Perma red, p.21
Perma Red, page 21
They picked up Sam Plowman two days later, apprehended him at the Dixon Bar. They held him less than thirty-six hours. His mother had found a sterling alibi for him. That’s my theory anyway. I don’t know, maybe a person like Plowman has only one obsession in a lifetime. But I hate to speculate on bullshit. It was Yellow Knife I was after. I saw my work cut out for me, a thick cloud I couldn’t blow away.
I stopped in at the 44 Bar but Yellow Knife hadn’t been there. The bartender didn’t even know Yellow Knife. I considered the possibility that Yellow Knife had bullied the man but that didn’t seem likely. Baptiste had other watering holes. It was always dark in the Stockman and the booze was cheap. Only hard drinkers patronized the place. A few regulars came for breakfast beers and stayed until closing. There were no mirrors behind the bar. Nobody wasted their nickels on the jukebox. The Stockman seemed the most likely place for Yellow Knife. These men couldn’t care less if an Indian drank beside them. They were looking for anonymity themselves.
I poked my head into the Stockman, but the afternoon sun was so bright I had to let my eyes adjust. My vision pulsed for a moment. I could make out the men at the bar. The bartender looked to be playing solitaire. He glanced up at me as I entered the bar. I was going to ask him a few questions but then I spotted Stoner and the rodeo cowboy sitting at the back table. The two of them together in the piss-reeking bar made me stop for a moment. The cowboy blew smoke through his nostrils and his bootheel ticked the floor, a nervous bounce, tight, anxious. Bart was leaning just far enough back from Stoner that he looked put off, but he was nodding his head. Stoner was doing all the talking. He looked to be laying some ground rules when he placed his hand flat on the table. And then they both nodded in unison.
As I left the bar I had to shield my eyes from the sun. I noticed Stoner had parked his car around back, almost hidden from view. I wondered what the two of them were up to but I had work to do. I couldn’t give much thought to two white men jawing in a bar. Yellow Knife was on the loose. I would have to keep a closer watch on Louise if I was going to keep her safe.
I understood I had to be straight with myself too. I couldn’t lie to myself about Louise anymore. I desired to possess her, and in many ways I wasn’t much different from Plowman, not much different from Stoner. I wanted Louise in all the small ways a man can want a woman, probably in some ways as bad as Sam Plowman had wanted Hemaucus. I didn’t have the high ground here. I knew I had a lot to be ashamed of. This morning I had let a white man press a mud-boot to Hemaucus and talk about bullet trajectories and possible motives when I should have leaned over her with respect and closed her eyes.
I still chased Louise, looked for her, told myself she needed to be looked after. I should have backed off a long time ago, when my wife still loved me. There’s a point in love where we all can choose to be in love or not to be in love. Maybe something deep in our lives beyond instinct and hope makes us weary and too damn wanting, the slow time when we look out our morning window and we don’t see the new sun or the grass shining. We only see that something is missing in our lives, something we’re not quite sure of, like the feeling of losing a good, deep breath to restlessness. I jumped on the hope of solution and it turned out to be love again, which in my opinion was just more wanting, the worst kind of wanting after you had already stood at the altar with a shit grin on your face that didn’t look like a happy glow after five years.
I’d been thinking maybe I’d try to move off the Flathead for a while. I’d been wondering what it might be like in California, free from all my troubles. But deep down I knew I’d just be staying here. I was stuck with wanting something I knew I’d never have. And Louise was the woman I felt myself pulling in my breath for, my soft gut. A woman who saw only that my boots were polished and holeless, the leather on my holster had a nice sound, that I always had a good meat sandwich in my jockey box. I guess maybe that’s all the Indians saw in me. It’s what I saw in myself, a whole lot of nothing everybody else didn’t have.
