The Antelope Wife (18 page)

“Miskwaabik,” he mumbles, absent in his work. “They say the thunder people sent down this red stuff, put it in the ground.”

“Why’s it your favorite pot?”

“Conducts the heat real good.”

“What about those bowls?”

“Smooth the batter out.”

The answers are getting closer, quicker.

“What are you making?” Rozin herself asks, even though she could look into Frank’s sweat- and butter-stained recipe notebook, a tattered spiral-bound, and find out for herself. He won’t answer for a long while, though, and this makes Rozin naturally curious. So she peeks over his shoulder at the notebook, sees a word she has never seen before, although she has heard of it. Blitzkuchen. Written on top of the lined paper in tired ink.

Blitzkuchen! All of a sudden, he gets talkative. Frank sets the egg timer. He is always timing—this, that—because of course there always is something in the oven to rescue or to check. Anyhow, that day, Frank is working again on his life project. The cake of all cakes. Early in his life, says Frank, he tasted it—light as air with a taste of peach. A subterranean chocolate. Citrus. Crumbled tears. Sweet lemon. A smooch of almond.

“It explodes on your palate,” he says, eyes fixed and grave.

“Oh, gimme a break,” says Cecille, who has heard this before. “Stick with our daily bread. Or daily doughnut.”

Frank considers. An aura of furious effort. Concentrated baker’s conversion of heat, light, energy.

“I make the staff of life,” says Frank in a dignified and measured voice. “That is my calling. But I will never stop attempting the blitzkuchen.”

He’s trying to reconstruct the recipe. Trying to capture time. Or at least the punch line of an old family story. The cake is a fabulous thing, he says. The cake is holy. Extraordinary with immense powers of what sort nobody knows. He calls it the cake of peace. The cake of loving sincerity.

Rozin looks at him in wounded skepticism. This is a very different Frank. He has never spoken this way. He has always been down-to-earth. That is something she likes about him. This streak of mysticism, over a cake of all things, makes Rozin nervous, makes him suspect.

For years, he says, he has searched and tested for the exact recipe. In fact, the hunt for this recipe could be called his life quest. Always, between other concoctions, even inventions like his popular rhubarb sludge bars, when he has a little moment to himself, Frank makes a trial cake. Attempts a variation on the length of time he beats the batter. Amount of ground hazelnuts. Type of sugars and butters. Whatever.

“Of exquisite importance,” he says to Rozin, waving a darkly wrapped bar of chocolate now, his wide-boned, pleasant face remote and concentrated. “Cocoa content seventy-seven percent. Strong and dark.” He writes this in his notebook, scrawls it, and sighs over the batter he is now whipping in the bowl.

“Perhaps,” Rozin says, “it is all in the stirring.”

He frowns, lost in concentration now, and doesn’t answer for the longest time.

“Hey, Frank,” Deanna says, wanting to break the spell and change the subject, “why don’t you do the nose trick?”

He looks at the twins, shy.

“Come on, Frank.”

Frank can push his nose all the way to one side and tape it there. He can also pop his joints, vibrate his ears, and roll back his eyelids. He was the high school clown. He used to be ironic and jolly, always with a sly humor and a broad goofiness. But his fear of losing Rozin has made him serious.

Humor or the suggestion of it reminds him that he might say something to offend Rozin. He is stilted, stunted, stymied by his need to win her. Jokes puzzle and panic him. Put him in a sweat. Like right now, just thinking of a stupid old funny trick that made him look like a big dork, he gets upset. He thrusts his smooth hands deep in the flour barrel. Looks like he’ll cry until a teary dough forms around his fingers. Maybe, Rozin thinks, watching him knead and sugar and tenderize, this is how he works through the unresolved grief that Cecille says sociologists have begun to suspect every Indian is born with. Rozin has no idea he has lost his humor because of her.

Chapter 17

Nibi

K
LAUS AND
R
ICHARD
have medicine breath from the family-size bottle of Listerine they are drinking. They are sitting by the art museum, half asleep in the heated shank of the day. The air is stifling. The heat is very unseasonable. It is April and should have been cool, but the heat gags thought. The heat makes everyone uneasy. Cars rush by on the other side of the bench.

“Nice to get that breeze from the traffic!” says Richard. “That carbon monoxide. Ah.” He takes a deep breath, sits up, and hits his chest. Klaus, a red bandanna wrapped around his head and a T-shirt torn from collar to waist, lies curled, booze-thin, his legs folded neatly as a cat’s, his arms a pillow. He opens his eyes and croaks.

“Nibi. Nibi.”

“Oh shut up. I got no water, Klaus. Go to the drinking fountain.”

“Where’s it at?”

“Over there.”

