Love Medicine (22 page)

His hair stiffened. His body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly. Behind him there was a wide, tall window. Gerry opened it and sent the screen into thin air with an elegant chorus girl kick.

Then he followed the screen, squeezing himself unbelievably through the frame like a fat rabbit disappearing down a hole. It was three stories down to the cement and asphalt parking lot.

Officers Lovchik and Harriss gained the window. The nurses followed.

I slipped through the fire exit and took the back stairs down into the parking lot, believing I would find him stunned and broken there.

But Gerry had chosen his window with exceptional luck, for the officers had parked their car directly underneath. Gerry landed just over the driver’s seat, caving the roof into the steering wheel. He bounced off the hood of the car and then, limping, a bit dazed perhaps, straddled his bike. Out of duty, Lovchik released several rounds into the still trees below him. The reports were still echoing when I reached the front of the building.

I was just in time to see Gerry Nanapush, emboldened by his godlike leap and recovery, pop a whee lie and disappear between the neat shrubs that marked the entrance to the hospital, Two weeks later Dot and her girl, who was finally named Shawn, like most girls born that year, came back to work at the scales.

Things went on as they had before, except that Shawn kept us occupied during the long hours. She was large, of course, and had a sturdy pair of lungs she used often. When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated with sugar tits or pacifiers. Dot unzipped her parka halfway, pulled her blouse up, and let her nurse for what seemed like hours.

We could scarcely believe her appetite. Dot was a diligent producer of milk, however. Her breasts, like overfilled inner tubes, strained at her nylon blouses. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, Dot rose and carried them in the crooks of her arms, for her shoulders were growing bowed beneath their weight.

The trucks came in on the hour, or half hour. I heard the rush of air brakes, gears grinding only inches from my head. It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me. I wasn’t lonely now that Dot had returned. The season would end soon, and we wondered what had happened to Gerry.

There were only a few weeks left of work when we heard that Gerry was caught again. He’d picked the wrong reservation to hide on-Pine Ridge.

As always, it was overrun with federal agents and armored vehicles.

Weapons were stashed everywhere and easy to acquire. Gerry got himself a weapon. Two men tried to arrest him. Gerry would not go along, and when he started to run and the shooting started, Gerry shot and killed a clean shaven man with dark hair and light eyes, a state trooper, a man whose picture was printed in all the papers.

They sent Gerry to prison in Marion, Illinois. He was placed in the control unit. He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

Dot and I continued to work the last weeks together. Once we weighed baby Shawn. We unlatched her little knit suit, heavy as armor, and bundled her in a light, crocheted blanket. Dot went into the shack to adjust the weights. I stood there with Shawn.

She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms.

busy, I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load.

But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

da CROWN OF THORNS r U a S (1981) A month after June died Gordie took the first drink, and then the need was on him like a hook in his jaw, tipping his wrist, sending him out with needles piercing his hairline, his aching hands.

From the beginning it was his hands that made him drink. They remembered things his mind could not-curve of hip and taut breast.

They remembered farther back, to the times he spent, with June when the two were young. They had always been together, like brother and sister, stealing duck eggs, blowing crabgrass between their thumbs, chasing cows. They got in trouble together.

They fought but always made up easy and quick, until they were married.

His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and the speed of their striking. He’d been a mom”,.” boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

They remembered this while they curled around the gold colored can of beer he had begged down the road at Eli’s.

“You gone too far now,” Ell said. Gordie knew he was sitting at his Uncle Ell’s table again because the orange spots in the oilcloth were there beneath his eyes. Ell’s voice came from the soft pure blackness that stretched out in all directions from the lighted area around the beer can. Gordie’s hands felt unclean. The can felt cold and pure.

It was as though his hands were soiling something never touched before.

The way the light fell it was as though the can were lit on a special altar.

“I’m contaminated,” Gordie said.

“You sure are. ” Eli spoke somewhere beyond sight. “You’re going to land up in the hospital.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, Gordle struggled to say, but he was distracted suddenly by the size of his hands. So big. Strong.

“Look at that,” said Cordle wonderingly, opening and closing his fist.

“If only they’d let me fight the big one, huh? If only they’d gave me a chance.”

“You did fight the big one,” said Eli. “You got beat.”

“That’s right,” said Gordic. “it wasn’t even no contest. I wasn’t even any good.”

“You forget those things,” said Eli. He was moving back and forth behind the chair.

“Eat this egg. I fixed it over easy.”

“I couldn’t,” said Gordie, “or this bun either. I’m too sick.”

His hands would not stay still. He had noticed this. They managed to do an alarming variety of things while he was not looking.

Now they had somehow crushed the beer can into a shape. He took his hands away and studied the can in its glowing spotlight.

The can was bent at the waist and twisted at the hips like the torso of a woman. It rocked slightly side to side in the breeze from the window.

“She’s empty!” he realized suddenly, repossessing the can. “I don’t think it was full to begin with. I couldn’t’ve. ” “What?”

asked Eli. Patiently, his face calm, he spooned the egg and fork-toasted bread into his mouth. His head was brown and showed through the thin gray stubble of his crew cut. A pale light lifted and fell in the room. It was six A.M. “Want some?” Eli offered steaming coffee in a green plastic mug, warped and stained. It was the same color as his work clothes.

Gordie shook his head and turned away Eli drank from the cup himself “You wouldn’t have another someplace that you forgot?” said Gordie sadly.

“No,” said Eli.

“I’ve got to make a raise then,” said Gordie.

