The Antelope Wife (12 page)
She married one of the Shawano brothers, even though that family was said to be descended of wiindigoog. She lived winters on the traplines with his father and brothers. Spring through late fall they stayed in a village where she could be with her woman relatives, talk all night, cook, laugh. She never used her medicine to attract the hooved ones. Never. But everyone knew what she could do.
Sometimes the deer people came to her, anyway.
One slender doe did on the morning of the big knives. Told Blue Prairie Woman to leave, go now, tie her baby on the back of the dog, and run. Too late, though. Just as she started out a tornado of bluecoat men. Everything scattered, lost, burned, murdered. She saw the same man who killed her great-aunt leap forward suddenly and run, uttering inhuman cries of loss, from the swirl of death into the distance. He was following her baby. Her baby tied in the dikinaagan. Riding on the back of the dog-mother of six fat, fine puppies. One, Blue Prairie Woman would nurse with her own milk. The others grew too weak to save.
T
HEY ARE GIVING
out free figures of gods of the underworld along with Happy Meals at McDonald’s. Driving up to the window, Rozin buys the meals. Cally gets Hades, a sinister blue guy with skinny arms, and Deanna gets two plastic halves of the three-headed dog Cerberus, which makes the twins wonder immediately whether, if Hades went into a pet parlor to get the dog clipped for the summer, he’d have to pay triple.
“Cerberus has one body. That’s definitive,” says Cally.
“But the heads represent separate thoughts, separate dogs,” Deanna points out.
“With my crummy job we’ve got enough to worry about,” Rozin tells her daughters.
She laughs shortly but the supermarket checker job she took again, temporarily, is turning out to last a long time and still no benefits.
T
HE TWINS’ ROOM
has a rattling old window. Their outlook on the world. The trees are black locust and tree-of-heaven trees that grow everywhere, tough, with small, oval pointer-finger leaves that flip over in a breeze. Sometimes the girls watch the dull underside roil. They bathe their brains in showers of four-o’clock gold, streaming from the west. Sometimes a branch tosses high, like a horse against the bit. They think of riding the branch, hair flying against the wind. The thought of that same wind ruffling leaves and heading north along no highway to ruffle the leaves of their grandmas’ trees pulls at them with longing. Some days, the twins feel that pull more than others. Summer has been comics and bakery and turning almost ten. Already leaves are turning on the driest trees. Some mornings are quick and cool. A low wind rides, trembling in the stiff grass, unwinding and slowing their steps. The gravity tugs harder. School looms too close. The girls turn to each other with wide eyes.
Will they take us on
rides
, anyplace there are
rides
, if we dance, if we cry, if we hold our breath? How about we reasonably ask.
T
HAT IS WHAT
almost being ten is about. They ask to go to the state fair and their mother says yes. End of August. It is night, the cheese-curd stands frying curdled milk, the Australian batter-fried potatoes, the chili con carne bars at war, the dip cones, and the beer gardens. Eating something long, snakey, and blue, the twins, Cecille, Rozin, and Frank watch the show horses practice outside the arena in a sawdust ring. So delicate. So fine. Hooves like sewing machine needles, they do fancy stitch work up and down the sides of the metal fence. They pass so close the girls can feel the breath off their velvet noses and smell the warmth of their glossed hides, braided manes, sense the determination of their stiff little riders.
Here is Frank, so kind, his hands plucking cotton candy off a paper cone to hand first to her, then the girls. And so unassuming. He looks at the prize rabbits of every shape and size, and the bread sculptures and the Elvis faces made of beans and seeds, and he makes no jokes whatsoever about the size of the prize boar’s sexual equipment. Nor does he look as though he feels entirely outclassed in that matter, like some men, staring back over their shoulders at the pig in envy and fascination. Frank might be good for me, Rozin thinks, walking behind the girls, who hold hands with him. Cecille walks ahead of them all. Rozin follows as they make their way zigzagging to the sizzling zipper lights of the midway. They walk past the howling bungee jump, over the Chinese bridge, on and on until right before them the Gravitron rears.
C
ALLY AND
D
EANNA
stand in the drama of light and music and fair noise watching people move like happy zombies to the entrance of the ride, a big crowd. Just over their heads, they see the exit and entrance of a new bunch of people slightly nervous and chattering as bored attendants strap them in. The operator of the ride looks way too young—brushstrokes of a soft yellow beard, hair in a braid, earring. Vacant. He disappears for a minute under the equipment and then jumps to his music monitor control panel and begins rattling some strange Wolfman Jack spiel into the microphone.
The Gravitron starts slowly with the purr of a giant motor and a lurch of gears. The deep bass throbs to life, heavy rock beat, a flame of guitars. Strapped in standing, hands at their sides, the riders are hugged by welded bars to the inside of a gigantic pie plate that starts turning now, turning against the night. Green lights in refracting bands. Rippling blue. Pink. A maddened cake stand that swivels on its base! Tipping side to side, it spins faster, faster, gravity a hand flattening the faces of the screamers to one green dimension. . . .
