LaRose (21 page)

LaRose stroked the ends of her hair on the pillow beside him.

I am a broken animal, she whispered.

IT WAS GOING
to snow, first snow of the season, Romeo could smell it. He could always smell that gritty freshness before it happened, before the weatherpeople turned the snow to drama on his television. He plunged outside, across the lumps of torn earth, and took the road to town. Sure enough, as he rollingly walked, flakes began
and he had the impression, maybe it was the drug he’d taken, that he was all of a sudden stuck. He was in a globe, frozen on a tiny treadmill in a little scene of a man walking to the Dead Custer, forever, through falling bits of white paper or maybe some snowlike chemical that would sift down over and over as a child turned his world upside down in its hands. He liked this idea so well that he had to remind himself it wasn’t true. The motionless motion was so transfixing, and his thoughts—his thoughts were centered.

Landreaux happened to drive through this tableau, oblivious as always, but the snow swirled in his wake and got Romeo’s thoughts back on his old favorite, revenge. Landreaux believed he was outside of Romeo’s reach and interest. But no, he wasn’t. Landreaux was so full of himself, so high on himself that even now he did not remember those old days of theirs. Far back when they were young boys hardly older than LaRose. That’s how far back and deep it went, invisible most times like a splinter to the bone. Then surfacing or piercing Romeo from the inside like those terrible fake pills the old vultures had tricked down him.

Bits of snow melted in Romeo’s filmy hair. It was just a fluke, maybe, but he’d got himself put on to a substitute maintenance list at the hospital. Be still my heart! So many prescription bottles, so little time. Because his habits had already become invisible to the ambulance crew, he overheard a sentence that he’d copied out on scratch paper.
Never touched the carotid.
He’d palmed a box of colored tacks and fixed the paper to the wall. Working out connections. It would be the first of many clues to what had really happened on the day Landreaux killed Dusty.

Lennie Briscoe, the weary hound, and Romeo, his weasel sidekick, would assemble the truth.

In the clarity of thinking that he enjoyed after Landreaux’s car passed, Romeo thought about how people with information spoke quietly, in code. He was learning to decipher what they said. Sometimes he had to make an educated guess. But he knew they were possessed of crucial knowledge.

To get the truth, I must become truth. Or at least appear truth-worthy, he decided.

Therefore, Romeo cleaned himself up. He applied for a real full-time at the hospital. Slim chance. And the paperwork always made him sweat. But there, at the hospital, he thought maybe he could be important again. The other people on maintenance were respected community members. Some of them even drove the ambulance, and all of them were trusted. Sterling Chance really was, for instance, sterling. As head of maintenance, he listened to Romeo answer interview questions with a calm and perceptive gaze.

Self-contained, thought Romeo. He admired Sterling Chance. For the first time since, well, since Mrs. Peace was his teacher, Romeo truly wanted something other than reliable pathways to oblivion. He wanted this job. Not just a measly part-time intermittent job, but a full-time job. True, his motives were sketchy. Drugs and vengeance. But why quibble with a budding work ethic? There was no question that this job would make his old drug sources look pathetic. Never again would he have to suffer the indignation of crisscrossing side effects. And information? If he did get information on this job, it would be information he would keep until he really needed it—sad information. But information so rare and shocking that maybe, perhaps, you could use it to blackmail a person for life. Which was a satisfying thought when you’d previously failed to kill that person.

FIGHTING OFF, OUTWITTING,
burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog traveled. They wore out their snowshoes. The girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and stuffed them inside with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out.

The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell
back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, only lifting his head, eyes shut, to sip water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark.

He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him.

All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl winding her hand in a strip of blanket to grip the handle of the ax, then heating its edge red hot. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. Every so often, silence, then the mad cacophony again. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog, or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Very much surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum.

It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life.

He must have heard wrong. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles
joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition until, at last, the concatenations ebbed to a mere throb of color. The drum corrected some interior rhythm; a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept.

Again, that night, he heard the battle outside. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, once she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woolen turban. Toward night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned.

You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing.

Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body, grasping her hand, he was not afraid to lift off the ground. They traveled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast no cold could reach them. Below, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body he was not to leave again until he had completed half a century of hard, bone-break, work.

Two days later, they entered from deep wilderness a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the bends of a river. Along a street of beaten snow several wooden houses were neatly rooted in a dreamlike row. They were so like the houses Wolfred had left behind out east, that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He thought he was in home country, and walked up to the door of the largest house. His knock was answered, but not until he explained himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a whiteman.

She and her family, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm
kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him.

When you grow up, he said.

She smiled and nodded.

He asked her name.

She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower.

The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school that had recently been established for Indians only. It was located out in territory that had become the state of Michigan, and the girl could travel there, too, if she wanted to become educated. Only, as she had no family, she would become indentured to the place. Although she did not understand what that meant, she agreed to it.

At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her. But it never did. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But it never did. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now—Indian. As in,
Do not speak Indian
, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, Inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening.

The other children smelled like old people, but she got used to it. Soon she did too. Her wool dress and corset pinched, and the woolen underwear itched like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she must eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else.

She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things—forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world.

She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, placed her soul back into her body, and told her that she would live.