LaRose(28)

It will be all right. We will get old here together after all.

This was Landreaux’s thought the first time Peter dropped off LaRose. They would be together through spring and summer into the dog days, when the house heated through, and the old logs deep inside gave off the earthen scent of loam.

Landreaux opened the door and LaRose ran straight past him, clutching his stuffed creature, shouting for his mom. Landreaux turned back to wave good-bye, but Peter had quickly swung back out onto the road. Landreaux closed the aluminum storm door and then pushed the wooden door shut behind it. To see LaRose and Emmaline fly together would hurt, so he bent over by the mud rug and took a long time pairing up the scattered shoes and setting them in lines. When he finally came to them, his long arms dangling, they were talking about how to use the potato peeler.

LaRose sat down at the table by the window, in feeble winter sunlight. The edges of the storm window were thick with frost. Steam had frozen in gray fuzz upon the sides and sills. He peeled the potato skin away from himself, bit by skimpy bit, onto a plastic plate. Emmaline shook chunks of meat in a bag with flour, then pinched up each chunk and dropped it carefully into hot grease. The cast-iron skillet was smooth and light from fifty years of hard use. Her mother had left it.

Landreaux sat across the table and opened out the rest of the newspaper. The rustling it made caused him to notice his hands were lightly trembling.

Snow and Josette pushed through the door first. Willard and Hollis were hauling all of the gym bags. Everything scattered into piles at the door. The girls ran to LaRose and grabbed him, knelt by the kitchen chair dramatically weeping. The older boys slapped LaRose’s palm.

We saved your bunk for you, man, said Hollis.

Yeah, I tried to sleep there and he slammed me off onto the floor, said Coochy. It’s all yours now.

He’s sleeping here! Here in his own house! Josette moaned.

You knew that, said Snow.

LaRose smoothed their hair as they competition-wept.

Mii’iw, said Landreaux.

The sisters sniffed and looked redeemed, like a light had been restored inside of them. They were so happy they didn’t know how to show it without seeming fake. The girls sat down to do the carrots.

You’re cutting too fat.

No, I’m not. Look at the potatoes.

Proportion, Josette.

Don’t be oblique.

They had acquired a list of SAT words from a teacher who liked them both. Most teachers liked them because they studied. They were relieved to finish out their volleyball season. The games were an hour, two hours away. They took all night. So did Hollis’s and Willard’s basketball games. Landreaux and Emmaline took turns driving them because the bus added on the hours. Besides, they made their children study in the car in the backseat with a flashlight. How did they know to do this? They had learned from Emmaline’s mother. This sort of devotion was not from Landreaux’s side. His parents had been alcoholics with short lives.



ROMEO PUYAT REALLY did have a job—in fact, several jobs. His intermittent sub-assistant maintenance position at the tribal college kept his bottom-feeder jobs viable. He did a lot of reading at the tribal college between carpet shampoos and window polishes. He was hoping to move to another venue, like the tribal hospital, but people kept those jobs forever. Anyway, his official job fed his second jobs the way a big fish feeds a school of little fish—with waste and wasted food.

Romeo’s second jobs, though unofficial, maybe even volunteer, were lucrative and multi-aspected. For one thing, he picked up and disposed of the hazardous waste usually contained in medication bottles and prescribed by the Indian Health Service doctors. Nobody had hired or invited him to do this—but it had become a part of his way of life. When cleaning at his venue, he went to great lengths to hang around each classroom as long as possible in order to check for medications that might have mistakenly been left in handbags. On a volunteer basis, he even removed the hazardous waste that accumulated outside the other buildings, especially when he visited the hospital. To the casual eye it might look as if he was trawling for cigarette butts. But although it was a fact that he could rely on finding a lightly smoked cigarette outside certain doorways (tossed out in haste from the smoke-free environment), his mission was more far-reaching. Part of his job was, in fact, more in the line of clandestine work. Someone at the bar, maybe it was the priest, had even referred to Romeo once as the reservation’s information specialist. He thought that true. He was a spy, but a freelancer. Nobody ran him, he ran his one-man operation for his own benefit.

He had his methods. He came by lots of important information by busying himself around the tribal college coffeepot, or by standing outside the doors of teacher coffee rooms, or just sitting in the social areas acting invisible. On a rare occasion or two, he had been ignored as he weeded the grassy scarp in the shadow of the on-call ambulance crew. They knew everything about every catastrophe that happened, things that never made it out into the public. Romeo had heard about deaths where a suicide was covered up so the corpse could be blessed and buried by the church. He’d found out about botched abortions and suspicious deaths of newborns that looked almost like SIDS. He knew how people overdosed, on what, and how hard the crew fought to bring them back. When it was time to let them go. All this information kicked around in his head. It was good to know these things. In fact, Romeo had decided that information, long of reach, devastating, and, as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power. So there was that.