The Round House (2 page)

Don't you Indians have your own hospital over there? Aren't you building a new one?

The emergency room's under construction, I told her.

Still, she said.

Still what? I made my voice grating and sarcastic. I was never like so many Indian boys, who'd look down quiet in their anger and say nothing. My mother had taught me different.

The pregnant woman pursed her lips and looked back at her magazine. The old woman was knitting the thumb of a mitten. I went over to the pay phone, but I didn't have any money. I went to the nurse's window, asked to use the phone. We were close enough for the call to be local, so the nurse let me use it. But there was no answer. So I knew my aunt had taken Edward up to adore the sacrament, which got them out of the house on Sunday nights. He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker. Uncle Edward was a science teacher.

I sat back down in the waiting room, as far from the pregnant lady as I could get, but the room was very small, so that wasn't far enough. She was thumbing through that magazine. Cher was on the cover. I could read the words beside Cher's jaw:
She's made
Moonstruck
a megahit, her lover is 23 and she's tough enough to say “mess with me and I'll kill you.”
But Cher did not look tough. She looked like a surprised plastic doll. The bony, bulgey woman peeked around Cher and spoke to the knitting lady.

Looked like that poor woman had a miscarriage or maybe—her voice went sly—a rape.

The woman's lip lifted up off her rabbit teeth as she looked at me. Her ratty yellow hair quivered. I looked right back, into her lashless hazel eyes. Then I did something odd by instinct. I went over and took the magazine out of her hands. Still staring at her, I tore off the cover and dropped the rest of the magazine. I ripped again. Cher's identical eyebrows parted. The lady who was knitting pursed her lips, counting stitches. I gave the cover back and the woman accepted the pieces. Then suddenly I felt bad about Cher. What had she done to me? I got up and walked out the door.

I stood outside. I could hear the woman's voice, raised, triumphant, complaining to the nurse. The sun was almost down. The air had gone cold, and with the darkness a stealthy chill entered me. I hopped up and down and swung my arms. I didn't care what. I was not going back in until that woman was gone, or until my father came out and told me that my mother was all right. I could not stop thinking about what that woman had said. Those two words stabbed my thoughts, as she had meant them to do. Miscarriage. A word I didn't altogether understand but knew had to do with babies. Which I knew were impossible. My mother had told me, six years before, when I'd pestered her for a brother, that the doctor had made sure that after me she could not get pregnant. It just could not happen. So that left the other word.

A
fter a while, I saw a nurse take the pregnant lady back in through the emergency doors. I hoped they would not put her anywhere near my mother. I went in and again called my aunt, who said that she'd leave Edward to watch Mooshum and drive right over. She also asked me what had happened, what was wrong.

Mom's bleeding, I said. My throat shut and I couldn't say more.

She's hurt? Was there an accident?

I got it out that I didn't know and Clemence hung up. A poker-faced nurse came out and told me to go back to my mother. The nurse disapproved that my mother had asked for me. Insisted, she said. I wanted to run ahead, but I followed the nurse down a bright-lit hall, into a windowless room lined with green glass-fronted metal cabinets. The room had been dimmed and my mother was wearing a flimsy hospital gown. A sheet was tucked around her legs. There was no blood, anywhere. My father was standing at the head of her bed, his hand on the metal rail of the headboard. At first I didn't look at him, just at her. My mother was a beautiful woman—that's something I always knew. A given among family, among strangers. She and Clemence had coffee-cream skin and hot black glossy curls. Slim even after their children. Calm and direct, with take-charge eyes and movie-star lips. When overcome with laughter, they lost all dignity, however, and choked, snorted, burped, wheezed, even farted, which made them ever more hysterical. They usually sent each other into fits, but sometimes my father, too, could make them lose control. Even then, they were beautiful.

Now I saw my mother's face puffed with welts and distorted to an ugly shape. She peered through slits in the swollen flesh of her lids.

