The Painted Drum (19 page)

“The dead are drinking here tonight,” said Ira as she joined the man at the table. They were in a town bar where the hard-drinking people went, a tough place where everyone looked up each time a new person entered from the icy street. The drinkers didn’t look away once the door shut and the blast of cold air was absorbed into the bar’s steamy atmosphere—they just kept watching emptily the way the dead stare. Ira looked right back at them and narrowed her eyes.

“I don’t feel like going home.”

“You feel like coming with me,” the man, who was not drunk, stated, “but you can’t because if you do, you will have to sleep on the other side of my wife.”

“Is she good-looking? Or is she ugly like you?” asked Ira, but she smiled to show she meant he was the opposite of ugly.

The people had turned away to resume their conversations, to drink or argue. Thirty or more sat scattered in the booths or at the tables, some in unzipped snowmobile suits or dressed in camou-flage hunting parkas. The man sitting beside Ira had given her the only friendly look in the place, so she’d sat down next to him.

“C’mon,” said Ira, smiling, “ugly like you?”

The man said with a kind of shy reluctance that his wife was beautiful, but for the scar on her lip. He passed his finger slantwise across his own mouth, and Ira remembered the woman he spoke of. Instead of mentioning her name, people often made a sign for her like that, and everybody knew who they meant.

“I’m almost beautiful, too,” said Ira. “I would be except for what’s in here.”

She tapped her breast over the heart, casually, then she took a drink of the beer that the man had just bought for her.

“Maybe you could clean that up,” the man suggested, nodding at that place Ira indicated.

“I’m trying to,” said Ira. “Alcohol kills germs.”

She took an abrupt swallow of her drink and tapped her face with her fingers. “I’m getting sterilized inside. You won’t catch anything from me.”

“Even if I did,” the man said, “my wife would cure it. She knows a lot of these old-time medicines?”

His voice rose as though he was asking a question of Ira, who nodded just as if she was giving a real answer to his question. She drank her beer, had another, and then one more. Now she was just drunk enough. She didn’t want to get any drunker, but she also did not want to get sober, not yet, not by any means. As she’d already said, she wasn’t ready to go home. She said it again in a vaguer, softer way than before.

“I’m not ready to go home.”

“Don’t say that around just anybody,” said the man, chiding her in a friendly way. “There’s dirty men in here.”

“Where, where,” said Ira, looking openly at the drinkers now. Their stares seemed comical. “I want a dirty man.

“But not that one,” she went on, following the chin-pointing nod of the man who was buying her drinks. “I’ve had him and he’s no good. His wife hired someone, maybe hired your own wife, to put a medicine upon his wiinag so it droops when he thinks of anyone but her.” She laughed and made a sad face as she held up her finger and then slowly curled it into her palm.

“I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want that, either.”

“What do you want?” asked the man.

“I want something else,” said Ira. “I definitely want something else.”

“Maybe you want spiritual help,” said the man.

Ira lowered her face and then cast her eyes up at him and shook her head back and forth.

“What are you doing in a bar, anyway?” she said. “What do you mean spiritual help? You don’t go talking about spiritual things when you’re drinking.”

“I do,” said the man. “I’m like that. Different because I know how to handle my drinking. Therefore, in a bar, I can talk of these things as though I was a regular person.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Ira, “you’re not a regular person. You’re a windigo. You’re made of ice inside. You turn your drinks to slush in your belly, then you try and offer me spiritual help and you say your wife is beautiful, she has a scarred lip, she knows medicine. There’s something not right about this conversation.”

Ira pushed her finger around the lip of her glass, then scooped up some foam. She stuck her finger in her mouth. Looking at him curiously, she continued. “You know what I mean? Something off.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the man. “You’re a good-looking woman. You’ll get laid.”

“Any time I want,” said Ira, tossing her hair back, fluffing it with her hand like an old-time movie star, “I look in the mirror, don’t I? You should see me naked, but you never will. I’m so good-looking when I’m naked that it hurts to look at me. I have a painfully good-looking body that makes men beg like dogs. But you’ll never see it.”

“Another beer.” The man signaled.

“Thanks,” said Ira. “All the same, you’ll never see it. Just think. There you’ll be in the rest home. You open your mouth like a toothless old bird and they pour soup down your gullet through a funnel. You’ll be thinking to yourself,
If only I’d seen her body, what she looked like under that sweater, that parka, those jeans. Maybe I could resign myself to drinking soup through a funnel.
But no. You’ll always wonder.”

“I don’t need to see you that way, really,” said the man. “I can tell. Of course, to raise children right, your looks don’t matter.”

“You got that right,” said Ira, shifting in her chair, frowning at the black plastic ashtray, tipping it critically back and forth. “Kids, they don’t care. They think you’re beautiful anyway, no matter what. I should go home. That’s where my kids are. They’re sleeping anyway.”

“You hope.”

“Well, it’s cold. It’s very cold. They’re not going out of doors.”

“It is very bad, this cold.”

“This dry cold.”

“And it’s still going down.”

