LaRose(104)

Yes.

Don’t you love that word? I fit these connections to other connections until a huger connection emerged.

What are you talking about? Elide doesn’t mean that. It means erase.

Or slur together!

Yes, like when you’re drunk, slurring, erasing part of your word.

Well, says Romeo, maybe. Erased the meanings between the salient points. Could have.

And then what?

And then, and then, well. Peter Ravich was there in the Alco parking lot, okay?

Romeo searches his hands, polishes his wrist, and tells Father Travis every detail of what he’d told Peter Ravich. He is still talking when Father Travis gets up. Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his own life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down off his face. He stands to follow Father Travis, still talking. Climbs upstairs and through the center aisle of the church, still talking, too stunned at himself to genuflect. Steps out the front door of the church.

From there, he can see down the hill into the marrow of the reservation town. High and mentally blasted as he is, he sees into each heart. Pain is dotted all around, glowing from the deep chest wells of his people. To the west the hearts of the dead still pulse, burning soft and green in their caskets. They stream out pale light from the earth. And to the south there are the buffalo that the tribe has bought for tourism purposes. A darkly gathered congregation. Their hearts also on fire with the dreadful message of their extinction. Their ghostly gathering now. Like us, a symbol of resistance, thinks Romeo. Like us, now rambling around in a little pen of hay getting fat. Like us, their hearts visible as lamps in the dust. To the east, also, the holy dawn of all the earth, every morning of every day, the promise and the weariness. He is so tired, Romeo. Because of course Peter will kill Landreaux. He saw this, has always known it. He doesn’t want to look north because he realizes he’s thought in the counterclockwise fashion that belongs only to the spirit world, where, it appears to him now, he belongs. His place of rest.

So thoroughly relieved and convinced is Romeo in that instant, and so fully does it seize him, the idea of his death, that he casts himself violently headlong down the twenty cement church steps, to the very base.



FATHER TRAVIS DROVE the parish outing van along the BIA road across to County 27 and pulled into the Ravich driveway. Landreaux’s Corolla was parked to one side of the drive, and Peter’s pickup was gone. Nola came out the front door and stood on the fussy little stone pathway to the drive, hands on her hips, full makeup, brightly frosted hair, immaculate pale outfit. She held his gaze pleasantly. As if she’d never seen him before.

Hello? Can I help you?

Is Peter home?

No.

I need to speak to him right away.

Nola gave him a suspicious flounce, and called Maggie. She came out, also smartly dressed.

What’s wrong?

Maggie could tell immediately that everything was not all right. Not all right again. And she had tried so hard with the family photograph! But clearly, something had happened with her dad. He’d acted weird the whole way back. And now the old Vin Diesel priest.

Can you tell me where your dad went?

I’ll look around, she said to Father Travis. Just wait.

Maggie walked through the house with her radar on. Her mother kept everything so exactly in its exact place that Maggie could always feel, before she even saw, what was different about a room.

Maggie came back outside.

He took his best deer rifle.

Thank you, said Father Travis.



WAYLON DROVE UP just after Father Travis left, and Maggie turned off her radar, right there in the driveway, where he met her. She had asked him over to help her work in the cornfield. Peter had plowed last year’s stubble into the field, but there were already weeds up in the rows. She went inside, and changed into work clothes, put on SP 30 and came out. Together, they walked to the field. It was warm. They each had a hoe they’d keep sharp using the files stuck in the back pockets of their jeans. Maggie’s were short cutoffs. She was a faster or more indifferent weed killer, so she got ahead of Waylon right away. He left a few pickers in the black dirt and stumbled after her. Maggie’s white shirt was tied off at her belly. Her foal’s legs shot down into thick socks, heavy tie boots. A battered straw cowboy hat shaded her face. Her lips were moving to some song in her head. Both of them had heavy brown cotton gloves in their back pockets but they swung their hoes bare-handed. The scent of dry crushed plants, torn dirt, piercing and pure, followed them over the earth. Waylon was proud of his shoes—Jordans—which he shouldn’t have been wearing in the field. His dad had bought them and didn’t have the money. He’d had to sign something to get them—but he wanted people to know that Waylon’s family could afford them. Fine dirt was sifting into the shoes and his sweating feet turned the dust to paste. He kept on swinging the hoe, slicing off pickers, shuffling along behind Maggie in his pasty shoes. One moment he was thinking about washing the shoes out later with a hose, or maybe a wet cloth, and if he would ruin them. The next moment everything changed.

Maggie’s white shirt is slung off. She is chopping weeds in just her bra—sky-colored cups holding two small creamy scoops. She is pale all over because of the sunblock slathering that went on before an incident of possible sun exposure. Her skin is marless. Not a freckle, a fleck of mole, or even a blemish. Only the blue dot on her shoulder. Which Waylon sees when she turns away. That dot. He knows what it is. She told him. And his heart is pierced as with the needle-sharp pencil. He puts his hand to his chest, takes his hand off, even looks at his fingers, but there’s no blood. Just her, obliviously swaying with her hoe, occasionally leaning forward to viciously whack a deep-rooted thistle.