The Antelope Wife

by Louise Erdrich

  Bismarck, North Dakota, center of the universe. Locus of space and time for me and my Niinimoshenh. We turn in, take a room at the motel’s end. I lead her in first and I close the door behind and then she turns to me—suddenly, she knows she is caught. Where are my girls? her eyes say, their fear sharp as bone. I want my girls! When she lunges, I’m ready, but she’s so fast I cannot keep her from running at the window, falling back. She twists, strong and lithe, for the door, but I block and try to ease her down. She pounds at me with hard fists and launches straight into the bathroom, pulling down the mirror, breaking a tooth on the tub’s edge.

  What can I do? I have those yards of sweetheart calico. I go back. I tear them carefully and with great gentleness I bandage her cuts. I don’t know what else to do—I tie her up. I pull one strip gently through her bleeding mouth. Lastly, I tie our wrists together and then, beside her, in an agony of feeling, I sleep.

  I ADORE HER. I’ll do anything for her. Anything except let her go. Once I get her to my city, things are better anyway. She seems to forget her daughters, their wanting eyes, the grand space, the air. And besides, I tell her that we’ll send for her daughters by airplane. They can come and live with me and go to school right here.

  She nods, but there is something hopeless in her look. She dials and dials long-distance numbers, there are phone calls all over the whole state of Montana, all of these 406 numbers are on the bill. She never speaks, though sometimes I imagine I hear her whispering. I try the numbers, but every time I dial one that she’s used I get that Indian answering machine—that out-of-service signal. Does she even understand the phone? And anyway, one night she smiles into my face—we’re just the same height. I look deep and full into her eyes. She loves me the way I love her, I can tell. I want to hold her and hold her—for good, for bad. After that, our nights are something I can’t address in the day, as though we’re wearing other bodies, other people’s flaming skins, as though we’re from another time and place. Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.

  I get so I don’t want to leave her to go to work. In the morning she sits at her spot before the television, watching in still fascination, jumping a little at the car chases, sympathizing with the love scenes. I catch her looking into the mirror I’ve hung in the living room and she is mimicking the faces of the women on the soap operas, their love looks, their pouting expressions. Their clothes. She opens my wallet, takes all my money. I’d give her anything. “Here,” I say, “take my checkbook too.” But she just throws it on the floor. She leaves off her old skins and buys new, tight and covered with bold designs. She laughs harder, but her laugh is silent, shaking her like a tree in a storm. She drinks wine. In a pair of black jeans in a bar she is approached by men whenever I turn aside, so I don’t turn aside. I stick to her, cleave to her, won’t let her go, and in the nights sometimes I still tie her to me with sweetheart calico.

  Weeping, weeping, she cries the whole day away. Sometimes I find her in the corner, drunk, marvelous in frothy negligees, laughing and lip-synching love scenes to the mirror again. I think I’ll find a mind doctor, things cannot go on. She’s crazy. But if they lock her up, they’ll have to lock me up too. She’ll rage at me for days with her eyes, bare her teeth, stamp on my feet with her heeled boot if I get near enough to try for a kiss. Then just as suddenly, she’ll change. She’ll turn herself into the most loving companion. We’ll sit at night watching television, touching our knees together while I check the next day’s schedule. Her eyes speak. Her long complicated looks tell me stories—of the old days, of her people. The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to catch the distance, her sweeping looks say. We live there. We live there in the place where sky meets earth.

  I bring her sweet grass, tie it into her hair, and then we make love and we don’t stop until we’re sleeping on each other’s pillows.

  Winter, and the daylight dwindles. She starts to eat and eat and puffs up before my eyes, devouring potato chips and drinking wine until I swear at her, say she’s ugly, tell her to get a job, to lose weight, to be the person she was when I first met her. That tooth is still cracked off, and when she smiles her smile is jagged with hatred but her eyes are still dark with love, with amusement. She lifts into the air in a dance and spins, spins away so I can’t catch her and once again she is in my arms and we’re moving, moving together. She’s so fantastically plump I can’t bear it all, her breasts round and pointed, and that night I drown, I go down in the depth of her. I’m lost as I never was and next morning, next afternoon, she drags me back into bed. I can’t stop although I’m exhausted. She keeps on and she keeps on. Day after day. Until I know she is trying to kill me.

  That night, while she’s asleep, I sneak into the kitchen. I call Jimmy Badger, get his phone through a series of other people.

  “It’s her or me,” I say.

  “Well, finally.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Bring her back to us, you fool.”

  HIS WORDS BURN behind my eyes. If you see one you are lost forever. They appear and disappear like shadows on the plains, say the old women. Some men follow them and do not return. Even if you do return, you will never be right in the head. Her daughters are pouting mad. They don’t have much patience, Jimmy says. He keeps talking, talking. They never did, that family. Our luck is changing. Our houses caved in with the winter’s snow and our work is going for grabs. Nobody’s stopping at the gas pump. Bring her back to us! says Jimmy. There’s misery in the air. The fish are mushy inside—some disease. Her girls are mad at us.

  Bring her back, you fool!

