Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Our dog had died two months ago and we hadn’t got a new one yet. I opened my backpack and Sonja put in the milk and other things I’d picked out. She pushed back my five dollars and gazed at me from under her delicate, pale-brown, plucked eyebrows. Tears flooded her eyes. Shit, she said. Let me at the guy. I’ll waste him.

I did not know what to say. Sonja’s breasts made most thoughts leave my head.

How’s your mom doing? she said, shaking her head, swiping at her cheeks.

I tried to focus now; my mother was not fine so I could not answer fine . Nor could I tell Sonja that half an hour ago I’d feared my mother was dead and I had rushed upon her and got hit by her for the first time in my life. Sonja lit a cigarette, offered me a piece of Black Jack gum.

Not good, I said. Jumpy.

Sonja nodded. We’ll bring Pearl.

Pearl was a rangy long-legged mutt with a bull terrier’s broad head and viselike jaws. She had Doberman markings, a shepherd’s heavy coat, and some wolf in her. Pearl didn’t bark much but when she did she became very worked up. She paced and snapped the air whenever someone violated her invisible territorial boundaries. Pearl was not a companion dog and I wasn’t sure I wanted her, but my father did.

She’s too old to teach to fetch and stuff, I complained to him when he got home that night.

We were sitting downstairs, eating heated-up casserole brought once again by Clemence. My father had made his usual pot of weak coffee and he was drinking it like water. My mother was in the bedroom, not hungry. My father put down his fork. From the way he did it (he was a man who liked his food and to stop eating was usually a relinquishment, though these days he wasn’t eating much), I thought he was angry. But although his gestures of recent were abrupt and he often clenched his fists, he did not raise his voice. He spoke very quietly, reasonably, telling me why we needed Pearl.

Joe, we need a protection dog. There is a man we suspect. But he has cleared out. Which means he could be anywhere. Or, he might not have done it but the real attacker could still be in the area.

I asked what I thought was a police TV question.

What evidence do you have that this one guy did it?

My father considered not answering, I could tell. But he finally did. He had trouble saying some of the words.

The perpetrator or the suspect ... the attacker ... dropped a book of matches. The matches were from the golf course. They give them out at the desk.

So they’re starting with the golfers, I said. This meant the attacker could be Indian or white. That golf course fascinated everyone—it was a kind of fad. Golf was for rich people, supposedly, but here we had a course of scraggly grass and natural water pits. With a special introductory rate. People passed their clubs around and everybody seemed to have tried it—except my dad.

Yes, the golf course.

Why’d he drop the matches?

My father rubbed a hand across his eyes and again had trouble speaking.

He wanted to, tried to, he was having trouble lighting a match.

A book match?

Yes.

Oh. Did he get it lit?

No ... the match was wet.

So then what happened?

Suddenly my eyes began to water and I bent over my plate.

My father picked his fork back up. He quickly shoveled Clemence’s well-known macaroni and tomato sauce/hamburger concoction into his mouth. He saw that I had stopped eating and was waiting, and he sat back. He drained another cup of coffee from his favorite heavy white china diner mug. He put a napkin to his lips, shut his eyes, opened them, and looked at me directly.

All right, Joe, you’re asking a lot of questions. You are developing an order to things in your mind. You’re thinking this out. So am I. Joe, the perpetrator couldn’t light the match. He went to look for another book of matches. Some way of lighting a fire. While he was gone, your mother managed to escape.

How?

For the first time since we’d pulled out those trees the Sunday before, my father smiled, or it was some version of a smile, I should say. There was no amusement in it. Later on, if I had to classify that smile, I would say it was a smile like Mooshum’s. A smile of remembrance of lost times.

Joe, do you remember how I used to get so exasperated when your mother locked herself out of her car? She had—still has—a habit of leaving the car keys on the dashboard. After she parks, she always gathers her papers or groceries off the passenger seat, then she puts her keys on the dash, gets out, and locks the car. She forgets that she left her keys in the car until she needs to go home. Then she rummages through her purse and can’t find her keys. Oh no, she says, not again! She goes out, sees her car keys are on the dashboard, locked inside, and then calls me. Remember?

Yeah. I almost smiled too as he described what had been her habit, the whole rigmarole we went through. Yeah, Dad, she calls you. You use a mild swear word, then you get the extra set of keys and take a long walk over to the tribal offices.

Mild swear word. Where’d you get that?

Damn, I don’t know.

He smiled again, put his hand out and nicked at my cheek with his knuckle.

I never really minded, he said. But one day it occurred to me that your mom would be really stuck if I wasn’t home. We don’t go many places. Our schedule is pretty boring. But if I wasn’t home, or you weren’t, to bike her keys over.

That’s never happened.

But see, you might have been outside. Not heard the telephone. I thought, What if she really gets stuck somewhere? And thinking this, about two months ago I glued a magnet onto the back of one of those little metal boxes Whitey sells mints in. I saw someone else had a key holder like it. I put a car key in the box and stuck it inside the car’s frame just over the left rear tire. That’s how she escaped.

What? I said. How?

She managed to reach under the car; she got the car key. He came at her. She locked herself in the car, then she started the car and drove away.

I took a deep breath. I couldn’t help a sense of her fear from slashing through me and it made me weak.

My father started eating again, and this time he was clearly going to finish his meal. The subject of what had happened to my mother was closed. I went back to the dog.

Pearl bites, I said.

Good, said my father.

He’s still after her then.

We don’t know, said my father. Anybody could have picked up those matches. Indian. White. Anybody could have dropped them. But probably it was someone from around here.

You can’t tell if a person is an Indian from a set of fingerprints. You can’t tell from a name. You can’t even tell from a local police report. You can’t tell from a picture. From a mug shot. From a phone number. From the government’s point of view, the only way you can tell an Indian is an Indian is to look at that person’s history. There must be ancestors from way back who signed some document or were recorded as Indians by the U.S. government, someone identified as a member of a tribe. And then after that you have to look at that person’s blood quantum, how much Indian blood they’ve got that belongs to one tribe. In most cases, the government will call the person an Indian if their blood is one quarter—it usually has to be from one tribe. But that tribe has also got to be federally recognized. In other words, being an Indian is in some ways a tangle of red tape.

On the other hand, Indians know other Indians without the need for a federal pedigree, and this knowledge—like love, sex, or having or not having a baby—has nothing to do with government.

It took me another day to find out that it was already going around that there were suspects—basically anyone who acted strange or had not been seen or had been seen walking out of his back door with loaded black garbage bags.