Dead Floating Lovers (27 page)

I sat in a metal lawn chair, poking a stick at the fire I had built down on the beach. The water lapped rhythmically along the shoreline. Flames burned bright orange in the pit. I was invisible in the dark. Embers glowed beneath the logs as, one by one, I fed the manuscript pages to the fire, enjoying the brief white flame, the edges curling inward, the quick, bright disintegration.

There was no excuse this time. What I’d judged as superb creativity was only a flair for mimicry, or outright plagiarism. The people in my head weren’t mine. They belonged to other writers; other stories. Somewhere in my brain there was a blind spot. Once I claimed people as my own, I couldn’t see or recall where they’d come from. A fatal flaw in a writer. How could I trust anything I wrote?

I felt sorry for myself and mad at myself at the same time. I hadn’t wanted to wait around for the embarrassed comments the audience would come up with. Sympathy wasn’t good for my deflated ego. Nor were the suggestions Flora and the others might offer, like talking my next idea over with them before beginning to write. I wanted to get home, be alone, and burn something, anything, completely.

When Dolly Wakowski called my name and came out of the darkness, down the path from my house, I wasn’t happy to see her. I didn’t want to see anyone, maybe for days, or weeks. Dolly said nothing. She squatted in the sand and stared into the flames along with me. After a while, she grabbed a handful of the manuscript and fed the pages, one by one, into the fire, then watched as each burned.

“Everybody gets fooled, ya know,” she said after a while, her voice making a small place in the quiet around us. Her profile, outlined in the red glow of my bonfire, looked old and gnarly and wise.

“Yeah,” I said, not mollified, “how could I be so stupid? I think it’s because of that other book, the one about you and me and those poor old ladies. Threw me off my stride.”

“This wasn’t the first time,” she cruelly reminded me. “‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ Now you’ve been fooled twice and you won’t forget again.”

“Forget! I won’t ever write again. That’s enough.” I poked at a dying log with my stick. Sparks shot into the night air. I held down burning pages as they tried to fly away. “In fact, I’m leaving here. That’s enough. You people have stolen my dog, humiliated me, threatened me, put me in danger …”

She didn’t say a word. When I turned to her, she nodded.

“Jackson and I might get back together,” I said. “It’s worth a second try. No use staying here, fooling myself that I can write a salable book. I’m tired of fighting everything and everybody.”

“Yeah. I suppose you are.”

She was maddening. I wanted her to argue with me, not agree.

“If lightning should strike and I sell that other book, I’ll make sure you get your cut.”

“Don’t see me worrying.” She poked at the last burning pages.

There was the smack of a bird out on the dark water. Maybe a loon. Or maybe it was my miserable beaver, watching us.

“You think I’m making a mistake,” I said.

She gave something like a little laugh, but not a happy one. “You
know
you’re making a mistake. Just going back to what you ran away from. Next time it won’t be so easy to leave.”

“Jackson’s changed. He’s gotten older …”

“Yeah. Three year’s worth.” She stood, stretched, and started back up toward the house, calling over her shoulder, “OK. Call me when you get over the self-pity. I don’t need to hear any more of this crap.”

She was disappearing into the darkness when I called after her. “Thanks for coming, Dolly. I … appreciate it.”

“Knew you’d be down.” She hesitated where she stood, only a shadow among the ferns. “You probably don’t care but I found Christine Naquma.”

I said nothing. I knew she still stood there. “You know what else?” Odd, her disembodied voice coming out of blackness. “Eugenia had my dad’s discharge papers from the army up in her vestibule tonight. He was in Vietnam. Can you imagine? Kind of weird seeing papers with his name on ’em. Guess he was real after all.”

Bones and Indians and murder and Dolly’s mythical family had all faded to the back of my brain. Before I could come up with an answer, she was gone.

I sat on, adding logs as the fire burned to cinders. Maybe I would sleep out here, I told myself, rocking back and forth in my rickety old chair. Something so clean about water and sand and fire and night. Depression settled on me. I listened to the beaver swimming. I listened to the fire crack and spit. I left my chair and lay down flat in the sand with my hands behind my head.

I didn’t see the figure silently approaching. I saw nothing until the man loomed above me, long hair across his shoulders, eyes reflecting dying flames. It wasn’t Lewis George. But it wasn’t anyone I wanted to be alone with, here on my deserted beach.

Alfred Naquma.

I scrambled to my knees and then held still. I found I had no fear left in me. And not even any anger. The man’s face was shadowed. I didn’t really feel in danger, but still I moved my hand slowly toward a log that lay half in and half out of the fire. It would make a great weapon, if he came after me.

Despite the isolation of my beach, despite what I had believed about this man, something else was going on. He bent his long body and settled silently to the sand, one hand on either knee. Still, he said nothing.

The firelight played off his face, red off glistening skin. The long black hair hung straight. With a sense of inevitability, I stayed crouched where I was.

“I came to apologize,” he said, voice across the crackling fire like a voice from a cave.

I listened and said nothing.

“I have already told my people how sorry I am. For the trouble I caused them. For forcing friends to do things they would never do. I’ve brought shame on our tribe. I cannot let them go on protecting me.”

He stopped. I held my breath and settled back on my heels.

“I am sorry about your dog. I didn’t know. Nor did I know people lied to protect me at the casino. I have put friends in danger. Not anymore. Thirteen years is too long not to speak. I have been told you are a decent woman. My poor friend Lewis, the only true father I’ve ever known, thought he could force you to stop the police from looking into Mary’s murder. He thought he could make you keep stories out of the newspaper. Lewis thinks a father must protect his son.”

