Perma red, p.8
Perma Red, page 8
“I waited here for you every day,” he said. “I knew you’d come back to this place.”
She tried not to reveal that she was puzzled. She looked away from him. “Oh,” she said, “I thought maybe you knew I’d been thinking about you.” She had wanted to see Baptiste here in this spot, had felt she had conjured him there, but was disturbed now to think Baptiste had spied on her in this place all along.
“I knew you’d come around to me. I did know that,” he said and encircled her waist with his long arms.
“Not like that,” she said, though for the first time it felt good to be close to Baptiste. “Not like that at all,” she said and pulled away from him.
He did not move to touch her. He glanced toward the water. A bird fluttered over the far bank. Baptiste’s arms were tight to his sides, his shoulders braced.
“I thought you were different,” she said, “different in a way. Different like your mother.”
He threw a small, round rock at the water. “What?” he said. “You think I can read your mind? Come on, you give me too much credit,” he said. “If Indians like me had so much power we would have won.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and looked at the slow curve of the river. Baptiste had known to find her here because he was an ordinary man, an ordinary man obsessed with a woman. She didn’t know what to feel. She felt disappointed. Baptiste was right.
The birds stayed away from the weeds where she and Baptiste hid from Charlie Kicking Woman. They sat up on the hill in a thatch of rustling grass where they could watch Highway 200 and the Flathead River. To the east, Louise could see the Mission Mountains, the distant threads of snow that marked them. She could see the corner of her grandmother’s house. Baptiste spotted Charlie first. Charlie’s first stop was her home. She strained to hear the voice of her grandmother, the knock of the closing door, but she heard nothing. He soon appeared again, walking the fields to the root cellar. In the red dusk light of fall she could see the shine of his blue-black hair.
“Didn’t take him long to sniff your trail,” Baptiste said. “He wants you.” Baptiste tapped her knee. She felt annoyed by him. She could see Charlie, how he circled the fields. They watched him for a long time and Louise yawned. She didn’t believe he was going to be close to them before darkness closed the valley, if he found their trail at all. She watched Charlie Kicking Woman stop. He stood still for a long time and then he was walking back toward her grandmother’s house.
“Cold,” Louise said. “You’re getting colder.”
Louise lay back in the grass. “If he’s looking for me,” she told Baptiste, “I don’t think he has a clue.” She was exhausted from running, tired of it all. The wind had picked up and the tall, sleepy grass swept over her. The powdered moon was almost invisible. She began wishing that Charlie Kicking Woman would just go away and not only because she didn’t want to be caught. She didn’t want to make a fool out of Charlie again. She had seen Charlie drinking coffee in the Perma store. He was sitting with a group of suyapis, all of them in their uniforms. State police officers and Charlie the Indian by himself. Louise had stopped just outside the screen door to listen to them. The white men were talking about Indians as if Charlie wasn’t an Indian, or maybe Charlie wasn’t a cop, or, worse yet, as if Charlie wasn’t even there. Louise had snuck up to the window to watch Charlie. Their conversation was loud. It wasn’t long before one of the white men stood up and put his hands on his hips. Charlie stood up then and put his hands on his hips too. He was nodding and laughing with those men like he had been places he’d never been. Charlie Kicking Woman began making fun of Indians himself when he looked up to see Louise. He had stopped talking then. He had taken off his hat and fumbled with some change in his pocket. He had shamed himself. Louise knew his shame. She had tried to pass herself off as white too many times so that she could spare herself ridicule and discomfort. She had denied her family and herself so she could have a drink with a white man. She didn’t know what would happen if Charlie did find them. Baptiste always seemed to get the better of Charlie. She didn’t want to be witness to Charlie’s redfaced fumbling again. It would be better for all of them if he didn’t find her.
