The Antelope Wife

~ ~ ~

The red beads were hard to get and expensive, because their clear cranberry depth was attained only by the addition, to the liquid glass, of twenty-four-carat gold. Because she had to have them in the center of her design, the second twin gambled, lost, grew desperate, bet everything. At last, even the blankets of her children. She won enough, just barely, for the beads. And then the snow fell. Gazing into the molten hearts of the ruby-red whiteheart beads, the children shivered, drew closer, chewed on the hem of her deerhide skirt. First one, and then the other, plucked up the beads from behind her hand. Even knowing they were not food, it was the look of them, bright as summer berries, that tempted their hunger. When her fingers finally closed on air, she turned, saw her youngest quickly swallow the last bead. The mother looked at her children, eyes dazed, fingers swollen, brain itching. All she could think of was finishing her work. She reached for the knife. Frightened, the children ran.

She had to follow them, searching out their panicked trail, calling for them in the dark places and the bright places, the indigo, the white, the unfinished details and larger meaning of her design.

Chapter 19. Wiindigoo Dog

THE DOG IS standing on his chest again, looking down into his face and grinning the same curious, confiding dog grin that started Klaus on this eternal binge. The dog is a scuffed-up white with spooky yellow-brown eyes and a big pink dragging tongue. The damn thing has splayed wolf paws, ears alert and swivel-based like a deer’s, and no pity whatsoever for Klaus.

“Boozhoo, Klaus, you are the most screwed-up, sad, fucked-in-the-face, toxic, shkwebii, irredeemable drunk I’ve talked to yet today,” says the dog Klaus calls Wiindigoo Dog.

“Get off me,” says Klaus.

Weary. Tired. Klaus had thought wiindigoog were strictly human until this dog came to visit him on a rainy afternoon this summer. Sweetheart Calico has, of course, left him, too. Come back. Then left again. Sent back this dog in her place. Wiindigoo. Bad spirit of hunger and not just normal hunger but out-of-control hunger. Hunger of impossible devouring. Utter animal hunger that does not care whether you are sober or brave or have your hard-won GED certificate let alone degree. No matter. Just food. Klaus is just food to the wiindigoo. And the wiindigoo laughs.

“Shit-faced as per usual.” The dog yawns. Its black gums gleam and its ears point straight at Klaus. “I suppose we should have one of our little sessions?”

“No!” Klaus firmly says. “No!” Louder. “Nooooo…”

But Wiindigoo Dog is dragging his fat blazing purple killer tongue all over Klaus’s face, feet, hands, everywhere. With each tongue lick Klaus shrieks and gags with laughter until he is crying in hysterical hiccups, at which point the dog leans down into Klaus’s face and breathes month-old fishhead dog breath on Klaus.

When he is utterly immobilized, then, he leans down and tells Klaus his latest dirty dog joke.

“SO KLAUS, NOT too long ago I overhear these three dogs. A Ho-Chunk dog. A Sioux dog. An Ojibwe dog, too. They’re sitting in the veterinarian’s office waiting room talking about why they’re here. The Ho-Chunk dog says, ‘Well, the other day they were eating that good stew they make, just lapping it up right in front of me. That night they put the cover on the stew pot but they forgot to put the pot away. So I sneaked into the kitchen and I took the top of that pot in my teeth, set it down careful, and ate all the rest of that stew. Then I got in the garbage and ate the bones and the guts of everything that went into that stew. Then I wanted to sleep but oh, by that time I had the worst stomachache. I just had to go. I barked, but the Ho-Chunks, you know they sleep good. They never even stirred in their sleep, so, well, I just went caca all over the house. Now, I guess, they’re so mad they’re going to put me to sleep. I guess I'll go easy anyways. What about you?’

“ ‘Me,’ said the Dakota Sioux dog, ‘I have a similar story. You ever heard of the stew the Dakotas make with guts? It’s mighty good, and my owner had a big plate of that plus all the makings for Indian tacos in his pickup one day. He was driving home and I was proudly sitting in the cab of the truck when he stopped. He get out, left me sitting there with all that good stuff, and I just couldn’t help it. I wolfed it all down. Every bite. Man, was it ever good! But then I waited and waited and my owner, he was having a good time, and he didn’t come back. I tried to hold it for a long time but finally, well, I just had to go. I went all over that cab of his pickup. Boy, when he came back, was he ever mad! He brought me here. I’m going to be put to sleep too. And you, what about you?’

“ ‘Well me,’ said the Ojibwe dog, ‘I was sitting on the couch one day just dozing off. I was half asleep and my owner, she likes to vacuum her house in the nude, she was doing her usual housework. She was working on the carpet right in front of me and usually, even though I’m not fixed, I’ve got a fair amount of self-control. But then she bent over right in front of me and I just lost it. I went right for her.’

“ ‘Sexually?’ asked the others.

“ ‘Yeah,’ the Ojibwe dog admitted.

