Yes, of course! Sweetheart Calico’s look says. I’ll take care of them the same way I would take care of my own daughters!
She nods and walks up to the girls, takes their hands in hers. Now the three are standing in the doorway and Rozin is waving good-bye.
“Good-bye, Mama, we’ll be okay.”
The girls cling to Sweetheart Calico. The dog sits steadfast at the doorstep. Rozin has many doubts but she drives off anyway, afraid of cool skepticism. Afraid of lack of trust. Afraid to offend her supervisor, who could take away the job that pays the mortgage and feeds them and buys all they need to live.
The Spaces
As soon as Rozin drives away, Sweetheart Calico lifts the girls’ hands. She looks from one to the other. The cracked-off tooth in her smile makes her look homely and goofy, but also she is beautiful in her pointy boots and swirling blouse. She has a lot of makeup on—bubble-gum pink lipstick, happy blue eye shadow, blaring black eyeliner.
“You forgot one braid,” says Cally.
“Yeah, you look weird like that,” says Deanna.
Oh this? Sweetheart Calico touches her flowing hair uncertainly. Wrong?
“But it’s not so bad,” the girls decide. “It’s a look.”
Sweetheart Calico rolls her eyes, happy. Here we go! She swings their hands as she steps down the steps.
“Wait!” says Cally. “We never finished our breakfast!”
“We don’t have jackets! Plus we’re supposed to be sick!”
So what? Her arm swinging makes them laugh. We’ll find food. You’re not really sick. It’s weirdly warm today. Time to move, to go, to walk, to tap along, to jump and run! The girls take jackets anyway because they do not trust the warm sun and they follow Sweetheart down the lumpy old sidewalk with the tree roots bulging up out of the earth. They run past her once they get to the park; they leap and scurry through the swing sets, monkey bars, and field of grass, where they find half an old Frisbee. They toss it awkwardly to the dog, who gamely chases along after it as if he is doing them a favor. Which he is. He is worried about where they are going. Sweetheart Calico always gets lost. He laps all the water he comes across. Pees everywhere he can. He does his best to leave a trail, in the manner of Hansel in the forest, but this has been a dry fall and there are few puddles. He pees like a frat boy. Everywhere. But can’t reach fountains to replenish. They pass the lake and he gulps at the toxic shore until his stomach bulges. They are foraging on and on into the city, into the downtown area near the bus station, past the Irish pubs, music bars, and old buildings made of reddish purple stone dug from the northern Minnesota quarries or fawn-colored Kasota stone dug from the southern Minnesota quarries. Farther yet until they hit the river. There on its banks, the dog smells an entire two-day-old novel that Richard and Klaus have written with their scent in the leaves, on the sidewalks, on the ground, on the benches. They are not here anymore.
The dog tries to communicate with Sweetheart Calico: Let’s go back now, it’s time. Let’s go home. They are not like your daughters. They can’t run forever. They are not as swift, not as strong, and they are human, not like you.
The dog leaps at her, snapping at her one braid. Sweetheart Calico catches his jaw with her pointed steel toe. He yelps and crumples. Gets up showing his teeth. If only I were still a wolf, then I’d hamstring and eat you! The girls are slowing down, slumping over. They sit down on a curb. They are so hungry and thirsty that can’t even cry. Desperate, the dog barks, lolls, leaps at everyone who passes in his most appealing way. Which is not appealing. Someone says, “There are leash laws, you know.” Sweetheart Calico stands watching, twitchy and annoyed. She does not like to stand still. The girls droop on the curb some more. At last a man comes out of the pizza shop behind them with sodas and slices. He can’t stand it anymore. The children gobble up their food with big eyes and he tells Sweetheart Calico that she should take them home. He keeps talking, trying to impress the gravity on her. They shouldn’t be around here. This is not a good neighborhood for children as they could get picked up and drugged and either sold to a Wayzata businessman or trafficked up to Duluth to service the freighters—and it is dark, anyway, and who are they and maybe he should call the police?
