Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  “I suppose you thought you could take advantage of a poor young woman. I don’t know who it was, you or Henry, that suggested after several too many beers that we change our penny ante poker game to strip. Well I still have to laugh. I had you men right down to your boxer shorts in no time flat, and I was sitting there, warm and cozy as you please. I was still in my dress with my shoes on my feet.”

  “You had them beads on, clip earrings, bangle bracelets, silk stockings,” Beverly pouted.

  “Garters and other numerous foundation garments. Of course I did. I am a woman of detachable parts. You should know by now. You simply weren’t playing in your league with strip poker.”

  She had the grace to put a hand to her lips as they un curved hiding the little gap-toothed smile he’d doted over at the time of that game.

  “Want to know something I never told before?” she said. “It was after I won your shorts with my pair of deuces and Henry’s with my eights, and you were naked, that I decided which one to marry.

  Beverly was shocked at this statement, bold even for Lulu. His wind felt knocked out of him for a moment, because her words called up the old times so clearly, the way he felt when she decided to marry his brother. He’d buried the feelings eventually in the knowledge that she wasn’t right for him, man of the world that he was becoming. He congratulated himself for years after i A W7 F_ mom… ……… on getting free of her slack, ambition less but mindlessly powerful female clutches. Right now his reasoning had ripped wide open, however, and jealousy kicked him in the stomach.

  Lulu cooed. Her voice was like a wind chime rattling. Cheap, sweet, maddening. “Some men react in that situation and some don’t,” she told him. “It was reaction I looked for, if you know what I mean.”

  Beverly was silent.

  Lulu winked at him with her bold gleaming blackberry eyes.

  She had smooth tight skin, wrinkled only where she laughed, always fragrantly powdered. At the time her hair was still dark and thickly curled. lAter-she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never grow back. Because her face was soft and yet alert, vigilant as some small cat’s, plump and tame but with a wildness in its breast, Beverly had always felt exposed, preyed on, undressed around her, even before the game in which she’d stripped him naked and now, as he found, appraised him in his shame.

  You got your reaction when you needed it, he wanted to say.

  Yet, even in his mounting exasperation, he did not lose control and stoop to discussing what had happened after Henry’s wake, when they both went outside to get some air. He tolled his sleeves down and fished a soft pack of Marlboros from her side of the table. She watched his hand as he struck the match, and her eyes narrowed. They were so black the iris sometimes showed within like blue flames. He thought her heartless, suddenly, and wondered if she even remembered the two of them in the shed after Henry’s wake. But there was no good way he could think of to ask without getting back down to her level.

  Henry junior came to the window, hungry, and Lulu made a sandwich for him with baloney and hot-dog relish. The boy was seven years old, sturdy, with Lulu’s delicate skin and the almost Asian-looking eyes of all the Lamartines. Beverly watched the ZA

  AM

  boy with electrified attention. He couldn’t really say if anything about the child reminded him of himself, unless it was the gaze.

  Beverly had tried to train his gaze like a hawk to use in barroom stare-downs during his tour of duty. It came in handy, as well, when he made a sale, although civilian life had long ago taken the edge off his intensity, as it had his muscles, his hero’s stubborn, sagging flesh that, he could still muster in a crisis. There was a crisis now.

  The boy seemed to have acquired the stare down technique naturally.

  Beverly was the first to look away.

  “Uncle Bev,” Henry Junior said. “I always heard about the bird on your arm. Could you make it fly?”

  So Beverly rolled up shirts sleeve once more and forced his blood up.

  He flexed powerfully, over and over, until the boy was bored, satisfied, and fled back to his brothers. Beverly let his arm down carefully. It was numb. The sound of the. 22 reports came thick and fast for a while, then all the boys paused to reload and set the jugs in a line against the fence and argue over whose shot went where.

  “They’re teaching him to shoot,” explained Lulu. “We had two bucks brought down last fall. And pheasants? Those boys will always put meat on my table.”

  She rambled on about them all, and Bev listened with relief, gathering his strength to pull the conversation back his way again.

  One of the oldest boys was going down to Haskell Junior College, while another, Gerry, was testing the limits of the mission school system, at twelve. Lulu pointed Gerry out among the others. Bev could see Lulu most clearly in this boy. He laughed at everything, or seemed barely to be keeping amusement in. His eyes were black, sly, snapping with sparks. He led the rest in play without a hint of effort, just like Lulu, whose gestures worked as subtle magnets. He was a big boy, a born leader, light on his feet and powerful. His mind seemed quick.

  It would not surprise Bev -WN to hear, after many years passed on, that this Gerry grew up to be both a natural criminal and a hero whose face appeared on the six-o’clock news.

  Lulu managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly, Bev noticed, while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else. As her voice swirled on, Bev thought of some Tarzan book he had read. In that book there was a queen protected by bloodthirsty warriors who smoothly dispatched all of her enemies, Lulu’s boys had grown into a kind of pack. They always bung together.

