The Dance Boots (14 page)

I learned it in a dream.

Any of us by ourselves, we're just one little piece of the big picture, and that picture is home. We love it, we think we hate it sometimes, but that doesn't change anything. We are part of it; we are in the picture. It's home.

Setting pins at the Palace Bowl was repetitious work. To do it took rhythm, but not the kind of rhythm that let you forget about what you were doing and think of other things—that was Punk's advice. A lot of guys had gotten hurt that way, he told us that first night. “It's easy to let your mind wander away, but you gotta be careful. Work with the rhythm but just make sure you pay attention, and you'll be all right.” After a while I was able to do that, work with the rhythm but pay attention, yet my mind wandered just the same, and I began to think of other things.

Before I got the rhythm I smashed my fingers and knuckles a few times, and my body ached to where it was just about unbearable, then all of a sudden I felt it, almost heard it, and gave in to the beat. I would be all but dancing to the pattern of the Palace Bowl beat, shuffling, bending, picking up two, three pins at a time in each hand, and over the sound of balls rolling down the lanes right at me and on both sides of my pit and hitting pins and pins hitting each other and the floor as they fell, I could hear that click-click
as the pins in my hands touched heads and bodies and feel their smooth cool necks between my fingers. I bent and rose, swinging, using the muscles in my hips, shoulders, stomach, and back for strength, those in my hands and feet for the more detailed work of picking up pins and dancing out of the way of the scramble of rolling wood on the floor of the pit. And once my body began to dance to the rhythm, my mind did, too, and I began to hear it, the melody of past and present, and see the other dancers all round me—Vernon and Punk and Biik in the pits, the bowlers who looked so tiny down at the approach ends of their lanes, Mr. Mountbatten at the bar, Ingrum at the counter, and Miss Winnie smoking at her table, flirtatiously blowing smoke rings—the playing against that the harmony of everything that was happening back home in Duluth and everything that happened before that, too. My mother and dad—he was dead for sure and I suppose she must have been, too—and my sisters, Violet lost and Sis on her own, the federal boarding school at Harrod, and my dreams. My recurring dreams of horses in fields, one brown with white spots, one almost black with a white blaze down his forehead, a round and short-legged pony, an old faded gray blind in one eye, a light brown with eyes as purple and sad as a moose's. My dreams, the same ones I have to this day: Two girls in dresses and boys' high-topped work boots riding bareback in a field bounded by a fence and forests, gripping the manes of their horses. The slender girl sits regally, holding the purple-eyed brown's mane with both hands, her chin high; she half smiles, watching her sister, round faced, with a laughing mouth full of teeth, lift one hand to wave at the sky. In my dreams, the woman in the green-checked apron is holding my hand, her thumb and three fingers circling my wrist in a firm bracelet, her forefinger wrapped around my thumb, so that her dry cool hand is a mitten. “Lookit, Sam. See, there's your sisters. There's Violet, there's Sis. Look, they don't even see us, them girls!” I wave to my sisters, and laugh with
them, although they don't know it; the woman bends to stroke my head, which is resting against her green-checked hip, with her bony and tender hand. “Them girls, they don't even know we're lookin' at them, do they, Sam?” My mother, I suppose she must be, before she took off for wherever the hell she went. Next I dream of Harrod. When I run away to Maggie's, I wake up when I get caught by the disciplinarian and brought back to boarding school. Whenever I sleep it starts all over again.

I am an old man now, my dreams the same today as they were when we worked at the Palace, a one-reeler with people, rhythm, and music, sights that play over and over. Girls. Horses. The woman in the green-checked apron holding my hand, bending to stroke my head and my face with her other hand. Her departure. Boarding school. The run to Maggie's. All that was tied up with the rhythm of work, as I danced with their ghosts, living and dead, danced to the silent song of lives led and lives being lived, accompanied by the drop-roll of bowling balls and the clatter and crash of downed pins.

