They glowed, mushroom pale in the dark. The cushioned jogging soles were so radiant and spongy he seemed to float softly toward us.
The famous Chippewa who had songs wrote for him, whose face was on protest buttons, whose fate was argued over in courts of law, who sent press releases to the world, sat down at the dirtiest kitchen table in Minnesota with his son and his cellmate, and picked up a deck of cards.
A marked deck.
For the marked men, which was all of us.
I was marked for pursuit by authority as was my father, but King was marked in another entire way. As Gerry explained in a quiet voice that had no business to issue from a bulk that could scarcely squeeze between the table and the wall, King was a squealer, an informer. He’d got Gerry’s confidence and then betrayed it.
“I’m trusting,” Gerry said to me, shaking his head, blinking his mild eyes, “especially of all my Indian relations. I confided to him all my plans to escape once, never knowing he was an apple. ” That is: red on the outside, white on the inside.
“Your friend here, this King Kashpaw, was the King of Stoolies. ” I looked at King. Here was a man you could call sick with one quick glance. His face was gray as lead, his eyes was darting side to side, his lips looked numb. He kept on licking them with dry clucking sounds.
Gerry had maneuvered things so King sat between us, hedged in, at the back of the wall behind the little pile of Lucky Charms.
“Why don’t you eat them,” he said to King. “You’ll need it.
“Luck of the Irish. See where it got them,” I said.
Gerry looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m Lipsha Morrissey.”
His slant black brows stayed up. His long hair was pulled back in a tail, and his thin black mustache hung down his lip, so that his teeth flashed out only when he grinned very broad. His grin flashed now, wolf white and sharp, in his big placid face. Until he grinned like that he looked asleep. Suddenly he tossed his hair back and bust out laughing.
He laughed a good long time. It was a loud joyful comforting sound to Lipsha Morrissey, but to King and Lynette it must have been harrowing.
The way he laughed, and then the slow method his eyes took me in by notches, when he was back to himself again, gave me reason to believe that he knew whose son he looked at.
I was certain, at any rate, that he was my dad. His nose was even bigger than mine, but squashed in the same places. It was his hands that had really tipped me off.
All the time he’d been talking, grinning, even laughing, they had the cards playing in and out of their fingers. They had a life all unto themselves that was spent in knowledge of the cards, and I knew just what gave them that knowledge. He had a form of the touch. Behind the bars, though, he hadn’t much chance to use it on humans. So his hands had poured their talents into understanding the decks. He cast his eyes down every once in a while, briefly, to see the face that his hands were memorizing. His fingers moved around the paper edges, found the nail nicks. His wolf smile glinted. There was a system to the crimping that he recognized. Those crimps were like a signature-his mother’s.
I’d only learned Lulu’s system, not restyled it.
“She taught me,” I said.
He only nodded, and his teeth showed again.
He looked at King, who was staring across the room. King’s eyes were locked with Lynette’s, and hers were paralyzed. She was squeezing Howard on the points of her bosom. The boy was saying over and over with monotonous grit,
“Let me down. Let me down. Let me down. ” “Let him down,” said Gerry.
Instantly she dropped her arms. The boy landed in a pile of Bop hair and poking limbs. He got up, brushed his T-shirt off, and went back to sit by the television. Lynette moved b-ckwa,d India V. — VE 1W eyes were wild and wary as a rat’s. It was the first time I’d ever seen her with no words for what was going on.
“I’m interrupting here,” said Gerry. “Please excuse my butting in without knocking.” He knocked on the table now.
“Deal me in?”
“We were playing five-card stud.”
“Stud. That’s not quite appropriate for this one here,” he said smoothly, indicating King. “Five-card punk’s more like it.” King smiled a sick, tight grin and took up his hand of cards.
“Tell your wife to take her knuckles off that dirty fry pan which she means to sling at my head,” Gerry calmly continued.
Lynette took her hand out of the sink with a little squeak and rushed past us. We heard her pick up the phone in the next room then slam it down again. Presumably the lines was no longer properly connected.
“We must decide,” said Gerry seriously, taking a ragged toothpick from his breast pocket and sticking it in his mouth, “what we are playing for.”
King felt much better, or seemed to, when he glanced at his cards.
“I got money,” He said. “I got money in my account.”
“We’re not playing for your rubber check,” Gerry said. “You probably used your payoff up by now. We won’t play for money.
But we got to play for something, otherwise there’s no game.
King sat there bracing up his shoulders. He was coming back to his own.
“Aw c’mon,” he said. “Who told you I turned evidence. I never did.”
“I heard the tapes,” said Gerry, with a pursed smile full of snake’s milk. “Tapes of things I told nobody but you, my friend.
Yes, we got to play for something. We got to. have high stakes, otherwise there is no game.”
“What did you come here for?” blurted King. He tried to laugh If — Mod but he had to put his cards down to hide his shaking hands.
“Whaddyou want?”
“I want to play,” said Gerry very clearly and slowly, as if to a person who spoke a different language. “I came to play.”
I had been sitting there, “just listening.
“Let’s play for the car,” I said to King. “Let’s play for the Firebird you bought with June’s insurance.”
At the mention of my mom, Gerry’s face got stiff around the edges.
“June’s insurance,” he said wonderingly. I could see how his mind leapt back, making connections, jumping at the intersection points of our lives: his romance with June. The baby given to Grandma Kashpaw.
June’s son by Gordie. King. Her running off. Me growing up. And then at last June walking toward home in the Easter snow that, I saw now, had resumed failing softly in this room.
I could tell Gerry had not come here with precise notions on revenge, even though the testimony King gave had cost him years. Gerry Nanapush was curious and plagued by memory.
He’d come here out of these. Only the urge to see the rat’s life with his own eyes could have caused him to scale copper pipes four stories up and squeeze through that small kitchen window.
Only that curiosity and the urge to see someone again, or the hint of someone, the resemblance of June, could have brought him.
Now, however, dream and curiosity had found their reason.
There was the car, June’s car, which was a route of clean escape. If Gerry won the car, I knew I’d stay there and keep King strict company until my father managed to cross the border into Canada.
“Let’s play for the car,” Gerry agreed. “June’s car.”
But King didn’t want to play for the car.
“It’s mine,” he said.
— a-c “No, it’s really June’s,” explained Gerry. “Any one of us could be keeping it for June. ” “You don’t get it,” said King. There was a struggle going on inside him, the sense of what her car meant to him rising through a deep unwilling fog. But in the end he couldn’t voice what he felt.