Louise Erdrich - LaRose

Romeo nods and vacuums in the noodles, along with these words. McCain has suffered and survived. McCain knows whereof he speaks. Romeo loves to say that name, so cowboy. McCain would never put the young people of American reasonlessly in harm’s way. Romeo upends the cooled pot, drinking the soup dregs.

The file he took such pains to steal remains in his tribal security conference bag. Just before settling into a concocted dream state, Romeo remembers. He pulls the bag over to his mattress and switches on the cockeyed lamp. He pulls out the paper and glances over the coroner’s report on the accident that occurred just about three years ago, on the reservation side of the boundary line only by a few dozen yards. His eyes cross. He’s barely following the letters. He knows anyway what’s in it, knows from the conversations he has pieced together on his bulletin board, knows just what happened, can see what happened, if he wants to, in his mind. But he doesn’t want to. Who could. He shoves away the document, the black bag, the responsibility that he has assumed. He shoves away the fact that his country sounds like war. Then suddenly, halfway into a dream, he gets it.

There is more than they dare say. More the carotid than the femoral, more than these tubes and cakes. Condoleezza, her eyes glitter when she says the word cavort as in cavort with terrorists. The image of Saddam cavorting when the Holy Towers were destroyed. They know something they won’t tell the public. Don’t want panic. McCain knows what it is. McCain must think the Towers were only the beginning. Behind all the flimsy bits of pretend truth there must be a real truth so terrible it would cause a stock market crash. But what if that truth is some kind of bubble truth? What if behind the truth, there is nothing but a heap of pride or money or just stuff?

Romeo has seen the havoc that occurs when commodities of all sorts are going bad and people need to use them fast — in cafeteria the strange amount of celery, the overflow of tapioca, in clinic the medications, so useful but of fragile potency past a certain month. What if.

What if there is a use-by date on a heap of war stuff?

The Breaks

IN HIS SINGLE bed with his head resting on one hard polyester-fill pillow, Father Travis tries to sleep. Under a woolen Pendleton, a flashy turquoise Chief Joseph blanket he was given by the Iron family when he blessed the vows of Landreaux and Emmaline, he gives up. He opens his eyes and stares into a soft-sifting darkness that seems to rise and fall in the room.

No trappings of authority, no special hotline to God, he tries to pray. He has been through so many definitions of his God now that he has to scroll around to find one to address. First there was fervent protector of his childhood, the God of kindliness. Then there was a blank space where he did not think of God and trained his body to act in the service of his country. God resumed as the unknowable exacting force that allowed a bomb to take his friends’ lives but gave a thin boy the power to rescue Travis. Afterward, there was the God who spoke one night about fractured mercy, waters of being, incline of radiance. He was invited to a conference attended by immortals, who spoke to him and dressed his arms with colored ribbons. Scarlet and blue whizzed and yellows ruptured, spilling brilliance through the room. That was pain in West Germany. But he was somewhere else, from time to time, watching the familiar body on the white sheets. Oh, you should have been a priest. He was sure he’d heard those words from the mouth of God, in the hospital, but later he realized that his mother might have said this as she prayed beside him before he came back alive, before he entered a drabber, more monotonous daily agony.

Was there a Polish God? The God of sausage and pierogi. A mystical, shrewd, earth-dwelling God who always took things hard. His parents’ God, the one they’d left him with not long after he was ordained. Having seen him back into his life, they’d felt that it was all right to leave, he’d guessed, because bam bam, a stroke, a fatal disease, and they were out of existence.

You should stop making Gods up, imagining them as a human would imagine a God, he says to himself, again. Address your prayers to the nothingness, the nonfigurative, abstract, indifferent power, the ever-so-useful higher power. Talk to the unknowable. The ineffable author of all forms. Father Travis finally dozes thinking of all the trees, all the birds, all the mountains, all the rivers, all the seas, the love, all the goodness, all the apple blossoms falling on the wind, then the dust of the world swirling up and falling, the stillness on the waters before it all began.

Father Travis bolts up, slumps over, head in hands.

It is over, he thinks.

In the morning, there will be a call from the Most Reverend Florian Soreno, His Excellency, Bishop Soreno, who will tell Father Travis what he already knows.

THE FEARSOME FOUR still meet, only now they really are fearsome. They get together in Tyler’s garage. They have another electric guitar to compete with the old one. Their noise is louder and they smoke weed, drink beer, share cigarettes, talk. They have girlfriends, but only Buggy’s lets him do everything he wants. He tells them all about it, and the other boys save his stories in their heads. They have not forgotten Maggie, but it’s different with her. She beat on them! Back then, they respected her. Now when they think about it, they’d like to kind of dominate her. Show her. They got big and she stayed spindly. The way it goes. But then, she’s unpredictable and quick. Her nut kicks now living on in legend. Buggy had to get some outpatient surgery. His parents considered sending the doctor bills to Peter and Nola Ravich. But Buggy didn’t want everyone to know. Also, Maggie’s family is now associated with those Irons from the reservation. Maggie’s got her danger girl Indian sisters, Josette and Snow. The Fearsome Four are much aware. Yes, those girls go to another school but they could come right over with a posse, ambush their asses, no problem and there’s those older brothers, Coochy and the one who worked in construction, Hollis — ripped dudes. Bummer though it is, Maggie is off-limits unless one of them gets ridiculously high. They hardly even talk about her, except for sometimes, in low voices, wondering if she ever told anyone about what they did.

It didn’t go too far, anyway.

Nothin’ nothin’ really. We never crossed, you know, a line there.

For sure. No line was crossed. Was it?

Dude, we hardly touched her. She just got mad for no real fucken reason!

Will you guys get off it? That was so long ago. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares.

Anyway, says Buggy, she wanted it and she still wants it.

The other boys are silent, taking in this line of reasoning. They all nod, except Brad, who stares off into the air like he hasn’t heard them. Though he has for sure heard what they said, he is Christian, and that doesn’t sound right at all.

Block. Punch. Side kick. Knife-hand. Block. PunchPunch. Snap kick. Block. Block. Poor kid, thinks Emmaline, LaRose’s got Landreaux’s exact nose, okay on an adult but too big for a boy’s face. Yet he is a handsome kid. And those eyelashes. Landreaux’s, again wasted. Expressive brows. His sisters shouldn’t put makeup on him, but they do. A year’s growth and he won’t let them. Maybe Emmaline should stop them now.

Father Travis stands beside her. She rises from her chair.

He wasn’t going to speak of it. He was going to make a simple announcement. Next Sunday Mass. Or the Sunday after. But—

I’m being transferred.