“ ‘Gee,’ said the other dogs, shaking their heads, ‘that’s too bad. So she’s putting you to sleep too.’

“ ‘Gawiin,’ said the Ojibwa dog, modestly. ‘You know us Chippewa dogs, we got the love medicine. Me, I’m getting a shampoo and my nails clipped.’ ”

“YOU’RE A VERY sick dog,” says Klaus.

“You’re the blooming picture of health yourself,” says the wiindigoo dog. “I gotta motivate out of here.”

“Listen.” Klaus tries to look pitiful. “Go get her, will you? Bring her back to me.”

“Get who?”

“You know,” says Klaus, very shy, “please. My sweetheart.”

“Your sweetheart who doesn't love you. Let her go,” says the dog.

I WONDER IF I am going to change now, thinks Richard, as the ambulance rockets through Gakaabikaang. I am not going to die, which is a disappointment. After he left Frank’s bakery, he walked about a mile, then collapsed on his head. He may have a concussion, but he can’t seem to pass out again. Richard pauses in his thoughts to feel the piercing regret. But there is also an odd pulse of pleasure as his life threads strongly through him, stabilized. His ambulance-ride meditation continues.

Why not live as if I did die? Why not live as if nothing matters? All the consequences of being the old Richard will land upon me, but perhaps I can endure. After all, I am the last of a family who mostly perished underneath a grand piano that nobody knew how to play. At my grandmother’s funeral a young nun tried, but the piano was ruined by the same rain and snow that had weakened their lungs. Yet here I am, a survivor. This life is heavy, but also, it is nothing.

The ambulance stops and he is wheeled into a lighted place of shining surfaces. He is obviously an indigent man with no insurance, so he is parked in the hall with no painkillers. When the pain starts, it is fierce. He moans and sobs until a nurse gives him a wonderful shot that erases his disappointment in living.

Don’t ever forget, says the morphine, how sweet I am.

The hallway lights dim and a humming hush falls over the actions of the nurses and doctors and trained paramedics and cleaning people and the other patients, too, with their urgent complaints and serious faces. A young girl is wheeled by; she is the age of his daughters. A pale child weeping with fear.

Richard thinks of the young nun who tried to play the piano for his grandparents. Love washes powerfully through his heart.

Oh, pale child, he thinks, pale child of astounding beauty. Don’t be afraid. But she continues to wail down the hall until heavy doors shut soundlessly.

RICHARD DRIFTS, SLEEPS, and when he wakes he is stitched up, bandaged, discharged, and walking the street. The morphine leaves his body stealthily, whispering, You want me. And then the pain is outrageous. Richard picks up one foot and then the other until he is at a shelter where they know him. They feed him mashed potatoes, gravy, watery corn, and give him a cot to sleep on. He sinks into a long blackness. But then the ripsaw snore of the man sleeping next to him stabs regularly into his brain, and that night, staring into fuzzy space, Richard understands he can no longer bear the random snores of other winos. In prison, he will be safer from random snores — a roommate, maybe, whose snore he will get used to. He will be warm. He will be fed and there will be lots of other Indians. There will be a television and a routine and maybe he can figure out his next move in life.

I will surrender myself to justice, he says to the snoring man.

THE NEXT DAY, Richard walks to the police station, through the doors that open so easily and shut so completely.

“I surrender,” he says to the desk clerk.

The desk clerk takes his information and puts it into a computer.

“Stay here,” he says after a moment, and indicates a line of chairs.

“Good-bye, random snores,” says Richard, and sits down. He waits for an hour. The officer makes a phone call. Richard waits some more. Finally, a man in a gray suit with no tie walks up to him and hands him a packet of papers. The man walks away. Richard opens the packet. They are divorce papers.

Richard walks back to the desk clerk.

“I surrendered to a different thing,” he says. “I disposed of toxic carpet in an ordinary barn. There should be some charges against me sitting in your computer.”

The desk clerk politely looks Richard up again, but says that there is nothing pending.

“No warrant? Nothing from the EPA?” Richard can hear desperation in his voice.

“Not at this time,” says the clerk.

“This federal administration sucks,” says Richard as he walks out the door. “No concern at all for illegal dumping. And my head hurts like hell.”

“Wait!” says another officer. “Your name once again?”

“I was in the newspapers,” Richard says modestly. From his pocket he takes a wine-blurred clipping.

“So you’re the asshole that screwed that nice old Norwegian couple,” says the officer. “I’m sure there is a warrant somewhere.”

Richard reclaims his chair and sits back, shuts his eyes.

Chapter 20. The Surprise Party

THE BRUISED PODS of cardamom. Sweet cake flour fine as powder. Scent of vanilla easing up the stairwell. Frank is browning tart crusts. Makes his own lemon curd to fill them. Juices the lemons, shreds the peel, stirs the pudding in a thick-bottomed kettle with the timeless assurance of a man whose beloved wife is just upstairs. They have finally moved in together, so they are, he figures, married in the old-time Indian way. As in the old-time traditions, he will keep fixing up her house forever. But instead of hunting, he’ll bake. Rozin is at her desk organizing, studying, taking notes, all with the relieved intensity of a born-again student. She has decided to finish her undergraduate degree and go to law school. She breathes the vanilla wafting up the stairs and feels on her skin the slow increasing tension of the baking crusts below her. Vaguely she anticipates the moment of piercing sweetness, the first bite, the taste he will bring her at noon.