Sweetheart Calico gives her most human nod and saunters off. The dog and the girls follow her. The man shrugs and walks back inside. It’s getting cold. Around the corner, Sweetheart leaps high and cuts a little caper. It’s time now! The lights are going to ride up and down! The signs pulse on: There’s girls hot, hot, hot! And free drinks for pretty women! Just past Augies she forgets the twins. But that’s all right because they’re gone, anyway, following the dog, who is following the trail of his own piss marks down the streets and through the alleys and across the parks and backyards and church landscaping across the bus station sidewalk and along old park benches and over the walking bridge that spans I-94 and its torrent of noise.
And do their feet ever hurt. And their sad little hearts feel ever sadder. And will they get back to their mother?
A COOL FALL NIGHT on Andrew Jackson Street. Dead cottonwood leaves clattering and traffic a dim snarl to the west. Rozin sits with her back to the open window. She watches her phone as if staring at it would make it ring. She imagines the police voice, We’ve found them. We’ve found them. The police told Rozin to stay home and wait because missing children usually show up. They usually do! They will! But nothing happens. Her heart’s flamenco tattoo taptittytaptap. Hating itself. Adrenaline floods her like poison. She’s alert and leaden. There is the phone, ringing with some crazy new ringtone. But no, that’s just chatter of sleeping sparrows in the leggy vines. She hears the girls outside! But no, that’s the fan in the next room, sifting fire through its sleeves. The light socket with the bulb out grows a new bulb. What thoughts. Stupid thoughts.
Rozin wakes to the telephone’s persistent ring. Downstairs, in the yellow wash of light over the kitchen sink, she raises the phone to her aunt’s voice.
“Did you find them?” Giizis asks.
“No.”
Rozin lowers the receiver into its cradle. She passes her hand across her face, crumples a fist to her mouth, and wonders what she will feel next. Nothing comes. Just nothing, though her blood roars and her skull suddenly feels tight as a helmet. Her brain overstuffed with too many thoughts. She is just about to lift the phone again and call somebody, anybody, when Deanna’s voice floats down from the top of the staircase.
“Mama . . .”
Rozin steps back out into the hallway, stands at the bottom holding the worn curl of the banister.
“Mama?” Deanna asks. “We’re lost.”
Cally says, “Shut up, Deanna. She knows.”
They aren’t up there. The house is empty.
Rozin freezes. An excuse, a little laugh, shoots up inside her and then her throat shuts. If she lets her daughters keep talking, they will never stop. They’ll go on talking. She’ll talk them all the way home. The air at the top of the stairs is thick as black cotton and she can’t see where they went. Her knees give.
“Come home,” she whispers.
Dread like an ice cape. Silence. The dread passes over and a lighter feeling sails in. Her heart bobs and the longing is a stitch in her side. She gasps painfully.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” she calls out, hopeful and afraid. But there is no answer. Wax leaves clatter against the side of the house. She crouches on the bottom step, motionless.
She won’t call Frank. Perversely, she thinks he got her into this mess. He poured the coffee that kept her from going to work all those times, which made her paranoid about missing work this morning. And Sweetheart Calico. Her. Her. Why did Rozin ignore her best instincts and leave her children with a woman who has never spoken a word out loud, a woman weird and wild or FAS or learning disabled or suffering a form of autism or some undiagnosed ADD or ADHD or who is off her medication for some mental disorder even though she sometimes seems so pleasant and willing and kind and p
layful.
Rozin begins to pray to the great and kind spirit. The earth tips its farthest shoulder to the sun and the dark goes solid. Cold air seizes in bands along the mopboards. She sits there, waiting. Incrementally, the dark motes thin to gray. The air stirs with the cold soupiness of dawn. She doesn’t shift her weight. She doesn’t lean or twist to move again, not until the starlings begin to whistle in the tattered cedars.
ROZIN RISES AND slips her arms into an old shirt. One of Richard’s that she kept, a black-and-white checkered shirt that reaches almost down to her knees. For he is a tall man, and she is more her mother’s size. She removes a heavy iron pot from its cupboard place and brings it over to the bowl of the kitchen sink. Into the pot, she pours an inch or so of wild rice. A fine sweet dust rises off the rice like smoke, smelling of the lake bottom, weedy and fresh. Next, she runs water into the pot, swirls her hand among the ticking grains. Black-green, brown-green, dotted with paler speckles and very fine. Uncultivated. Not the fake stuff. Knocked into the bottom of Noodin’s beat-up aluminum canoe. A few small hulls, sharp and papery, ride the surface. Poured off, the water carries away green clay, powdery silt. Another water. Five waters altogether, until the last comes clean and she sets the pot aside. Onions now. She holds a kitchen match tight between her teeth so the juice won’t make her eyes water, then she crosshatches the onion from the root end, slicing the tiny cubes into a pile she keeps neatly triangled with the flat of the knife.
