The Dance Boots (18 page)

“Earl, we keep going west there, we'll hit the Tweeten road, eh?”

He tipped the cup up and his head back to catch the last drop with a little slurp and handed the cup back. “S' good. Mino pugwud.” He felt better with Alice awake.

“Earl, we need to go toward west there; we want to hit the Tweeten road.”

Earl hummed, hitting about every third note out loud like he always did, so you couldn't know what song he had in mind till he got to a part he liked. “Hm … hm, hm, hm … hm … hm, hm … hon-ey, let me be your sal-ty dog.”

“Earl!”

“What's that, little girl, Kwesens?” He looked over at her and laughed. Alice, she was always the one watching what was going on and looking out for what might be going to happen, her, so he never really had to; she'd be calling his attention to so many things he didn't even need to know but that was Alice, always looking and pointing things out. Pretty little thing, she was looking some like her mother used to these days, but his eyesight was going a little, both
what his eyes saw and what his mind saw, and at times he saw one Alice, or another Alice, and sometimes he wondered whether he was really seeing her, or her mother, or Alice when she was ten, or fifty. Tonight at Early Bird he'd looked around for her, losing track of his two cards when he couldn't see her anywhere. He'd asked Sissy and Beryl, “Where's Alice, where'd she go?” And Beryl said, “She's right there, Uncle, she's sitting right there next to you.” And he looked and there was this little old lady with her nose all but stuck to her bingo cards, and he turned back and said to Beryl, “That ain't her.” “Sure it is, Uncle Earl, that's Auntie Alice right there,” Beryl said, and he said again, “No it ain't,” which made her and Sissy laugh a little and he got all embarrassed. When he looked again sure enough it was Alice all busy with her four lucky cards so she didn't notice anything.

“Earl, where's that Tweeten road? Do you know where we are?”

“Little girl, I always know where we are. Don't you worry.”

“It's getting dark out. Get your headlamps on so you can see out.”

The old couple faced forward, the woman in the blue flowered housedress intent, staring, concentrating on memorizing each big tree and dip, watching for a marked crossroad, the man in the wool hunting pants and plaid flannel shirt mildly watching the scenery, waiting to have his attention called to a road sign or an intersection. He turned to his wife from time to time, taking in her dress as part of the scenery, fading with the day as the lupines did from pastel to silver gray, then to the same dusky color as the upholstery. Her face and her hair, turned to the moon, lightened and whitened, face to silver gray, hair to a brilliant sterling, stray front hairs loosened from the pinned-up braid waving around her face glowing like a row of electric filaments. Pretty little thing, Alice.

Earl always got sleepy when he drove, so she had to force herself to try to stay wide awake, especially when he drove in the dark, and
think of things to say. Oh, now wouldn't it be good sometime to be one of those old ladies who slept while her husband drove, she thought. Instead, she had to think of one thing after another that would keep his mind perked up but not so much that he drove right off the road. Let's see, next week was her ladyfriend's birthday and they were going to drive down to the county home at Duluth. What else, oh yes, Earl liked chocolate cake.

“Next week, let's bring a cake for Lisette's birthday…. That'll be Tuesday, won't it? … You think she could eat a chocolate cake?”

“Sure.” Earl peered over the dash, squinting. “You see that old shack there, see that? That look like that old Dommage place to you?”

“Dunno, Earl, amanj. It's all fallen down; don't look like it. We can't be anywhere near there, I don't think.”

“Well, if that was the place, I think we're pretty close to the lumber road…. Mmmhmm, I think I know it now…. Eyaa, we should be there pretty soon.” He bent slightly forward from the shoulders and nodded his head up and down a few times to find which he could see better through—the tops of his lenses or the tiny bifocal chips below, small as a child's fingernail—and continued the Falcon's slow and unvarying speed through the darkening dusty road, around curves and over potholes and on the straightaway at twenty miles per hour, leaning the top layer of his consciousness on Alice's voice talking about Lisette's birthday coming up.

