again. Gordie began to drive.

This time, when the shaking started, there was no limit to the depth.

It was in the bones, then the marrow of the bones. It ran all through him. His head snapped back. He stopped the car. The crowbar was in his lap in case she came to life again. He held it, fusing his hands to the iron to keep them still.

He sat there in the front seat, holding tight to the bar, shaking violently all around it. He heard loud voices. The windshield cracked into a spider’s nest. The dash fell open and the radio shrieked. The crowbar fell, silencing that too.

The shaking stopped, a sudden lull that surprised him.

In that clear moment it came to his attention that he’d Just killed June.

She was in the backseat, sprawled, her short skirt hiked up over her hips. The sheer white panties glowed. Her hair was tossed in a dead black swirl. What had he done this time? Had he used the bar? It was in his hands.

“Get rid of the evidence,” He said, but his fingers locked shut around the iron, as if frozen to it. He would never be able to open his hands again. He was cracking, giving way. Control was caving like weathered ground. The blood roared in his ears. He could not see where he was falling, but he knew, at length, that he’d landed in an area of terrible vastness where nothing was familiar.

Sister Mary Martin de Porres played the clarinet and sometimes, when she was troubled or sleep was elusive, wrote her own music. Tonight she woke, staring, from an odd dream. For a long moment she vaguely believed she was at home in Lincoln. She had been drawing a cool bath for herself, filling the clawed tub, stirring the water with her hands.

The water smelled sharp, of indestructible metals. The cicadas buzzed outside, and the pods were blackening on the catalpas. She thought that once she — add stripped herself and crawled into the tub, she would change, she would be able to breathe under water. But she woke first.

She turned on her side, found she was in her room at Sacred Heart, and reached for her eyeglasses. Her clock said one. She watched the glowing minute hand glide forward and knew, without even attempting to close her eyes again, that it was another of “her nights,” as the others put it on those days when she was unusually out of sorts.

“Sister Mary Martin’s had one of her nights again.”

Her nights were enjoyable while she was having them, which was part of the problem. Once she woke in a certain mood and thought of the clarinet, sleep seemed dull, unnecessary even, although she knew for a fact that she was not a person who could go sleepless without becoming irritable. She rolled out of bed.

She was a short, limber, hardworking woman, who looked much younger than she was, that is, she looked thirtyish instead of forty-two, Most of the others, people noticed, looked younger than their true ages, also.

“It’s no darn use anyway,” she mumbled, slipping on her old green robe.

Already she felt excited about rising alone, seeing no one. Her own youthfulness surprised her on nights like this. Her legs felt springy and lean, her body taut like a girl’s. She raised her arms over her head, stretched hard, and brought them down.

Then she eased through her door. It was the one at the end of the halls, the quietest room of all. She walked soundlessly along the tiles, down the stairs, through another corridor, and back around the chapel into a small sitting room impossibly cluttered with afghans and pillows.

She turned on the floor lamp and pulled her instrument case from beneath the sofa. Kneeling with it, she lifted the pieces from the crushed and molded velvet and fit them together. She took a small, lined music notebook from a shelf of books. A sharpened pencil was already attached to the spine with a string.

Last of all, before she sat down, she draped an enormous bee yellow afghan around her shoulders. Then she settled herself, hooked her cold feet in the bottom of the knit blanket, wet the reed, and began to play.

Sometimes it put her to sleep in half an hour. Other times she hit on a tune and scribbled, wherever it took her, until dawn.

The sitting room was newly attached to the main convent and insulated heavily, so her music disturbed no one. On warm nights she even opened windows and let the noises drift in, clear in the dry air, from the town below. They were wild noises hoarse wails, reeling fiddle music, rumble of unmufflered motors, and squeals of panicked acceleration.

Then after three or four in the morning a kind of dazed blue silence fell, and there was nothing but her own music and the black crickets in the wall.

Tonight, perhaps because of her dream, which was both familiar and something she did not understand, the music was both faintly menacing and full of wonder. It took her in circles of memories. A shape rose in her mind, a tree that was fully branched like the main candelabrum on the altar of the Blessed Virgin. It had been her favorite tree to climb on as a child, but at night she had feared the rasp of its branches.

She stopped, particularly struck by a chance phrase, and played it over with slight variations until it seemed too lovely to discard.

Then she wrote it down. She worked in silence for a while after, seeing something that might become a pattern, approaching and retreating from the strength of her own design.

An hour or perhaps two hours passed. The air was still. Sister Mary Martin heard nothing but the music, even when she stopped playing to write down the notes. A slim gravel path led around the back of the convent, but perhaps, she thought later, the man had walked through the wet grass, for she did not hear him approaching and only realized his presence at the window when the sill raffled. He’d tried to knock, but had fallen instead against the frame. Mary Martin froze in her chair and laid the clarinet across her lap.

“Who’s there?” she said firmly. There was no answer. She was annoyed, first to have her night invaded and then with herself for not having drawn the blinds, because the sky was black and she could not see even the shadow of the prowler’s shape while she herself was perfectly exposed, as on a stage.

“What do you want?” There was still no answer, and her heart sped, although the windows were screened and secure. She could always rouse the others if she had to. But she was consistently the one called upon to lift heavy boxes and jump start the commuity’s car. Probably it would be up to her to scare off this intruder m herself, even if the others came downstairs.

She reached up and switched the lamp off. The room went utterly dark.

Now she heard his breath rasp, his shudder lightly ring the screen. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw the blunt outline of him, hang-dog, slumped hard against the window.

“What do you want?” she repeated, rising from the chair. She began to lower the clarinet to the carpet, then held it. If he came through the screen slieCOL11d poke him with the playing end. She walked over to the dense shadow of the bookshelf, near the window and against the wall, where she thought it would be impossible for him to see her.

