Love Medicine

by Louise Erdrich

  I dealt a pair to King.

  Gerry got a straight.

  And myselP I dealt myself a perfect family. A royal flush.

  We turned our hands over, showing them, and then there was a long strained pause.

  “I’ll take the keys,” I said.

  Gerry was rubbing his chin, a silent study.

  King took a long time working the keys off the ring. As he did so I took a deep breath and glanced up at my father.

  “I’ll drive,” I said, “wherever you want to go.”

  King threw the keys down, but I never heard them hit the table. I never heard them because between the throwing and the landing there was a thud on the door.

  “Open up! Police!”

  Now It was me paralyzed. The room went whirling. Awful fear of being trapped squeezed my middle. It was even worse than I ever imagined. I heard them tramping in the entryway and their voices echoing in the air shaft. I heard their booming voices, gravel clicking in their holsters, the champing at the door of the steel harnesses at their belts, and in my mind I saw their raw red hands forming in fists.

  For what seemed the longest time, we sat there stiff as bricks.

  Then someone moved. It was Howard. He came running from the next room on his toothpick legs.

  “Hold on! I’m coming,” he yelled. “He’s here!”

  The boy ran to the door, fumbled with the catch that was placed too high for him, screaming all the time,

  “He’s here!

  He’s here!”

  And how the boy had changed-gone from being a playground of flickering shadows to old age. He was suddenly a tiny, lined, gray grownup who threw himself in concentration up to the latch, screaming the name of his father.

  And you know, that was what scared me most. Him screaming his own dad’s name.

  “King’s here! King’s here!”

  I sat there like a lump on a log. This was it, I thought, this was the wages of everything we done. This was the wages of the father meeting up with the son and the ghost of a woman caught in the dark space between them. This was the wages. This was the sad fact.

  I couldn’t linger too long on sad facts though, for Howard finally got them in. He stood there wheezing and crying and pointing at King.

  I thought the police would leap across the table and collar Gerry, then tie me up, and I had just mustered up the courage to get arrested with a decent struggle when I noticed that the state police were still standing in the door. It hadn’t taken more than a quick look-see through that apartment for them to ascertain that Gerry wasn’t there.

  I whirled around.

  He was gone. Vanished. He’d been hoisted from his chair into thin space. There was nothing but air where my dad had been.

  My lips formed his name, but I never said it aloud. To this day I think he laid a finger beside his nose and went flying up the air shaft.

  That’s the only thing possible.

  The police were mumbling. King was answering.

  “Sorry for bothering you, sir,” they said. “Have a good evening.

  And then they shut the door and we were left there. It all happened so fast we felt stunned flat. I didn’t even have time for relief that they never asked about me. Howard was laying on the floor, stretched out, still as death. I knew he was playing dead. I would have in his shoes.

  I picked him up and I put him under the coat on the couch. It was a woman’s coat, an old plaid thing with one sleeve ripped loose and the lining split. It still held a sweet, fresh whiff of perfume. I smelled the woman’s comfort as I tucked the collar up around his neck.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You lost your head a minute. Go on and cry.”

  But there was no tears. He lay there stiff and watchful, ready for the hurt. The sense in his black eyes already had retreated to an unknown depth.

  “The registration,” I said to King. “The fucking registration.”

  Lynette lurched to the bread box; her teeth were chattering.

  She messed around among some crumpled papers and dried bread heels, and finally came up with the form. She put it on the table and made him sign it. I grabbed the keys. I folded the paper, put it in my pocket, and then I quit them without a word.

  The car was stove-in on the right bumper so that one headlight flared off to the side. I had seen there was nicks and dents in the beautiful finished skin. I ran my hand up the racy invert line of the hood as I drove the tangled highways in a general homeward direction. I had the windows open, needing good fresh air. I was free as a bird, as the blue wings burning on the hood. Night was gentle and flowing swiftly to either side. The buzzing yellow arc lamps of the city were soon left behind, and the air began turning bold and sweet with the smells of melting earth. I thought I’d drive straight through the night, cleaving the soft wet silence with my peacefulness. I thought I would never quit driving, it felt so good. I had a full tank and I was buzzed up with Lynette’s coffee and the power of events. I knew my dad would get away.

