The Dance Boots (16 page)

On slow nights Dolly and Vernon bowled, and we watched them through the pin windows. Vernon didn't look much at her when they were talking, or when she looked at him, but when she bowled he stared like he was at the movies. He was fascinated by every single thing about her, that was plain to see: The port wine
birthmark shaped like a palm tree, her chain-smoking, how she'd made enough working at a laundry to support her mother before she died. Her arms and shoulders, big and muscular from handling the mangle at the laundry. Her blue sweater that matched her eyes. Dolly looked right at Vernon when he talked to her, those nearsighted, sky-colored eyes seeking and reading in his nearly black ones what he was too bashful to say, squinting a little just like when she was concentrating on the pins. She treated me and Buster like we were her own little brothers, Punk like a friend she and Vernon were always happy to see. She'd never been to Duluth, she said, had always wanted to see Mozhay Point.

Louis bought a car, an Overland Red Bird—remember that car? He got it so he could drive up to Duluth to visit his true love, Maggie. When he got back to Minneapolis, he stopped by the Palace to tell us that a whole bunch of the LaForces were staying with Maggie, but that even with all those people around she was real lonesome for her boys, asked him to tell us we were welcome to come home anytime.

The day Vernon turned seventeen Mr. Mountbatten made a Victory cake in the morning, before the Palace had any business, and boiled up a potato sausage and cabbage for a birthday party lunch. He gave Vernon a present “from the Palace” wrapped in white tissue paper, a wallet with five dollars in it. Ingrum and Winnie gave him box of handkerchiefs. Dolly came over after work and sat with Winnie while she watched Vernon work. It was a quiet night for Dolly. Winnie tried to teach her how to blow smoke rings and French inhale, but Dolly's attention was all on Vernon. She sat with her legs crossed, twirling her right foot round and round while she smoked cigarette after cigarette, holding them right up to her mouth between her first and second fingers, inhaling one right after another, watching Vernon set pins through the little window at the end of the lane. She knew he'd be leaving, going into the army, now that
he was seventeen, that Maggie had promised to sign for him.

“Watch me, now, Dolly, and then you try it. You take a puff, then just keep it in your mouth, but don't breathe with your mouth at all. Just stick out your bottom lip a little and breathe in with your nose,” Winnie instructed. “Like this.”

Dolly roused herself and tried. She was polite, like Vernon, both of them so easy to get along with. They were like two peas in a pod, I thought, just alike. She French-inhaled a few times to oblige Winnie, but anybody could see her heart wasn't in it. Her eyes were watery from smoke and sorrow at Vernon's coming absence. She didn't want to be the only pea left in the pod, a person could sure see that.

So, it was time to get back to Duluth. We gave Mr. Mountbatten a week's notice so he could find some other pin boys. That week Dolly came to the Palace every night except for Red Cross night at the girls' Y; she skipped Girls' League at church. She sat with Miss Winnie French-inhaling and blowing smoke rings while she watched for glimpses of Vernon at the ends of the two lanes he worked. “Pretty soon I'm going to remember seeing these little glimpses of Vernon in back of the pins way at the end of the alley, and I'm gonna wish for that again, wish I could be back here tonight seeing him through the pin window, wish I had that little bit,” she thought. “I'm gonna spend my days thinking of him while I'm at work, just like now, but I won't be able to see him at the Palace at the end of the day.”

“Hey, Winnie, know what I'm gonna do? When Vernon's gone I'm gonna learn how to knit and make him a pair of socks.”

“He'll like that, won't he? Know what, I'm gonna save my sugar rations, and Ingrum can give us his, too, and we'll make some fudge to send to him.”

“See this? I bought this bride magazine for when he gets back. It's got all these wedding dresses in it, and things you can do to make your place all dolled up? And ideas for keeping things nice, too.”

“Honey, you and Vernon are going to be happy as kings, that's for sure.”

“As soon as he gets back.”

“That's right, honey. As soon as he gets back.”

“And I'm gonna have a baby, too.” Dolly's nose began to redden.

Winnie covered Dolly's hand with her own. “You'll have lots of babies, honey. As soon as he gets back.”

