Perma red, p.6
Perma Red, page 6
“Step back now, Louise.” Yellow Knife put his arm up and corralled her behind his back. He clicked his tongue and without further prompting the horse began stepping back, pulling the rope taut. “Easy now,” Yellow Knife said. We heard the rope tick. “Easy, easy,” Yellow Knife said. I watched the horse whoa back, throwing his head up. I could see the muscles straining in the big stallion’s chest. The horse heaved back and I heard the door screech and then loosen. The hinges of the door were broken. I worried that the door might break loose and crack the man but I decided to shut up. I had lost my power over the situation. I’d done enough damage to chime in with my two cents. The door held tight.
“Damn,” Railer said. I could hear the sound of a car coming, but before I could move, Railer was on the road. He retrieved his hat from the ground and was straightening the bill as the car peaked the far hill. Railer met the car with his palm flat, his arm outstretched. The wrecked car was creaking. Railer rolled his hand for the passing car. He pointed to the far lane but the car stopped. The Two Teeth family leaned out the windows. “Baptiste,” they called, waving. I lifted my hand but they met my hello with grim faces. I caught Yellow Knife watching as the car passed us. I was not the hero here. I wasn’t even important enough to be the enemy. The family ignored me. I wasn’t an Indian to them. I was a traitor in blue uniform. I forced a smile anyway and hoped Louise was not watching me too. The car rocked again. The man yelped, his face dangerously close to pitching to pavement. “It’s coming,” he said. “Keep her coming,” he said to the horse. “Keep her coming.” I was worried we were letting Yellow Knife kill the man.
“Hey, Charlie. Be good for something will you?” Yellow Knife called to me. I saw then that the door was coming loose. The door was giving way. I stepped up to brace the door and Railer helped me. “Back it up, back it up,” Yellow Knife said, and the poor animal strained. I could see the shine of sweat on its withers. “Pop the door, will you?” Yellow Knife said to me. I moved reluctantly. I was surprised when the door pulled off easily. The man breathed a loud sigh.
“Let me get you,” I said to the man. “Let me help.” But even though he was still hanging like a bat he shrugged away from me. “No,” the man said. “You get away from me,” he said. “If anyone’s going to be helping me, it’s going to be that guy,” he said, indicating Yellow Knife. I didn’t want to look up at Yellow Knife. I had lost this round.
Louise
YEARS OF SUMMER
She had to return to school at the end of August, long before summer would surrender. She had outgrown her clothes and the nuns wouldn’t allow brassieres. The nuns gave Louise tape to hold her breasts, but the days were warm and soon the adhesive would slip off, and she would feel her breasts loose. She had spent a long summer away from school. She had drunk with men twice her age. She had been told she was beautiful. The swell of her breasts was admired. Here the nuns told her she was immodest. Cover yourself, they would say to her, crossing their arms over their own breasts. She had no defense, no underclothing. She had felt the changes in her body. The changes seemed to come sharp and fast. Overnight her clothing shrank. She could feel the groaning of her bones before sleep. A new longing settled in her by degree. It wasn’t just the blood of her growing that ached in her and stained her clothing. She had changed. She was a woman.
The boys began to recognize her womanhood, too, but at the Ursulines’ she was safe from the boys because of the constant threat of Baptiste Yellow Knife. She could count on Baptiste to rescue her. When Joseph Garlic had tried to kiss her Baptiste had saved her. He came out of nowhere, they said, and he had knocked Joseph down with such force he skidded a ways on the blacktop. When he got back up, Baptiste punched Joseph so hard his eyes purled white and his head rested for a time too long on the pavement, his arms splayed, palms up, his left cheek swelling. The rest of the boys stood back, looking away from Joseph, not wishing to take on Baptiste Yellow Knife. Louise had run back into the school, not stopping even to look at Baptiste. She wished they would have beaten up Baptiste, too, humiliated him, held his head to dust and bared his buttocks. She was afraid Baptiste was her constant, and yet she felt relieved knowing he had become her savior.
