Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  “Apple, Apple?”

  “What Banana?”

  “Over here, Apple!”

  That was what he and his buddy, who King said was a Kentucky Boy, used to call each other, in code.

  “How come you didn’t just use names?” I asked between gulps.

  “What difference?”

  “The enemy. ” He glared at me. He was getting into the fantasy.

  “They’re a small people. ” He put his hand out at Howard’s height.

  “Hard to see. ” I sat back. My whole middle was comfortably soaked in milk.

  “That’s all right,” he said, waving my imaginary pleading off.

  “Some other time. I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “All right,” I said. “I understand. Let’s play cards.”

  Anything to get his mind off all that fun he had missed in Vietnam.

  Anything not to think what might happen if the army caught up with me.

  What they did with the Lipsha Morrissey type I didn’t want to ask. I ‘just knew I didn’t want to be a member of some fruit bowl in the jungle, not to mention of how they crazed your mind in training camp.

  Not for me.

  There was a pack of cards on the windowsill, that window looking down into the sad gray patch of space. I thought perhaps they should have closed it off. That shaft went through all the way to the ground floor.

  You could hear ghostly doors slamming, voices in the entryway.

  It was supposed to be elegant once, but now the soft and threafful dusk of it gave me the creeps.

  Poker?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Five-card stud.

  “Deuces wild.”

  I like the deuce wild. I like that puny little card becoming strategy.

  We started playing. The dark came sifting gently down, so we put the lights on. The place seemed almost cozy when there wasn’t any reason to have windows anyway. I was all full of milk and cereal like a good child. The meal had perked me up; Lynette made coffee, and although it tasted like dishwater run through a car battery, I sipped it gratefully.

  If this evening around mat how.” the table, with King in a state of rare normality, was the most brotherly we’d ever get, I decided it was enough. One thing you’ll notice. I did not let on I knew that both our backgrounds were sprung from the same source. And I hadn’t asked about Gerry yet. I felt better keeping it to myself For the moment, I didn’t even care to flaunt that I belonged. Belonging was a matter of deciding to.

  Through many trials I had seen this to be true. I decided I belonged, whether or not King thought I did. I was a real kid now, or halfway real. I crimped myself an ace.

  I’d had to learn the knack of cheating at cards when I worked as an attendant at the Senior Citizens. Otherwise they’d beat your hide. It wasn’t cheating to them, anyway, just second nature. The games were cheerfully cutthroat vicious, and the meanest player of them all was Lulu. She’d learned to crimp, that is, to mark your cards with little scratches and folds as you play, when she started losing her eyesight.

  It was just supposed to keep her even in the game, she said. I learned to crimp from her before I ever knew she was my grandmother, which might explain why I took to it with such enormous ease. The blood tells. I suppose there is a gene for crimping in your strings of cells.

  At any rate, I was getting to know the cards pretty good. I always like to keep my eye on where my jacks are going in the deck, because other people like to call the one-eyed jacks wild. I got aS Oft Spot fDTthe ‘ack. The jack of hearts is me-who doesn’t hold a sword in his hand, but a banana peel.

  I raised King a moon. We wasn’t playing for change but bits of cereal.

  There wasn’t any change around and he was short on matches, so we used the marshmallow bits that came in the box.

  Stars were a hundred dollars, hearts fifty, moons were twenty, and the diamond was ten. The pieces of cereal themselves was all worth one.

  That’s how it went. Every so often we would munch a little from the pot, to keep us going.

  He took me with a full, swept the marshmallows to his side, home.-, and threw them one by one in his mouth. We started over again.

  In the next room there was some show on with lots of guns burping. I wondered how to bring up Gerry.

  Again, I decided to take the bull by the teeth. King was dealing.

  “So you knew Gerry Nanapush when you was both in Stillwater,” I said.

  The cards spurted evenly from his hands. He didn’t miss one.

  “Oh Gee,” he said with an awkward boasting laugh. “We were like this. ” He put the last of his cards down, and held up his first two fingers, clenched together.

