Louise Erdrich - LaRose

Like you always do! Josette and Snow, a team again, jumped up and rushed him. You’re so predictable. Why can’t you bust loose? Drink tea? Read a comic! C’mon, Daddy, be creative!

They knew they could make him laugh, and when he did they attacked him, jumping on him, pretending to fling him on the floor. He fake fell, cowered in a dramatic I-give-up, hands in the air.

Mercy! He begs for mercy! Show him no mercy, growled Snow and began to fake punch him so he fake reeled back, holding his stomach, laughing until the girls left him on the floor.

Okay, Daddy, try to pull yourself together. Go do your wander. Or here’s a newspaper full of want ads. Or boring news. Just don’t TELL us about every boring thing that happens in the tristate area. We’ll go make you that weak coffee you like to guzzle. We’re gonna cook, too. We got some meatball meat. Noodles. Mushroom soup. You’ll flip.

Landreaux sat back in his chair. His back ached from lifting Ottie, rolling, bathing, seating Ottie. Then it didn’t ache. The pain left. His heart rate slowed. He didn’t mind anything now. This was the first time in a long time he’d goofed off, let the girls wrestle him down. He felt lighter, almost happy, and he didn’t need the other pill, but after Snow brought him a cup of coffee, he felt his fingers tease it from his pocket. Then it slipped from his fingers, onto the floor. Some better person tried to crush it with his heel. But the heel was in a sock and the pill was coated with a hardening agent, which resisted until Landreaux walked over to the entry, got his boot, and hammered the thing to powder. Even then, on the vinyl tiling, there was a perfect little patch of whiteness, which, if he went down in a yoga crouch, nose to the floor, he could inhale. But how would that look to his girls, ass in the air? He sat down again and swirled his foot around on the powder until it was absorbed into the floor so that the desperate man would have to put his nose to the ball of the foot of the sock and sniff the powder out with mighty whiffs and he was safe, yes safe, because Landreaux had taken this process down too far a level even for himself.

ONE DAY LAROSE closed in. He had written down the last names of the Fearsomes and narrowed down their probable locations from a telephone book. He lied again, got a ride from Peter, who dropped him off in Pluto to visit a friend whom LaRose ditched after an hour. The town was small, some blocks now bulldozed clear of houses that had collapsed. Empty. It wasn’t hard to find the various houses after all, but he was looking for the one with the garage that Maggie had once described. When he saw the Veddars’ garage, and looked in the window, he knew that was the place. He walked in the side door. Nobody was there, so he decided to wait. He fell asleep on the broken couch. When he opened his eyes, it was Tyler shaking him.

LaRose lets his punch fly — he’s been dreaming of it.

Ow! Tyler steps back, puzzled, rubbing his jaw. Why’d you do that?

LaRose leaps up on the couch. They are all there! He channels Maggie’s claw hand moves, hears Father Travis’s shout in class: Loud kiap! Loud kiap. To strike fear into the enemy.

LaRose gives his choking war cry. Kiap! Then another, more confident. Ready stance! Heart rammed in his throat, pulses thudding.

Why’d you do that? Tyler turns to the others. He socked me!

For Maggie!

Buggy has snapped a beer open. Maggie! Hatred warps his face. He’s the meanest. Brad Morrissey is the biggest, but he isn’t mean at all anymore, except in football. He has certain codes of honor now, because of Jesus and football. He only kills people in football. And Curtains is just confused.

What’s your name, little kid?

LaRose launches himself onto Curtains’s back, climbs his shirt, tries a choke hold.

Get him off me!

Accidentally, but on purpose, Buggy slaps LaRose so hard that he flies off Curtains and lands on his back. When LaRose hits the floor with a violent smack, he bounces out of his body. His lungs squeeze shut. He is hovering above, looking down at himself in wonder.

Brad is bending over LaRose, concerned. Why’d you do that, Buggy? He’s, like, not breathing.

LaRose hovers, watching to see if he’ll take a breath. Freedom, buoyancy, repose. Oh yes, and take that breath before Brad gives him mouth-to-mouth. As soon as he fills his lungs, LaRose is sucked back into his body with a gentle thhhhpppp. He lies still until he’s sure he’s intact. He stands up, dusts off his pants, picks up his backpack, and leaves. He means to walk home, but Brad Morrissey insists on giving him a ride. They say not one word until the Ravich driveway.

The way you defended your sister was awesome, says Brad.

LaRose turns and knife-hands Brad on the nose, drawing blood. Then he gets out of the car.

You should go out for football someday, calls Brad as he pulls out, mopping at his face. LaRose walks into the house, up the stairs to his room. He needs to be alone. Something has happened.

THERE ARE FIVE LaRoses. First the LaRose who poisoned Mackinnon, went to mission school, married Wolfred, taught her children the shape of the world, and traveled that world as a set of stolen bones. Second, her daughter LaRose, who went to Carlisle. This LaRose got tuberculosis like her own mother, and like the first LaRose fought it off again and again. Lived long enough to become the mother of the third LaRose, who went to Fort Totten and bore the fourth LaRose, who eventually became the mother of Emmaline, the teacher of Romeo and Landreaux. The fourth LaRose also became the grandmother of the last LaRose, who was given to the Ravich family by his parents in exchange for a son accidentally killed.

In all of these LaRoses there was a tendency to fly above the earth. They could fly for hours when the right songs were drummed and sung to support them. Those songs are now waiting in the leaves, half lost, but the drumming of the water drum will never be lost. This ability to fly went back to the first LaRose, whose mother taught her to do it when her name was still Mirage, and who had learned this from her father, a jiisikid conjurer, who’d flung his spirit all the way around the world in 1798 and come back to tell his astonished drummers that it was no use, white people covered the earth like lice.

Old Story 3

WHAT TASTES SO good? This was the man’s wife asking.

The blood of your husband, the snake. I have made him into broth, said the husband.

The woman was furious and ran to the tree where her snake lived. She knocked three times, but it did not emerge and she knew it was killed. While she was gone, her husband plunged the two little boys into the ground, for safety.

That doesn’t sound very safe, said LaRose.

This time Ignatia didn’t answer, just kept on with the story.

When the woman ran back, her husband cut off her head. Then he rose into the air to flee away into the sky.

How could he do that? asked LaRose.

In those olden old days, said Ignatia, remember, before this earth existed, those people had all kinds of power. They could talk to anything and it would answer.

I mean how could he cut off her head, said LaRose.

But Ignatia had resolved to ignore all questions.

After a while, said Ignatia, the woman’s head opened its eyes.

Scary, said LaRose, with respect.

The head asked the dish where her children were. She asked all of the belongings in the lodge, but they would not tell. At last a stone did tell her that her husband had sunk the children into the earth, and that now they were fleeing underground. The stone said that he had given them four things — power to make a river, fire, a mountain, a forest of thorns.