Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I’ve heard that one before.

Sonja laughed and I went red.

C’mon, in here.

We went behind the counter to the tiny closet she called her office. There was a small metal desk, chair, cot, and lamp squeezed in. I took the doll from beneath my shirt.

Weird, said Sonja.

I took the head off.

Holy fuck.

Sonja shut the closet door. She used her long pink nails to tug the roll of bills from the neck. Then she uncurled a couple. They were hundred-dollar bills. Sonja rolled the bills back up, tightly, jammed them into the doll, and put the head back on. She went out, shutting the door behind her, and got three plastic bags. Then she came back in and rolled the doll into one of the bags and wrapped another bag around that one, then used the third bag as the carrier. She was looking down at me in the dim office. Her eyes were round and their blue was dark as rain.

Those bills are wet.

The doll was in the lake.

Anybody see you fish it out? Anybody see you with the doll?

No.

Sonja took the canvas deposit pouch out of a drawer. I knew about the pouch because she took the money to the bank twice a day. A sign at the register said, “No Money on the Premises!” Another next to it read, “Smile, You’re on Candid Camera.” That the camera was fake was a big secret. Sonja got out the tan aluminum cash box that locked with a little key. She thought a moment, then she took a stack of white business envelopes out of a drawer and put them in the tin box.

Where’s your dad?

Home.

Sonja dialed the home number and said, Mind if I take Joe with me doing errands? We’ll be back late afternoon.

Where are we going? I asked.

To my house, first.

We took the doll in the plastic bag, the deposit pouch, and the tan box to the car. Sonja kissed Whitey as we passed and told him that she was making the deposit and was going to buy me some clothes and stuff. The implication was that she was doing for me the things that my mother would have done if she was able to get up and out.

Sure, said Whitey, waving us off.

Sonja always made certain that I buckled myself in and rode safe. She had an old Buick sedan that Whitey kept running, and she was a careful driver, though she smoked, flicking the ashes into a messy little pull-out ashtray. The rest of the car was vacuumed spotless. We rode out of town and turned down the road to the old place, past the horses in the pasture, who looked up at us and started forward. They must have known the sound of the car. The dogs were standing at the house, waiting. They were Pearl’s sisters—Ball and Chain. Both were black with burning yellow eyes and patches of cottontail brown here and there in their ruffs and tails. The male dog, Big Brother, had run off about a month before.

Whitey had put a stairway and deck on the front of the house. It was made of treated lumber that hadn’t lost its sick green color yet. The house was a floaty blue. Sonja said she’d painted it that blue because of the name of the color: Lost in Space. The trim was spanking white but the aluminum storm door and solid-core interior door were old and battered. Inside, the house was cool and dim. It smelled of Pine-Sol and lemon polish, cigarettes and stale fried fish. There were four small rooms. The bedroom had a saggy double bed topped with a flowered comforter, and the window looked out on the sloping pasture and the horses. The pinto and the Appaloosa had come close to the wire at the edge of the yard. Spook whinnied, a love sound. I followed Sonja into the bedroom, where she opened her closet. Perfume wafted out. She turned around with a clothes iron in her hand and plugged it into the wall beside the ironing board. The board was set right before the window, where she could watch the horses.

I sat down on the edge of the bed, took the doll’s head off, and gave Sonja bill after bill. She carefully ironed each one flat and dry, testing the bottom of the iron often with her finger. They were all hundreds. At first we put five bills carefully in each envelope, and folded down the flap but didn’t seal it, and put the envelope on the bed. Then we got low on envelopes and put ten bills in each one. Then twenty. Sonja gave me a tweezers and I fished the last bills out of the wrists and ankles of the doll. Sonja used a flashlight to peer down the doll’s neck. At last, I put the head back on.

Put it back in the bag, said Sonja.

She wiped her wrist across her forehead and upper lip. Her face was covered with beads of sweat although the heat hadn’t reached inside the house yet.

She flapped her arms up and down, patted her armpits.

Phew. Go out in the kitchen and get me some water. I gotta change my shirt.

I went out to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The well on the place sucked up sweet water. Sonja always kept a jug of it cold. I poured water into a Pabst Blue Ribbon glass—they collected beer glasses—and drank it down. Then I filled it back up for Sonja. I guess I wanted her to drink out of the same glass as me, though I really wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how much money might be in the envelopes. I went back in and Sonja had a fresh shirt on—pink and gray stripes that pulled wide across her chest. The shirt had a stiff white collar and a buttoned tab. She drank the water.

Whew, she said.

We put the envelopes into the cash bag and put the bag in the aluminum box. Sonja went to the bathroom and brushed her hair and so on. She didn’t entirely shut the door and I sat there in the kitchen looking at the bathroom wall. When she came out she had on fresh lipstick, a pink that exactly matched her fingernails and the stripes on her shirt. We went out to the car. Sonja took the doll with her in the plastic bag. She locked it in the trunk.

We’re going to open a bunch of college savings accounts for you, said Sonja.

First we drove to Hoopdance and were ushered past the teller to talk with a bank manager in back. Sonja said that she was opening an account for me, a savings account, and we both signed printed cards while the woman typed out the passbook in my name with Sonja as a co-signer. Sonja handed over three of the envelopes, and the woman opening the account gave her a sharp look.

They sold his land, Sonja shrugged.

The woman counted out the money and typed it into the passbook. She put the passbook into a little plastic envelope and gave it pointedly to me.

I walked out with the passbook, and we drove to the other bank in Hoopdance, where we did the same thing. Only this time Sonja mentioned a big bingo win.

I’ll say, said the bank manager.

We kept going, drove to Argus. At one bank she said I had inherited money from my senile uncle. At another she mentioned a racehorse. Then she went back to the bingo win. It took all afternoon, us driving through the new grass pastures and crops just beginning to show. At a roadside rest stop, Sonja stopped and opened the trunk. She took out the doll in its plastic bags and dropped it in a trash can. After that, we stopped in the next town and got take-out hamburgers and french fries. Sonja wouldn’t let me drink a Coke but had some idea that orange soda was better for me. I didn’t care. I was so happy to be in a car where Sonja had to watch the road and I could glance at her breasts straining at those stripes before I looked up at her face. Every time I talked to her, I looked at her breasts. I kept the cash box on my lap and stopped thinking about the money, actually, as money. But at last when we had deposited it all and were driving toward home I went through each of the passbooks and added the numbers up in my head. I told Sonja there was over forty thousand dollars.

It was a full-size baby doll, she said.

How come we couldn’t keep out at least one bill? I asked. Once I thought about it, I was disappointed.