Baptiste was still keeping watch, rigid and vigilant. She began to feel grateful to Baptiste, but when he tapped her leg again there was a rise in his voice that told her he was in this for himself. Baptiste liked to trick others. She looked up to see Baptiste rocking. He rubbed the top of his head. She could hear the whistle of his breath and when she sat up, Baptiste sidled up behind her and wrapped his arms and legs around her. Charlie had suddenly changed direction. He was moving up the hill quickly, with purpose. When he kept coming in their direction, she bucked up against Baptiste’s arms, ready to run, but Baptiste had captured her tight. “Easy,” he said to her, and she felt like he was talking to Champagne. She couldn’t stop her heart from racing. She could feel Baptiste’s voice at the nape of her neck and she strained to hear what he was saying but he was not talking to her then.
Louise watched Officer Kicking Woman as he walked a straight-line path to where they sat hidden in the weeds. He knows where we are, Louise thought and pressed the palms of her hands flat to the ground, ready to run again. Baptiste leaned his chest into her back, and snipped off a milkweed stem, split it open to white foam with his broad thumbnail. He took the watery milk and rubbed it on his hand. Charlie walked a distance away from them and then stopped. A web of grasshoppers shot up behind him. Charlie’s shoulders pulled up tight to his ears. He glanced backward for a moment so short he must have felt the muscles stretch behind his eyes.
Charlie was close. She hid her face. She did not want to see him. She could hear a crease of wind slow. Baptiste turned to her. “He cannot see you, Louise,” he said. “He is blind to us here.” Louise did not believe Baptiste. She pressed her fingers to his lips to quiet him but he kept talking. She put her hands over her head and scrunched herself down into the weeds.
Baptiste’s voice was heavy in her ears. Charlie would hear Baptiste and take her back to Thompson Falls. Weakness pressed deep into her chest. Her hands were trembling like the honeyed saplings at the thick base of the hill. Charlie had stopped walking. He rested his hand on his holster. And still Baptiste kept talking. Charlie was close enough to hear Baptiste, to see them in the weeds. But Charlie only tilted his head up as if he were hearing something far away. Louise looked down at Charlie standing in the open field. The sudden wind had brought back the heat of summer. Clear heat shuddered the long September grass, a heat that looked wet in the distance, a wavering, filmy heat that seemed to wash over him. Louise wrapped her arms around her knees and watched Charlie. Charlie began walking toward them again. She breathed through her mouth. “He can’t even hear us,” Baptiste told her, but Charlie kept walking steadily toward them.
She believed Charlie was playing a trick on them. He was letting them hide like children, letting them play their game, but as Charlie got closer she could see his face and she knew. His eyes watered with the hard setting sun. Baptiste tapped Louise’s hand. “We are hidden,” he said. He pointed toward the stiff juniper that lined the river. She looked carefully.
“See that,” Baptiste said. “See.”
She saw the large herd of deer as if she were imagining it. First a twitch. Then a rolling haze. A great shuddering movement like wind on grass.
She could see the gray highway, the stuttering light on the river. She could see light cradled in sweetgrass. She could not remember seeing light as if it were more than just light. Silver light channeled down the rock face of Revais Hill. Light glanced off Charlie’s smooth face. Louise wondered if the sun itself shed its skin to hide all the animals. “That’s right,” Baptiste said, and she wondered if he was answering her.
In this field, these hills, the sun ached over red leaves, hid bear and deer. Trout slept in the hazy shadow of early evening, safe. She wanted to believe she was safe, too, that there was a place for her to hide from all of them, from Baptiste Yellow Knife, from Mr. Bradlock, from Charlie Kicking Woman’s chase.
Charlie’s shadow darkened the spot where Louise sat with Baptiste. Louise was close enough to Charlie to touch his gun. She felt like a snake coiled and ready to strike. She could feel the heat of his leg, smell the singed heat of his wool slacks. She looked up, saw the wind stiffen the hair up from Charlie’s forehead. Baptiste looked up too. Charlie was so close Louise could hear the tight squeak of his leather holster. She drew her knees tighter to her chest and heard the blood beating in her throat. Charlie shook his head and kicked at a rock beside her, his boot skimming her thigh. She felt laughter curdle her stomach. The idea that Charlie could not see them in the cover of the weeds began to fill Louise.
