Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“They might be,” I said. “Or they might just be different.”

“Oh, different,” agreed Jimmy. “For sure.”

He looked at me keenly, grabbed me with his eyes, kept talking. His voice was remote and commanding.

“Our old women say they appear and disappear. Some men follow the antelope and lose their minds.”

I was stubborn. “Or maybe they’re just a family that’s a little unusual, or wild.”

“Leave,” said Jimmy Badger. “Leave now.”

BUT IN MY HEART, I knew I was already caught. The best hunter allows his prey to lead, not the other way around. That hunter doesn’t force himself to figure and track, just lets himself be drawn to the meeting. That’s what I did.

Suddenly I have her there with me in the van, and she is fast asleep. I sit and watch her for a long time. I am witched. Her eyelashes are so long that, when the light from the outdoor flood lamps comes on, they cast faint shadows on her cheeks. Her breath has the scent of grass and her hair of sage. I want to kiss her forever. My heart’s a panic on my sleeve.

I drive off. Yes, I do. I drive off with this woman while her daughters are breathing softly, there in the tent, unconscious. I leave the girls all of my trade beads and fancy pawn and jewelry, everything that was stored in the corner of the tent. The miles go by, the roads empty. The Missions rear before us, throwing fire off sheer rock faces. Then we’re past those mountains into more open country. My sweetheart wakes up, confused and tired. I tell her jokes and stories, list for her strange or valuable things people throw away. Trading is my second nature, but garbage supports me. I’m in the waste haul business. Me and my partner, or boss I suppose you’d have to say, contract with the city even, big companies, little ones. I drive through the day. I drive through the night. Only when I am so exhausted that I’m seeing double, do I finally stop.

Bismarck, North Dakota, center of the universe. Locus of space and time for me and my Niinimoshenh. We turn in, take a room at the motel’s end. I lead her in first and I close the door behind and then she turns to me — suddenly, she knows she is caught. Where are my girls? her eyes say, their fear sharp as bone. I want my girls! When she lunges, I’m ready, but she’s so fast I cannot keep her from running at the window, falling back. She twists, strong and lithe, for the door, but I block and try to ease her down. She pounds at me with hard fists and launches straight into the bathroom, pulling down the mirror, breaking a tooth on the tub’s edge.

What can I do? I have those yards of sweetheart calico. I go back. I tear them carefully and with great gentleness I bandage her cuts. I don’t know what else to do — I tie her up. I pull one strip gently through her bleeding mouth. Lastly, I tie our wrists together and then, beside her, in an agony of feeling, I sleep.

I ADORE HER. I’ll do anything for her. Anything except let her go. Once I get her to my city, things are better anyway. She seems to forget her daughters, their wanting eyes, the grand space, the air. And besides, I tell her that we’ll send for her daughters by airplane. They can come and live with me and go to school right here.

She nods, but there is something hopeless in her look. She dials and dials long-distance numbers, there are phone calls all over the whole state of Montana, all of these 406 numbers are on the bill. She never speaks, though sometimes I imagine I hear her whispering. I try the numbers, but every time I dial one that she’s used I get that Indian answering machine — that out-of-service signal. Does she even understand the phone? And anyway, one night she smiles into my face — we’re just the same height. I look deep and full into her eyes. She loves me the way I love her, I can tell. I want to hold her and hold her — for good, for bad. After that, our nights are something I can’t address in the day, as though we’re wearing other bodies, other people’s flaming skins, as though we’re from another time and place. Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.

I get so I don’t want to leave her to go to work. In the morning she sits at her spot before the television, watching in still fascination, jumping a little at the car chases, sympathizing with the love scenes. I catch her looking into the mirror I’ve hung in the living room and she is mimicking the faces of the women on the soap operas, their love looks, their pouting expressions. Their clothes. She opens my wallet, takes all my money. I’d give her anything. “Here,” I say, “take my checkbook too.” But she just throws it on the floor. She leaves off her old skins and buys new, tight and covered with bold designs. She laughs harder, but her laugh is silent, shaking her like a tree in a storm. She drinks wine. In a pair of black jeans in a bar she is approached by men whenever I turn aside, so I don’t turn aside. I stick to her, cleave to her, won’t let her go, and in the nights sometimes I still tie her to me with sweetheart calico.

Weeping, weeping, she cries the whole day away. Sometimes I find her in the corner, drunk, marvelous in frothy negligees, laughing and lip-synching love scenes to the mirror again. I think I’ll find a mind doctor, things cannot go on. She’s crazy. But if they lock her up, they’ll have to lock me up too. She’ll rage at me for days with her eyes, bare her teeth, stamp on my feet with her heeled boot if I get near enough to try for a kiss. Then just as suddenly, she’ll change. She’ll turn herself into the most loving companion. We’ll sit at night watching television, touching our knees together while I check the next day’s schedule. Her eyes speak. Her long complicated looks tell me stories — of the old days, of her people. The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to catch the distance, her sweeping looks say. We live there. We live there in the place where sky meets earth .

I bring her sweet grass, tie it into her hair, and then we make love and we don’t stop until we’re sleeping on each other’s pillows.

Winter, and the daylight dwindles. She starts to eat and eat and puffs up before my eyes, devouring potato chips and drinking wine until I swear at her, say she’s ugly, tell her to get a job, to lose weight, to be the person she was when I first met her. That tooth is still cracked off, and when she smiles her smile is jagged with hatred but her eyes are still dark with love, with amusement. She lifts into the air in a dance and spins, spins away so I can’t catch her and once again she is in my arms and we’re moving, moving together. She’s so fantastically plump I can’t bear it all, her breasts round and pointed, and that night I drown, I go down in the depth of her. I’m lost as I never was and next morning, next afternoon, she drags me back into bed. I can’t stop although I’m exhausted. She keeps on and she keeps on. Day after day. Until I know she is trying to kill me.

That night, while she’s asleep, I sneak into the kitchen. I call Jimmy Badger, get his phone through a series of other people.

“It’s her or me,” I say.

“Well, finally.”

“What should I do?”

“Bring her back to us, you fool.”

HIS WORDS BURN behind my eyes. If you see one you are lost forever. They appear and disappear like shadows on the plains, say the old women. Some men follow them and do not return. Even if you do return, you will never be right in the head. Her daughters are pouting mad. They don’t have much patience, Jimmy says. He keeps talking, talking. They never did, that family. Our luck is changing. Our houses caved in with the winter’s snow and our work is going for grabs. Nobody’s stopping at the gas pump. Bring her back to us! says Jimmy. There’s misery in the air. The fish are mushy inside — some disease. Her girls are mad at us.