What happened? I asked stupidly.

She didn't answer. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She blotted them away with a gauze-wrapped fist. I'm all right, Joe. Look at me. See?

And I looked at her. But she was not all right. There were scrapes of blows and the awful lopsidedness. Her skin had lost its normal warm color. It was gray as ash. Her lips were seamed with dried blood. The nurse came in, raised the end of the bed with a crank. Laid another blanket over her. I hung my head and leaned toward her. I tried to stroke her wrapped wrist and cold, dry fingertips. With a cry, she snatched her hand away as though I'd hurt her. She went rigid and closed her eyes. This action devastated me. I looked up at my father and he gestured for me to come to him. He put his arm around me, walked me out of the room.

She's not all right, I said.

He looked down at his watch and then back at me. His face registered the humming rage of a man who couldn't think fast enough.

She's not all right. I spoke as if to tell him an urgent truth. And for a moment I thought he'd break. I could see something rising in him, but he conquered it, breathed out, and gathered himself.

Joe. He was looking strangely at his watch again. Joe, he said. Your mother was attacked.

We stood in the hallway together under patchy, buzzing, fluorescent lights. I said the first thing I thought of.

By who? Attacked by who?

Absurdly, we both realized that my father's usual response would have been to correct my grammar. We looked at each other and he said nothing.

My father has the head, neck, and shoulders of a tall and powerful man, but the rest of him is perfectly average. Even a little clumsy and soft. If you think about it, this is a good physique to have as a judge. He looms imposingly seated at the bench, but when conferring in his chambers (a glorified broom closet) he is nonthreatening and people trust him. As well as thunderous, his voice is capable of every nuance, and sometimes very gentle. It was the gentleness in his voice now that scared me, and the softness. Almost a whisper.

She doesn't know who the man was, Joe.

But will we find him? I asked in that same hushed voice.

We will find him, my father said.

And then what?

My father never shaved on Sundays, and a few tiny stubbles of gray beard showed. That thing in him was gathering again, ready to burst out. But instead he put his hands on my shoulders and spoke with that reedy softness that spooked me.

I can't think that far ahead right now.

I put my hands on his hands and looked into his eyes. His leveling brown eyes. I wanted to know that whoever had attacked my mother would be found, punished, and killed. My father saw this. His fingers bit into my shoulders.

We'll get him, I said quickly. I was fearful as I said this, dizzy.

Yes.

He took his hands away. Yes, he said again. He tapped his watch, bit down on his lip. Now if the police would come. They need to get a statement. They should have been here.

We turned to go back to the room.

Which police? I asked.

Exactly, he said.

T
he nurse didn't want us back in the room yet, and as we stood waiting the police arrived. Three men came through the emergency ward doors and stood quietly in the hall. There was a state trooper, an officer local to the town of Hoopdance, and Vince Madwesin, from the tribal police. My father had insisted that they each take a statement from my mother because it wasn't clear where the crime had been committed—on state or tribal land—or who had committed it—an Indian or a non-Indian. I already knew, in a rudimentary way, that these questions would swirl around the facts. I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice. My father touched my shoulder before he left me and approached them. I stood against the wall. They were all slightly taller than my father, but they knew him and leaned down close to hear his words. They listened to him intently, their eyes not leaving his face. As he spoke, he looked down at the floor occasionally and folded his hands behind his back. He looked at each of them in turn from under his brows, then cast his eyes down at the floor again.

Each police officer went into the room with a notebook and a pen, and came out again in about fifteen minutes, expressionless. Each shook my father's hand and swiftly exited.

A young doctor named Egge was on duty that day. He was the one who had examined my mother. As my father and I were going back to Mom's room, we saw that Dr. Egge had returned.

I don't suggest that the boy . . . , he began.

I thought it was funny that his domed, balding, shiny head was eggish, like his name. His oval face with the little round black eyeglasses looked familiar, and I realized it was the sort of face my mother used to draw on boiled eggs so that I would eat them.

