Then Peter started drinking gas station lattes too. They laughed together at their latte addiction. The laugh flew out of Nola’s throat, harsh and rusty. It dissolved when it hit Peter’s chest. Nola saw it. That night, she rested her head there and closed her eyes.
A COLD RAIN was blowing, not sleet yet, or snow. Fat drops smacked Nola’s face as she came back to the house one afternoon. LaRose was upstairs, the door to his room halfway shut. Walking by the door Nola heard him talking, or rather, having a conversation. He often spoke while he was playing in his action world. He used Legos, blocks, magnets, an old erector set, Tinkertoys, cast-off bolts and odd bits of metal, even butter tubs and cracker boxes, to create a complex citadel. This magic edifice was attacked and defended by members of alliances that shifted and formed in his hands when he played with the many plastic creatures he had found in Dusty’s toy bucket or been given. Tetrahellemon, Vontro, Green Menace, Lightning, Mudder, Seker, Maxmillions, Warthog, Simitron, Xor, Tor, Hiki, and the Master.
He was shy about his games. He never played around people, usually closed the door entirely, sometimes spoke in whispers. But today LaRose was so absorbed in the invented drama before him that he didn’t hear Nola approach, or sense her listening.
Let’s connect our fists and rocket over the dinosaurs.
You can’t push me!
I repeat.
The plasma boat got our back. We’re safe.
Get Xor out! Quick! He’s getting weak!
Triceratops forced him in his jaws!
Good one, Hiki. The Master likes.
Don’t use that one, Dusty.
He lost his powers yesterday. He’s recuperating in the chamber.
Green Menace will stop the infest!
The cycle has begun and we must complete the universe.
Maxmillions. Take Maxmillions.
Yeah, you’re Seker. Hold the exam button down.
Then mouth explosions. Bchchchchch! Pfwoooozhzhz! And the quiet clashing of molded plastic.
Nola sank silently down against the wall beside the open door. Her face was peaceful, her eyes downcast; her lips moved slightly as if she was repeating a name or prayer.
She heard everything. An epic battle between light and darkness. Forms passing through the material of time. Character subverting space. The gathering and regathering. Shapes of beings unknown merging deeply with the known. Worlds fusing. Dimensions collapsing. Two boys playing.
The next day, Nola splashed gasoline on the rotted lumber and ten-year-old tax records and bank statements she had gathered in the burn pit. It was a sparkling, mild, windless day. She threw in a burning twist of paper. There was a dull whump. When the fire was burning hot, she pushed in the green chair.
That’s all over, she said out loud.
Whenever she was alone, tears had filled her eyes. No drug had helped, and even LaRose had not helped at first. But after listening to him play with Dusty yesterday, she woke this morning and got out of bed before she knew she’d done it. There had not been that agonized mudlike hold the bed usually had on her. Then later this morning her old self stirred. Something unknown, internal, righted itself. She felt unalone. Like the inner and the outer worlds were aligned, as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. Something good he was doing for her by playing with her son from the other kingdom.
Plans sprang up. She would get fancier chickens, not just her old reliables. She would get barred rocks, wyandottes, Orpingtons, some of those wild-looking featherhead Polish chickens. She would make the garden bigger, better. They already had that ugly dog who wouldn’t leave her alone. So an old sweet horse. Flowers, shrubs, bats now that bats are good, bees now that bees are good. Bird feeders. Trap the feral cats, but then what to do with them. No. Let them hunt rats, keep the barn safe. A cow, two maybe, for milk only. She hated sheep. No sheep, no goats. Rabbits, though, in a stack of rabbit hutches and from time to time she supposed Peter would remove one and kill it for supper. She’d make him skin it, too, cut it up in pieces. She would fry it, sure, but wait, their eyes! Big soft eyes! Too much. Too much, too soon. If you could eat a rabbit, you could eat a cat. If you could eat a cat, you could eat a dog. So it went, on up. No, she’d just have chickens, she thought, staring into the flames. That was all the death she would be able to bear. Slow down, she counseled herself. You have time to live now. She looked around, behind her, toward the woods.