She shuffles her note cards and lets the screen saver — silver bolts of lightning turning purple, magenta, yellow, silver again — streak and snag across the humming face of her computer. Rozin wants to do something special for Frank’s birthday, something memorable, something even a little outrageous so that, in the future, he will remember how much she cared about his birthday. Even if they never get married (she considers this just living together), they will tell each other about it and eventually the birthday narrative will be just as good as, say, a wedding.

Frank is bored by gestures of storybook romance. Flowers and music leave him blank, even fancy wines. Those things are too predictable anyway. She needs something more, something that will reach toward Frank in a way that touches some essence of who he is, and it will be private, and it will be just the two of them, which will surprise him, because Frank has heard her speak wistfully of gathering together the very people he would invite to, say, a wedding. But she will instead create some sexy private moment, some personal ritual that would be known only to them.

To this end, she sets her mind.

In a how-to-get-him magazine article, she once read about a woman who greeted her man at the door wearing only plastic wrap. It is, she considers, a sort of miracle substance to Frank — he uses it all the time when he bakes. She thinks of getting a roll from the kitchen and making of herself the surprise. But then, the stuff itself is so clingy, so staticky, so dry and unwieldy and easily ripped that she doubts it will feel that good to make love dragging in its folds. She thinks of wearing only chocolate, or homemade raspberry jam, or sugar frosting, or peach. She thinks of lemon curd and cheesecake filling. Considers buttering herself and rolling in a bath of cinnamon. Or fluff, she thinks, go cheap maybe. Marshmallow fluff. Marshmallows. A bikini of tiny multicolored marshmallows. Frank can take his time eating them, but then, once she is naked, he will be stuffed full of stale marshmallows. Rozin’s mind drifts. Whatever they are. Are they made of marsh? Or mallow? She imagines preparing the cake, the thing itself, the cake from the recipe he has perfected. The blitzkuchen. Theirs. But then what? How will she wear it? How will they eat it? What if she makes a mistake? In her dream she sees them grind the cake to crumbs between them. Yes, and no. She will wear something else, or some lack of something. She comes full circle to the plastic wrap. Thinks obsessively about the way to devise her dress.

FRANK ISN’T CRAZY about his birthday. So he decides he’ll ignore it and give Rozin a party instead. She will plan something for him, sure — but he’ll do her one better by surprising her.

On a bit of cash register paper he makes a list of gifts and possibilities. Jewelry. Little luxuries. A private, exquisite dinner he can cook. A night of solitude in some remote place or just a camp-out on the kitchen floor. He thinks of her, what she will like, however, and then he thinks of her again, understanding what she really wants. After all, he’s heard her mention the party with longing, out loud.

Friends, family, reunited enemies, survivors of the last six months. They’d meet. They’d have a party — where… here. Frank looks around him. Here! In the house. Here, where the locust trees shed that fluttering shade, he will string lights. Speakers. He sighs, resigned to it. There will be music. Dancing. Beer. Kool-Aid. Pastries. Cake and barbecue. He’ll make the cake of cakes once more, again, from the refined recipe. They’ll all be there. It will be generous, big, loud, and best of all, a smile slowly dawns in him, exquisite, he will make it a surprise.

THE WEEK BEFORE, she panics. Thinks of buying him a watch. A name bracelet. Shoes. Something he can look at every day. Neither one of them mentions the birthday, and its avoided bulk grows between them — bigger and bigger like a twice-risen bread, and then a vast wild-yeasted dough. It doubles and redoubles itself — and the tipping load of it grows flimsy and the two grow shy. They can’t touch, retreat after work; isolated in their plans, they neglect each other’s company and brood. Make secret phone calls. Each cultivates a convincing memory loss. They mention little as the date approaches, then less, then nothing. It is as though they are both secretly adulterous.

The Birthday

The air is dusty and faintly golden, but the morning has been cold so that the scent of the lilacs newly blossoming hangs here and there in pockets of sweetness. All day, Rozin glances at the index card that holds her plan — the twins with Cecille, a supposed dinner out. After the store closes he will come home. She will be setting flowers in vases. Unwrapping candles. Sautéing mushrooms. Changing the sheets on their saggy double-bed mattress. As he nears the predictable end of his routine she’ll light the candles upstairs in the bedroom. Doff her clothes. Apply perfume. She will cover, or rather decorate, herself strategically with stick-on bows. Two bright pink ones on her tawny nipples. One below.

