The Round House (3 page)

Gathering herself, she sat up. She patted my hand. I didn't ask her about the gasoline again.

I
fell asleep on a plastic couch and someone put a hospital blanket over me. I sweated in my sleep and when I woke, my cheek and arm were stuck to the plastic. I peeled myself unpleasantly up on one elbow.

Dr. Egge was across the room talking to Clemence. I could tell right away that things were better, that my mother was better, that whatever had happened with the surgery was better, and in spite of how bad things were, at least for now the picture wasn't getting any worse. So I put my face down on the sticky green plastic, which now felt good, and I fell back asleep.

Chapter Two

Lonely Among Us

I
had three friends. I still keep up with two of them. The other is a white cross on the Montana Hi-Line. His physical departure is marked there, I mean. As for his spirit, I carry that around with me in the form of a round black stone. He gave it to me when he found out what had happened to my mother. Virgil Lafournais was his name, or Cappy. He told me that the stone was one of those found at the base of a lightning-struck tree, that it was sacred. A thunderbird egg, he called it. He gave it to me the day I went back to school. Every time I got a pitying or curious look from another kid or a teacher that day, I touched the stone Cappy gave me.

It was five days since we had found my mother sitting in the driveway. I'd refused to go to school before she came back from the hospital. She was anxious to get out, relieved to be home. She said good-bye to me that morning from my parents' bed in their upstairs bedroom.

Cappy and your other friends will miss you, she said.

I should go back to school, even though there were just over two weeks left until summer. When she was better, she would make us a cake, she said, and sloppy joes. She had always liked to feed us.

My other two friends were Zack Peace and Angus Kashpaw. Back in those days, the four of us were more or less together whenever it was possible, though it was understood that Cappy and I were closest. Cappy's mother had died when he was young, leaving Cappy and his older brother, Randall, and his father, Doe Lafournais, to a life that had worn itself into bachelor grooves and a house of womanless chaos. For although Doe became involved with women from time to time, he never did remarry. He was both a janitor of the tribal offices and, on and off, the chairman of the tribe. When he was first elected in the 1960s, he was paid just enough money to take his janitor job down to half-time. When too exhausted to run for a term, he picked up extra hours as the night watchman. It wasn't until the seventies that the feds put money into tribal government, and we started figuring out how to run things. Doe was still chairman, on again, off again. The way it worked was, people voted Doe into office whenever they got mad at the current chairman. But as soon as Doe was in, the buzz began, the complaints, the gossip machine, the inexorable teardown that is part of reservation politics and the lot of anyone who rises too far into any spotlight. When it got bad enough, Doe would decline to run. He'd pack up his office, including the tribal chairman stationery that he always had printed on his own dime
: Doe Lafournais, Tribal Chairman
. For a few years, we'd have lots of drawing paper at Cappy's house. Inevitably, his successor went through the same treatment. Eventually Doe's contrite and pleading constituents would work on him until he threw his hat back in the ring. 1988 was an out-of-office year for Doe, which meant he did a lot of fishing with us. We'd spent half the winter in Doe's icehouse, pulling in northerns and sneaking beers.

Zack Peace's family was split up now for the second time. His father, Corwin Peace, was a musician on perpetual tour. His mother, Carleen Thunder, ran the tribal newspaper. His stepdad, Vince Madwesin, was the tribal police officer who had interviewed my mother. Zack was almost a decade older than his baby brother and sister, because his parents had married young, divorced, then given it a second try and found out they were right the first time they divorced. Zack was musical, like his father, and always brought his guitar to the icehouse. He said he knew one thousand songs.

As for Angus, he was from a part of the reservation that was hard-core poor. The tribe had acquired the money to put in subsidized project housing—large, tan city-style apartment buildings just outside of town. They were surrounded by hummocks of weedy earth, no trees or bushes. The money had run out before steps were built, so people used ramps of plywood or just hoisted themselves in and jumped out of their houses. His aunt Star had moved Angus, his two brothers, her boyfriend's two children, and a changing array of pregnant sisters and bingeing or detoxing cousins into a three-bedroom unit. Aunt Star managed an epic amount of craziness. It didn't help that besides no steps the building itself was a low-bid nightmare. The contractor had skimped on insulation, so in winter Star had to keep the oven on all night with the door open and the water in the kitchen trickling, or the pipes would freeze. There were rags stuffed between the walls and windows, because the Sheetrock had shrunk away from the cheap-john aluminum combination storm frames. The windows soon fell apart, lost their screens. Nothing worked. The plumbing kept backing up. I even became an expert in sealing the toilet with wax and duct tape. Star was always bribing us with frybread to do house repairs or rig up satellite reception off a dented hubcap or some such thing.

