Perma red, p.17
Perma Red, page 17
“Bothering you?” Myrna asked.
Louise nodded and swallowed.
“You know,” said Myrna, “I once had one of those myself. On my arm though. Saved myself the doctor bill. Utility scissors,” she said.
Louise looked at her and saw that she was smiling. The road had only a hand’s-width shoulder but Myrna banked off.
“I think Ed left his pruning shears in the trunk,” she said, getting out. “Cut through bone, those things.” The woman pulled out a large pair of clippers with a hawknosed blade. “This will just take a second.”
Louise sat still on the bench seat of the Buick, not sure what to do. She had the feeling she should run. She felt her back on the plastic seat covers swelling with heat. Before she could wrestle her crutches to stand, Myrna had shoved the beak of her shears down the inside of her cast. Louise felt the sharp scrape on the inside, more on her leg than on the plaster. She felt a sudden sharp poke. “I’m getting her,” Myrna said. But when Louise looked down she saw the opening curve of her cast blotting blood. She could feel wetness slipping to her ankle, and then a small blood bubble broke twice at the top of her cast.
“This don’t seem to be working,” Myrna said. “Awful sorry.”
Myrna’s kids had left the backseat and were running down the slope toward the river.
“Don’t be running off too far,” Myrna yelled. The children did not look back at her so she turned to Louise. “Might help to go over to the river and get cooled off.”
“I think so,” Louise said. She pulled her crutches up under her arms and stood in the sun for a minute. The sun ached at the back of her head. She could feel the stitches draw tight to her scalp. She headed down to the water. Myrna stood up on the road and waved her arms to the kids.
“Back now,” the woman called. The kids ran past Louise and all she heard was the Buick’s thumping motor, the small spin of gravel as they pulled back onto the highway.
Louise stood at the riverbank feeling weak in the sun. She could walk back home from here but not with crutches and a heavy cast.
She sat on the bank and let the water rush over her cast. The river was cold and her leg sunk like clay to the bottom but the cast held its shape, stiff and chafing. Louise felt heavy with sleep. She rested her forehead in her hands and noticed the water had begun to whiten around her feet. Chalky water swirled downriver and she felt the shell of the cast come loose.
She stood up and rubbed the back of her leg. Louise had heard in a bar on Front Street that Baptiste had left the Flathead and had gone to Yakima to catch the apple-picking season. She felt the burden of him and his leaving and hoped he was gone from her. She squatted near the river and washed her face in cold water. She could go home now.
She thought of Charlie Kicking Woman, how he had taken care of her in Missoula, how his eyes were heavy and when he woke up in the morning he looked like he had been crying. He held her hand. He patted her legs. When he smiled at her, she had pretended she was not looking at him. She felt the dull throb of her heartbeat, sick to know Charlie had been like the other men, and she had been too weak willed to fight his advances. Heartsick. Sick to remember his nakedness, his thick body, his wanting. She made up her mind to pretend last night had never happened and hoped he would too. She would behave as if nothing had happened between them because nothing had happened. Nothing really. She hoped last night would slip from her days, hide from her memory, and his. She wanted to go home without the memory of Charlie Kicking Woman’s hands cleansing her wounded breast. She felt sadness in the smallest bones of her feet and hands, the same feeling she had at the end of winter as if she had been through a long, difficult time she would not see again.
It was a long walk home. She had to rest by the roadside a few times. She hoped there would be another ride, but she saw no other cars on the highway. She only wanted to see her grandmother but when she approached the hillside overlooking her grandmother’s home she saw the truck that was parked in front. She hesitated. She recognized her father’s old vehicle and wondered why he had come to visit. Her father had married Loretta Old Horn after her mother’s death, and he rarely stopped by anymore. She felt a heaviness in her chest. She didn’t want to face her father or his second wife either. Louise hated Loretta. Loretta talked incessantly and laughed whenever anyone finished a sentence, whether it was funny or not. She was exhausting to be around. Her eyeteeth were missing and the rest of her teeth were close to rotting out. Louise couldn’t see what was so beautiful about Loretta that could have made her father leave her mother. And when her father first left them, Louise had to stop herself from thinking about Loretta’s teeth, the hissing lisp of her drunkenness, how in the winter her hair was dirty and smelled like tanning brains. “She uses rancid bear grease on her hair. That’s what makes it stringy,” she had once told her sister, though she had never seen Loretta’s hair unbraided. She had laughed with Florence when they’d happen to chance on Loretta in the store or at Indian doings.