See? She whispered. I burned the chair.
Wishing Well
WISHINGWELLWISHING WELLWISHING WELLWEHYAHHEYWHENYAHHEY. Ojibwes have a song for everything. This was Romeo’s lock-picking song. He sang beneath his breath as he unlocked a hospital file cabinet with an unbent paper clip.
It is truly wonderful, he thinks, that such precious information is considered secure when protected by a lock so jiggly, and cheap-john enough to break. Or merely find a key to this generic lock if he so wishes. Or saw it off. But he has the time and inclination to pick this lock, which will make his entry invisible.
For ten quiet minutes Romeo toys with the innards of the lock, humming and whispering his lock-picking song until the tumblers line up and the mechanism yields.
Within the cabinet his secretarial finger-flipping produces the copy of a file it would be hard to obtain otherwise, the original probably residing in tribal police headquarters. From which zone he is barred except as an arrestee. Funny the trust that resides in him as a recovering alcoholic. Everybody loves that recovery shit, he thinks, as he slides out the paper he needs and replaces the file just in case anybody thinks to look for it although nobody ever will, as this was considered an open-and-shut sort of thing, a tragic accident.
He puts the document into a flimsy black cloth bag, another freebie he’s cleaned up from the tribal security conference, where he witnessed tribal police officers using their Homeland Security grants to practice double-cuffing each other on the floor. The pack also holds ten sealed squares of expired noodles, the kind with pungent little foil skibs of flavoring. He’s also scored three blueberry yogurts from the staff fridge at the hospital. Romeo heads up to the Catholic day school to see about lunch leftovers—he has been lucky there. If he could find some protein source to complement the noodles, and perhaps a wilted carrot or two, he’d have a hearty soup. An onion would be a plus!
Romeo scores a flabby cucumber and some chicken cooked so dry it almost flakes, but the soup will soften it. And there is nothing wrong with boiled cucumber. Back home, he switches on his television and the hot plate. Feeling domestic, he rinses out his enameled tin saucepan in the bathroom sink. He opens three packets of noodles, douses them with water and flavoring, pares the cucumber into bits, cutting against his thumb. Behind him, CNN seems stuck on yellowcake.
Yellowcake, he sings.
Weyoheyoh weyoheyhoh
Yellowcake
Yellowcake
Make my sweet tooth ache.
Then, remembering all of the yellow cakes he’s devoured at funeral dinners and always with that chocolate frosting in tiny elevated swirls, he becomes nostalgic. Settling in before the television he meanders back to the times he went to visit Mrs. Peace so long ago and accepted squares of cake from the hands of little Emmaline. If he had ever declared his love to her once they were grown, would it have mattered? Would she have gone out with him, not Landreaux? Every year she moved farther above him, ever more out of his league. Not that he cared to be in any league, anymore, where women were concerned. My junk is monk, he thought. LOL. He’d learned LOL at work. In the olden days, there had been a chance. When he was considered smart. When there was cake passed on a little flowered plate from her hands to his hands. He can taste it, the melting scoop of vanilla soaking into the sweet loam of the slice. Like her dearness soaking into his porous heart. He’s not h
igh, just living with that memory.
Not just to bring down Landreaux, he suddenly thinks, staring at his detective wall. But more. Maybe something true. I am not just a scabbed-over pariah. People should know.
The ramen hisses up, boiling over. Romeo busies himself rescuing his dinner. He gets his spoon ready, an old heavy metal cooking spoon from the government school. With a rag for a pot holder, he brings the pot of soup over and sets it upon a folded towel on the floor next to his chair. Waiting for his soup to cool, Romeo fixes his attention on the news. More yellowcake uranium powders. Italian what? Military Intelligence. What? Apparently Saddam has purchased Niger uranium powders, yellowcake uranium powders, which look like what they sound like, yellowcakey powders used for nuclear weapons. Then McCain comes on and Romeo puts the spoon back. McCain says that Saddam is a clear and present danger and that his pursuit to acquire weapons of mass destruction leads McCain to have very little doubt that Saddam would use them.
