LaRose(34)

BIINDIGEG!

Here’s my boy!

The apartment was filled with the friends of Mrs. Peace, all excited to see LaRose. He was a favorite.

Here’s the boy who likes us, said Sam Eagleboy. The boy who wants the stories. You raised this boy good, Emmaline.

Sam was a thin man with beautiful upswept lines around his eyes and mouth, as if he was smiling even when he was serious. There was nothing wrong with him except he was old. He wore a brown checkered shirt, neatly tucked. An agate bolo tie, jeans held up by a belt of cracked amber leather. On his slim feet, running shoes. Sam put in miles walking the halls and grounds. Malvern Sangrait, a mean little washtub of a woman, glowered from her permanently squinted left eye and gave a suspicious little huff. She leaned forward on her walker. She was wearing eyeliner and Meow Girl red lipstick.

So you got your boy back, she said to Emmaline. Her hair was pulled to one side with a purple plastic barrette. He’s skinny, ooh. They didn’t feed him good.

He’s just growing, said Emmaline. And she smiled. She was smiling all the time.

Mrs. Peace passed around paper plates and napkins, then frybread and chokecherry jelly. There was coffee. Powdered orange drink for LaRose. Everybody ate except Sam Eagleboy, who did not eat the whiteman’s food. Though he did drink coffee.

You could use some whiteman food, said Malvern. You’re all boney.

Boney where it counts, said Ignatia Thunder, who wheeled an oxygen tank nonchalantly around with her. She laughed so hard she had to dial up her nozzle.

So they say, said Malvern. I ain’t seen it.

Her face was sly.

Yet, said Ignatia. Turn on your bedside lamp. You never know.

Hey, said Emmaline. She nicked her head at LaRose.

Malvern touched her barrette and twitched her pouting red lips from side to side, glancing at Ignatia. She raised her thatchy gray eyebrows. They didn’t match her blue-black hair. She ate some bread in tiny bites, drank some coffee. Sam spoke to LaRose in Ojibwe. He was teaching him words for the plates and dishes. He told how to make a spirit dish and how the spirits appreciated when a person noticed them. How the spirits were there in things, all things, and would talk with the Ojibwe. How they came in dreams, and also in the ordinary world, and how LaRose should tell his mom when he encountered them. He pursed his lips toward Emmaline.

Malvern jutted her lower lip out and stared at Sam, then shook her head and popped her eyes at Ignatia.

Oh, he talks a good one, she said, sure enough. Then he goes on his night prowls. Tapping on the ladies’ doors.

Let him be, laughed Ignatia. He can’t do no harm where we can watch him. Let him talk to this here gwiiwisens. This boy should get teachings. He wants to learn. He wants the story. Besides that, we know Sam’s only got an eye for you.

Pah, said Malvern. You think?



FATHER TRAVIS COULD not exhaust himself, although he drove his body with unrelenting ardor along the outdoor fitness trail. The push-up station, poles bolted between the short logs, was unsatisfactory. He’d left the popple bark on the poles because it helped him grip. That wasn’t it. The irritating fact was the ground was uneven or the pieces of log weren’t exactly the same size—though he’d carefully measured. It was impossible to do a push-up correctly. He finally compromised by switching sides twice to work both arms the same. The instructions he’d lettered neatly on a board gave no hint of this solution.

He jogged the short distance to the next station, and had done two hundred sit-ups on the heavy rubber mat when he noticed that he was surrounded by used condoms. They drooped among the leaves and lay shriveling into the weeds or mowed to shreds. Kids. They’d gum up the mowing machine! He did a hundred more sit-ups, fed by outrage, and when he calmed down felt ridiculous. No, condoms wouldn’t gum up a lawn mower. He proceeded to the chin-up bar. After the chin-up bar there was the step-up, which he did until his legs wobbled. He didn’t just stagger on, though, but did lunges until the madness of the jump-rope spot. He’d brought his rope so he could whirl in place, switching up, backwards, forward, until his lungs burned and then burned some more. How nice if he could sink an old-fashioned well pump right here! The sulphur-laden rez water containing all the minerals and iron a body needs. That water would be cold, and he’d find it sweet.

He loved it here. He loved his people. They were his people, weren’t they? They drove him nuts, but he was inspired by their generosity. And they laughed so much. He hadn’t known funny before. So with or without his savior, or his sanity, he wanted to stay. He had made another sit-up station, for reverse sit-ups, again with a decomposing rubber mat, but not decorated by a single condom. Well, it was too far into the bush. After the horror movies these kids watched they were all scared of the woods—Indians. Millennial Indians. Nobody had vandalized his outdoor heavy bag ’cause that was too far into the woods as well. He beat the wood ticks off the bag with a host of vicious side kicks. It had taken a world of groin pain to free that adhered scar tissue. But he could now lift his leg as high as his brain. Haha, God, he said when he walked with God. You saved me for a reason—so that I could develop my crazy showgirl kick.

Sometimes he didn’t feel the shift occur; he was just back there sliding from his sleeping bag, then flying. The sentries guarding the former office building where the Marines were barracked had been expecting a water truck. Instead a yellow Mercedes stake-bed truck sped straight past and the bomb it carried detonated in the lobby. The building went up into the air in pieces and then the pieces, with Marines in them, rearranged as they came down. Father Travis felt the dream flying, the down slamming, but not the slashing and tearing of his body. The black whirling energy became black crushing silence. Then the screaming started. It wasn’t until he tried to get to the others that he realized he couldn’t move. That’s when he started screaming too, not for help, but Get off me, because he understood that he was the meat in a steel and concrete sandwich and could feel the rubble shifting. Dust in. Dust out. Scream the dust out. Take a breath of dust. Scream again. Then voices. We got one. Get off that slab. He’s in there. We need a crane.