Bone Dance (15 page)

She sat down across from him again. “Lonny, if I ever loved a kid, it's you. And I think that I have failed you badly. And that's why we are going to sit here, right into next week if we have to. You have my total and undivided attention.”

He could see his mother now as if she were standing right beside them. The pink sweater she often wore. Her fingernails perfect elongated moons. The way her feet slid along the floor when she was tired. The matter-of-fact way she went about doing everything. And when she was angry, a small gesture—a magazine sliding onto the floor, an icy shake of the head, a word, a look—everything about the way she moved, a slow economy of efficient energy. So many things about her that he had forgotten began to rush back.

“Start talking,” said Deena, “and don't leave out a thing.”

At five o'clock in the morning, the red dawn rose beyond the big east-facing windows of Deena's Deli. His mother's spirit had eased herself in beside Deena, and Lonny knew that he was seeing things again. Her face was turned so that he could clearly see the way her fine black hair always escaped and fell across her ear no matter how many times she tried to clip it back.

Deena looked across at him and said, “We need to pack it up here. I can't keep awake much longer. You didn't even eat your pie. So”—she gave Lonny a wan smile—”you're going to set your heart at ease finally and go and talk to him.”

He got up out of the booth, went around, and pulled her, dog tired, up out of her seat. She leaned against him, and he clung to her, trembling.

“It'll be okay,” she said, stroking his back. “Go on now.”

“Deena,” he whispered in her ear, “I know Mom wouldn't want you to give up on Pop.”

And then he was in the truck, driving away, one hand on the steering wheel, the other, for courage, on the cracked red vinyl seat, the very edge of it, where, drawn in ballpoint ink by himself one day when he was fourteen and bored and missing Mom, was a tiny blue heart pierced with an arrow.

“I'm going to put the coffee on, Pop,” he said when he got home. “I've got something I have to tell you.”

Pop rolled over in his bed and rubbed his eyes. “You were out again all night,” he said. “I wish you'd give a fellow some warning. So I wouldn't always have to be lying here in the middle of the night, worrying about you.”

“Please,” said Lonny, “come on out to the kitchen. Get up now, because I really need you to do that.”

He made coffee, and Pop came and sat down, and then Lonny told him everything. And when it was all finished, when everything was finally all out in the open, Pop sat there stunned, leaning forward, and said, “All this time…?”

Lonny didn't trust himself to answer. He nodded his head and stared at Pop and couldn't take his eyes away. It was like looking at hope coming up over the horizon.

“I thought… the LaFrenière land…
That's
why you didn't want it?”

Lonny nodded again and felt a gasp shake his body.

Pop dropped his head, wiped his eyes. “I was so busy with my own grief.”

“I'm
so
sorry, Pop.”

Pop raised his eyes. “Why couldn't you have told me?”

“She said it would kill you.”

“Who said that? Your mother?”

“She died feeling disappointed in me.”

“My God,” said Pop.

He got up quickly and came to Lonny and wrapped his arms around him just like a big sheltering tree. “There, there,” he said as Lonny wept and clung to him. “There, there,” he said, awkwardly kissing the top of Lonny's head. “You don't have to keep suffering, son. It's over now. I forgive you.”

Lonny nodded, pulled away, choked back his sobs. But more tears kept coming. Finally, he threw back his head in his chair and wept uncontrollably.

Pop kept on talking, whether out of relief or concern, Lonny wasn't sure, but his words rippled along like rain. And then Lonny stopped crying, and for the first time since he could remember, he felt calm.

“The year before I met your mother,” Pop was saying, “I went over Dinlaren way. There's an elder over there by the name of Joe Dakotah, and he runs a sweat lodge. Anyway, I went there to be purified and find some meaning to my life, and right in the middle of all that praying and chanting, I get the idea for that newspaper ad, looking for a companion. And, by gum, didn't it work out pretty good, too. I found you and my Margaret. A little prayer sitting right next to Mother Earth never hurts when you have a troubled
heart. Would you like me to arrange for you to meet Joe?”