Before we went to Minneapolis to look for work, me and Cousin Vernon lived in Duluth, with Vernon's mother, Maggie, and his little brother, Biik. We'd both quit Harrod school, Vernon when he turned sixteen and me the last time I ran away and those bastards finally got tired of hunting me down. We were ready for the army and ready to get into the war but we were too young, and we were really mad about that. Vernon was going to enlist as soon as he turned seventeen, when Maggie could sign for him to go. His brothers Sonny and George were fighting in Africa and in the Pacific, and his cousins, all of the LaForce boys, were overseas, too. Me and Vernon, we were useless, us, and were waiting until the army would take us, like I said. I was going to have to wait even longer than Vernon because I didn't have a mother to sign for me; meanwhile, we were looking for something to do. Vernon decided that he could
stop living off Maggie and we could go down to Minneapolis to look for work.

“I'm gonna get a job, Ma, and then I'm gonna send you some money so you won't have to work all the time,” Vernon told her, “and me and Sam are gonna get ourselves a place to stay.”

“Mmmm, that's nice,” she said.

Maggie, she had us each take a blanket to roll our clothes in, packed us some food, and gave us five bucks, too; that was Maggie. She told us to go find Louis when we got there; he was living at the Holland House Hotel, close to all his friends on Franklin Avenue, the Av, where the Indians in Minneapolis came and went, all the Chippewas and Sioux, Boozhoos and Howkolas we called them sometimes, and Indians from some other places, too. There was all of a sudden a lot of Indians in Minneapolis then, during the Second World War, coming and going from all the reservations, making money working in the munitions plants and factories, living sometimes six people to a room, sharing with people like me and Vernon who came to work, too, and helping out their relatives back home.

We told Biik he had to stay with Maggie and go to school in the fall. He was pretty mad about that, like we were about not getting to go into the army.

It took us two days and four rides to hitch down to Minneapolis. We slept overnight behind a gas station in Cambridge. Early in the morning the owner woke us up and told us to get the hell out of there. We jumped up pretty quick and gathered up our stuff, that guy saying all the while, “I mean it, you bums, get the hell off my property or I'm getting the cops over here,” till we were out of his sight. Down the street there was a bakery where we bought a loaf of bread and some doughnuts to eat on the road. We ate the bread while we stood at the side of the road just outside of Cambridge with our thumbs out and shared the doughnuts with the farmer who picked us up.

The farmer took us past Forest Lake, and then a Watkins salesman in a checkered suit picked us up and took us all the way into the city. By that time it was getting dark but we knew where the Av was, and it wasn't hard to find the Holland House. Louis was back from work, and he was glad to see us, asked us what Maggie was up to and if the LaForces were still up on the reservation or what. He introduced us to a couple of men from up north who worked with him at the grain elevators (‘Like you to meet my son, Vernon, and Sam Sweet. Maynard's boy—you remember Maynard”) and a couple of Sioux from South Dakota. The Sioux were very polite; they shook our hands and told us they were glad to meet us. Louis and the Sioux said if we wanted to go down to the grain elevators with them in the morning we could probably get a job killing rats. “No rabbits down there; if youse boys get hungry youse are gonna have to settle for rats.” The Sioux started laughing hysterically at this good joke on their buddies the Chippewas.

We slept on the floor in Louis's room that night; it was all right, a pretty good time. Louis was a lot of fun, and we sat around talking till pretty late. When we got up early the bathroom was full of men getting ready to work; a couple of the younger men were wet-combing their hair, but most were just washing their faces and coughing into the sinks; their jobs weren't the kind you had to comb your hair for.

We got on at the grain elevators just like that and spent our first day in Minneapolis chasing rats and beating them to death with shovels, work that just wore you out. Our job was to kill the rats that lived in the elevators, some of them growing to the size of dogs because of all that grain they ate. The foreman told us each to pick up a shovel, stay out of the grain shovelers' way, and make sure no rats, dead or alive, got shoveled into the grain that was going to the mill. “We don't want nothing like rats getting ground up into the flour, boys. You make sure that don't happen.”

We envied Louis his nice job shoveling grain, where the men inhaled particles of grain dust so fine that it floated like a yellow fog as soon as the shoveling started. Within minutes of starting work the men started to cough. Then they hawked the rest of the day, some of them until they puked, which stopped the cough but not for long. They wore handkerchiefs tied over their faces, like bank robbers. Louis kept his handkerchief tied over his nose and mouth in a square knotted above the backs of his ears and then at the back of the neck. He said it worked for him, and he never puked. He did sweat, though, soaked right through his overalls and shirt, and that fine grain powder stuck to it so that he looked like a big piece of grain himself.