Actually, once she had taken up with her big love, Elwin, we did manage the satellite. Star had a fancy television bought with the one lavish bingo win she'd managed in her lifetime. Together with Elwin we MacGyvered some old equipment together and got signals from Fargo, Minneapolis, even Chicago or Denver. The satellite was hooked up in September of 1987, just in time for the season premieres of all the network shows. We improved reception to the point where we sometimes even got the shows syndicated out of certain cities, ever-changing according to the weather and the magnetism of the planets. We had to hunt them down, but I don't think we ever missed one episode of
Star Trek
. Not the old one, but
The Next Generation
. We loved
Star Wars
, had our favorite quotes, but we lived in
TNG
.

Naturally, we all wanted to be Worf. We all wanted to be Klingons. Worf's solution to any problem was to attack. In the episode Justice we found out Worf didn't enjoy sex with human females because they were too fragile and he had to show restraint. Our big joke around pretty girls was
Hey, show some restraint
. In Hide and Q the ideal Klingon girl jumped Worf and she was grotesquely hot. Worf was combustible, noble, and handsome even with a turtle shell on his forehead. Next to Worf, we liked Data because he mocked white people by being curious about stupid things that the crew would do or say, and because when gorgeous Yar got drunk he declared himself fully functional and had sex with her. Wesley, the one you'd think we'd identify with, our age and a genius, and with a careless mom who let him get into trouble, did not interest us because he was a bumbling white town-baby and wore ludicrous sweaters. We were in love of course with the empathic half-Betazoid Deanna Troy, especially when the show let her hair go long and curly. Her jumpsuits were low-cut, her red V belt pointed you-know-where, and her big head and short curvy body drove us wild. Commander Riker was supposedly hot for her, but he was wooden, implausible. Better once a beard hid his baby cheeks, but we still wanted to be Worf. As for Captain Picard, he was an old man, though a French old man, so we liked him. We also liked Geordi because it turned out he was always in pain because he wore the eye visor, and that made him noble too.

The reason I go into this is that because of this show we set ourselves apart. We made drawings, cartoons, and even tried to write an episode. We pretended we had special knowledge. We were starting to get our growth and were anxious how we'd turn out. In
TNG
we weren't skinny, picked on, poor, motherless, or scared. We were cool because no one else knew what we were talking about.

T
he first day I went back to school, Cappy walked me home. It is unusual to see people walking places on the reservation now, except on the special walking paths created to promote fitness. But in the late eighties young people still walked places, and as both Cappy and I lived less than a mile from school, we often flipped a coin to see whose house we'd go to. His was livelier, as Randall always had his friends around, but mine had a television and box so that we could play Bionic Commando, a game we were fanatical about.

Cappy had given me the thunderbird egg in the school hallway, and he told me about it on the way back to the house. He said that when he had found it the tree was still smoking. I pretended I believed him. Without saying anything, it was clear that Cappy was just walking me home and would not go inside. I would not have let him anyway. My mother didn't want anyone to see her. Although my father was about to take a leave of absence and had called in another judge from retirement, he was still finishing up some paperwork at his office. He had already told me that he'd keep checking in all that day, but that my mother would be glad when I got home.

As we walked up the drive, Clemence came out the front door and said she'd got a call from a neighbor that Mooshum was out in the yard. I assumed from her rush that he'd left his pants in the house. She got in her car and swerved away. Cappy turned around for his own house once we'd reached mine, and I walked to the back door. As I rounded the corner, I saw the twiggy treelets with their shriveled leaves, still laid out in a row on the concrete to die. I put down my books and gathered them up, one by one, and stashed them at the edge of the yard. It was in me at that moment to feel sorry for the little trees and to be aware also that I dreaded going into my house. I had never felt that before. Then I tried to open the door and found it was locked.