A breeze blew through the screen and she smelled the sour reek of him.

Drunk. Probably half conscious.

But now he roused himself with a sudden ‘erk and spoke.

“I come to take confession. I need to confess it.

She stood against the wall, next to the window, arms folded against her chest.

“I’m not a priest.”

“Bless me Father for I have sinned.

The voice was blurred, stupidly childish.

“I’ll go get a priest for you,” she said.

“It’s been, shit, ten years since my last confession.” He laughed, then he coughed.

The wind blew up, suddenly, a cold gust from the garden, and a different, specifically evil, smell came from his clothes, along with the smell of something un definably worse.

“What do you want?” she said for the third time.

He banged the screen with his elbow. He turned, hugging himself, pounding his arms with his fists, and threw his forehead against the window frame. He was weeping, she recognized at last. This was the soundless violent way that this particular man wept.

“All right,” she said, knowing and not wanting to know. It would be a very bad thing that he had to say. “Tell me.”

And then he tried to tell her, stumbling and stuttering, about the car and the crowbar and how he’d killed June.

A low humming tension collected In the dark around Mary Martin as she sorted through his Tumbled story. He could not stop talking. He went on and on. Finally it became real for her also.

He had ‘just now killed his wife. Her throat went dry. She held the clarinet across her chest with both hands, fingers pressed on the warm valves and ebony. She listened. Clarity. She could not think. The word fell into her mind, but her mind was not clear.

The metal valve caps were silky smooth. She thought she smelled the blood on him. A knot of sickness formed in her stomach and uncurled, rising in her throat, burning. She wanted urgently to get away from him and sleep. She needed to lie down.

“Stop,” she begged. Her throat closed. He fell silent on her word.

But it was too late. She saw the woman clubbed, distinctly heard the bar smash down, saw the vivid blood.

Her fists were tight knobs. Tears had filled the slight cup where her glasses frames touched her cheeks, and they leaked straight down from there along the corners of her mouth. The tears dropped on her hands, She had to say something.

“Are you sure that she’s dead?”

His silence told her that he was. He seemed to have relaxed, breathing easier, as if telling her had removed some of the burden _,dig from him already She heard him fumble through his clothes. A match snicked. There was a brief glare of light, and then tobacco curled faintly through the window and disappeared in the black room.

Something lit furiously in Mary Martin when she heard him take the smoke in with a grateful sigh. Light pinwheeled behind her eyes, red and jagged, giving off a tide of heat that swept her to the window.

For what she did not know.

Now she stood, trembling, inches from him and spoke into the shadow of his face.

“Where is she?”

“Outside in my car.”

“Take me to see her then,” said Mary Martin.

To get to the portico of the back entryway, she had to pass through the dark chapel. A candle burned, soft orange in its jar, before the small wooden sacristy where the host was kept. She walked by without genuflecting or making the sign of the cross, then made herself stop and go back. The calm of the orange glow reproached her. But after she had bent her knee and crossed herself she felt no different. She left her clarinet on one of the chairs and walked out to unlatch the back door.

She stepped into the coot night air. He had gone before her and was already partway down the path walking bowlegged for balance. She stamped out the glowing cigarette stub he flipped in the grass. He stopped twice, giving in to a spasm of rolling shivers against a drainpipe then again where the gate opened out to the front yard. His car was parked in the lot, askew. She saw it right off-a long, low slung green car directly lit by the yard light. He stopped at the edge of the gravel lot, swaying slightly, and put his hand to his mouth.

She had not seen his face yet, and now, as she stood beside him, forced herself to look, to find something, before she went to the car, that would make it impossible to hate him.

But his face was the puckered, dull mask of a drunk, and she turned quickly away. She walked over to the car, leaving him where he stood.

The backseat was lit from one side, she saw, and so she walked up to it, taking deep breaths before she bent and gazed through the window.

Mary Martin had prepared herself so strictly for the sight of a woman’s body that the animal jolted her perhaps more than if the woman had been there. At the first sight of it, so strange and awful, a loud cackle came from her mouth. Her legs sagged, suddenly old, and a fainting surge of weakness spread through her. She managed to open the door.

There was no mistake-dun flanks, flag tail, curled legs, and lolling head, The yard light showed it clearly. But she had to believe. She bent into the car, put her hands straight out, and lowered them carefully onto the deer. The flesh was stiff, but the short hair seemed warm and alive. The smell hit her-the same frightening smell that had been on the man-some death musk that deer give off, acrid and burning and final. Suddenly and without warning, like her chest were cracking, the weeping broke her. It came out of heTwith hard violence, loud in her ears, a wild burst of sounds that emptied her.

When it was over, she found herself in the backseat wedged against the animal’s body.

Night was lifting. The sky was blue gray. She thought she could smell the dew in the dust and silence. Then, almost dreamily, she shook her head toward the light, blank for a moment as a waking child.

She heard the wailing voice, an echo of hers, and remembered the man at the edge of the gravel lot.

She crawled from the car, shook the cramps from her legs, and started toward him. Her hands made gestures in the air, but no sound came from her mouth. When he saw that she was coming at him he stopped in the middle of a bawl. He stiffened, windilled his arms, and stumbled backward in a cardboard fright.

Lights were on behind him in the convent. Mary Martin began to run.

He whirled to all sides, darting glances, then fled with incredible quickness back along the sides of the building to the long yard where there were orchards, planted pines, then the reservation grass and woods.

She followed him, calling now, into the apple trees but lost him there, and all that morning, while they waited for the orderlies and the tribal police to come with cuffing and litters and a court order, they heard him crying like a drowned person, howling in the open fields.

how_ LOVE MEDICINE r (1982)