That evening, she does all exactly as she has envisioned. Last thing, she peels the waxy paper off the stick-on rectangle and applies the bows. The two pink. Below her navel, she smacks on a frilly expensive bow, white and silver, bought at a Hallmark shop. She pins her hair up and presses another tiny hot pink bow on over her ear, a white one on her shoulder. A tiny spice-brown bow on each earlobe. She wedges her feet into silver high-heeled pumps. Picks up a match, a sparkler, a cupcake. Nothing else. Her heart drums as she smoothes on her lipstick and touches an extra dab of perfume to each temple.

DOWNSTAIRS IN THE HOUSE, sliding through the front door from which Frank has removed the creak, and from the back alley through the wild yard, the wedding party guests come whispering, tiptoeing, sneaking childishly, huddling together. In the big room below, where the staircase from the upstairs gives out into the kitchen, there is a wider step, almost a landing, next to which Frank stands with his hand on the light switch. He has informed them all of the routine. When Rozin comes down the stairs and reaches the landing, placed almost like a small stage at the entrance to the kitchen, when she pauses in the gloom, he’ll hit the switch. They’ll all yell….

WALKING DOWN THE STAIRCASE through the hush of the evening toward Frank’s voice, hollow at the bottom of the steps, Rozin is preoccupied with balance and timing. The heels are higher than she is used to. Naked but for the bows, she shivers. She comes down slowly so as not to stumble. That would ruin it all. She plans that she will stand at the bottom of the stairs, where light will catch the satin in the ribbons of the stick-on bows. In one hand, the cupcake with the sparkler in it. In the other hand, the match she will strike on the rough wood of the door frame…

THE SCRAPE OF the match, the flame, and her uncertain voice. Frank flips on the lights. The packed crowd shouts on cue. Surprise!

And everybody is surprised.

Rozin blinks. She stands, heels together, mouth open. She is naked, but for the trembling bows. The sparkler sparks on the cupcake she holds. For an endless moment, the party of friends and family stand paralyzed, gaping. Then Rozin stumbles backward, gasping, as Frank with extraordinary presence of mind whips a starched white apron off the hook behind him and drapes it over her. He bends close to her in concern. Face working, she waves him off. Tears sting his eyes. Nobody has the presence of mind to speak. The silence holds until it is broken by one solitary hiccup from Rozin. Huddled over the apron, the cupcake smoldering and smashed at the silver tip of her shoe, she hiccups again.

The party waits. The hiccups sound like the prelude to a bout of hysteria. Though she is no weeper, Frank nonetheless expects her to cry. Her shoulders shake. Her forehead is red in her hands. But when she lifts her face, her small laugh lights a string of firecracker laughs through the kitchen so that Frank’s own scratchy, hoarse, unfamiliar laughing croak is part of the general roar.

Chapter 21. Northwest Trader Blue

GRANDMAS GIIZIS AND NOODIN enter the early morning kitchen stealthily, hungry for leftover birthday cake. Knowing their habit, their love of sweets, the girls have risen to entrap them. Cally is already pouring coffee. Deanna is already cutting the remains of the twelve-layer chocolate raspberry cake that Frank nearly pulled off his ponytail in frustration to get right.

The grandmas accept the thick, uneven slices of cake and look at Cally and Deanna quizzically, with a slow and doggy quiet regard. Giizis takes a burning sip of hot coffee.

“You girls are up early,” she observes. “What do you want?”

Cally and Deanna shoot a look at each other, bite their lips. Each takes a huge deep breath. Cally elbows Deanna. She elbows her sister back.

“Nookoo?” says Deanna.

“Grandma?” says Cally.

“Eya’?” says Giizis.

“Eya’?” says Noodin.

“We want to know something.”

Giizis and Noodin shoot a look at each other, bite their lips, and each takes her own huge deep breath. They hope it will not be about those things that their mother should talk about. They hope they will not have to plan a menstrual moon-lodge ceremony or a berry feast or talk about the old ways and the new, regarding woman matters, not yet!

“About our names. We want to know.”

The grandmothers’ crooked, hungry smiles grow softly indulgent and even delighted. Here their granddaughters are asking for the names that have frightened their mother off. The names that came so powerfully in dreams. History scared Rozin, but history is what her daughters want. The right ones are asking for their names here, the young ones, and their mother can just go whistle up a tree trunk.

“How do we get them? What do we do? Do you know them? Mama said you dreamed them once. We tried to get her to tell us. She wouldn’t tell us. She said there had to be a ceremony. What ceremony. How does it go? Do we have to get married? We hate boys. They are so gross. Dogs are better. But Sweetheart Calico took her dog. And how do we get our names?”

The grandmas take big bites of unhealthy chocolate raspberry sugar cake, chew it, and enjoy the taste. Their smiles appear. A sunny moment of startling peace. In walks Rozin wearing her fuzzy pink bathrobe, yawning.