My wife insisted on seeing Joe again, my father told Dr. Egge. She needs him to see that she is all right.

Dr. Egge was silent. He gave my father a prim little piercing look. My father stepped back from Egge and asked me to go out into the waiting room to see if Clemence had arrived yet.

I'd like to see Mom again.

I'll come get you, said my father urgently. Go.

Dr. Egge was staring even harder at my father. I turned away from them with sick reluctance. As my father and Dr. Egge walked away from me, they spoke in low voices. I didn't want to leave, so I turned and watched them before I went out into the waiting room. They stopped outside my mother's room. Dr. Egge finished speaking and jabbed his eyeglasses up his nose with one finger. My father walked to the wall as if he were going through it. He pressed his forehead and hands against the wall and stood there with his eyes shut.

Dr. Egge turned and saw me frozen at the doors. He pointed toward the waiting room. My father's emotion was something, his gesture implied, that I was too young to witness. But during the last few hours I had become increasingly resistant to authority. Instead of politely vanishing, I ran to my father, flailing Dr. Egge aside. I threw my arms around my father's soft torso, held him under his jacket, and I fiercely clung to him, saying nothing, only breathing with him, taking great deep sobs of air.

M
uch later, after I had gone into law and gone back and examined every document I could find, every statement, relived every moment of that day and the days that followed, I understood that this was when my father had learned from Dr. Egge the details and extent of my mother's injuries. But that day, all I knew, after Clemence separated me from my father and led me away, was that the hallway was a steep incline. I went back through the doors and let Clemence talk to my father. After I'd sat for about half an hour in the waiting room, Clemence came in and told me that my mother was going into surgery. She held my hand. We sat together staring at a picture of a pioneer woman sitting on a hot hillside with her baby lying next to her, shaded beneath a black umbrella. We agreed that we had never really cared for the picture and now we were going to actively hate it, though this was not the picture's fault.

I should take you home, let you sleep in Joseph's room, said Clemence. You can go to school tomorrow from our house. I'll come back here and wait.

I was tired, my brain hurt, but I looked at her like she was crazy. Because she was crazy to think that I would go to school. Nothing would go on as normal. That steeply inclined hallway led to this place—the waiting room—where I would wait.

You could at least sleep, said Aunt Clemence. It wouldn't hurt to sleep. The time would pass and you wouldn't have to stare at that damn picture.

Was it rape? I asked her.

Yes, she said.

There was something else, I said.

My family doesn't hedge about things. Though Catholic, my aunt was not one to let butter melt in her mouth. When she spoke, answering me, her voice was quick and cool.

Rape is forced sex. A man can force a woman to have sex. That's what happened.

I nodded. But I wanted to know something else.

Will she die from it?

No, said Clemence immediately. She won't die. But sometimes—

She bit down on her lips from the inside so they made a frowning line and she squinted at the picture.

—it's more complicated, she said finally. You saw that she was hurt, real bad? Clemence touched her own cheek, sweetly rouged and powdered from going to church.

Yes, I saw.

Our eyes filled with tears and we looked away from each other, down at Clemence's purse as she dug in it for Kleenex. We both let ourselves cry a bit as she got the Kleenex. It was a relief. Then we put the tissues to our faces and Clemence went on.

It can be more violent than other times.

Violently raped, I thought.

I knew those words fit together. Probably from some court case I'd read in my father's books or from a newspaper article or the cherished paperback thrillers my uncle, Whitey, kept on his handmade bookshelf.

Gasoline, I said. I smelled it. Why did she smell like gas? Did she go to Whitey's?

Clemence stared at me, the Kleenex frozen beside her nose, and her skin went the color of old snow. She bent over suddenly and put her head down on her knees.

I'm okay, she said through the Kleenex. Her voice sounded normal, even detached. Don't worry, Joe. I thought I was going to faint, but I'm not.