Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  She seemed to know something was in the air, however; her face lifted from time to time all that morning. She sniffed, and even I could smell the lingering odor of sweat like sour wheat, the faint reek of slept-in clothes and gasoline. Once, that morning, Dot looked at me and narrowed her long, hooded eyes. “I got pains,” she said, “every so often. Like it’s going to come sometime soon. Well, all I can say is he better drag ass to get here, that Gerry.” She closed her eyes then, and went to sleep.

  Ed Rafferty, one of the drivers, pulled in with a load. It was overweight, and when I handed him the pink slip he grinned.

  There were two scales, you see, on the way to the cement plant, and if a driver got past the state-run scale early, before the state officials were there, the company would pay for whatever he got But it was not illicit gravel that tipped the wedge past away withe red mark on the balance. When I walked back inside I saw the weight had gone down to just under the red. Ed drove off, still laughing, and I assumed that he had leaned on the arm of the scale, increasing the weight.

  “That Ed,” I said, “got me again.”

  But Dot stared past me, needles poised in her fist like a picador’s lances. It gave me a start, to see her frozen in such a menacing pose.

  It was not the sort of pose to turn your back on, but I did turn, following her gaze to the door, which a man’s body filled suddenly Gerry, of course it was Gerry. He’d tipped the weight up past the red and leapt down, cat-quick for all his mass, and silent. I hadn’t heard his step. Gravel crushed, evidently, but did not roll beneath his tight, thin boots.

  He was bigger than I remembered from the bar, or perhaps it was just that we’d been living in that dollhouse of a weigh shack so long that everything else looked huge. He was so big that he had to hunker one shoulder beneath the lintel and back his belly in, pushing the doorframe wider with his long, soft hands. It was the hands I watched as Gerry filled the shack. His plump fingers looked so graceful and artistic against his smooth mass. He used them prettily. Revolving agile wrists he reached across the few inches left between himself and Dot. Then his littlest fingers curled like a woman’s at tea, and he disarmed his wife.

  He drew the needles out of Dot’s fists, and examined the little garment that hung like a queer fruit beneath.

  “S’very, very nice,” he said, scrutinizing the tiny, even stitches.

  “S’for the kid?”

  Dot nodded solemnly and dropped her eyes to her lap. It was an almost tender moment. The silence lasted so long that I got embarrassed and would have left had I not been wedged firmly behind his hip in one corner.

  Gerry stood there, smoothing black hair behind his ears.

  Again, there was a queer delicacy about the way he did this. So many things Gerry did might remind you of the way that a beautiful courtesan, standing naked before a mirror, would touch herself-lovingly, conscious of her attractions. He nodded encouragingly. “Let’s go then,” said Dot.

  Suave, grand, gigantic, they moved across the construction site and then, by mysterious means, slipped their bodies into Dot’s compact car.

  I expected the car to belly down, thought the muffler would scrape the ground behind them. But instead they flew, raising a great spume of dust that hung in the air a long time after they were out of sight.

  I went back into the weigh shack when the air behind them had settled. I was bored, dead bored. And since one thing meant about as much to me as another, I picked up her needles and began knitting, as well as I could anyway, jerking the yarn back after each stitch, becoming more and more absorbed in my work until, as it happened, I came suddenly to the end of the garment, snipped the yarn, and worked the loose ends back into the collar of the thick little suit.

  I missed Dot in the days that followed, days so alike they welded searrilessly to one another and took your mind away. I seemed to exist in a suspension and spent my time sifting at the window watching nothing until the sun went down, bruising the whole sky as it dropped, clotting my heart. I couldn’t name anything I felt anymore, although I knew it was a kind of boredom. I had been living the same life too long. I did jumping jacks and pushups and stood on my head in the little shack to break the tedium, but too much solitude rots the brain.

  I wondered how Gerry had stood it. Sometimes I grabbed drivers out of their trucks and talked loudly and quickly and inconsequentially as a madwoman.