“Cake!” She frowns at the grandmas and is about to scold them about their blood sugar when the girls grab her arms. Before she even pours herself a coffee, they tell her that they have asked their grandmas to give them names. The names she would not tell them. They are gloating. Rozin turns her back and chooses a tribal college ceramic cup in despair. It is chipped. She thinks of smashing it in the sink.

“I was afraid this would happen. I never should have said anything.”

“Don’t be afraid,” says Cally.

“It will be all right, Mom,” says Deanna, and brings her the carton of half-and-half from the refrigerator.

“Thanks,” says Rozin. It is odd how girls know everything about your habits. They have been watching and learning all about you. They know that you cannot take your first sip of coffee without cream-milk in the cup. They know that after your first sip of black medicine water you are a better person.

“Yes,” says Rozin, after the first taste. “Yes, I guess it is time.”

The Names

There will be a feast and a ceremony later. But at this moment, the grandmas feel they should proceed. Before Rozin drinks enough coffee to change her mind. First, the grandmas fill two cups for Rozin and make her promise not to open her mouth until they are done talking. Then Giizis settles herself, pulling at her big soft T-shirt. Frowning into her coffee cup, she speaks.

FIRST OF ALL the old woman came to me. Our ancestor who was killed by the bluecoat soldier. “During my time I made such beautiful things,” she said. “I wanted my children and grandchildren to know they were loved. Other people see those special dresses, moccasins, leggings, or a baby’s first dikinaagan, and know that child is cared for. I made that cradle board real special. I copied into velvet the flowers we love, the wild prairie roses. You can eat them if you are hungry. Those sweet petals keep you going. But we didn’t need them, for here we had killed a lot of buffalo, and we had dried the meat before we were attacked.

“I saw the soldier shoot at children and I ran at him with a stone. But he killed me on the end of his gun. Not so easy, however, because I stared at him in his eyes. I stared him back in time, to when he was defenseless, before his birth. And then I put my spirit into him as best I could.

“That long moment passed. I looked at the distance. Over his shoulder, I saw the dog running off with my baby granddaughter, the dikinaagan strapped on its back. Oh, I was happy. They were getting away. I was filled with joy and nothing hurt me. I had given that child my own name, a very old name that goes back for many generations, and would be carried forward now. I cried out that name, and fell away and held the earth, and melted into the earth, and am part of everything now. My spirit guided the other spirits who died with me on that day, for I was named after the band of radiant light we travel.

“Why is it given to us to see the colors and the power and the imperishable message? We are so limited, so small. Gaagigenagweyaabiikwe, I cried, and put the name into the soldier’s mind so he repeated it and repeated it. He scratched it into the sand the first time he sat down — whiteman’s letters, a name never written down — and eventually he carved it into his arm. My name killed him eventually, though he died by his own knife, it is true. But our people had pity on his spirit. We helped him to depart this earth. As he walked the road to the next life, the letters never melted from his arm, they guided him. And now they are part of everything, too. They are the name I give you. Everlasting Rainbow. The footbridge that connects us with the other world.”

“OF COURSE,” SAYS Giizis, sipping her coffee, “it is very difficult to translate a real Ojibwe name into the whiteman’s language. So often, our names include movement, the stirring of leaves, the glint of light on water, the trembling of color. English is so limited.”

“We do our best,” says Noodin with a critical sigh.

“Ombe omaa,” says Giizis to Deanna, and she places her hands on her grandniece’s head and says the name four times. She makes Deanna repeat it. Then Cally and Rozin. She writes it down.

“Not gonna carve it in my arm. Now you memorize this.”

She gives the paper to Deanna and then nods at Noodin. “Mi’iw minik, my sister, ginitam.”

“THERE ARE THESE beads I love,” says Noodin. “Deep ones, made of special glass. Hungarian beads called northwest trader blue. In them, you see the depth of the spirit life. See sky as through a hole in your body. Water. Life. See into the skin of the coming world.”

Cally nods, lets a long breath out, impatient to see how this bead talk connects with her name.

“Just a second,” Noodin says, “I’m getting it all fixed in my mind. My brain is soaking up the sugar. I have to let the cells energize before I go on telling you.”

Noodin draws a deep breath and continues.

“When I was a child,” says Noodin, “I wanted beads of that northwest trader blue, and I would do anything to get them. I first glimpsed this blue on the breast of a Pembina woman passing swiftly. I saw her hand rise to the beads and then touch the blue reflection on her throat. Ever after, I knew I must have that certain blueness which was like no other blue. I scored my fingers making quill baskets and when they were finished I went to the trader and sold them. I looked behind his glass and wood counter at the hanks of beads hanging there on nails — beads the ripe silk of prairie roses. Silver beads, black, cut-glass white. Beads the tan of pony hide and green, every green there is on earth. There were blues there, sky blue, water blue, the blue of the eyes of those people who took our trees. The blue of old pants and the blue of mean thoughts. I searched for the blue of those beads I had seen on the Pembina woman, but that blue was different from all the other blues on earth. Disappointed at the trader’s cache, I spent my money on sweet candy. There would come a time I would see the beads I needed, but I already knew they could not be bought.”

