Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Heart to heart, Joe. Listen, this is a sadist. Beyond the limits, someone who has no ... way beyond ...

Way beyond your jurisdiction , I said. There was an edge of juvenile sarcasm in my voice.

Well, you understand a bit about jurisdiction issues, he said, catching my scorn, then ignoring it. Joe, please. I am asking you now as your father to quit. It is a police matter, do you understand?

Who? Tribal? Smokies? FBI? What do they care?

Look, Joe, you know Soren Bjerke.

Yes, I said. I remember what you said once about FBI agents who draw Indian Country.

What did I say? he asked warily.

You said if they’re assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority.

Did I really? said my father. He nodded, almost smiled.

Soren is not a rookie, he said.

All right, Dad. So why didn’t he find the gas can?

I don’t know, said my father.

I know. Because he doesn’t care about her. Not really. Not like we do.

I had worked myself into a fury now, or planted myself into one with every puny hothouse plant that would not succeed in gaining my mother’s attention. It seemed that anything my father did, or said, was calculated to drive me crazy. I was strangling there alone with my father in the quiet late afternoon. A rough cloud had boiled over me—I wanted all of a sudden nothing else but to escape from my father, and my mother too, rip away their web of guilt and protection and nameless sickening emotions.

I gotta go.

A tick started crawling up my leg. I pulled up the cuff of my trousers, caught it, and ripped it savagely apart with my nails.

All right, my father said quietly. Where do you want to go?

Anywhere.

Joe, he said carefully. I should have told you I am proud of you. I am proud of how you love your mother. Proud of how you figured this out. But do you understand that if something should happen to you, Joe, that your mother and I would ... we couldn’t bear it. You give us life ...

I jumped up. Yellow spots pulsed before my eyes.

You gave me life, I said. That’s how it’s supposed to work. So let me do what I want with it!

I ran for my bike, jumped on it, and pedaled right around him. He tried to catch at me with his arms but I swerved at the last moment and put on a burst of speed that put me out of his reach.

Iknew my father would call Clemence and Edward’s. The gas station was out for the same reason. Cappy’s and Zack’s parents both had telephones. That left Angus. I pedaled straight over to find him outside, crushing last night’s haul of beer cans. None of the cans were Hamm’s. Angus had a scraped cheek and a fat lip. The fact is, sometimes Star would belt him. And when drunk, Elwin had a sly way of trapping Angus and slapping him up—it just about killed Elwin laughing. We wished it would. Besides that, there was a bunch of other guys who didn’t like Angus’s hair, or something, anything. Angus was glad to see me.

Those assholes again?

Nah, he said. So I knew his aunt or Elwin had done it.

As I helped Angus stomp the cans flat in the rock-hard dirt behind the building, I told him all that I’d overheard my father and Edward say about the priest the night before.

If we could find out that the priest drank Hamm’s, I said. Do priests even drink?

Do they drink? said Angus. Hell, yes. They start with wine at mass. After that, I think they get shitfaced every night.

Every time Angus stamped down a can, his hair flew up in a brown mat. Angus had a round face and innocent long eyelashes. He had a crazy disarray of big, gleaming, dangerous-looking teeth. His fat bottom lip bared them in a helpless snarl.

I want to go to mass, I said.

Angus stopped with his foot in midair. What? You wanna go to mass? What for?

Is there a mass?

Sure, there’s a five o’clock. We could just make it.

Angus’s aunt was as pious as Clemence, though I doubted she’d confessed to slugging Angus.

We could check that priest out, I said.

Father Travis.

Right.

Okay, man.

Angus went up to his aunt’s apartment and brought down the bike seat for his pink BMX. He attached it to the hollow rod with a bolt. He put the wrench in his pocket. Whitey had suggested this tactic and given him the wrench when his second mission bike was stolen. Next time someone steals your bike he’ll get his ass reamed anyway, said Whitey. We took off and pedaled the long way to stay out of sight of the gas station, and we made it to the doors of Sacred Heart just before mass started. I followed Angus’s lead, genuflected, and sat down. We took front-row seats. I had meant to observe the priest with a cool and objective calm—the same way, say, Captain Picard viewed the murderous Ligonian who had abducted Chief Security Officer Yar. I summoned to my face Picard’s motionless yet searching gaze as the bell rang to draw the worshippers to their feet. I thought I had prepared myself. But when Father Travis swept in wearing a green robe that looked like a rough blanket, my head seemed to balloon out and fill with bees.

Hey, Starboy, my head is buzzing like a fucking hive, I whispered to Angus.

Shut up, he said.

The little group of twenty or so people began to murmur and Angus thrust a folded paper into my hands. It bore a typed set of responses and the words to hymns. My eyes stuck to Father Travis. I’d seen him before, of course, but I had never really looked at him closely. Boys called Father Travis Pan Face for his expressionless features. Girls called him Father What-a-Waste because his pale eyes glowed over romance-novel cheekbones. His skin was markless and had that redhead’s milky pallor except for the snake of livid scar tissue that traveled up his neck. He had close-set little ears, a grave slash of a mouth, and a buzz cut cap of fox-colored hair that receded back from his temples but came to a slashing point in the center. His teeth did not show when he talked and his boxy chin remained motionless so that the lips alone moved in his still face and the words seemed to wiggle out. Now, the mechanical regularity of his features in which the ever-moving slot of a mouth worked made me dizzy enough to sit down. I had the presence of mind to drop the paper so that I could pretend to search for it between my knees. Angus kicked me.

I’ll puke if you do that again, I hissed. As soon as we could, pretending to find the end of the line for Holy Communion, we slipped out of the church and went down to the playground. Angus had a cigarette. We painstakingly halved it and I smoked my piece even though it brought back the whirling sense of misery. I must have looked as bad as I felt.

I’m gonna go find Cappy.

Yeah, I said. Why don’t you. Tell him I ran away from my dad and to bring some food.

You ran away? Angus frowned. I’d always had the perfect family—loving, rich by reservation standards, stable—the family you would never run away from. No more. His eyes went sharp with pity and he rode off. I wheeled my bicycle into a ruffle of brush and spindly trees, mowed underneath, that marked the edge of the church’s land. I leaned my bike against the tree and lay down in spite of the ticks. I shut my eyes. As I lay there I felt the earth pulling at my body. It seemed I could actually feel the gravity, which I pictured somehow as a huge molten magnet sitting at the center of the earth. I could feel it drawing on me and draining me of strength. I was going past limits, boundaries, to where nothing made sense and Q was high judge in red velvet robes. I fell into a drowse sudden as a fainting spell. Then woke to the vibrations of a quick-moving set of footsteps. I opened my eyes and stared straight up the flowing lines of black cloth to the wooden cross and Father Travis’s rope belt. Above his rigid torso, broad chest, and undercliff of chin, his colorless eyes shone on me under the flat lids.