“Looks like fun,” says Cecille.
“Yes!” says Rozin.
The twins think they must be hearing things. Rozin says it again. Her tone so dry the twins think she must definitely be kidding, but she’s actually not. This is how on the next run the girls find themselves watching with Cecille, astounded at Frank and their mother. They walk up the ride stairway and climb into the cages that close over them like alien claws. Again the Gravitron comes to life, now, Frank and their mother clinging to the bars and straps, blurring into one unit as the ride commences. The girls’ faces are serious with worry. Cecille tells them not to worry and she turns away for a moment. Turning back the other way around, she casually catches the eye of the operator, or not his eye so much as the strange fixed grin that he is shooting right through her from the little cage he inhabits next to the gears and motors.
He stares at Cecille and she stares back at him until she realizes he’s not seeing her. Staring through her as though he’s disordered, his whole body fixed and frozen, he’s a shirt-store dummy.
High, Cecille thinks in total understanding.
“Hey you!” She waves her hands at him, yells. He whips his head away and with a screech of Wolfman laughter only crazier and nastier, he accelerates the ride. Faster. Higher. Cranked up and down with fire shooting from their eyes, the riders scream. The operator starts to blow froth bubbles. Rabies! An overdose! And he’s garbled, makes no sense. There’s only this overarching manic howl that penetrates the Hendrix “Purple Haze” lick and funk. The girls cling to Cecille in terror. She is certain he’s hit the far edge. She starts forward. Others, concerned, do the same. Cally and Deanna grab each other and watch as people surround the lighted booth and start to knock, and then find that his door’s wedged shut. The people start to claw and beat and yammer. He’s spouting chilling warbles and declaiming as he revs the inner body of the Gravitron.
What follows from above is frightful, the riders understanding now that something has gone most horrifically wrong and the ride, a killer to begin with, now juiced up to unbearable, is whipping them mercilessly through time and space. They’re roaring. Puking. Blurred. They’re like those tigers turned to butter. They’re all one face of horror smeared across the inner circle of the Gravitron. They’ll die. Brain damage, inner organs turned to mush. The girls are so terrified they grab a railing and begin, with another desperate and grounded loved one, to wrench the bar from the walkway. They think they will use it to batter in the Plexiglas window, flail against the door, somehow jam the mechanism. But no, someone is there before them. With a tire iron swung with swordlike precision, Cecille smashes the window. People jump to the marked controls and now, at last, the ride is slowing. Each rider, coming into focus, is the very picture of sick and dazzled terror except for one.
Rozin. She steps out of her cage, doesn’t falter, not a single misstep. She helps a wobbly, limp, gray-green-faced, sweating Frank off and leads him to a place in the grass where he sits in grateful wonder with his eyes still spinning. She strokes his hand. She holds his shoulder, puts her arm around him, and holds him lovingly, the way the girls cannot ever remember her holding their father. The way she acts is so different, so natural, so real, so warm and naked that they suddenly have this picture of what has just happened to her.
Their mother has been scaled. All the scales of convention and ironic distance have been scuffed off her. All the boney armor she affects against the world. She has been stripped by centrifugal force and jumbled up inside. The wrench of gravity has undone all her strings.
H
E CALLS, THAT
night. The twins hear them long on the phone and put their pillows over their heads, laughing at them. Juvenile! The next day is Saturday and he calls again. She’s jumping up and pacing back and forth. Strewn with a blasted weight of emotion. The girls can sense waves of feeling, banners with cutting edges, huge sensations ranging from her, all set loose. Dressed, but awkwardly, her collar turned inside, she bats away their hands when they try to fix it. Goes to a corner of the room. And it is there from watching her back and shoulders tremble that the girls understand it is too big for her, too much. It is pulling at her with inexorable weight. She’s falling into it. Gravity. They don’t know what to do. Already in the other room, the phone is ringing. As their mother walks toward the receiver with her hand outstretched, she seems to shrink and fall into the steady pull.
R
OZIN WAITS FOR
the school bus alongside her daughters. They stand close together on the street corner, watching traffic. Her hand brushes down her daughters’ slippery brown hair. The girls ask about the deer husband and Blue Prairie Woman. Is it true?
“That old story,” says Rozin. She holds their slim shoulders against her. Their heavy backpacks clunk against her hips on each side. The bus bumbles to a stop and the doors sigh open.
“Is it true?” Both of the girls look back as they are getting on. They pause on the black school-bus steps.
“Don’t worry,” says Rozin. “It will be all right. It will be okay.”
“What will?”
“The divorce,” hisses Cally.
Deanna halts as the door swishes shut and the bus drives off before they sit down, completely against safety regulations. Now they are waving from the backseat. Rozin watches until the bus turns down the street and then she walks into the kitchen and puts the old blue kettle on to boil. Standing tall in her black yoga pants, in which she will do the same jumping jacks and sit-ups she learned in high school, hands pressed on the pale tiles of the counter, unsmiling, she gazes out the window into the festooned yard. She leans forward and frowns as though looking for something hidden.