“Where’s my dog?” I demanded, braver and stronger.

He put up a hand.

“When my grandfather died, Lewis took me into his home. The tribe sent me to college. I have too much to be grateful to them for to hurt them now.”

“My dog …”

“I heard that the police are after my sister, Christine. She had nothing to do with what I’m going to tell you,” he went on. “In return for what I am about to say, I want your friends to leave Christine alone. She has a good life. She is safe and away from this place. I hope you will take me at my word and do nothing further to contact her.”

I couldn’t make any promises. “I’ll listen, but Dolly Wakowski wants this solved. Chet was her husband. She has as much right to the truth as you have.”

Alfred nodded, then threw his head back a moment and combed his fingers through his long hair. A sliver of a moon was rising. Pale white light glinted off his shining skin.

“I am the only one who knows that truth,” he said.

I waited.

“Our parents died when we were young,” he began. “There was only my father’s father left to care for us. He had the curse of alcoholism. Long before my grandfather forced us to leave the reservation and go to Sandy Lake, he started drinking. When our people confronted him about his drinking, he got angry and took me and my two sisters away. Orly Naquma was a cruel man. We were beaten many times. He threatened to kill us if we said a word about our life there at Sandy Lake. To get to school we had to walk many, many miles. Sometimes the bus was gone before we made it to the main road. If we were late coming home, it meant another beating. We were to work the skins for him. Help him get money, but none of it was for us. I felt sorriest for my two sisters. Mary made trouble for him. Christine was too quiet.” He stopped and drew a deep breath.

“The girls got to an age when they wanted a normal life. Mary stole what she could from Orly and sold hides on the side. Eventually she bought an old car and kept it way off from our house, among trees. She enrolled in beauty school. She was out of high school then and supposed to be working, bringing money home to him. When he found she was going to beauty school in Traverse City, that she had stolen his skins, he beat her. That time it was very bad. Then that last day, when she came with Chet Wakowski to say she wanted her clothes and that she was leaving, our grandfather was the only one at the cabin.”

He paused a long time. I thought maybe his story was finished, stopped because he didn’t know what happened next.

“I wasn’t there when it happened or I would have stopped him. At least, I need to think I would have stopped him. Grandfather had been drinking all day. He was terrible when I got home. At first I didn’t know what he meant when he bragged, ‘I fixed her. I fixed her like I’ll fix the rest of you.’ I ignored him but soon I knew something terrible had happened. Something to do with Mary.”

“Are you saying you didn’t … ?”

He looked at me, reflection of moonlight in his eyes.

“Let me finish. Then I’ll answer your questions.”

I waited, thinking what I should do. Dolly and Detective Brent had to know. I wasn’t the authority here.

“As the day went on, Orly Naquma sat in his rocking chair, in the middle of the room. He drank, finishing one bottle of whiskey and starting another. After a while the old man began to laugh. He said he had taught Mary a lesson. Now the rest of us would know who was in charge. No child disobeyed an elder, he said. He ranted until I asked him, finally, what lesson he’d taught Mary.”

Alfred took a deep breath. A shudder passed over his shoulders. “I wish I didn’t ask him. To this day, I wish I didn’t know what he’d done.”

“What … was it?” Like Alfred, I didn’t really want to know.

“She came home to get her possessions, he said. That was when she told Orly she was running away with a white man. A married white man. She would shame us and herself, Grandfather said.

“‘I fixed her.’ That’s what he shouted at me. ‘And that man, too. He won’t be sniffing around an Indian woman again.’

“It dawned on me, what he was saying. He’d really done what he’d threatened us with so many times. He’d killed Mary, a spirited, hopeful soul who asked little from life. I put my hands on him and shook him hard, demanding he tell me what he’d done. He struck me a few times; hit me with that whiskey bottle once. Then he stumbled back into his chair and began to laugh harder and harder. I prayed he would choke and die. But, God help me, he didn’t.”

The last words were coughed out. It took time for him to recover his voice.

“He shot my sister, and her friend, he told me. When the man was dead, he got him into our rowboat. In the rowboat he tied cement blocks to the man’s feet. In the middle of the lake, he pushed him overboard, then went back for Mary.

“Mary wasn’t to have even a watery burial. He put her body on the raft I’d made when we were small and towed it to the middle of the lake. He left her there, on top of the raft, for the birds to peck and the sun to rot.”

He stopped, picked up a stick, and poked at the dying fire.

“I couldn’t do anything,” he went on. “I couldn’t move. Hate rose and came out through my skin. As if my whole body was on fire, I needed to take his skinny neck in my hands and squeeze so tight his eyes would pop out of his ugly face. I wanted him dead. I told myself that I was now a man and vengeance was my right.”

The voice hardened. The words came at me clipped and angry. Between us, hovering over the embers, hung the scene he was reliving. Ugliness and evil. I needed to hear what he said, but wished it weren’t true, that no human being had to live the way Alfred, Mary, and Christine had lived.

“I waited until he passed out,” he went on. “The way he did every night. When the chair stopped rocking and his laughter dwindled to a drool and a hiccup; when that bottle rolled from his lap to the floor …”

I sensed something coming that would challenge my sense of morality. If I could have stopped him, I would have. His voice was direct, words loosening and tumbling. He was going to tell me a terrible truth.