Perma red, p.2
Perma Red, page 2
“Louise,” he said, and she hesitated in her walk. It had been a spring without rain. She could smell the autumn edge of leaves. The fields gave up the morning in great pulses of heat. She felt his desire in the dense heat of her breasts, a thousand snelled hooks pulled by little sinkers weighed the tips of her nipples, the heavy lobes of her ears. She placed her hand on her scalp and felt her blood beating. The sun was so hot she could count the strands of hair beneath her palm. A heaviness settled in her lungs like green water. She stopped and shifted her feet to brace herself against the son of Dirty Swallow. His presence was odd, like a pressing wind she had to lean into to gain strength.
“You don’t talk to me,” he said. “Do you hear me talking to you?”
Louise knew something was wrong. She felt heavy on the spot where she stood. She stamped her tongue against her front teeth and tried to think of Roger Mullan, his long yellow teeth. His own mother said he could eat apples through a picket fence. She strained to hold the image.
Baptiste tugged at the swell in his crotch as he talked to her. She focused all of her attention on moving away from him. He struck a match on the zipper of his pants to a yellow flame and lit a pipe of kinnikinnick leaves. Now that she had his full attention again he did not look like the Baptiste who had held Hemaucus’s hand. She could tell he had been drinking. He’d been drinking for days. His breath was bitter. She glanced at his face but would not meet his gaze. It occurred to her, like a push, that Baptiste could be both handsome and ugly to her. His voice was slow water moving deep in the channel, pulling her. She knew he wasn’t touching her but the rasp of his swollen tongue grazed her left breast. She turned to him and he was grinning. He blew smoke through his lips like a kiss and her eyes watered. She believed he knew what she was thinking. Around the brown hub of his eyes the whites rimmed yellow as if they’d been boiled. She felt an urge to move closer to him, a strange urge she didn’t understand, the same urge she had to look close into the small mouths of dead animals. She would cross the highway again for a closer look at a bone-broken deer. And she knew she would move closer to Baptiste.
“Louise,” he whispered. Her name was thick in his mouth. She could feel a wet heat rising from his collar. She surprised herself when she leaned forward to touch the tip of her tongue to the fat lobe of his ear. He tasted sour with old body salt. He pressed his cheek to hers, leaving a damp imprint. Louise pulled back. She would not kiss him. He smelled different up close. Sweet, warm earth and the faint, odd smell of burning lime that covered everything unclean. He crooked his head toward her as if he could hear her heart beating. He opened his mouth to reveal his tongue red as a salamander.
The back of her head felt tight as if every pore had shut down. Louise tried not to look behind her. She breathed in slowly and listened. The wind was still. She imagined her head was as smooth as the translucent round moon rising high above their heads.
And, like the moon, she saw the world as if from a great distance. The fields were brittle with weeds. She saw Baptiste Yellow Knife below her, smaller than a hummingbird, his tiny heart beating down the thin, thin walls of his heart. One hundred yards from him Malick’s store hid neatly stacked cans of soup, vegetables, baskets of penny candy. He could no longer touch her. The thought made her breathless as clouds. She looked down over the sun-silver hills and saw something moving. She sucked her breath full of wind. She saw the root cellar of her grandmother, the hill mound of rocks weathered smooth by rain, and, deep inside the cellar, the fat rattler that had outsmarted her family for years hiding behind fruit jars and gunnysacks of jerky, leaving the pale ghost peel of himself that grew longer and longer each year. She saw the hiding snakes in all their places.
In the damp shade of Grandma’s woodpile a slim rattler was sleeping. She saw the Ursuline school and the snakes in the field close to the playground. Lorraine Small Salmon, just five years old, turned jump rope while, close to the tips of her shoes, a brown rattler hummed. She saw her sister chase the rooster toward and away from the bottom land where the tender-fanged mouths of one hundred snakes waited in the weeds. She saw a fisherman she didn’t know, as vulnerable as his sunburned pate, at the Jocko, surrounded on all sides by brown rocks and rattlesnakes thick as lichen. She saw the dead snake the boys had hung on the cross of the French nun’s grave. She saw the road snakes that had been sliced and smashed by passing cars, their eyes lit with the hard, black backs of flies, and beyond them, more snakes. She saw the milk-white eyes of a thousand August rattlers. She saw Dirty Swallow walking toward her grandma’s rain-blistered door. Behind her, rattlesnakes trailed like a wedding train.
