Louise Erdrich - Four Souls

“I have no money now,” she shrieked. “I am broke to the bone!”

She began to laugh and her caw of mirth was terrible to one who loved her. There is perhaps nothing quite socially painful as watching one you admire make herself foolish in other eyes. For yes, there were some now openly mocking her, saying how the Pillager used to be too good to look down at the shit on her shoes and now see what she’s become. But others, most of the others, were very quiet. It was no small thing to see a woman who had represented something — oh yes, maybe fearful, maybe something that they didn’t like — but represented the old ways, succumb to the new. We could feel that Pillager knowledge dissolving in the burning water. She was the last of the Pillagers, and to see her as a common drunk would take something out of every one of us. A terrible, thin, coldness slipped down my veins. Despair, though I couldn’t name it right then, is a thin and bitter chill. I pulled my thin old shirt tight around my neck. I could not watch Fleur go lost.

“N’dawnis,” I called out again from my place. “Come home with me, I’m begging you, now.”

But I might as well have been talking to the bottle itself. She laid down her cards.

“Wait!” she told the others in a hissing, slurred undertone. “Let me go deal with the gabby old man.”

Fleur reeled over to me and then stumbled into my lap. She gave a bray for a laugh, and dipped her head and spoke close to my ear. “Stay and watch what I have learned from you, old friend.”

Her voice was sober as a rock. I sat back to enjoy myself.

The first thing that happened was Fleur lost another hand. Now she owed. That was the quicksand of Tatro’s eternal game.

“I better fold and go home,” she blurted.

“You can’t,” said Tatro.

“I got no money.”

“Bet something else.”

“I got nothing but my car.”

“Bet that.”

Fleur studied that idea, squinting an eye at him across the table as though his features were going blurry. The toothpick in Tatro’s mouth jigged up and down. As soon as the car was mentioned, more people flooded in. Now the place was so crowded I had to creak up and stand on my chair to see the table. Fleur’s fingers began to tap a little, as if she was nervous, and then she cried out.

“I need a whiskey on the house to clear my head!”

“Double, on the house,” Tatro agreed. “Are you in with the Pierce-Arrow?” His toothpick now was tight-clenched. A light of panting greed was in his eye. The white of hubcaps. The chrome strip. The purring beauty of its expensive motor. From the beginning, from her first drink, he’d started to feel in his hands the steering wheel. Now his foot was pressing on the gas.

“What do you bet in return? What you got besides this place? I don’t want this place!” She laughed at her own wit. She was the only one though and there was now a gasp of breath around her as she slipped from her chair and fell onto the floor. She pulled herself up by gripping the table’s edge. “Oh, I’m a little shkwebii,” she sang in a dreamy slur. “What do you bet me?”

“She can’t play,” said a Kashpaw. “It’s taking advantage.”

“She got in the game she stays in the game,” said Tatro. Those were the rules. A player played a hand as long as fingers could hold cards. And as others had at times invoked this rule and profited by it, no one could really by rights make an issue. But the question remained what Tatro would put up. He pointed to the wall.

“Take your pick.”

“Nothing’s worth my car.”

“Then take all of it!”

“What else you got?”

Fleur asked and then she fell off her chair again, only when she did so this time she appeared to realize suddenly that she was too drunk to go on. “I ain’t steady enough,” she informed everyone around her. Then she made a move that clenched a triumph in Tatro’s mind.

“I’m gonna give my hand over to n’gozis.”

A perfectly legal move by the game’s long hammered-out rules. If a player couldn’t see the cards or had the wit to know his moves were stupid, it was acceptable to hand the cards to a relative. This was, in fact, the way the game sucked in more people. It had worked to Tatro’s long-term advantage, and he thought it was working short term now. He looked at the boy.

“Change chairs with me an’ play my han’,” Fleur said to her son. A hushed groan pushed out of people when the boy’s gaze wandered up. His round eyes were empty of all light of understanding, his face as blank as one of Father Damien’s china dinner plates. Wordless, he moved to his mother’s chair. Fleur took the stool beside him, holding herself upright by clutching his shoulder. She crooned dizzily.

“What you got, Tatro?”

Seeing a sure win now, Tatro smiled his gray smile.

“I have some land,” he said in a precise voice. “One hundred sixty acres on the lake. They’re worthless. No timber.”

“Throw in the island too!” I croaked from my perch on the chair.

“Yes, the island,” the others in the room took up my suggestion. A surge of anger went through them, for the hopelessness of memory bit into them each in a different way.

Tatro looked over at the boy again. Engrossed in a point in space just over Tatro’s head, he seemed in an idiot’s trance. His hands were folded in his lap. Now he brought one up and licked his palm and tried to touch the colorless swatches of his hair down. This childish gesture of embarrassment decided Tatro.

“All right, the land and the island for the car.”

“Get the deeds! Get the papers to both!” Others took up my insistence and the papers were soon fetched, the car’s from the glove box and the deed to the land from the black safe in the floor beneath the cash register. Now the papers sat on the table. Tatro and the boy cut for the deal. The boy got the deal and it was then that the life of him showed, Fleur’s part of him, the Pillager. His gaze raked lower so it rested with dead calm on Tatro’s face, but his hands! The boy’s hands swooped out from his sleeves like starved birds and the cards flew and gathered and divided themselves with a grace that made Tatro gasp.

I don’t know if it was then Tatro knew how thoroughly he had been taken, or when he realized that the foolish mask the boy wore was in fact both his real face and unreadable. But for sure he must have known it by the fourth hand and then the fifth. The bet was six hands out of ten and the boy took every one.

A FTER THE card game between the boy and the Indian agent was finished, after Tatro had staggered off gasping, after everyone had melted from the celebration that spilled out the bar onto the road and then followed my old man home, we slept, exhausted, and rose the next day. We sat together talking around the fire drinking morning tea and replaying the game, the foolish and foolhardiness of Tatro, the bitter twist of his luck, the surprised malice in his face. I could feel Lulu just beyond the firelight. I knew she’d vanish if I spoke, so I brought a plate into the bush and set it on the ground. My husband smoked an endless pipe and speculated.

“He will try to deny it, but there were too many witnesses. He will have to honor his signed agreement and transfer the land.”

“My land is no good anyway,” Fleur gloated, “according to him. Ishkonigan, the leftovers!” The pleasure in her voice was wild. Her movements were jerky, her face stark with exhaustion. She looked older and almost sick, yellow showed under the smooth sheen of her skin.

“You got what you came back for,” I said, reading her looks and knowing that she’d been drinking, long and hard, off in the Cities, and now here. “The agent is shrewd and heartless. You bested him and should be glad.”