Broth will slowly cook the onions into the rice. Before she sets the top on the pot she adds a tiny pinch of white pepper but no more. The twins like simple foods, no spices. Odd they never got their dad’s complex food tastes. Basic foods. Potatoes and cheese for Cally. Rozin remembers the stubborn genius of Richard’s ways and sees him, now, before her suddenly. Dark brown hair and brown eyes with a curved smile and hollow cheeks. Shuts her eyes against the picture. He is a magnet, Richard Whiteheart Beads, with a prickly and unappeasable energy some people resent and others worship. Around him, she was like that herself, never doing things the easy way, always finding the method of most resistance. Even now, she prefers to cook food she’ll have to guide and watch over. A soft vanilla pudding from scratch. Stewed turkey. Creamed corn still from scratch, though she can’t use fresh cobs, only frozen this late in the year. She butters and creams them, pours them back into a plastic bowl. It is good, though, the care she takes with everything, for the smell of this food is going to bring them home.
She sets two places carefully. A paper napkin folded once. Knife, fork, and spoon all on one side. She fills the plates with the wild rice in a heap beside the turkey, the milky, buttery corn, a bit of fruit salad containing strawberries, and, beside them, a large bowl of vanilla pudding.
Come on now. Come home. Eat it, eat it all up, now, she thinks vehemently, heartsick. You’ve been out all night. The sooner you eat the sooner you can go to sleep.
The minute hand flicks down the face of the clock. 7:30. The phone rings. The caller ID says it is Frank so she does not answer it. At 7:36 she hears the dog scrabbling up the steps and then the tired dragging footsteps of her daughters. She’s out the door and holding them. They smell like salt, pepperoni, leaves, garbage. They smell like the only meaning in life. They slept in the park, they tell her in amazement, underneath the heaviest bushes. They had their jackets! There was a thick layer of newspaper down on the ground, so they curled up because they couldn’t walk farther and the dog curled with them to keep them warm you should have heard he growled a horrible growl if anybody came near the bush. They don’t know where they were. Where Sweetheart Calico was. And no, she didn’t kidnap them. No. They just went with her. For the fun of it. And then it wasn’t fun and they were lost and a man gave them pizza and the night covered them. Then to get back here they followed the dog. And what’s that smell? It smells good. Is there some food? They sit at the table shoveling in the food with concentration. As Rozin watches them, her being fills. She gets up and walks to the refrigerator. She takes out a pound of hamburger, which is all the meat she has, unwraps the meat, and puts in on a plate on the floor. The dog comes over, inhales the meat. Laps fresh water from the bowl she sets beside it. Rozin slowly lifts the phone.
“Did you find them?” asks Noodin.
“Yes,” she says.
Rozin knows that they have been smoking their little pipes and praying all night long. They learned the words to their prayers from their grandmother Peace and their grandfather Waabizi, the Swan, during the years those two raised them. The words call the spirits by name from each direction, from the sky, from the earth, from the night, from the day, from the sun, from the moon, from the winds, the flocks of birds and the solitary birds, from the clans, from the animals that give themselves as food or are sent to delight us or to help us, like the dog, from the rivers, from the lakes, from the rain, from the water in the mother’s body and the water in the snow, from the stars and the mysterious place the stars came from, and the fire, the original fire.
Chapter 14
Almost Soup
NOW, MY BROTHERS and sisters, having retraced my urine with stunning accuracy, snarled at bums all night, snarfed a bowl of hamburger, and having guarded and saved my young humans, I will resume the story of my life. I begin shortly after I received my name. As you know, I started my life in the vicinity of Roys and Shawanos. There I lived among my relatives, who all descended in some manner from the dog named Sorrow, who was nursed by Blue Prairie Woman and bequeathed to us our eternal protective connection, the devotion of Sorrow’s descendants to hers. I was brought down to this place by the theft of Sweetheart Calico. We dogs sensed that danger and chaos in her form could threaten the twins.