Romeo nods and vacuums in the noodles, along with these words. McCain has suffered and survived. McCain knows whereof he speaks. Romeo loves to say that name, so cowboy. McCain would never put the young people of American reasonlessly in harm’s way. Romeo upends the cooled pot, drinking the soup dregs.
The file he took such pains to steal remains in his tribal security conference bag. Just before settling into a concocted dream state, Romeo remembers. He pulls the bag over to his mattress and switches on the cockeyed lamp. He pulls out the paper and glances over the coroner’s report on the accident that occurred just about three years ago, on the reservation side of the boundary line only by a few dozen yards. His eyes cross. He’s barely following the letters. He knows anyway what’s in it, knows from the conversations he has pieced together on his bulletin board, knows just what happened, can see what happened, if he wants to, in his mind. But he doesn’t want to. Who could. He shoves away the document, the black bag, the responsibility that he has assumed. He shoves away the fact that his country sounds like war. Then suddenly, halfway into a dream, he gets it.
There is more than they dare say. More the carotid than the femoral, more than these tubes and cakes. Condoleezza, her eyes glitter when she says the word cavort as in cavort with terrorists. The image of Saddam cavorting when the Holy Towers were destroyed. They know something they won’t tell the public. Don’t want panic. McCain knows what it is. McCain must think the Towers were only the beginning. Behind all the flimsy bits of pretend truth there must be a real truth so terrible it would cause a stock market crash. But what if that truth is some kind of bubble truth? What if behind the truth, there is nothing but a heap of pride or money or just stuff?
Romeo has seen the havoc that occurs when commodities of all sorts are going bad and people need to use them fast—in cafeteria the strange amount of celery, the overflow of tapioca, in clinic the medications, so useful but of fragile potency past a certain month. What if.
What if there is a use-by date on a heap of war stuff?
The Breaks
IN HIS SINGLE bed with his head resting on one hard polyester-fill pillow, Father Travis tries to sleep. Under a woolen Pendleton, a flashy turquoise Chief Joseph blanket he was given by the Iron family when he blessed the vows of Landreaux and Emmaline, he gives up. He opens his eyes and stares into a soft-sifting darkness that seems to rise and fall in the room.
No trappings of authority, no special hotline to God, he tries to pray. He has been through so many definitions of his God now that he has to scroll around to find one to address. First there was fervent protector of his childhood, the God of kindliness. Then there was a blank space where he did not think of God and trained his body to act in the service of his country. God resumed as the unknowable exacting force that allowed a bomb to take his friends’ lives but gave a thin boy the power to rescue Travis. Afterward, there was the God who spoke one night about fractured mercy, waters of being, incline of radiance. He was invited to a conference attended by immortals, who spoke to him and dressed his arms with colored ribbons. Scarlet and blue whizzed and yellows ruptured, spilling brilliance through the room. That was pain in West Germany. But he was somewhere else, from time to time, watching the familiar body on the white sheets. Oh, you should have been a priest. He was sure he’d heard those words from the mouth of God, in the hospital, but later he realized that his mother might have said this as she prayed beside him before he came back alive, before he entered a drabber, more monotonous daily agony.
Was there a Polish God? The God of sausage and pierogi. A mystical, shrewd, earth-dwelling God who always took things hard. His parents’ God, the one they’d left him with not long after he was ordained. Having seen him back into his life, they’d felt that it was all right to leave, he’d guessed, because bam bam, a stroke, a fatal disease, and they were out of existence.