  He could fly. He could strip and flee and change into shapes of swift release. Owls and bees, two-toned Ramblers, buzzards, cottontails, and motes of dust. These forms was interchangeable with his. He was the clouds scudding over the moon, the wings of ducks banging in the slough, he was … I was waxing eloquent in my mind when all of a sudden the back end started knocking. I slowed down and it got louder, so I speeded up again and it got quiet. I thought it must be the jack not properly secured in the trunk. What else would I think? I started waxing off again. But then the knocking would start up, so I’d have to bear down and speed. It finally got me to the point where it was disrupting my concentration to make a sense of things. I didn’t want to stop, but I thought I’d have to just pull over and tie the jack in tight. So I stopped, and soon as I did I knew there was something strange going on, because the knocking started up fast and furious.

  I jumped out, not knowing what on earth to think. I thought there was some animal trapped inside there. I wouldn’t put it past King to throw a dog or something in his back trunk. The night was so dark. I didn’t know that it might not spring for my throat, so I held the key out very ginger when I put it in the trunk latch. I turned the key and jumped back. The hood sprang up.

  I couldn’t tell what was in there, but it was sure big, and loud-gulping, sighing, half gagging. I finally figured out that it was human, and rushed to drag the body out. As soon as he could speak, of course, I knew it was by a miracle none other than Gerry Nanapush. He was curled up tight as a baby in its mother’s stomach, wedged so thoroughly inside it took a struggle to get him loose.

  just about bought it there,” he gasped when he was free, sitting on the side of the ditch. “I never realized I’d get so low on air.”

  I just couldn’t completely register what was happening. After a while he straightened out and took a little brush from his pocket and put his hair back smooth and sleek in its tail. There was a sharp sweat on him.

  I realized how scared he had been, and when I opened the car door, I put a hand on his shoulder to guide him in, These things had took their toll. He couldn’t talk for a long time, so we let the road take us along.

  It was miles and miles before he roused himself to ask if I would take the next right-and turn I came to and drive until I hit Canada. He said he’d be obliged if I could let him off near the border.

  “I got a wife and little girl up there,” he said. “I’m going to visit them.”

  “You’re gonna make it this time,” I said. “Home free.”

  “No,” he said, stretching his arms out, evidently feeling better,

  “I

  won’t ever really have what you’d call a home.”

  He was right about that, of course. I’d never seen. He could not go back to a place where he was known and belonged. No matter where he settled down he would always be looking behind his shoulders. No matter what, he would always be on the run.

  We talked a good long time about the reservation then. I caught him u
p on all the little black listings and scandals that had happened. He wanted to know everything about Lulu, his mom, so I told him how she’d started running things along with Grandma Kashpaw. I told him how she’d even testified for Chippewa claims and that people were starting to talk, now, about her knowledge as an old-time traditional.

  “Times do change,” Gerry laughed. “She was always damn good in front of an audience.”

  “She had her picture in the paper in Washington,” I said.

  “I saw it.” He was silent. I guess he missed her pretty bad.

  After miles of driving I asked.

  “Did you know June?”

  That question took him altogether by surprise. We were driving the small roads, the less traveled and less well kept. The dark was vast and thick. I had to drive slower and more careful than before.

  After a moment Gerry said he knew June, way back when. A little while after that he blurted out,

  “Hell on wheels! She was really something so beautiful.”

  “You sound like you was in love with her,” I promptly said.

  “In love with her like everybody else,” he told me. “I know she burned out young. I heard that. But I always keep seeing her the way she was at the time of my first incarceration.”

  “Slim.” “But not too slim. Long legged. Always with a nice, a really nice laugh, but she was a shy one. So far away sometimes you couldn’t touch her.”

  “She had a streak maybe, an odd streak.”

  “I don’t know about that. She liked order. We’d live in motels.

  She would always arrange the room real ri cat put everything away, make the bed every morning even though they’d strip it that afternoon.”

  “Something I can’t remember,” I said; “did she have nice fingers?”

  “Nice!” he said. “She had the prettiest damn fingers in the world!”

  “I was wondering,” I said, “if you killed that trooper.”

  If I tell you he said no, you will think he was lying. You will think a man don’t get two consecutive life sentences for nothing beneath the U.S. ‘udicial system. You’ll keep thinking that, too, unless you happen to rub against that system on your own. Then things will astonish you. I promise they will.

  If I tell you he said yes, and relate to you how it all happened, it might get used against him. I’m sorry but I just don’t trust to write down what he answered, yes or no. We have entered an area of too deep water.

  Let’s just say he answered: “That’s the penetrating mystery of it.

  Nobody knows.”

  I could feel him looking over at me a long time after speaking.

  I concentrated on steering us very straight and put the heater on.

  Up until then, I hadn’t really noticed how cold it was.

  “Enough about me anyhows,” he said. “What’s your story?”

