Love Medicine (13 page)

Lulu smiles and talks to the people who come out of their houses. As soon as we are alone, though, she clams up and hums some tune she heard on the radio. I try to get through h several times.

“I’m sorry about Henry,” I say. Her husband was killed on the droad tracks. I never had a chance to say I was sorry.

“He was a good man.” That is all the answer I get.

“How are your boys?” I ask later. I know she has a lot of them, but you would never guess it. She seems so young.

“Fine. ” In desperation, I say she has a border of petunias that is the envy of many far-flung neighbors. Marie has often mentioned it.

“My petunias,” she tells me in a flat voice, “are none of your business.”

I am shut up for a time, then. I understand that this is useless.

Whatever I am doing it is not what she wants. And the truth is, I do not know what I want from it either. Perhaps ‘just a mention that I, Nector Kashpaw, middle-aged butter mover, was the young hard-muscled man who thrilled and sparked her so long ago.

As it turns out, however, I receive so much more. Not because of anything I do or say. It’s more mysterious than that.

We are driving back to the agency after the last load, with just two boxes left in the backseat, my box and hers. Since the petunias, she has not even hummed to herself So I am more than surprised, when, in a sudden burst, she says how nice it would be to drive up to the lookout and take in the view.

Now I’m the shy one.

“I’ve got to get home,” I say, “with this butter.”

But she simply takes the turn up the hill. Her skin is glowing, as if she were brightly golden beneath the brown. Her hair is dry and electric. I heard her tell somebody, where we stopped, that she didn’t have time to curl it. The permanent fuzz shorts out here and there above her forehead. On some women this might look strange, but on Lulu it seems stylish, like her tiny crystal earrings and the French rouge on her cheeks.

I do not compare her with Marie. I would not do that. But the way I ache for Lulu, suddenly, is terrible and sad.

“I don’t think we should,” I say to her when we stop. The shadows are stretching, smooth and blue, out of the trees.

“Should what?”

Turning to me, her mouth a tight gleaming triangle, her cheekbones high and pointed, her chin a little cup, her eyes lit, she watches.

“Sit here,” I say, “alone like this.”

“For heaven sake she says,

“I’m not going to bite. I just wanted to look at the view.”

M

wood Then she does just that. She settles back. She puts her arm out the window. The air is mild. She looks down on the spread of trees and sloughs. Then she shuts her eyes.

“It’s a damn pretty place,” she says. Her voice is blurred and contented. She does not seem angry with me anymore, and because of this, I can ask her what I didn’t know I wanted to ask all along. It surprises me by falling off my lips.

“Will you forgive me?”

She doesn’t answer right away, which is fine, because I have to get used to the fact that I said it.

“Maybe,” she says at last, “but I’m not the same girl.”

I’m about to say she hasn’t changed, and then I realize how much she has changed. She has gotten smarter than I am by a long shot, to understand she is different.

“I’m different now, too,” I am able to admit.

She looks at me, and then something wonderful happens to her face.

It opens, as if a flower bloomed all at once or the moon rode out from behind a cloud. She is smiling.

“So your butter’s going to melt,” she says, then she is laughing outright. She reaches into the backseat and grabs a block. It is wrapped in waxed paper, squashed and soft, but still fresh. She smears some on my face. I’m so surprised that I just sit there for a moment, feeling stupid. Then I wive the butter off my cheek. I take the block from her-andA put it’on the dash. When we grab each other and kiss there is butter on our hands. It wears off as we touch, then undo, each other’s clothes. All those buttons! I make her turn around so I won’t rip any off, then I carefully unbsten them.

“You’re different,” she agrees now, “better.”

I do not want her to say anything else. I tell her to lay quiet. Be still. I get the backrest down with levers. I know how to do this because I thought of it, offhand, as we were driving. I did not plan what happened, though. How could I have planned? How could I have known that I would take the butter from the dash? I home, rub a handful along her collarbone, then circle her breasts, then let it slide down between them and over the rough little tips. I rub the butter in a circle on her stomach.

“You look pretty like that,” I say. “All greased up.”