Grandma Noodin stares at Cally, looking through her, figuring.

“During my motherhood, when I was rocking or nursing my baby,” she went on, softly, “I had a lot of time to think about this blueness. I could see it before me, how it appeared and disappeared, the blue at the base of a flame, the blue in a fading line when I shut my eyes, the blue in one moment at the edge of the sky at dusk. There. Gone. That blue of those beads, I understood, was the blueness of time. Perhaps you don’t know that time has a color. You’ve seen that color but you were not watching, you were not aware. Time is blue. Or time is the blue in things. I came to understand that my search for the blueness called northwest trader blue was the search to hold time.

“Only twice in my life did I see that blue clear. I saw that blue when my daughter was born — as her life emerged from my life, that color flooded my mind. The other time, my girl, was the day I found your name. Or dreamed it. Or gambled for it. Here’s how it happened.”

Other Side of the Earth

I was a new mother-to-be, pregnant. Picking berries, I felt sleepy and lay on the ground. It was so soft underneath the tree, the grass long and fine as hair. I put down my bucket to rest and curled in the comfort. While sleeping, I saw the Pembina again — she came to me. I saw her as a tiny speck first, then bigger and bigger until she was down the road and standing right in front of me. Had those beads on. Still hanging from around her neck. They were made of that same blue I have described to you and I still wanted them with all my heart.

“Will you gamble for them?” the Pembina asked me, gently.

I told her that I wanted those beads but had nothing I could use to put down. No money. No jewelry. Just berries. She took marked plum pits out of her pocket, smiled, and right there we sat down together to gamble.

“You have your life,” she said gently, “and the ones inside of you as well. Would you bet me two lives in return for my blue beads?”

“YOU GAMBLED,” SAYS Rozin. “I believe it! That was me inside, you know!”

“Shut up, my girl,” says Noodin.

“You promised,” says Giizis.

I DIDN’T EVEN think twice but answered her yes. We started playing the game, throwing down the plum stones and gathering them up, taking turn after turn until the sweat broke out on my forehead. I beat her the first of three games. She took the second. I took the third and gestured at her beads. Slow, careful, she lifted the strand over her neck and then she handed them over.

“Now,” she said, “you have the only possession important to me. Now you have my beads called northwest trader blue. The only other thing I own of value are my names, Other Side of the Earth, Blue Prairie Woman before that. You have put your life up. I’ll put my names. Let us gamble again to see who keeps the beads.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve waited too long for these. Now that I’ve got them, why risk them?”

She gazed at me with her still, sad eyes, touched her quiet fingers to the back of my hand, and carefully explained.

“Our spirit names, they are like hand-me-downs which have once fit other owners. They still bear the marks and puckers. The shape of the other life.”

“Why should I take the chance?” I asked, stubborn. “So what?”

“The name goes with the beads, you see,” she said, “because without the name those beads will kill you.”

“Of what?”

“Longing.”

Which did not frighten me.

Still, I played her another game and yet another. That is how I won her names from her. My girl, that was my naming dream. Long version. Your name is a stubborn and eraseless long-lasting name. One that won’t disappear.

CALLY WANTS HER to say it, the old name, the original.

“Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe, Blue Prairie Woman.” she hears, but she isn’t satisfied.

“And the beads?”

Cally is surprised to hear the sharpness in her voice. She hasn’t even thanked her grandma, yet already the need is on her. She has got to know what the necklace of beads looks like, that blue. She can imagine it at the edge of her vision. A blueness that is a hook of feeling in the heart.

“The beads.” Noodin’s whole face wrinkles, her thin lips slowly spread in an innocent smile. “Already, you want them, I know. But you will have to trade for them with their owner, Sweetheart Calico.”

Who stands behind them suddenly, her gaze on Cally’s back like a cape of quills.

The Blue Beads

The twins have become been afraid of her. She is not just any woman. She is something created out there where the distances turn words to air and thoughts to colors. She wiggles the first bead from the broken place in her smile. Then she pulls bead after strung bead from her dark mouth out. That’s where she was keeping them all of this time, they understand. Beneath her tongue. No wonder she was silent. And sure enough, as she holds them forward to barter, now, she speaks. Her voice is lilting and flutelike on the vowels and sibilant between the jagged ends of her tooth.

“Make that damn Klaus let me go!”

“Okay,” says Cally. “First give me the beads.”

Chapter 22. Wiindigoo Dog

SO THERE WAS this big canine rabies outbreak in the state of Minnesota. Here’s what happened. The state sent three dogcatchers to work day and night rounding up the dogs. The first dogcatcher was from a crack Norwegian dog-catching school, the second was Swedish, the third was an Indian dogcatcher. Each had a truck. They traveled together in a squad. They worked hard all morning and by noon each of the dogcatchers had a pretty-fair-sized truck full of dogs. About then, they were getting hungry, so they chained up the back of the trucks. But they forgot to lock the doors themselves, see, so by pushing and wiggling the dogs could open the doors behind the loose chain just enough to squeeze out, carefully, one at a time.