  I told him all the things about me which I owned up to: how I —aid had quit school for the betterment of my mental powers, and learned on my own; how I was took on early by the Kashpaws and remained on the rez to look after the elder ones. I believe that my home is the only place I belong and was never interested to leave it, but circumstances forced my hand. I mentioned the one girl I ever trusted, Albertine. I told how she was a sister to me.

  “I knew her too,” said Gerry. “Kind of quiet.”

  “She was?” I never thought of her like that.

  “You’re one hell of a card player,” Gerry complimented.

  “Oh.” I got shy that I had out dealt him. “You must have played a lot in prison.”

  “There’s nothing else to fool with.”

  Suddenly I blurted out,

  “I’m running from the army police.”

  “Oh, that’s your problem! That’s your problem! I knew you had a problem!” He started smacking his big knee and shifted around in the bucket seat. He seemed excited.

  “Then we’re both as good as cons.”

  “That’s the damn truth,” I agreed.

  But somehow, since we were splitting up, that did not give me a whole lot of consolation. He slapped his fist a couple of times in his palm and laughed, shaking his head. Suddenly he caught his breath and halted.

  “You couldn’t have took your physical yet.”

  I said I hadn’t.

  “You don’t need to worry about the army,” he said, dropping his hands in his lap. “I’m glad.”

  I glanced over at him. But he wasn’t looking at me and he ‘t moving at all. His head was turned. Evidently he was wasn I I watching the same dark scenery that unrolled about us endlessly-spring’s empty fields, standing water, and the signs of human life, the yard lamps, so modest and few and far between.

  “Look here,” he said. I didn’t have to go in the army because “Oh,” I said. “Lucky for you.”

  “Lucky for you too.”

  I kept on steering.

  “You’re a Nanapush man,” he said. I could feel him looking at me. I could feel the soft, broad, serious weight of all his features.

  “We all have this odd thing with our hearts.”

  He put a hand out and touched my shoulder.

  There was a moment when the car and road stood still, and then I felt it. I felt my own heart give this little burping skip.

  So many things in the world have happened before. But it’s like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it’s a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt-smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. We held each other’s arms, tight and manly, when we got to the border. A windbreak swallowed him up. I didn’t want my lights to show, so I cruised for miles and miles in the soft clear moonlight, slow, feeling the comfortable dark behind me and before.

  I didn’t turn the headlights on until I hit the highways. Near dawn, I came to the bridge over the boundary river. I was getting pretty close to home now, so I stopped the car in the middle of the bridge, got out to stretch, and for some reason I remembered how the old ones used to offer tobacco to the water. I looked down over the rail.

  It’s a dark, thick, twisting river. the bed is deep and narrow. I thought of June. The water played in whorls beneath me or flexed over sunken cars. How weakly I remembered her. If it made any sense at all, she was part of the great loneliness being carried up the driving current. I tell you, there was good in what she did for me, I know now.

  The son that she acknowledged suffered more than Lipsha Morrissey did.

  The thought of June grabbed my heart so, but I was lucky she turned me over to Grandma Kashpaw.

  I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water, and bring her home.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR LmISE ERDRICH was born in Little Falls, Minnesota in 1954, the eldest of seven children. Her father and mother both taught at the Wahpeton (ND) Indian Boarding School, where she attended primary and secondary school before matriculating to Dartmouth College in 1972 as one of the first group of women admitted to that institution.

  Upon her graduation in 1976, His. Erdrich returned to North Dakota to conduct poetry workshops sponsored by the National and State Endowments for the Humanities Poetry in the Schools Program. In 1978 she attended Johns Hopkins University and received an MFA in Creative Writing the following year. She then moved to Boston to become editor of the Boston Indian Council newspaper, The Circle. In 1980 she received a fellowship to the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire, and in 1981 she was named Writer-in-Residence at Dartmouth’s Native American Studi
es Program. Her short stories have won widespread praise, appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, His.” Mother Jones, Chicago, and The Paris Review, as well as in The Best American Short Stories of 1983, The Pushcart Prize Anthology of 1983, and The 0. Henry Prize Stories of 1985. She also won the first Nelson Algren Award in 1997 and The Society of Magazine Editors’ Award in 1983. Jacklight, a poetry collection, was published in 1984.

  In addition to the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, Love Medicine has won the Sue Kaufman Prize for Best First Novel from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Virginia McCormack Scully Prize for Best Book of 1984 dealing with Indians or Chicanos, the Best First Fiction Award from the Great Lakes College Association, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. His. Erdrich’s next novel, The Beet Queen, will be published in 1986.

  His. Erdrich now lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Michael Dorris, and their five children. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.