She was afraid of change. After one long summer Louise returned to school to find everyone had changed. The tomboys giggled now and the boys were tough. They had all outgrown playground and curfews. They had worn out the idea of heaven and hell and carnal sin. The girls in classes behind her had grown breasts. Most of the boys were taller than the tallest nun. Rumor was that Melveena Big Beaver wasn’t just fat, she was heavy with child. They were growing too old for childish pranks. They were growing too old for a school that hid their longings. Some girls wore red lipstick at the powwows. And their silk stockings and panties hung on the bushes with their boyfriends’ sighs. The boys smoked without choking now. They stood in the back of the schoolyard sharing invented stories, broad shoulders huddled together, faces haunted by cigarette smoke and thoughts of women.
The nuns held them all in check, slapped at the girls’ round hips, bound their breasts with tape, sniffed the boys’ sheets, separated the fidgeting boys and girls in quiet rows they forever paced with the metal-edged threat of rulers.
She found herself waiting for Baptiste at times, holding onto the chain-link fence with one hand, letting her body swoop toward the pavement while her fingers grasped the metal links, becoming a semicircle drifting, hoping to be saved from the nuns, ignoring school, waiting for something or someone to save her. When Baptiste did show up she took to standing outside with him, neither talking nor listening to him, but waiting still until Mr. Bradlock sent her away to the all-white school in Dixon, to save her.
From the all-white school in Dixon Louise was sent to the all-white school in Thompson Falls, because the Dixon boys had lifted the back of her skirt to find she wore no panties. She had fought the Dixon boys, slapped their hands and scooped her skirt down tightly to her knees while the teachers had stood by or clapped their hands but made no real attempt to stop the boys who were attacking her. Louise had kicked at them, had spat at them, punched and scratched them. She felt a boy’s fingers in her hair and she had slammed the butt of her palm into his chin until she heard the pop of his jaw. She caught one weasel-faced boy in the groin with the heel of her shoe, and he had bent over wheezing, and still no one came to help her. The boys had lifted her skirt high up over their heads, a tent, a worn umbrella, and finally she had stood still and let them have their look, let them see her bare ass. And she had been the one sent away, not the hooting boys who swooned at her lean nakedness.
Her only friend at Dixon was Myra Vullet, but even Myra stayed clear of her at school, watching her with a broad face smooth as river stone. Louise had no place here. At least at the Ursulines’ she could count on Baptiste. She was no longer a child. She had outgrown schoolboys and schoolgirls. She had outgrown geography, and home economics had nothing to do with her life. She felt more comfortable in the bar in Dixon than she felt in the classroom.
At the Dixon school she ran away three times. Each time was a simple decision. She had no stockings. Her only pair of shoes was worn so thin she could count the stones beneath their soles. She had three dresses and she had outgrown all of them. The buttonholes of her favorite dress strained so tight you could see skin. Ten days into the school year she could take almost anything but she had grown tired of being the only Indian in the all-white school at Dixon.
The Dixon school was so close to home Mr. Bradlock, the BIA social worker, decided it would be best to place her in Thompson Falls again, with a family that would watch her; that way she’d have to think twice about leaving. He drove her to Thompson Falls himself. It was a cool day in the early part of September, but it wasn’t cold, and Mr. Bradlock kept the car heater running so high she felt dizzy. She rested her wet palms on the nape of her neck. “Don’t get any ideas,” he told her. But she did have ideas. She wanted him to stop just once so she could get out of the car and run from him, run from his oily peanut-colored suit, run from his large and balding head. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop once.
When they passed her grandmother’s house she looked at the floorboard, hoping Mr. Bradlock would not see her face. She saw the rock hills rise above his car. She felt the shifting curves. The river was slow and green. She felt a flutter in her chest and she wondered if she would ever get back home again.
Lately Louise woke from dreams that Mr. Bradlock would send her away and she would never come back, like Dolores Pretty Feather. Dolores was dying. Louise knew because Baptiste had told her. Dolores had been sent to Portland. And whenever Louise had passed the class photograph in the Ursulines’ hall she thought Dolores’s face looked ghostly, locked forever behind the glass pane, her eyes glazed upward as if she was watching a bird passing.