When the dogcatchers came back from lunch, then, first thing they looked into the back of their trucks. The crack Norwegian dogcatcher’s truck was totally empty and so was the Swede’s truck. But the Ojibwe dogcatcher’s truck, though unlatched the same and only chained, was still full of dogs.

“This is something, though,” said the Swede and the Norwegian to the Ojibwe. “How do you account for the fact all our dogs are gone and yours are still there?”

“Oh,” said the Ojibwa, “mine are Indian dogs. Wherever they are, that’s their rez. Every time one of them tries to sneak off, the others pull him back.”

“I DON’T LIKE that joke,” says Klaus. “My rez is very special to me. It is my place of authority.”

“Geget, you filthy piece of guts,” says the Wiindigoo Dog. “I like it there, too. Don’t get spiritual on me.”

“Why do you like it?” asks Klaus. “You have no spirituality whatsoever. What’s there for you?”

“On the rez,” says the wiindigoo, “the ladies, they roam. Bye now. Gotta maaj.”

“Good riddance.” Klaus turns over and sleeps.

WHILE SLEEPING he remembers that he is really someone else with a life and a toothbrush and a paycheck. He lives a normal day in his sleep, rising in the morning to do a hundred crunches and fifty push-ups, then pours himself a bowl of cereal before he showers. That feels good! Next, he is shaving, just those few whiskers on the blunt end of his chin. He is walking away from his actual house. Locking his door. Getting into his car.

Car! Once upon a time far away and long ago. These things were his. He earned them with work and money. His mouth waters. Coins and bills. He remembers the solid pack of his wallet in his left jeans pocket. He is left-handed, a lefty. What does that matter now? He is totally ambidextrous with the bottle.

KLAUS IS SLEEPING with his head sticking out of the bushes in the park, and he is wearing a green baseball cap. A young man wearing thick earphones and chewing a piece of bread-tie plastic whips around the bushes, expertly mowing grass for the city park system. He rides the mower with sloppy assurance — the big red machine itself encourages reckless driving with its fat cushy seat and wide cramping whine of protest. That’s what his lawn mower is — one long scream of protest. the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. The young man rounds the corner and runs over Klaus’s head.

There is no warning, of course. No chance for Klaus to prepare himself in his dream for getting his head run over by a lawn mower. Only the jagged earsplitting raucous blade shrieks, only the helmet of metallic motor sound, only the fact, lucky Klaus, that a powerful stray dog bolts toward the machine and gets hit, slams into the air. Bounces off a tree and vanishes. The impact jars the machine to a giant skip so that the accident leaves no more than a neat bloody crease down the exact middle of Klaus’s face.

KLAUS DREAMS HE is a drum struck violently and rapidly. His drum face wears the sacred center stripe. Klaus blinks up into the sky. Sun shot and pearly. Leaves gleaming and tossing. His ears are suddenly unpacked of cotton and his thoughts run pure between his temples, open and sparkling. In the extraordinary light Klaus makes a thousand decisions. Two of them matter. Number one, he will finally stop. Just stop. And he knows, the way he has known so many times before, right down to his aching big toe, center of his soul, that he is done drinking. He can do that. The other of his important decisions is not so consciously settled. It is just that he knows, in vague detail but with overriding certainty, the next thing to do.

Bring her back. Bring her back to us, you fool.

Getting sober. Letting her go. The idea of it hurts so bad he momentarily wishes that the lawn mower had struck him full on, taken off his head, his thoughts.

THERE IS A little bench down the street in a dogshit triangle of lawn. Some strangled dark red ambrosia-colored snapdragons are planted there by who knows who? Better go there, says a voice. Her dog, Wiindigoo. Get out. Don’t look back. Now, right now, attend to yourself and focus on the next fifteen minutes of your life. For you were never able to do it a day at a time, not you. An hour. Two hours. Half a day at a time. Or not.

Klaus goes looking for her. Now and again they’ll ask him, what was so fucking great about her? What did she do, in bed for instance, or what did she cook? Was it something she did with her hands, her face, some way she had, perhaps? A love way. A food. Not one thing in particular, he says. She never cooked anything from a recipe. Potatoes, mac and cheese, that kind of stuff. It wasn’t that. They’ll ask did she have his children. No, he’ll say. No kids. Was she related to you? Was she from your own clan?

Sometimes he thinks she was. Yes.

In his worst down and outs, he gets comfort from the thought that she was just a fragment of his imagination, his pretty antelope woman. But he knows she is actual in every way. What scares him worst is this: The simple knowledge that his Sweetheart Calico is a whole other person. Lives in another body, walks in a different skin. Thinks different thoughts he can’t know about. Wants a freedom he can’t give.

She dragged me in, he says greedily, can’t she handle it now?

