Picture Perfect (33 page)

Neither Cyrus nor Dorothea took Cassie's hand. She waited a moment, then wiped it on her coat and let it twitch at her side.

Will stepped closer to her and leaned toward her ear. “I'm going to make up some story to leave you here alone with them,” he murmured. “Trust me; it's just a matter of them getting to know you.” He squeezed Cassie's shoulder and turned back to his grandparents. Dorothea had already moved off to the kitchen to begin rinsing plates. “I'm going over to Abel Soap's to see if he's still breathing,” Will said easily. “He owes me fifty bucks.”

He loped toward the door, where Wheezer was already waiting. “Remember,” he warned his grandparents. “English. You promised.”

The door sealed shut behind Will with an indrawn breath, and Cassie stared at it for several seconds. Over the running water, Cassie could hear Dorothea muttering in Lakota. Occasionally she'd glance over her shoulder, as if to see if Cassie had left yet. Obviously the old woman spoke English; she should at least be giving Cassie a fair chance. Straightening, Cassie turned to Cyrus. “Can you tell me what she's saying?” she asked.

Cyrus shrugged and walked toward the couch. “She wishes Will had taken you with him.”

For a few minutes Cassie stood in the center of the living room, wavering between having a good cry or just walking out that front door and continuing until she got back to Rapid City. Cyrus settled onto the middle cushion of the couch, which heaved under his light frame, and picked up the knitting. He looped the yarn around his fingers and clicked the needles faster and faster until they chattered like teeth. Dorothea finished washing the dishes and started to sweep the spotless kitchen floor.

In fact, neither of Will's grandparents showed the slightest inclination toward making Cassie more comfortable, or talking sociably to her, and neither seemed to think this behavior was unaccountably rude. Cassie vaguely remembered a colleague who had done his dissertation on what he referred to as tipi etiquette: how the Plains Indians of the nineteenth century had lived. She could recall something about women on one side and men on the other, about warriors eating before anyone else, about the impoliteness of walking between a person and the central fire. Cassie didn't know if these customs still held, but she felt there was a set of rules that she hadn't been told, rules she would have to divine herself.

She began by straightening up the magazines. Cyrus looked over his needles once, grunted, and kept on knitting. When Cassie had made two neat stacks, she stood up and walked into the kitchen area. She rummaged through the shelves until she found a stack of white dishcloths, and she wet one with soapy water and began to scrub down the front of the refrigerator.

Dorothea didn't look up at Cassie, didn't even acknowledge that Cassie was less than three feet away. “You know,” Cassie said, her voice too loud and bright for the tiny house, “I have a friend at UCLA who specializes in Native American anthropology.” She didn't add that the man was a cultural anthropologist, so she'd barely spoken to him in three years. Instead, she racked her brain trying to remember his course syllabus and her own graduate work.

“The truth is,” Cassie continued, “I don't know anything about Indians. I don't know what Will told you, but my specialty dates back before that.” She rinsed her dishcloth in the sink. “Except for weapons,” she said. “I'm pretty good with weapons. I did my dissertation on violence, on whether it was learned or innate—” Cassie stopped, thinking of the irony of that, given what her marriage had come to. When nobody responded, she kept speaking. “Let's see…I can remember a New Mexico group called the Clovis culture that invented a stone spearhead that could be lashed to an arrow, which obviously made it easier to kill mammoth…” Cassie's voice trailed off, thinking of this group of nomads forty thousand years ago slaughtering a huge, shuddering beast; and then Cyrus's own grandfather, who might have hunted the buffalo in much the same way just a hundred and fifty years earlier. She stopped herself from continuing, realizing she sounded as if she was giving a lecture. Over her head, Cyrus and Dorothea exchanged a look:
Is she always like this
?

“Well,” Cassie said more quietly. “You probably already know this.” She shook her head, calling herself a fool for coming on like a locomotive when she should have been creeping along quietly.

Dorothea came over to her and wrung the dripping dishcloth, draping it over the sink and gesturing with her hands so Cassie understood this was the way she liked it to be. Dorothea glanced around the gleaming kitchen, nodding, and then pulled on her parka. She crossed in front of Cassie, grasping Cassie's chin with strong fingers and turning her face up. In Lakota, she said something, a strange collection of clicks and syllables that Cassie thought softer than a lullaby.