They both know it is dry, always is. No fountains work in this part of the city. They share out the last of the Listerine. Richard screws the black cap carefully onto the empty bottle. He sets the bottle on the margin of grass beside the museum steps.

The bench feels good to Klaus, hard but broad enough to curl his knees on. He is so comfortable that he does not move, decides to endure his thirst. He shuts his eyes.

A woman comes out of the museum. She is carrying a huge orange cloth purse slung over her shoulder. It thumps against her as she walks, like a big soft pumpkin. Richard calls out, “Hey, white lady!”

She frowns.

The woman isn’t all white. She is something else. Hard to tell what she is, exactly. Richard thinks maybe a Korean or a Mexican or maybe, but probably not, she could be an Indian from somewhere else. She takes some money from her purse and puts it in his hand. Bills.

“Oh,” says Richard, “that’s very nice of you. I’d like you to meet my friend.”

The woman walks away.

“Still,” Richard calls after her, “I thank you. I’ll put down tobacco for you.” She does not turn around. “That’s a sacred gesture. We’re still Indians.”

“You got cigarettes?” Klaus peers at Richard and holds out his fingers.

Richard gives him a cigarette. “That is my last cigarette,” he says, although he has more. Klaus holds it lightly in the palm of his hand, in his fingers again. He does not smoke the cigarette.

“How much did that lady give?” he asks.

“There’s four here,” says Richard, counting the bills over slowly, twice.

Holding the cigarette, Klaus shuts his eyes again and listens. There is music. A sweetheart song playing between his ears. He is still dancing from some long-ago night, as he always does in his dreams. Even now, though her image sags like air is escaping, he pictures his Niinimoshenh and her twenty-six sisters and her daughters in shawls of floating hair. Over and over again they spring into his dreams. Gallop at him. Brandish their hooves like polished nails. He bats them off. She is alone again. There for him again. But he can’t stop his mind from turning his sweetheart into a Disney character. The Blue Fairy. Her light increases. Her smile spreads slowly into jag-toothed mercy and then her voice flows, the cool of a river. Once, very drunk, he watched the movie
Pinocchio
eight or ten times in a row with successive nieces and nephews, their friends, their friends’ cousins, then the cousins’ cousins and friends. By the time the night came on and the children were draped in slumber on the floor and on pillows and heaps of blankets and clothes, he had fallen in love with the Blue Fairy.

“What should we do with this money?” says Richard.

“I’m sick.”

Klaus stretches out his arm, too heavy, and then lets it drop. Unconscious again. Two men come out of the art museum. Surprisingly—what day is this?—one of them hands Richard money too. Coins. Then a group of people emerge from the big doors and skirt the men as they pass talking loudly to one another about where to go for lunch. More people come, the two men go invisible. Some event sponsored by the museum is letting out. No more luck. The streams of people soon disappear into their cars.

“That was exciting,” says Richard.

“I’m sick,” says Klaus. “Water.”

“I wonder if they’d let me in to look at the paintings. Maybe we should make a donation.”

“Don’t do that!”

Klaus surges to life and props himself against the steps, a big loose-jointed man doll. His lady love is still there in the back of his mind, standing in a ball of blue light.

“I’d like a drink of water,” he says to her. She has a glass of water in her hand, too, Sweetheart Calico, but she pours it out in front of his eyes. The molecules dissolve all around him and do nothing for his thirst.

“Did she do that to you, too? Did she?” Klaus is disappointed, outraged.

“What?”

“Pour the water out right before your eyes!”

“No.”

“What
did
she do then, Sweetheart?” Klaus asks, jealous. “Tell me every detail or I’ll kill you right here.”

“With what?”

“My bare hands,” says Klaus lazily.

“Klaus,” says Richard in a fatherly voice, “you’re sick.” Gently, he takes the cigarette from between Klaus’s fingers. He unpeels the wrapping from the cigarette and begins to sprinkle the tobacco on the clipped grass. Klaus and Richard are very quiet, watching the flakes of tobacco fall to earth. Above them, in the trees, a cicada begins. A long drawn-out buzzing whine. Wait, thinks Klaus, it is only April, that can’t be a cicada. It must be the heat in my brain. The day is heating past bearable. When all of the tobacco is shaken onto the grass, they get to their feet. Klaus steadies himself. His knees shake. As they slowly move down the street past the museum, on both sides of the sidewalk the sprinklers set into the sod of the lawn sputter on and then spray out cones of mist. Klaus bends over, puts his mouth on the little holes in the ground, the spigots, and tries to drink.

A museum guard in a dark uniform, a large woman bland and bored, walks down the steps and tells them to leave.

“You’re supposed to say,” Richard admonishes, “quit the premises. Better yet, vacate them.”

The woman shrugs and walks back up the steps.

“Vacate,” says Klaus, his face beaded with spray, “I’m still thirsty. It’s hard to get much. That spray is thin.”

