Louise Erdrich - LaRose

Landreaux sat across the table and opened out the rest of the newspaper. The rustling it made caused him to notice his hands were lightly trembling.

Snow and Josette pushed through the door first. Willard and Hollis were hauling all of the gym bags. Everything scattered into piles at the door. The girls ran to LaRose and grabbed him, knelt by the kitchen chair dramatically weeping. The older boys slapped LaRose’s palm.

We saved your bunk for you, man, said Hollis.

Yeah, I tried to sleep there and he slammed me off onto the floor, said Coochy. It’s all yours now.

He’s sleeping here! Here in his own house! Josette moaned.

You knew that, said Snow.

LaRose smoothed their hair as they competition-wept.

Mii’iw, said Landreaux.

The sisters sniffed and looked redeemed, like a light had been restored inside of them. They were so happy they didn’t know how to show it without seeming fake. The girls sat down to do the carrots.

You’re cutting too fat.

No, I’m not. Look at the potatoes.

Proportion, Josette.

Don’t be oblique.

They had acquired a list of SAT words from a teacher who liked them both. Most teachers liked them because they studied. They were relieved to finish out their volleyball season. The games were an hour, two hours away. They took all night. So did Hollis’s and Willard’s basketball games. Landreaux and Emmaline took turns driving them because the bus added on the hours. Besides, they made their children study in the car in the backseat with a flashlight. How did they know to do this? They had learned from Emmaline’s mother. This sort of devotion was not from Landreaux’s side. His parents had been alcoholics with short lives.

ROMEO PUYAT REALLY did have a job — in fact, several jobs. His intermittent sub-assistant maintenance position at the tribal college kept his bottom-feeder jobs viable. He did a lot of reading at the tribal college between carpet shampoos and window polishes. He was hoping to move to another venue, like the tribal hospital, but people kept those jobs forever. Anyway, his official job fed his second jobs the way a big fish feeds a school of little fish — with waste and wasted food.

Romeo’s second jobs, though unofficial, maybe even volunteer, were lucrative and multi-aspected. For one thing, he picked up and disposed of the hazardous waste usually contained in medication bottles and prescribed by the Indian Health Service doctors. Nobody had hired or invited him to do this — but it had become a part of his way of life. When cleaning at his venue, he went to great lengths to hang around each classroom as long as possible in order to check for medications that might have mistakenly been left in handbags. On a volunteer basis, he even removed the hazardous waste that accumulated outside the other buildings, especially when he visited the hospital. To the casual eye it might look as if he was trawling for cigarette butts. But although it was a fact that he could rely on finding a lightly smoked cigarette outside certain doorways (tossed out in haste from the smoke-free environment), his mission was more far-reaching. Part of his job was, in fact, more in the line of clandestine work. Someone at the bar, maybe it was the priest, had even referred to Romeo once as the reservation’s information specialist. He thought that true. He was a spy, but a freelancer. Nobody ran him, he ran his one-man operation for his own benefit.

He had his methods. He came by lots of important information by busying himself around the tribal college coffeepot, or by standing outside the doors of teacher coffee rooms, or just sitting in the social areas acting invisible. On a rare occasion or two, he had been ignored as he weeded the grassy scarp in the shadow of the on-call ambulance crew. They knew everything about every catastrophe that happened, things that never made it out into the public. Romeo had heard about deaths where a suicide was covered up so the corpse could be blessed and buried by the church. He’d found out about botched abortions and suspicious deaths of newborns that looked almost like SIDS. He knew how people overdosed, on what, and how hard the crew fought to bring them back. When it was time to let them go. All this information kicked around in his head. It was good to know these things. In fact, Romeo had decided that information, long of reach, devastating, and, as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power. So there was that.

Also, Romeo went through trash. Pharmacy trash was his specialty. The trash was usually shredded and the Dumpsters locked, but Romeo had a certain pharmacy employee who “belonged” to him as the result of information. Every few days he could spirit away a couple of bags and stuff them into the trunk of his car.

Romeo occupied a condemned disability apartment in the condemned tribal housing complex nicknamed Green Acres — built unfortunately over toxic landfill that leaked green gas. Romeo was immune to the noxious air that seeped up between the cracks in the linoleum. Mold, also, black or red, never bothered him. If smells got strong, he would lift new car fresheners from Whitey’s — mango was his favorite. His apartment decor was centered around a fake year-round Christmas tree. The foil tree was decorated with the mango car fresheners. His walls displayed photographs tacked into the softened drywall. There was a television, a mini-fridge, a boom box, a mattress, two grubby polyester sleeping bags, and a beautiful handmade diamond willow lamp with a broken shade like a tipped hat.

In the light from his lamp, on a captain’s chair torn from a wrecked van, Romeo went through the contents of the bags. All he could wish for was there on paper — discarded printouts, labels, prescription script, pharmacist’s notes — that his information-bought informant had failed to shred. Within these piles, he found what drugs everybody in the entire community was on and which, for their mighty highs, could be pilfered by close relatives. It was there that Romeo found out who was going to die and who would live, who was crazier than he was, or by omission, sane and blessed with health. He kept track of his calculations on a scratch pad — drug, dosage, refill dates, how the patient should take the medicine. Though never in any case in Romeo’s file did the doctor recommend that a patient crush to powder and inhale a single medication, that was often his preferred method of delivery.

Tonight, the words palliative care appeared again. He kept anything with those words in a special paper-clipped pile. Also discarded in the bag was a bonus feature. His favorite section — the tribal newspaper’s obituary page. He matched several enticing prescriptions to one of the names, then noted the funeral would be tomorrow.

At 9:45 the next morning, Romeo stopped at the grocery, invested in a pound of stew meat, and then drove to church. He parked at the edge of the lot next to a pickup with a gas cap that could be easily pried up with a screwdriver. He sat in his car until everyone had entered the church, then quickly siphoned into his own car more than enough gas to carry him to the home of the deceased and back again. It was six miles out, and he got there within fifteen minutes.

Romeo pulled up next to the house, went right up to the front door, knocked. The big outside dogs were barking wildly, but he threw down a few bits of meat for them to argue over. The little inside dogs barked in the house entry. Nobody else answered and it was a cheap key lockset from Walmart. He pried the worn bolt gently from the frame with his flat-head screwdriver, entered, threw down a few more pieces of stew meat. The dogs wagged their tails and followed him straight to the bedroom. The TV tray table beside the bed held a few amber plastic bottles, which he examined. He took one. There was a bedside table with a half-open drawer. Bingo. Three more bottles, one entirely full. In the bathroom, he went carefully through the medicine cabinet, examining each medication with a frown. He smiled at one and shook it, pocketed three more. No need to be greedy. It was 10:30 now. He fixed the lock so it wouldn’t fall off and left. And there was still half a pound of meat in his pocket.