  “That is, we were buddies until those asshole Winnebagos started spreading rumors about me.”

  “Oh?” I tried leading him. I was out of stars and betting hearts.

  But he wasn’t going to get no further into that. I waited a little while before I tried anything else.

  “Well is it true,” I said, “they have him in maximum security with the real big-time criminals?”

  “Not that I heard,” King said, for sure now uncomfortable. “I heard he’s back in Mandan. It’s … not all that secure.”

  King pouted his cheeks and pushed his moons over, I asked him if he thought Gerry had really killed that smokey or was it pinned on him the way so many people said after the trial.

  “I really wouldn’t know,” was all King muttered.

  I wished he would have told me, because that’s one thing I really wondered now that Gerry was my father. Had he really cut a living man down? I wanted to know what kind of seed I had sprung from. The television guns were chattering. We played in silence, and it came to me after a while that something was definitely wrong and agitating King.

  A couple of times he blurted bits of a tuneless song as though he was keeping his mind from touching a sore subject. He lit his Marlboros one off the other’s end, and sometimes left two burning in an ashtray. He couldn’t have been so deeply absorbed in a game where the stakes was a bowl of cereal, so I had to wonder what was wrong. I had a clue it was related to my questioning him on Gerry. After that, I’d had trouble letting him win a single game.

  Long about nine he got to really looking jumpy. He was wiping beads of sweat off his upper lip, biting on his thumb. Finally he got it out he wanted to go in the next room, catch the news. So we quit playing.

  Lynette was curled up on the couch underneath an old coat, and the boy Howard was sitting rigid in the chair.

  Newsbreak came on, sure enough, and that’s when I had my inkling of what was bothering King, what was strange here all along, maybe even why he was on the wagon.

  He had to keep his wits about him.

  The newscaster was talking. “Federal criminal Gerry Nanapush escaped while being transferred to the North Dakota State Penitentiary. He is believed to be at large in the tri-state region.

  Nanapush is six feet, four inches and weighs three hundred and twenty pounds. He was last seen wearing a ripped black nylon jacket, jeans, and a pair of white leather running shoes with red stripes. Nanapush may be armed and should be considered dangerous. ” I whooped. “Treat with caution! Handle with care! Armed and dangerous Chippewa!”

  I looked at King. “Can’t keep an Indian down!” I said. “Right on brother!”

  That was when I noticed King and Lynette weren’t laughing or excited in the least. They said,

  “Shut up,” in unison and turned back to the television. I was hardly bothered though. I couldn’t have cared less.

  I only cared that I’d known that this was happening and now it was happening. All signs pointed to it.

  For hours we sat as if paralyzed, there in the blue smoke wreaths and fissures of drifting dust. I was happy in the television radiance. They were not. All four of us were waiting, though, for what happened next.

  I was listening past the shows, past the noise and jingles, as hard as I could. Th
at is why I heard. I was not surprised. I heard it clear with my extra special sense. Down on the first floor a door shut softly. steps paused at the bottom of the skylight shaft. There was a delicate scrabbling of mice beneath the stars, and a foothold was suddenly gained. In my mind’s eye I saw him spring into the close air.

  The copper pipes bowed outward in his hand.

  The hot ones, wrapped in asbestos, ringed or joined every three feet, led up the inside of the dusk-filled hollow shaft. I didn’t have to look down the fake window in order to know he was climbing. I thought the whole building must have heard.

  I thought so, but when I glanced over at King and Lynette they were still gazing slack-jawed into the ions like their futures was prefigured in the flashing shapes. They didn’t blink when he knocked an ashtray off the windowsill in the kitchen. They didn’t start when his tender footsteps slid along the warped floor. Only when he stood, enormous, gentle, completely blocking the silvery rays, only when he pointed his hand at them like a gun, did they stop drifting and bunch themselves in sense. Their shapes detached from the couch even as the boy’s shape flattened into the chair. I looked down at the man’s feet.