Loretta would smile timidly at them, adjusting her dress and touching her hair, and that would make them laugh all the harder. But sometimes Loretta would look beyond their shoulders as if she was expecting someone else. Louise would hate Loretta then. Loretta could look off into the distance where Louise’s father would always be waiting. It seemed that Loretta would always have Louise’s father and he would always be good to her even if her hair stunk like beaver balls and all of her teeth fell out.
Louise wondered for a moment if something was wrong. But she didn’t want to think about that. She heard the hiss of wind through the cottonwoods. A few yellow leaves filtered down through the trees. Even if Loretta had come to visit, Louise was ready to go home. She crossed her arms over her chest and chose to believe everything was fine. Louise shaded her face and looked for her sister, hoped Grandma had sent her outside. Louise looked toward the pond where Florence often gathered cattails, to the white-soil hill where Florence liked to sit and chew the salty clay, but she wasn’t outside.
Louise pressed her ear to the warm slat boards to hear the dim voices at the kitchen table. She was relieved she did not hear Loretta’s voice. She could feel a low humming along the door frame, the sound of quiet conversation. She heard the slow-throated murmurs of her father. She heard the chair leg scorch the floor and someone skirted back to stand. A stiff wind settled the dry grass. Louise wondered if he was leaving. She peeked through the window, leaned carefully into the darkness to see, but her eyes were stained with light. She cupped her hands to the window and saw her dad standing in the doorway of the kitchen, gripping his sweat-stained hat. She stood still, her heart twitching in the heat. Her father coughed and she ducked back down where she wouldn’t be seen. She waited awhile through a long silence. She wondered what was going on. Then a low sound rose from the kitchen, almost nothing at first, then clear and loud, pitched high like a cow caught in mud. Her father was crying. She felt blood hum in her ears. Her leg ached. Her knees jiggled. She saw her dirt-brown shoes, the hard black bruise on her leg.
Her father left the house alone and drove away slowly, without saying hello or good-bye or even looking at Louise. She lifted her hand to wave but his eyes were dazed and swollen, and fixed on the road. Louise entered the house slowly, saw only her grandmother seated at the kitchen table, her hands folded. It was quiet. So quiet. She did not hear the birds. She did not hear the sound of wind. Her grandmother looked up at Louise and her eyes were calm. “Your sister,” she said, “has drowned in the river.” Louise glanced away from Grandma, looked toward the stairs, out the window to where the clouds dazed the sun. She couldn’t have heard right. “We have lost Florence,” her grandmother said. Her voice was deep and certain.
“No,” Louise said, “she’s just outside.” Louise was convinced her sister was close, outside for a moment, maybe hiding, but alive somewhere and waiting to be found. Grandma got up from the table and held Louise’s hand. Louise noticed her hands were damp and she focused on her grandmother’s hands. “She went down to the river this morning,” Grandma said. “When she didn’t come back right away, I looked for her. I had your dad come help me.”
“Well, Grandma,” Louise said, “maybe you missed her.”
“She’s still in the Flathead,” her grandmother said, and her voice seemed strong and determined. Her grandmother was trying to convince herself Florence was gone. “We’re going to try to get her out now.”
“But how do you know? How do you know she’s in the river?” Louise asked. She didn’t want to believe Florence was dead but she found herself trying to remember the last time she had seen her sister. She tried to smile but her lower lip quivered, she was already crying.
“Louise,” her grandmother gripped her hands, “we know. Now we have to get her.”