  I’m just a city boy, I answer him, slow, stark, confused. I don’t know what you people do, out there, living on the plains where there are no trees, no woods, no place to hide except the distances. You can see too much.

  You fool, bring her back to us!

  But how can I? Her lying next to me in deepest night, breathing quiet in love, in trust. Her hand in mine, her wicked hoof.

  Chapter 7

  The Ojibwe Week

  Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad

  Klaus lives in exactly half of the bottom floor of a duplex built in 1882 and owned now by his friend and boss, Richard Whiteheart Beads. His main room, once the dining room, has a ripply old window topped with a stained-glass panel. Even though the old window looks directly into the window of a brand-new lower-income housing unit built smack on the property line of Andrew Jackson Street, just off Franklin Avenue, an occasional shaft of morning radiance sometimes stirs in the prisms of glass. When that happens, bands of colored light quiver on the mottled walls. The bed, a savage hummocky mattress laid on top of an even older mattress and box spring, which in turn is nailed right into the floor, sometimes catches the rainbows in its gnarled sheets and blankets. The rainbows move across the bodies of late sleepers. Klaus watches the sheaf of colors waver slowly through Sweetheart Calico’s hair and then across her brow. The rainbow slides down her face, a shimmering veil. When she wakes up, she doesn’t move except to sag with disappointment. Her eyes are dead and sad, killing the rainbow, catching at his heart.

  “We are codependent,” he says. “I read it in a newspaper. We are at risk, you and I. Well, you most of all since you are the one tied to the bed.”

  A curtain tieback solidly bolted into the wall acts as a hitching post for Sweetheart Calico. A web of makeshift restraints binds her ankles, wrists. There is even a cord around her waist, tied with complicating rosebud cloth and functioning as a sort of sleep sash. Klaus unties her and she rises, naked, yawning. She rubs one ankle with the side of her other foot and stretches her arms. She floats to the bathroom breathing an old tune—she doesn’t talk to Klaus but she’s always whispering songs much older and more powerful than any powwow or sweat-lodge or even sun-dance song he has ever heard. There are flushing sounds, water, a shower. She loves the shower and will stand beneath it smiling for half an hour and would stay longer if Rozin, wife
of Richard Whiteheart Beads and monitor of hot water use in this joint living space, didn’t stop her.

  “I need some hot water for cleaning,” she calls from the kitchen.

  Giziibiigisaginigegiizhigad is the Ojibwe word for Saturday and means Floor-Washing Day. Which tells you that nobody cared what day of the week it was until the Ojibwe had floors and also that the Ojibwe wash their floors.

  We are a clean people, Klaus thinks. He knocks on the bathroom door. He opens the door and when he sees the bathroom window is wide open, in spite of the child safety locks he installed, he knows already without looking behind the shower curtain that she is gone.

  SHE LOPES CRAZILY through the park. In the lighted shelter where the street people drag her, she curls up on a flea-funky pallet in the corner and sleeps, not forgetting all of her daughters but taking them back into her body and holding them.

  At night, she remembers running beside her mother.

  Her daughters dance out of black mist in the shimmering caves of their hair.

  When she touches their faces, they pour all their love through their eyes at her. Klaus? She never dreams about or remembers him. He is just the one she was tied to, who brought her here. But no matter how fast or how far she walks, she can’t get out of the city. The lights and cars tangle her. Streets open onto streets and the highways roar hungry as swollen rivers, bearing in their rush dangerous bright junk.

  Anama’e-giizhigad

  Although the Ojibwe never had a special day to pray until mission and boarding schools taught how you could slack off the rest of the week, Sunday now has its name. Praying Day. Klaus spent all day yesterday walking the streets and bushwhacking down by the river and questioning. Questioning people.

  “Have you seen a naked beautiful Indian woman hanging around here by any chance? Or she could be wearing just a towel?”

  “Bug off, asshole.”

  “She’s mine,” he says. “Don’t touch her.”

  Yesterday he walked a hundred miles. At least he felt like it. Today on Praying Day he takes out the pipe that his father was given when he returned home safe from the war. Which war? The war so shadowed out by other wars that nobody can recall that it was the war to end all wars.

  “I’ll be asking the Creator for some assistance,” he says to his father’s pipe as he fits it together and loads it while singing the song that goes along with loading a pipe. He takes from a slip of cardboard a feather that he uses to fan the ember at the heart of a small wad of sage. The smoke rises and rolls. He has disabled the smoke alarm.

  “I pledge this feather to my woman if she returns of her own free will,” he says between smokes.

  The feather is very special, a thunderbird feather, a long pure white one that dropped one day out of an empty sky.

  Dropped into my life just like you, my darling sweetgrass love, Klaus thinks. The smoke curls comfortingly around his head. But he smokes his pipe too much. He smokes it again and again until his head aches and his chest is clogged. He will cough for the rest of the day and every time he does, a puff of smoke will pop from his lungs.

  Dizzy, he breaks down his pipe, cleans it, puts it carefully away. He rolls the pipestone bowl in his father’s sock—all besides the pipe and his deaf ear that he’s got left from his father. Oh, wait, you could count his libido, too, and of course his lips.

