Louise Erdrich - The Round House

There’s coffee in back here, said Linda. I can drink it free. She regarded my father warily, although she knew my mother. Everyone knew what had happened but nobody knew what to say or what not to say.

Never mind about the coffee, said my father. I’d like to have a word with you. Why don’t you get someone to cover for you? You aren’t busy.

Linda opened her wet lips to protest but could not think of a good excuse. In a few moments she had cleared things with her supervisor and came from around the counter. We walked out of the post office and across the street to Mighty Al’s, which was a little soup can of a place. I couldn’t believe my father was going to question someone in the close quarters of Mighty’s, which had six scrounged tables crammed together. And I was right. My father asked no questions of Linda but proceeded to have a useless conversation about the weather.

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I’d even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. Dad and Linda Wishkob talked about the weather for quite a while and then she got up and left.

You really put her through the wringer, Dad.

The blackboard menu today advertised Hamburger Soup, all U could eat. We started on our second bowls of steaming hot soup: ground meat, commodity macaroni, canned tomatoes, celery, onion, salt, and pepper. It was especially good that day. Dad had also ordered Mighty’s coffee, which he called the stoic’s choice. It was always burnt. He kept drinking it expressionlessly after we’d finished the soup.

I wanted to get a feel for how she was doing, said my father. She’s been through the wringer enough, for real.

I wasn’t sure what coming down to talk with Linda Wishkob was about, but apparently some exchange I didn’t understand took place.

Dad had finally allowed Cappy to come over that day. It was a grueling hot afternoon so we were inside playing Bionic Commando, quietly as we could, with the fan on. As always, my mother was sleeping. There was a soft tap. I answered the door, and there was Linda Wishkob, her bulging eyes, her tight blue uniform, her sweaty, dull, makeup-less face. Those long fingernails on the stubby fingers suddenly struck me as sinister, though they were painted an innocent pink.

I’ll just wait for her to wake up, said Linda.

She surprised me by stepping past me into the living room. She nodded at Cappy and sat down behind us. Cappy shrugged, and as we hadn’t played our game for a while and were not going to quit for any small reason, we continued: For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando. Our mission takes us through the land of a thousand eyes, where death awaits us around every corner and through every window. Our destination: enemy headquarters. The heart of our hated foe’s impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.

She watched us in such utter silence that we forgot about her. She hardly breathed or moved a muscle. When my mother left her room and went to the upstairs bathroom I didn’t hear that either, but Linda did. She padded to the foot of the stairs and before I could say or do anything, she called my mother’s name. Then she started walking up the stairs. I quit playing and jumped up, but already Linda’s soft round body was at the top of the stairs and she was greeting my mother as if my mother weren’t skinnily tottering away from her, disoriented, discovered, and invaded. Linda Wishkob did not seem to notice my mother’s agitation. With a kind of oblivious simplicity she just followed her into her room. The door remained open. I heard the bed creak. The scrape of Linda’s chair. And then their voices, as they started to talk.

Afew days later there was finally a steady downpour of rain and I stayed inside for the second time that summer, playing my games, drawing cartoons. Angus had been working on his second portrait of Worf, but Star had called up and told him to borrow a plumber’s snake from Cappy’s place. They were over at Angus’s now, probably, drinking Elwin’s Blatz and pulling goop out of a stinking drain. My pictures bored me. I thought of sneaking the Cohen handbook, but reading my father’s cases and notes had set up a despair in me. On a day like this I might have gone upstairs, locked myself in my room, and paged through my hidden HOMEWORK folder. My mother’s presence upstairs had killed that habit off. I was thinking of slogging over to Angus’s or even of taking out the third and fourth Tolkien books my father had got me for Christmas, but I wasn’t sure I was desperate enough to do either thing. The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother’s spirit isn’t dying right upstairs. I thought it might wash all of the plants out of the garden, but of course that wouldn’t worry my mother. I took her a sandwich, but she was asleep. I took out the Tolkien set. I had just started reading as the rain came down and down, when out of the drumming pour, like a drenched hobbit, Linda Wishkob arrived again to visit.

Upstairs she went, with hardly a look at me. She had a little package in her hands, probably some of her banana bread—she bought black bananas and was known for her bread. A whole lot of murmuring went on upstairs—so mysterious to me. Why my mother chose to speak to Linda Wishkob might have bothered me or set me on alert or at least made me wonder. I didn’t. But my father did. When he came home and learned that Linda was upstairs, he said to me in a soft voice, Let’s trap her.

What?

You be the bait.

Oh, thanks.

She’ll talk to you, Joe. She likes you. She likes your mother. Me, she’s wary of. Listen to them upstairs.

Why do you want her to talk?

We need every piece of information—we need to know what she can tell us about the Larks.

But she’s a Wishkob.

Adopted, remember. Remember the case, Joe, the case we pulled.

I don’t think it’s relevant.

Nice word.

But finally, I agreed to do it and Dad had fortunately bought some ice cream. It was Linda’s favorite food.

Even on a rainy day?

He smiled. She’s cold-blooded.

So when Linda came down the stairs I asked if she wanted a bowl of ice cream. She asked what flavor. I told her we had the striped stuff. Neapolitan, she said, and accepted a bowl. We sat down in the kitchen and Dad casually closed the door, saying that Mom needed her rest and how good it was of Linda to visit and how much everyone had enjoyed her banana bread.

The spice is excellent, I said.