“Well, let’s go.” They decide, taking themselves back down the street, to find a Wendy’s hamburgers. Sneak in a side door to their bathrooms. If challenged, show their money.

“Where is this supposed Wendy’s?” says Richard after they walk in the broiling sun over to the other side of Minneapolis.

“I’m thirsty,” says Klaus.

They stand outside a grocery store next to a liquor store on Hennepin and they feel good, laugh, making the choice.

“Mad Dog or Evian?” Richard asks Klaus.

“I’m going in there,” Klaus says, pointing up at the grocery sign. “I’m asking for a drink of water.”

He is in and out the door in seconds and a security guard nodding with satisfaction yells, “Good luck anyway, finding a fountain.”

“He didn’t want to do that,” says Klaus. They walk into the liquor store. “He was just doing his job.”

“So was Custer,” says Richard. “I opt for a subtle white.” He addresses the storekeeper. “Something with volume. I don’t get too hung up on the bouquet.”

“That’s good,” says the clerk.

“My circumstances won’t permit it.” Richard nods. “I can tell the difference between a dollar ninety-nine and a two fifty-nine bottle of white port wine, though, you can’t fool me. Don’t try.”

“I wouldn’t.”

The clerk scrapes their money off the counter and bags up two bottles, each in its own individual sack, and sets them on the counter for the men to take.

“You wouldn’t have a cup of water handy, would you?” asks Klaus.

“Not really,” says the clerk.

“Did he mean not as in reality or really not,” asks Richard as they go out the door.

“He meant they don’t have a glass of real water,” Klaus says, gazing back into the window with longing, “just those cardboard pictures on the walls.”

“That’s all you need,” says the Blue Fairy, holding up the bottle before his eyes. Twice, with her glass hoof, she strikes the hollow ground. “Let’s mogate.”

“To the big water. Gichi-ziibi.”

“Howah!”

They walk. Hotter. Hotter. A few times they take a drink from their bottles, but mainly they want to get to the Mississippi, so they walk. Shaking a little, hungry. Go around the back of a pizza place where the manager leaves unclaimed orders every once in a while. Past the Deja Vue Showgirls. SexWorld. Fancy café garbage Dumpster and outdoor bar. Nothing there. A woman exiting an antique store holds out a dollar and the moment Richard touches the bill she drops it like he’d run an electric wire up her arm. She darts away.

“It’s that sex thing,” says Richard, his look sage. “I have that effect on women.”

“They run like hell.”

Klaus laughs too hard, furious, thinking of how his antelope girl could take off and sprint.

They reach the broad lawns and paths beside the river, go down the embankment and edge along the shore until they find a clump of bushes, familiar shade.

“We were here a while ago. I remember this place,” says Richard. “We should put down some tobacco.”

“Or smoke it.”

“We just got two cigarettes left.”

“Let’s smoke it like an offering then. It don’t mix with wine, not for religious purposes.”

“That’s true,” says Richard. He slowly decides, and then he speaks. “This afternoon, let’s just regard our tobacco as a habit-forming drug.”

Klaus sways to his knees and then painfully, slowly, he inches down the bank of the river, leans over the edge to where the water begins. At that place, he lowers his face like a horse. He puts his face into the water, sucks the river into himself, drinks it and drinks it.

“That’s Prairie Island nuclear water,” Richard yells.

Klaus keeps drinking.

“He can’t hear me,” Richard says to himself. “Besides, that plant is down the stream farther.”

Richard lights a cigarette, takes a drink of wine.

“Or Xcel shit. Or some beaver might have pissed up near Itasca.”

Klaus keeps drinking and drinking.

“For sure,” says Richard, worried.

Klaus doesn’t stop.

“Wowee,” says Richard, taking a drink of the wine, swishing it around on his tongue, “full-bodied as my sour old lady.”

“How about you?” Richard yells to the river. “Klaus?”

Klaus is still face in the water, drinking, drinking up the river like a giant.

“What do you think he sees,” says Richard, helpless without an audience, wishing he could open Klaus’s wine already. “What do you think he’s looking at? What do you think he sees?”

After another drink, Richard answers himself.

“To the bottom.”

And he is right and she is down there. Klaus is watching her float toward him—his special woman—the Blue Fairy, merlady—a trembling beauty alive with Jell-O light, surrounded by a radiance of filtered sun and nuclear dust and splintered fish scales. The water is medicinal, bubbling, hot turquoise. She stops for a moment, flying backward in the great muscle of the current pushing south. It tugs at her hair. She has to go, Klaus knows. Longing for her scorches him through and through. He stretches toward her with all of his soul, but she only looks back at him over her shoulder with her hungry black eyes. Gives a flick of her white-flag tail.