Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

Fleur wasn’t done yet. No apologies. More reckoning was in order and of course she needed her land. Signed over, safe, and in her name. And until that happened, everybody had to contend with a restless spirit in a car that never collected dust crisscrossing the whole reservation day and night as if patrolling. Or maybe trolling would be more like it, because by now everyone wanted to bite. What was she going to do? When would her car actually stop and park on the gray weed-afflicted bareness glittering with crushed and broken glass that surrounded the bar that nobody called by Tatro’s fanciful name but instead just ziiginigewigamig, the pouring house, or Tatro’s. When would she stop there and when would she leave her shell of white metal and walk into the one room and sit down at the table in the corner where an endless, low-stakes poker game went on day and night, never ended and never finished, never changed except that players came and went and always were replaced but usually by family members who looked similar, so that the game itself had become the reservation’s purgatory, where once a person entered there was no way out. Someone else in your family surely would lose the amount you had won, for instance, and must borrow your winnings to retrieve the loss. Then you would have to step back into the game to make sure you got your loan back. On it would go. By this intricate means there was a fixed and yet shifting amount of money that might be owned or owed but eventually went back into the game so that over the years the figures and the numbers hovered in the air like an abstract cloud.

I suppose Fleur’s entrance brought things down to earth. She was not there to enter into the game of eternal subtractions and additions. She was there to throw the balance off. She was there to get what she wanted and once she did she wouldn’t give it back. It wouldn’t ever go back into the game. Tatro didn’t know this. In fact, he didn’t know what she wanted at all. For a man who had lived among us for thirty years he had not learned much, but that wasn’t why he stayed, anyway, to learn anything or know anything or even acquire things, though he did, as by now our most beautiful and even sacred objects hung upon the walls of his bar. They were either won in the poker game or traded to him for hard liquor — fair and square, we could not dispute that. Yet many turned their backs away from the wall in order to drink. These things were watching. Our grandmothers’ and our grandfathers’ hands had made them. And no, they shouldn’t have been traded, should not have been sold except perhaps to feed a person’s children. There were cradle boards, tight beaded on velvet, that once held the drunks beneath them. There were gun belts and shoulder bags that only our head men used to carry. Makizinan, old-time buckskin dresses, intricately woven purses and sashes and carrying bags. There was even a drum. Each thing represented, then, a transaction, which is what held Tatro. He really didn’t know why he stayed at all and in fact he constantly harped on it and made all sorts of plans to go back east. He didn’t know that what held him was the pain itself. It had got into and afflicted him. It had seeped down upon him from his loaded walls. He could not do much, less and less, except pour liquor and play cards. On some days, he didn’t get out of his bed and only dragged himself out when his all-night bartender threatened to quit unless he was relieved. Once he got his day started, Tatro usually revived and was more or less himself by sundown in the summer and late spring. In fall and winter the sun set too early and usually caught him frowning at his own hands or staring out the window until the window reflected Tatro and he was staring into his own eyes. Sometimes he didn’t recognize himself. People saw him start and pull away from his reflection. He didn’t look much different from it, anyway, all hollow-eyed and bluish gray from lack of sleep and smoky air. He was skinny and wrecked, with a drift of gray hair, but he would live to be a hundred, probably, people said. That kind of old whiteman always did.

So he was there as if waiting when Fleur entered with her son, who sat down next to her, vacant-eyed, and popped a sweet mallow-pillow into his mouth. He let it dissolve while he stared off into what passed for air inside that bar. The boy stared through drifts and curls of smoke. He stared through people who came and went. He stared but didn’t see. The last thing people would have thought he noticed was the game played to either side and spread out before him, but in fact, when he moved his lips and kept his eyes turned toward the ceiling as if reciting a fool’s prayer, he was working out the whole game in his head from the first card played and he was gathering tics and habits, little sighs or intakes of breath. And he was learning the language of the toothpick. For instance, on which side Tatro chewed it when his hand was good. Jewett Tatro had a tender tooth on one side and if he had a bad hand Tatro would shift the toothpick in his jaw and bite down to distract himself. That toothpick told everything and the boy, the idiot, marked it and learned its habits while his mother played a demure game right next to him.

Yes, demure. She played modest and even and I don’t need to tell you, dangerous. She played a snake’s game. And of course she came back every night at the same time. She took no drink, but the marks of it were on her anyway. I could tell what she had done and, I hoped, quit doing down there in the city. There was still the reek of it and even the beginnings of ruin on her beautiful face. It hurt me to see this. It hurt us all, especially Margaret, who I noticed had gone unusually silent and thoughtful when it came to Fleur. Anyway, it did relieve me that Fleur didn’t drink when she played, first that she still could — not drink, I mean. She wasn’t that far gone. And I was also pleased because it indicated that she was going to pursue some strategy, the end of which I thought I knew already — everyone did, except Tatro. We all thought we knew why she was there.

Tatro knew the land had once been hers but didn’t figure that she needed it back — not her in that white suit and that fancy car, which he coveted. Tatro got into the game every few days or so, which was another way that so much of our wealth ended up hung from nails above the bar. He liked to play for things because that made the game more interesting and also, even at that time, Tatro believed that the ways of making these old things were dying out and he was intrigued to have the last of such objects in his collection. So he played Fleur, having some vague idea of her reputation as a card player, and that she wasn’t winning big from him and even occasionally losing a hand puffed him up. So far so transparent to me, to us all. But what about the boy beside her? What was he doing there?

It wasn’t clear to me until some days had passed and Tatro was clearly bored of the game. A person’s boredom always worked to Fleur’s advantage. I sat in the corner of the bar, never touching a drop as I nursed too recent a memory of my shame. I sat there and drank orange soda fizz from a bottle. And I watched, night after night, for something to change. But what finally happened dismayed me. With no warning and in the middle of a game, Fleur called out, just after she’d lost a hand.

“Double whiskey!”

Down her cards went. Then the two shots.

“Oooh,” she crowed, “that was good, that’s better.”

Then she ordered another.

“N’dawnis, gego minikweken!” I couldn’t help advise her, but Fleur just turned to me with a look of indulgent amusement and kept on playing. She drank her poison more slowly, but then in short order it hit her and I saw her fumble. Her words thickened and her laugh, too loud, jarred the room. Her son sat next to her, impervious. Fleur saw things funny, funnier, and as she grew louder and more shrill everyone in the place collected around the table. When she shouted for more and in short order lost another hand to Tatro, more people slipped in through the door.