Louise had heard from Octave Good Wolf that Dolores was so sick she had collapsed in Mission before they sent her away. Dolores coughed up so much blood it was rumored Mrs. Moniker passed out at the sight of it. Stuffy Mrs. Moniker passed out in front of the Teepee Bar. There was so much blood, Octave said, the dogs licked at the spot for days. So much blood Octave’s mother told him to walk home on a different street.
“She’s afraid I’ll get it,” he said. “Tooberculosis.”
There were stories they put Dolores in bathtubs of ice to keep her blood slow, to keep her lungs from rupturing. In her sleep Louise would see Dolores in a long, white, porcelain tub of clear ice, Dolores’s head resting on the lip of the tub, the shaved crown of her scalp gray with cold. Dolores in a room without windows. Dolores with eyelashes so long she had curled them with a butter knife.
Louise would wake thinking of Dolores and the old white woman from Paradise who had put her newly dead husband in a tin tub of ice in the living room to save herself funeral costs. So many Indians Louise knew were being sent away to hospitals for TB. They disappeared and nobody ever visited them or came back with news of how they were. Her father’s new wife, Loretta, carried a picture of her sister Rosalie in her wallet. The photograph had been pushed and pulled in and out of Loretta’s wallet and touched so many times, you could hold it up to the window and see through the lines and cracks of its finish. It wasn’t an old picture but Rosalie looked far away, the way that people can look distant and dead in a photograph.
All the Indians began wondering why so many of them had the disease. Why so many of them were disappearing. Her grandmother thought they were all being killed off slowly. And there was evidence. Last month the health nurse had brought her grandmother a bottle of iodine and told her to put a drop of it in her drinking water each day. “It’s a good idea,” the nurse had said. “It will keep you healthy.” But her grandmother had looked at the skull and crossbones on the small green bottle.
“These people think we’re not smart,” her grandmother had said.
Her grandmother told her Mr. Bradlock wanted to break her like a horse, make Louise a white woman. And Louise could believe this was true. She had heard Mr. Bradlock talking about her. “She’s a beautiful girl,” he had said to Charlie Kicking Woman. “I just can’t have her living like a damn Indian.” And when Charlie looked at him, Mr. Bradlock had fumbled with the sleeves of his jacket and turned away from Charlie, but he had not apologized. She had heard Charlie say in a soft voice that surprised her, “You are Indian. You are.” She didn’t need Charlie to tell her she was Indian but somehow it made her feel stronger.
Mr. Bradlock took Louise to Mrs. Shelby Finger’s house in downtown Thompson Falls. He pulled up in front of a small pink house in the middle of town and a young woman clopped down the steps of the house in a pair of big white pumps.
“That’ll be Arliss Hebert,” Mr. Bradlock said. “Maybe she can teach you a thing or two about manners.”
Louise felt a small claw of panic tighten her throat. She knew the name too well. Arliss Hebert. Was this the same Arliss, the Arliss that used to live in Hot Springs? She had known Arliss. She had known Arliss for years. Arliss used to sit outside her mother’s house in a dirtstained dress, a small ugly girl who would cuss at the Indians who were headed to Camas to bury the dead. Arliss was dirty inside and out, Louise’s grandmother used to say. And now here she was again. And Louise would be living in her house.
When Mr. Bradlock was leaving Louise wished she were going with him. “Here’s your big chance,” he told her. And Louise wasn’t sure what he meant by his comment. She listened to his car, the high whining of the last shift of gears, and then he was gone. She stood beneath the changing light of a maple tree. She could hear the tattered whisper of leaves high over her head, but when she looked up she saw the tree was still hard green.
Mr. Bradlock had thrown Louise’s clothing on the damp lawn, a small wad of clothing rolled and wrapped in twine. Arliss stood over Louise, balancing one foot on the edge of her white high heel. Arliss stared at her. Louise felt the sting, the swelling at the back of her throat. She fanned her face and looked down the road. She was tired. She wondered how long it would take to walk back to Perma. A long time, she thought. Arliss made a sound with her tongue, uncrossed her arms, then walked back into her mother’s house. Louise sat down on her clothing and looked down the road again.
Mrs. Finger finally opened the door and motioned to Louise. “Get in here,” she said. “What are you doing?”