You should stop making Gods up, imagining them as a human would imagine a God, he says to himself, again. Address your prayers to the nothingness, the nonfigurative, abstract, indifferent power, the ever-so-useful higher power. Talk to the unknowable. The ineffable author of all forms. Father Travis finally dozes thinking of all the trees, all the birds, all the mountains, all the rivers, all the seas, the love, all the goodness, all the apple blossoms falling on the wind, then the dust of the world swirling up and falling, the stillness on the waters before it all began.
Father Travis bolts up, slumps over, head in hands.
It is over, he thinks.
In the morning, there will be a call from the Most Reverend Florian Soreno, His Excellency, Bishop Soreno, who will tell Father Travis what he already knows.
THE FEARSOME FOUR still meet, only now they really are fearsome. They get together in Tyler’s garage. They have another electric guitar to compete with the old one. Their noise is louder and they smoke weed, drink beer, share cigarettes, talk. They have girlfriends, but only Buggy’s lets him do everything he wants. He tells them all about it, and the other boys save his stories in their heads. They have not forgotten Maggie, but it’s different with her. She beat on them! Back then, they respected her. Now when they think about it, they’d like to kind of dominate her. Show her. They got big and she stayed spindly. The way it goes. But then, she’s unpredictable and quick. Her nut kicks now living on in legend. Buggy had to get some outpatient surgery. His parents considered sending the doctor bills to Peter and Nola Ravich. But Buggy didn’t want everyone to know. Also, Maggie’s family is now associated with those Irons from the reservation. Maggie’s got her danger girl Indian sisters, Josette and Snow. The Fearsome Four are much aware. Yes, those girls go to another school but they could come right over with a posse, ambush their asses, no problem and there’s those older brothers, Coochy and the one who worked in construction, Hollis—ripped dudes. Bummer though it is, Maggie is off-limits unless one of them gets ridiculously high. They hardly even talk about her, except for sometimes, in low voices, wondering if she ever told anyone about what they did.
It didn’t go too far, anyway.
Nothin’ nothin’ really. We never crossed, you know, a line there.
For sure. No line was crossed. Was it?
Dude, we hardly touched her. She just got mad for no real fucken reason!
Will you guys get off it? That was so long ago. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares.
Anyway, says Buggy, she wanted it and she still wants it.
The other boys are silent, taking in this line of reasoning. They all nod, except Brad, who stares off into the air like he hasn’t heard them. Though he has for sure heard what they said, he is Christian, and that doesn’t sound right at all.
Block. Punch. Side kick. Knife-hand. Block. PunchPunch. Snap kick. Block. Block. Poor kid, thinks Emmaline, LaRose’s got Landreaux’s exact nose, okay on an adult but too big for a boy’s face. Yet he is a handsome kid. And those eyelashes. Landreaux’s, again wasted. Expressive brows. His sisters shouldn’t put makeup on him, but they do. A year’s growth and he won’t let them. Maybe Emmaline should stop th
em now.
Father Travis stands beside her. She rises from her chair.
He wasn’t going to speak of it. He was going to make a simple announcement. Next Sunday Mass. Or the Sunday after. But—
I’m being transferred.
Leaving.
Yes.
Her gaze is fully fixed on him.
When?
I’ll help the next priest for a few months. After that, I go.
Where?
I don’t exactly know yet.
He laughs uncomfortably. Mutters something about a new line of work.
Emmaline turns away, and when she turns back, Father Travis is unnerved to see that she might be crying. It is hard to tell, because she’s talking at the same time as tears well up and disappear without spilling. Father Travis knows that Emmaline rarely weeps. When she cried on that terrible day in his office, it was a rent soul leaking quietly, eclipsed by Landreaux’s tearing sobs. She tries to speak but she is incoherent, which undoes him. Even when emotional she has always made sense before. Emmaline shakes her hair across her face, creases her brows, bites her lips, tries to hold back words, then blurts out nonsense. Father Travis listens hard, trying to understand, but he is rocked by her emotion. She stops.