LaRose (25 page)

And you boys, where did you go? She sat up straight and peered at them with frail intensity. Where did you go?

The boys paused, drew breath. She was staring at them, anxious.

We went to boarding school, they said.

Oh yes, she said. Of course you did. Fort Totten. Did they feed you enough?

Fort Totten had closed years ago.

Though they could always eat more, there had been food enough at their school. One of the reasons Romeo had loved it there. No, food wasn’t why Landreaux had run away. It was more to do with living smothered by alien rules, and with his grandparents who had loved him but maybe no longer existed, and with that thing he had seen in the old woman’s face—fighting to keep herself. Landreaux was reminded of Bowl Head’s know-better smile when he did something Indian. And Landreaux felt the other part of it powerfully, too, the way the woman’s son treated her, her desperation over which reality to choose.

You fed us good, said Landreaux.

The woman looked at them with her hard, folded face and her eyes from the spirit world.

You want something? Take it. She gestured all around. Take anything, before he takes it. He wants to sell it, the acreage, the house. What we lived for. And you were always such good boys. Quiet boys. Ducked your heads away. Like that, like you’re doing now, she said to Romeo, to Landreaux. Take it. Take it all.

JARS OF WATER,
money, bags of food. Romeo and Landreaux walked back to the railroad tracks and continued west. In forty
years the tracks would carry mile-long black steel sausage cars full of fracked oil—the trains wouldn’t stop until they blew up or reached a port. But when the boys ran away there were only occasional freight trains loading grain cars at town elevators. It only occurred to them once they walked the tracks and passed hundreds of acres of sprouting wheat and corn that there was no reason for a train to load up at a grain elevator early in the summer.

They stopped at a friendly cottonwood tree, sat and stuffed themselves with boiled eggs, sandwiches, cheese, pickles. The old farm lady had given them money from a secret sock stuffed with rolled bills. She had also tried to give them her husband’s watch, a ring with white stones, a bracelet made of yellow stones, and a clock that she said was antique. Landreaux would have taken these things but Romeo politely refused.

Man, were you nuts back there? Romeo said to Landreaux as they ate. If the cops ever caught us with that farmer lady’s stuff they would lock us in prison.

Landreaux shrugged. We should count the money.

The top bills on the rolls were tens and the inside bills were twenties and a couple of hundred-dollar bills, at which they marveled.

Oh no, no, no, said Romeo. I bet that Ceel knows about this. He will sic the cops.

Landreaux was dazzled. He kept counting. Over a thousand dollars.

The boys carefully divided the money. They pried up the insoles of their shoes and put the hundred-dollar bills and the twenties there. They each kept seventy dollars out, in their pockets, and walked on and on, treading down the cushiony money in their shoes, until they came to a town. It was a fairly large town and had a Ben Franklin dime store. They went in. The store lady followed them around; they were used to that. It didn’t faze Landreaux, but Romeo insolently waved a ten-dollar bill at her. Landreaux bought black licorice pipes. Romeo bought red wheels. They paid and went down the sidewalk to the edge of town and back, Landreaux pretending to
smoke. At the eastern end they passed a small café with a sign,
BUS
. Landreaux was afraid to buy a ticket. Plus they argued about where to go. Home? Not home.

We should go to Minneapolis and get a job, Landreaux said, because he’d heard people say this.

Romeo stared at Landreaux.

Nobody’s going to hire us, he said. We’re supposed to be in school. If they see us, the police might even arrest us.

How did Landreaux get this far, he wondered, without understanding how things work? But Landreaux kept talking about Minneapolis and jobs until he gave in and they bought the tickets, which were so expensive that Romeo knew for sure this was all stupid. When they boarded the bus, he said, What are we doing? We risked our life not to get on a bus.

But the bus rumbled off and they were trapped on it. At least the seats were cushy and could recline back. Their stomachs were full. They drowsed, then fell into a dead sleep. They woke for the lunch break, bought soup, and gulped it down fast. Watching Romeo suck his soup down, Landreaux thought, as he had many times, how much Romeo looked like a weasel with his wedge-shaped face, close-set eyes, and avid jaws.

There was flat North Dakota and then rolling Minnesota farms. They fell silent, mesmerized by the pretty land, the neat little towns of brick and stone. Then, down an empty highway, Landreaux saw her. He grabbed Romeo and pulled him over to the bus window. A woman walked along the breakdown lane, toward them. Landreaux had seen her as just a pinpoint far away, but there was something familiar. When she was close enough he realized it was Bowl Head. Her hair was white, short, and stuck out exactly the same. They ducked as the bus whizzed past her. Landreaux scrambled to the back of the bus to see if she had recognized them. He bumped two grown-ups necking underneath a blanket on the flat backseat. Bowl Head was in the distance but she was running, he thought, definitely
running after them. He knew that she was a slow runner. He had seen her chase a boy named Artan. Although Bowl Head was slow, she was steady; she never stopped. Artan ran circles around her, but she still caught him because she outlasted him, never quit, never faltered in her pursuit.

He was shaking when he sat back down with Romeo. When Landreaux told him what he’d seen, Romeo put his hand on Landreaux’s arm and said it wasn’t Bowl Head.

Lots of white ladies look like her, don’t you notice?

Landreaux calmed down, but he couldn’t stop thinking the strange thought that Bowl Head was a spirit, a force, an element set loose by the boarding school to pursue them to the end of time.

The bus brought them to the city.

When they had boarded, the driver had asked who was meeting them in Minneapolis. They were struck silent. Mom and Dad? Relatives? He’d asked. They nodded in relief. They were about to step past the driver now, but he held them back.

Wait here. I’ll escort you to your parents, he said. Okay, boys?