  They glowed, mushroom pale in the dark. The cushioned jogging soles were so radiant and spongy he seemed to float softly toward us.

  The famous Chippewa who had songs wrote for him, whose face was on protest buttons, whose fate was argued over in courts of law, who sent press releases to the world, sat down at the dirtiest kitchen table in Minnesota with his son and his cellmate, and picked up a deck of cards.

  A marked deck.

  For the marked men, which was all of us.

  I was marked for pursuit by authority as was my father, but King was marked in another entire way. As Gerry explained in a quiet voice that had no business to issue from a bulk that could scarcely squeeze between the table and the wall, King was a squealer, an informer. He’d got Gerry’s confidence and then betrayed it.

  “I’m trusting,” Gerry said to me, shaking his head, blinking his mild eyes, “especially of all my Indian relations. I confided to him all my plans to escape once, never knowing he was an apple. ” That is: red on the outside, white on the inside.

  “Your friend here, this King Kashpaw, was the King of Stoolies. ” I looked at King. Here was a man you could call sick with one quick glance. His face was gray as lead, his eyes was darting side to side, his lips looked numb. He kept on licking them with dry clucking sounds.

  Gerry had maneuvered things so King sat between us, hedged in, at the back of the wall behind the little pile of Lucky Charms.

  “Why don’t you eat them,” he said to King. “You’ll need it.

  “Luck of the Irish. See where it got them,” I said.

  Gerry looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “I’m Lipsha Morrissey.”

  His slant black brows stayed up. His long hair was pulled back in a tail, and his thin black mustache hung down his lip, so that his teeth flashed out only when he grinned very broad. His grin flashed now, wolf white and sharp, in his big placid face. Until he grinned like that he looked asleep. Suddenly he tossed his hair back and bust out laughing.

  He laughed a good long time. It was a loud joyful comforting sound to Lipsha Morrissey, but to King and Lynette it must have been harrowing.

  The way he laughed, and then the slow method his eyes took me in by notches, when he was back to himself again, gave me reason to believe that he knew whose son he looked at.

  I was certain, at any rate, that he was my dad. His nose was even bigger than mine, but squashed in the same places. It was his hands that had really tipped me off.

  All the time he’d been talking, grinning, even laughing, they had the cards playing in and out of their fingers. They had a life all unto themselves that was spent in knowledge of the cards, and I knew just what gave them that knowledge. He had a form of the touch. Behind the bars, though, he hadn’t much chance to use it on humans. So his hands had poured their talents into understanding the decks. He cast his eyes down every once in a while, briefly, to see the face that his hands were memorizing. His fingers moved around the paper edges, found the nail nicks. His wolf smile glinted. There was a system to the crimping that he recognized. Those crimps were like a signature-his mother’s.

  I’d only learned Lulu’s system, not restyled it.

  “She taught me,” I said.

  He only nodded, and his teeth showed again.

  He looked at King, who was staring across the room. King’s eyes were locked with Lynette’s, and hers were paralyzed. She was squeezing Howard on the points of her bosom. The boy was saying over and over with monotonous grit,

  “Let me down. Let me down. Let me down. ” “Let him down,” said Gerry.

  Instantly she dropped her arms. The boy landed in a pile of Bop hair and poking limbs. He got up, brushed his T-shirt off, and went back to sit by the television. Lynette moved b-ckwa,d India V.—VE 1W eyes were wild and wary as a rat’s. It was the first time I’d ever seen her with no words for what was going on.

  “I’m interrupting here,” said Gerry. “Please excuse my butting in without knocking.” He knocked on the table now.

  “Deal me in?”

  “We were playing five-card stud.”

  “Stud. That’s not quite appropriate for this one here,” he said smoothly, indicating King. “Five-card punk’s more like it.” King smiled a sick, tight grin and took up his hand of cards.

  “Tell your wife to take her knuckles off that dirty fry pan which she means to sling at my head,” Gerry calmly continued.

