The Round House (14 page)

You want to know how it happened. You want to know how I deal with it. You want to know things that you have no right to know. But you're not bad boys. I can see that now. You wanted to find out who hurt your mother, his mother. He stared at me.

I was at the U.S. Embassy in '83 and got lucky. I'm here, right? The spigot works. I have to take extremely good care of it. Otherwise, infections. Some sex drive. All sublimated. I was in seminary school before becoming a Marine. Had a spell of anger. Came home like this, a sign. Finished up. Ordained. Shipped here. Any questions?

I told him no priest here had ever shot the gophers.

Sisters gas 'em. You like to be gassed in a tunnel? Better thing to die clean, outside. They die like that. He snapped his fingers. Turn over and look at the sky, huh? The clouds.

He wasn't looking at us. He wasn't looking at anything now. He waved his hand, dismissing us. We half rose. He was far away. He steepled his hands together and lowered his forehead to rest against his fingers. We edged past him to the door, quietly moved the chair, and undid the dead bolt. We shut the door carefully and then we walked over to our bikes. The wind was blowing harder now. Beating the hood of the yard light so it flickered. The pines groaned. But the air was warm. A south wind, brought by Shawanobinesi, the Southern Thunderbird. A rain-bearing wind.

Chapter Six

Datalore

T
he wind passed over us in a rolling mass of clouds that just kept moving until the sky went clear. Just like that, as if nothing had happened between us, my father and I began to talk. He told me he'd had an interesting conversation with Father Travis, and I froze up. But it was all about Texas and the military; Father Travis hadn't ratted on us. Whatever suspicions my father had expressed that night to Edward were gone, or submerged. I asked my father if he'd talked to Soren Bjerke.

The gas can? I asked.

Pertinent.

Now that Father Travis was off the list, I'd been thinking about the cases and bench notes my father and I had pulled. I asked my father if Bjerke had questioned the Larks, brother and sister.

He's talked to Linda.

My father tensely frowned. He had promised himself not to involve me, or confide in me, or collaborate with me. He knew where it went, what I might get into, but he didn't know the half of it. And here was the thing I didn't understand then but do now—the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before. So he had no choice, not really. Eventually, he had to talk to me.

I should visit Linda Wishkob, he said. She stonewalled Bjerke. But maybe . . . you want to come?

L
inda Wishkob was magnetically ugly. Her pasty wedge of a face just cleared the post office counter. She regarded us with mooncalf, bulging eyes; her wet red lips were curls of flesh. Her hair, a cap of straight brown floss, quivered as she pulled out commemoratives. She displayed them for my father. She reminded me of a pop-eyed porcupine, even down to her fat little long-nailed paws. My father chose a set of fifty states of the union and asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee.

There's coffee in back here, said Linda. I can drink it free. She regarded my father warily, although she knew my mother. Everyone knew what had happened but nobody knew what to say or what not to say.

Never mind about the coffee, said my father. I'd like to have a word with you. Why don't you get someone to cover for you? You aren't busy.

Linda opened her wet lips to protest but could not think of a good excuse. In a few moments she had cleared things with her supervisor and came from around the counter. We walked out of the post office and across the street to Mighty Al's, which was a little soup can of a place. I couldn't believe my father was going to question someone in the close quarters of Mighty's, which had six scrounged tables crammed together. And I was right. My father asked no questions of Linda but proceeded to have a useless conversation about the weather.

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done with, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I'd even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. Dad and Linda Wishkob talked about the weather for quite a while and then she got up and left.

You really put her through the wringer, Dad.

The blackboard menu today advertised Hamburger Soup, all U could eat. We started on our second bowls of steaming hot soup: ground meat, commodity macaroni, canned tomatoes, celery, onion, salt, and pepper. It was especially good that day. Dad had also ordered Mighty's coffee, which he called the stoic's choice. It was always burnt. He kept drinking it expressionlessly after we'd finished the soup.

I wanted to get a feel for how she was doing, said my father. She's been through the wringer enough, for real.

I wasn't sure what coming down to talk with Linda Wishkob was about, but apparently some exchange I didn't understand took place.

