The Round House (38 page)

I was silent.

And he could not let go, she said at last. Because he came back and he came back like he
wanted
his monster killed, though another reason has occurred to me also.

What's that?

He was nervous about Mayla. I just know she's somewhere on the reservation. He had to keep checking on her, make sure she wasn't found.

Do you think she's alive?

No.

After a while, dread stole into me. I asked, Am I like him?

No, she said. This'll get to you. Or whoever, I mean. This could wreck you. Don't let it wreck you, Joe. What could you do? Or whoever do?

She shrugged. But me, that's another story. It's me who is not so different, Joe. It's me who should have shot him with Albert's old twelve-gauge. Though if Linden had his druthers, I think he'd rather have got shot with the deer rifle.

Yeah, it's about that rifle, I said.

The rifle.

It's under your porch. Can you hide it? Get it off the reservation?

She grinned at me in a way fit to burst and I thought
crazy
, but then she bit her lip modestly and blinked.

Buster found it already, Joe. He knows when anything new enters his territory. I thought he was interested in a skunk. Then I looked underneath and saw the edge of that black Hefty bag.

She saw my shock.

Don't worry, Joe. Want to know where I've been on my sick leave? To Pierre, to my brother Cedric's. He got his training down in Fort Benning, Georgia, and sure knew how to disassemble that rifle. We threw a couple of pieces in the Missouri. I drove back here in a zigzag I can't even remember, down back roads, and ditched the rest of it in sloughs. She held up her empty palms and said, Tell whoever did it to rest easy. Her eyes clouded, her look gentled.

Your mom? How is she?

She was out in the garden, picking bush beans. She said she was fine, but I mean she said it over and over so I'd believe her.

I'll come see her. I want you to give her this.

Linda took something from her pocket and held her fist over my hand. When she opened it a small black screw fell out.

Tell her she can keep this in her jewelry box. Or bury it. Whatever she likes.

I put the screw in my pocket.

Halfway home, blown along all the way back with the usual frozen foil-wrapped brick of banana bread numbing my armpit, I realized of course that the screw in my pocket was part of the rifle. Steadied by the wind, I didn't have to pause or use my handlebars. I fished it out and winged it into the ditch.

T
his time it was Angus's bottle of Captain Jack's stolen from his mother's boyfriend with a handful of Valium pills and a grocery bag halfway filled with cans of cold Blatz.

We were drinking at the edge of the construction site. After the lazy bulldozers and the Bobcats stopped moving the same dirt piles around, the place was ours. Some days they left our bike tracks alone, other days they obliterated our work. We had no idea what was going to be built. There was always the same amount of dirt.

A federal project, said Zack.

Cappy tipped the beer down with a pill, lay back, and stared up into the leaves. The light was turning gold.

This here is my favorite time of day, he said. He took a small wallet-size school photo of Zelia from his cowboy shirt pocket and held it to his forehead.

Ssshhh, they're communicating, Angus said.

I miss you too, baby, said Cappy after a few moments. He put the photo back in his pocket, pressed down the pearl snaps, and patted his heart.

It's a beautiful love, I said. I turned on my side and leaned into the earth and threw up a little. I buried the puke with dirt. Nobody noticed. I mumbled, I wouldn't mind a beautiful love.

Cappy handed me a pamphlet. Her last letter, man. It was about the Rapture. This was in it. Cappy smiled upward.

I looked at the pamphlet steadily, reading the words several times to get their meaning

Rapture, yeah man, said Zack.

Not that kind of rapture, said Cappy. It's a mass liftoff. There's only a certain number of people who can go. They don't apparently take Catholics so Zelia's family is thinking of converting before the Tribulation. She wants me to convert along with them so we get raptured up together.

Stairway to heaven, laughed Zack.

Raptured as one, I said. As one. My brain had started on a repeating loop and I had to force my mouth to stop saying everything I thought fifty times.

I don't think you'll make it, you two, said Angus dreamily. You guys can't get in now with that mortal stain.

It was like an icicle jabbed into my thoughts. The subject hadn't come up with the four of us. We hadn't spoken of Lark's death. The cold spread. My brain was clear, but the rest of me was just too comfortable. Cappy handled the moment and melted the fear out of me as usual.

Starboy, said Cappy, holding out his hand. Angus clasped it in a brother shake. The truth is, none of us will get there. They only take you stone-cold sober.

All your life? said Angus.

All your life, Starboy, said Cappy. You cannot slip even one time.

Ah, said Angus, we're screwed. My whole family is screwed. No rapture.

We don't need no rapture, Zack said. We got confession. Tell your sins to Father and you're wiped clean.

I did that, said Cappy. Father tried to clock me.

We all laughed and talked for a while about Cappy's run. Then we fell silent and watched the flickering leaves.

Zelia probably confessed at home, Cappy said after a while. Zelia probably got wiped clean.

Unless she got pregnant. I hadn't meant to say a thing like that, but I could not stop the
Star Wars
quote: Luke, at that speed do you think you'll be able to pull out in time?

If only I hadn't, said Cappy. If only she was. We would have to get married then.

You're thirteen, I remembered.

Zelia said so were Romeo and Juliet.

I hate that movie, said Zack.

Angus was asleep, his breath whining evenly as a cicada.