  Lynette took her hand out of the sink with a little squeak and rushed past us. We heard her pick up the phone in the next room then slam it down again. Presumably the lines was no longer properly connected.

  “We must decide,” said Gerry seriously, taking a ragged toothpick from his breast pocket and sticking it in his mouth, “what we are playing for.”

  King felt much better, or seemed to, when he glanced at his cards.

  “I got money,” He said. “I got money in my account.”

  “We’re not playing for your rubber check,” Gerry said. “You probably used your payoff up by now. We won’t play for money.

  But we got to play for something, otherwise there’s no game.

  King sat there bracing up his shoulders. He was coming back to his own.

  “Aw c’mon,” he said. “Who told you I turned evidence. I never did.”

  “I heard the tapes,” said Gerry, with a pursed smile full of snake’s milk. “Tapes of things I told nobody but you, my friend.

  Yes, we got to play for something. We got to. have high stakes, otherwise there is no game.”

  “What did you come here for?” blurted King. He tried to laugh If -Mod but he had to put his cards down to hide his shaking hands.

  “Whaddyou want?”

  “I want to play,” said Gerry very clearly and slowly, as if to a person who spoke a different language. “I came to play.”

  I had been sitting there, “just listening.

  “Let’s play for the car,” I said to King. “Let’s play for the Firebird you bought with June’s insurance.”

  At the mention of my mom, Gerry’s face got stiff around the edges.

  “June’s insurance,” he said wonderingly. I could see how his mind leapt back, making connections, jumping at the intersection points of our lives: his romance with June. The baby given to Grandma Kashpaw.

  June’s son by Gordie. King. Her running off. Me growing up. And then at last June walking toward home in the Easter snow that, I saw now, had resumed failing softly in this room.

  I could tell Gerry had not come here with precise notions on revenge, even though the testimony King gave had cost him years. Gerry Nanapush was curious and plagued by memory.

  He’d come here out of these. Only the urge to see the rat’s life with his own eyes could have caused him to scale copper pipe
s four stories up and squeeze through that small kitchen window.

  Only that curiosity and the urge to see someone again, or the hint of someone, the resemblance of June, could have brought him.

  Now, however, dream and curiosity had found their reason.

  There was the car, June’s car, which was a route of clean escape. If Gerry won the car, I knew I’d stay there and keep King strict company until my father managed to cross the border into Canada.

  “Let’s play for the car,” Gerry agreed. “June’s car.”

  But King didn’t want to play for the car.

  “It’s mine,” he said.

  -a-c “No, it’s really June’s,” explained Gerry. “Any one of us could be keeping it for June. ” “You don’t get it,” said King. There was a struggle going on inside him, the sense of what her car meant to him rising through a deep unwilling fog. But in the end he couldn’t voice what he felt.

  “It’s not fair,” he muttered. “Just ain’t fair.”

  “What is fair?” Gerry picked up the cards, shuffled, dealt them out again. “Society? Society is like this card game here, cousin.

  We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

  We picked our cards up.

  “Well this really ain’t fair,” said King. “This is ridiculous.” His neck was swelling up slightly, showing big veins. “By God,” he said, “this ain’t no way to treat an American vet! I never dodged it like you.” He nearly spat in vexation. But Gerry’s teeth just showed, crooked and gleaming white.

  “Glad I didn’t have to go,” he said. “They couldn’t pay me enough to commit their murders.”

  He sighed and raked the cards back into his palms.

  “If it helps,” he said to King, “don’t think of it as losing a car but as saving your own snatching neck. ” King went all rigid. Gerry was already serving two consecutive life sentences. He’d have to die and be resurrected twice before he’d quit the joint.

  “Deal and call,” King said in a choked voice. “Deal five and show.”

  Gerry shoved the deck across the table to me and nodded that it was my deal. His face was cool and serene, like the pictures of those Chinese gods. So I shuffled carefully. I saw the patterns of it happen in my mind. I dealt the patterns out with perfect ease, keeping strict to Lulu’s form.