Louise Erdrich - The Round House

I gulped. The other sandwich made a lump in my throat.

Wash it down with some tea?

She poured a bit more into my glass from a plastic pitcher bobbing with cut lemons and ice.

I didn’t take off work to mourn, you know me better than that, she said. I took off work for other reasons. I had sick leave coming so I thought, hey, I’ll use this time to straighten a few things out.

What things? I thought of her neatly duplicate living room, but then I knew she meant her thoughts.

I’ll tell you, said Linda, if you’ll tell me why you came here.

I put down my sandwich, wishing I had eaten it all before we got to this.

Wait, said Linda. As if she’d read my mind, she said that we should eat first and talk later. She apologized for being a bad hostess. Then she lifted her food in her chubby little hands, the sharp nails newly shellacked, and gave me such a look—it was a merry twinkle but at the same time it suggested insanity. I ate slowly, but eventually I had to take the final bite.

Linda patted her lips with her paper napkin and folded it into squares.

The golf course, she said. You pumped me for information. She wagged her finger at me. Two and two makes three. However, I have decided that you are too young to have accomplished this. Maybe you’re not, but I’ve decided you are. My theory is you gave the information about Linden golfing to someone older. But someone nearsighted, not your father. Your father is a very good shot.

He is?

This was of course a big surprise to me.

Everybody knows that. He brought down anything he aimed at as a young man. Kids don’t know their parents’ history. What did you come here for?

Can I trust you?

If you have to ask me that? No.

I was stuck. That mad sparkle came back and lighted up her tiny round eyes. She seemed about to explode with laughter. Instead, she leaned toward me and peered around as if the walls were bugged, then she whispered.

I would do anything in the world for your family. I am devoted to you guys. Though you’ve been using me, Joe, and you want something from me now. What is it?

Right then, I thought I was going to ask about the rifle. Instead, I heard myself ask the question I knew had no answer.

Why, Linda? Why did he do it?

I caught her off guard. Her eyes bulged and filled. But she answered. She answered like she thought it was so obvious I wouldn’t need to ask.

He hated your family, I mean, your father mostly. But Whitey and Sonja too. His thinking was all crooked, Joe. He hated your father but he was afraid of him. Still, he wouldn’t have come for Geraldine except for he became a monster when it came to Mayla. By filling out that form in Geraldine’s office, Mayla had named old Yeltow as father of her child—meaning she got pregnant while she worked for him. A high-school girl. From that old lech, excuse me, she got a car to travel home with, and payoff money not to talk, but she still insisted on enrolling her baby. Linden worked for the governor, but he was always jealous, always possessive, sick, smitten to death with Mayla. He wanted to run away with her on that money, and here she won’t share. Won’t go with him. Probably hates him, scared of him. Tries to get Geraldine to help her—so now both of them know the truth. All this eats at him. He idolized Yeltow. Maybe he thought if he had that file he’d save Yeltow. Or maybe he’d blackmail Yeltow. I could see him doing either. And of course your mother wouldn’t give him that file. But why he did this to your mother had more to do with a man who set loose his monster. Not everybody’s got a monster, and most who do keep it locked up. But I saw the monster in my brother way back in the hospital and it made me deathly ill. I knew that someday he would let it loose. It would lurch out with part of me inside. Yes. I was part of the monster too. I gave and gave, but know what? It was still hungry. Know why? Because no matter how much it ate, it couldn’t get the right thing. There was always something it needed. Something missing in his mother, too. I’ll tell you what it was: me. My powerful spirit. Me! His mother couldn’t face what she did to her baby, but even more: that what she did could not destroy me. Still, Linda brooded, she could call me after telling the doctor to let me die. All those years later. Call me and say, Hello, it’s your mother.

I was silent.

And he could not let go, she said at last. Because he came back and he came back like he wanted his monster killed, though another reason has occurred to me also.

What’s that?

He was nervous about Mayla. I just know she’s somewhere on the reservation. He had to keep checking on her, make sure she wasn’t found.

Do you think she’s alive?

No.

After a while, dread stole into me. I asked, Am I like him?

No, she said. This’ll get to you. Or whoever, I mean. This could wreck you. Don’t let it wreck you, Joe. What could you do? Or whoever do?

She shrugged. But me, that’s another story. It’s me who is not so different, Joe. It’s me who should have shot him with Albert’s old twelve-gauge. Though if Linden had his druthers, I think he’d rather have got shot with the deer rifle.

Yeah, it’s about that rifle, I said.

The rifle.

It’s under your porch. Can you hide it? Get it off the reservation?

She grinned at me in a way fit to burst and I thought crazy , but then she bit her lip modestly and blinked.

Buster found it already, Joe. He knows when anything new enters his territory. I thought he was interested in a skunk. Then I looked underneath and saw the edge of that black Hefty bag.

She saw my shock.

Don’t worry, Joe. Want to know where I’ve been on my sick leave? To Pierre, to my brother Cedric’s. He got his training down in Fort Benning, Georgia, and sure knew how to disassemble that rifle. We threw a couple of pieces in the Missouri. I drove back here in a zigzag I can’t even remember, down back roads, and ditched the rest of it in sloughs. She held up her empty palms and said, Tell whoever did it to rest easy. Her eyes clouded, her look gentled.

Your mom? How is she?

She was out in the garden, picking bush beans. She said she was fine, but I mean she said it over and over so I’d believe her.

I’ll come see her. I want you to give her this.

Linda took something from her pocket and held her fist over my hand. When she opened it a small black screw fell out.

Tell her she can keep this in her jewelry box. Or bury it. Whatever she likes.

I put the screw in my pocket.

Halfway home, blown along all the way back with the usual frozen foil-wrapped brick of banana bread numbing my armpit, I realized of course that the screw in my pocket was part of the rifle. Steadied by the wind, I didn’t have to pause or use my handlebars. I fished it out and winged it into the ditch.

This time it was Angus’s bottle of Captain Jack’s stolen from his mother’s boyfriend with a handful of Valium pills and a grocery bag halfway filled with cans of cold Blatz.

We were drinking at the edge of the construction site. After the lazy bulldozers and the Bobcats stopped moving the same dirt piles around, the place was ours. Some days they left our bike tracks alone, other days they obliterated our work. We had no idea what was going to be built. There was always the same amount of dirt.

A federal project, said Zack.

Cappy tipped the beer down with a pill, lay back, and stared up into the leaves. The light was turning gold.

This here is my favorite time of day, he said. He took a small wallet-size school photo of Zelia from his cowboy shirt pocket and held it to his forehead.