She cried the whole time, but she clung to him. And he leaned into her and felt her tongue and when she stiffened against him she held fast to him as if he were her life and her all. When it was over he pulled back from her and the look in her eyes frightened him. She looked whipped, wounded, like a dog that’s been fed and beaten at the same time. Was that a bruise under her left eye? Was that blood on her lip? He didn’t know what to say — he’d run out of words. In silence he zipped up, buttoned his jacket; in silence he backed away from her and felt for the door.
Slowly, tentatively, as if he were facing down a wild beast that might spring at him if he glanced away for even an instant, he turned the knob behind him. It was then that she let herself fall to the floor, lifeless as a doll. She lay there, motionless, her head cradled in her arms, the jeans down around her ankles. He couldn’t hear her sobs now, but the balled white length of her was trembling with them, that much he could see.
It was his last picture of her.
Coming down the hill was nothing. He seemed to skate on his feet and each time he lost his balance a stiff young sapling sprang up for him to latch hold of. He squeezed his mind as he might have squeezed a blister, and purged himself of the image of her. By the time he reached the bridge he was in Barrow, with its unfathomable shadows, its hard edges, its geometry of ice. He saw his father there, and his father was healthy and vigorous, the man who’d taken him to the trestle to plumb the murky river for crabs, the man who’d stood up to Sasha Freeman and Morton Blum and all the rest. Walter, his father said, it’s been a long time, and he held out his arms.
Costumes
She was a good-looking woman, a beauty, what with her expensive teeth, her full proud bosom, the flat abdomen that had grown round only once to contain the swell of life. He liked her eyes too, eyes that were like the marbles he’d won as a boy, the palest cloud of violet in a prism of glass, and he liked the way she looked at him when he was telling her things. He told her about Manitou’s big woman or Mishemokwa the bear-spirit or about his father and Horace Tantaquidgeon, and she leaned forward, her lips parted, brow furrowed, eyes so intent she might have been listening to the oracle, to the father of nations, to Manitou himself. But what he liked best of all about her was that she was a white woman, the wife of the son of his ancient enemy — that was too perfect.
He’d first met her up there, in Jamestown. What was it — four, five years ago? He was tired of the shack, tired of carrying the burden of his hopeless race, tired of solitude, and he’d gone north to pick apples and shoot duck for a couple of weeks — till Thanksgiving, maybe. Till the lakes froze and the ducks were gone, anyway. It was November, the Tuesday before Turkey Day, and he was sitting out on One Bird’s porch with a rag, a can of 3-In-One oil and One Bird’s hoary single-shot Remington. He’d used it the day before to bring down a pair of canvasbacks and a pintail, and he’d cleaned and oiled it after supper. He wasn’t really cleaning it now — he was just stroking the barrel with a rag soaked in oil, just to have something to do with his hands. The day was clear, breezy, with a scent of the tundra on the wind.
The station wagon — it was a Chevy, brand-new, white, with that fake wood business along the side — surprised him. It came around the corner by Dick Fourtrier’s place, muscling its way over the washboard dirt and the potholes, and then slowed in front of One Bird’s, jerking to a halt finally just down the road. On came the back-up lights, and the wagon lumbered back till it was even with him. He saw a head bob in the window, saw the wind tug at the exhaust. The morning locked itself up in silence. Then the driver’s door fell open and there she was, Joanna, the charity lady, coming around the side of the car in her leather pumps, her cashmere sweater and pleated skirt, coming up the flagstone path with its hackles of stiff yellow weed, coming to the house that needed paint, coming to him.
“Hello,” she said when she was halfway up the walk, and her smile gave back the glory of all those years of six-month checkups and all those miles of dental floss well-plied.
He was stoic, he was tough, he was an ex-con, a survivor, a man who lived off the land, a communist. His own teeth were rotten as a hyena’s and he was wearing work pants, a flannel shirt and a vest that had once been sky blue in color but was now smeared with grease, blood, steak sauce, the leavings of rabbit, pheasant, fish. He watched her with cold green eyes and he said nothing.
She stopped at the foot of the porch, her smile just the smallest bit strained, and she clasped her slim hands together and began twisting a ring round her finger — a diamond, of the type that proclaimed her the property of another man. “Hi,” she said, reiterating the greeting, as if he might not have heard her the first time, “can you tell me where I might find the social hall?”
The social hall. He wanted to sneer at her, shock her, hurt her, wanted to tell her she could look for it up her ass for all he cared, but he didn’t. There was something about her — he couldn’t say what — that set her apart from the others, those blue-haired old loons with their ratty blankets and their bibles and the rest of their do-goody claptrap, and it frightened him. Just a bit. Or maybe it wasn’t fright exactly — it was more of a frisson, a jolt. He just couldn’t picture her waving a placard (Save the Poor Ignorant Downtrodden Native American!) with the rest of them or slipping into a cheery barbecue apron and serving up flapjacks and sausage links at one of those horrific charity breakfasts.
She was a good-looking woman, of course — young, too — but that wasn’t it. There was something else here, something deeper, something that was coming to him like a gift, like a birthday cake with all the candles aglow. He didn’t know what. Not yet. It was enough to know it was there.
Since he’d said nothing, merely dug into her with those insolent eyes and dropped the barrel of the gun between his legs, rubbing it up and down as suggestively as he could, she went on, her voice a little jumpy, talking too fast now: “It’s my first time. Here, I mean. I’m from downstate, in Westchester, and Harriet Moore — she’s a friend of my cousin from Skaneateles — well, to make a long story short,” tossing her hair to indicate the wagon behind her, “I’ve got a load of stuff that we collected in the Peterskill area — cranberries, canned peaches and yellow beans, and — and gravy mix — for the, for you, I mean — no, I mean for your people and …” she trailed off in confusion, the green gaze too much for her.
He stopped rubbing. A wedge of geese called out from half a mile up. She glanced over her shoulder to where the car sat at the curb, still running, the door flung open wide, and then turned back to him: “So can you tell me where it is?”
For the first time, he spoke: “Where what is?”
“The social hall.”
He set the gun down on the newspaper spread out to protect the weathered boards of the porch, then rose from his chair to tower over her. And then he grinned, rotten teeth and all. “Sure,” he said, coming down off the steps to stand there and catch the scent of her, “sure I know where it is. I’ll take you there myself.”