Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  What could a sneak thief have to say anyhow? I thought.

  I was drove to this crime by mass confusion. My soul was going to get whaled on for sure, if it was not already damned. As I walked out of that room, I justified. I justified my criminal act by being so unhappy I could die of it. Confusion. It was a bleak sadness sweeping through my brain. Sirens blowing. Random anger, which had never been my style before.

  More than anything, I resented how they all had known.

  So that’s all there was to it, pretty much. I rode the bus across the missile bases and the sunflower fields until I came to our most popular border town, and then shame hit but good. Shame rolled over me in waves and a tidal wash. I was buried in it like a sink hold I took a room in a hotel for old veterans and, like them, I spent my daylight sifting in the window drinking 3.2 beer and my nights in the lobby watching cop shows. Shame had me by the neck. But at last, when it had played out to squirts and dribbles, I was able to look around me.

  I was able to walk the streets like the younger derelicts.

  I walked back and forth then, all day, only vaguely curious about what I would do next. As I walked, I kept returning to one particular window.

  In it was the pictures of some clean-cut boys with monkey wrenches standing among a bank of red flowers.

  There was a caption. It said:

  JOIN TODAY’S ACTION ARMY

  Eventually, I walked into the office behind those grinning boys. Two shakes later, before I had thought twice, I was signing my name on a wad of paper.

  , After I had signed up for my monkey wrench and red flower, I went back to the hotel and watched Efrem Zimbalist junior persecute some drug addicts. I happened to take a close look around me at one point, and then I realized something. I realized that if I went in the army, and then if I got lucky enough to come out, I would be a veteran like these guys-gumming the stubble on their chins, dreaming of long-hocked medals, curling up around their secret war wounds to comfort a lonesome night.

  Not much You never knew who you were. That’s one reason why I told you.

  I thought it was a knowledge that could make or break you.”

  Again I sat there in total silence.

  “Well,” she said, “make or break?”

  I didn’t know. I was still trying to compass it all out. It was the tax ingest problem my brain had ever had to work with. I know that Grandma Kashpaw tried to give me help. She used up her cans of commodity beef to keep my strength up. She fought Old Lady Blue at the mission bundle sales to acquire a Stetson practically new except for a burnt hole through the crown. One night she said that she didn’t trust the banks no more and showed me where she’d stuck her money. She had it all tied up in a little pink hankie and stuck amid her underskirts.

  “I’m an old woman,” she said. “What do I need with this?”

  Maybe I was mis constructing but the more I thought about the way she looked at me when she said that, the more I felt like Grandma was offering me something. Bus fare, maybe, the chance to get away from here in my confusion. Whatever it was she really meant, I finally did the wicked act you might have already been expecting.

  I stole into Grandma Kashpaw’s apartment and sneaked the hankie full of money from her drawer.

  As my hand was feeling for that hankie, I heard her breathing in the dark bed, pretending to be asleep. I was doing what she was afraid of and running away. More than anything I wanted to say I’d get back as soon as I could, reassure her somehow, but I couldn’t. My throat choked up.

  What could a sneak thief have to say anyhow? I thought.

  I was drove to this crime by mass confusion. My soul was going to get whaled on for sure, if it was not already damned. As I walked out of that room, I justified. I justified my criminal act by being so unhappy I could die of it. Confusion. It was a bleak sadness sweeping through my brain. Sirens blowing. Random anger, which had never been my style before.

  More than anything, I resented how they all had known.

  So that’s all there was to it, pretty much. I rode the bus across the missile bases and the sunflower fields until I came to our most popular border town, and then shame hit but good. Shame rolled over me in waves and a tidal wash. I was buried in it like a sink hold I took a room in a hotel for old veterans and, like them, I spent my daylight sitting in the window drinking 3.2 beer and my nights in the lobby watching cop shows. Shame had me by the neck. But at last, when it had played out to squirts and dribbles, I was able to look around me.