  When a shot went true, their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively.

  They moved in dance steps too intricate for the non initiated eye to Unitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.

  Lulu had gone silent, suddenly, to fetch something from her icebox.

  In that quiet moment something about the boys outside struck Beverly as almost dangerous.

  He watched them close around Henry junior in an impenetrable mass of black-and-white sneakers, sweatshirts, baseball hats, and butts of Marlin rifles. Through the chinks between their bodies Beverly saw Gerry, dark and electric as his mother, kneel behind Henry junior and arm-over-arm instruct him how to cradle, aim, and squeeze-fire the

  .22.

  When Henry junior stumbled, kicked backward by the recoil, missing the ‘ug, the boys dusted him clean and set him back behind the rifle again.

  Slowly, as he watched, Beverly’s uneasy sense of menace gave way to some sweet apprehension of their kinship. He was remembering the way he and Henry and Slick, the oldest of his brothers, used to put themselves on the line for each other in high school. People used to say you couldn’t drive a knife edge between the Larnartines. Nothing ever came between them. Nothing ever did or would.

  Even while he was thinking that, Beverly knew it wasn’t true.

  What had come between them was a who, and she was standing across from him now at the kitchen counter. Lulu licked some unseen sweetness from her fingers, having finished her sugared bread. Her tongue was small, flat, and pale as a little cat’s.

  Her eyes had shut in mystery. He wondered if she knew his thoughts.

  She padded easily toward him, and he stood up in an odd panic as she approached. He felt his heart knock urgently as a stranger in trouble, and then she touched him through his pants.

  He was helpless. His mouth fell on hers and kept traveling, through the walls and ceilings, down the levels, through the broad, warm reaches of the years.

  The boys came back very late in the afternoon. By then, Beverly had drastically revised his plans for Henry junior to the point where he had no plans at all. In a d
azed, immediate, unhappy bewilderment he sat on the doily-bedecked couch opening and closing his hands in his lap. Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy.

  She seemed to fill pots with food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she’d never put in. The table jumped to set itself The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, Lyman, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. Then the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency.

  Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they’d had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himself.

  He looked at her. She turned to the sinkful of dishes and disappeared in a cloud of steam. Only the round rear of her blue flowered housedress was visible, so he watched that. It was too late now. He had fallen. He could not help but remember their one night together.

  They had gone into the shed while the earth was-still damp and the cut flowers in their foam balls still exuded scent over Henry’s grave.

  Beverly had kissed the small cries back onto Lulu’s lips. He remembered. Then passion overtook them. She hung on to him like they were riding the tossing ground, her teeth grinding in his ear. He wasn’t man or woman. None of that mattered.

  Yet he was more of a man than he’d ever been. The grief of loss for the beloved made their tiny flames of life so sad and precious it hardly mattered who was what. the flesh was only given so that the flame could touch in a union however less than perfect. Afterward they lay together, breathing the dark in and out. He had wept the one other time in his life besides post combat, and after a while he came into her again, tasting his ownMiTaculous continuance.

  Lulu left him sitting on the couch and went back into the sacred domain of her femininity. That was the bedroom with the locking door that she left open just a crack. She pulled down the blue-and-white-checked bedspread, put the pillows aside, and lay down carefully with her hands folded on her stomach. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. She went into herself, sinking through her body as if on a raft of darkness, until she reached the very bottom of her soul where there was nothing to do but wait.

  Things had gotten by Beverly. Night came down. His sad dazzlement abated and he tried to avoid thinking of Elsa. But she was there filing her orange nails whichever way he ducked. And then there was the way he was proud of living his life. He wanted to go A back and sell word-enrichment books. No one on the reservation would buy them, he knew, and the thought panicked him. He realized that the depth and danger of his situation was great if he had forgotten that basic fact. The moon went black. The bushes seemed to close around the house.

  Retrench, he told himself, as the boys turned heavily and mumbled in their invisible cots and all along the floors around him. Retreat if you have to and forget about Henry junior. He finally faced surrender and knew it was the only thing he could possibly have the strength for.

  He planned to get into his car while it was still dark, before dawn, and drive back to Minneapolis without Henry junior. He would simply have to bolt without saying good-bye to Lulu. But when he rose from the couch, he walked down the hall to her bedroom door. He didn’t pause but walked right through. It was like routine he’d built up over time in marriage.

  The close dark was scented with bath lilac. Glowing green spears told the hour in her side-table clock. The bedclothes rustled. He stood holding the lathed wooden post. And then his veins were full of warm ash and his tongue swelled in his throat.

  He lay down in her arms.

  Whirling blackness swept through him, and there was nothing else to do.

  The wings didn’t beat as hard as they used to, but the bird still flew.