Finally I caught Louise drinking in the bar. I’ve hauled her out of the bar a hundred times and a hundred times more I’ve let her stay. That night I just wanted to be in the same room with her, Yellow Knife or not, legal or not. She turned to me with her wind-sweet smile and leaned so close to me I could smell the sweat in her hair. She put her head on my shoulder and said so low I almost couldn’t hear her, “Where would you like to be?” And I didn’t expect her to say that. The question caught me by surprise. I suppose the question could have meant a lot of things but what it meant to me that night was more than I wanted anyone to see. It was a question that drew me to her. And standing there in my uniform with the threat of getting tossed out on my butt, with the threat of losing my job and my standing in the community, I slipped a tight arm around her waist. We were quiet together for a long while. I left the bar alone. About the time I got close to home my belly was shaking and I was grinding my teeth, thinking there was a stupidity born in me I could never escape.
I knew I had to clamp down and focus on the business at hand. I couldn’t let myself be caught again in a compromising situation that wouldn’t do Louise or me any good. I wanted a little rest, a break from work. I had planned to stay home on my day off. Sleep in.
The phone woke me too early. I yanked the covers up over my head. The phone didn’t stop ringing. I pulled myself up. I picked up the receiver, not bothering to say hello. “Charlie?” the voice said. “Is that you, Charlie?” The woman had only spoken a few words but the voice was unmistakable. Dirty Swallow. I rubbed the bristle of my hair, blinked into the dark morning looming through the windows. “Can you tell me what this is about?” I said. I could hear the low buzzing wire humming between us. “Just you come,” she said.
It was five in the morning. I’d been in bed for three hours. Sleep was calling me, so I washed my face and pulled on my trousers. Dirty Swallow wasn’t a person to ignore. She had no problem getting even, and I didn’t want to add her to my long list of troubles. I wondered if this concerned Yellow Knife. “Son of a bitch,” I said, as I buttoned my shirt. “Son of a bitch.”
The day was so dry with cold my heater rattled. The mountains were edged with morning light. The stars were thinning. I thought about my warm bed, heavy blankets over my back, sleep. A thin skiff of snow powdered the highway. The cold swelled my knuckles. I could see Dirty Swallow’s house in the distance and knew I had to wake up.
I turned my car in the drive and spotted the pelt of an animal hung on the corral, heavy as an Indian blanket. Skinned. A bad dream. The thought occurred to me that Yellow Knife had gutted his best horse and had hung it up to dry. Maybe he needed money and had concocted this idea, but I was straining for answers. I pulled my car up and stopped. I busied myself for a moment. I opened the jockey box and looked for a stick of gum but knew I wouldn’t find anything. I was stalling the inevitable and probably making things worse. I grabbed my notebook and made my way to the corral.
Dirty Swallow stepped up behind me. She had a way of sneaking up on people and it had always made me nervous. “What happened here?” I asked.
Wisps of her hair had threaded loose from her braid. I saw the pale puff of her breath and realized she was having difficulty speaking.
“This was here when I got up this morning,” she said.
I reached in my pocket for my gloves. It was a horse hide, folded; as I pulled back the skin a bitter smoke rose above us.
“Baptiste do this?” I asked, but she shook her head.
“Someone took his horse,” she said.
“Stole it?” I said.
“He thinks so. He’s out looking for that horse now,” she said.
“I don’t follow,” I said. She seemed frustrated by my stupidity. She crossed her arms and raised her voice. “This isn’t the horse,” she said.
I wasn’t getting anywhere. I thought for a while. Dirty Swallow seemed to be telling me someone had stolen Yellow Knife’s horse and had left a skinned one in its place.
“Whoever done this, wanted my son to think this was his horse.”
It was a cruel deed to do to any man, even Yellow Knife. The man had plenty of enemies. I knew that for sure. The kill was fresh. Blood tapped the snow.
My toes were beginning to feel the sting of cold. I looked toward the field, saw a few Indian ponies. I didn’t see Yellow Knife’s prized horse.
I checked the hide for a brand but found none. I scribbled in my notebook. The hide appeared to have the markings of Yellow Knife’s horse. I tried to remember the animal’s name, but knew it wasn’t important. I only remembered that Louise loved the horse.
“You got any ideas who might be trying to get back at him?” I asked with a tight jaw. I didn’t wait for her answer. “I’ll write up a report,” I told her. “Do some checking.”