  There were other times I couldn’t talk at all because my tongue had rusted to the roof of my mouth.

  mm Sometimes I daydreamed about Dot and Gerry. I had many choice daydreams, but theirs was my favorite. I pictured them in Dot’s long tan trailer house, both hungry. Heads swaying, clasped hands swinging between them like hooked trunks, they moved through the kitchen feeding casually from boxes and bags on the counters, like ponderous animals alone in a forest. When they had fed, they moved on to the bedroom and settled themselves upon Dot’s king-size and sateen-quilted spread.

  They rubbed together, locked and unlocked their parts. They set the trailer rocking on its cement-block-and-plywood foundation and the tremors spread, causing cups to fall, plates to shatter in the china hutches of their more established neighbors.

  But what of the child there, suspended between them. Did it know how to weather such tropical storms? It was a week past the week it was due, and I expected the good news to come any moment. I was anxious to hear the outcome, but still, I was surprised when Gerry rumbled to the weigh-shack door on a huge and ancient, rust-pocked, untrustworthy-looking machine that was like no motorcycle I’d ever seen before.

  “She asst for you,” he hissed. “Quick, get on!”

  I hoisted myself up behind him, although there wasn’t room on the seat.

  I clawed his smooth back for a handhold and finally perched, or so it seemed, on the rim of his heavy belt. Flylike, glued to him by suction, we rode as one person, whipping a great wind around us. Cars scattered, the lights blinked and flickered on the main street.

  Pedestrians swiveled to catch a glimpse of us-a mountain tearing by balanced on a toy, and clinging to the sheer northwest face, a scrawny half-breed howling something that Dopplered across the bridge and faded out, finally, in the parking lot of Saint Adalbert’s Hospital.

  In the waiting room we settled on chairs molded of orange plastic.

  The spike legs splayed beneath Gerry’s mass but managed to support him the four hours we waited. Nurses passed, settling like field gulls among reports and prescriptions, eyeing us with reserved hostility.

  Gerry hardly spoke. He didn’t have to, I watched his ribs and the small of his back darken with sweat. For that well-lighted tunnel, the waiting room, the tin rack of magaIzines, all were the props and inevitable features of institutions.

  From time to time Gerry paced in the time-honored manner of the prisoner or expectant father. He made lengthy trips to the bathroom.

  All the quickness and delicacy of his movements had disappeared, and he was only a poor tired fat man in those hours, a husband worried about his wife, menaced, tired of getting caught.

  At last the gulls emerged and drew Gerry in among them. He visited Dot for perhaps half an hour, and then came out of her visi room. Again he settled, the plastic chair twitched beneath him.

  He looked bewildered and silly and a little addled with what he had seen. The shaded lenses of his glasses kept slipping down his nose.

  Beside him, I felt the aftermath of the shock wave traveling from the epicenter deep in his flesh outward from part of him that had shifted along a crevice. The tremors moved in widening rings. When they reached the very surface of him, and when he began trembling, Gerry stood suddenly. “I’m going after cigars,” he said, and walked quickly away.

  His steps quickened to a near run as he moved down the corridor.

  Waiting for the elevator, he flexed his nimble fingers. Dot told me she had once sent him to the store for a roll of toilet paper. It was eight months before she saw him again, for he’d met the local constabulary on
the way. So I knew, when he flexed his fingers, that he was thinking of pulling the biker’s gloves over his knuckles, of running. It was perhaps the very first time in his life he had something to run for.

  It seemed to me, at that moment, that I should at least let Gerry know it was all right for him to leave, to run as far and fast as he had to now. Although I felt heavy-my body had gone slack, and my lungs ached with smoke-1 jumped up. I signaled him from the end of the corridor.

  Gerry turned, unwillingly turned. He looked my way just as two of our local police-Officers Lovchik and Harriss-pushed open the fire door that sealed off the staircase behind me. I didn’t see them and was shocked at first that my wave caused such an extreme reaction in Gerry.

  His hair stiffened. His body lifted like a hot-air balloon filling suddenly. Behind him there was a wide, tall window. Gerry opened it and sent the screen into thin air with an elegant chorus girl kick.

  Then he followed the screen, squeezing himself unbelievably through the frame like a fat rabbit disappearing down a hole. It was three stories down to the cement and asphalt parking lot.

  Officers Lovchik and Harriss gained the window. The nurses followed.

  I slipped through the fire exit and took the back stairs down into the parking lot, believing I would find him stunned and broken there.

  But Gerry had chosen his window with exceptional luck, for the officers had parked their car directly underneath. Gerry landed just over the driver’s seat, caving the roof into the steering wheel. He bounced off the hood of the car and then, limping, a bit dazed perhaps, straddled his bike. Out of duty, Lovchik released several rounds into the still trees below him. The reports were still echoing when I reached the front of the building.

  I was just in time to see Gerry Nanapush, emboldened by his godlike leap and recovery, pop a whee lie and disappear between the neat shrubs that marked the entrance to the hospital, Two weeks later Dot and her girl, who was finally named Shawn, like most girls born that year, came back to work at the scales.

  Things went on as they had before, except that Shawn kept us occupied during the long hours. She was large, of course, and had a sturdy pair of lungs she used often. When she cried, she screwed her face into fierce baby wrinkles and would not be placated with sugar tits or pacifiers. Dot unzipped her parka halfway, pulled her blouse up, and let her nurse for what seemed like hours.

  We could scarcely believe her appetite. Dot was a diligent producer of milk, however. Her breasts, like overfilled inner tubes, strained at her nylon blouses. Sometimes when she thought no one was looking, Dot rose and carried them in the crooks of her arms, for her shoulders were growing bowed beneath their weight.

  The trucks came in on the hour, or half hour. I heard the rush of air brakes, gears grinding only inches from my head. It occurred to me that although I measured many tons every day, I would never know how heavy a ton was unless it fell on me. I wasn’t lonely now that Dot had returned. The season would end soon, and we wondered what had happened to Gerry.

  There were only a few weeks left of work when we heard that Gerry was caught again. He’d picked the wrong reservation to hide on-Pine Ridge.

  As always, it was overrun with federal agents and armored vehicles.

  Weapons were stashed everywhere and easy to acquire. Gerry got himself a weapon. Two men tried to arrest him. Gerry would not go along, and when he started to run and the shooting started, Gerry shot and killed a clean shaven man with dark hair and light eyes, a state trooper, a man whose picture was printed in all the papers.

  They sent Gerry to prison in Marion, Illinois. He was placed in the control unit. He receives visitors in a room where no touching is allowed, where the voice is carried by phone, glances meet through sheets of Plexiglas, and no children will ever be engendered.

  Dot and I continued to work the last weeks together. Once we weighed baby Shawn. We unlatched her little knit suit, heavy as armor, and bundled her in a light, crocheted blanket. Dot went into the shack to adjust the weights. I stood there with Shawn.

  She was such a solid child, she seemed heavy as lead in my arms.

  busy, I placed her on the ramp between the wheel sights and held her steady for a moment, then took my hands slowly away. She stared calmly into the rough distant sky. She did not flinch when the wind came from every direction, wrapping us tight enough to squeeze the very breath from a stone. She was so dense with life, such a powerful distillation of Dot and Gerry, it seemed she might weigh about as much as any load.

  But that was only a thought, of course. For as it turned out, she was too light and did not register at all.

  da CROWN OF THORNS r U a S (1981) A month after June died Gordie took the first drink, and then the need was on him like a hook in his jaw, tipping his wrist, sending him out with needles piercing his hairline, his aching hands.

  From the beginning it was his hands that made him drink. They remembered things his mind could not-curve of hip and taut breast.

  They remembered farther back, to the times he spent, with June when the two were young. They had always been together, like brother and sister, stealing duck eggs, blowing crabgrass between their thumbs, chasing cows. They got in trouble together.

  They fought but always made up easy and quick, until they were married.

  His hands remembered things he forced his mind away from how they flew out from his sides in rage so sudden that he could not control the force and the speed of their striking. He’d been a mom”,.” boxer in the Golden Gloves. But what his hands remembered now were the times they struck June.

