The Dance Boots (17 page)

Joe recalled McGoun after the tractor accident that crippled his hip, when he was the boys' disciplinarian and walked with a dragging limp, heavy with the left foot, dragging the right, a doubled leather strap hooked over his belt. McGoun, slapping the strap against his hand as he smiled at the boy. “Say ‘Joe Washington,' not ‘Zho Waash.' Say it. ‘Joe Washington.'” Slapping the strap against his hand. Pushing Joe against the wall with his forearm, holding him there, smiling. Spitting the words into his face, “Say ‘My name is Joe Washington.' Say it.” McGoun leaning, his weight heavy against Joe's chest, the boy finally gasping, “Joe.” McGoun, pulling that little Rice Bird girl by the arm to behind the barn, lifting her by the arm so that her feet barely touched the ground, telling her to take down her bloomers, whipping her on the bare rear with that strap till she peed, water running down her legs, darkening the dirt
under her feet. That worthless bag of shit, McGoun, who thought he was something because he could do whatever he wanted with other people's children.

Mickey could only see McGoun the prefect, remembered McGoun beating him, young Waboos, in the basement of the laundry building, holding Waboos by the throat against the wall, ramming his fist into the little boy's side. McGoun locked him in the discipline room, where he stayed for days at a time, his eyes getting used to the dark, his stomach to the meals of bread and water, every time McGoun decided that he needed discipline. McGoun played cat-and-mouse games with young Mickey, hurting him physically, torturing his mind, frightening his spirit as it grew from Waboos to Maingen, frightening the entity of the young wolf back into the timid rabbit, Waboos. Waboos turned, kneeling on one knee, to present his back for the strap, at the unspoken signal taught by McGoun. It had become, with practice, a ritual, the prefect looking at Mickey, then from Mickey to the ground in front of him, signaling with a flick of his hand, palm up to palm down. Maingen, the young wolf, fled in defeat and humiliation, leaving Waboos, who was unable to defend Mickey, who knelt.

The shadow step-dragged his way through the Viking and stopped by the three Indians at the bar.

McGoun was older now and smaller than Joe remembered. His gray-brown overcoat was ripped in the front, his face lined; he needed a bath badly. His hands were shaking; he needed a drink even more. The old ghost opened his mouth to speak; rotten breath rolled like snoose between four broken, brown teeth. “Still a sack of shit,” Joe thought.

“He's not that much older than me; I never realized that until just now,” thought Louis. McGoun stunk, like he had pissed in his pants. He was wearing old moccasins that were damp from rain or piss. The flowers and vine decorations on the vamps were losing
beads, like tears falling off the old man's feet. They had been beautiful once. “Where did he get them,” Louis wondered. Louis's mother had made moccasins like those for her boys before they left for boarding school, he remembered. McGoun took all their clothes away when they got to school and he lied to his boss, said he burned them, but he sold the Gallette boys' moccasins to the owner of the Harrod General Store. Cheater, traitor. Betrayed his people.

Mickey stared with owl eyes at the apparition. Was he real, he wondered, and he almost raised an arm to touch him, to find out, but found that his hands wouldn't move. He was Waboos, the little boy frozen, mesmerized by the specter. He was Maingen, young wolf hungry for the day McGoun would get his, lowering his head, kneeling at the signal, humiliated and waiting for the chance to avenge his vulnerability.

The ghost spoke to the three. “Can you spare a nickel for a beer?” He passed a hand to Louis, to Joe, to Mickey, where he held it out.

Waboos remembered what to do without being told. He climbed off the bar stool and knelt on one knee, turned to present his back for the strap.

Louis grasped McGoun by the front of his stained overcoat and walked out the back door of the Viking into the parking lot, pulling the ghost who was real behind him. Outside, under the single light above the back door, he pushed the prefect in front of him to the back of the parking lot, then kicked him in the rear, hard enough to knock him to the ground. He rolled the man onto his back and straddled him, his knees on the man's wrists.

“I wish this was a pile of shit you're layin' in here,” he said in his soft and distant voice, his mouth inches from the old man's. “I wish Frank was here. You remember Frank Gallette? I wish he was here, I wish he could see you.” He hit McGoun across the face with the back of his hand. “I wish they could all see you.”

