Returning to Earth (7 page)

I'm getting to the end of my story but there are a number of bad things I've done that puzzle me. Such things nag at you the way you can't keep your tongue away from the hole left by a pulled tooth. My dad said that just because you've done a few bad things doesn't mean you're a bad person. And some things are right in the middle. For instance it bothered him that he knew Jesse embezzled money from Mr. Burkett after the rape of Jesse's daughter. My dad
couldn't figure out what to do about the crime of stealing so he did nothing. He also said that in Korea he made love to hungry girls for candy bars, which most of the soldiers did, but then it wasn't right to take advantage of hunger. But then it's amazing what will be done for sex. I knew a guy from Iron River that made love to a cop's wife even though he figured he'd probably get shot if the cop found out. Well the cop did find out and this guy got his kneecap blasted off all for sex.

The first bad thing I did was sort of in the middle. Melvin, Carl, and me were brook trout fishing a few miles south of town. We were trespassing on this rich guy's place and we were sneaky and quiet because the guy had a German shepherd guard dog. Melvin was carrying his dad's pistol but he didn't have any bullets so I couldn't figure out the point. Boys can be very dumb. Anyway, Carl let out a yelp when he caught a big brook trout about twelve inches and the guard dog came running. Nothing's fair and the guard dog grabbed Melvin by the leg when he tried to climb a white pine. I went after the dog and faked it out with my left arm. The dog grabbed my coat but I reached over its head and got hold of its collar and swung it around hard and slammed it into a tree. Well, I went too far and the dog just lay there with fear in its eyes so I petted it and then its eyes went still though they remained open. Melvin had to have stitches in his ankle where the dog grabbed him but to this day I wonder if there wasn't a better way to handle the matter than killing the dog. Carl wondered what the rich man was protecting if he had to have a dog that bit people. Melvin had to pay his own doctor bill out of his paper route.
His parents were a strange couple in that the dad drank too much and the mother was real religious. She was fine at baked goods and if we wanted a piece of pie or peanut butter cookies we had to pray with her on our knees right there in the kitchen. It seemed like a fair trade though Carl always made crazy faces during prayer. Melvin's mom told me I was a heathen headed for hell. This scared me at the time but when I told my dad he joked that since I was only half Indian heathen maybe only half of me would go to hell. He wasn't too impressed by Christian people in that Catholics, Lutherans, and Baptists seemed to all act the same. It embarrassed him when Jesse was on vacation in old Mexico and he had to drive the Burketts to the Episcopal church in that big Packard. The question was why they couldn't walk a couple of blocks. Mr. Burkett had so many drunken driving tickets the authorities wouldn't allow him behind the wheel.

Dad said that people make terrible messes pretending they're perfect. He knew the Bible preached against self-righteousness and people still went ahead and drowned in it. When Cynthia and I got caught making love on the Burketts' living room floor and my dad got fired because of it I went crazy for twenty hours or so and then suddenly things returned to normal but not before I did some stupid things. First I drank too much beer down in Skandia during a poker game and lost the filly draft horse my dad gave me for my birthday. He had a mare he skidded logs with and had bred her to a stallion owned by a Mennonite over by Germfask. I had a full house but this guy from Trenary had a straight flush and there went my filly. This experience set me forever
against gambling and is the main reason we left Sugar Island and the Soo area. I know the huge casino helped the tribe but gambling just set my nerves on edge. It's the stupid hope of getting something for nothing that corrupts people, but then after we moved to Bay Mills a small casino was also started there though there were plans for a bigger one. Cynthia told me to get off my high horse because the casino had helped finance education projects and get Indians indoor plumbing. If you're old and it's thirty below zero with lots of snowdrifts it's hard to walk outside to a privy.

Anyway, after I lost the filly I was spoiling for trouble and Melvin said let's drive down to Escanaba. Melvin had just had his sixteenth birthday and was still a virgin and this bothered him. Carl had told him to stop being so dirty-mouthed around girls and to wear clean clothes but Melvin's mother had taken off to Missouri to join this religious cult and their house was a mess. Melvin said, “No, it's only because I'm ugly.” The upshot was that Melvin had heard that there was this woman that worked at a strip club in Escanaba that would screw a fellow for twenty-five dollars. Carl would drive because he was fairly sober because if he drank more than two beers he would puke due to stomach problems. Carl's dad was a big deal at the college and we were driving a newer-model Chevy. The beer was kept in the trunk so we had to slow down and drive off on a log road when we wanted one.