Now for a few moments neither did speak, as they were both caught up in their private worries and thoughts about the cold. The man knew his wife had the car and he hoped she would remember to start it in the middle of the night, otherwise the battery would go dead. In this kind of deep cold you had to run the car every four or six hours, unless you could plug it in someplace. He’d looked ahead. He had a heater for it because he really did work. Sometimes if you covered the hood up with blankets, to keep the wind off, that helped too. His wife also talked to the car, treated it like an animal and told it when it was going to be fed. Sometimes she was joking when she did that, sometimes she was serious. Sometimes she put tobacco down beside its wheels before a long, tough trip. She didn’t drink. The scar was put upon her face when she was just a little girl.

“I don’t know.” Ira was talking again. “I should have a reason. I just don’t want to go home. I don’t know how I would get there anyhow, through the bush. I got a ride into town, here, before I knew it was going to keep on getting colder and colder like this.”

“Maybe you should come home with me,” said the man in a transparently false tone of voice, “I was bullshitting you about my wife.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Well, I am pretty sure that she is at her sister’s with the kids and with the cold going deeper like this they will not be coming home. Do you want me to make a phone call?”

“I’m just that drunk I don’t have good judgment right now. Do you have an STD?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh right, your wife and her medicine. I’m just sure she fixed it,” said Ira. “Where do you live anyway?”

It seemed to Ira that she knew where he lived, that she’d heard about him. Something more than that scar was familiar about his wife, too, but she couldn’t put the story together.

“I live just outside town here. I work at the electric plant. I got my own house through the housing board.” The man sounded dreamy now. “It’s a three bedroom and it came to us already half assembled. They drove it up to the lot in two pieces, wrapped in plastic. Then they took the plastic off and set the halves down and fit them together. When we walked inside, the rooms already had their cupboards, toilets, everything. It was a miracle.”

The man was solemn, remembering the day that the house arrived. Ira laughed. “Cheap miracle. A prefab. My father built our house by hand.”

“All they had to do was hook up the plumbing, the electric, the gas.”

“You might be contented,” said Ira. “I wouldn’t be. I’m looking for something else.”

The young man now laughed. “How long have you said that,” he asked, “how many times to a guy in a bar? I’m a little different because I can live with my habit, controlled drinking. You’re getting drunk though.”

“And you’re helping me.” Ira pointed at him and squinted along her finger. “You are an enabler. That is what I call you.”

“Why do we do this, oh why do we do this,” said the man, a false pathos in his voice at which the two of them laughed in a slightly overanimated way that made them both know they were attractive to each other, and that they were thinking about what might happen.

“I suppose your wife, with all of her medicines, she has a theory on why.”

“Yes she does, it’s an elegant theory. She’s a social worker and she sees all that people do. Her theory? It’s called sheer stupidity.”

“You met her in a bar?”

“No, at a ceremony.”

Ira slapped the table lightly.

“There you go again referring to spiritual things in a bar. You can either be a drunk or a spiritual person. Not both if you’re an Indian. I’m sorry. That’s the way it is.”

“Who said?”

“Oh, come on,” Ira looked around the bar, as though someone might be listening in, “the Shawnee prophet. You ever heard of the Shawnee prophet? That’s who said.”

The man looked down at his hands, at his beer, which he had drunk too quickly.

“I suppose I am no better than you.”

“That’s what I’m telling you,” said Ira. “If you’re here, you’ve made a choice. That choice is not to be spiritual. That choice is to be like me.”

The man now turned and looked at her for a long time. He was in his early thirties and she in her late twenties. Their hair was identical, a dull and wavy black, and his was longer, tied in a ponytail with a band of black elastic. Ira’s hair was springy and thick. She pushed it back behind her ears, but her ears were small and flat so the hair kept falling back in wiry tendrils around her face. She was lucky, she knew, to have the face she had. It could be worse. A round face with small, clever, up-slanting features. Someone had called her mouth passionate—not that she had big pouty zhaaginaash lips—her upper lip was straight across. But it curved in an arc as though a man had pushed against it with his teeth. Although she’d had three children, and ate cheap, starchy, greasy food, her body was still young and slender. Maybe her eyes, deep and smoky black, carried a wounded look in them. Maybe she was just confused because of the beers and the uncertainty about returning home. Her wants conflicted. She wanted this man to bring her home, but that was twenty miles, so she needed for him to have a working car and take her there. But first, she needed to buy food. She had already arranged for a delivery of fuel, but that would be tomorrow. At the same time, she wanted to stay here, suspended. Like one of those bugs trapped in plastic for a souvenir, she thought, looking at the light in the warm color of her beer. Halfway drunk forever. Not yet sloppy, but not back there, either, in the sober gray static. She supposed that she was desperate.

“Objectively speaking,” she whispered, knowing the man would bend closer to hear, “I shouldn’t have left them in this cold. But the only way I could get some money was if I came to town.”

“How,” said the man, “and where?”

“Here,” she said, calmly. “I came here to sell my body to the highest bidder. The truth is my kids need some food, the house needs heating oil. My oldest, she’s nine. They’re okay for a little while. So listen, niiji, if you don’t have the money, if you can’t pay, tell me now so I quit wasting my time on you.”

