Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

“It’s that sex thing,” says Richard, his look sage. “I have that effect on women.”

“They run like hell.”

Klaus laughs too hard, furious, thinking of how his antelope girl could take off and sprint.

They reach the broad lawns and paths beside the river, go down the embankment and edge along the shore until they find a clump of bushes, familiar shade.

“We were here a while ago. I remember this place,” says Richard. “We should put down some tobacco.”

“Or smoke it.”

“We just got two cigarettes left.”

“Let’s smoke it like an offering then. It don’t mix with wine, not for religious purposes.”

“That’s true,” says Richard. He slowly decides, and then he speaks. “This afternoon, let’s just regard our tobacco as a habit-forming drug.”

Klaus sways to his knees and then painfully, slowly, he inches down the bank of the river, leans over the edge to where the water begins. At that place, he lowers his face like a horse. He puts his face into the water, sucks the river into himself, drinks it and drinks it.

“That’s Prairie Island nuclear water,” Richard yells.

Klaus keeps drinking.

“He can’t hear me,” Richard says to himself. “Besides, that plant is down the stream farther.”

Richard lights a cigarette, takes a drink of wine.

“Or Xcel shit. Or some beaver might have pissed up near Itasca.”

Klaus keeps drinking and drinking.

“For sure,” says Richard, worried.

Klaus doesn’t stop.

“Wowee,” says Richard, taking a drink of the wine, swishing it around on his tongue, “full-bodied as my sour old lady.”

“How about you?” Richard yells to the river. “Klaus?”

Klaus is still face in the water, drinking, drinking up the river like a giant.

“What do you think he sees,” says Richard, helpless without an audience, wishing he could open Klaus’s wine already. “What do you think he’s looking at? What do you think he sees?”

After another drink, Richard answers himself.

“To the bottom.”

And he is right and she is down there. Klaus is watching her float toward him — his special woman — the Blue Fairy, merlady — a trembling beauty alive with Jell-O light, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales. The water is medicinal, bubbling, hot turquoise. She stops for a moment, flying backward in the great muscle of the current pushing south. It tugs at her hair. She has to go, Klaus knows. Longing for her scorches him through and through. He stretches toward her with all of his soul, but she only looks back at him over her shoulder with her hungry black eyes. Gives a flick of her white-flag tail.

ROZIN FLIPS THROUGH a pile of mail, two paper bags at her knees. One for glossy junk mail and one for plain envelopes and letter paper. Gakaabikaang insists that its citizens sort their business out, and Rozin does this with even more devotion than she used to before her husband created a toxic waste dump in the barn of innocent old people. A story that has been reported in the newspapers she recycles.

A letter with a handwritten address. BIA boarding school script, thinks Rozin. An elder. Indians of the boarding school era have beautiful handwriting — flowing, spikey, and precise. The capitals are rounded and tailed. Rozin looks at the letter and thinks: swollen fingers whacked by rulers and many tears made these letters. These are the well-formed and perfected small triumphs of shame. The name where there should be a return address is Jimmy Badger. The letter is addressed to Klaus.

Rozin opens it because Klaus is gone, and reads:

Bring her back to us. Her daughters are going crazy and are running through our men. They have broke up every marriage and punched out every wife. Our tribal leaders are again locking each other up and the school board is devouring the administration. Gangs are here, the drugs are getting harder, the drinking bloodier. Nobody stops at the gas station and the casino deal is stalled. Birds are falling from the sky. An eagle died in my yard. I have made its tail feathers into a white fan for the woman with the blue beads, the one you stole. Bring her back to us! Bring her back!

Rozin drops the letter on the table. That’s it. Cecille is right. History won’t let up. Sweetheart’s presence has meaning and from Jimmy Badger’s letter Rozin now understands that is true. If only the BIA had been more careful about teaching details like a return address! It seems Sweetheart Calico is throwing our world out of whack. She belongs where she was — the stamp is canceled Montana. Since Klaus stole her and brought her here, thinks Rozin, everything there and here has gone downhill. That carpet scam went bad. Klaus and Richard disappeared. I got happy with Frank, but the twins were spirited off by Sweetheart and I lost my job. Then I took them north and they got sick. Finally, they jump in Cecille’s car and end up here. At least they’re back in school. But we should figure out what to do with Sweetheart Calico.

It seems that Sweetheart doesn’t want Rozin to find her, because she won’t be found. She has stopped coming to the house since Rozin came back. That is because Sweetheart is busy stalking Klaus and Richard, just out of sight. When they fall asleep, she steals whatever they’ve rustled together in their day of foraging. She takes it all. The dog has run away to live with her, hunting rabbits in the melted underbrush and through the new spring yards. It’s not a bad way to live although it is sometimes so repetitious. Klaus and Richard walk to the same places, collect the same change, buy the same bottles, sleep curled in the same smelly mess of sleeping bags and blankets.

Sweetheart has two sleeping bags. She knows the most deserted hiding places. Finds a house. Creeps into the bag with the dog and both stay warm and also they have scored another old forsaken pizza. Inside the sleeping bag with pizza dog farts, Sweetheart sleeps deeply, happily, even profoundly. She is dreaming of the open spaces, of running and running. She is laughing with her daughters as they charge up and down the hills. She goes to visit Jimmy Badger in her dream and he blesses her with an eagle tail fan and tells how glad he is that she’s come home.

Ziigwan

As the days slowly grow warmer, Rozin rises earlier and earlier. She is looking for a job. It isn’t going well. She has moved back into her house and Frank keeps bringing by the unsold goodies at the end of every day. Rozin knows she can balloon up fast on day-old muffins, so sometimes she tries to go running with Cecille. The jogging suit Cecille wears, made out of the same silk as a parachute, bright yellow, flares up and down the street and over to the river, her route. With her hair in a ponytail and neat black ribbon, she is a fixated bee. Shadowboxing. Leaping. Posing with her hands cocked and her eyes steady. Man-eating tiger eyes. Irish-Anishinaabe masterpiece woman. Rozin sweats like mad as she bounces slowly along behind her cousin, feeling heavier and madder and more resentful of her joblessness and lack of power in the system. Perhaps I will go back to school, she thinks. Become a lawyer. Hit Richard up for child support. How would that work? You can’t hit up a man who has made himself into a wino. You can’t garnishee his panhandling take, but I would like to.

She works in the bakery sometimes, but only when Frank is busy. She doesn’t sit or have coffee or pass the time of day. Rozin handles the customers and cleans the glass counter and display case of their eternal fingerprints.

Still there are times Rozin rises even earlier, and in those blue morning hours, Frank teaches her everything he knows about the attractions of flours to yeasts to butters. He explains the temperatures that make them brown and rise. Rozin learns to skim with serious efficiency the bits of blackened dough from the Jacuzzi-sized deep fryer full of boiling fat and to run the whip cycle on the mixer that froths up lard and sugar. Her favorite part is to add the food coloring in drops. Instant red, blue, lavender. Killer frosting, whipped high.