Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“What hair?”

I’m an Indian with a buzz cut now. I got it when she left the first time. I cut my hair for sorrow. She left again. More sorrow. And again. Yet shorter. Anyway, now that she’s back my hair says to her, I hope, what I have reformed myself to believe. Plain living. Hard work. The simple life, unadorned, ridding the world of waste. “People You Can Count On.” My new motto in garbage management. My belief.

“You should grow it out again. Long. Women love it.”

Whiteheart Beads is referring to his own ponytail, a serious thick rope reaching halfway down his suit-jacket back. We, the two of us, present a very different image and I must admit that his is probably the more selling look in terms of women. And for sure, since from our association raffle he has won two Appreciation Top Prize all-expense-paid tickets to Maui, a fact revealed shortly after the soda pop stops flowing at this lunch, his ponytail might bring good luck.

We mill around. We eat more. Used to be us Indians had nothing to throw away — we used it all up to the last scrap. Now we have a lot of casino trash, of course, and used diapers, disposable and yet eternal, like the rest of the country. Keep this up and we’ll all one day be a landfill of diapers, living as adults right on top of our own baby shit. Makes sense to me. Of course, our main business is that we deal with EPA staff. Richard aims to be the first Native-owned waste disposal company in the whole U.S. He’s already proud of it. Proud of our imaginary management expertise and good old-fashioned ability to haul shit. Not to mention stabilize it. Let’s not talk about carpet.

A cake is wheeled in and it is shaped like a collection vehicle with bright colors of thick frosting, the lard and sugar kind, heart-stopping artery paste.

“You want ’em?”

Whiteheart holds the tickets out casually in the lucky presentation envelope. I take the envelope: pictures of windsurfing Barbies and Kens, a couple of sea turtles winging through the gloom. Native Hawaiians dressed in flowers, holding torches, paddling a huge wooden canoe.

“Right,” I say, reluctant to hand the envelope back. I notice it’s not transferable, his name is filled in the blanks.

Whiteheart waves his hands at me, fanning out his fingers.

“Keep ’em. Keep. My wedding present.”

“Wedding?” My heart jumps.

“Or pretend wedding honeymoon only. It’s up to you.”

Whiteheart looks at me and shrugs, very modest, as though any gratitude will just embarrass him, as though it makes him very nervous, which I notice he has been all along, that day, through the cheese and crackers, fruit, cold meats, the cake. He’s been looking over his shoulder, staring into corners, behaving in this distracted and jumpy fashion I know so well. Woman trouble.

“Whiteheart, Whiteheart my friend.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Who is she? You can tell me.”

His smile snaps across his face like a banner pulled tight.

“Not a woman. Not a woman. You take those tickets, Klaus. You can borrow my ID. You have a good time — hey, I mean it.”

Then, with surprisingly little fuss or bother, Whiteheart exits through a side door, disappears almost. Unlike him until the eleventh hour.

NEXT THING I KNOW, my sweetheart and me are getting ready for the trip. Maui. Glorious. Tropical. Hotel on the beach. We decide to go immediately in case Whiteheart’s mind changes or he comes along, a thing he is fond of doing on our dates. I was always the one who minded those lopsided occasions worse than Sweetheart. I think back on that now. I should have known from the beginning, but love blinded me the way it does. She probably would have rather been with Whiteheart even then! But no, no. Don’t get ahead of the next event.

It all happens bang right out of the gates. These guys. Two guys at the airport looking us over in that special way I am familiar with from getting kicked out of the army. Big guys. In suits. Four words to cause concern. Big guys in suits. I’ll never look at life the same.

We check in.

Apparently there is some sort of seating arrangement that goes with these tickets, and it involves my wife and I split up in separate seats. Not only that, but the middle row seats.

“Hey, this can’t be right. We’re together, on our honeymoon,” I tell the check-in personnel — exotic-looking woman, nails to here.

She chews her lip and fiddles with the keyboard, scowls at what blips up on the screen, and then looks at us with a blank, closed expression. Lots of purple eye shadow.

“I can’t do a thing about it.” Her declaration is such that I don’t even think to argue. She stamps our tickets, asks us if anyone had given us anything to carry on board the plane, waves us on.

“We’ll switch once we’re on the plane,” I say to my lady love, reassuring her. “Someone will be glad to change places with a couple newlyweds.”

I like your faith in human nature , her look tells me. I am proud of her pessimism, read it as an answer. And she is right about those guys. One of them sits next to each of us. I ask, politely, lying. “We’re newlyweds. Our seats got screwed up. Would one of you fellows mind switching?”

Like asking a favor of a set of bowling balls. These guys are muscle-bound and thick of neck, ponytailed like Whiteheart. One with a gold ring in the chunky lobe of his ear. The seatmate I address is the color of a Hereford, too, reddish and whitish. Dull eyes of a slab of meat. And you know what it’s like in the middle seat of an airplane anyway, that stuffed-in-a-cat-carrier feeling, claustrophobic. I am directly behind my love and to take my mind off my panic, I watch with longing the only part of her that I can see — top of her head and dark hair ponytailed in something I’ve heard called a scrunchie, a purple satin cloth band thing that bobs and slides up and down as she nervously mimics the flight attendant’s demonstration.

It concerns me, her sitting next to that guy.

Quite apart from the weirdness in the first place, she’s that sort of taut-bodied, fine-boned woman who arouses instant lust. From the back, especially, one of her most attractive angles. She has a sloping deer-haunch bottom. I am glad it is pressed against the seat. Her mouth now that her tooth is broken always looks as though she’s just bit into a sweet tart candy, pursed together like her scrunchie. When she smiles, though, it looks real witchy. I find her broken tooth something to adore, though I admit it is not to every man’s taste. Anyway, what I’m trying to say, politely, is that her front side, grinning, though lovely to me, is not her most attractive to the less discerning. I hoped she wouldn’t have to rise, say, to visit the bathroom, putting that lovely rear of hers within a handsbreadth of that ape.

No chance of that, I later find.

I was in perfect agony , she communicates, slumping against me once we have deplaned, and do you think they would so much as let me stir? Pretended to speak another sign language, or not understand me. I ended up pointing you know where and hissing. I wince. They didn’t get it. She shrugs. Pretended not to. What’s going on?

This is at the car rental place, in Maui herself, where we find ourselves waiting a mere ten hours after boarding that plane. We are standing in the patient headlights of those guys in suits.

“Something odd about those guys,” I mutter, tired, fed by a prescient insight. “Something that has to do with Whiteheart.”

Sweetheart always perks up when his name drops from my lips. She peers at me now through her tattered hair. Whiteheart. These burly types in suits. I keep not getting it even as we drive through the booming night air, light and sugary, blowing a pale salt through the windows of the car. They are going along the same road, it appears. I still don’t get it when they make the turnoff, directly behind us. When they park, next space. When they emerge just as we do and form an escort phalanx around us like Roman guards. Then, as we march into the huge waterfall-running Bird of Paradise lounge and check-in desk, I do get it. They’re going to kill us. They’re assassins.