Vernon got the first one, a rat that didn't look like any rat we ever saw before. There we were, standing behind Louis, holding our shovels like baseball bats, and Louis was pumping his arms and moving that grain, shoveling like a madman, like all the shovelers were, and in about a minute this big bushy rat almost the size of a porcupine but fast, man that thing was fast, dodged Louis's shovel and ran right between us. Vernon swung the shovel in this big arc over his right shoulder down toward the floor, skimming right to the rat's path, and pow! That thing was knocked right out; got it right in the face. Vernon raised his eyebrows at me and smiled, then shoveled that thing up off the floor and carried it over to where the foreman said we were supposed to start our rat pile. “Giizis, heyey-wah!” Louis called to him. “My son, there. Wait till he gets in the army!” he said to the shoveler next to him, this Grand Portage niijii with arms like Popeye's.

“Shimaaganish, that's him,” answered the niijii, and began to sing, “Slap that Jap off the map.”

“Wa ha ha, Benito's jaw!” Louis continued for him in a deep voice, to sound funny, and they started to laugh like crazy, working their shovels so fast they glinted and twinkled in the haze of grain dust.

I didn't like killing rats; there was this one that I beaned pretty good but didn't kill it when I hit it, so it lay there twitching and heaving, really suffering, so I had to bash its head in with the shovel. Jeez, that was bad, and there were more like that, too. I had smears of blood on my overalls, especially on the legs; Vernon was splattered all the way up to his face. He really killed a lot of rats, but he ran a lot more than I did and where I got to feeling worn out he got tired to the point he was like crazy drunk. By dinner break he was so wound up from all that running around that his hind end appeared to hover about a half-inch above the wooden bench we sat on to eat the lard sandwiches Louis had packed in the bucket, and his eyes, red-rimmed and teary, blinked excitedly. “You see all them rats? Pow! Ka-pow!” he laughed hoarsely. “P'shoom! Ak-akak-ak-ak!”

“You gonna eat, or what?” Louis asked.

Vernon turned clear around and threw up back of the bench.

After dinner break I looked around at some of the rat killers working with other shovelers, and they didn't look sick, or excited, or even especially tired. They looked like nothing but overall sacks stiff with sweat that dried out and got covered the next day and the day after that with more sweat and blood and grain dust, overall sacks charging and chasing rats, overall sacks holding inside hope that someday they might work their way up to shovelers.

They paid us in cash at the end of the day; we hosed off our clothes the best we could and washed our hands and faces, dunked our heads under the sink faucets to rinse the dust out of our ears and hair, and walked out of there with Louis and his buddies to get something to eat. We had hamburgers and fried potatoes at this bar near the Holland, Eddie's, but Vernon and me were too young for a beer so we left when they started buying rounds. We walked over to the Holland, and when the manager saw us come in the door, he said we couldn't stay there unless we paid for a room, he was sick
of that bunch of Indians from Duluth bringing all their relatives in to sleep for free, next one he saw he was calling the cops, and here's your stuff, boys, if you haven't got two bits apiece for your room take it and get out, so we picked up our blanket rolls and left.

We walked a while around toward downtown till we found a place to sleep in a park. All snug rolled up in my blanket between Vernon and a squatty little pine tree I looked up at the stars, same ones as were shining down that very same minute on everybody at home, and started to think how if we wanted to kill rats we could be doing that at the terminals in Duluth. But I wasn't ready to go home yet.

“Hey, Vernon.”

“Wegonen, Cousin?”

“Let's not kill rats tomorrow, Cousin; how about it?”

“Okay by me.” Vernon was always very easy to get along with.

There was a skinny, worried-looking guy leaning a handwritten cardboard sign next to the doorway to the Palace Bowl. “pinesters wanted,” it said.

“What's that?” I asked him.

“Pin boys, we're looking for pinsetters, somebody to set pins, need them right now. You fellas want a job?” His forehead wrinkles moved up and down, opening and closing like a squeezebox when he talked, his voice high and light. “We had two pin boys just enlisted in the navy, need a couple of pin boys right away. You fellas want a job? It'll be gone tomorrow.”