Louise Erdrich - Love Medicine

That day Dot ‘just glared toward me from a distance. She worked in the weigh shack, and I was hired to press buttons on the conveyor belt.

All I had to do was adjust the speeds on the belt for sand, rocks, or gravel and make sure it was aimed toward the right pile. There was a pyramid for each type of material, which was used to make hot-mix and cement. Across the wide yard, I saw Dot emerge from the little weigh shack from time to time. I couldn’t tell whether she recognized me, but I thought, by the end of the day, that she probably didn’t. I found out differently the next morning when I went to the company truck for coffee.

She got me alongside of the truck somehow, away from the men. She didn’t say a word, just held the buck knife out where I could see it, blade toward me. She jiggled the handle, and the tip waved like the pointy head of a pit viper. Blind. Heat seeking. I was completely astonished. I had ‘just put the plastic cover on my coffee and it steamed between my hands.

“Well, I’m sorry I laughed,” I said. She stepped back. I peeled the lid off my coffee, took a sip, and then I said the wrong thing again.

“And I wasn’t going after your boyfriend.”

“Why not?” she said at once. “What’s wrong with him?”

I saw that I was going to lose this argument no matter what I said, so for once I did the right thing. I threw my coffee in her face and ran.

Later on that day Dot came out of the weigh shack and yelled,

“Okay then!” I was close enough to see that she even grinned. I waved. From then on things were better between us, which was lucky, because I turned out to be such a good button presser that within two weeks I was promoted to the weigh shack, to help Dot.

It wasn’t that Dot needed help weighing trucks, it was just a formality for the state highway department. I never quite understood, but it seems Dot had been both the truck weigher and the truck-weight inspector for a while, until someone caught wind of this. The company hired me to actually weigh the trucks, and Dot was hired by the state to make sure I recorded accurate weights. What she really did was sleep, knit, or eat all day. Between truckloads I did the same. I didn’t even have to get off my stool to weigh the trucks, because the arm of the scale projected through a rectangular hole and the weights appeared right in front of me. The standard back dumps, belly dumps and yellow company trucks eased onto a platform built over the arm next to the shack. I wrote their weight on a little pink slip, clipped the paper in a clothespin attached to a broom handle, and handed it up to the driver. I kept a copy of the pink slip on a yellow slip that I put in a metal file box No one ever picked up the file box so I never knew what the yellow slips were for. The company paid me very well.

It was early July when Dot and I started working together. At first I sat as far away from her as possible and never took my eyes Retail’, mom off her knitting needles, although it made me a little dizzy to watch her work. It wasn’t long before we came to an understanding, though, and after this I felt perfectly comfortable with Dot.

She was nothing but direct, you see, and told me right off that only three things made her angry. Number one was someone flirting with Gerry. Number two was a cigarette leech, someone who was always quitting but smoking yours. Number three was a piss-ant. I asked her what that was. “A piss-ant,” she said, “is a man with fat buns who tries to sell you things. A Jaycee, an Elk, a Kiwanis.” I always knew where I stood with Dot, so I trusted her.

I knew that if I fell out of her favor she would threaten me and give me time to run before she tried anything physical.

By mid-July our shack was unbearable, for it drew heat in from the bare yard and held it. We sat outside most of the time, moving around the shack to catch what shade fell, letting the raw hot wind off the beet fields suck the sweat from our armpits and legs.

But the seasons change fast in North Dakota. We spent the last day of August jumping from foot to numb foot before Hadj], the foreman, dragged a little column of bottled gas into the shack. He lit the spoked wheel on its head, it bloomed, and from then on we huddled close to the heater, eating, dozing, or sitting mindless its small radius of dry warmth.

By that time Dot weighed over two hundred pounds, most of it peanut-butter cups and egg-salad sandwiches. She was a short, broad-beamed woman with long yellow eyes and spaces between each of her strong teeth. When we began working together, her hair was cropped close. By the cold months it had grown out in thick quills-brown at the shank, orange at the tip. The orange dye job had not suited her coloring. By that time, too, Dot’s belly was round and full, for she was due in October. The child rode high, and she often rested her forearms on it while she knitted.

One of Dot’s most peculiar feats was transforming that gentle task into something perverse. She knit viciously, jerking the yarn around her thumb until the tip whitened, pulling each stitch so tightly that the little garments she finished stood up by themselves like miniature suits of mail.

I thought that the child would need those tight stitches when it was born. Although Dot as expecting mother lived a fairly calm life, it was clear that she had also moved loosely among the dangerous elements.

The child, for example, had been conceived in a visiting room at the state prison. Dot had straddled Gerry’s lap in a corner the closed-circuit TV did not quite scan. Through a hole ripped in her pantyhose and a hole ripped in Gerry’s jeans they somehow managed to join and, miraculously, to conceive.

Not long after my conversation with Gerry in the bar, he was caught.

That time he went back peacefully, and didn’t put up a fight. He was mainly in the penitentiary for breaking out of it, anyway, since for his crime of assault and battery he had received three years and time off for good behavior. He just never managed to serve those three years or behave well. He broke out time after time, and was caught each time he did it, regular as clockwork.

Gerry was talented at getting out, that’s a fact. He boasted that no steel or concrete shit barn could hold a Chippewa, and he had eel like properties in spite of his enormous size. Greased with lard once, he squirmed into a six-foot-thick prison wall and vanished.

Some thought he had stuck there, immured forever, and that he would bring luck, like the bones of slaves sealed in the wall of China. But Gerry rubbed his own belly for luck and brought luck to no one else, for he appeared, suddenly, at Dot’s door, and she was hard-pressed to hide him.

She managed for nearly a month. Hiding a six-foot-plus, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Indian in the middle of a town that doesn’t like Indians in the first place isn’t easy. A month was quite an accomplishment, when you know what she was up against.

She spent most of her time walking to and from the grocery store, padding along on her swollen feet, astonishing the neighbors with the size of what they thought was her appetite. Stacks of pork chops, whole fryers, thick steaks disappeared overnight, and since Gerry couldn’t take the garbage out by day, sometimes he threw the bones out the windows, where they collected, where dogs soon learned to wait for a handout and fought and squabbled over whatever there was.

The neighbors finally complained, and one day, while Dot was at work, Lovchik knocked on the door of the trailer house. Gerry answered, sighed, and walked over to their car. He was so good at getting out of the joint and so terrible at getting caught. It was as if he couldn’t stay out of their hands. Dot knew his problem and told him that he was crazy to think he could walk out of prison and then live like a normal person. Dot told him that didn’t work. She told him to get lost for a while on the reservation or to let his Mother, Lulu, who had a long successful history of hiding men, keep him under cover. She told him to change his name, to let the straggly hairs above his lip grow, disguising his face. But Gerry wouldn’t do any of that. He simply knew he did not belong in prison, although he admitted it had done him some good when he was younger, hadn’t known how to be a criminal, and so had taken lessons from professionals. Now that he knew all there was to know, however, he couldn’t see the point of staying in a prison and taking the same lessons over and over. “A hate factory, ” he called it once, and said it manufactured black poisons in his stomach that he couldn’t get rid of although he poked a finger down his throat and retched and tried to be a clean and normal person in spite of everything.