Louise Erdrich - The Round House

Ineeded to find Cappy. Not to tell him. I never would tell him. I’d never tell anyone. There was in me as I rode toward the Lafournaises a disconnect so profound I could think of nothing but obliteration. I would somehow find the means to get drunk. The world would take on that amber tone. Things would soften to brown as if in old photographs. I would be safe.

Zack and Angus were hanging out in the grocery store parking lot. Their bikes were there, and Cappy’s too, but they were sitting in Zack’s older cousin’s car. They got out when they saw me, and told me that Cappy had gone into the post office to see if there was a letter.

He should’ve come out by now, said Zack.

I went to get Cappy and finally found him out back of the building, sitting on a busted chair where the post office employees took smoke breaks in the summer. His hair was flung down over his face. He was smoking and didn’t look at me when I stood next to him. Just held out a piece of paper.

You will cease and desist from any contact with our daughter. My wife found the package of letters Zelia was hiding. You should have to consider that in this case we may persecute you to the full axtent of the law.

Also currently Zelia is being punished and also in short order we will be changing residence. You have stolen our daughter’s innocence and wracked our life.

Cappy’s arms and legs were splayed out, limp and despairing. His face was the color of ashes and there was a cloud of smoke around his head. I sat down beside him on a cardboard box. There was nothing to say about anything at all. I put my head in my hands.

Yeah, said Cappy wildly. Fuck yeah. Punish her? I bet they’re keeping her locked up until they move. So she can’t go over to the post office. Wrack their lives! I’ll wrack their lives? By loving their daughter with a true love?

Look at me, brother, he begged.

I did.

Look at me. He threw his hair back, tapped the tips of his fingers on his chest. Would I wreck her life? The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will. Our bodies, too. So fucking what? Every bit of what we did was made in heaven. The Creator is goodness, brother. In his mysterious mercy he gave me Zelia. The gift of our love—I can’t throw it back in the face of the Creator, can I?

No.

That’s what her parents are asking me to do. But I won’t do it. I will not throw our love back in God’s face. It will exist for all time whether or not her parents can see that. Nothing they do can get between us.

Okay.

Yeah, said Cappy. His hair flopped down again. He set fire to the letter with the burning coal of his cigarette. Watched it catch, flare, and burn to the tip of his fingers. He dropped the scrap and the flimsy films of burnt paper floated down around his feet.

I’m going home to get that bus money, said Cappy. And then I’m gassing up Randall’s car. I’ll come and get you at your house.

Where are we going?

I can’t sit still, Joe. I can’t stay here. And I know there will be no rest for me until I see her.

We left Zack and Angus drinking pop in Zack’s cousin’s car and went home. My place was empty. I filled a backpack with a change of clothes and all the money I had, which came to $78.00. I still had some from Sonja, and I’d never spent the cash Whitey paid me for the week I’d worked—he’d overpaid me, maybe to try and keep my mouth shut. I took a jacket. Because I was still waiting for Cappy, and because in spite of what I’d done I was still the kind of person who thought ahead and made lunch, I put together a dozen peanut butter pickle sandwiches. I ate one and drank some milk. He still did not come. I remembered how hard it was to start Randall’s car. Engage, I thought. Pearl followed me around. I went into my father’s office. I tried the desk drawer my father had been locking for a while now, and it caught, but he hadn’t quite turned the key all the way and I jiggled it open. In the drawer was a manila file folder. It was filled with greasy Xeroxes. There was the copy of a tribal enrollment form. On the form it said Mayla Wolfskin. She was listed as seventeen years old and the mother of a child named Tanya. Curtis W. Yeltow was listed as the father, just as Linda had said. I closed the file and put it back in the drawer. I managed to turn the lock with a paper clip so it would seem that the drawer had not been opened; what that mattered anyway, I don’t know. I was glad that I wouldn’t have to talk to Bjerke. I took a sheet of writing paper from a leather box. My father kept a cup of sharpened pencils on his desk. I took one and wrote my parents that I was going on a camping trip. They should not worry, I’d be with Cappy and I was sorry for the short notice. I said that we’d be gone for three or four days. I’d call them. I imagined writing: ask Bugger Pourier about his dream. But I didn’t. There was some noise outside. Pearl barked. It was Angus and Zack. They wanted to know why we’d ditched them and so I told them about the letter, and about how Cappy was going to get Randall’s car.

I’ve got something, Angus said.

He showed me an ID. It was a driver’s license, which his cousin had pretended to lose and got another one. He’d sold the ID to Angus although the picture didn’t look like him at all.

Don’t you think it looks like Cappy though? He could buy for us.

It looks like him enough, I said. Right about then Cappy drove up and we all got into the idling car. I sat in front and Zack and Angus took the back.

Where we going? asked Zack.

Montana, Cappy said.

The two in back laughed, but I looked out the window, at Pearl. She wouldn’t take her eyes off me.

Iknow there’s lots of world over and above Highway 5, but when you’re driving on it—four boys in one car and it’s so peaceful, so empty for mile after mile, when the radio stations cut out and there’s just static and the sound of your voices, and wind when you put your arm out to rest it on the hood—it seems you are balanced. Skimming along the rim of the universe. We had half a tank when we left home and we filled it up again twice before we got across the line to Plentywood. We dropped down there and edged along the bottom of Fort Peck to Wolf Point. Cappy turned the wheel over to me, and we sat there idling outside a liquor store while he bought a fifth and a case and another fifth. Zack had brought his guitar. He sang cry in your beer C&W, one after the next, making us laugh every time. And we kept going, the talk passing this way and that, turning funny and then ridiculous as Cappy made his plan to spring Zelia from her house at the return address in Helena—still far off.

Zack and Angus got nervous at a gas station and called home. That’s when Zack got his ear scorched off. He slunk back to the car, looked over at me, said, Oops! We ate the sandwiches. We ate beef jerky, spicy sausages, bags of chips, and cans of nuts from the gas stations. We guzzled water at a rest stop and the car died. We had to push it to a downhill slope, take it out of gear, and jump in while it rolled. The engine turned over and we war-whooped, high and fine. Zack and Angus passed out in back, leaning on each other and snoring. Cappy and I started talking and kept on driving west through the long dusk. The sun burned forever and stayed balanced on the horizon for an age, then flared red from below that dark line for another eternity. So it seemed that time stopped. We rolled effortlessly in a dream.