Louise Erdrich - The Round House

There’s something, I said.

I put down my fork and looked at my empty plate. I wanted another piece, this time with ice cream. At the same time, I had a sick sense of what I was about to do and thought that I might never eat again.

Something? said my father. Bjerke wiped his lips.

There was a file, I said.

Bjerke put down his napkin. My father peered at me over the rims of his eyeglasses.

Joe and I went through the files, he said to Bjerke, by way of explaining my unexpected remark. We pulled the possible court cases where someone might have—

Not that kind of file, I said.

The two of them nodded at me patiently. Then I saw my father realize there was something he did not know in what I was about to say. He lowered his head and stared at me. That gilded octopus ticked on the wall. I took a deep breath, and when I spoke I whispered in a childish way that I immediately found shameful but which riveted them.

Please don’t tell Mom I said this. Please?

Joe, said my father. He took off his glasses and set them on the table.

Please?

Joe.

All right. That afternoon when Mom went to the office there was a phone call. When she put the phone down, I could tell she was upset. Then about an hour afterward she said she was going after a file. A week ago, I remembered about the file. So I asked her if they found the file. She said there was no file. She said that I should never mention a file. But there was a file. She went after it. That file is why this happened.

I stopped talking and my mouth hung open. We stared at one another like three dummies with crumbs on our chins.

That is not all, said my father suddenly. That is not all you know.

He leaned over the table in that way he had. He loomed, he seemed to grow. I thought about the money first, of course, but I was not about to give that up and anyway to speak about it now would also implicate Sonja, and I would never betray her. I tried to shrug it off.

That’s it, I said. Nothing else. But he just loomed. So I gave up a lesser secret, which is often the way we satisfy someone who knows, and knows that he knows, as my father did then.

All right.

Bjerke leaned forward too. I pushed my chair back, a little wildly.

Take it easy, said my dad. Just tell what you know.

That day we went out to the round house and found the gas can, well, we found something else there too. Across the fence line, down by the lakeshore. There was a cooler and a pile of clothes. We didn’t touch the clothes.

What about the cooler? asked Bjerke.

Well, I believe we opened that.

What was in it? asked my father.

Beer cans.

I was about to say they were empty and then I looked at my father and knew that a denial was beneath me and a lie would embarrass both of us in front of Bjerke.

Two six-packs, I said.

Bjerke and my father looked at each other, nodded, and sat back in their chairs.

Just like that I ratted out my friends in order to hide the fact of the money. I sat stunned at how quickly it had happened. I was also shocked at how perfectly my admission covered up the forty thousand dollars I had just secured that very day with Sonja’s help. Or under Sonja’s direction. It was me helping Sonja, after all. She was the one who’d had the idea. She was the one who hadn’t gone to my father or to the police. She was an adult and so theoretically she was responsible for what had happened that day. I could always take refuge in that, I thought, and that I had this idea surprised and then humiliated me so that, sitting there before my father and Bjerke, I began to sweat and I felt my heart quicken and my throat seize tight.

I jumped up.

I gotta go!

Did he smell like beer? I heard my father ask.

No, said Bjerke.

I locked myself in the bathroom and could hear them talking out there. If there’d been a window easy to open I might have jumped out and run. I put my hands under the water and muttered words and very deliberately did not look into the mirror.

When I came back out and slunk to the table, I saw a slip of paper next to my empty cake plate and milk glass.

Read it, said my father.

I sat down. It was a citation, though just on scrap paper. Underage drinking. It mentioned juvenile detention.

Should I cite your friends too?

I drank both six-packs. I paused. Over time.

Where would we find the cans? asked Bjerke.

They’re gone. Crushed up. Thrown out. They were Hamm’s.

Bjerke didn’t seem to think the brand was remarkable. He didn’t even jot this down.

That area was under surveillance, he said. We knew about the cooler and the clothes, but they don’t belong to the attacker. Bugger Pourier came home from Minneapolis to see his dying mother. She kicked him out, as usual, and he moved in down there. We were hoping he’d come get his beer. But I guess you drank it first.

He said this in a remote but somehow sympathetic tone and I felt my head begin to swim with the sudden drain of adrenaline. I stood up again and backed away with the paper warning in my hands.

I’m sorry, sir. They were Hamm’s. We thought ...

I kept backing up until I reached the doorway and then I turned around. Leaden, I climbed the stairs. I went past my mother’s door without looking in on her. I went into my own room and shut the door. My parents’ bedroom took up the front of the upstairs and had three windows that normally let in the first sunlight of morning. The bathroom and sewing room took up small spaces on either side of the stairway. My room at the back of the house caught the long gold of sunset and in summer especially it was comforting to lie in my bed and watch the radiant shadows climb the walls. My walls were painted a soft yellow. My mother had painted the walls while she was pregnant and always said she’d chosen the color because it would be right for either a girl or boy, but that halfway through the painting she knew I was a boy. She knew because each time she worked in the room a crane flew by the window, my father’s doodem, as I have said. Her own clan was the turtle. My father insisted that she had arranged for the snapping turtles she’d hooked on their first date to scare him into asking her to marry him without delay. I only learned later that they’d caught the very snapper whose shell my mother’s first boyfriend had carved with their initials. That boy had perished, Clemence had told me. The turtle’s message had been about mortality. How my father should act with swiftness in the face of death. As the light crept down the sides of the walls, turning the yellow paint to a deeper bronze, I thought about the awful doll and the money. I thought about Sonja’s left breast and right breast, which after continual surreptitious observation I had concluded were slightly different, and I wondered if I’d ever know exactly how. I thought about my father sitting in the welling gloom downstairs, and my mother in the black bedroom with the shades drawn against tomorrow’s sunrise. There was that hush on the reservation that falls between the summer dusk and dark, before the pickup trucks drag between the bars, the dance hall, and the drive-up liquor window. Sounds were muted—a horse neighed over the trees. There was a short, angry bawl way off as a child was dragged in from outdoors. There was the drone of a faraway motor chugging down from the church on the hill. My mother hadn’t ever realized that cranes are very predictable and cease their hunting at a certain hour and return to their roosts. Now the crane my mother used to watch, or its offspring, flapped slowly past my window. That evening it cast the image not of itself but of an angel on my wall. I watched this shadow. Through some refraction of brilliance the wings arched up from the slender body. Then the feathers took fire so the creature was consumed by light.