I was so surprised at first that I kicked at the door, thinking it was stuck. But the back door was really locked. And the front door locked automatically—Clemence had probably forgotten that. I got the key from its hiding place and went in slowly, quiet, not banging the door and slamming my books on the table as I ordinarily would have. On any other day, my mother wouldn't have been home yet and I would have felt the sort of elation that a boy feels when he steps into his house knowing that for two hours it is all his. That he can make his own sandwich. That if there is TV reception, there might be afterschool reruns for him to watch. That there might be cookies or some other sweet around, hidden by his mother, but not hidden too well. That he can rifle through the books on his father and mother's bedroom bookshelves for a book like
Hawaii
, by James Michener, where he might learn interesting but ultimately useless tips on Polynesian foreplay—but there, I have to stop. The back door had been locked for the first time I ever recall, and I'd had to fish the key from underneath the back steps where it had always hung on a nail, used only when the three of us returned from long trips.

Which was the sense I had now: that just going to school had been a long trip—and now I had returned.

The air seemed hollow in the house, stale, strangely flat. I realized that this was because in the days since we'd found my mother sitting in the driveway, nobody had baked, fried, cooked, or in any way prepared food. My father only made coffee, which he drank day and night. Clemence had brought us casseroles that were still sitting, half eaten, in the refrigerator. I called for my mother softly, and walked halfway up the stairs until I could see that the door to my parents' bedroom was shut. I eased back down the stairs into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of cold milk, and took a big swallow. It was grossly sour. I dumped the milk, rinsed the glass, filled it, and gulped down the iron water of our reservation until the sour taste was gone. Then I stood there with the empty glass in my hands.

Part of the dining room set was visible through the open door, a roan maple table with six chairs around it. The living room was divided off by low shelves. The couch sat just outside a small room lined with books—my father's den, or study. Holding the glass, I felt the tremendous hush in our little house as something that follows in the wake of a huge explosion. Everything had stopped. Even the clock's ticking. My father had unplugged it when we came home from the hospital the second night. I want a new clock, he'd said. I stood there looking at the old clock, whose hands were meaninglessly stopped at 11:22. The sun fell onto the kitchen floor in golden pools, but it was an ominous radiance, like the piercing light behind a western cloud. A trance of dread came over me, a taste of death like sour milk. I set the glass on the table and bolted up the stairs. Burst into my parents' bedroom. My mother was sunk in such heavy sleep that when I tried to throw myself down next to her, she struck me in the face. It was a forearm back blow and caught my jaw, stunning me.

Joe, she said, trembling. Joe.

I was determined not to let her know she'd hurt me.

Mom . . . the milk was sour.

She lowered her arm and sat up.

Sour?

She had never let the milk go sour in the refrigerator before. She had grown up without refrigeration and was proud of how clean she kept her treasured icebox. She took the freshness of its contents seriously. She'd bought Tupperware even, at a party. The milk was sour?

Yes, I said. It was.

We have to go to the grocery!

Her serene reserve was gone—a nervous horror welled across her face. The bruises had come out and her eyes were darkly rimmed like a raccoon's. A sick green pulsed around her temples. Her jaw was indigo. Her eyebrows had always been so expressive of irony and love, but now were held tight by anguish. Two vertical lines, black as if drawn by a marker, creased her forehead. Her fingers plucked at the quilt's edge. Sour!

They have milk now at Whitey's gas station. I can bike down there, Mom.

They do? She looked at me as though I'd saved her, like a hero.

I brought her purse. She gave me a five-dollar bill.

Get other things, she said. Food you like. Treats. She stumbled over the words and I realized that she'd probably been given some sort of drug to help her sleep.

O
ur house was built in the 1940s, a sturdy bungalow-style. The BIA superintendent, a pompous, natty, abnormally short bureaucrat who was profoundly hated, had once lived in it. The house had been sold to the tribe in 1969 and used as office space until it was scheduled to be torn down and replaced by actual offices. My father had bought it and moved it onto the little plot of land near town that had belonged to Geraldine's late uncle, Shamengwa, a handsome man in an old-fashioned framed picture. My mother missed his music, but his violin was buried with him. Whitey had used the rest of the land that Shamengwa had owned to put up his gas station on the other side of town. Mooshum owned the old allotment about four miles away, where Uncle Whitey lived. Whitey had married a younger woman—a tall, blonde, weather-beaten ex-stripper—who now worked the gas station cash register. Whitey pumped the gas, changed oil, inflated tires, did unreliable repair work. His wife did the books, restocked the shelves of the little store with nuts and chips, and told people why they could or could not charge gas. She had recently bought a large dairy cooler. She kept a smaller cooler filled with bottles of orange and grape Crush. Sonja was her name, and I liked her the way a boy likes his aunt, but I felt differently about her breasts—on them I had a hopeless crush.