Charlie scanned the base of White Lodge Hill. When he left, he walked carefully, turning back to gaze in their direction with eyes steady and unseeing. She thought Charlie held only the vision of certain trees, a few rock swells he could not distinguish from dirt, everything blending to nothing. Maybe Charlie saw the curve of her hip as only another slope of land, her fingers stark as the weeds that surrounded her. Maybe Charlie could not see the meadowlark in the pine branches, the distant white heat lifting, the separate river rocks, the sleek dark shale that rose from the hill. Louise could feel a low shifting breeze. Charlie turned his broad back to them. Baptiste held her safe. He was talking to her, telling her a story. She wanted to lay back in the prickle of weeds beside him and listen to his dry voice. She could still see Charlie but then he began running, running as if from a cold place where the only name spoken was his own.
The sun had moved behind them, a yielding light now that carried a tint of coolness. She began to believe she was there by herself. Alone, listening to her heart, the sound of far water.
Louise
THE FALLING PLACE
She left Baptiste Yellow Knife at Dixon with the idea that she would head to Missoula and shake Charlie. She was surprised Baptiste had told her to go, had let her go. She thought if she could stay in Missoula for a while she could head back home and have a better chance of fooling Mr. Bradlock. She didn’t get a ride right away and she was worried Charlie would spot her on the roadside with her thumb up.
The stranger had picked her up at the hour she imagined her grandmother was washing her face at the spring. The man was tall, big-boned, and broad hipped. His thinning hair was widow peaked and made his strain-lined forehead longer. After each curve he patted the steering wheel with the palm of his hand but said nothing to Louise. She closed her eyes to see the green edge of water clearing in the pool of her grandmother’s hands. The gray dusk of cottonwood trunks turning the color of salt clay.
She could feel night cooling the road. The muggy smell of nettles and jimsonweed hissed through a window crack and made her lonesome. It was dusk and growing dark fast. It seemed things were moving closer. The fields and the highway, the trees and the river blended toward sky and to earth again. She put her hand to her forehead and pulled back her hair. Eventually they would find her and they would take her back to Thompson Falls, back to the scaled face of Mrs. Finger, the tight frown of Arliss who would find a way to blame Louise for their problems with Warner Phillips. She remembered how Mr. Moxy, the music teacher, once put his hand on her shoulder and in a hushed voice more intimate than a whisper told her she could pass for white and had hooked his finger and nipped Louise’s breast as if he were cuffing her chin to be proud. She had never told anyone about Mr. Moxy. She had learned to take care of her own problems. She kneed him hard in the crotch. He left her alone after that incident, although he would smile at her at times, a cool glimpse of a smile as if they shared a secret. They could take her back to Thompson Falls a hundred times. She would not stay there.
Her throat pulsed at the collar. She shifted in the seat and reached back quickly and unhooked the top button of her blouse. From a side glance the man smiled at her and when she turned to smile back he looked away. The green panel light of the car lit his pale brown hair, the angular planes of his cheekbones. He had looked older when he had stopped to offer a ride. Now she saw the smooth skin of his face, how his chin shined from razor burn. His forehead had relaxed with the hum of tires, the long straight road, the distance of a day passing toward evening.
He had a cowboy shirt on, fancy, but not storebought. There were hand-embroidered cowboy boots on his cuffs, on his left shoulder a horse head with an eye too big. It had fine detailed stitching, like lasso roping for the yoke. The fabric looked wet and was the color of beans. He’s proud of himself, Louise thought and pressed the side of her forehead and cheek to the cool door window. She could feel wind skim her scalp; it pulled a strand of her hair through the window crack. Louise leaned her head back on the seat and looked ahead at the path of his headlights. The moon could not light up this darkness. The land lay out blind to them. He drove his car too close to the edge of a hill. She saw the rapid eyes of a porcupine, the gray needles of his coat, then the night again, pinholes of stars, the road threading out, the weak moon.
They were leaving the town of Arlee and she was looking forward to Missoula. She pressed her tight back into the seat, lit a cigarette, and opened the ashtray. It was clean. She tapped it shut and rolled down the window. The man gripped the steering wheel. She could feel the smooth force of the car, the solid whining road.
“What’s your name?” she said. The man swallowed. “My real name,” he said, “is Vivian.”