From a great distance she heard Baptiste Yellow Knife say, “Marry me.” Louise stepped back from him to leave. The air was clean and hot. A sudden wind snapped her dress tight to the backs of her legs. She shielded her watering eyes from the grit of dust. He never stopped watching her, and for one small moment, she felt bad for him and bad for herself. She could hate him enough to pull him inside of her, to melt his bones to water. She turned from him and began to run. She dropped her small bag of groceries to run faster, to run home, more afraid of Dirty Swallow in her grandmother’s house than of any field or road rattler.
Her sister, Florence, was squatting on top of the lean-to where the wood was kept. Florence put her finger to her lips and motioned for Louise to stop. The back door of her grandmother’s house was wide-open but the day was so bright Louise could not see into the darkness of the kitchen. The windows of the house were glazed with white sun. Louise glanced up at the narrow shade line below the eves, saw the twitching tails of sparrows hiding from heat. She felt a dull-fisted warmth in her throat and she tried to swallow. She stepped carefully through knee-deep sage, lifting her skirt up from small snags of cheatgrass. She saw the last edge of bushgrass, the scuff-smooth cow trail that led around the pond toward home. There was a rhythm of water moving slowly around the creek. She thought of rainbow trout, their dense eyes watching, the scales ringing along their backs as they bit up toward the small white wings beyond water. There was a pause in the reed grass as a deep breeze pulled dust toward a higher place. The red-winged blackbirds were quiet. She looked closer at the bloated cottonwood roots that stretched to the pond edge. A slow current writhed silver and then green in the sleeping shade. She threw a rock toward the pond, saw a sudden lap of water, then more waves, the smooth familiar wiggle parting grass, small hiss. She had come to know the language of the fields, the thin weave at the roots of grass. Snakes.
Louise knew Dirty Swallow was inside the house. Dirty Swallow had come to Old Macheese’s wake, and she had come to visit the day Louise’s mother had died. The dry weeds had crackled with rattlers. Both times Florence had scrambled to a place where the rattlers couldn’t get to her. As she came closer Louise could hear Dirty Swallow’s voice. Dirty Swallow was walking, pacing her grandmother’s kitchen in circles. As Louise stepped on the porch she heard the dry-rice sound of a rattler retreating.
“Get out of my house,” her grandmother was saying to Dirty Swallow, but Dirty Swallow was not listening to her. Dirty Swallow stood still in the center of the kitchen. There was a sense of movement around her, a draft of spinning air. Her skirt was soft over her fat hips and worn so thin in places Louise wondered if she was seeing flesh, certain she could make out Dirty Swallow’s dirt-dark skin beneath her pale skirt. The woman wore a belt of snakeskin and rattlers, her very presence a rustling noise that hushed the room. One rattle on her belt almost swept the floor and Louise tried to envision the length of the snake it had come from. A coolness whispered the linoleum floor, a vague scent of cucumbers split by sun was rising from the damp corners of the room. Louise heard the ticking shift of rattlers beneath the house.
“Go now,” her grandmother said to Dirty Swallow. “You’re not welcome here with your threats.”
Louise had heard that Dirty Swallow wore a live snake around her waist, a big brown rattler with yellow eyes. She tried not to look too closely at the woman’s hips, afraid she might see the shifting pattern of a diamondback. Dirty Swallow gazed out the open door, and Louise turned to see a snake belly up the steps toward her. Dirty Swallow clicked her tongue and the snake stopped and coiled on the porch, its rattle lifted. Her grandmother was eyeing the broom propped in the corner. Dirty Swallow faced Louise with the squinting eyes of a mean drinker, hard poised and grinning, unpredictable because she was not a drinker. “I want you to answer my son,” Dirty Swallow said. “Agree to marry him or someone in your family will be bit.”
“You old bitch,” Louise said loud enough to be heard.
“I see you’re not raising your granddaughters right,” Dirty Swallow said. “It doesn’t surprise me.”
“I won’t make Louise do anything she doesn’t want to,” Grandma said. Dirty Swallow clapped her hands together once. The rattler slid back down the stairs, leaving a belly trail in dust, silent and soon invisible at the edge of the weeds, and Louise knew then that Dirty Swallow had made her decision.
Louise stood on the porch and watched as Dirty Swallow cleared the field and met the highway. She bit her nails and watched the dragonflies tip downward to touch the weeds. This is the modern age, Sister Simon had told the class, we can’t rattle bones to cure fevers. Hair clippings and toenails aren’t going to save you from blizzards. Louise wasn’t afraid of Dirty Swallow. She wasn’t afraid of snakes. She was afraid of herself, she thought, afraid of the feelings Baptiste called up in her. She didn’t want to live on the reservation her whole life. She wondered if there was something more, something beyond her grandmother’s small house, something beyond the same roads she walked every day, something beyond Baptiste Yellow Knife. She looked at the hills. The river was motionless. In the heat the sky was tired, drained of color; everything seemed to be sleeping in the afternoon sun. She could see Dirty Swallow still walking in the distance. She walked steadily, and sometimes the pitch of the road would sink her out of sight, and then she would appear again farther away, and when she passed over the last hill Louise could no longer see her. A scorched wind pulsed at the door.
Louise expected her grandmother to scold her but her grandmother came outside to help Florence get down from the lean-to. “Don’t be such a coward,” she heard her grandmother say, and for a moment Louise thought her grandmother was speaking to her. “You can’t run from the things you’re afraid of,” she was saying to Florence.
Louise looked far off to the Mission Mountains, so hot, dizzy beads of blood spun black in her vision. Even with her eyes closed she could see the red sun. Old thoughts returned. She remembered her mother as she was being carried from her room. Charlie Kicking Woman had lifted her up from the bed, and as he turned toward the door, Louise saw her mother’s face. Her face was swollen, the color of water-washed wood, pale, gray. She had looked so frail to Louise, almost holy, like St. Bernadette. She could see the delicate veins along her mother’s jawline, the veins the color of turquoise at her temples. Fever had frayed her beautiful hair, but as she passed Louise, her hair had brushed Louise’s face, and Louise had felt the sweet touch of her mother once more for the last time.
In the huckleberry summer after her mother had died, she remembered listening outside the open kitchen window to her grandmother and her aunt talking about the choices of men, of bad medicine and the power of the old marriage. She was a young girl standing barefoot to a long summer just beginning, and she imagined a skin bag dark with the oil of many hands, curling around the singed tips of her hair. Even then she had been thinking of Baptiste, Baptiste leaning over her as she lay on the schoolroom floor, her blood leaving, a heavy black smoke rising white from his teeth, a whispering, his breath inhaling her blue, blue heart. She wanted to believe that if her mother was still alive, her mother could tell her what to do. She wanted to jump down from the porch, run fast toward the mountains. But she had no way of knowing if she ran toward or away from him. Baptiste was everywhere.
They walked toward Perma. Grandma had promised Florence a bottle of Orange Nesbitts if she walked all the way there without complaint. Louise had chased her sister and they were laughing so hard Grandma said they would be crying soon. “Mrs. Yellow Knife,” Florence called Louise. “Mrs. Yellow Knife.” Louise ran from Florence like she was running away. Her breath was high in her chest. The magpies talked on the fence posts, and the sun shimmered over them. The black-eyed daisies were thick by the roadside, and Grandma had stopped to pick the tender shoots before they blossomed. Louise remembered jumping the barrow pit. She had turned to see Florence midleap behind her. She heard the flutter of paper against weeds. She saw a grasshopper land on Florence’s shoulder. Grandma was peeling the flower stems. She offered each of them a taste of Indian celery. “I love the spring,” Grandma said to them. Florence tried to slap the stem from Louise’s hand. “Don’t dawdle,” Grandma said. She had walked ahead of them. Louise ran to catch up to her. She walked beside her grandmother, and it felt good to be walking.
Heat waved at the end of the road. “Why do we see water at the end of the road,” she asked her grandmother, “when there is no water?”
“That’s to keep lazy people walking,” Grandma said.
Louise looked back at Florence. She appeared to be limping. “Hey, Lazy,” Louise called to her. Florence smiled back but her walking was unsteady. Her hair hung in two heavy braids in front of her. She seemed pitched forward, dizzy. Her face shined with sweat. Grandma stopped, and when she turned to see Florence, she dropped her flowers and hurried back to her. Florence was hopping on her right leg, and Louise wondered if she was just trying to get some attention. “I think I got stung by a bee,” she told Grandma. Her left leg was so swollen her heavy stocking had begun to split. Grandma squatted down beside her and tugged Florence’s stocking down. Louise was running toward them. She saw the two small fang pricks that bled at her sister’s ankle. Her sister moved slowly to sit down. Grandma took her handkerchief from her head and dabbed at the bite. Florence’s leg was as purple as the Mission Mountains, so tight, Louise felt the blood dim at the base of her skull. The fields were whining.
“Am I going to die?” Florence asked. Louise noticed her sister’s eyes were slow and calm as if she had just woken from a fever sleep. Louise felt afraid.
“Go get help, Louise. Run,” her grandmother said.
Her knees felt too weak to support her so she pumped her arms. She ran to catch the water at the end of the road. She ran to save her sister’s life. She ran with the sun so hot in her throat the miles slowed before her. This isn’t the Dark Ages, she could hear Sister Simon saying, people travel from one end of the earth to the other just for vacation. Men are civilized. We have telephones and typewriters. Electric mixers and wash machines. Indoor plumbing. You Indians must understand. We can talk to wild animals until we’re blue in the face, but a bird is never going to tell you how to build a nest. Snakes won’t bite our enemies because we tell them to. I’m here to liberate you from the darkness of superstition. Wake up, the sister had told the Indian children when their lips trembled at her ideas, wake up to the world.
Charlie Kicking Woman
THE BITE
It had been a slow day on patrol. I hadn’t seen another car on the highway for hours. Nothing but the late-spring smell of sage and hay. I figured I would drive on over to the Magpie place. It was a hot day for spring. My uniform was burning like steel wool. I hadn’t seen much of Louise lately. I had heard the rumors about her and Yellow Knife, stories that he’d been hanging around her, stories that he planned to marry her. I was hoping against that possibility. Baptiste Yellow Knife had turned into a mean, sullen man, a drinking man. I thought I might just take Louise out to my car and show her my log chart, show her all the times I’d picked Yellow Knife up. Drunk and disorderly, trespassing, assault, drunk and disorderly, drunk and disorderly, creating a public nuisance. The list was long. I thought about showing her grandmother too. Louise wasn’t easy to convince.
I reminded myself that soon I would have license to chase her again. She was a truant, one of the half-breeds we had to round up every year for school. It was my job to hunt her. She ran away often, sometimes twice a week, and over the years she had become a headache to me. I wanted to save her. I believed if I kept corralling her, eventually school would stick. I don’t know if I imagined what she would become with an education but I knew what she would become without one. I didn’t want to see Louise White Elk in the poorhouse, a husband like Baptiste beating her on weekends, ten squalling kids and another on the way. I wanted something different for her, and sometimes my wife accused me of wanting her for myself.
The BIA social worker Mr. Bradlock had tried everything. Once he placed her in the Dixon school with all white students. Then they placed Louise back in the Ursulines’, then back again to Dixon. She didn’t like it much at either place and ran away every chance she got. Last fall, she had hooked up with Georgette Small Salmon in St. Ignatius and the two of them ran off to Hot Springs together. I picked Louise up two days later, smelling like cigarette smoke and alcohol. She was wearing sunglasses. Georgette had punched her because Louise had been acting as though she was better than everybody else. Louise, Georgette told me later, was acting like a white woman. I guess when Louise asked Georgette what made her think acting like a white woman was acting better than everybody else she got slugged. The bruise around Louise’s eye looked like the fat, split seam of a plum.
Mr. Bradlock thought Louise’s grandmother would be old-fashioned, someone he could reason with. “You may be talking to an old woman,” I told him, “but this is an Indian grandmother you’re talking to.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Bradlock had said, “I’m going to talk to the girl’s grandmother.” And I knew he was imagining a strict woman in a high collar, an old woman who baked cookies. Louise’s grandmother did wear long skirts and high-topped moccasins. She covered her braided black hair with a bright kerchief, and her hair had silvered at the temples. She was also a gambler, stayed up all night for days on end to play stick game. She still rode the horses at the Kalispell horse races. She could chop wood and walk twenty miles to Mission to go to mass. She put up her own food, jerked beef, and fished in summer and winter. She stood about five feet tall but she could work like a man. She had different ideas for her granddaughter. “That’s one grandmother,” I had told Mr. Bradlock, “that won’t be turning her granddaughter over to us, even if it is for Louise’s own good.” But he didn’t listen to me.
