Louise Erdrich - The Antelope Wife

I told her that I wanted those beads but had nothing I could use to put down. No money. No jewelry. Just berries. She took marked plum pits out of her pocket, smiled, and right there we sat down together to gamble.

“You have your life,” she said gently, “and the ones inside of you as well. Would you bet me two lives in return for my blue beads?”

“YOU GAMBLED,” SAYS Rozin. “I believe it! That was me inside, you know!”

“Shut up, my girl,” says Noodin.

“You promised,” says Giizis.

I DIDN’T EVEN think twice but answered her yes. We started playing the game, throwing down the plum stones and gathering them up, taking turn after turn until the sweat broke out on my forehead. I beat her the first of three games. She took the second. I took the third and gestured at her beads. Slow, careful, she lifted the strand over her neck and then she handed them over.

“Now,” she said, “you have the only possession important to me. Now you have my beads called northwest trader blue. The only other thing I own of value are my names, Other Side of the Earth, Blue Prairie Woman before that. You have put your life up. I’ll put my names. Let us gamble again to see who keeps the beads.”

“No,” I said. “I’ve waited too long for these. Now that I’ve got them, why risk them?”

She gazed at me with her still, sad eyes, touched her quiet fingers to the back of my hand, and carefully explained.

“Our spirit names, they are like hand-me-downs which have once fit other owners. They still bear the marks and puckers. The shape of the other life.”

“Why should I take the chance?” I asked, stubborn. “So what?”

“The name goes with the beads, you see,” she said, “because without the name those beads will kill you.”

“Of what?”

“Longing.”

Which did not frighten me.

Still, I played her another game and yet another. That is how I won her names from her. My girl, that was my naming dream. Long version. Your name is a stubborn and eraseless long-lasting name. One that won’t disappear.

CALLY WANTS HER to say it, the old name, the original.

“Ozhaawashkmashkodikwe, Blue Prairie Woman.” she hears, but she isn’t satisfied.

“And the beads?”

Cally is surprised to hear the sharpness in her voice. She hasn’t even thanked her grandma, yet already the need is on her. She has got to know what the necklace of beads looks like, that blue. She can imagine it at the edge of her vision. A blueness that is a hook of feeling in the heart.

“The beads.” Noodin’s whole face wrinkles, her thin lips slowly spread in an innocent smile. “Already, you want them, I know. But you will have to trade for them with their owner, Sweetheart Calico.”

Who stands behind them suddenly, her gaze on Cally’s back like a cape of quills.

The Blue Beads

The twins have become been afraid of her. She is not just any woman. She is something created out there where the distances turn words to air and thoughts to colors. She wiggles the first bead from the broken place in her smile. Then she pulls bead after strung bead from her dark mouth out. That’s where she was keeping them all of this time, they understand. Beneath her tongue. No wonder she was silent. And sure enough, as she holds them forward to barter, now, she speaks. Her voice is lilting and flutelike on the vowels and sibilant between the jagged ends of her tooth.

“Make that damn Klaus let me go!”

“Okay,” says Cally. “First give me the beads.”

SO THERE WAS this big canine rabies outbreak in the state of Minnesota. Here’s what happened. The state sent three dogcatchers to work day and night rounding up the dogs. The first dogcatcher was from a crack Norwegian dog-catching school, the second was Swedish, the third was an Indian dogcatcher. Each had a truck. They traveled together in a squad. They worked hard all morning and by noon each of the dogcatchers had a pretty-fair-sized truck full of dogs. About then, they were getting hungry, so they chained up the back of the trucks. But they forgot to lock the doors themselves, see, so by pushing and wiggling the dogs could open the doors behind the loose chain just enough to squeeze out, carefully, one at a time.

When the dogcatchers came back from lunch, then, first thing they looked into the back of their trucks. The crack Norwegian dogcatcher’s truck was totally empty and so was the Swede’s truck. But the Ojibwe dogcatcher’s truck, though unlatched the same and only chained, was still full of dogs.

“This is something, though,” said the Swede and the Norwegian to the Ojibwe. “How do you account for the fact all our dogs are gone and yours are still there?”

“Oh,” said the Ojibwa, “mine are Indian dogs. Wherever they are, that’s their rez. Every time one of them tries to sneak off, the others pull him back.”

“I DON’T LIKE that joke,” says Klaus. “My rez is very special to me. It is my place of authority.”

“Geget, you filthy piece of guts,” says the Wiindigoo Dog. “I like it there, too. Don’t get spiritual on me.”

“Why do you like it?” asks Klaus. “You have no spirituality whatsoever. What’s there for you?”

“On the rez,” says the wiindigoo, “the ladies, they roam. Bye now. Gotta maaj.”

“Good riddance.” Klaus turns over and sleeps.

WHILE SLEEPING he remembers that he is really someone else with a life and a toothbrush and a paycheck. He lives a normal day in his sleep, rising in the morning to do a hundred crunches and fifty push-ups, then pours himself a bowl of cereal before he showers. That feels good! Next, he is shaving, just those few whiskers on the blunt end of his chin. He is walking away from his actual house. Locking his door. Getting into his car.

Car! Once upon a time far away and long ago. These things were his. He earned them with work and money. His mouth waters. Coins and bills. He remembers the solid pack of his wallet in his left jeans pocket. He is left-handed, a lefty. What does that matter now? He is totally ambidextrous with the bottle.

KLAUS IS SLEEPING with his head sticking out of the bushes in the park, and he is wearing a green baseball cap. A young man wearing thick earphones and chewing a piece of bread-tie plastic whips around the bushes, expertly mowing grass for the city park system. He rides the mower with sloppy assurance — the big red machine itself encourages reckless driving with its fat cushy seat and wide cramping whine of protest. That’s what his lawn mower is — one long scream of protest. the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. The young man rounds the corner and runs over Klaus’s head.

There is no warning, of course. No chance for Klaus to prepare himself in his dream for getting his head run over by a lawn mower. Only the jagged earsplitting raucous blade shrieks, only the helmet of metallic motor sound, only the fact, lucky Klaus, that a powerful stray dog bolts toward the machine and gets hit, slams into the air. Bounces off a tree and vanishes. The impact jars the machine to a giant skip so that the accident leaves no more than a neat bloody crease down the exact middle of Klaus’s face.

KLAUS DREAMS HE is a drum struck violently and rapidly. His drum face wears the sacred center stripe. Klaus blinks up into the sky. Sun shot and pearly. Leaves gleaming and tossing. His ears are suddenly unpacked of cotton and his thoughts run pure between his temples, open and sparkling. In the extraordinary light Klaus makes a thousand decisions. Two of them matter. Number one, he will finally stop. Just stop. And he knows, the way he has known so many times before, right down to his aching big toe, center of his soul, that he is done drinking. He can do that. The other of his important decisions is not so consciously settled. It is just that he knows, in vague detail but with overriding certainty, the next thing to do.