LaRose(84)

See? She whispered. I burned the chair.


Wishing Well

WISHINGWELLWISHING WELLWISHING WELLWEHYAHHEYWHENYAHHEY. Ojibwes have a song for everything. This was Romeo’s lock-picking song. He sang beneath his breath as he unlocked a hospital file cabinet with an unbent paper clip.

It is truly wonderful, he thinks, that such precious information is considered secure when protected by a lock so jiggly, and cheap-john enough to break. Or merely find a key to this generic lock if he so wishes. Or saw it off. But he has the time and inclination to pick this lock, which will make his entry invisible.

For ten quiet minutes Romeo toys with the innards of the lock, humming and whispering his lock-picking song until the tumblers line up and the mechanism yields.

Within the cabinet his secretarial finger-flipping produces the copy of a file it would be hard to obtain otherwise, the original probably residing in tribal police headquarters. From which zone he is barred except as an arrestee. Funny the trust that resides in him as a recovering alcoholic. Everybody loves that recovery shit, he thinks, as he slides out the paper he needs and replaces the file just in case anybody thinks to look for it although nobody ever will, as this was considered an open-and-shut sort of thing, a tragic accident.

He puts the document into a flimsy black cloth bag, another freebie he’s cleaned up from the tribal security conference, where he witnessed tribal police officers using their Homeland Security grants to practice double-cuffing each other on the floor. The pack also holds ten sealed squares of expired noodles, the kind with pungent little foil skibs of flavoring. He’s also scored three blueberry yogurts from the staff fridge at the hospital. Romeo heads up to the Catholic day school to see about lunch leftovers—he has been lucky there. If he could find some protein source to complement the noodles, and perhaps a wilted carrot or two, he’d have a hearty soup. An onion would be a plus!

Romeo scores a flabby cucumber and some chicken cooked so dry it almost flakes, but the soup will soften it. And there is nothing wrong with boiled cucumber. Back home, he switches on his television and the hot plate. Feeling domestic, he rinses out his enameled tin saucepan in the bathroom sink. He opens three packets of noodles, douses them with water and flavoring, pares the cucumber into bits, cutting against his thumb. Behind him, CNN seems stuck on yellowcake.

Yellowcake, he sings.

Weyoheyoh weyoheyhoh

Yellowcake

Yellowcake

Make my sweet tooth ache.

Then, remembering all of the yellow cakes he’s devoured at funeral dinners and always with that chocolate frosting in tiny elevated swirls, he becomes nostalgic. Settling in before the television he meanders back to the times he went to visit Mrs. Peace so long ago and accepted squares of cake from the hands of little Emmaline. If he had ever declared his love to her once they were grown, would it have mattered? Would she have gone out with him, not Landreaux? Every year she moved farther above him, ever more out of his league. Not that he cared to be in any league, anymore, where women were concerned. My junk is monk, he thought. LOL. He’d learned LOL at work. In the olden days, there had been a chance. When he was considered smart. When there was cake passed on a little flowered plate from her hands to his hands. He can taste it, the melting scoop of vanilla soaking into the sweet loam of the slice. Like her dearness soaking into his porous heart. He’s not high, just living with that memory.

Not just to bring down Landreaux, he suddenly thinks, staring at his detective wall. But more. Maybe something true. I am not just a scabbed-over pariah. People should know.

The ramen hisses up, boiling over. Romeo busies himself rescuing his dinner. He gets his spoon ready, an old heavy metal cooking spoon from the government school. With a rag for a pot holder, he brings the pot of soup over and sets it upon a folded towel on the floor next to his chair. Waiting for his soup to cool, Romeo fixes his attention on the news. More yellowcake uranium powders. Italian what? Military Intelligence. What? Apparently Saddam has purchased Niger uranium powders, yellowcake uranium powders, which look like what they sound like, yellowcakey powders used for nuclear weapons. Then McCain comes on and Romeo puts the spoon back. McCain says that Saddam is a clear and present danger and that his pursuit to acquire weapons of mass destruction leads McCain to have very little doubt that Saddam would use them.

Romeo nods and vacuums in the noodles, along with these words. McCain has suffered and survived. McCain knows whereof he speaks. Romeo loves to say that name, so cowboy. McCain would never put the young people of American reasonlessly in harm’s way. Romeo upends the cooled pot, drinking the soup dregs.

The file he took such pains to steal remains in his tribal security conference bag. Just before settling into a concocted dream state, Romeo remembers. He pulls the bag over to his mattress and switches on the cockeyed lamp. He pulls out the paper and glances over the coroner’s report on the accident that occurred just about three years ago, on the reservation side of the boundary line only by a few dozen yards. His eyes cross. He’s barely following the letters. He knows anyway what’s in it, knows from the conversations he has pieced together on his bulletin board, knows just what happened, can see what happened, if he wants to, in his mind. But he doesn’t want to. Who could. He shoves away the document, the black bag, the responsibility that he has assumed. He shoves away the fact that his country sounds like war. Then suddenly, halfway into a dream, he gets it.

There is more than they dare say. More the carotid than the femoral, more than these tubes and cakes. Condoleezza, her eyes glitter when she says the word cavort as in cavort with terrorists. The image of Saddam cavorting when the Holy Towers were destroyed. They know something they won’t tell the public. Don’t want panic. McCain knows what it is. McCain must think the Towers were only the beginning. Behind all the flimsy bits of pretend truth there must be a real truth so terrible it would cause a stock market crash. But what if that truth is some kind of bubble truth? What if behind the truth, there is nothing but a heap of pride or money or just stuff?