  I was able to walk the streets like the younger derelicts.

  I walked back and forth then, all day, only vaguely curious about what I would do next. As I walked, I kept returning to one particular window.

  In it was the pictures of some clean-cut boys with monkey wrenches standing among a bank of red flowers.

  There was a caption. It said:

  JOIN TODAY’S ACTION ARMY

  Eventually, I walked into the office behind those grinning boys. Two shakes later, before I had thought twice, I was signing my name on a wad of paper.

  I After I had signed up for my monkey wrench and red flower, I went back to the hotel and watched Efrem Zimbalist junior persecute some drug addicts. I happened to take a close look around me at one point, and then I realized something. I realized that if I went in the army, and then if I got lucky enough to come out, I would be a veteran like these guys-gumming the stubble on their chins, dreaming of long-hocked medals, curling up around their secret war wounds to comfort a lonesome night.

  Not much in that, less than nothing. It gave me a sick chill to think of ending up here, like foam th rowed off the waves of the lake, spin drift, all warped and cracked like junk and left to rot.

  This here was yesterday’s action army, I thought.

  Fear clenched down. If I wanted to evade the consequences, I was going to have to hightail it and run.

  But where to? That was my problem. I couldn’t bear going back home to the rez, where every damn Kashpaw cousin knew the secret of my background all those years. I was too galled. And yet I really didn’t have nowhere else. There was no clear direction to follow, nothing to send me anywhere, until, as in this sort of case, I decided to ask myself point-blank what exactly I wanted.

  The answer came quick and surprising.

  “I want to meet my dad,” I said aloud.

  An old Sioux vet who said he was at Iwo Jima with Ira Hayes passed me a bagged flask of whiskey underneath the sign PLEASE DON’T DRINK HERE.

  THIS is YOUR LOBBY. I took a long pull, slugged it down. Then I started crying. That is, tears came out. I made no sound.

  “it often has that effect on me too, boy,” the old man said. “It cleans you out.”

  So I let the tears fall, my hands shredding the bag, until the face of Old Grand Dad was revealed and the clerk told us to take it outside.

  By then I was half smashed. Everything seemed to hang in a sharp-edged silence. It was there, before the peeled, kicked-up doorway of the Rudolph Hotel that I got the word on what I should do.

  “Ira’s favorite brand,” said my friend, gazing tenderly at the empty bottle. “What the hell.”

  As he walked away he threw it over his shoulder, and it hit me smack between the eyes.

  Now as you know, as I have told you, I am sometimes blessed with the talent to touch the sick and heal their individual problems without even knowing what they are. I have some powers which, now that I think of it, was likely come down from Old Man Pillager.

  And then there is the newfound fact of insight I inherited from Lulu, as well as the familiar teachings of Grandma Kashpaw on visioning what comes to pass within a lump of tinfoil.

  It was all these connecting threads of power, you see, that gave me the flash of vision when I was knocked in the skull by Ira’s favorite brand.

  No concrete shit barn prison’s built that can hold a Chippewa, I thought.

  And I realized instantly that was a direct, locally known quote of my father, Gerry
Nanapush, famous politicking hero, dangerous armed criminal, judo expert, escape artist, charismatic member of the American Indian Movement, and smoker of many pipes of kinnikinnick in the most radical groups.

  That was … Dad.

  According to my vision, he would make a break for freedom soon.

  So that is how I got to the Twin Cities. After I got off the Greyhound I just started following the Indians whenever I saw one, and eventually ended up where I belonged. Now I was sitting across from King.

  Let’s get one thing straight: I never had much use for King. He did me dirt. Yet we know there were reasons to visit him. For one thing, I just had to see him knowing what I knew. Maybe things would change now that we were formally brothers. The other thing was that King had done time with Gerry Nanapush. I didn’t think King knew Gerry was my father, but I knew there was some connection, a strong connection.” maybe strong enough to lead me onward in my quest. I had to get down to the bottom of my heritage.

  now-&AMM King once threatened to slice me up with a bread knife. I didn’t bold that against him, since it was done during one of his frequent leaves of sense, but what I did hold against him was the manner he always took toward me.