Dad had finally allowed Cappy to come over that day. It was a grueling hot afternoon so we were inside playing Bionic Commando, quietly as we could, with the fan on. As always, my mother was sleeping. There was a soft tap. I answered the door, and there was Linda Wishkob, her bulging eyes, her tight blue uniform, her sweaty, dull, makeup-less face. Those long fingernails on the stubby fingers suddenly struck me as sinister, though they were painted an innocent pink.

I'll just wait for her to wake up, said Linda.

She surprised me by stepping past me into the living room. She nodded at Cappy and sat down behind us. Cappy shrugged, and as we hadn't played our game for a while and were not going to quit for any small reason, we continued: For years our people have struggled to resist an unstoppable array of greedy and unstable beings. Our army has been reduced to a few desperate warriors and we are all but weaponless and starving. We taste the nearness of defeat. But deep in the bowels of our community our scientists have perfected an unprecedented fighting weapon. Our bionic arm reaches, crushes, flexes, feints, folds. It pierces armor and its heat-seeking sensors can detect the most well-defended foe. The bionic arm combines the power of an entire army in itself and must be operated by one and only one soldier who can meet the test. I am that soldier. Or Cappy is that soldier. The Bionic Commando. Our mission takes us through the land of a thousand eyes, where death awaits us around every corner and through every window. Our destination: enemy headquarters. The heart of our hated foe's impregnable fortress. The challenge: impossible. Our resolve: unflagging. Our courage: quitless. Our audience: Linda Wishkob.

She watched us in such utter silence that we forgot about her. She hardly breathed or moved a muscle. When my mother left her room and went to the upstairs bathroom I didn't hear that either, but Linda did. She padded to the foot of the stairs and before I could say or do anything, she called my mother's name. Then she started walking up the stairs. I quit playing and jumped up, but already Linda's soft round body was at the top of the stairs and she was greeting my mother as if my mother weren't skinnily tottering away from her, disoriented, discovered, and invaded. Linda Wishkob did not seem to notice my mother's agitation. With a kind of oblivious simplicity she just followed her into her room. The door remained open. I heard the bed creak. The scrape of Linda's chair. And then their voices, as they started to talk.

A
few days later there was finally a steady downpour of rain and I stayed inside for the second time that summer, playing my games, drawing cartoons. Angus had been working on his second portrait of Worf, but Star had called up and told him to borrow a plumber's snake from Cappy's place. They were over at Angus's now, probably, drinking Elwin's Blatz and pulling goop out of a stinking drain. My pictures bored me. I thought of sneaking the
Cohen
handbook, but reading my father's cases and notes had set up a despair in me. On a day like this I might have gone upstairs, locked myself in my room, and paged through my hidden
HOMEWORK
folder. My mother's presence upstairs had killed that habit off. I was thinking of slogging over to Angus's or even of taking out the third and fourth Tolkien books my father had got me for Christmas, but I wasn't sure I was desperate enough to do either thing. The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother's spirit isn't dying right upstairs. I thought it might wash all of the plants out of the garden, but of course that wouldn't worry my mother. I took her a sandwich, but she was asleep. I took out the Tolkien set. I had just started reading as the rain came down and down, when out of the drumming pour, like a drenched hobbit, Linda Wishkob arrived again to visit.

Upstairs she went, with hardly a look at me. She had a little package in her hands, probably some of her banana bread—she bought black bananas and was known for her bread. A whole lot of murmuring went on upstairs—so mysterious to me. Why my mother chose to speak to Linda Wishkob might have bothered me or set me on alert or at least made me wonder. I didn't. But my father did. When he came home and learned that Linda was upstairs, he said to me in a soft voice, Let's trap her.

What?

You be the bait.

Oh, thanks.

She'll talk to you, Joe. She likes you. She likes your mother. Me, she's wary of. Listen to them upstairs.

Why do you want her to talk?

We need every piece of information—we need to know what she can tell us about the Larks.

But she's a Wishkob.

Adopted, remember. Remember the case, Joe, the case we pulled.

I don't think it's relevant.

Nice word.

But finally, I agreed to do it and Dad had fortunately bought some ice cream. It was Linda's favorite food.

Even on a rainy day?

He smiled. She's cold-blooded.