“What’s your other name?” she asked. She could half see his reflection on the windshield. He was rubbing his neck.
“Vance.”
“Vance,” she repeated, but she did not offer her name. They passed one car with a dull headlight low to the ground. The other headlight shot the windshield silver and for a moment there was only a blinding whiteness, then the sky beyond, dense as velvet. Louise listened to the man breathe. He turned on the radio. A voice from Great Falls listed midland farm prices, the price of corn, wheat, potatoes. The radio popped and hummed. She licked the powder off a stick of gum and stuck it back in her pocket to light another cigarette. She handed the cigarette to the stranger, saying nothing. He pulled a breath in slowly, his chest full, exhaling a sigh. She could smell his lungs, sweet from sips of Coca-Cola, and she tried to imagine him naked. He would live at home, she thought, a man whose mother sewed cowboy shirts for him, pressing detailed horses and lassos to his bowed shoulders. A man who would only be naked behind a bathroom door, his butt red from a hot bath. She smiled at him and he glanced at her, his eyebrows as thin as his nose. She felt a sudden warmth for him, sitting in his dark car smoking cigarettes, traveling over roads that had scorched her feet too many times. She could like him.
His headlights bleached a tunnel of light beyond Sleeping Child. She could see a thin glow over the haze of the hill, an edge of her heart turning silver. Stars settled closer. She rubbed a dull pain beneath her rib cage. Walking the barefoot miles to escape Thompson Falls had made her legs restless. She could feel the slow crawl of blood in her calves. She leaned forward to loosen her shoelaces. She kept her head down for a moment. She could smell the leather of his seats, his wood-sweet cologne.
The man shouted, “Look,” and she lifted her head eyelevel to the bottom of the windshield. She held the deer in her vision like light. For one moment suspended in its leap. She could see its white throat, the hair bristled on its back. She heard first the thick hide buckling the smooth chrome, then the slow slide of the well-grazed deer over the wind-ridden hood. She pictured the break of the shiny hood ornament, a knife now slitting a straight edge of the deer’s belly, the hood purple with blood.
The deer came through the windshield, and time moved slowly for Louise. She heard the wheeze of the stranger as the deer hooves cracked the windshield. She could hear the dull flesh blows to the man’s chest, and she thought of jumping down to sawdust in moccasins, of fruit ripe and falling to hard ground. His voice was cushioned by the neck of the deer, little puffs of breath, then a whistling, a rattling bone caught in his windpipe, pressing. She covered her face with her forearms, felt the razor cuff of hooves at the back of her hands, blood rush to her elbows. She heard herself moan as the car bounced hard on rough ground. She saw the headlights shoot up toward sky then down again to sage and white grass. She counted these things in the pulse of her fingers. A hiss of steam rose white like a warm winter river above the hood. She closed her eyes as her forehead hit the windshield frame.
She noticed first the car had stopped running. The deer’s heavy head was cradled in her lap. She felt its still tongue, rough and dry on her hand. The cupped moon was yellow through the frame of broken glass. A dim light pressed through the open front window, enough that she could see the stranger, his eyes half open and dreaming beneath the cover of the deer’s warm back. She felt a chill at her neck. She half listened to the dry slide of broken glass falling from the smooth leather seats as she pulled herself out of the car. She heard wood snap in the field as she headed for the highway. The haze on the road met the tops of the trees. She could see car lights filter the highest pine branches, a great powdered light that seemed to gather the ground. She lifted her arms to the first car and was resigned to see Charlie Kicking Woman.
Officer Kicking Woman
HERE
She appeared in my headlights, sudden and brilliant, an apparition I could taste on the tip of my tongue, bitter metal on the backs of my teeth. Louise. There was a slashrip across her blouse, and her skirt was torn and ragged. It occurred to me after it was all over she must have been bleeding badly because all I remember when I think about seeing her that night is the red-wet back of her arm as she shielded her eyes from my car lights.
I had to stop the car and rest my arm on the steering wheel a moment, blow a long breath through closed teeth. It shook me up to see Louise on the roadside looking like my worst fears. Louise grabbed the door on the passenger side.