Yellow Knife had more problems than I could solve. I planned to head back home and hit the sack. I tried to put the incident to rest but it stayed with me. I drove home wondering who would go to such lengths to get at Yellow Knife. The deed was meant to shock him. I figured someone had Yellow Knife’s horse in their pasture but that story didn’t hold together. The person had purposely left a horse for Yellow Knife to find and it had to be somebody from here.
Louise
THE LONG HUNGER
The winter that Baptiste had told her to prepare for finally arrived. Cold crawled up the windows of her grandmother’s house and stayed. Snow fell for three blind days, a dry snow that chirped under her shoes and drifted so high she had to fight to open the door of the outhouse. The Flathead River, the highway, and the hills became the same white plain. Snow piled up against the root cellar and caught up under the eaves of the house. Dry snow snaked through the walls, sifted through the weather-cracked floors. Louise would wake to find the silt-like snow covering her face and her chinhigh blankets. Even the red-bellied stove couldn’t chase an early-winter cold that dipped to fifteen below.
When Louise would go to Malick’s store, her grandmother would wrap Louise’s feet in so many newspapers she would have to struggle to get her father’s old boots on. She would wrap each finger in catalog paper and shove her hands deep into wool socks. Mr. Malick always scolded her when she arrived with her face burning with cold, her eyes small and watering. He told her she could freeze to death in ten minutes with a good wind. Linder Schultz had frozen to death on a walk from his house to his barn, Mr. Malick told her. Lay right down and died. She pulled her scarf up to her mouth.
A few weeks earlier a wind had caught her. It had come on her suddenly when she was almost home. She heard a breeze at the top of Perma Hill, like an old man wheezing. It didn’t seem like anything at first but as she reached the crest of the hill she saw the snow-swirling fog. Louise couldn’t see the road anymore. It was like stepping into deep, white water. She drew a stuttering breath. A low wind hissed over her head and stung the backs of her legs. She took her hands out of her pockets and pulled her coat tighter around her waist. She tried to remember a story that Baptiste had told her about the cold and the Indians who had danced for good days to come, but her thoughts were confused. She had seen Baptiste in Dixon with the bossy white woman. He had attempted to approach Louise but the woman had tugged at his shirttail and he had given in to her. Baptiste’s eyes had been strange, the pale-rimmed eyes of a man who had lost sleep. He had become thin. He had become another man around this woman, and Louise’s grandmother had told her to forget him. It was best to let him go. But she could not forget the brutal slap of his hands, the numb scar at the crown of her skull. He had beaten her, and she could not forget him. She could not forgive him either and the thought of Baptiste nagged her. She looked down at her feet and tried to feel the rut of the road, but she could only feel her dry fingers curling up in the catalog paper. A slow burn.
She tried not to cry. She kept her eyes down. She tried to watch her feet and keep walking. Her wool coat scratched her back. There was a dryness in her nostrils that was beginning to sting. She could feel the sharp snow scrape her neck. She took her scarf off and her hair lifted away from her head and snapped silver lights. She couldn’t tie her scarf back on with her stiff fingers so she tucked the ends down into her coat. Louise wasn’t sure she was on the road. She couldn’t see anything familiar. The wind sprayed a fine sheet of snow over her. Her coat snapped at her knees. Then as suddenly as the storm had descended it lifted and Louise saw her grandmother’s house.
She would make it through the winter even without Baptiste, even when most days she had little more to eat than fry bread and beans. She belted her skirts now to keep them from falling down. A few days earlier the health nurse had placed two fingers at Louise’s chest and had tapped until Louise could hear the dull hard thump of her bones. She knew the nurse thought she had TB. Louise knew her sickness was only hunger. All winter long she would wake up nightly, shivering in her frostbitten dreams of eating venison. She woke remembering how Charlie had chased her up the narrow canyon, how she had hid in a rock split that would swallow her now. She knew this hunger would grip her into spring. A hunger that would stay with her long after the Indian celery had blossomed. A hunger that had made her stingy and jealous.