So when Linda came down the stairs I asked if she wanted a bowl of ice cream. She asked what flavor. I told her we had the striped stuff. Neapolitan, she said, and accepted a bowl. We sat down in the kitchen and Dad casually closed the door, saying that Mom needed her rest and how good it was of Linda to visit and how much everyone had enjoyed her banana bread.

The spice is excellent, I said.

I only use cinnamon, said Linda, and her pop eyes swelled with pleasure. Real cinnamon I buy in jars, not cans. From a foreign food section down in Hornbacher's, Fargo. Not the stuff you get here. Sometimes I use a little lemon zest or orange peel.

She was so happy we liked the banana bread that I thought maybe Dad wouldn't need me to get her to talk, but he said, Wasn't it good, Joe? And then I said how I'd eaten it for breakfast and how I'd even stolen a piece because Mom and Dad were hogging it all.

I'll bring two loaves next time, Linda said lovingly.

I spooned ice cream into my mouth and tried to let my father draw her out, but he raised his eyebrows at me.

Linda, I said, I heard. You know I wonder. I guess I'm asking a personal question.

Go right ahead, she said, and her pale features went rosy. Maybe nobody asked her personal questions. I thought quickly and let my tongue fly.

I have friends, you know, whose parents or cousins were adopted out. Adopted out of the tribe, and that is hard, well I've heard that. But I guess nobody ever talks about getting . . .

Adopted in?

Linda showed her little rat teeth in such a simple, encouraging smile that I was reassured now, and suddenly found I really wanted to know. I wanted to know her story. I ate more ice cream. I said I really did like the banana bread, and that I was surprised I had, because the truth was usually I hated banana bread. What I mean is suddenly I forgot my father and really started talking to Linda. I went past pop eyes and sinister porcupine hands and wispy hair and just saw Linda, and wanted to know about her, which is probably why she told me.

Linda's Story

I was born in the winter, she started, but then stopped to finish her ice cream. Once she'd pushed away the bowl, she started for real. My brother was born two minutes before me. The nurse had just wrapped him in a blue flannel warming blanket when the mother said,
Oh god, there's another one
, and out I slid, half dead. I then proceeded to die in earnest. I went from slightly pink to dull gray-blue, at which point the nurse tried to scoop me into a bed warmed by lights. The nurse was stopped by the doctor, who pointed out my crumpled head, arm, and leg. Stepping in front of the nurse and me, the doctor addressed the mother, telling her that the second baby had a congenital deformity, and asking if he should use extraordinary means to salvage it.

The answer was no.

No, let it die. But while the doctor's back was turned, the nurse cleared my mouth with her finger, shook me upside down, and swaddled me tight in another blanket, pink. I took a blazing breath.

Nurse, said the doctor.

Too late, she answered.

I
was left in the nursery with a bottle strapped onto my face while the county decided how I would be transported to some sort of transitional situation. I was still too young to be admitted to any state-run institution, and Mr. and Mrs. George Lark refused to have me in their house. The night janitor at the hospital, a reservation woman named Betty Wishkob, asked for permission to hold me on her break. While cradling me, with her back turned to the observation window, Betty—Mom—nursed me. As she fed me, Mom molded and rounded my head in her powerful hand. Nobody in the hospital knew that she was nursing me at night, or that she was doctoring me and had decided to keep me.

This was five decades ago. I'm fifty now. When Mom asked if she could take me home, there was relief and not a lot of paperwork involved, at least in the beginning. So I was saved and grew up with the Wishkobs. I lived on the reservation and went to school as an Indian person would—first at the mission and later at the government school. But before then, around the age of three, I was taken away for the first time. I still remember the smell of disinfectant, and what I call
white despair
, into which there came a presence, someone or something who grieved with me and held my hand. That presence stayed with me. The next time a welfare officer decided to find a more suitable home for me, I was four. I stood beside Mom holding her skirt—green cotton. I hid my face in the scent of heated cloth. Then I was in the backseat of a car that sped soundlessly in some infinite direction. I woke alone in another white room. My bed was narrow and the sheets were tucked tightly down, so I had to struggle to get out. I sat on the edge of the bed for what seemed like a long time, waiting.