I like Gakaabikaang. I’ve made it my home. Here on the ground where I now sprawl and scratch, I intend to live out my years of strength, fertility, and purpose. As you see, I have survived into my tranquil middle age. But not by chance. Not by luck. I have the dog skills of the ages in my blood.
Survival Rules for Animoshag
It is jokingly said by Anishinaabeg that those Indians who live on the plains eat dogs while they, the woods Indians, eat rabbits. However, it is my dog experience that this is not entirely true. I tell you now, relatives and friends, it is best to beware. Even in Ojibwe country, we are not out of danger.
There are the slick and deadly wheels of reservation cars. Poisons, occasionally, set out for our weaker cousins the mice and rats. Not to speak of the coyotes, the paw-snapping jaws of clever Ojibwe trapper steel. And we may happen into the snares set as well for our enemies. Lynx. Marten. Feral cats. Bears, whom we worship. I learned early. Eat anything you can at any time. Fast. Bolt it down. Stay cute, but stay elusive. Don’t let them think twice when they’ve got the hatchet out. I see cold steel, I’m gone. Believe it. And there are all sorts of illnesses we dread. Avoid the bite of the fox. It is madness. Avoid all bats. Avoid all black-and-white-striped moving objects. And slow things with spiny quills. Avoid all humans when they get into a feasting mood. Get near the tables fast, though, once the food is cooked. Stay close to their feet. Stay ready.
But don’t steal from their plates.
Avoid medicine men. Snakes. Boys with BB guns. Anything ropelike or easily used to hang or tie. Avoid outhouse holes. Cats that live indoors. Do not sleep under cars. Or with horses. Do not eat anything attached to a skinny, burning string. Do not eat lard from the table. Do not go into the house at all unless no one is watching. Do not, unless you are absolutely certain you can blame it on a cat, eat any of their chickens. Do not eat pies. Do not eat decks of cards, plastic jugs, dry beans, dish sponges. If you must eat a shoe, eat both of the pair, every scrap, untraceable. Always, when in doubt, the rule is you are better off underneath the house. Don’t chase cars driven by young teenage boys. Don’t chase cars driven by old ladies. Don’t bark or growl at men cradling rifles. Don’t get wet in winter, and don’t let yourself dry out when the hot winds of August blow. We’re not equipped to sweat. Keep yo
ur mouth open. Visit the lake. Pee often. Take messages from tree stumps and the corners of buildings. Don’t forget to leave in return a polite and respectful hello. You never know when it will come in handy, your contact, your friend. You never know whom you will need to rely upon.
Which is how I come to my next story of survival.
Avoiding Sacrifice
Within the deep lakes of the Ojibwe there is supposed to live a kind of man-monster-cat thing that tips boats over in the cold of spring and plucks down into his arms the sexiest women. Keeping this cranky old thing happy is the job of local Indian humans and they’re always throwing their tobacco in the water, talking to the waves. But when the monster takes a person in whatever way—usually by drowning—there is some deeper, older, hungrier urge that must be satisfied by a stronger item than tobacco. You guessed it. Lay low, animoshag. I tell you, when a man goes out drunk in his motorboat, hide. Say he’s just good-timing, lapping beer, driving his boat in circles, and he hits his own wake coming at him. Pops out of the boat. Goes down.
Humans call that fate. We dogs call that stupidity. Whatever you name it, there’s always a good chance they’ll come looking for a dog. A white dog. One to tie with red ribbons. Brush nice. Truss in a rope. Feed a steak or two. Pray over. Pet soft. Not worth it. Stone around the neck. Then, splash. Dog offering!
My friends and relatives, we have walked down the prayer road clearing the way for humans since before time started. We have gone ahead of them to present their good points to the gatekeeper at that soft pasture where they eat all day and gamble the night away. Don’t forget, though, in heaven we still just get the bones they toss. We have kept our humans company in darkest hours. Saved them from starvation—you know how. We have talked to their gods on their behalf and thrown ourselves in front of their wheels to save them from idiotic journeys, to the bootlegger’s, say. We’re glad to do these things. As an old race, we know our purpose. Original Dog walked alongside Nanabozhoo, their tricky creator. The dog is bound to the human. Raised alongside the human. With the human. Still, half the time we know better than the human.