After Dorothea walked out the door, Cyrus stood by the window, watching her go back to work for the afternoon shift. He knew what Cassie was about to ask. “She says you should remember something while you are with the People,” he translated. “What you consider these specimens of history are still our great-great-grandfathers.”

He did not turn from the window, but he held up his hand, beckoning Cassie. She stood and walked over to Cyrus, and he settled his arm around her shoulders in a gesture that was not an embrace but more of a prodding. His long, straight fingers rested on her collarbone. Cassie gazed at the vast landscape with Cyrus, knowing he did not notice the oceans of snow, the corpses of abandoned trucks, and the tattered tarpaulins blowing off a neighbor's hut. Instead he saw the place where his ancestors' footsteps lay beneath his own, the place that—because of this—he would call home.

 

W
ILL SAT UP FROM THE PILE OF BLANKETS HE WAS USING AS A BED
and stared at Cassie, asleep on the pull-out couch. When he lived with his grandparents it had been his bed, and he watched her body press into the hollows in the mattress he himself had made.

He was drenched with sweat; he had been dreaming of her. Crazy as it sounded, she had been a Kit Fox, a member of one of the ancient warrior societies. Every Sioux boy had grown up hearing of the Kit Foxes and the Strong Hearts, wishing that the People were still at war with the Chippewa so they too could count coup and prove their bravery. The Kit Foxes had been the most dramatic. They had worn red sashes they would peg to the ground, meaning they'd fight on that spot until they won, they were killed, or they were released by a friend. Will could remember how he'd played at this behind the school during recess; how once he'd filched his grandmother's shawl to use as a sash and had been grounded for a month.

In the dream, Cassie's belly was swollen with her child, and she wore the sash high, just below her breasts. From a distance Will saw her stake herself to the soft earth and begin to sing.

Out of nowhere, Alex Rivers appeared, circling around her, coming closer and closer. He cuffed Cassie across the side of the head, and from where he stood Will shouted out to warn her, but she did not move. She stood her ground, even when the blows brought tears to her eyes.

Will dreamed that he screamed at the top of his lungs and started moving, racing toward the spot where Cassie was. Without losing speed, he reached down and pulled up her stake, wrapping his arm around her hips and forcing her to run just as fast as he was.

He woke up panting, angry and somewhat amazed that Cassie lay three feet away from him, curling and uncurling her fingers in her sleep. He moved quietly, in rhythm with the sounds of his grandfather's breathing coming from behind the bedroom curtain, and sat on the edge of the mattress.

Cassie was awake before his entire weight had eased down. Will put a finger to her lips, and then pointed in the direction of the curtain. “I'm leaving tomorrow,” he whispered.

Cassie struggled to a sitting position, but Will held his hand on her shoulder, pressing her back. “Why?”

“Because I have a job in L.A. Because I hate it here.” Will smirked. “Take your pick.”

She had to know it was going to come to this; he'd as much as said it straight out. But to his horror, Cassie gulped back a sob. “You can't leave me here alone,” she whispered, knowing full well that he could and he would.

When she turned away from him, he stroked his hand over her brow, feeling guilty. Cassie was small and plain, the girl next door; he'd seen a hundred women prettier than she was. He wondered what it was about this woman that could rob his mind of set intentions, that could trap a movie star into marriage.

Will stared at the back of Cassie's head, forcing himself to remember the way he'd kept his thumb over his grade school report cards when he carried them home, because the students were listed not only by surname but also by the percentage of Indian blood in their veins. He tried to think of the winter he and his grandparents had lived on beef jerky and canned squash because the government rationing program had gotten screwed up.
Yes
, he thought,
I need the distance
. But even as Will thought this he lay down beside Cassie until her quivering back was pressed tight against his chest. He did not move against her, not wanting to make this into something it wasn't. Instead he listened to her heart, and to his grandparents' soft snores, twisted around each other. He gently covered Cassie's stomach with his hand. “You won't be alone,” he said.

D
URING
March, while the snow at Pine Ridge melted to little patches and drifts caught between the cottonwood trees, Cassie grew accustomed to the reservation. Because it was her safe haven, she did not see it for what it was—a place with more murders per capita than anywhere else in the United States, a people bled dry by poverty and indifference. Instead she chose to notice how beautiful the nut-brown Sioux babies were, how the mud puddles reflected her growing form, how the sun became tangled in the branches of trees, and how the quiet had a noise all its own.

“You coming or not,
wasicu
^•
wínyan
?”

Dorothea's voice startled Cassie from her position at the window. She still did not feel comfortable with Dorothea, but she wanted to get out of the house. “I'd love to,” she said, pulling her coat on and struggling with the tight buttons at the stomach. Dorothea was off from the cafeteria today, and because the ground had thawed considerably, she was going to replenish her store of roots and herbs.

In the weeks that Cassie had been staying with the Flying Horses, she had come closer to understanding them. And although Cyrus and Dorothea weren't actually friendly, they didn't cut her down, either; in fact, they went out of their way to make introductions when townspeople eyed her curiously. Cassie was beginning to see that things were different here—that a man might wear the same shirt five days in a row because it was his only one; that a mother was more likely to feed a child HoHos and orange soda than fresh grains and milk. She had altered her concept of time—set hours for breakfast and lunch and sleeping—to Indian time, which meant you ate when you were hungry and you rested when you had the need. And she was growing accustomed to the Lakota scarcity of words. She realized now that unlike whites, who chattered to fill up the spaces in conversations, the Lakota simply believed it was perfectly all right to say nothing. So Cassie moved through the woods in companionable quiet beside Dorothea, listening to the wind and the dry grass crunching beneath her feet.

“
Wa
^•
láka he
? Do you see that?” Dorothea called. She was pointing to a familiar tree, still bare.

“Cedar?” Cassie said, feeling she was being tested.

Dorothea nodded, impressed. “It's too early now, but we boil the fruit and leaves and drink the remedy to cure coughs.”

For the next hour and a half, Cassie listened to Dorothea describe an ancient art of healing. Some of the items were still sleeping through the winter: cattail's down, which was used like gauze; sweet flag for fever and toothache; slippery elm as a laxative; wild verbena for stomachache. Dorothea brushed off the roots of the false red mallow, which would become a salve for sunburns and open wounds. She picked wolfberry, because it soothed Cyrus's tired eyes.

When she sank back against the trunk of a cottonwood, oblivious to the wet earth seeping through her polyester pants, Cassie did the same. “I didn't know you were a medicine woman,” Cassie said.

Dorothea shook her head. “I'm not,” she said. “I just know some things.” She shrugged. “Besides, there is a great deal I cannot do anything about. That's what a medicine man is for. We have Joseph Stands in Sun—Cyrus introduced you to him in town last week. There are some sicknesses that live here”—she pointed to her heart—“and there are some sicknesses that you can't heal.”

“You mean something like cancer,” Cassie said.

“
Hiyá
,” Dorothea replied, scowling. “That's just something evil in the body. Marjorie Two Fists went into Rapid City and had the cancer cut out of her breast, and she's been fine for years. I'm talking about something evil. In the
ton
. The soul.” She stared fixedly at Cassie. “The People believe that a baby is born either good or bad. And that is that. You can make changes up until the time of birth, but afterward it can't be helped. And a bad baby will grow up into a bad man.”

Dorothea's eyes bored into Cassie, and she turned away. In a society where someone else's children were a gift that could grace your own household, how could Dorothea fathom a father who demeaned his son? A mother who forgot he existed? Cassie wanted to tell Dorothea that her husband hadn't been born bad; that he had simply been convinced of it so many times he began to act the part.

A cold wind settled over the thicket, taking away Cassie's thoughts. She looked at Dorothea's bulging apron. “You and Joseph Stands in Sun must take a lot of business away from the town doctor,” she said.

Dorothea picked at a twig, splitting the bark to reveal a tiny green bud. “Sometimes it is easier for people to come to me than to make the trip all the way to the doctor; some people don't trust the doctor.”

“Why?”

Dorothea puffed out her cheeks. “Because we have always had medicine men, I guess, but we haven't always had
wasicu
^•
doctors.”

“
Wasicu
^•
. What does that mean?” Cassie said quickly, recognizing the Lakota word. “It sounds like what you call me. What everyone calls me.”

Dorothea looked surprised, as if an idiot would have picked this up before. “It means ‘white,'” she said.

Cassie turned the word over in her mouth, testing its dips and chirps, like a mourning dove's call. “It's pretty.”

Dorothea pulled herself to her feet and looked down at Cassie. With typical Sioux bluntness, she said, “It comes from three Lakota words, the ones that translate to ‘fat, greedy person.'”

Cassie slogged quietly through the mud, forcing herself to stay silent. Nobody had asked her here, nobody had to like her. For her whole life, she'd been playing roles where she tried to please and inevitably failed, simply because of who she was: a helpless child, Alex's wife, a white woman. She wondered if, as Dorothea said, this was something she'd been born to, something defective in her spirit.

She almost walked directly into Dorothea because she didn't notice that the old woman had stopped moving. “You know,” Dorothea said easily, “when I was a child, I had seven sisters. We lived a little closer to Pine Ridge town. Of course, my parents did not have money for enough food or clothing, much less toys, so all we got to play with were old buttons and Salvation Army teddy bears at Christmas, and things we could make ourselves. My oldest sister taught us how to make gourd dolls out of the squash that grew wild, and rags we could find in trash barrels. We'd wrap the rags around the bulb of the squash like a kerchief, and knot the fabric into arms and legs.

“They were something, those dolls. And what I remember was that each year while my sisters were trying to find a smooth green squash without bumps on its face, I would look for the particolored ones, the ones that streaked yellow and green, half and half.” Dorothea suddenly grasped Cassie's hand, and Cassie was amazed at the power in her thin brown fingers. “Hybrids are strong, you know. They last longer. And in their own way, they are beautiful, Cassie,
ha
^•
?”

The women walked carefully, both unwilling to break this gossamer thread that Dorothea had netted between them by speaking, for the first time, Cassie's given name.

 

A
S
A
LEX
R
IVERS KNOTTED HIS BLACK BOW TIE
,
HE THOUGHT ABOUT
Macbeth, the character he'd shelved for a month before resuming production last week. He was starting to understand the makings of the character, much more so than he had when he'd first undertaken the film. There was a terror to Macbeth's marriage—a realization that the woman standing before him was not the same woman he'd married; that she had a capacity for acting a way he'd never believed possible.

His personal situation was clearly different, but still familiar. Certainly mistakes had been made, but he'd never figured it would come to this. When he'd come into the house and found Cassie missing, he had been tempted to check the rooms twice, the closets and the attic. It was hard to accept that she had actually gone. It happened to other people, especially in Hollywood, where weddings were more a confection of publicity than a wellspring of love. But it had never been like that between him and Cassie. He hadn't believed Cassie could walk out that door, mostly because he couldn't admit to himself that maybe he needed her more than she needed him.

Alex dragged a comb through his hair and straightened his wingtip collar. In five minutes he'd leave for Melanie Grayson's place. She was his Lady Macbeth; they'd go together to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion where the Academy Awards ceremony was held. He stared into the mirror, not quite able to place the face that he saw. He knew that the greatest acting job of his life would not be the one for which he might receive an Oscar, but rather the one he would give tonight when in front of thousands he'd have to pretend that he gave a damn whether he won or not.

Herb was waiting downstairs with a white Mercedes limousine. “I tell you, tonight I got heartburn,” he said. He grinned at Alex. “You talk to Cassie?”

“Just got off the phone,” he lied. “She wishes me luck.”

“Agh, luck,” Herb said. “You're a shoo-in. It's a shame she couldn't make it out here, even for the night. But I know what it's like in those touch-and-go situations, you don't want to leave them alone for a minute.”

Alex nodded. “She says maybe if I win, her father will make a dramatic recovery.”

“From your lips to God's ears,” Herb murmured, and then he pushed Alex toward the door. “Let's get Melanie, and then we schmooze.”

Alex didn't even get out of the limousine when they pulled into Melanie's driveway; he figured this was far from a date, and he wasn't planning on giving the wrong impression. He let Herb escort her from the door to the back seat of the car, where Alex had already poured her a glass of champagne. “You look lovely,” Alex said, knowing it was expected.

Melanie smoothed down the white satin skirt that clung to her like a snake's skin. “This old thing?” she said, smirking. They all knew she'd spent an exorbitant amount of money on the ostentatious dress, and that she'd tried to bill it to the
Macbeth
production. She pointed out that she never would have had to be so careful about her appearance if she hadn't been seated beside Alex, on whom the cameras would focus at least three times that night.

He stared out the window as the traffic began to grind to a halt several blocks in front of the building. Cassie would never have worn a dress like that. She would have had something original, of course, but simple and beautiful. Just like her.

He found himself getting angrier and angrier at Melanie as the car crept along. Her thigh was pressed too closely to his; her hair was the wrong color; her perfume wasn't Cassie's. “You nervous?” she purred, rubbing his forearm.

Alex didn't answer. He stared down at her hand on the sleeve of his coat as if it were a tarantula.

“Kids, kids,” Herb bellowed from the seat facing them. “Let's kiss and make up,” he said. “Remember, this is good publicity.”

Alex knew that Herb was right; rumors were flying about the former shutdown in production of
Macbeth
, so many that Alex was beginning to remember the hell he'd gone through with
Antony and Cleopatra
. Maybe he was just doomed when it came to Shakespeare.

“Yeah, Alex,” Melanie breathed, inches away from his face. “Let's kiss and make up.”

Alex twirled his wedding ring around his finger, a habit he'd taken to lately, as if it were a necessary reminder.
If you win
, he warned himself,
no matter what, do not jump up and embrace her
.

Herb patted Melanie's knee. “Leave him alone,” he sighed. “He's brooding.”

“I know,” Melanie said huskily. “That's what we all love about him.”

Alex ignored their senseless patter until their limousine was next in line. “Ready for the vultures, darling?” Melanie asked, snapping closed her compact.

Alex stepped into the afternoon sunshine first, squinting and holding his hand up in a half-wave, half-sunshield. He reached into the bowels of the limousine to help Melanie out, watching her turn on a smile with the wattage of a nighttime beacon at a maximum-security prison. She lightly placed her hand on his arm, and at his low growl, removed it.

There were too many shouts and catcalls to hear the reporters or to notice the flashbulbs and the rolling tape. He walked beside Melanie, nodding and grinning, trying for a facial expression that said he was not too sure of himself, but still confident about his chances.

The man walking in front of him was a producer over at FOX, and although Alex could not remember his name, his stooped gait and liver-spotted hairline were familiar. He and his wife were tiny and hunched over, and Alex wondered if that was the burden of age or simply of a long Hollywood marriage. They meandered down the red carpeting so slowly that several times Alex was forced to stop with Melanie and simply stand, smiling like an idiot. The man turned and noticed for the first time that Alex was behind him. He stopped dead in his tracks, holding out a hand. Alex shook it. “Golf balls,” the man said.

“Excuse me?”

“Golf balls. When I saw your movie, I had golf balls in my throat. That's how much it moved me.” He reached up and squeezed Alex's shoulder. “The best of the best tonight, eh?”

Alex had heard that kind of comment before about
Life
. Everyone had an estranged father or sister or friend, and Alex's role had encouraged them to make their peace. Alex Rivers, king of mending fences. Sultan of reconciliation. With the ultimate skeleton in his closet: a wife he had driven away.

As he waited on the red carpeting he heard the word “sweep,” and he knew that people were talking about the potential for
The Story of His Life
to walk away with an Oscar for each of its eleven nominations, including the golden trio of Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture.
Sweep. Sweep. Sweep
. The syllable fell onto his ears over and over, lulling Alex into a daydream of what this could have been like, how it would have felt to have Cassie standing close to him, what the reporters would have said when he pulled her into his arms and swept her down the aisle in a Cinderella waltz, as if nothing this night could matter more than her.