  They remembered this while they curled around the gold colored can of beer he had begged down the road at Eli’s.

  “You gone too far now,” Ell said. Gordie knew he was sitting at his Uncle Ell’s table again because the orange spots in the oilcloth were there beneath his eyes. Ell’s voice came from the soft pure blackness that stretched out in all directions from the lighted area around the beer can. Gordie’s hands felt unclean. The can felt cold and pure.

  It was as though his hands were soiling something never touched before.

  The way the light fell it was as though the can were lit on a special altar.

  “I’m contaminated,” Gordie said.

  “You sure are. ” Eli spoke somewhere beyond sight. “You’re going to land up in the hospital.”

  That wasn’t what he’d meant, Gordle struggled to say, but he was distracted suddenly by the size of his hands. So big. Strong.

  “Look at that,” said Cordle wonderingly, opening and closing his fist.

  “If only they’d let me fight the big one, huh? If only they’d gave me a chance.”

  “You did fight the big one,” said Eli. “You got beat.”

  “That’s right,” said Gordic. “it wasn’t even no contest. I wasn’t even any good.”

  “You forget those things,” said Eli. He was moving back and forth behind the chair.

  “Eat this egg. I fixed it over easy.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Gordie, “or this bun either. I’m too sick.”

  His hands would not stay still. He had noticed this. They managed to do an alarming variety of things while he was not looking.

  Now they had somehow crushed the beer can into a shape. He took his hands away and studied the can in its glowing spotlight.

  The can was bent at the waist and twisted at the hips like the torso of a woman. It rocked slightly side to side in the breeze from the window.

  “She’s empty!” he realized suddenly, repossessing the can. “I don’t think it was full to begin with. I couldn’t’ve. ” “What?”

  asked Eli. Patiently, his face calm, he spooned the egg and fork-toasted bread into his mouth. His head was brown and showed through the thin gray stubble of his crew cut. A pale light lifted and fell in the room. It was six A.M. “Want some?” Eli offered steaming coffee in a green plastic mug, warped and stained. It was the same color as his work clothes.

  Gordie shook his head and tur
ned away Eli drank from the cup himself “You wouldn’t have another someplace that you forgot?” said Gordie sadly.

  “No,” said Eli.

  “I’ve got to make a raise then,” said Gordie.

  The two men sat quietly, then Gordie shook the can, put it down, and walked out of the door. Once outside, he was hit by such a burst of determination that He almost walked normally, balanced in one wheel rut, down Eli’s little road. Some of his thick hair stuck straight up in a peak, and some was crushed flat.

  His face sagged. He’d hardly eaten that week, and his pants flapped beneath his jacket, cinched tight, the zipper shamefully unzipped.

  Eli watched from his chair, sipping the coffee to warm his blood. He liked the window halfway open although the mornings were still cold.

  When June lived with him she’d slept on the cot beside the stove, a lump beneath the quilts and army blankets when he came in to get her up for the government school bus.

  Sometimes they’d sat together looking out the same window into cold blue dark. He’d hated to send her off at that lonely hour. Her coat was red. All her clothes were from the nuns. Once he’d bought June a plastic dish of bright bath-oil beads. Before he could stop her she had put one in her mouth, not understanding what it was. She’d swallowed it down, too. Then, when she’d come home, started crying out of disappointment and shame, bubbles had popped from her lips and nose.

  Eli laughed out loud, then stopped. He saw her face and the shocked look. He sat there thinking of her without smiling and watched Gordie disappear.

  Two cars passed Gordie on the road but neither stopped. It was too early to get anything in town, but he would have appreciated a ride to his house. It was a mile to his turnoff, and his need grew worse with each step he took. He shook with the cold, with the lack. The world had narrowed to this strip of frozen mud. The trees were stung to either side in a dense mist, and the crackle his feet made breaking ice crystals was bad to hear. From time to time he stopped to let the crackle die down. He put his hands to his mouth to breathe on them.