Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

What had come between them was a who, and she was standing across from him now at the kitchen counter. Lulu licked some unseen sweetness from her fingers, having finished her sugared bread. Her tongue was small, flat, and pale as a little cat’s.

Her eyes had shut in mystery. He wondered if she knew his thoughts.

She padded easily toward him, and he stood up in an odd panic as she approached. He felt his heart knock urgently as a stranger in trouble, and then she touched him through his pants.

He was helpless. His mouth fell on hers and kept traveling, through the walls and ceilings, down the levels, through the broad, warm reaches of the years.

The boys came back very late in the afternoon. By then, Beverly had drastically revised his plans for Henry junior to the point where he had no plans at all. In a dazed, immediate, unhappy bewilderment he sat on the doily-bedecked couch opening and closing his hands in his lap. Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy.

She seemed to fill pots with food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she’d never put in. The table jumped to set itself The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, Lyman, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. Then the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency.

Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they’d had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himself.

He looked at her. She turned to the sinkful of dishes and disappeared in a cloud of steam. Only the round rear of her blue flowered housedress was visible, so he watched that. It was too late now. He had fallen. He could not help but remember their one night together.

They had gone into the shed while the earth was-still damp and the cut flowers in their foam balls still exuded scent over Henry’s grave.

Beverly had kissed the small cries back onto Lulu’s lips. He remembered. Then passion overtook them. She hung on to him like they were riding the tossing ground, her teeth grinding in his ear. He wasn’t man or woman. None of that mattered.

Yet he was more of a man than he’d ever been. The grief of loss for the beloved made their tiny flames of life so sad and precious it hardly mattered who was what. the flesh was only given so that the flame could touch in a union however less than perfect. Afterward they lay together, breathing the dark in and out. He had wept the one other time in his life besides post combat, and after a while he came into her again, tasting his ownMiTaculous continuance.

Lulu left him sitting on the couch and went back into the sacred domain of her femininity. That was the bedroom with the locking door that she left open just a crack. She pulled down the blue-and-white-checked bedspread, put the pillows aside, and lay down carefully with her hands folded on her stomach. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. She went into herself, sinking through her body as if on a raft of darkness, until she reached the very bottom of her soul where there was nothing to do but wait.

Things had gotten by Beverly. Night came down. His sad dazzlement abated and he tried to avoid thinking of Elsa. But she was there filing her orange nails whichever way he ducked. And then there was the way he was proud of living his life. He wanted to go A back and sell word-enrichment books. No one on the reservation would buy them, he knew, and the thought panicked him. He realized that the depth and danger of his situation was great if he had forgotten that basic fact. The moon went black. The bushes seemed to close around the house.

Retrench, he told himself, as the boys turned heavily and mumbled in their invisible cots and all along the floors around him. Retreat if you have to and forget about Henry junior. He finally faced surrender and knew it was the only thing he could possibly have the strength for.

He planned to get into his car while it was still dark, before dawn, and drive back to Minneapolis without Henry junior. He would simply have to bolt without saying good-bye to Lulu. But when he rose from the couch, he walked down the hall to her bedroom door. He didn’t pause but walked right through. It was like routine he’d built up over time in marriage.

The close dark was scented with bath lilac. Glowing green spears told the hour in her side-table clock. The bedclothes rustled. He stood holding the lathed wooden post. And then his veins were full of warm ash and his tongue swelled in his throat.

He lay down in her arms.

Whirling blackness swept through him, and there was nothing else to do.

The wings didn’t beat as hard as they used to, but the bird still flew.

THE PLUNGE OF THE B r.1 a S (1957)

I never wanted much, and I needed even less, but what happened was that I got everything handed to me on a plate. It came from being a Kashpaw, I used to think. Our family was respected as the last hereditary leaders of this tribe. But Kashpaws died out around here, people forgot, and I still kept getting offers.

What kind of offers? just ask … jobs for one. I got out of Flaildreau with my ears rung from playing football, and the first thing they said was

“Nector Kashpaw, go West!

Hollywood wants you!” They made a lot of westerns in those days. I never talk about this often, but they were hiring for a scene in South Dakota and this talent scout picked me out from the graduating class.

His company was pulling in extras for the wagon-train scenes. Because of my height, I got hired on for the biggest Indian part. But they didn’t know I was a Kashpaw, because right off I had to die.

“Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it.

Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.

So I thought it was quite enough to be killed the once you have to die in this life, and I quit. I hopped a train down the wheat belt and threshed. I got offers there too. jobs came easy. I worked a year.

I was thinking of staying on, but then I got a proposition that discouraged me out of Kansas for good.

Down in the city I met this old rich woman. She had her car stopped when she saw me pass by.

“Ask the chief if he’d like to work for me,” she said to her man up front. So her man, a buffalo soldier, did.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“I want him to model for my masterpiece. Tell him all he has to do is stand still and let me paint his picture.”

“Sounds easy enough.” I agreed.

The pay was fifty dollars. I went to her house. They fed me, and later on they sent me over to her barn. I went in. When I saw her dressed in a white coat with a hat like a little black pancake on her head, I felt pity. She was an old wreck of a thing. Snaggletoothed.

She put me on a block of wood and then said to me,

“Disrobe. ” No one had ever told me to take off my clothes just like that.

So I pretended not to understand her. “What robe?” I asked.

“Disrobe,” she repeated. I stood there and looked confused.

Pitiful! I thought. Then she started to demonstrate by clawing at her buttons. I was just about to go and help her when she said in a near holler,

“Take off your clothes!”

She wanted to paint me without a stitch on, of course.

There were lots of naked pictures in her barn. I wouldn’t do it.

She offered money, more money, until she offered me so much that I had to forget my dignity. So I was paid by this woman a round two hundred dollars for standing stock still in L a diaper.