  THE PLUNGE OF THE B r .1 a S (1957)

  NECTOR KASHPAW

  I never wanted much, and I needed even less, but what happened was that I got everything handed to me on a plate. It came from being a Kashpaw, I used to think. Our family was respected as the last hereditary leaders of this tribe. But Kashpaws died out around here, people forgot, and I still kept getting offers.

  What kind of offers? just ask … jobs for one. I got out of Flaildreau with my ears rung from playing football, and the first thing they said was

  “Nector Kashpaw, go West!

  Hollywood wants you!” They made a lot of westerns in those days. I never talk about this often, but they were hiring for a scene in South Dakota and this talent scout picked me out from the graduating class.

  His company was pulling in extras for the wagon-train scenes. Because of my height, I got hired on for the biggest Indian part. But they didn’t know I was a Kashpaw, because right off I had to die.

  “Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it.

  Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.

  So I thought it was quite enough to be killed the once you have to die in this life, and I quit. I hopped a train down the wheat belt and threshed. I got offers there too. jobs came easy. I worked a year.

  I was thinking of staying on, but then I got a proposition that discouraged me out of Kansas for good.

  Down in the city I met this old rich woman. She had her car stopped when she saw me pass by.

  “Ask the chief if he’d like to work for me,” she said to her man up front. So her man, a buffalo soldier, did.

  “Doing what?” I asked.

  “I want him to model for my masterpiece. Tell him all he has to do is stand still and let me paint his picture.”

  “Sounds easy enough.” I agreed.

  The pay was fifty dollars. I went to her house. They fed me, and later on they sent me over to her barn. I went in. When I saw her dressed in a white coat with a hat like a little black pancake on her head, I felt pity. She was an old wreck of a thing. Snaggletoothed.

  She put me on a block of wood and then said to me,

  “Disrobe. ” No one had ever told me to take off my clothes just like that.

  So I pretended not to understand her. “What robe?” I asked.

  “Disrobe,” she repeated. I stood there and looked confused.

  Pitiful! I thought. Then she started to demonstrate by clawing at her buttons. I was just about to go and help her when she said in a near holler,

  “Take off your clothes!”

  She wanted to paint me without a stitch on, of course.

  There were lots of naked pictures in her barn. I wouldn’t do it.

  She offered money, more money, until she offered me so much that I had to forget my dignity. So I was paid by this woman a round two hundred dollars for standing stock still in L a diaper.

  I could not believe it, later, when she showed me the picture.

  Plunge of the Brave, was the title of it. Later on, that picture would become famous. It would hang in the Bismarck state capitol.

  There I was, jumping off a cliff, naked of course, down into a rocky river. Certain death. Remember Custer’s saying? The only good Indian is a dead Indian? Well from my dealings with I whites I would add to that quote: “The only interesting Indian is dead, or dying by falling backwards off a horse.”

  When I saw that the greater world was only interested in my doom, I went home on the back of a train. Riding the rails one night the moon was in the boxcar. A nip was in the air. I remembered that picture, and I knew that Nector Kashpaw would fool the pitiful rich woman that painted him and survive the raging water. I’d hold my breath when I hit and let the current pull me toward the surface, around jagged rocks. I wouldn’t fight it, and in that way I’d get to shore.

  Back home, it seemed like that was happening for a while.

  Things were quiet. I lived with my mother and Eli in the old A place, hunting or roaming or chopping a little wood. I kept thinking about the one book I read in high school. For some reason this priest in
Flandreau would teach no other book all four years but Moby Dick, the story of the great white whale. I knew that book inside and out.

  I’d even stolen a copy from school and taken it home in my suitcase.

  This led to another famous misunderstanding.

  “You’re always reading that book,” my mother said once.

  “What’s in it?”

  “The story of the great white whale.”

  She could not believe it. After a while, she said,

  “What do they got to wail about, those whites?”

  I told her the whale was a fish as big as the church. She did not believe this either. Who would?

  “Call me Ishmael,” I said sometimes, only to myself. For he survived the great white monster like I got out of the rich lady’s saw” picture. He let the water bounce his coffin to the top. In my life so far I’d gone easy and come out on top, like him. But the river ‘t done with me yo. I floated through the calm sweet spots, wasn but somewhere the river branched.

  So far I haven’t mentioned the other offers I had been getting.

  These offers were for candy, sweet candy between the bed covers.

  There was girls like new taffy, hardened sour balls of married ladies, rich marshmallow widows, and even a man, rock salt and barley sugar in a jungle of weeds. I never did anything to bring these offers on.

  They just happened. I never thought twice. Then I fell in love for real.

  Lulu Nanapush was the one who made me greedy.

  At boarding school, as children, I treated her as my sister and A shared out peanut-butter-syrup sandwiches on the bus to stop her N crying. I let her tag with me to town. At the movies I bought her AA licorice.

  Then we grew up apart from each other, I came home, and saw her dancing in the Friday-night crowd. She was doing the butterfly with two other men. For the first time, on seeing her, I knew exactly what I wanted.