Louise Erdrich - The Round House

My father stopped and tried to give me that old look he used to fix on me, and others, from the bench. I could feel it, but I would not meet his gaze.

—yet, he said gently, this too is an abandonment of my own responsibility. That person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life. As I did not kill Lark, but wanted to, I must at least protect the person who took on that task. And I would, even to the extent of attempting to argue a legal precedent.

What?

Traditional precedent. It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

I felt my mother’s attention on me keenly.

I just wanted you to know that, my father prodded.

Lots of people had it in for Lark, I said.

I looked from one of my parents to the other. Behind them in the next room the shelves of old books stood mellow in the dip of shadow at twilight. The scuffed brown leather. Meditations . Plato. The Iliad . Shakespeare in sober dark red and the essays of Montaigne. Then below, a matching Great Books collection they subscribed to by mail. There was a free Book of Mormon from a passing LDS missionary. There was William Warren, Basil Johnston, The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner , and everything by Vine Deloria Jr. There were the novels they read together—fat paperbacks thumbed and stacked. I looked at the books as if they could help us. But we had moved way far past books now into the stories Mooshum told in his sleep. There were no quotations in my father’s repertoire for where we were, and it was beyond me at the time to think of Mooshum’s sleeptalking as a reading of traditional case law.

So if you hear anything, Joe, said my father.

If I hear anything, yeah, Dad. He’d gotten my attention. There was some relief for me, even, in what he said. But my father was also wrong, and about one thing in particular. He’d said I was now safe, but I was not exactly safe from Lark. Neither was Cappy. Every night he came after us in dreams.

We are back at the golf course in the moment I locked eyes with Lark. That terrible contact. Then the gunshot. At that moment, we exchange selves. Lark is in my body, watching. I am in his body, dying. Cappy runs up the hill with Joe and the gun, but he doesn’t know Joe contains the soul of Lark. Dying on the golf course, I know that Lark is going to kill Cappy when they reach the overlook. I try to call out and warn Cappy, but I feel my life bleed out of me into the clipped grass.

Ieither have that dream, or one where I see the backyard ghost again. The same ghost Randall saw in the sweat lodge—his sour gaze and rigid mouth. Only this time, like with Randall, the ghost is leaning over me, talking to me through a veil of darkness, backlit, his white hair shining. And I know he’s the police.

As always I woke shouting Cappy’s name. To muffle sound, I’d stuffed a towel at the base of my door. I peered out in the fresh light hoping no one had heard me. I listened. It sounded like Mom and Dad had gone downstairs already, or gone out. I lay back in the covers. The air was cool but I was sweating and still full of adrenaline. My heart was jumping. I rubbed my hand on my chest to calm it and tried to slow down my breathing. Each dream was more real every time it occurred, like it was wearing a track into my brain.

I need medicine, I said out loud, meaning Ojibwe medicine. Old-time medicine people knew how to handle dreams, that’s what Mooshum had said. But his spirit was far away now, trying to shed the body in the cot by the window. The only other medicine person I knew was Grandma Thunder. Maybe we could ask her what to do. Not tell her details, of course, or reveal what had happened. Just get advice about these dreams. Bugger Pourier, of all people, stepped into my thoughts right then. Probably because the last time I’d thought of Grandma Thunder, I sent him to her, and right before that Bugger had stolen my bike. Something about a dream.

I sat up. He’d wanted to see if something he saw was a dream. My own dream’s reality, which always clung to me, and Bugger’s intent drunken fixation fused. What had he seen? I had worked on Bugger’s hunger and turned him around so I could get back my bicycle. But I’d never asked him what he saw. I got up and got dressed, ate some breakfast, and went out. To look for Bugger you looked behind places, starting with the Dead Custer. I searched all morning and asked everyone I met, but no one knew. I finally went to the post office. That was where I should have gone first, it turned out. I didn’t think of it, as poor Bugger hadn’t had an address.

He’s in the hospital, said Linda. Isn’t he? she called back to Mrs. Nanapush, sorting letters.

He busted his foot stealing a case of beer. Dropped it on his foot. So now he’s laid up and his sisters say it’s a blessing in disguise—could dry him out.

I rode over to the hospital to visit Bugger. He was in a room with three other men. His foot was in a cast and rigged for traction, though I wondered if that was necessary for his foot to heal or meant to tie him to the bed.

My boy! He was glad to see me. Did you bring me a drop?

No, I said.

His avid face fell into a pout.

I came to ask you something.

Not even a little flower arrangement, he grumped. Or a pancake.

You want a pancake?

I been seeing pancakes. Whiskey. Spiders. Pancakes. Lizards. Pancakes are the only good thing I see. But they just feed an old man the damn oatmeal. Coffee and oatmeal. It’s a plain breakfast.

Not even toast? I asked.

I could have it if I wanted, but I keep asking for pancakes. Bugger looked at me fiercely. I am holding out for pancakes!

I have to ask you something.

Ask away then. I’ll give you the answer for a pancake.

Okay.

And whiskey. He leaned forward secretively. Bring me a drop, but don’t let those others know about it. Keep the bottle in your shirt.

All right.

Bugger sat back, ready, his face expectant.

Remember when you took my bike?

His face turned blank. I spoke slowly, pausing after each sentence for him to nod.

You were sitting outside Mighty Al’s. You saw my bike. You got on my bike and started riding. I came out and asked where you were going. You said you wanted to check and see if something was a dream.

Bugger’s face lighted up.

Remember now?

No.

I reset the scene five or six times before Bugger’s mind finally turned back and began to riffle through the recent past. He held very still and concentrated now, so hard I could almost hear the gears grind. As his thoughts collected, his expression changed, but so gradually that it was only after I’d looked away impatiently and then looked back that I noticed he was petrified. He stared at something between us on the bedcover. I thought he was having a hallucination, not of the pancakes, which would have filled him with joy, but some sort of reptile or insect. But then his look changed to pity and he gasped, Poor girl!

What girl?

Poor girl.

He began to sob in dry wrenches. He kept crying about her. He mumbled about construction and I knew. She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her. I couldn’t help the picture from forming. Us jumping our bikes, flying back and forth, and her below. I stood up, jolted. I knew, down to the core of me, that he had seen Mayla Wolfskin. He had seen her dead body. If we hadn’t killed Lark, he’d have gone to jail for life anyway. I spun around thinking I should go to the police, then stopped. I could not let the police know I was even thinking this way. I had to get off their radar entirely, with Cappy, disappear. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even I didn’t want to know what I knew. The best thing for me to do was forget. And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream.