Love Medicine (4 page)

spoon, I I I Lynette was weary, eyes watery and red. Her tan hair, caught in a stiff club, looked as though it had been used to drag her here.

“You don’t got any children, do you Albertine,” she said, holding the spoon away, licking it herself, making a disgusted face.

“So you wouldn’t know how they just can’t leave anything alone!”

“She’s not married yet,” said Zelda, dangling a bright plastic bundle of keys down to the baby. “She thinks she’ll wait for her baby until after she’s married. Oochy koo,” she crooned when King junior focused and, in an effort of intense delight, pulled the keys down to himself.

Lynette bolted up, shook the keys roughly from his grasp, and snatched him into the next room. He gave a short outraged wail, ANN A then fell silent, and after a while Lynette emerged, pulling down her blouse. The cloth was a dark violet bruised color.

“Thought you wanted to see the gravestone,” Aurelia quickly remembered, addressing Zelda. “You better get going before it’s dark out. Tell King you want him to take you up there.”

“I suppose,” said Mama, turning to me,

“Aurelia didn’t see those two cases of stinking beer in their backseat. I’m not driving anywhere with a drunk.”

“He’s not a drunk!” Lynette wailed in sudden passion. “But I’d drink a few beers too if I had to be in this family.”

Then she whirled and ran outside.

King was slumped morosely in the front seat of the car, a beer clenched between his thighs. He drummed his knuckles to the Oak Ridge Boys.

“I don’t even let her drive it,” he said when I asked. He nodded toward Lynette, who was strolling down the driveway ditch, adding to a straggly bunch of prairie roses. I saw her bend over, tearing at a tough branch.

“She’s going to hurt her hands.”

“On, she don’t know nothing,” said King. “She never been to school.

I seen a little of the world when I was in the service. You get my picture?”

He’d sent a photo of himself in the uniform. I’d been surprised when I saw the picture because I’d realized then that my rough w boy cousin had developed hard cheekbones and a movie-star gaze. Now, brooding under the bill of his blue hat, he turned that moody stare through the windshield and shook his head at his wife. “She don’t fit in, he said.

“She’s fine,” I surprised myself by saying. “Just give her a chance.

“Chance. ” King tipped his beer up. “Chance. She took her chance when she married me. She knew which one I took after.”

Then as if on cue, the one whom King did not take after drove into the yard with a squealing flourish, laying hard on his horn.

Uncle Gordie Kashpaw was considered good-looking, although not in the same way as his son King. Gordle had a dark, round, eager face, creased and puckered from being stitched up after an accident. There was always a compelling pleasantness about him. In some curious way all the stitches and folds had contributed to, rather than detracted from, his looks. His face was like something valuable that was broken and put carefully back together. And all the more lovable for the care taken.

In the throes of drunken inspiration now, he drove twice around the yard before his old Chevy chugged to a halt. Uncle Eli got out.

“Well it’s still standing up,” Eli said to the house. “And so am I.

But you,” he addressed Gordie, “ain’t.”

It was true, Gordie’s feet were giving him trouble. They caught on things as he groped on the hood and pulled himself out. The rubber foot mat, the fenders, then the little ruts and stones as he clambered toward the front steps.

“Zelda’s in there,” King shouted a warning, “and Grandma too! ” Gordie sat down on the steps to collect his wits before tangling with them.

Inside, Uncle Eli sat down next to his twin. They didn’t look much alike anymore, for Eli had Wizened and toughened while Grandpa was larger, softer, even paler than his brother. They happened to be dressed the same though, in work pants and jackets, except that Grandpa’s outfit was navy blue and Eli’s was olive green. Eli wore a stained, crumpled cap that seemed so much a part of his head not even Zelda thought of asking him to remove it. He nodded at Grandpa and grinned at the food; he had a huge toothless smile that took up his entire face.

“Here’s my Uncle Eli,” Aurelia said, putting down the plate of JW food for him. “Here’s my favorite uncle. See, Daddy?

Uncle Eli’s here. Your brother.”

“Oh Eli,” said Grandpa, extending his hand. Grandpa grinned and nodded at his brother, but said nothing more until Eli started to eat.

“I don’t eat very much anymore. I’m getting so old,” Eli was telling us.

“You’re eating a lot,” Grandpa pointed out. “Is there going to be anything left?”

“You ate already,” said Grandma. “Now sit still and visit with your brother.” She fussed a little over Eli. “Don’t mind him. Eat enough.

You’re getting thin.”

“It’s too late,” said Grandpa. “He’s eating everything.”

He closely watched each bite his brother took. Eli wasn’t bothered in the least. Indeed, he openly enjoyed his food for Grandpa.

“Oh, for heaven sake Zelda sighed. “Are we ever getting out of here?

Aurelia. Why don’t you take separate cars and drive us in?

It’s too late to see that gravestone now anyway, but I’m darned if I’m going to be here once they start on those cases in the back of June’s car.”

“Put the laundry out,” said Grandma; “I’m ready enough. And you, Albertine”-she nodded at me as they walked out the door-“they can eat all they want. just as long as they save the pies. Them pies are made special for tomorrow.”

“Sure you don’t want to come along with us now?” asked Mama.

“She’s young,” said Aurelia. “Besides, she’s got to keep those drunken men from eating on those pies.”

She bent close to me. Her breath was sweet with cake frosting, stale with cigarettes. JAIN

“I’ll be back later on,” she whispered. “I got to go see a friend.”

Then she winked at me exactly the way June had winked about-OEM her secret friends. One eye shut, the lips pushed into a small selfdeprecating question mark.

Grandpa eased himself into the backseat and sat as instructed, arms spread to either side, holding down the plies of folded laundry

“They can eat!” Grandma yelled once more. “But save them pies! ” She bucked forward when Aurelia’s car lurched over the hole in the drive, and then they shot over the hill.

“Say Albertine, did you know your Uncle Eli is the last man on the reservation that could snare himself a deer?”

Gordie unlatched a beer, pushed it across the kitchen table to me.

We were still at that table, only now the plates, dish pans of salad, and pies were cleared away for ashtrays, beer, packs of cigarettes.

Although Aurelia kept the house now, it was like communal property for the Kashpaws. There was always someone camped out or sleeping on her fold-up cots.

One more of us had arrived by this time. That was Lipsha Morrissey, who had been taken in by Grandma and always lived with us. Lipsha sat down, with a beer in his hand like everyone, and looked at the floor.

He was in ore a listener than a talker, a shy one with a wide, sweet, intelligent face. He had long eyelashes.

“Girl-eyes,” King used to tease him. King had beat up Lipsha so many times when we were young that Grandma wouldn’t let them play on the same side of the yard. They still avoided each other. Even now, in the small kitchen, they never met each other’s eyes or said hello.

I had to wonder, as I always did, how much they knew.

One secret I had learned from sitting quietly around the aunts, from gathering shreds of talk before they remembered me, was Lipsha’s secret, or half of It at least. I knew who his mother was.

And because I knew his mother I knew the reason he and King never got along. They were half brothers. Lipsha was June’s boy, born in one of those years she left Gordic. Once you knew about her, and looked at him, it was easy to tell. He had her flat pretty features and slim grace, only on him these things had never even begun to harden.

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.