Again they nodded. When the driver went down the steps to open the luggage compartment they slipped off the bus and entered the station. They mingled with a group of people scanning the little crowd held to one side of the walkway by a rope. The boys ducked under the rope, darted through the glass doors, and then they were out in the street.

Noise pressed down from every side, pushing them along. Romeo tried to watch the metal signs and stay on First Avenue. They had seen stoplights only a few times in their lives. Now stoplights everywhere. They copied what other people did, drank at a public drinking fountain, looked in windows or at framed menus outside of restaurants. Walked as if they knew where they were going. At a tiny corner store they bought bottles of pop and boxes of buttered popcorn. All of a sudden they came to the end of their downtown
city street. There was a building made of rose-red bricks and a sign,
BERMAN BUCKSKIN
. A gravel parking lot, chain link, scarred walls. Beyond that a tangle of weeds, scrub, spindly trees.

They went into the weeds. A path sloped down to a broad river. They made their way down the bank to the concrete abutment that anchored the bridge. There in the brush, they saw evidence of a camp—some driftwood logs placed around the smear of a dead fire, blackened rocks, blankets stuffed underneath some boards, two large sagging cardboard boxes and bags containing empty cans and bottles. Stained pieces of carpeting were laid out where the ground was level. They drank their orange sodas and ate the popcorn. They added the bottles to the others, tore the boxes into tiny bits and threw them in the river. They watched the curls of paper float east. It was getting dark.

Let’s go up there, said Landreaux.

They tilted their heads back and looked into the iron trusses. Rusted ends of rebar in the eroded concrete pilings stuck out enough for hand- and footholds. Landreaux pulled a raggy blanket from the boards, draped it around his neck, and climbed. The blanket reeked of rot and urine. Romeo shook out a blanket, but the stench nearly choked him and he left it. The top of the concrete piling was big enough for the two of them, but dropped straight down to the river on one side. There was four feet of space between their heads and the iron girders that held the wooden trestle and rails. The train would pass over to one side of them. It would be loud, but then they’d already been inside the workings of a school bus.

They woke and squirmed together when the train passed over. After that, they couldn’t get back to sleep right away and lay awake, listening. Everything died down—the traffic, the throb and bleat of the city. It was so quiet they could hear the river muscling its way past to a rushing place, a dam or waterfall. They slept hard again. Sometime close to dawn, the light just lifting, Romeo heard people talking below. He prodded at Landreaux carefully, as Landreaux was
liable to thrash around when coming to. They craned over the edge of their nest and tried to hear what the people below were saying.

Slam, said a man.

Fuckin A.

Eight dollars, man. Nine dollars.

Good looks, good looks.

Well, it wasn’t your breath, said a woman.

It’s that Red Lake whammy.

Chippewa skunk oil, said the woman.

And you love it.

I don’t love it, but I might roll around in it.

Oooo, down girl.

The voices started laughing and laughing, whooping until they gasped. Something the woman must have done. Over the course of the next week, they learned that this special predawn hour was the only time they could hear the voices of the people in the camp. The city was still sleeping, the air hollow. The water gave off a fog that carried sound up to their ears. At all other times the voices could be heard only as a rising and falling mutter punctuated by blunt pops of laughter and, once, a flurry of screaming and shouting, a fight that seemed to have come to nothing as the members of the camp, always five and sometimes six, ate or slept on their carpet beds or in boxes, hidden in the weeds. Most of the people were Indians.

Romeo and Landreaux developed habits opposite those of the scraggly people in the camp. An hour or so after full daylight, when the bums were unconscious, the boys climbed down. They skirted the fire circle and the sleepers. Sometimes they swiped a bit of food, plundered a bread bag; once they took an open can of baked beans. They stepped onto a thin path that led along the river until it neared another camp, maybe a rival camp, maybe the source of the fight. The boys veered up the bank before they got too close. Once up on the street they crossed the river along a low parapet on an old bridge
that was ready to be torn down. On the other side of the bridge there was a neighborhood where milk was delivered. Every so often they could lift a bottle. When the stores opened, they bought bread and a pound of baloney. In a park, an alley, or on the sunny steps of a decrepit church, they divided up the loaf and the baloney, ate it all. They never tired of this breakfast.

There were three separate movie theaters to walk to. Every afternoon they saw a matinee, gathered all the half-eaten boxes of popcorn afterward, and stowed them by their seats to eat during the next show. Sometimes if the movie was extremely good they hid behind the exit curtains until the evening shows came on. They saw:
Bigfoot
,
The Aristocats
,
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
,
Airport
,
House of Dark Shadows
,
Hercules in New York
,
Rio Lobo
,
A Man Called Horse
(six times; it affected them deeply),
Little Big Man
(eight times; it affected them deeply), and
Soldier Blue.
(It affected them deeply but they were asked to leave. It was not for children because it featured a woman crying over an Indian’s severed arm. They became obsessed by this unspeakable scene.)

Because they had to see this movie again, they sneaked into
Soldier Blue.
While they were watching for the arm, a woman entered late and sat down a few rows in front of them. Her pale hair puffed out around her head. They slumped down in their chairs, peeked between the backrests in the row ahead. Suddenly she swiveled around. Her teeth lighted up in the dark. Her Bowl Head hair glowed and rose, detached from her body. Her hand went up. They thought she was going to crawl over the seats toward them. But another person came to sit beside her and she turned back to the screen. She hadn’t seen the boys. They crept out. Romeo’s pants were slightly peed in, but Landreaux was much worse and thought he might puke.

See, said Landreaux.

I know, said Romeo. But get hold of yourself. It looked like Bowl Head but it couldn’t have been her, man. Couldn’t have!