Louise did not understand what her grandmother was saying to her. The world seemed suddenly more than she could comprehend, her problems with Baptiste small, understandable. She pulled away from her grandmother and stepped out on the porch as if she could wake herself up in the bright afternoon light. She could see the green edge of the Flathead River in the near distance. The water looked thin. She could see the chalky slump of hills that crowned the banks, the tall pine trees that shadowed the water. All this time, she thought, she had been talking to her grandmother, and her sister was in the river.
“Your dad’s gone for Charlie Kicking Woman,” Louise heard her grandmother say. “They’re going to drag the river.” Several years ago a rancher had drowned in the river. She remembered the dragline, the large snag hook entering the water, the man cleaved by the brutal hook. Her grandmother stood behind her. She glimpsed the heaviness in the old woman’s shoulders, remembered how clumsy her grandmother’s hands were after her mother’s death, the painstaking weave of her grandmother’s fingers as she braided Florence’s hair. She saw the burden of her grandmother’s grief. She saw the scarlet willows that dipped down to the distant water and began to feel the quivering weight of her sister’s death. There was no way to avoid grief.
Louise wondered if she could pull Florence from the river. She knew any foolish action would only cause her grandmother more pain, but she couldn’t let Charlie drag the river. She looked toward the road. She didn’t tell her grandmother what she was planning. She wasn’t sure it would work or if Jules Bart would agree to help them. But if anyone could pull her sister from the river without a hook, it was him. She left her grandmother standing beside the house and fought the urge to look back. Instead Louise looked far away to the watery light at the end of the long highway, the wavering pure light she could not reach, and wished this story was like that tricking light, something that appeared to be real but was only a dream.
Charlie Kicking Woman
THE STILL RIVER PLACE
I burned the roads getting home, early enough to change my uniform and meet the day looking decent, but I arrived too late to save my marriage. Aida had left me. I guess I knew even as I sat in that hotel room she was already gone from me. A man knows these things. I drove up to our small blue house knowing it was empty. A quietness lined the rocky path to the garden. The lilac bush was turning brown. I imagined her leaving as I was driving the climb of Ravalli Hill. Sun was bleeding through the sparse winter grass as I held my breath to see the buffalo herd against all that sky, the same moment I imagined Aida closing the door on the house we shared.
Instead of going after her like I should have, I began to inventory her belongings as I entered the front screened porch, the chore of an officer first on the scene, the piecing together of the clues that would not tell me a story different from the one I already knew. Still I persisted in my task, feeling I owed myself that much, the confirmation of all my failures. Maybe I felt I owed her enough to assess the life she had left behind. It occurred to me that the belongings a person leaves behind aren’t meant to suggest their return. People leave behind physical evidence of the reasons they have chosen to leave. She had left behind plenty, a note scrawled on the back of a grocery bill that simply said it wasn’t going to work, the delicate china cups gathering dust in the display case I had made, four pairs of mended silk stockings, the bonewhite shoes I thought she was proud of, the straight skirt I had hoped would make her look sophisticated, her white church gloves folded in the top drawer with a sprig of sage and dried wild roses, the dangly crystal earrings she mistook for diamonds. And all these things, these possessions, added up to nothing, the sum total of what it seemed I had become. An old guilt spread around me like the ragged quilt she had sewn for our bed. When the clock chimed in the kitchen I had wanted to stop it to mark that moment in my life.
I resisted the urge to let her belongings stall my life. I boxed up her things and piled them in the shed. I had the uneasy feeling she would come home while I was at work, come home in love with me, and, finding no trace of herself, leave again brokenhearted. The thought anguished me because even though I missed her, I told myself I did not want her back. I had grown tired of it all. I was that guilty. I had fallen in love with another woman. I had fallen in love with Louise, and even though I denied any interest in her, I must have said her name two or three times a day to my wife, bringing Louise up casually so as not to imply interest. Louise was only another aspect of my job, something I could talk about when I came home from work. I told myself I was only relating my day, but more and more my day was stories of sightings or nonsightings of Louise. I was stupid enough to think I could get away with it. I realized I was arrogant enough to think Aida would come home to me at all. I had treated her without regard. I had detached myself from the small details of her life and had revealed to her only the passion I held for the comings and goings of a woman who was a stranger to her and in many ways a stranger to me as well.