She hadn’t seen Harvey Stoner in a while and then one night he pulled up just outside her grandmother’s house and parked. She had grabbed her coat and left with him. Harvey Stoner had taken Louise to Kalispell, a dark bar no different from the bar in Dixon. She kept her coat on even though the snow melted from her shoes. She was afraid Stoner might see how thin she had become, how hungry she was. She had hoped he would take her out for a meal so she could save her food for her grandmother, but Harvey did not talk about food. It was early December. Dusty red lights glowed in nests of angel hair above the bar. A string of red and green lights was tacked in the narrow window that overlooked Main Street.
Stoner talked to the bartender and gave her four bits to play the jukebox. She pocketed one quarter and slipped the other quarter into the machine. She heard Harvey shake for the jukebox. She could hear the bartender whispering, feel the lazy approval of Harvey’s gaze on her backside.
“Get some peanuts, Harvey, will you?” she said, hoping he would not hear the hunger in her voice.
“She wants my nuts,” the bartender said, and both men laughed.
She felt the floor cool with a thin sheath of snow as the door opened. She read the jukebox list and punched until she felt the hand on her shoulder. It startled her but she had learned not to show fear, not to jump at sudden advances. She looked up and saw her husband. She felt her heart strike her chest. She glanced past his shoulder, expecting to see his girlfriend, but he was alone.
Baptiste Yellow Knife stood before her, the husband she no longer recognized. He was so thin, thinner than she had remembered. His pants revealed his leanness. He had lost his soft summer belly. “I need some help from you here,” Baptiste said, just to her. Louise stepped back from Baptiste and was surprised to find she held no anger toward him. He weaved slightly but not from drink. He seemed feverish. The bartender had come up behind her.
“You know this character?” the bartender asked her, his eyes on Baptiste. Louise remained mute. “You read the sign?” he said, this time to Baptiste alone.
Louise stepped back and hoped the man would not see how she twisted her hands behind her back. Louise could see Baptiste as she thought these men saw him. She recognized the pink ringworm curl, his scalp worn in places. She knew he was hungry. And that he had had trouble with the woman from Yakima, trouble he had brought on himself like a hail of bricks. He had struck the woman maybe or had looked too long at another woman. Every day there could be a hundred reasons to leave Baptiste Yellow Knife. Louise imagined Baptiste pissing by the side of the road, the woman’s black car roaring off in a stinging wind.
“Hey, fella,” the bartender said to Baptiste, “time to go.”
Baptiste stood by the jukebox. He placed his hands on his hips and tried to hitch his pants. Christmas lights glowed through his sparse hair. She had not caused his problems, she told herself, but in that moment she could not deny him. The bartender had grabbed onto Baptiste’s arm. Harvey opened the door. It was so cold Louise felt an aching heaviness in her knees.
“Read the sign,” the man kept saying to Baptiste.
“Read the sign.”
“Come on, Louise,” Baptiste said. He lifted his hand to her. Louise heard the jukebox sift the record stack and pull her song.
“Make her read the sign?” Baptiste asked.
The bartender turned toward Louise and looked her over. She wondered how she appeared to him, if he could see the Indian in her.
“You know this joker?” the bartender said to her. He seemed ready to toss her out with Baptiste. She saw the long road back home winding all the way through the sleeping woods, the ice-edged lake. Her shoes were so thin she curled her toes to warm them and looked down at her feet.
“No,” she said. The bartender shoved Baptiste out the door and then latched it. Harvey patted the barstool next to him for Louise to sit down. She took a hard swallow of whiskey, watched the narrow window to see her husband pass by. She thought for sure he would rattle the window with his fist. Accuse her. But she waited a long time and did not see Baptiste. She knew she did not love Baptiste, had never loved him, but the idea that he might love her crushed her. She had held no warmth for him in this dark place. She had found no kindness, no acceptance in herself or the company she kept. She was over a hundred miles from home, a hundred miles but Baptiste had found her. It would be six months until summer again. Six months before the rattlers would find the sun. She could have walked home alone and felt less lonely. Her heart was the tablet of seltzer Stoner threw in his water glass.