When Joe and Mickey came out the back door, they heard Louis
before they saw him, heard his quiet voice talking nonstop, reminding McGoun of things that he had done. Louis's speech was rhythmic; when they got close enough they could see that he was shaking the prefect by the shoulders and that McGoun's head was hitting the ground with the cadence. Under jagged stars reflected in a hangnail moon, McGoun had shifted shapes himself, Joe thought. McGoun had become a rat lying beneath a leafless elm that stood between the three boys and the moon, swaying in the night breeze, moving shadows around the prefect. A shadow cast by his side became a rat's tail switching in the wind; the oily black beads that were his eyes reflected the moon's laughing scorn. From deep in his chest he blew damp, piss-scented breath that steamed in the cool night air. His upper lip lifted, and he half-smiled. He caught Mickey's eye and winked. The hold he had over them would outlast anything tangible.

Mickey was unnerved. “He—he's—”He tried to find words to speak, began to cough, braced his stomach with one hand and stuffed the ball of handkerchiefs against his mouth with the other. With nothing to lean on, he collapsed on the ground next to Louis and McGoun.

Joe crouched, with his arms around Mickey's shoulders. “Louis,” he said, “listen, you're going to kill him.”

Louis looked at him with calm eyes dark and muddy as the Grand Bois slough at night. “I know,” he answered in his soft and even way, and continued to shake McGoun's shoulders and head.

Mickey's cough changed to a whistle, then to a sob, as he tried to force his lungs to inhale. Joe knelt and held him in his arms, arching Mickey's back to help him get some air.

“All right, Waboos? All right, Cousin?”

The intake of air blended with moaning of the leafless elm that swayed in the night wind, weaving shadows around the four.

Louis let go of McGoun. “Let's get him out of here.” He put one
arm around Mickey's waist and with the other held Mickey's hand across his own shoulders. Joe did the same.

McGoun rolled to his stomach and rose to his hands and knees, then to stand on two feet. He coughed, hawked, spit. “Wha' kinda Indians are youse? Minikwe daa, boys. C'mon … let's drink,” he muttered. “Get back here … snot-nosed coward…. Louis, ask your old lady … which of those kids were mine.” His legs quivered and he abruptly sat. Surprised, he chuckled. “Help me up, boys, will you?”

Louis braced Waboos against Joe and lifted the drunk by the waist of his pants. McGoun pivoted on his heels, waistband held from behind by Louis. “Maybe he's mine, too,” he rasped. Louis swung him and he fell, a heap of old clothes and urine. His throat rattled, his eyes glittered and winked, black and shining as jet.

They left the prefect in the parking lot behind the Viking, under the blue-gray light of the moon, under stars that sprinkled broken glass onto the sidewalk, walking slowly away with their love and their grief.

“Good girl. She's a good old girl, Bineshii. Gets us where we want to go.” Earl's car, a green Falcon, was coated with red taconite dust from the road to Mesabi, where he had driven Alice earlier in the day to buy new winter boots, a Harlequin romance, a
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, and a pink toilet seat, like her friend Beryl's, at Pamida. He patted the dash. “Miigwa-yaak, ina? Isn't that so?” Then to Alice, who didn't reply, “Oh, gi-nibaa, little girl. Well, you have a good nap. Bineshii will keep me company; she's good company. Bineshii will just fly us home, won't you, pretty bird?”

He had bought the car used, nearly ten years earlier, from a young guy in Mesabi who had worked on it himself and kept it clean and purring. The shocks were new on that first drive back to the reservation from Mesabi, the engine running so quietly and so smoothly that it felt to Earl as though the car barely skimmed the road, all but flying right over the red dust without hardly touching ground. When he had pressed his foot a little harder on the gas pedal, the sound from the Falcon was that of a rush of wings.

A decade and fifty thousand miles later, after trips every week or so back and forth from Mozhay Point Reservation to Mesabi and back, and through the wilds of reservation back roads to bingo night at the tribal school, age had altered the Falcon's appearance. Red road dust and rust spots had mottled the green paint to army camouflage. The front and rear bumpers had bent and rippled. Because of the vertical crease right below the driver's side rearview mirror (from the time Earl took the door off, backing up with it open because the rear window was covered with ice), the driver's side door closed with a half-inch gap. Yet, Earl thought to himself, Bineshii ran as prettily as she ever had. “You've been a good friend, old aa-da-baan,” he mumbled.

As the sun set, the popple leaves along the side of the road let go of their captured yellow-green light, yielding to the uncertainties of twilight, that time of day when seeing became difficult. Earl's face, drawing a gray lavender out of the dusk, peered forward, nose above the wheel, then left, then right.

“Getting harder to see,” he thought to himself. “Ye-e-s, sir, she's been a good old car, old Bineshii, the old girl,” he said aloud. Maybe Alice would wake up, help him out.

“Hmmmm,” she sighed in her sleep.