We got to Escanaba and of course Melvin didn't know which of the three strip clubs was where this professional woman worked. None of the clubs would let us in anyway because we didn't have identification and we weren't old
enough. By the third club Melvin was pissed off and had become obnoxious pretending he was big and strong rather than small. This is what beer can do to man. Well, Carl became smart-mouthed and the bouncers shoved him away from the door and then little Melvin threw a punch about a foot wide of the mark and the bouncer backhanded him across the sidewalk into a car. I had to step in though I figured the bouncer to be about two-eighty to my two-thirty. He had a fair amount of fat around the waist, though, and I guessed he probably got winded pretty fast. Boxers know you have to build up your wind with roadwork or you can't put meat in your punches. Well, I ran on the track team so wind wasn't the problem. We boxed and I forced him to wrestle some to wear him out. I took a pretty good haymaker to an ear, which made my head ring like a church bell. By now a crowd had grouped around us and people were betting. The bouncer rushed me and got me half up on a car hood but I got my legs around his chest in a scissors and squeezed out what breath he had left. The bouncer was leaning up against the car when I started hammering him mostly to the body because that way you don't hurt your hands and it takes the will to continue out of your opponent. I hesitated before I threw my last punch because the bouncer's eyes looked like the German shepherd's a few years before. I hit him once more anyway and that's what I truly regret. I should never have thrown that last punch but I was angry about the filly and my dad getting fired by the Burketts for my behavior with Cynthia. Well, we heard a siren so Melvin, Carl, and me ran off down an alley and sat in a dark vacant lot for about an hour and then Carl snuck around and got
the car. We didn't get back to town until daylight. Dad was making breakfast and told me that Mr. Burkett had called him in the evening and hired him back. He made an ice compress for the side of my face which was swollen up. He said that my body had far outgrown my brain. I've regretted that last punch a thousand times. These days men don't fight so much and it's a good thing. Cynthia's parents told her that she could never see me again but that afternoon we met up at Flower's near Au Train. Cynthia only had a learner's permit but she swiped her mother's car and drove out to meet me anyway. She couldn't have been an easy girl to raise. [I suppose I wasn't. C.] I was pleased that Flower and Cynthia liked each other. When Cynthia said something bad about her parents Flower said, “White people try to keep their children young. You're a grown-up. You can always move on.” She wasn't preaching. She said it flatly, like “Try my homemade ketchup with your potatoes.” I was always proud that our son Herald never got in a fight except during his hockey games when it's more or less expected. Herald never liked winter except for hockey. Once he got his B.A. at the University of Michigan with a straight four-point he headed for Caltech for graduate school. When we talk on the phone I begin with “You warm enough, Herald?” and he always says, “Sure am, Dad.”

The other day K took me for a ride up to Big Bay but the day didn't turn out quite as well as I hoped. Big Bay made me think about murder again and then I couldn't swallow the hamburger K bought me at the bar and it smelled so good. I thought, “Look at me, I can't even eat a hamburger and in my working days I'd sometimes eat five for lunch.” I thought
about murder in Big Bay because I remembered watching this famous movie made in the area many years ago. [He's talking about the movie
Anatomy of a Murder
with James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, and Lee Remick, part of which was shot in the Big Bay area. C.] I think I was about ten at the time and watched it with my dad, who treated me like a grown-up man at that time because I could do a man's work. It had been two years since Mother had gone away and he had pretty much got his sense of humor back, which could be pretty rough. For instance at school a lot of kids called me Donny Injun and some of them not in a nice way. All my dad had to say was “You'll have to live with it.” Once he had to come to school to see the principal because I had gotten in a couple of fights over being called Donny Injun. He bawled me out, saying, “You can't fight over someone calling you a name. Only if they punch you.” I was upset because I didn't think he understood me because being a little more than a quarter he could pass for an ordinary white person. My darker skin and bigger nose and cheekbones came from my mother, who was three-quarters pure-blood. It was hard also at this time because of Floyd booting the puppy to death.

Anyway, I was sitting there in the fancy car Cynthia bought in the parking lot of the bar waiting for K and thinking about the murder movie. The woman in it was a real peach but then my thoughts went back to Floyd again. Sometimes you can't control your thinking, and then this little girl came up to the open car window and asked, “Are you a real Indian?” and I said, “About half,” and she said, “How can anyone be half?” And then her dad, who was talking to
someone in front of the bar for directions because he was a tourist, came trotting over, grabbed his daughter, and yelled at me, “Don't talk to my daughter,” like I was a pervert. People are set on scaring the shit out of their kids these days. Well, K was just coming to the car with a sack of burgers and with his other hand twisted the guy's ear and said, “Get the fuck out of here.” The guy was terrified of K and his funny haircut and took off with his poor kid. It was unpleasant.