Yet he knows with bleak shame he is excusing his trapper’s appetite. He’s tangled in a net of holes. He doesn’t know how to stop wanting her in him, with him, part of him, existing in his food and water and booze. He doesn’t know how to stop the circle of his thoughts.

In the old days, they used to paint the red stripe of the drum down the middle of their faces. Right now, sitting on the carved bench in the hopeful little ugly park he closes his eyes. His face bears the blood-painted stripe. He tries to divide himself up equally — two parts. Send half of yourself to each direction. West, east. Let her go with the western half, free. But the part of Klaus that goes to the west reaches out and clings to his love like a baby, following her into sky-hung space.

Giiwebatoon

Klaus folds and unfolds the strip of cloth that he uses as his headband, traces the small buds and sprigs of pink unbudding roses and white roses, the sweetheart calico. Sweat and dirt, drunken sleeps, railroad bed, underpass and overpass dust, volleyball-court gravel, frozen snirt, river water, and many tears are all pressed into the piece of cloth. It holds the story of his wretched love. Though grit scored, dirt changed, and sun faded, it isn’t frayed. It is woven of the same toughness as his longing. He wraps the strip of calico around his wrist like a bandage and he waits. He becomes part of the scenery, a tree, or anyway a stump. He is waiting for her to appear.

Red flash. A curtain drops away. She walks across the downtown concrete. His wife, his niinimoshenh, his Blue Fairy, his torture, his merwoman, mercy and love. She is walking along very slow and hesitant, waiting for lights to change before she crosses, reaching for her own hand. Her dark fall of hair hangs tatty and lifeless. She breathes in clear air and blows smoke out her nose. Looking over her shoulder at him, sensing his presence, her eyes are no longer living agates. Her eyes have turned the dead gray of sidewalk.

Klaus steps toward her and flaps his hands.

“Run! Run home. You can go now!”

She starts nervously, but then shrugs, lights a cigarette from off the one she was smoking already, and doesn’t run away. She looks at him, through and through, weary. His dear love’s face is thin, the bones showing pure and stark, pressing just the right places under her skin. How he used to trace them is still locked in his hands. His fingers begin to move across the rips in his T-shirt.

She steps closer. He reaches out and holds her long-fingered delicate hand. Then, pulling the cloth around their wrists, he ties her hand to his hand gently with the sweetheart calico. He has no plan to do this either. No plan for what happens next, but it is simple. They start out. Start walking.

North and west, along the river until the herringbone brick path with decorative plantings becomes a common sidewalk. Eventually it turns to tar black as licorice at first and then lighter, lighter, showing stones in the aggregate, thinning, rubbing out, erasing, absorbed back slowly into the earth. Then earth itself is under their feet, a worn path for joggers and for bicyclists. It is clear at first and then grassier, fainter, grown over, traversing backyards or parkland. Back lots of tire stores, warehouses, malls, developments, wild mustard, polleny green-gold, a farm, then another one, all of a sudden undergrowth so thick along the banks they cannot enter.

They turn from the water flowing off the edge of the world and start walking due west.

They walk all evening, rest. Fall asleep in a grassy old yard just beside an abandoned shed that still shelters a hulk of metal that once was a car. Against the shed, still chained to the door, there is a cracked leather collar. Strung through it bones of a dog vertebrae. Scattered beside more bones and baked hide.

That dead dog comes alive and is her dog. Coyote gray, grinning and slobbering, it trots just behind them.

They keep walking. Next morning, too. They drink from a clean pothole lake and walk on until, over a slight rise, the sky immensely opens up before them in a blast of space.

“Niinimoshenh,” he says softly. “Run home. Giiwebatoon.”

He feels her start, tense, breathe the air in deeper gulps. A flowing fawn material, her grace comes over her. If he looks at her he won’t be able to do it. So he does not look at her face. Slowly, fighting his own need, dizzy, Klaus pulls at the loop of dirty gray sweetheart calico. He undoes the knot that binds her to him. At first, she doesn’t seem to know what her freedom means. She gazes at the distance until it fills her eyes. Then she shakes her hand and sees that she is no longer bound to Klaus. She stretches her arm out before her, turns her fingers over curiously, examines her blank brown palms.

“You let me go,” she says to him. He’s shocked to hear her soft, raspy voice.

“Yes,” he whispers. He sits down suddenly like a baby dropping to its seat. Sprawled in the grass, addled, his tears slowly pump. He throws down the strip of cloth that tied her to him and tied him to the bottle.

When he does that, he imagines that she will bound forward in the lyric of motion that only her people have. But she does not spring from his shadow, only walks forward a weary step. Confused, broken inside, shaking her head, she stumbles over the uneven ground. The dog stays right at her heels. As she walks west, she begins to sing. Klaus watches her. The land is so flat. She is perfectly in focus. He can see her slender back, quick legs, once or twice a staggering leap, a fall, an attempt to run. Klaus thinks that she might turn around but she keeps moving until she is a white needle, quivering, then a dark fleck on the western band.