She laughs, laying there, and touches the place I should put more. I do. Then she guides me forward into her body with her hands.

Midnight found me in my pickup, that night in July. I was surprised, worn out, more than a little frightened of what we’d done, and I felt so good. I felt loose limbed and strong in the dark breeze, roaring home, the cold air sucking the sweat through my clothes and my veins full of warm, sweet water.

As I turned down our road I saw the lamp, still glowing. That meant Marie was probably sitting up to make sure I slept out in the shack if I was drunk.

I walked in, letting the screen whine softly shut behind me.

“Hello,” I whispered, hoping to get on into the next dark room and hide myself in bed. She was sitting at the kitchen table, reading an old catalog. She did not look up from the pictures.

“Hungry?”

“No,” I said.

Already she knew, from my walk or the sound of my voice, that I had not been drinking. She flipped some pages.

“Look at this washer,” she said. I bent close to study it. She said I smelled like a churn. I told her about the seventeen tons of melting butter and how I’d been hauling it since first thing that afternoon.

“Swam in it too,” she said, glancing at my clothes. “Where’s ours?”

“What?”

“Our butter.”

I’d forgotten it in Lulu’s car. My tongue was stuck. I was speechless to realize my sudden guilt.

IL

“You forgot.

She slammed down the catalog and doused the lamp.

I had a job as night watchman at a trailer-hitch plant. Five times a week I went and sat in the ‘anitor’s office. Half the night I pushed a broom or meddled with odd repairs. The other half I drowsed, wrote my chairman’s reports, made occasional rounds.

On the sixth night of the week I left home, as usual, but as soon as I got to the road Lulu Lamartine lived on I turned. I hid the truck in a cove of brush. Then I walked up the road to her house in the dark.

On that sixth night it was as though I left my body at the still wheel of the pickup and inhabited another more youthful one. I moved, witching water. I was full of sinkholes, shot with rapids.

Climbing in her bedroom window, I rose. I was a flood that strained bridges. Uncontainable. I rushed into Lulu, and the miracle was she could hold me. She could contain me without giving way. Or she could run with me, unfolding in sheets and snaky waves.

I could twist like a rope. I could disappear beneath the surface.

I could run to a halt and Lulu would have been there every moment, just her, and no babies to be careful of tangled somewhere in the covers.

And so this continued five years.

How I managed two lives was a feat of drastic proportions.

Most of the time I was moving in a dim fog of pure tiredness. I never got one full morning of sleep those years, because there were babies holed up everywhere set to let loose their squawls at the very moment I started to doze. Oh yes, Marie kept taking in babies right along. Like the butter, there was a surplus of babies on the reservation, and we seemed to get unexpected shipments from time to time.

I got nervous, and no wonder, with demands weighing me down. And as for Lulu, what started off carefree and irregular became a clockwork precision of timing. I had to get there prompt on night number six, leave just before dawn broke, give and take all the pleasure I could muster myself to stand in between. The more I saw of Lulu the more I realized she was not from the secret land of the Nash Ambassador, but real, a woman like Marie, with a long list of things she needed done or said to please her.

I had to run down the lists of both of them, Lulu and Marie.

I had much trouble to keep what they each wanted, when, straight.

In that time, one thing that happened was that Lulu gave birth.

It was when she was carrying the child I began to realize this woman was not only earthly, she had a mind like a wedge of iron.

For instance, she never did admit that she was carrying.

“I’m putting on the hog.” She clicked her tongue, patting her belly, which was high and round while the rest of her stayed FDIC slim.

One night, holding Lulu very close, I felt the baby jump. She said nothing, only smiled. Her white teeth glared in the dark. She snapped at me in play like an animal. In that way she frightened me from asking if the baby was mine. I was jealous of Lulu, and she knew this for a fact. I was jealous because I could not control her or count on her whereabouts. I knew what a lively, sweet fleshed figure she cut.

And yet I couldn’t ask her to be true, since I wasn’t. I was two timing Lulu in being married to Marie, and vice versa of course.