I'm slow to get to the worst thing about me. Last year before I lost most of my strength to this disease I had K drive me up to Baraga because I planned on killing Floyd. For years I thought that if I was dying of a dread disease I'd take Floyd along. I had to be dying because I couldn't stand the idea of being locked into a prison. I can't even sleep with tight covers or in a zipped-up sleeping bag. When I was real little and out of hand my mother would shut me up in a broom closet but not for real long. She said that if I didn't behave a ghost that was half bear would eat me up in this closet. And then when I was in the second grade the teacher taped my mouth and shut me in a janitor's closet. At recess Melvin had been pestering these older girls and they jumped him, took off his pants, and threw them in the pond. Melvin was real short so I had to wade in and get his pants, and I was punished because we weren't supposed to go in the pond. It was fenced off because a kid had drowned there years before when he fell through the ice at recess. Well, the teacher forgot to let me out of the janitor's closet and when Dad came home from work at the Burketts' and I wasn't there he went to the school. The principal was still in his office and when he found me in the janitor's closet he was
angry at the teacher but nothing came of it except she was nicer after the incident. I was embarrassed because I'd been in there about five hours and had peed my pants. Melvin played an old-fashioned Halloween trick on this teacher where you put a paper sack full of dog shit on the porch, light it on fire, ring the doorbell, and run for it. The teacher came out and stomped the little fire getting her shoe covered with dog shit. I suppose it's not too funny but Melvin wanted vengeance on this teacher. Melvin had a bad end on the Seney stretch, which is fifty miles of straight highway between Seney and Shingleton. Melvin quit high school when I ran off with Cynthia. He became a pretty good mechanic and drove in demolition derbies, where they get about thirty old cars ramming into each other to see who lasts. They draw pretty big crowds though I didn't like them because of the noise. Melvin was liquored up and drove his hot Pontiac Trans Am about a hundred miles an hour down the Seney stretch with the state police giving chase. They said Melvin swerved to miss a deer and rolled the car about a dozen times including end over end near the Driggs River turnoff.

So K drove me up to Baraga last August so I could kick Floyd to death like he did to my puppy. Nothing about the day was what I expected. First of all it was real hot with a south wind and I had imagined killing Floyd on a cool day. We stopped at a gas station and convenience store outside of Baraga for directions and K bought a twelve-pack of beer saying that Floyd might want it as a last meal. We drove down this gravel road a few miles with my anger rising so that the edges of my sight were blurred. Floyd's place was
Depression brick, that fake brick made out of tar paper, the whole house tilted a bit to the south from a weak foundation and north winds. There was what we call a car garden with a half dozen old cars and pickups sitting in a wild raspberry patch. Floyd was sitting on the front porch next to a big electric fan with an orange extension cord coming out of the house window. Three old, fat dogs got up and barked once when we pulled up and then the dogs lay back down near Floyd's wheelchair. Floyd yelled out, “Donny Injun” and started laughing as if this was a social visit. There were no steps up to the porch but a sheet of plywood so he could get his motorized wheelchair up and down. K sat down on a rickety porch swing and petted the old dogs. He put the twelve-pack on the table, on which there was a big package of sweet rolls and bottles of Floyd's medications. You couldn't imagine a man my age in worse disrepair than Floyd. He had a bad case of the bloat and I guessed him to be well over three hundred. He had so much fat around his neck that you couldn't have strangled him. I was leaning against a porch post because I was feeling dizzy. He said he'd heard through a cousin in Marquette that I was sick and was sorry about it. I was losing my anger but said in a rush that I had come to kill him and he laughed and said, “Why bother?” I had to move because the fan was blowing my way and Floyd smelled bad. He drank three of the beers in no time at all. He talked baby talk to the dogs and showed us how they would all roll over in unison after which he gave them each a piece of sweet roll. Floyd leaned over and turned off a country music station so we could hear a group of sandhill cranes squawking in a field full of big stumps to the west of
the house. I couldn't collect my thoughts. Floyd opened his fourth beer and said he was sorry about the puppy and that dogs were his favorite things. The county welfare people wanted him to move down to the VA hospital in Iron Mountain but he couldn't live without his
women
. All the dogs were female. One put her chin near the stump of his missing right leg and he gave her another piece of sweet roll and then to be democratic he had to give another piece to the other dogs. He asked me if I had a pistol because he had always thought someone might shoot him. I said no and that I was going to kick him to death like he did the puppy. He closed his eyes and said he was sorry about the puppy and then he said, “Everyone was always afraid of you, Donny.” Suddenly I was embarrassed. K couldn't take it anymore and vaulted over the porch railing and took a little walk. The dogs went with him. Dogs like K. We sat there for a while talking about Melvin and also Carl, who was a GP doctor down on the outskirts of Chicago. I was itching to get out of there but was too hot and dizzy to move. Floyd said that in June a bunch of the young sandhill cranes walked into the yard and scared the hell out of the dogs. Finally K came back with the dogs and we left after asking Floyd if we could make a grocery run for him. He said no that he just ate canned food because he couldn't chew with only a couple of teeth. He seemed worried that K was going to take the rest of the beer. There was crusty stuff in the corners of his eyes and his dogs stood up to bid us good-bye.