The Night Watchman(87)

That helped, and she was always able to go back to work, but the burning kept coming back. Zhaanat boiled down the tea and Patrice carried a small medicine bottle of it. Every day, during lunch, she bathed her eyes in the medicine. She did it in a women’s bathroom stall, so that nobody could see and tell on her. She was afraid that she might lose her job.





Words


The word used for ejaculation—baashkizige—is also used for shooting off a gun. The word used for condom—biinda’oojigan—means gun case. Millie entered these words into her notebook. Fascinating.





Vera


One afternoon, with Edith looking on, good old Harry knelt beside the couch with a ring. He asked her to marry him. She closed her eyes. She had just awakened but she was still tired. Before she could answer him she fell asleep again. Later, in the evening, he was on his knees again. This time, she let her eyes open. He looked like a way out of her mess. She took the ring and put it on her finger. Then she hid her face. He said he wouldn’t even kiss her. He said that there would be no hanky-panky for a long time. Never, she thought. A few nights later he stood in the doorway making with himself. The vibrations woke her up. The slickering sound.

“Holy Jesus,” she shouted, sitting up. “What the damn hell do you think you’re doing?”

Harry flipped the lights on. He was holding a bottle of milk. He’d been shaking the milk because the top was frozen. He couldn’t sleep and was going to heat it up. Did she want some?





LaBatte


No sooner had he stopped than it began to get around. Francis Boyd asked him on the hush-hush to get him a little coffee. Just a cup from the can. He’d use those grounds four times, he said. Lilia Snow asked for toilet paper. She was tired of the Sears catalog. It was scratching up her little peach. Junior Bizhiki wanted a glass beaker like she’d seen in her friend’s kitchen. “I don’t do that no more,” he said to her, alarmed. “I never did that anyway. I mean, what are you talking about?” Gordon Fleury said he would appreciate it if LaBatte could get him tools. Any kind of tools. LaBatte this time was outraged. He was insulted. He slammed the door of his ramshackle house, nearly busting it off. Well, you didn’t slam doors on this reservation. You didn’t slam doors in a person’s face. That got around. He got the nickname Slammer. Which wasn’t such a bad nickname. He took it with good grace. It was a better nickname than several others he had lived down. And a better nickname than Fingers or Pockets or Father Christmas or the other name he was afraid of getting, Jinx. He was in danger of getting that name because he used the word so much. But he used it because he knew what he knew. For instance, he knew that Pixie had a jinx on her. He could tell from her eyes.





New Year’s Soup




Oh, it was good. Filled your belly. Made you smile. Cured your hangover. Kept you moving in the cold. It was made with onions, balls of meat the Michifs called boulettes, potatoes peeled and boiled just right. You stirred in flour and got the broth. Pepper and salt. That’s all it was. Sometimes you just cut the meat up. That was good too. There wasn’t a way to go wrong, as long as it was hot. And you made bread if you had the flour, fried if you had the grease, in bannocks the Michifs called gullet, in little raised squares or beignets that people called bangs. It was food you could stretch way out. Zhaanat made it with bear meat. Cured the common cold. Cured the uncommon. Didn’t cure trachoma. You couldn’t put soup in your eye.

“You should go to the nurse,” Wood Mountain said. “Hey, I’ll take you into town. You can ride Daisy Chain and I’ll run beside you. I am still in training but my mother told me not to fight no more.”

“Do it,” said Zhaanat. “My medicine doesn’t fix this, just holds it off.”

Patrice rode into town on the tough old horse. It was a plodder and Wood Mountain ran half a mile out, ran back, walked beside her for a while, ran out front again. The hospital was made of brick. The waiting room was stark, the chairs hard. Patrice had been vaccinated against smallpox at school. Even Zhaanat had been vaccinated. “White-man diseases need white-man cures,” she said. But for all else, Patrice turned to Zhaanat’s medicines. This was the first time her mother’s cures hadn’t worked. She’d never seen the doctor or the nurse. Or waited in this ominous little room.

The nurse was thin and gray, hair pulled into a bun. She wore a long gray dress with a starched white collar, and had the bearing of a no-nonsense nun.

“What are you here for, young miss?” she said. Her voice was thin and dry. Patrice blinked at her.

The nurse asked Patrice to stand close to a bright lamp, told her to open her mouth and used a thin wooden stick to clamp down her tongue.

“You have good teeth,” she said.

She peeked into Patrice’s ears, took her pulse. At last she stared into Patrice’s eyes, focusing on one, then the other. Then she put her clean cool fingers below and above Patrice’s watering eyes. Up close the skin of the nurse’s face was fine as paper, creased in tiny lines, almost transparent. Even through her tears Patrice could see this. The nurse pulled down on the lower lids and up on the upper lids.

“Good we caught this in time. You might have gone blind,” she said.

She left Patrice sitting in the tiny room painted a peculiar green, the shelves holding glass jars full of cotton balls and thin wooden sticks. Blind! Blind! Patrice kept hearing what the nurse had said. When she returned, the nurse gave Patrice a small jar of medicinal ointment.