The two men sat quietly, then Gordie shook the can, put it down, and walked out of the door. Once outside, he was hit by such a burst of determination that He almost walked normally, balanced in one wheel rut, down Eli’s little road. Some of his thick hair stuck straight up in a peak, and some was crushed flat.

His face sagged. He’d hardly eaten that week, and his pants flapped beneath his jacket, cinched tight, the zipper shamefully unzipped.

Eli watched from his chair, sipping the coffee to warm his blood. He liked the window halfway open although the mornings were still cold.

When June lived with him she’d slept on the cot beside the stove, a lump beneath the quilts and army blankets when he came in to get her up for the government school bus.

Sometimes they’d sat together looking out the same window into cold blue dark. He’d hated to send her off at that lonely hour. Her coat was red. All her clothes were from the nuns. Once he’d bought June a plastic dish of bright bath-oil beads. Before he could stop her she had put one in her mouth, not understanding what it was. She’d swallowed it down, too. Then, when she’d come home, started crying out of disappointment and shame, bubbles had popped from her lips and nose.

Eli laughed out loud, then stopped. He saw her face and the shocked look. He sat there thinking of her without smiling and watched Gordie disappear.

Two cars passed Gordie on the road but neither stopped. It was too early to get anything in town, but he would have appreciated a ride to his house. It was a mile to his turnoff, and his need grew worse with each step he took. He shook with the cold, with the lack. The world had narrowed to this strip of frozen mud. The trees were stung to either side in a dense mist, and the crackle his feet made breaking ice crystals was bad to hear. From time to time he stopped to let the crackle die down. He put his hands to his mouth to breathe on them.

He touched his cold cheeks. The skin felt rubbery and dead, Finally the turnoff came and he went down to the lake where his house was.

Somehow he gained the stairs and door then crawled across the carpet to the phone. He even looked the number up in the book.

“Royce there?” he asked the woman’s voice. She put her husband on without a word.

“You still drinking?” said Royce.

“Could you bring me some quarts? Three, four, last me out.

I’ll pay you when I get my check.”

“I don’t make house calls or give no credit.”

“Cousin … you know I work.”

There was a pause.

“All right then. Credit’s one dollar on the bottle, and house call’s two.”

Gordie babbled his thanks. The phone clicked. Knowing it would come, Gordie felt much stronger, clearer in the brain. He knew he would sleep once he got the wine. He noticed he’d IPP, landed underneath the table, that he’d brought the phone down.

He lay back restfully. It was a good place to stay.

A lot of time went by, hours or days, and the quarts were gone.

Mote wine appeared. One quart helped and the next didn’t.

Nothing happened. He’d gone too far. He found himself sitting at the kitchen table in a litter of dried bread, dishes he must have eaten something from, bottles and stubbed cigarettes. Either the sun was rising or the sun was going down, and although he did not feel that he could wait to find out which it was, he knew he had no choice. He was trapped there with himself He didn’t know how long since he had slept.

Gordie’s house was simple and very small. It was a rectangle divided in half The kitchen and the living room were in one half and the bedroom and the bathroom were in the other. A family of eight had lived here once, but that was long ago in the old days before government housing.

Gordie bought the place after June left. He’d fixed it up with shag carpeting, linoleum tile, paint and Sheetrock and new combination windows looking out on the lake. He had always wanted to live by a lake, and now he did. All the time he had been living there he both missed June and was relieved to be without her. Now he couldn’t believe that she would not return. He had been together with her all his life.

There was nothing she did not know about him. When they ran away from everybody and got married across the border in South Dakota, it was just a formality for the records. They already knew each other better than most people who were married a lifetime.

They knew the good things, but they knew how to hurt each other, too.

“I was a bastard, but so were you,” he insisted to the room.

“We were even.”

The sun was setting, he decided. The air was darker. The waves rustled and the twigs scraped together outside.

bank, I love you, little cousin!” he said loudly. “June!” Her name burst from him. He wanted to take it back as soon as he said it.

Never, never, ever call the dead by their names, Grandma said.

They might answer. Gordie knew this. Now he felt very uneasy.

Worse than before.

The sounds from the lake and trees bothered him, so he itched on the television. He turned the volume up as loud as possible. There was a program on with sirens and shooting. He kept that channel.

Still he could not forget that he’d called June.

He felt as though a bad thing was pushing against the walls from ‘de.

The windows quivered. He stood in the middle of the outsi room, unsteady, listening to everything too closely. He turned on the lights.

He locked each window and door. Still he heard things. The waves rustled against each other like a woman’s stockinged legs.

Acorns dropping on the roof clicked like heels.

There was a low murmur in the breeze.

An old vacuum cleaner was plugged in the corner. He switched that on and the vibrations scrambled the sounds in the air. That was better.

Along with the television and the buzz of the lights, the vacuum cleaner was a definite help. He thought of other noises he might produce indoors. He remembered about the radio in the bedroom and lurched through the doorway to turn that on too. Full blast, a satisfying loud music poured from it, adding to the din. He went into the bathroom and turned on his electric shaver. There were no curtains in the bathroom, and something made him look at the window.

Her face. June’s face was there. Wild and pale with a bloody mouth.

She raised her hand, thin bones, and scratched sadly on the glass.

When he ran from the bathroom she got angry and began to pound. The glass shattered. He heard it falling like music to the. bathroom floor.

Everything was on, even the oven. He stood in the humming light of the refrigerator, believing the cold radiance would protect him.

Nothing could stop her though.