Food. My voice again. But the others were sleeping. I stood up after a time because someone was moaning. It was Cappy. He was weeping, heartbroken, then frightened, shouting Please, no, in his sleep. I shook his arm and he passed on to some other dream. I watched over him until he seemed more peaceful. I left them sleeping there and wobbled home on my bike, but when I got into the yard the space under Pearl's bush looked so comfortable that I crept into the dark leaves with her and slept until the sun faded. I woke up, alert, and walked in the kitchen door.

Joe? Where you been? Mom called from the other room. I felt that she had been waiting for me the whole time.

I grabbed a glass and poured some milk and drank it fast.

Out biking around, I said.

You missed dinner. I can warm up some spaghetti.

But I was already eating it cold, straight from the refrigerator. Mom came in and shooed me aside.

At least can you put it on a plate? Joe, have you been smoking? You stink like cigarettes.

The other guys were.

Same old line I gave my folks.

I like spaghetti cold.

She made me a dish and begged me not to smoke.

I won't anymore, I promise.

She sat down watching me eat.

There's something I wanted to tell you this morning, Joe. You called out in your sleep last night. You yelled.

I did?

I got up and I went to your door. You were talking to Cappy.

What'd I say?

I couldn't make out what you said. But you called Cappy's name twice.

I kept eating. He's my best buddy, Mom. He's like a brother to me.

I thought about him crying in his sleep out at the construction site and put my fork down. I wanted to leave our house, find Cappy again. I felt that I should not have left him sleeping. The crack of light beneath my father's door widened and he came out and sat down at the table with us. He had stopped drinking coffee from dawn till dusk and on into the night. My mother gave him a glass of water. He was neatly shaven, never in his bathrobe anymore. He kept reduced hours at work.

I started today, Joe.

Started what? I was still distracted. If I called Cappy's house, maybe he could get a ride over here and stay the night. We'd be together in the dark. My father kept on talking.

I started my walking regimen, around the high-school track. I made it a half mile. I'll be going every day. You'll be out running too. I guess you'll lap me a few times.

My mother reached out and took his hand. He smoothed his hand over her fingers and touched her wedding ring.

She won't let me go alone, he said, looking at her. Oh, Geraldine!

They were both thinner and the lines along the side of their mouths had deepened. But the knifelike mark between my mother's eyebrows was gone now. I had stopped them from living in the fear cloud. I should have felt happy watching them across the table, but instead I was angered by their ignorance. Like I was the grown-up and the two of them holding hands were the oblivious children. They had no idea what I had gone through for them. Or Cappy. Me and Cappy. I stubbed my foot sullenly against the table leg.

Something's fighting in me, Joe, my father said.

My foot stopped kicking.

Maybe you'll understand if I talk to you about it?

Okay, I said, though I was jumping out of my skin. I didn't want to listen.

I feel relief at Lark's death, my father said. Just like you said when you first heard, I feel that way too. Your mother is safe from him, he will not show up in the grocery store or at Whitey's. We can go on now, can't we?

Yeah, I said. I tried to get up, but he spoke.

Yet the question of who killed Lark must be asked. There was no justice for your mother, his victim, or for Mayla, and yet justice exists.

Unevenly applied, Dad. But he got what he deserved. My voice was flat. My heart sickly pounding.

My mother had dropped my father's hand. She did not want to listen to us argue.

I feel that way too, said my father. Bjerke will interview us tomorrow—it's routine. But nothing is routine. He'll want to know where each of us was when Lark was killed. Here is my fight, Joe. I ask myself in this situation, as one sworn to uphold the law in every case, what I would do if I had any information that could lead to the identity of the killer. Last time I talked to your mother about this, I wasn't sure what I would do.

I looked at Mom and her lips were pressed together in a straight dark line.

But I've decided that I would do nothing. I would offer up no information. Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. It was no lynching. There was no question of his guilt. He may have even wanted to get caught and punished. We can't know his mind. Lark's killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma. It threads that unfair maze of land title law by which Lark could not be prosecuted. His death was the exit. I would say nothing, do nothing, to muddy the resolution. Yet—

My father stopped and tried to give me that old look he used to fix on me, and others, from the bench. I could feel it, but I would not meet his gaze.

—yet, he said gently, this too is an abandonment of my own responsibility. That person who killed Lark will live with the human consequences of having taken a life. As I did not kill Lark, but wanted to, I must at least protect the person who took on that task. And I would, even to the extent of attempting to argue a legal precedent.

What?

Traditional precedent. It could be argued that Lark met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

I felt my mother's attention on me keenly.

I just wanted you to know that, my father prodded.

Lots of people had it in for Lark, I said.

I looked from one of my parents to the other. Behind them in the next room the shelves of old books stood mellow in the dip of shadow at twilight. The scuffed brown leather.
Meditations
. Plato.
The Iliad
. Shakespeare in sober dark red and the essays of Montaigne. Then below, a matching Great Books collection they subscribed to by mail. There was a free Book of Mormon from a passing LDS missionary. There was William Warren, Basil Johnston,
The Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner
, and everything by Vine Deloria Jr. There were the novels they read together—fat paperbacks thumbed and stacked. I looked at the books as if they could help us. But we had moved way far past books now into the stories Mooshum told in his sleep. There were no quotations in my father's repertoire for where we were, and it was beyond me at the time to think of Mooshum's sleeptalking as a reading of traditional case law.

So if you hear anything, Joe, said my father.