“Well, she could eat just a little. I got a lot of eggs, and flour, and that whole tin of cocoa. I could use the Bundt pan, and then I could just put some powdered sugar on top, and she wouldn't have to eat frosting.” Lisette. Taking care of everything all the time and everybody letting her do all the work. The matriarch of the family and the whole damn bunch, at Lost Lake and at Duluth, too. Everybody was always counting on Lisette, and now look, spending the end of her life in the nursing home having to let other people
cut her toenails and feed her and put in her teeth for company and even tying her up so she could sit for a while in a chair. And with her mind all there, stuck inside that bed … that Lisette. She'd outlived a husband and a gentleman friend and most of her children.

Where the hell were they? “I don't think she can eat a lot of chocolate, or a lot of sugar, messes up her insides,” Alice said.

“Maybe something else, then,” Earl knew to answer, to keep Alice from worrying that he wasn't paying attention to the road. The thing was, he was paying attention; he's always paying attention, and seeing all kinds of things that Alice just plain missed. Like now, for instance, just look over there, just a little to the right, and even though it's dark, a person really paying attention, a person who knew what she was looking for, which Alice wasn't, could see the far end of the Harrod school property, the barbed wire fence that the older boys helped the handyman put up to keep the cows from getting too far away from the dairy barn. And further up the hill from that is the truck farm, and to the right of that is the classroom building, then the boys' dormitory. Or is the dormitory to the left? If he finds where the road forks off to the right, will they pass right in front of the boarding school? he wonders. Or are they already on the road now? It seems to be narrowing. Alice will sure be surprised when they get to the boarding school. She goes to the mission school up north, St. Veronique's, and has never seen Harrod.

“The road is getting narrower, Earl; I don't think we're going to hit the Tweeten.”

Just a little farther, just to see if they go past the school. What will the boys think, him driving a car, right up to the front of the school, with a pretty girl. Maybe Louis might want to go with them over to the ChiWaabik, play a couple of bingo games, or buy some pool tabs; they'd get him back in time before the prefect even did bed check. “Ya, just a mile or so, then we'll look for a place to turn
around.” He slowed, in order to be able to see it if they should go by; be a shame to go right past.

The dark was making her feel a little jumpy. They'd left the bingo hall before the Saturday Night Fever games just so Earl wouldn't have to drive in the dark, and now here they were someplace that didn't look like the cutoff at all, God knew where on this road that was getting skinnier and skinnier so that there was only room for one car, not that they had seen another, and she wished they would. One thing, Earl didn't look like he was going to fall asleep at the wheel; he was, in fact, looking through the windows like he might be recognizing where they were. Lordy, it was getting so dark, and the trees and scrub were so close to the car. She had always craved open space and light; in winter the snow brightened up the roads at night and the trees seemed to recede from the road, but then it was so cold and the nights were so long. And Earl was going slower, but the shadows seemed to be moving as fast as they had been when the car was going faster, in their own shapes and directions, shades of gray indistinct and ominous, brown-gray blending to green-gray blending to black-gray.

And then through the gray she saw color, blue ticking stripes, blinked, and saw it again.

“Earl?”

“Hmmm?”

“Earl, did you see …?” He couldn't have seen it; she couldn't have seen it herself. After all, it had been years. Years and years.

“What did you see, there? Something in the road?”

“Oh, I guess it wasn't anything.” It had been a child, a little girl in a blue-striped ticking dress, parting the bushes with her small hands to step through to the road, eyebrows raised and mouth open in her surprise to see Alice, old Alice. The girl's hair, bound at the back of her neck in a long tail, flew in a black arc as she turned to run back into the woods. The little wood spirit's thin back couldn't have been
wider than the palm of Alice's hand, but it would have taken two of Alice's small little-girl palms to span it the last time they had met. Alice had not seen the little people, little memegwesiwag, in that many years. She had always thought that they could be seen only by children.

“Earl, I think we oughta turn around, go back the way we came; maybe we went out the wrong end of the parking lot from ChiWaabik in the first place.”

What the heck was he thinking? The boarding school road wasn't anywhere near here. How could it be? It was probably a hundred miles to Harrod from Lost Lake. “Remember,” he thought, “you used to have to take the train there. Look, now, Alice looks like she's getting scared, and you're good and lost. She's got the right idea; turn around and go back, start over.”

“Ya, let's do that. I'm gonna turn around right here.” He slowed Bineshii in her night flight and turned the wheel to the left till he felt the front wheels leave the dirt and sink into grass. He muttered as brambles scratched across the windshield, then put the Falcon in reverse and cut it sharp to the right as he backed up across the dirt, sinking the rear wheels into a soft mud puddle. Shifting into first, he cut sharp to the left and slowly accelerated, stepping a little heavier on the gas as the rear wheels began to spin and whine.

Ai. Stuck.

He rocked the car from first to reverse, first to reverse (“C'mon, girl; come on, old car, you; c'mon”), cutting the steering wheel a little to the left, to the right, each time, as the Falcon's tires spun deeper into the mud on each try. Her wings mud-spattered and dragging, Bineshii bowed her head.

“Jeez, Earl, what are we going to do now?”

On Friday afternoons the Mozhay Point Reservation School let out early in order to give the gaming workers time to turn the gymnasium
/lunchroom into the ChiWaabik Bingo Hall. The bingo hall was the school's source of income and a source of employment and pride for the reservation community. Those lucky enough to have been hired for one of the part-time jobs showed up early on Fridays and waited lined up outside the classrooms for the students to get on their buses. Then everybody got busy. Henry and his son Al hooked up the banner grommets to pegs on the wall so that under the painted picture of the school emblem—a soaring eagle with “Mozhay Point Reservation School” above and “Young Eagles—Eagle Pride” below—hung the banner, “ChiWaabik
$ $ $ $ $
Win Big Bucks!” The kitchen ladies started coffee and set doughnuts on plates; the callers set up the table with the cranked cage full of number balls below one of the basketball hoops; the pull tab attendants brought the plastic cubes out of the closet; and the hall attendants lined up the tables and chairs. The janitors shined up the bathrooms and dust-mopped the floors. The teachers made sure that work from every student was taped to the walls outside the classrooms, from elementary classrooms that opened off the lunchroom/gym/bingo hall to the high school classrooms in the basement. Break times at ChiWaabik were important to the entire reservation community, an opportunity for socializing and viewing students' work, for parents and grandmas to walk past fingerpaintings and spelling tests and essays, taking pride in the work produced by the children of their own reservation school run by their own reservation school board.

Beryl was keeping an eye on twenty bingo cards, nine on the table in front of her and eleven in her lap, and with each number called, she passed her left hand quickly across the nine, then quickly, fingers wiggling, flipping each card forward in her lap, right hand flicking the little red plastic windows closed on the numbers that matched the caller's. Her coffee cup was kept filled, complimentary for elders, and between each round she freed her right hand to take a small
bite from the doughnut resting on the saucer. She was wearing her bingo outfit, a pair of black stretch pants and a sequined Mickey Mouse sweatshirt she got from her niece for Christmas. Just that afternoon Margie had touched up the roots of Beryl's very black hair, blacker than it had ever been when she was younger, used the curling iron to give it a little body, and teased it up into that French roll that Beryl had worn for the past thirty years, which set off her dangling beaded earrings brick-stitched into monarch butterflies. Her heavy black purse was on the floor in front of her chair, her right foot threaded through the handle and crossed at the ankle over her left. This was turning out to be Beryl's night: Saturday Night Fever Bingo attracted a lot of younger people who spent so much of their time socializing that they must have been missing their bingos; how else could she have won four times so far? Beryl was almost forty bucks ahead, and on the next chair Sis was getting cranky.

It's one thing to be happy for your friend when she wins, but after four times and her acting like she's doing something to deserve it, like she's really good at it, and after all she did really was pick her lucky cards out of the pile, it gets on your nerves, thought Sissy. Sis had had four cups of coffee and finished her (big deal) complimentary elder doughnut, and that young girl with the coffee-doughnut cart acted like she couldn't see Sis eyeing that bowl of doughnuts. There were plenty sitting there but was she going to bring one to Sis? No, she couldn't be bothered, and here Sis always left her a quarter at the end of the night whether she won or not. Well, there the girl was all decked out in her tight blue jeans and fancy cowboy boots with the silver caps on the toes, eyeing Beryl's nephew, Little Bud, like Sis was eyeing those doughnuts, and he was giving her the eye, too, every once in a while, so she wasn't paying any attention to her job, which was to pay attention to people like Beryl and Sissy. Was she one of those Dommages? Lucky to have
a job, if she was, and wouldn't have it long, the way she was going. Bunch of bums.