Louis drove us back up to Duluth, where Maggie signed for Vernon to enlist in the army. He ended up in Italy, somewhere, Dolly thought, from what she could get out of his letters. She wrote to Maggie every couple of weeks whether she'd heard from Vernon or not. After a while Maggie invited her to stay with her in Duluth, and Dolly got on at the Lincoln Laundry DeLuxe, ironing shirts. They moved to a duplex apartment with two bedrooms, right around the corner from Dolly's work. In the evenings Dolly knit socks for Vernon and the LaForce boys, too. When she started to really show and had to quit the DeLuxe she had more time and started some for me and Buster. She read that bride magazine over and over and got the place really dolled up, kept it nice. When we got word that Vernon was missing in action she stayed inside the duplex and didn't go out at all. The baby was born right there in the duplex. Maggie told people that the baby was hers and that Dolly was watching the baby to help her out so she could go back to work at the mattress factory. Nobody believed it but they were too polite to say.

Buster went back to school and got a job at the hospital as a dish washer. The ladies in the kitchen liked him, he said, and made sure he had a big supper before he started work every night. I heard that the shoeshine stand in the White Front bar could use help, and got on as a shine boy. When it was busy, and Emil the main shine boy had to help Whitey at the bar, it was my job to tend the stand by
myself. That was easy work: men would climb up the step to the high chair, and I would sit on a little bench cleaning their shoes, rubbing polish in and shining them up. When it wasn't busy at the bar, Emil took over the stand and sent me out to find business on the street, where I would walk around with the shoeshine kit, a wooden box with polish and saddle soap, rags and brushes in it, asking men if they wanted a shine. I'd have to take the stuff out of the box, and they'd put one foot at a time up on the box, and I'd have to kneel. That was harder work, and I had to hustle because I got paid by the shine.

I gave Maggie some money whenever I got paid, and Buster did, too, and you would think with all those people, the LaForces and everybody else, always coming to her house and staying there, they'd all be giving her some money and she'd be doing all right. But that's not the way it was. Some people worked, some didn't. Some gave her money, some didn't. Some shared what they had, and some didn't.

When I turned eighteen I joined the Marines; Buster was so jealous and mad that he frowned and made faces until the kids around the house started making fun of him. One day one of his buddies brought him to a boxing gym to try it out; he took a liking to the sport and showed talent, became a local celebrity. Still, he was impatient. Maggie signed for him to enlist in the army when he turned seventeen. By then Japan had surrendered; he was part of the occupation. We sent Maggie our allotment checks for her, Dolly, and little Robert Vernon. I know she shared what she had with anybody who needed it, including those allotment checks. That's the way it was with Maggie.

I remember a night, one of the times when I ran from Harrod and was at Maggie's, when she lived in that house back of the grain elevators. I remember she had a fire going in the backyard, and us kids were sitting on the back steps watching the sparks fly each time Sonny and Mickey reappeared like ghosts from the dark of
the elevator yards with more wood and tossed it on top of the pile. It was late spring and sure cold out; our backs and backsides, too, were freezing, but our faces and hands were hot from facing the fire. Maggie and George were poking into the ashes with sticks, turning charred wood over to find the potatoes that she had set in there to bake. Some of the LaForces were down from the reservation, staying for a while, and they had brought a couple of the Dommage kids, mean little kids we had to watch around Buster because they took his bottle to drink when nobody was looking, and they hadn't brought anything along to eat, as usual. Maggie gave them the first potatoes, took them out of the fire with her bare hands and split them so the white potato inside shone like the moon under the night sky, then handed them to the LaForces and the Dommage kids, too, like they were really important company, like they were doing her a favor eating her food. George bent over real close to his mother like he was helping her dig, and I could hear him whisper, “Why do you keep doing this? They're a bunch of bums. Why should we be feeding them? It's our food, and it's our money. They act like we're rich or something. They're never gonna pay us back.”

“Look at us, how lucky we are—we've got enough to share,” Maggie answered. “We're rich enough.”

The way it was with Maggie is, she always worked; at the mattress factory or cleaning hotel rooms or making baskets or beadwork to sell. She always worked, and so we did, too. That was other people's business, whether they worked or not, she said. Just like it was our business that we worked. When you went to work you could be your own person, didn't have to ask people for things all the time. We could see that. You could do what you wanted with your money. What Maggie wanted to do with her money was to give it away; a person who felt rich enough to do that would never be poor, she said, and a person who thought he didn't have enough to give away
would never be rich. “She died poor. Worked hard all her life and never had nothing, but she would give you the shirt off her back,” like George said. “She gave it all away.”

He was right. In George's eyes, Maggie worked hard and died poor. In her own, she lived and died rich.

She was the richest person I ever knew.

Joe Washington watched the three of them in the mirror. Him, Mickey, and Louis. Three Indians sitting at the bar in the Viking, their faces reflected in a blemished mirror through moving clouds of cigarette smoke. “We look like hell,” he thought, “especially Mickey. All the smoke in this place can't be good for him.”

Mickey's shoulders shuddered and heaved as he repressed a cough. He held a heavy white coffee cup up to the bartender, who filled it again; then he took a sip of coffee, set the cup down on the bar, and pulled a fistful of stained handkerchiefs out of his coat pocket. He retched heavily, wretchedly, into the handkerchiefs, the sound dry, as though he had coughed all of the moisture from his lungs. Joe knew the sound; before she had died his wife had sounded the same way. He put a hand on Mickey's shoulder until it stopped heaving. Mickey took the brown-flecked wad of handkerchiefs off his mouth and stuffed them back into his pocket, smiling apologetically. On the rim of the coffee cup Joe saw a thin spray, a delicate mist of pink. His eyes and Louis's met in the mirror.

“You doing all right, there? Hell of a cough,” Louis said.

“Medic!” Mickey tried to get them to laugh. “That's you, Zho! Medic!” His thin, yellowed fingers gripped the sides of the wooden bar stool. Shoulders bowed, he swayed in an attempt to force air into his lungs.

Bracing his bandaged neck against one shoulder, Joe half-lifted Mickey, helping him to straighten up. “Take it slow, pal. Just breathe in slow; you'll be all right.”

Mickey leaned against the wounded medic. “Hell of a sight,” thought Louis.

“Just got to catch my breath,” Mickey gasped, shallowly. “Hey, another beer for Zho.”

Louis told the bartender, “Another for our buddy, here. He just got out of the army.”

“On me, this one's on me,” wheezed Mickey.

“Those black circles around his eyes make him look like an owl,” thought Louis. When he was younger, they had called him Waboos, “rabbit.” He had been small, quick-moving, somewhat timid. He grew into a tall, skinny kid, long-jawed and cautious, with a rangy loping gait, a loner who loved company. They then had called him Maingen, “wolf,” and still did, although as he got sicker he looked like a wolf at the end of a long winter. He was changing again, before Louis's and Joe's eyes, shifting shapes, like Nanaboozhoo, but weak, tired, wearing out. He smiled, and the dying wolf turned into a young rabbit who closed his mouth and became a gray owl.

As if Louis had said the words aloud, Mickey turned his owl head without moving his shoulders, to get a better look at something he saw in the mirror. He blinked, turned back to the bar, then did a double take. He sat still on the barstool, gray owl in a tree, his claws gripping his perch, the wooden seat, his head turned toward the bar, and stared. Louis and Joe turned, too, Joe a little more slowly because the wound on the side of his neck pulled, a
cluster of small craters scabbing over, stiffening beneath a heavy bandage.

They saw him coming before they heard his old and familiar step, and although their memories of him were at different ages, they each recognized McGoun, the disciplinarian from the Harrod Indian School. Each recognized in the figure undying scenes from their childhoods at the boarding school.

Louis saw the outline of a shadow, a giant that shrank to become a man lurching toward the bar from a table near the front door, and in the transformation he saw—in days that he had buried but not deep enough—McGoun, the young handyman at the Harrod school, shoving Louis's brother Frank into a pile of manure in the dairy barn, ordering him to get up, kicking him in the side when he tried to raise himself on his hands and knees. McGoun, big and powerful, whose very walk frightened the lonely and vulnerable boys and girls who lived at Harrod. McGoun, the mixed-blood, whose own mother was from north of Miskwaa River, who turned on his own people's children.