When her husband steps into the kitchen, yawning, rubbing his chest, and pulling down a thick sweatshirt, she drops her gaze. Unspeaking, she sets out spoons, milk, slices a grapefruit, rattles a cereal box, takes down a pair of white lotus bowls. Richard pours the steaming water into the plunger coffeepot and then he stands with her in a drowsy suspension.
“Klaus and me are going to take a lot of heat on this. Bad stuff is going down,” he says.
“You never talk like that anymore,” says Rozin. “Why are you talking like that again?”
They fell in love at an American Indian Movement protest and her mother told her she had a sinister feeling about the future. But did Rozin listen? No, she ran off with those people and lived here and there, but fortunately not on Pine Ridge during the years it had the highest per capita murder rate in the USA. Being in AIM was frustrating since the old ways were taken up again, the ceremonies and the pipes and the berets . . . wait, those berets were French?—but they looked cool. AIM was complicated for women because for instance if you had your period you couldn’t be around any of the good-looking men and couldn’t cook or touch their pipes or any sacred objects but had to stay in a moon lodge, which was usually the apartment of a sympathetic white person. Rozin had rebelled against her mother’s traditional ways, but once they were AIM ways she felt spiritual.
Richard cheated on her many times while she was in the moon lodge. She never knew it at the time, but it later became a reason she felt justified in drinking coffee with Frank.
Eventually, Rozin tried to put her politics into practice. She went to school to be a social worker but didn’t finish her degree. Sometimes she does community work. Other times she’s laid off and works at the supermarket, or for temp agencies. Anyway, she is steady and was able to buy and rehabilitate this very old house. As for Richard, all he’s got left of AIM is the ponytail.
Richard is always participating in some scam or another. She has gotten used to this. He was the treasurer for AIM for one month and money vanished. He was actually kicked out, but things were getting very dangerous and he felt lucky not to have been executed by some former friend whose mind was poisoned by Cointelpro agents. Handsomely, charismatically, he flunked out of college and cast about for other ways to live. Once he was a telemarketer, he said, but he was actually part of a group that invested old people’s money in a nonexistent Indian hot springs resort. Another time he took a casino job and commuted. That worked out pretty well and he made enough to buy the yellow pickup truck that everybody knows him for driving.
“That pickup truck was never a good idea. So easy to spot,” says Rozin.
“Easy to repo,” says Richard.
She nods, but does not answer.
As always, she pours the coffee into his pottery cup. As always, he takes his first drink and winces at the stinging heat.
“Does it even bother you that I am going underground?”
“Underground, isn’t that for radicals? You’re an illegal carpet dumper.”
“I suppose you’re glad. I suppose that you’ll be messing around with Frank.”
“Yes,” sighs Rozin. “I suppose so.”
During a recent receptionist break she read a magazine article about the brain chemicals that are released in the beginning of romantic love. Wow, has she ever got them, and to spare.
“Are you in love?” says Richard poisonously.
“Madly,” says Rozin flatly. She succeeds in tamping down a warm flutter.
Her matter-of-factness deflates Richard. He thinks of how he could refer to Frank’s unhealthily sweet pastries and tell her he hopes they both get diabetes. But he just doesn’t have the energy. Maybe once he and Klaus are on the move his outlook will improve. He will call her on the phone with a slashing comeback. He will leave eloquent and withering messages.
“Are you changing your identity?” asks Rozin. “I’ll want to know when I get the divorce papers. I’ll want to know so I can serve you with divorce papers.”
“Make those guys who bring the papers wear neckties. And of course we’re changing our identities. We are going to masquerade as homeless guys who can’t remember who we are.”
Rozin is alarmed and sits down across from him, frowning.
“That’s stupid, Richard, and so dangerous.”
“What do you care?”
“I still care for you.”
“You won’t have sex with me.”
“That would be crossing a boundary.”
“It was a boundary we once loved to cross, like the state line, like the Forty-fifth Parallel, like the line between Central and Mountain time.”
They are both very quiet and sadly sit drinking their coffee and remembering that they’d had many good and crazy years before these bad years.
“Aren’t you worried about Cally and Deanna, about how they’ll take this?”
“I have the grandmas here.”
“They never liked me. They’ll talk bad about me.”
“No, I won’t let them.”
But they both know the grandmas are out of anyone’s control and that they have always said that Richard would end up homeless in the streets being hunted down by the authorities. Sure enough, that afternoon, the grandmas are watching when two of those very authorities come up to the house and repossess the yellow pickup truck. The repo men ask for Richard, but he is gone, because by that time Richard and Klaus are crawling around in the bushes down by the Mississippi River. They flip for who will buy the first bottle and Klaus loses. They roll out their sleeping bags and take the first burning swig. The sky is clear, slate blue. Soon enough, the air chills, dusk comes on, the brightest stars show, and the moon is nearly full.
“It’s not so bad,” says Richard.
There are deer in the leaves. A head pokes through once; a young doe stares at them meltingly and disappears.