Lulu held me tight by that string while she spun off on her own.” Who she saw, what she did, I have no way to ever know. But I do think the boy looked like a Kashpaw.

Every so often I would try to stop time again by finding a still place and sitting there. But the moment I was getting the feel of quietness, leaning up a tree, parked in the truck, sitting with the cows, or just smoking on a rock, so many details of love and politics would flood me.

It would be like I had dried my mind out only to receive the fresh dousing of, say, more tribal news.

Chippewa politics was thorns in my jeans. I never asked for the chairmanship, or for that matter, anything, and yet I was in the thick and boil of policy. I went to Washington about it. I talked to the governor. I had to fight like a weasel, but I was fighting with one paw tied behind my back because of wrangling over buying a washer for Marie.

For a time there, Marie only wanted one thing that I could give her.

Not love, not sex, just a wringer washer. I didn’t blame her, with all the diapers and the over halls and shirts. But our little stockpile of money kept getting used up before it came anywhere near a down payment on the price.

This wrangling and tearing went on with no letup. It was worse than before I’d stopped or took the butter from the dash.

Lulu aged me while at the same time she brought back my youth.

I was living fast and furious, swept so rapidly from job to home to work to Lulu’s arms, and back again, that I could hardly keep MY mind on straight at any time. I could not fight this, either. I had to speed where I was took. I only trusted that I would be tossed up on land when everyone who wanted something from Nector Kashpaw had wrung him dry.

So I was ready for the two things that happened in ‘57. They were almost a relief, to tell the truth, because they had to change my course.

Number one was a slick, flat-faced Cree salesman -out of Minneapolis that came and parked his car in Lulu’s yard. He was Henry’s brother, Beverly Lamartine, a made-good, shifty type who would hang Lulu for a dollar. I told her that. She just laughed.

“There’s no harm in him,” she said.

“I’ll kill him if he puts a hand on you.

IL She gave me a look that said she wouldn’t call a bluff that stupid or mention the obvious except to say, blasting holes in me,

“If it wasn’t for Marie

“What?” I said.

She bit her lip and eyed me. I went cold. It entered my mind that she was thinking to marry this urban Indian, this grease haired vet with tattoos up his arms.

“Oh no,” I said, “you wouldn’t.”

I got desperate with the thought, but I was helpless to sway her anvil mind. I laid her down. I pinned her arms back. I pulled her hair so her chin tipped up. Then I tried my best to make her into my own private puppet that I could dance up and down any way I moved her.

That’s what I did. Her body sweat and twisted. I made her take my pleasure. But when I fell back there was still no way I could have Lulu but one-to leave Marie-which was not possible.

Or so I thought.

That night I left Lulu right after she fell back in the pillows. I got in my truck and drove to the lake. I parked alone. I turned the lights off. And then, because even in the stillest of hours, by the side of the water, I was not still, I took off my clothes and walked naked to the shore.

I swam until I felt a clean tug in my soul to go home an forget about Lulu. I told myself I had seen her for’ the last time that night. I gave her up and dived down to the bottom of the lake where it was cold, dark, still, like the pit bottom of a grave. Perhaps I should have stayed there and never fought. Perhaps I should have taken a breath.

But I didn’t. The water bounced me up. I had to get back in the thick of my life.

The next day, I was glad of my conclusion to leave Lulu forever.

The area redevelopment went through. I was glad, because if I hadn’t betrayed Lulu before, I had to do it now, over the very Now= land she lived on. It was not hers. Even though she planted petunias and put the birdbath beneath her window, she didn’t own the land, because the Lamartines had squatted there. That land had always belonged to the tribe, I was sorry to find, for now the tribal council had decided that Lulu’s land was the one perfect place to locate a factory.

Oh, I argued. I did as much as I could. But government money was dangling before their noses. In the end, as tribal chairman, I was presented with a typed letter I should sign that would formally give notice that Lulu was kicked off the land.

My hand descended like in a dream. I wrote my name on the dotted line.

The secretary licked it in an envelope and then someone delivered it to Lulu’s door. I tried to let things go, but I was trapped behind the wheel. Whether I liked it or not I was steering something out of control.