The road darkened to maroon and curved more than seemed familiar; the popple trees, their leaves darkened to deep green, were taller and denser than he remembered.

Where the heck were they, he wondered. Earl had been certain enough of the direction home when he'd turned out of the parking lot at ChiWaabik Bingo Hall that he hadn't felt the need to look for any landmarks. How many times had he driven that way, how many times had he left Reservation Road for the dirt road cutoff, knowing by feel and habit the direction toward the Mozhay Point Elder Housing at Lost Lake? The blacktop had ended approximately where it felt it should for the cutoff, and the left arm of the Y turn
had felt right. How many times had he driven that way, first from going to watch the school building going up, to the day they hauled the pool tab boxes on the back of Buck's truck, over the Res Road? Remember that day, he beat Buck to school, leaving Lost Lake at the same time but gaining three or four minutes by way of the cutoff. He could drive that way from the parking lot of his apartment building to school with his eyes closed, he bet.

Now, though, he couldn't recognize anything they drove past. In the darkening green, damp shapes familiar by daylight began to seem foreign, ominous, vaguely a repetition of something uneasy from the past, or was it of sometime to come? Or was it something from the here and now? Who knew what lived in the woods, that came out after dark? Who would remember what came before, from what memories embedded in not only the stories but the very lives and levels of consciousness, of the generations that heard and cared for the stories, holding them for the next generation of listeners and when the time was right, when it was meant to be? Amanj … amanj i dash. He began to remember parts of ghost stories his grandfather and those old friends of his, long dead, no doubt about it, told when Earl was, what, not even ten years old and supposed to be asleep. They were real stories, he could remember that was for sure, each one had happened to a person that somebody knew or to a person long ago, an event so extraordinary that the details were noted and carried by men and women whose job it was to pass the experience and the lesson on at the right time and in the right way. Remember those sisters, with elbows sharper than mookomaanan, who stood as sentries where men younger and faster than Earl bravely tried to pass and were cut to shreds. And what else? Windigog, monsters not alive or dead—half again the size of a man—who craved flesh and blood. Balls of flame spinning across the sky above a person's head. He blinked away a horse galloping toward the car, red eyes, open mouth full of teeth, and
ears streaming smoke, and wondered if he should ask
Alice
if she knew where they were.

“Any gaw-pii left?” Alice, wake up. Wake me up, Alice—was I dreaming? “Alice, gi wi makademashkiki waboo, ina?”

“I'll get you a cup, Earl.”

Lordy, her knees hurt, and her middle was too thick to be turning and bending over the seat like that without grunting a little (and her heart ached a little more but only for a second, remembering it felt just that way when she was young and carried the baby, strong and kicking her in the ribs, so she couldn't turn and bend over without grunting a little; how could a person remember how it felt just that way all those years ago?), but she managed to reach down into the cardboard box on the floor behind her to find the canning jar of coffee wrapped in a dish towel and to lift it over the seatback still a little warm and pour some into the tin cup. She pulled a couple of little paper envelopes of sugar from the coffee cart at ChiWaabik out of her dress pocket and sprinkled a little into the coffee, sloshing the cup in little circles to mix some sweetness into Earl's drink, keep him awake and in a nice mood. “Lordy, it's getting dark earlier these days,” she thought. “You can hardly see. Almost fall.” For years, she had dreaded the long dark nights of winter.

Earl put the car into first and kept it there to free his right hand for his coffee, which spilled over onto his pants when he went over a rut, but those old wool pants he wore were so thick it didn't even soak through to his skin, and the coffee wasn't hot anymore so it wouldn't hurt anyway. When he was done with it she'd remind him to put on the headlamps, since it was getting dark so fast. Lordy, he wasn't paying much attention to the road, more to his coffee and to whatever was going round in his head. Wondering what it could be he was thinking about could just about drive a person crazy, she knew; she'd tried it from time to time over the years. With Earl it could be the color of the night sky that reminded him of that dark
blue dress they buried his mother in, then the distraction of the very light scent of skunk in the air that was nice in a way, then the thought of that little rabbit just sitting at the side of the road earlier in the day, like it was in the city waiting to cross the street, lots of rabbits this year, last year it was skunks; hasn't smelled one in a while, just a little in the air was nice in a way. Or he might be remembering how an aspirin bottle looked sitting on the window sill with the light shining through it so blue just the color of the night sky tonight that reminded him of that dark blue dress they buried his mother in, and so his mind walked and wandered. Earl. And him just sipping and swallowing that coffee like he's sitting in a chair in the front room, maybe going to set it down and sleep a little. Instead of driving a car. Lordy, when would that coffee kick in?