Louise Erdrich - LaRose

What’s wrong with him? asked Landreaux, touching the trussed bag gently.

We foun him like this.

The woman was extremely drunk. She tried to pat Romeo’s hair but kept missing his head.

We didn’t know what to do so we tied im in the bag. He says his arm and leg. Landreaux pulled the bag cautiously down Romeo’s leg. There was no blood, but the leg looked sickeningly wrong, even in his pants. And his arm was also crooked. His shoes were gone.

Let’s bring him to the doctor, said Landreaux, unnerved.

But Romeo’s head lurched up and he shrieked. No, no, no, no! Landreaux crab-scrabbled backward.

You were right. She’s here!

Romeo ground his teeth, eyes mystically flashing.

She come after us. Now I seen her.

Who?

Bowl Head, man, hissed Romeo.

See? The shaggy woman had also stepped back, impressed. What ya gonna do? She joggled the whiskey bottle.

Sonny knows where to get some more. We jus keep him here, loaded for the pain, eh? Until he’s better. We don want cops poke aroun here.

Landreaux crawled close to Romeo, touched his gray face. Romeo’s skin was cold, wet, and hard as rock. Landreaux waited, watched until he took a breath, then another. Landreaux’s eyes burned — he knew very well that Romeo had tried to save him. The sudden shame of having caused his friend’s injuries was unbearable.

I’m gonna find a way to haul you to the hospital. Wait here, he said, and ran off, his friend’s pain swelling his heart.

Landreaux bolted up the embankment. He stopped where they had fallen, and snatched Romeo’s shoes from weeds. Then he sprinted across the bridge in a panic. He slowed down, took the money from the inner soles of Romeo’s shoes, put the bills in his own shoes. He began to wander the neighborhoods they knew. He walked for hours, searching for a cop. He became so weary that he didn’t see the police car pull ahead of his path, or the officer who emerged, until he was close enough to be grabbed by a man who knew how to grab. Landreaux could feel that. It was reassuring that he could not get away, and Landreaux relaxed. He began to talk. He told the officer all about Romeo and the bums’ camp and how he needed help, how his friend looked dead.

The policeman put Landreaux carefully into the backseat of the car, which was hard plastic with a heavy mesh barrier. Someday there would be Plexiglas and Landreaux would know that too. There was a radio with a handheld microphone. The police used it, asked questions, relayed the information. Then they drove back across the river. An ambulance pulled up, and then another police car. Landreaux sat in the squad car while the others beat their way down the embankment. After some time passed the police came back.

They bugged out, said one officer.

Landreaux scrambled out of the car and sprinted into the brush, wormed through the loose links of a fence, dodged down an alley, across a street, and was caught trying to cross a parking lot. The officer tried to calm him.

You got to find him!

Landreaux yelled, blubbered, moaned, and finally fell silent. They drove him to the precinct headquarters and stuck him in a chair with a glass of water and a sandwich. He sat there for a day, then another half day. But even though he was tired of waiting, he scrambled up when the original Bowl Head walked into the station. His hair prickled up the back of his neck and his stomach tried to puke up the sandwich. He knew he had been right. Bowl Head was more than she appeared to be, even supernatural.

Much later on, when Landreaux first got high behind the water tower, he saw again that he was right, that she was the spirit of the boarding schools. She meant well and her intentions were to help him be a good boy, but a white boy.

When Landreaux begged the police for pity, she said that all the runaways acted like this. She signed some papers. A policeman walked him to the car, and he saw that Pits was riding in the passenger’s seat. The policeman put Landreaux in the backseat of the car and told him that he’d be all right now. Landreaux sat petrified, couldn’t even eat the lunch that Bowl Head bought him at a restaurant, though she urged him to and said he looked thin.

When they were almost halfway home, Pits said something and Bowl Head pulled the car over. Pits opened the back door and yanked Landreaux out, shoved him down the ditch and up the other side to a riffle of trees.

Go, he said.

Landreaux did not dare move. He heard Pits pull down his zipper. A moment later hot piss spattered the back of Landreaux’s pants.

That’s for losing Romeo; he was a good kid, said Pits.

Landreaux bolted away, down the ditch, back to the car. After they’d been driving for a while, Pits said something in a low voice to Bowl Head. She shook her springy white hair no, that he should not say what he said anyway.

Pew! Landreaux’s a pee boy now!

The emergency-room doctor at Hennepin County Medical Center thought that Romeo’s arm could be pinned together, but the leg had to come off. He stabilized Romeo and sent him to surgery. The surgeon there, Dr. Meyer Buell, had studied infectious diseases and was more conservative when it came to legs. He found out that Romeo was an American Indian. He knew that Romeo was descended of the one Indian in ten who had preternatural immunities, self-healing abilities, and had survived a thousand plagues.

I believe in this boy, he declared. Even though he is the scrawniest, stinkingest, maybe the ugliest kid I’ve ever seen, and in the worst shape, he is from a long line of survivors. He has the soul of a rat.

This was not an insult. Meyer knew rats, medical and feral. As a boy, he had been shipped from Poland to relatives here, right after the war. He respected rats. He admired their cunning will.

This will be a long operation, he said to his nurses as they helped him prepare. I will save this sad leg.

Every other morning for two months, Romeo waited for the all-seeing, stirringly kind brown eyes of Dr. Buell. He would enter the room, pause, and say with a slight accent, How goes the sad leg today? With his immaculate hands, his knowing hands, Dr. Buell unbandaged and peered at, even smelled the parts of Romeo’s arm and leg he could examine outside the cast.

One side of you will be weak as a baby when the cast comes off.

Everything hurts, it hurts so bad, said Romeo. Where are my shoes?

Don’t worry about your shoes, said Dr. Buell, for the hundredth time, in the kindest way possible.

He did not give Romeo pills anywhere near as powerful as he had known. It would be years before Romeo again tasted of the substances fed to him by the shaggy woman, but when he did, he felt reunited with the only mercy in this world.

IT WAS ANCIENT and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too. Sometimes it landed in a jailhouse of human tissue, walled off from the nourishing fronds of the body. Sometimes it bolted, ran free, tunneled through bones, or elaborated lungs into fancy lace. Sometimes it could go anywhere. Sometimes it came to nothing. Sometimes it made a home in a family, or commenced its restless touring in a school where children slept side by side.

One night after prayer at the mission school, where the first LaRose, the Flower, slept with other girls in rows, in a room coldly bitter except for their plumes of breath, tuberculosis flew suddenly from between a thin girl’s parted lips. In the icy wind that creaked through a bent window sash it drifted over Alice Anakwad. Hovered over her sister Mary. It dipped and spun toward the sloping bump of LaRose under a woolen blanket, but the current of air dropped it suddenly. The old being perished on the iron railing of her bed. Then a sister being tumbled explosively forward in a droplet of Alice’s cough, vaulted over the railing of LaRose’s bed, swooned downward in the intake of her breath.