Mrs. Finger was a small, skinny woman. She reminded Louise of a field cat ready to scratch. She wore so much lipstick her mouth looked sore. “They’re not paying us enough money to feed you,” she said to Louise, “but I am sure your lunch will be more food than you’re accustomed to anyway.” Louise did not let Mrs. Finger know that what she had said was true. Sometimes her grandmother had fry bread, sometimes dried meat, and sometimes beans, but Louise was always hungry. At the Ursulines’ it was the same, except worse. She had fought for her food at the Ursulines’, had knocked down some other hungry girl for a piece of chicken or half a sandwich. Louise had been hungry for years.
When Arliss and her mother sat down for dinner Louise would sit out on the porch steps hoping someone she knew would walk by. She even watched for Baptiste Yellow Knife, waited for him, imagined him coming up the walk, imagined rattlers slinking through the grass, slipping through mouseholes, curling around Mrs. Finger’s backyard trellis, rattlers entering Mrs. Finger’s kitchen, sleeping in circles on her bathroom rug, twining around the foot of Arliss’s pink vanity. Louise could see Baptiste in his old clothes smelling like woodsmoke, looking in the windows at Arliss undressing, looking at Arliss’s wide, white ass and smiling. She would imagine Jules Bart passing by, lifting his hand to Louise, the sunlight warm in his eyes, opening his door to her. She missed Grandma and Florence. She missed home. She dreamed of Baptiste riding up the drive on Champagne, hissing at Arliss, carrying Louise away while Arliss stood in her scuffed white shoes, open-mouthed and envious on the steps of her mother’s house.
At Thompson Falls, Arliss had grown into a young lady who wore white ankle socks and violet-and-roseflowered dresses. Louise noticed that Arliss’s high forehead seemed to bleach whiter in the sun. She had pale spider veins that mapped her temples and faintly edged her jawline. It seemed to Louise that Arliss had cracked her face, forever fussing in the mirror, tapping her cheeks and checking her big teeth, smearing her lips with petroleum jelly. She kept her thin skin so powdered and creamed it resembled tissue paper. She seemed silly to Louise but Louise began to learn from her, Arliss Hebert with her small shoulders and broad hips, Arliss with her hair gathered back in different-colored crocheted snoods she had made herself. None of the boys seemed to like Arliss, and even made fun of her as she walked by them in the hall. But Arliss Hebert had made her meanness count in life. Arliss recognized others’ misfortunes and would use their hardships to her benefit. Louise noticed that even though no one seemed to like Arliss at school they tried hard to stay on her good side.
On Louise’s first day of school at Thompson Falls Arliss hissed at Louise. “Dirty Indian,” she said, “dirty, dirty Indian,” loud enough for the others who stood on the school steps to hear. “You don’t belong here. You don’t deserve to live in my house.” Louise knew she could take Arliss, roll her down the hard steps, watching her skirt fan over her dimpled thighs, punch her powdered face until her eyes turned black. Louise could take care of Arliss but she chose to keep quiet.
Louise knew she didn’t belong at Thompson Falls. In the early morning she would sit outside on the steps of school and smoke the cigarettes she had stolen from Mrs. Finger. The students would stand at the windows to gawk at her until the teachers would come outside and yank her up by her elbows. But even if she sat at her desk with her hands quietly folded, the other students would point and whisper. The boys would dig each other’s sides and grin at her. And when she would pout they would lean close to her.
One long day when the sun was too hot at the windows, Mrs. Teeter, the teacher, smiled toward Arliss and announced to the class that Arliss Hebert was a lady. Louise watched chalk dust hover in the window light and remembered the day they had passed Arliss’s house on their way to the burial of Louise’s mother. Arliss had stood, tight fisted, in her yard. It was a hard, strange day, a rain-heavy day that would not rain. Earlier the sky had been blue and the day had been warm, almost hot. Passing through Hot Springs the sky was charged yellow and Arliss’s frayed hair stood out against the lightning-lit hills. Arliss’s face was strained from yelling but all Louise could hear was the steady rattle of her mother’s coffin in the back of the buckboard. She had heard Arliss before, Arliss too many times when they had gone to Camas Prairie for someone else’s burial. When Louise wrote to her grandmother she did not tell her she was staying in the house of an enemy.