  “You little orphant,” he’d say when we were young. “Who said you get a pork chop for dinner? That’s for the real children.” Or he’d steal my chunk of Spam. It didn’t matter what we were having, he’d steal mine for the sheer spite,

  “I’ll thank you, hand over your Koolaid too,” he’d say. “Only the real children get that.”

  And so forth, on and on. He did his best to make me feel like a beggar at the table of life. I was supposed to cat the real children’s crumbs.

  He lorded over me until I got about his size and really let fly once.

  I’m not a regular strong guy, but push me too far and I might just go haywire. Punching and rolling, biting and kicking, I tore into him. He still beat me that time, but at least King learned I was no fun to tangle with. I wonder now why I never made sense of what happened after that. June ran out of the house and broke us up. And then, even though I was the one on the bottom, she beat my britches with uncommon vigor. I hadn’t done King lasting harm. But I guess I had done her some.

  King must have been ten years old when I punched his face.

  Since that time we’d come on the verge of blows, but he never harassed me the way he used to do at the table, and I in turn stayed out of his path as much as possible.

  Now you know, when it comes to life, I stayed innocent for many years. I stayed simple. But I could not afford to be this anymore. I was on the run. I looked over at him sitting across the table. He was still King who had hounded me with dim conceptions. But he had changed. His bones had sunk back in his flesh.

  The booze was telling on him. Wear and tear of being mean had worn his temper so it balanced on a sliver. His eyes had a strange mocking glint.

  how.-,

  “Have some pop, Sad Sack,” he said, shoving

  “Just ing me a can.

  kidding. Haw. Today I’m on the wagon, ain’t that right?”

  “I guess you better be,” said Lynette. Her lip was puffed up.

  She had a surly look about her. Maybe they were fighting or maybe it was the deranging effects of this apartment. I had never seen a place remotely so depressing; even the inside of the Rudolph at least had windows. This place was like a long dark closet. The narrow rooms was laid in a row. The air was smoky and thick. The walls was a most disturbing shade of mustard green. One side you could hear people trampling up and down the hall, while the other led out into a dim-lighted area. This was not outdoors, but a well with spooky gray light from the dirty skylight on the roof I should mention, however, there was a couple attempts at doing something to reclaim this twilight zone.

  A corn plant In a flour bucket sagged like a drunk propped up a wall.

  One chubby t cactus, a fist in a glass, threatened you to touch it.

  There was the skin of a real live alligator nailed on the closet door.

  In the next room, over the television set, they had one of them velvet rugs that depict bulldogs playing cards.

  I had gone to check the next room out.

  “This here’s nice,” I said to Little King. The boy was glaring at

  TV.

  He didn’t so much as look at me.

  “Little King,” I said. “Hey there, it’s me.”

  “The don’t call himself Little King anymore,” Lynette said from the kitchen. “He thinks his name’s Howard.”

  “Howard?”

  The boy looked at me and nodded.

  “He won’t claim his dad no more,” said King, standing in the doorway.

  “He’s too good.”

  Which was true enough. You could see how smart that Howard was. The boy’s black eyes had fairly swallowed me up in their short glance. He was a skinny little kid, with pea kish hair the light brown color that Lynette’s was when it had been natural.

  The contrast between his light coloring and those deep black eyes was what made him so startling to look at. He turned back to the set.

  His face light up for a moment, captured in the drama of old cartoon Coyote getting blown to bits for the fifty-millionth time by the Road Runner.

  “Man that was decent,” he said in a false little squeaky voice.

  They showed the coyote all blasted and frayed.

  I always thought, personally, the coyote deserved to roast that chipper bird on a spit.

  “I feel sorry for old Wiley Coyote,” I said.

  The kid looked at me like I was a sad case.

  “That don’t matter,” he said. “They still blow him up.”

  Or run him over with garbage trucks. That’s what they did next.

  When he was flat as a pancake someone rolled him in a tube and mailed him C. 0. D. to Tijuana.

  It was just early evening, a typical Sunday night for the King Kasbpaw family. I decided to put them out for dinner at the very least. I’d get paid back for the pork chops and Koolaid King had screwed me out of as a child. I could see my presence was not exactly welcome to them, however. They seemed to have something weighty on their minds. They kept sighing and looking out their windows, which led down the air shaft. No one appreciated me asking Lynette whether I could help with dinner. She hadn’t actually looked like she was going to fix any. She sat back at the kitchen table, flicked her little red lighter, and blasted a ball of smoke in the air.

  “I’m on strike,” she said. “Tonight I’m improving my mind.”

  Across the table, King closed his eyes and popped a 7-Up.

  “She thinks that’s funny,” he said, “which it is.”

  She had a long blue sweater on and a blouse that looked. as if it was ripped whole from a shower curtain. There were magazines behind her in a cardboard box. She grabbed up a fistful of pages JAN.

  how.-, and went in to sit by the television. Me and King tipped back the 7-Ups.

  Pretty soon the boy came in and opened the refrigerator. He took out a carton of milk and put it on the cupboard. Then he got himself a bowl and spoon. He poured the bowl full of milk. Then he reached under the sink and took out a box of cereal.

  “He does it all backwards,” observed King. “First he should put the cereal in his bowl, then the milk.”

  Howard didn’t say nothing. He carried the bowl and the box of cereal very carefully in to the television. It was like he was going to make a religious offering. He and his mother would be huddled to the box, sitting there like cold spooks. I almost laughed. I was so tired from the bus that my mind was running wild. I asked,

  “Do you ever think about that summer you came to stay with Grandma Kashpaw? When you were little?”

  “Not too much.”

  I wondered what the hell he did think about. And then I thought there was no harm in asking.

  “Well what do you think about?” I asked.

  You could have knocked me over with a straw at the way he start
ed to answer that question. It was a big fat surprise, I’ll tell you, to know that King Kashpaw could do much more than growl, whine, throw his weight around. I guess being on the wagon brought him out or something.

  “Minnows,” he said. “It’s like I’m always stuck with the goddamn minnows. Every time I work my way up-say I’m next in line for the promotion-they shaft me. It’s always something they got against me. I move on. Entry level. Stuck down at the bottom with the minnows.”

  He grit his teeth, picked the warm can up in his hand, then crushed it softly so it gurgled.

  “I’m gonna rise,” he said. “One day I’m gonna rise. They can’t keep down the Indians. Right on brother, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I couldn’t help it; the laugh behind my face was like a sneeze.

  He’d called me brother.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “My God,” he said. “You’d think the Indians that got up there would look out for their own! Once they start earning twenty-five, thirty grand they move off in a suburb and forget about their cousins. They look down on you. Hey. You ever heard of the food chain?”

  “I’m hungry,” I said.

  “You been smoking dope? Dopehead. Listen. The big fish eats the little fish and the little fish eats the littler fish. The one with the biggest mouth eats any darrin old fish he wants.”

  I got up. They had another box of cereal under the counter.

  Lucky Charms. I poured some milk in my bowl and then dumped the cereal in, like Howard.

  “Yeah,” said King, “go ahead and eat anything you want. Like I was telling you, I was in the Marines. You can’t run from them bastards, man. They’ll get you every time. I was in Nam.”

  That was a fat lie, but I sat there and listened. The cereal was sweet, good, like candy, and the milk was filling. I lapped it up. I had a desperate hungry craving. I kept pouring it in and feeding my face fast as I could. He hardly noticed. He was off into his own mind.

  “BINH,” he popped his lips. “BINH, BINH.”

  That was the sound of incoming fire exploding next to his head.