I swiped my arms into a fresh uniform, ran a comb through my hair and brushed my teeth until my gums bled. I wanted just to take care of the things I could change. I wanted to return to work. I felt grateful for the job I held. I radioed dispatch, relieved when Adeline Top Crow answered me without passion. I heard the steady business of her voice as if nothing had changed. “Write up a standing floater on Yellow Knife,” I told her. “I’ll be in later to have the chief approve.” I heard a bleat of static and then Adeline gave me the sinking information. Drowning outside of Perma between Milepost 108 and 109. I had to stop by the station and retrieve the dragline and hook. The body had been located, she said, so I wouldn’t need the search boat. I didn’t ask who we were talking about. I didn’t want to know the details. I’d know soon enough. I had to put off the order to chase Baptiste off the reservation for now. I didn’t want to think about that either.
I figured I was heading for the stretch of water known as the still river place. There’d been trouble there before, near drownings, kid dares. I should have known a drowning was coming. All the signs were there. Summer refused to leave the Flathead like it was waiting to take someone with it. There hadn’t been a drowning on the reservation in years. Summer was promising to stay. The cool river was calling. I fixed it in my mind that I was headed to the drowning of a child, a difficult day growing worse. I felt strangely relieved. I wouldn’t have to think about Aida and I would have a rest from thoughts of Louise.
The sky had turned yellow with heat. I saw Bradlock standing by the highway and he lifted his hands up over his head, surrendered. I parked my car off the shoulder, pulling a fog of dust. Bradlock looked out of place in the tall grass, his baggy gray suit stained charcoal with sweat, his cocky brimmed hat. I had to look away from him. When I got out of the patrol car I felt an odd swoosh of coldness just over my head that chilled me.
I thought about the many hours I’d spent walking the river line. I’d walked this river in winter, fall, and summer, knowing where the marsh grass pooled to sucking mud. I knew each big rock like the highway markers, knew where the fat trout slept in lazy currents, knew where arm-length pike leaped for flies with sure snapping teeth. I didn’t look at the folks gathered by the river at first. It’s what I loved and hated about small-town living, everyone had license to be a rubberneck. I stood beside Bradlock, staring at the smooth dead eye of a crosscurrent and feeling the quivering bend in my knees. I went to the back of the cruiser to retrieve the dragline. Bradlock followed me around. “I think they’ve got other plans,” he said, but I ignored him. I had work to do and I wasn’t about to let Bradlock interfere. I slung the equipment over my shoulder.
They were all just looking toward the river. As I walked closer I felt the slick sweat on my back turning to salt under the drying sun. The water was so glassy my eyes teared. Everyone was quiet, quiet as a photograph. I didn’t recognize her at first. I was caught off guard. My ankles wobbled suddenly under the new weight. Louise was standing by the river with her grandmother’s arm encircling her. She was shivering. Her hair dribbled tails of water. Her dark nipples bled through her river-stained dress and for a moment I thought of the makeshift bandage I had taped to her ribs that morning. Logic betrayed me. I couldn’t reckon the image of Louise standing here by the river with the last image I held of her. She was still in Missoula. All at once I saw myself in the nightmare my life had become. I tried to piece together what I was seeing, make sense of it. But this was like no dream I’d ever had. The day was blinding and beautiful. I felt sick. I looked past Louise and her grandmother, past the small crowd gathered to gawk, looked past the cowboy spinning his lariat at the water’s edge, not making the connection.
I thought it was nothing but river grass or seaweed burnt by sun. Something, maybe nothing. Thin strands of river willow boiling in a thick coiling current just under a smooth-water surface. Up from deep-smelling water, I watched the snaking black hair. I remembered long hair. Louise’s sister. All of a sudden it hit me as I stood with the hook wicked enough to barb a full-grown man, still dangling from my shoulder. A coolness smiled beneath the squeak of my leather holster. My spine was a needle dipped to forty below. I thought of Florence spinning down to the silted river bottom, her wide eyes blinking back up at the mica-filtered light. Gone.
