Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

The bench feels good to Klaus, hard but broad enough to curl his knees on. He is so comfortable that he does not move, decides to endure his thirst. He shuts his eyes.

A woman comes out of the museum. She is carrying a huge orange cloth purse slung over her shoulder. It thumps against her as she walks, like a big soft pumpkin. Richard calls out, “Hey, white lady!”

She frowns.

The woman isn’t all white. She is something else. Hard to tell what she is, exactly. Richard thinks maybe a Korean or a Mexican or maybe, but probably not, she could be an Indian from somewhere else. She takes some money from her purse and puts it in his hand. Bills.

“Oh,” says Richard, “that’s very nice of you. I’d like you to meet my friend.”

The woman walks away.

“Still,” Richard calls after her, “I thank you. I’ll put down tobacco for you.” She does not turn around. “That’s a sacred gesture. We’re still Indians.”

“You got cigarettes?” Klaus peers at Richard and holds out his fingers.

Richard gives him a cigarette. “That is my last cigarette,” he says, although he has more. Klaus holds it lightly in the palm of his hand, in his fingers again. He does not smoke the cigarette.

“How much did that lady give?” he asks.

“There’s four here,” says Richard, counting the bills over slowly, twice.

Holding the cigarette, Klaus shuts his eyes again and listens. There is music. A sweetheart song playing between his ears. He is still dancing from some long-ago night, as he always does in his dreams. Even now, though her image sags like air is escaping, he pictures his Niinimoshenh and her twenty-six sisters and her daughters in shawls of floating hair. Over and over again they spring into his dreams. Gallop at him. Brandish their hooves like polished nails. He bats them off. She is alone again. There for him again. But he can’t stop his mind from turning his sweetheart into a Disney character. The Blue Fairy. Her light increases. Her smile spreads slowly into jag-toothed mercy and then her voice flows, the cool of a river. Once, very drunk, he watched the movie Pinocchio eight or ten times in a row with successive nieces and nephews, their friends, their friends’ cousins, then the cousins’ cousins and friends. By the time the night came on and the children were draped in slumber on the floor and on pillows and heaps of blankets and clothes, he had fallen in love with the Blue Fairy.

“What should we do with this money?” says Richard.

“I’m sick.”

Klaus stretches out his arm, too heavy, and then lets it drop. Unconscious again. Two men come out of the art museum. Surprisingly — what day is this? — one of them hands Richard money too. Coins. Then a group of people emerge from the big doors and skirt the men as they pass talking loudly to one another about where to go for lunch. More people come, the two men go invisible. Some event sponsored by the museum is letting out. No more luck. The streams of people soon disappear into their cars.

“That was exciting,” says Richard.

“I’m sick,” says Klaus. “Water.”

“I wonder if they’d let me in to look at the paintings. Maybe we should make a donation.”

“Don’t do that!”

Klaus surges to life and props himself against the steps, a big loose-jointed man doll. His lady love is still there in the back of his mind, standing in a ball of blue light.

“I’d like a drink of water,” he says to her. She has a glass of water in her hand, too, Sweetheart Calico, but she pours it out in front of his eyes. The molecules dissolve all around him and do nothing for his thirst.

“Did she do that to you, too? Did she?” Klaus is disappointed, outraged.

“What?”

“Pour the water out right before your eyes!”

“No.”

“What did she do then, Sweetheart?” Klaus asks, jealous. “Tell me every detail or I’ll kill you right here.”

“With what?”

“My bare hands,” says Klaus lazily.

“Klaus,” says Richard in a fatherly voice, “you’re sick.” Gently, he takes the cigarette from between Klaus’s fingers. He unpeels the wrapping from the cigarette and begins to sprinkle the tobacco on the clipped grass. Klaus and Richard are very quiet, watching the flakes of tobacco fall to earth. Above them, in the trees, a cicada begins. A long drawn-out buzzing whine. Wait, thinks Klaus, it is only April, that can’t be a cicada. It must be the heat in my brain. The day is heating past bearable. When all of the tobacco is shaken onto the grass, they get to their feet. Klaus steadies himself. His knees shake. As they slowly move down the street past the museum, on both sides of the sidewalk the sprinklers set into the sod of the lawn sputter on and then spray out cones of mist. Klaus bends over, puts his mouth on the little holes in the ground, the spigots, and tries to drink.

A museum guard in a dark uniform, a large woman bland and bored, walks down the steps and tells them to leave.

“You’re supposed to say,” Richard admonishes, “quit the premises. Better yet, vacate them.”

The woman shrugs and walks back up the steps.

“Vacate,” says Klaus, his face beaded with spray, “I’m still thirsty. It’s hard to get much. That spray is thin.”

“Well, let’s go.” They decide, taking themselves back down the street, to find a Wendy’s hamburgers. Sneak in a side door to their bathrooms. If challenged, show their money.

“Where is this supposed Wendy’s?” says Richard after they walk in the broiling sun over to the other side of Minneapolis.

“I’m thirsty,” says Klaus.

They stand outside a grocery store next to a liquor store on Hennepin and they feel good, laugh, making the choice.

“Mad Dog or Evian?” Richard asks Klaus.

“I’m going in there,” Klaus says, pointing up at the grocery sign. “I’m asking for a drink of water.”

He is in and out the door in seconds and a security guard nodding with satisfaction yells, “Good luck anyway, finding a fountain.”

“He didn’t want to do that,” says Klaus. They walk into the liquor store. “He was just doing his job.”

“So was Custer,” says Richard. “I opt for a subtle white.” He addresses the storekeeper. “Something with volume. I don’t get too hung up on the bouquet.”

“That’s good,” says the clerk.

“My circumstances won’t permit it.” Richard nods. “I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can’t fool me. Don’t try.”

“I wouldn’t.”

The clerk scrapes their money off the counter and bags up two bottles, each in its own individual sack, and sets them on the counter for the men to take.

“You wouldn’t have a cup of water handy, would you?” asks Klaus.

“Not really,” says the clerk.

“Did he mean not as in reality or really not,” asks Richard as they go out the door.

“He meant they don’t have a glass of real water,” Klaus says, gazing back into the window with longing, “just those cardboard pictures on the walls.”

“That’s all you need,” says the Blue Fairy, holding up the bottle before his eyes. Twice, with her glass hoof, she strikes the hollow ground. “Let’s mogate.”

“To the big water. Gichi-ziibi.”

“Howah!”

They walk. Hotter. Hotter. A few times they take a drink from their bottles, but mainly they want to get to the Mississippi, so they walk. Shaking a little, hungry. Go around the back of a pizza place where the manager leaves unclaimed orders every once in a while. Past the Deja Vue Showgirls. SexWorld. Fancy café garbage Dumpster and outdoor bar. Nothing there. A woman exiting an antique store holds out a dollar and the moment Richard touches the bill she drops it like he’d run an electric wire up her arm. She darts away.