“I already have,” said Lonny, wiping his eyes. “Two nights ago. He was over at Robert's, talking to Daryl. He's a scary guy. He makes you see the truth.”

“That's good then. Very, very good.” Pop slowly nodded his shaggy bear head.

Lonny hung his own head, looked at his hands, raised them, and covered his eyes. He was so tired, bone weary. Light gathered like kinks of electricity. A buffalo walked across his vision. Left to right. Disappeared. Walked around behind his head and slowly began to cross again.

“Will you do me a favor?” said Pop.

Lonny opened his eyes. “Anything, Pop.”

“It's about Earl. I figured his daughter should have the choice of doing what she wants with her father's ashes.”

“You've kept them all this time?”

“Was I wrong to do that?” said Pop.

“No. I guess you did whatever you thought you should do.”

“He wanted the cheap urn. A little white cardboard box. I worried about that. What the family might think. ‘But anything extra,' he told me a couple of days before he died, ‘anything extra off this old buffalo is fat that I want my daughter to have.' So I said, ‘Okay, Earl, the cheap urn it is.' “

Lonny shook his head and smiled.

“And then he says, ‘Ever see human ashes?' ‘Well,
no, I haven't,' I tell him. ‘They're heavy,' he says. ‘Got little pieces of bone and teeth in them. So make sure they pretty them up, okay?' ‘What exactly do you mean?' I say. ‘Well,' says Earl, ‘you know, she'll just look at them and get real turned off. People,' he says, ‘have this idea of
spreading them
. Know what I mean? So, Tom,' he says, looking at me with his eyes, and they're all burning up with pneumonia, ‘we have to be practical, okay? For her sake? So could you ask them, please, to put them in a grinder?' “

“You did that?”

“It was a dying man's wish. You can say what you want about Earl, but when he was sober, he did have this very down-to-earth personal side.” Hands on his knees, levering himself out of his chair, he said, “They're out in the shed. I'll go get them. I think you should be the one to give them to her. You need to go back and make your peace with her and the land.”

“Pop, she doesn't even want to talk to me.”

“We'll see about that. Go and clean yourself up now. You look like you've been sleeping in a swamp.”

Twenty minutes later, opening the truck door, Pop set the little white cardboard box on the seat beside Lonny. “Well, Earl,” he said, addressing the box, “looks like you're finally going to meet your daughter.”

He closed the door, leaned into the open window. “You're going to be okay,” he said, this time to Lonny. He pulled back and slapped the side of the truck.

Lonny drove away, stealing glances in the rearview
mirror. Pop raising his hand, waving. Pop dropping his hand, lowering his head, lost in a private moment. Pop looking at the sky. And as he slowly turned, then walked back toward the empty house, Lonny understood that Pop would be okay, too.

She gave up, disappointed, and put down the phone. She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a box of orange juice, a bag of bagels, a tub of cream cheese. She had wanted to tell her mother about how she'd come back from the clearing, dazzled, cleaned out in her spirit. How she then lay on the sofa with all the windows and doors open and her head so filled with sounds, growing sounds, frogs everywhere. “He's here! And here! And here!” they sang as they leaped in light. Leaped in shade. Trilled from trees. From under rocks. From up on top of the mound.

She'd intended, later, to go out naked under the stars, just as he had done, with only her quilt wrapped around her. And she would have stayed out all night, too. But she fell asleep right there, in the fullness of day, in this cabin, on this land that had somehow become saturated with her father's life. She didn't dream except for the clear green froggy light that glowed, then gradually dimmed, behind her closed eyes.

And then she slept through the night. She knew that as she slept the moon had changed position in the sky. And the stars, flung across the vast prairie cathedral, beamed their steady memory of light. They were all up there now, her grandmother and Grandpa and her dad, every one of them taking their place with the ancestors.

