Right now he looked anxious and bit his lips. The men were still talking about the animals they had killed.
“I had to save on my shells,” said Eli thoughtfully; “they was dear.
“Only real old-time Indians know deer good enough to snare,” Gordie said to us. “Your Uncle Eli’s a real old-timer.”
“You remember the first thing you ever got?” Eli asked King.
King looked down at his beer, then gave me a proud, sly, sideways glance. “A gook, ” he said. “I was in the Marines.”
Lipsha kicked the leg of my chair. King made much of having been in combat but was always vague on exactly where and when he had seen action,
“Skunk,” Gordie raised his voice. “King got himself a skunk when he was ten.”
“Did you ever eat a skunk?” Eli asked me.
“It’s like a piece of cold chicken,” I ventured. Eli and Gordic agreed with solemn grins.
“How do you skin your skunk?” Eli asked King.
King tipped his hat down, shading his eyes from the fluorescent kitchen ring. A blue-and-white patch had been stitched on the front of his hat.
“World’s Greatest Fisherman,” it said. King put his hands up in winning ignorance.
“How do you skin your skunk?” he asked Eli.
“You got to take the glands off first,” Eli explained carefully, ML — also IN pointing at different parts of his body. “Here, here, here. Then you skin it just like anything else. You have to boll it in three waters.
“Then you honestly eat it?” said Lynette. She had come into the room with a fresh beer and was now biting contentedly on a frayed end string of hair fallen from her ponytail.
Ell sat up straight and tilted his little green hat back.
“You picky too? Like Zelda! One time she came over to visit me with her first husband, that Swede Johnson. It was around dinnertime. I had a skunk dressed out, and so I fed it to them.
Ooooooh when she found out what she ate she was mad at me, boy.
“Skunk!” she says. “How disgusting! You old guys will eat anything!”
Lipsha laughed.
“I’d eat it,” Lynette declared to him, flipping her hair back with a chopping motion of her hand. “I’d eat it Just like that.”
“You’d eat shit,” said King.
I stared at his clean profile. He was staring across the table at Lipsha, who suddenly got up from his chair and walked out the door.
The screen door slammed. King’s lip curled down in some imitation of soap-opera bravado, but his chin trembled. I saw him clench his jaw and then felt a kind of wet blanket sadness coming down over us all. I wanted to follow Lipsha. I knew where he had gone. But I didn’t leave.
Lynette shrugged brightly and brushed away King’s remark. But it stayed at the table, as if it had opened a door on something-some sad, ugly scene we could not help but enter. I took a long drink and leaned toward Uncle Eli,
“A fox sleeps hard, eh?” said Eli after a few moments.
King leaned forward and pulled his hat still lower so it seemed to rest on his nose.
“I’ve shot a fox sleeping before,” he said. “You know that little black hole underneath a fox’s tall? I shot right through there. I was using a bow and my arrow went right through that fox. It got stiff.
It went straight through the air. Flattened out like a flash and was gone down its hole. I never did get it out.”
“Never shot a bow either,” said Gordie.
“Hah, you’re right. I never shot a bow either,” admitted King with a strange, snarling little laugh. “But I heard of this guy once who put his arrow through a fox then left it thrash around in the bush until he thought it was dead. He went in there after it. You know what he found? That fox had chewed the arrow off either side of its body and it was gone.”
“They don’t got that name for nothing,” Ell said.
“Fox,” said Gordie, peering closely at the keyhole in his beer.
“Can you gimme a cigarette, Ell?” King asked.
“When you ask for a cigarette around here,” said Gordie, “you d on’t say can I have a cigarette. You say ciga swa?”
“Them Michifs ask like that,” Eli said. “You got to ask a real old Cree like me for the right words.”
“Tell ‘em Uncle Eli,” Lynette said with a quick burst of drunken enthusiasm. “They’ve got to learn their own heritage!
When you go it will all be gone!”
“What you saying there, woman. Hey!” King shouted, filling the kitchen with the jagged tear of his voice. “When you talk to my relatives have a little respect. ” He put his arms up and shoved at her breasts.
“You bet your life, Uncle Eli,” he said more quietly, leaning back on the table. “You’re the greatest hunter. But I’m the World’s Greatest Fisherman.”
“No you ain’t,” Eli said. His voice was effortless and happy- “I caught a fourteen-inch trout.”
King looked at him carefully, focusing with difficulty. “You’re the greatest then,” he admitted. “Here.”
He reached over and plucked away Eli’s greasy olive-drab hat.
Eli’s head was brown, shiny through the white crew-cut stubble.
want King took off his blue hat and pushed it down on Eli’s head.
The hat slipped over Eli’s eyes.
“It’s too big for him!” Lynette screamed in a tiny outraged voice.
King adjusted the hat’s plastic tab.
“I gave you that hat, King! That’s your best hat!” Her voice rose sharply in its trill. “You don’t give that hat away!”
Ell sat calmly underneath the hat. It fit him perfectly. He seemed oblivious to King’s sacrifice and just sat, his old cap perched on his knee, turning the can around and around in his hand without drinking.
King swayed to his feet, clutched the stuffed plastic backrest of the chair. His voice was ripped and swollen. “Uncle Ell.” He bent over the old man. “Uncle Ell, you’re my uncle.”
“Damn right,” Eli agreed.
“I always thought so much of you, my uncle!” cried King in a loud, unhappy wall.
“Damn right,” said Eli. He turned to Gordie. “He’s drunk on his behind. I got to agree with him.”
“I think the fuckin’ world of you, Uncle!”
“Damn right. I’m an old man,” Eli said in a flat, soft voice.
King suddenly put his hands up around his ears and stumbled out the door.
“Fresh air be good for him,” said Gordie, relieved. “Say there, Albertine. You ever hear this one joke about the Indian, the Frenchman, and the Norwegian in the French Revolution?”
“Issat a Norwegian joke?” Lynette asked. “Hey. I’m full blooded Norwegian. I don’t know nothing about my family, but I know I’m full-blooded Norwegian.”
“No, it’s not about the Norwegians really,” Gordie went on.
“So anyway …”
Nevertheless she followed King out the door.
At JO” “There were these three. An Indian. A Frenchman. A Norwegian.
They were all in the French Revolution. And they were all set for the guillotine, right? But when they put the Indian in there the blade ‘just came halfway down and got stuck.”
“Fuckin’ bitch! Gimme the keys!” King screamed ‘just outside the door.
Gordie paused a moment. There was silence. He continued the joke.
“So they said it was the judgment of God. You can go, they said to the Indian. So the Indian got up and went. Then it was the Frenchman’s turn. They put his neck in the vise and were all set to execute him!
But it happened the same. The blade stuck.”
“Fuckin’bitch! Fuckin’bitch!” King shrieked again.
The car door slammed. Gordie’s eyes darted to the door, back to me with questions.