The Painted Drum (20 page)

At the lighted gas stop, Ira bought fifteen dollars worth of groceries—bread, peanut butter, milk, applesauce, macaroni. The man paid and Ira took the bag. Walking back outside, they hunched over, stabbed with cold.

“Gisina,” he said.

“I gotta get home now,” said Ira. “You take me.”

“I told you I can’t, we get my brother and he takes you in his truck, remember?”

“I remember it,” said Ira as they ducked along the edge of the road, hunched against the cold. “But I think I would rather go with you if you could take me. I don’t know about your brother as I’ve never met him. Your brother is a stranger to me.”

“Morris, he’s okay.” In his voice there was something else, too, and Ira’s mind grabbed onto it.

“What,” she said, “what about him?”

But they were at the house. It was very close to the gas station. The man’s brother lived in town, in a house Ira had never before noticed, which in itself was odd, the never having noticed a house in a place so small that everything was seen many times. Now the brown-board one-story house stood out. It felt to Ira like the house had suddenly been put there, as in a dream. They walked through unbroken snow up to the door, which was clawed by animals and jimmied around the knob. As they stood before the door waiting for the brother to answer, Ira’s throat tightened and she realized that even in the cold she was sweating lightly. The sweat was freezing in a sheen of ice on her brow. She wanted to turn and run away but John held the groceries. So she stood there, and when the door opened with a fierce shake, as it was stuck, she flinched and stepped back. Then she was pulled or propelled into a dark, close, rank den of a place. The two men went into another room and talked and made some deal, apparently, because when John returned, he gave Ira the groceries.

“I have to go, really, because my wife will be needing me.”

“Please.”

“I am who I said I was. I am not any different than that. I am not a bad person.”

“But your brother is.”

His eyes shifted away.

“Not always,” he said. And then Ira was alone with the brother who bumped around in the half-dark getting dressed to go outside.

“Morris,” she called out. “So chi miigwech for giving me the ride back to my kids. They shouldn’t be out there alone.”

“They shouldn’t be out there,” he agreed. His voice was gravelly, harsh maybe, but at least he said something to her. And he did seem to be getting ready to go. “I don’t mind. We have to start my truck though and she’s a bitch in this cold.”

“Okay,” said Ira, clutching the bag. She was encouraged and felt easier. She didn’t look at the brother directly, but stole small glances in the dim light. He was tall and rangy, with a lean, hungry-looking face, powerful shoulders and a bony, jutting nose. She couldn’t see his eyes, but when they went out the door she finally caught a glimpse, then wished she hadn’t. His eyes were bugged out, big and staring, white all around the black pebble of the iris. He looked like a man scared permanently out of his wits.

“Don’t mind it,” he said, as he noticed how Ira went very quiet getting into the truck. “I got this sickness where I can’t ever shut my eyes.”

He frowned, jiggled the key softly, then bent to the wheel in concentration and tried to get the engine to turn over. “C’mon, c’mon,” he said, “ninimoshe, c’mon baby.” He cranked the engine and each time gave a squirt of gas; he had some method by which he slowly brought the frozen block to life, but it took a while and in that time Ira began to know something. There grew in her a feeling that her children weren’t all right, they weren’t asleep. Hungry, well, she knew that already. She began to think that she should have taken them along with her to town because at least they could have crashed someplace together, somebody’s couch. Now their situation was not good; she could feel it in her gut, a crawling sensation that made her act desperately. Later, she regretted very much that she put her hand out, touching Morris. At the time she even knew it was wrong, because he looked at her as the engine groaned. Even though his face was dark in shadow, the whites of his eyes gleamed out, and there was something awful in his look.

“Gegaa, gegaa,” he shouted, and then, at last, the motor caught with a roar and the cab shuddered. Morris whooped and pounded the wheel. He was sort of too excited, thought Ira, as though he was on some drug, but maybe it was for his eyes. He could be on some medication. Morris backed the truck from the snowy yard and said, “Which way?”

“I live out by the border at the old treaty signing.”

“Way out there!” Morris marveled as they pulled into the road. “You guys are true-life bush Indians.”

“My dad was. He still hunted and trapped all year but there wasn’t a living in it. He has died since.”

“You got a job?” Morris’s eye rolled wildly at her and he grinned, his teeth big and sharp in the dashboard’s reflected lights.

“I did until my dad went, then I didn’t have no one to take care of my kids. So I get by, you know, I sell my beadwork and stuff. If I moved into town, I guess I could do pretty well.”

“Oh, I’d say,” but when he looked sideways at her, Ira thought he meant something else.

“Not that way,” she stated, without laughing. Now was when she began to wish she hadn’t touched him.

Morris gave a little hoot. As the heat came on, the cab of his truck began to smell like blood.

“You hunt yourself?” said Ira.

“Do I hunt
myself
?” Morris asked. “I’d like to see that.”

“I mean, do you hunt, just hunt?”

Morris didn’t answer, so Ira said, “You can’t shut your eyes for real?”

“Yeah. They will not close. I put drops in. Take the wheel.”

He quit steering and Ira slid over beside him to keep them from going in the ditch. He plucked a little squeeze bottle from his breast pocket and tipped back his head. “Ah,” he screwed the top on the bottle, dropped it back in his pocket, took the wheel with one hand. He grabbed Ira with the other and hauled her close to him. “I liked that.” The truck swerved.

“You got to keep both hands on the driving,” she said, unhooking his arm from around her shoulders. She slid back to her side of the truck. “Look, it’s iced up bad out there. Really, it’s very dangerous.” The road was plowed recently enough so that beneath the new and fluffy snow there was a hard, slick finish. “The conditions are definitely no good. Hey,” she tried to shift the mood. “How do you sleep?”

“I never do sleep,” said Morris. “That’s why I’m crazy.”

“You don’t seem too crazy,” Ira said.

“The VA sent me everywhere, all around the world, I been to Singapore. They couldn’t do shit. I can’t have sunlight or any light. Mostly I live inside listening to TV. Tapes. I got a million tapes. Cassette tapes. Nobody wants their cassette tapes anymore. The church gives ’em to me. People give ’em to me. I sit indoors and listen. So I know everything. All there is to know. It’s all on tapes. It comes through my ears.” He tapped the side of his head.

His ears look normal, Ira thought.

“My brother is the good talker. He’s the one who charms the ladies. He told me all about you.”

“What about your tapes? What are your tapes about?”

“Every kind of music, you would not believe. I got opera tapes which I can’t make out the language, Mötley Crüe tapes, George Michael, every C-and-W tape there is or was. I got classical music tapes however I don’t like to read the labels as it hurts my eyes, so I can’t tell you who is who by name. There is this one guy I listen to all the time, the fucker plays like his hands are on fire. And books, every book. Everything from horror books to spiritual messages. This one I had on before I left, I got the whole set of wisdom. Listen to this one,” Morris spoke slowly and carefully. “‘If anyone were to ask life over a thousand years, why are you alive? The only reply could be—I live so that I may live. Life lives from its own foundation and rises out of itself.’ How about that?”

As they bounced along Morris steered the truck, slowly, carefully.

“A guy wrote that in the twelfth century
A
.
D
.”

“If somebody asked me over a thousand years,” Ira said, cold inside, “I would say I live because my children need me.”

“Yeah,” said Morris. “That’s what my brother said. He told me all about how you needed money.”

“I don’t need it all that bad anymore,” Ira said. “I only got to last until tomorrow.”

“Well, I got money,” said Morris. “I got quite a bit of money. On me. And I don’t ever get a chance to be with a woman. I can’t go in bars.”

Now Ira knew why her throat clenched, why she’d been afraid. She knew why John had delivered her to his ma’iingan brother.

“If you have so much money,” she said, her voice rising too high, “why don’t you buy CDs?”

“Well, I have them too, and a player, of course. But I like listening to tapes for some reason. The assortment, I guess, and they’re free. My house is a grab bag of tapes. Powwow tapes. Poetry tapes. The most beautiful stories in the language. Ira, listen to this,” Morris’s voice rose high, almost a wail. “‘It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal.’ What about that? Fitzgerald. I wish I could stop this truck,” said Morris. “I wish that I could kiss you.”

“No,” said Ira, “I got to get back to my kids.”

“Well, I think this is a rare healing moment, and a kiss”—Morris slowed the truck until it crawled—“that won’t take a few seconds. A kiss is an efficacious drug. It might change my life.” The truck stopped, idling. Morris turned to her and the light played up in his eyes so they flashed and burned. “Please,” he said, putting the truck in park. Ira didn’t move. “You want me to start the truck moving?” They sat suspended, breathing, looking at each other.

“You’re pretty,” said Morris. His voice was low. He was choking on his breath. “Want me to start the truck?”

“Yes,” Ira said.

“C’mere then.”

She slid across to him in a trance of fear, but when he did not move toward her but only sat very still, something else happened. She put her hands over his eyes. He seemed to be holding his breath now, even trembling a little. He wasn’t going to hurt her, she realized. She kissed his mouth, and his foot pressed the gas pedal involuntarily, so it roared with a human sound. He laughed sheepishly and said, “I guess that tells you how I feel.” His breath was surprisingly sweet and his face smelled like soap. Still, underneath that, the truck smelled of blood. He leaned back into the seat like he was fainting a little. She kissed him again. Then she took her hands off his eyes and got back on her side of the cab. He sat up, stared forward, then pressed the gas pedal slowly and shifted evenly so there was no sudden jolt. They went along in silence.

“You do love your children, don’t you,” he said.

“Yes,” said Ira.

“But that second kiss,” Morris said. “Was it maybe personal?”

Ira said nothing, just pointed out the many small drifts on the road. Morris concentrated, slowing now, very cautious. When the driving was smoother he put his hand in his pocket and pulled something out and slid it across the seat.

“You take this.”

It was a wad of money.

“No,” Ira said. “I didn’t do nothing.”

“Please keep it,” Morris said, in a formal voice. “I feel dishonorable. Anyway, I got to get us to your place and return home by sunup. Morning light hurts my eyes very bad, I might need a pain pill, though I’m trying to get off those things. In the full sun I’ll get sick. I maybe could go blind. Things are going bad for me. Yesterday I head-butted a mirror. Then I cut my feet bad walking in the bits. I scored my knuckles with a knife, cutting cabbage for a soup. I had to go to the emergency and get everything sewed up and there’s still frozen blood all over in here; I guess I was hunting myself.”

“You don’t have a bandage on.”

“I don’t care to have one.”

He put his hand in the dash light’s glow and she saw black stitches running down between his fingers. His hand looked like a paw.

“You shouldn’t go slamming your face at mirrors,” she said.

“They give me the creeps. The Chinese believe you shouldn’t ever have one facing your bed or your soul might crawl out of your body at night and slip into the mirror.”

“Oh,” said Ira, startled, “I sort of believe that too.” Then she was watchful. “We’re almost at the turnoff. Slow down.” She helped him steer and they bumped down the awkwardly plowed road until they came to the place where Ira’s house was. The dark was lifting only slightly and at first she couldn’t see past the headlamp’s arc. So she couldn’t tell what had happened until the truck got close to the black and delicately smoking foundation.

Shawnee pulled herself out of her body and went up into the trees. At first she was frightened by the lightness, the drifting. She clung to her brother and sister and they came up with her. They were made of ash, black reeds, soot, a powder of loneliness, smoke. They held one another, but they couldn’t speak or cry out. They were in blackness so deep that they did not know where it stopped or where they started. There were tiny blue flashes of light. Strings of electricity pulled snapping out of the air. They could hear things, just as they had before, though the reference between sound and object was fading. The wind rushed in the heavy branched pines. There was the hushed question of an owl. Then just the sound, and not the bird.

Jostling lightly as they moved along the branch, they made a sound like the scrape of dry twigs. Their heads were bowls. Air flowed through the hollows of their curved, black ribs. In the deep eyeholes, fragments of ice gleamed. When one of them bent the branch too far and fell, they found they could hang in the air. Awkwardly, slowly increasing their skill, they figured out how to maneuver from one tree to the next. Jerky and tentative at first, then launching themselves with increasing grace and ease, they traveled. But they kept returning to the tree, the shapes underneath. Those shapes drew them. They cocked their black skulls, and the ice in the eye sockets gleamed with raw curiosity.

Shawnee woke up in the dark. The sound of drumming would not let her sleep, although she wanted to. She had finally gotten comfortable, so comfortable. Her dream was dark and fantastic. Nothing hurt. But the drum was loud, insistent, a full noise that made her jumpy inside. She lifted her head and shook off the snow. That sound was coming from just outside of the ditch. A fast, rolling beat. It drew her staggering to her feet. On her back, nestled close in the shell of nylon and down, her brother stirred. Alice didn’t move, but Shawnee lifted her anyway, dragged her by her hood and her hair. The drum grew louder, showing a way out, beating her around a tree and then a rock and over solid ground, all in the dark. Roused by the drum whenever she almost quit, Shawnee went on until she bumped flat into a wall. She moved along it and felt a window. She beat on the glass so hard with mitted and frozen fists that it shattered, and then she bawled like a little dog right outside the door.