She went out to eat breakfast on the steps outside the kitchen. Under the early morning sun, she flipped off the cream-cheese lid. The moan of the LaFrenières' truck sounded at the top of the road. Grew closer. Her heart began to pound high in her throat as Lonny pulled onto the land. By the time he got out of the truck, her mouth had gone dry. Her top lip stuck to her teeth. Her legs were weak.

Lonny stopped and stood silently in the grass. She folded her arms and felt his eyes looking at her.

“It seems,” he said, “I'm always bringing you things that are really tough to give. And are even tougher to receive.”

She raised her eyes. He walked toward her. Nestled in his palms was a small white box. He climbed up the little steps and sat down beside her.

“What's this?”

“Your dad's ashes.”

“Oh,” she said, and then felt as if she were plunging headlong into deep dark water.

He set the box down. “Pop figured that you'd know what you wanted to do with them. He wanted me to bring them to you.”

He sat quietly, perched at the edge of the step. Looking at his feet. Glancing at hers. Waiting.

And then he started talking quietly. “Your dad had been drinking pretty steady since Christmas, and he was drunk when he got to our house. He'd walked all that way, in a blizzard, just so we'd get that letter and mail it for him. But even if I'd mailed it right away, I don't know if you'd have met him in time. He got sick right after that. He was in the hospital five days later. He never came out again.”

She looked down at the lake. This was a view her father would have looked at again and again in the short time he was here. Did it bring him comfort? Everything was so complicated in this life. It's just like Grandpa had always said, always the good and the bad together.

“Let's go somewhere else,” Lonny said finally. “Let's go down to the lake. It's nice there. You can see little minnows swimming. The water is full of life this time of year.”

She walked ahead. A big gray rock edged the shoreline. There was room for two or more, and she sat down and Lonny sat near her. They stared out at the water. The sun warmed her shoulders. She ran her fingers along the sun-heated rock, and she could feel the warmth of his body close by.

“I didn't know who to be mad at,” she finally said. “Life is so unfair sometimes.” She turned to him. “It's a wonderful letter. I'm glad you kept it. I'm glad you didn't throw it out.”

“I should have sent it,” he said quickly. “I know that now.”

Do something, she thought. Or was it her thought? In a few minutes he'll drive away, said this thought, and you'll be alone again. With your father's ashes.

All it takes is moving one inch. That's what makes the difference. Moving your hand just a bit. Making your little finger lift ever so gently toward his. Contact, like lightning bugs.

And suddenly she is in his arms, her mouth against his neck, his sweet hair a curtain around them. His lips, his tongue. Wind blowing off the lake. His beating heart.

He felt as if he'd just jumped off a cliff and didn't know or care where or when he'd hit bottom. He held his fall for a quarter of a century. The world spun many times. This is what it's like to free-fall into somebody's heart, he thought. Maybe I'll die.

She was the first to start breathing again. He held her forehead against his, mentally counted to four, then pulled away.

She had that look that girls get. Even the smartest girls. Like their brains have just left their bodies and won't be returning anytime real soon. Usually this was a great sign. Today it finally made him want to put on the brakes. Then her vision seemed to clear. He watched her soft look harden into little points of dark darting flame.

“Relax,” he said, feeling shaky and full of crazy love.

“Boy,” she said, her eyes tearing up. She looked out at the lake. “Boy, oh, boy.”

He watched big fat tears flow down her face. Looked
away. Felt the way he had that first day when Pop took him up to the top of Medicine Bluff. Felt that joy again. Felt that pulse of rapture go racing like fire along his skin.

“I've never met anybody quite like you,” he said, looking at her sidelong, sliding his eyes away again.

“Damn right, and don't you forget it,” she said, swiping at her tears with trembling fingers.

“You make me shaky.” He laughed nervously.

“Is this good or bad?”

He sat there, caught by the wonder of her, imagined her back in a school playground somewhere, hanging upside down from a swing by her scabby knees. Inside her, he thought, is that little person still. And I have to be careful with her. I have to be very, very careful.

Gradually, as his story unraveled, as he told it to her, his eyes soft and clear, she understood everything. This is my place now, she was thinking, but he still loves it.