Louise Erdrich - The Painted Drum

At first they could see by the starlight reflected on the snow. Then, where the pines grew thick, Shawnee couldn’t see at all. The children walked in a liquid black ice, knocking into trees and snapping sharp fir branches. “Alice, hold my parka,” said Shawnee, but she felt her sister’s grip weakening. “Hold my parka,” she screamed, shaking Alice. The grip desperately tightened. Apitchi was a block on her back. She kept shifting him to keep her balance. The snow was softer underneath the pine trees and from time to time they floundered and fell, but always righted themselves at last and went on, weaker, colder. It would happen a little bit at a time this way, Shawnee thought, and finally they would not get up at all. The thought made her pedal her legs with more force and drag Alice with her and so they went on, forward, she thought. She didn’t know anymore. She wasn’t like some kids who stayed in the house. She went outside a lot. Played all day in the woods and never got lost. But she’d never been out in the dark and in the cold like this. She thought her feet were frozen, maybe. She couldn’t feel them. Alice had good boots. She thought that maybe Apitchi was frozen dead, too. But she did not stop. The force of her own wanting to live drove through her. Something passed through her in the dark that was darkness also. She knew that she would keep walking and she’d drag her sister and her brother too. She fell asleep walking once, and then woke, pulled her sister’s jacket, dragging her along. They would not get away from her. She wouldn’t stop. And she kept on thinking that until the snow gave way beneath them.

At the lighted gas stop, Ira bought fifteen dollars worth of groceries—bread, peanut butter, milk, applesauce, macaroni. The man paid and Ira took the bag. Walking back outside, they hunched over, stabbed with cold.

“Gisina,” he said.

“I gotta get home now,” said Ira. “You take me.”

“I told you I can’t, we get my brother and he takes you in his truck, remember?”

“I remember it,” said Ira as they ducked along the edge of the road, hunched against the cold. “But I think I would rather go with you if you could take me. I don’t know about your brother as I’ve never met him. Your brother is a stranger to me.”

“Morris, he’s okay.” In his voice there was something else, too, and Ira’s mind grabbed onto it.

“What,” she said, “what about him?”

But they were at the house. It was very close to the gas station. The man’s brother lived in town, in a house Ira had never before noticed, which in itself was odd, the never having noticed a house in a place so small that everything was seen many times. Now the brown-board one-story house stood out. It felt to Ira like the house had suddenly been put there, as in a dream. They walked through unbroken snow up to the door, which was clawed by animals and jimmied around the knob. As they stood before the door waiting for the brother to answer, Ira’s throat tightened and she realized that even in the cold she was sweating lightly. The sweat was freezing in a sheen of ice on her brow. She wanted to turn and run away but John held the groceries. So she stood there, and when the door opened with a fierce shake, as it was stuck, she flinched and stepped back. Then she was pulled or propelled into a dark, close, rank den of a place. The two men went into another room and talked and made some deal, apparently, because when John returned, he gave Ira the groceries.

“I have to go, really, because my wife will be needing me.”

“Please.”

“I am who I said I was. I am not any different than that. I am not a bad person.”

“But your brother is.”

His eyes shifted away.

“Not always,” he said. And then Ira was alone with the brother who bumped around in the half-dark getting dressed to go outside.

“Morris,” she called out. “So chi miigwech for giving me the ride back to my kids. They shouldn’t be out there alone.”

“They shouldn’t be out there,” he agreed. His voice was gravelly, harsh maybe, but at least he said something to her. And he did seem to be getting ready to go. “I don’t mind. We have to start my truck though and she’s a bitch in this cold.”

“Okay,” said Ira, clutching the bag. She was encouraged and felt easier. She didn’t look at the brother directly, but stole small glances in the dim light. He was tall and rangy, with a lean, hungry-looking face, powerful shoulders and a bony, jutting nose. She couldn’t see his eyes, but when they went out the door she finally caught a glimpse, then wished she hadn’t. His eyes were bugged out, big and staring, white all around the black pebble of the iris. He looked like a man scared permanently out of his wits.

“Don’t mind it,” he said, as he noticed how Ira went very quiet getting into the truck. “I got this sickness where I can’t ever shut my eyes.”

He frowned, jiggled the key softly, then bent to the wheel in concentration and tried to get the engine to turn over. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, “ninimoshe, c’mon baby.” He cranked the engine and each time gave a squirt of gas; he had some method by which he slowly brought the frozen block to life, but it took a while and in that time Ira began to know something. There grew in her a feeling that her children weren’t all right, they weren’t asleep. Hungry, well, she knew that already. She began to think that she should have taken them along with her to town because at least they could have crashed someplace together, somebody’s couch. Now their situation was not good; she could feel it in her gut, a crawling sensation that made her act desperately. Later, she regretted very much that she put her hand out, touching Morris. At the time she even knew it was wrong, because he looked at her as the engine groaned. Even though his face was dark in shadow, the whites of his eyes gleamed out, and there was something awful in his look.

“Gegaa, gegaa,” he shouted, and then, at last, the motor caught with a roar and the cab shuddered. Morris whooped and pounded the wheel. He was sort of too excited, thought Ira, as though he was on some drug, but maybe it was for his eyes. He could be on some medication. Morris backed the truck from the snowy yard and said, “Which way?”

“I live out by the border at the old treaty signing.”

“Way out there!” Morris marveled as they pulled into the road. “You guys are true-life bush Indians.”

“My dad was. He still hunted and trapped all year but there wasn’t a living in it. He has died since.”

“You got a job?” Morris’s eye rolled wildly at her and he grinned, his teeth big and sharp in the dashboard’s reflected lights.

“I did until my dad went, then I didn’t have no one to take care of my kids. So I get by, you know, I sell my beadwork and stuff. If I moved into town, I guess I could do pretty well.”

“Oh, I’d say,” but when he looked sideways at her, Ira thought he meant something else.

“Not that way,” she stated, without laughing. Now was when she began to wish she hadn’t touched him.

Morris gave a little hoot. As the heat came on, the cab of his truck began to smell like blood.

“You hunt yourself?” said Ira.

“Do I hunt myself ?” Morris asked. “I’d like to see that.”

“I mean, do you hunt, just hunt?”

Morris didn’t answer, so Ira said, “You can’t shut your eyes for real?”

“Yeah. They will not close. I put drops in. Take the wheel.”

He quit steering and Ira slid over beside him to keep them from going in the ditch. He plucked a little squeeze bottle from his breast pocket and tipped back his head. “Ah,” he screwed the top on the bottle, dropped it back in his pocket, took the wheel with one hand. He grabbed Ira with the other and hauled her close to him. “I liked that.” The truck swerved.