He stared at her with his mouth a little open.

“I’m just kidding,” said Ira. “Thanks for the beers.”

As she wasn’t kidding at all, she got up. She stuffed her gloves in her purse. She zipped up her thin black parka and put up the pointed hood. Her face was surrounded by bristles of cheap black fur.

“Wait,” said the man, “I can’t just let you go like that. We should walk down to the gas station, get some food. I have this much.” He took a ten-dollar bill from one pocket, fished a five from the other. “And I do not even have to see your naked gleaming body. We can get some milk and bread at the gas station. Peanut butter. If what you say is true, if your children are out there, then we get my brother to give you a ride to your place. Once there, you put your kids to bed and then deliver yourself to our lust.”

Ira looked at him and raised her eyebrows, two clean black arches.

“Just a joke,” said the young man.

“What’s your name?” said Ira.

“John,” he said.

“And your brother?”

“Morris.” Then in Ojibwe. “Ma’iingan izhinikaazo. He is named for the wolf.”

“Your brother shouldn’t have that name,” Ira said as she followed him out the door.

She watched him walk ahead of her. His hair hung long down his back and he adjusted a heavy skinning knife at his belt. He wore a heavier parka than she owned, and good leather boots. So maybe his story about the job, the house in two pieces, the wife, maybe all of that was true. She had persevered in the tribe’s social service agency all day filling applications for emergency heating oil. Before she left home that morning, she’d cooked up a pot of oatmeal. She thought of her daughter, who was named for the Shawnee prophet like her cousin and great-aunt, so many in her family. Ira thought what a practical girl her Shawnee was, how she’d take the younger two and put them to bed, and then would crawl in next to them for warmth. They’d be sleeping by now, underneath all of the quilts and blankets, curled in the skin of the bear her father had shot. She would be back with the food before they woke, and the delivery truck was on its way. So she followed the man with the ma’iingan brother.

Shawnee stared into the fire for a while, then suddenly she was so comfortable that she went directly into a sleeping dream where everything that just happened was a dream and her mother was shaking her and saying, “Wake up, wake up,” and when she did wake up she saw that the half-made baskets piled next to the makeshift fireplace were blazing. The fire had already spread over to the trash can just under the window. Shawnee blinked as the curtains burst into light. Then the fire licked here and there like a tongue. Alice woke up and the two girls tried to throw cups of water on the flames, but the water only trickled out of the tap, which was already blocked with ice. Still, the fire gave them time. They took all they could outdoors. The fire ate into the walls and then pulled itself under the roof until it found a way to push an arm of flame into the air. The children stepped back, and back again, then sank again into their blankets and huddled in the bearskin. There were blasts and balls of exploding shimmers and then the blaze attained a steady roar. It was warm in the blankets.
I shouldn’t sleep
, Shawnee thought, but she found herself curling around Alice, who held Apitchi tight against her, and then she closed her eyes.

When they woke the flames were low and the sky was still dark.
Somebody must have seen it
, Shawnee thought.
If we stay here they’ll find us
. So they edged closer, and closer, as the house cooled, but it was still dark outside when the house no longer gave enough warmth. They were standing in the ashes by then and were covered in black soot. Apitchi whimpered in a low, despairing, birdlike voice. Alice was silent. Her eyes were wide and glittered with black frost. They couldn’t get warm. Their nearest neighbor was six miles down the road. Three miles if you cut through the woods. Although it had just snowed, the old snow was crusted hard enough to hold them, Shawnee thought. So she tied Apitchi onto her back with a long, knitted scarf. Then she walked into the woods. Her feet sank through the snow about three inches, then found the hard pack. She broke the trail. Alice followed in her steps.

At first they could see by the starlight reflected on the snow. Then, where the pines grew thick, Shawnee couldn’t see at all. The children walked in a liquid black ice, knocking into trees and snapping sharp fir branches. “Alice, hold my parka,” said Shawnee, but she felt her sister’s grip weakening. “Hold my parka,” she screamed, shaking Alice. The grip desperately tightened. Apitchi was a block on her back. She kept shifting him to keep her balance. The snow was softer underneath the pine trees and from time to time they floundered and fell, but always righted themselves at last and went on, weaker, colder. It would happen a little bit at a time this way, Shawnee thought, and finally they would not get up at all. The thought made her pedal her legs with more force and drag Alice with her and so they went on, forward, she thought. She didn’t know anymore. She wasn’t like some kids who stayed in the house. She went outside a lot. Played all day in the woods and never got lost. But she’d never been out in the dark and in the cold like this. She thought her feet were frozen, maybe. She couldn’t feel them. Alice had good boots. She thought that maybe Apitchi was frozen dead, too. But she did not stop. The force of her own wanting to live drove through her. Something passed through her in the dark that was darkness also. She knew that she would keep walking and she’d drag her sister and her brother too. She fell asleep walking once, and then woke, pulled her sister’s jacket, dragging her along. They would not get away from her. She wouldn’t stop. And she kept on thinking that until the snow gave way beneath them.