  “You got a lip line a girl would kill for,” one of his not-girlfriends had said to him. Those plush yet sculpted lips were his father’s lips. Many times they fit around this pipe stem, this okij. His father was so old that he died of old age when Klaus was six. Klaus is the same age as his nephews. He rolls the okij in a red-and-white buckshot bag. He puts the feather back into its fold of cardboard and stashes these sacred items on the highest shelf of the kitchen cabinet. He feels much better. He goes out to talk with Richard Whiteheart Beads. He coughs. A puff of smoke.

  “Is that a smoke signal?” Richard says. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “Have you seen a beautiful naked antelope lady running through the streets?”

  “She escaped? That’s good. You can’t just keep a woman tied up in your room, you know. Rozin suspects. If she finds out she will get in touch with the women’s crisis hotline. I don’t want the police coming around here. Plus, my girls. What kind of example for them?”

  Klaus coughs.

  “Oh, I got that signal,” Richard says. “Me fucked.”

  “That is the problem,” says Klaus. “She has enslaved me with her antelope ways.”

  “You one sad mess,” says Richard. “Let her go.”

  But Klaus goes out into the night and continues to search the streets, which are quiet and peaceful and empty.

  Nitam-anokii-giizhigad

  First Work Day. Proving that the names of the days of the weeks are the products of colonized minds. What a name for Monday. Rubbing it in that work starts early in the a.m. with Richard. Today they are ripping carpet out of the soon-to-be-renovated Prairiewood Rivertree Mall, next to the Foreststream Manor.

  Carpets in malls are always the color of filth. In the petrochemical nap, the hue of every excrescence from shit to trodden vomit comes up beneath their prying and ripping tools. They carry roll after roll of the stuff out to Richard’s fancy yellow pickup truck. Even Klaus thinks it’s way too visible. They are being paid to dispose of a toxic substance and Richard has the perfect place.

  Land checkerboard was one gift of the Dawes or General Allotment Act of 1887, which dispossessed most tribes of 90 percent of the lands that were left after the red-hot smoke of treaty signing. The checkerboard. Their reservation which they drive to from the city is a checkerboard—white squares and red squares—denoting ownership. One red square still belongs to Klaus’s foremothers. On one white square a big farm stands, owned by a retired Norwegian couple who winter and sometimes spring and even fall in Florida. Richard has rented their farm under an assumed name. He and Klaus are now quickly filling the barn with carpet, which it costs a pretty penny to dispose of in an EPA-designated hazardous waste site or costs nothing to put in a barn.

  “They won’t mind. They won’t even notice. They never go out to the barn.”

  “You sure?” asks Klaus. They are unloading the ripped-up carpet. Roll after noxious roll. The rolls are bound with the same cord hanging from the hitching post next to Klaus’s bed. Klaus and Richard have made meticulously neat stacks, filling the cow stalls level. They make certain that each layer is completely solid, filling in the gaps between rows with carpet scraps.

  We are doing a bad thing, but we are doing it well, thinks Klaus.

  For his part, Richard uses compartmentalization. Its extreme usefulness cannot be overestimated. Richard first learned the term from Rozin. He was surprised to find there was a word for what he had been doing all his life to accommodate the knockings of his conscience.

  Oh, on some level, he says to his conscience, this is certainly wrong. Not only will the old couple be stuck with hazardous waste, but the checkerboard is reservation board and thus eligible for tribal homeland status if the casino ever turns a profit. Theoretically there might be enough money in the tribal coffers one day to repurchase this old farm and add it to our reservation, only first there’d be the problem of disposing of as many tons of carpet as this barn will hold and it looks like it will hold an awful lot.

  Wall. Wall. Wall. Compartment.

  Meanwhile, Richard is pocketing the money paid him to dispose properly of righteous poisons. Some of it he pays to Klaus.

  Even if this land is owned by Norwegians it is still Mother Earth, thinks Klaus. Nookomis, please forgive me. I am sorry. I am doing a very tidy job of hurting you, if that makes a difference.

  He takes his gloves off and says that a beer would go down good.

  “Let’s hit a bar on the way home,” says Richard. And so they do. And they are finished with Nitam-anokii-giizhigad.

  Niizho-giizhigad

  Life is hell without her tied up next to m
e. Klaus mourns all night and dismally wakes on the Second Work Day. All the Ojibwe do is work, you would think. Work and pray. Again the carpet ripping and the fetid stink of concrete underneath and again the thoughtful cerebral work of stacking in the barn. Stacking for the future so that the two can climb onto the neat floor from the stairs up to the hay loft and not die in a carpet quake or be swallowed up in a carpet-roll crevasse.

  Sweetheart Calico, Sweetheart Calico. My bitter black heart is bursting open. Klaus whispers. His chest still hurts from the intense smoke-praying that he did two days before and from all the secular inhalations in the days since. There’s been no clue, no lead, no sighting of the woman he kidnapped—no, she went willingly, didn’t she? It’s all unclear. He put her in his van at the powwow and took her home and got addicted to her.

  Your sex love should be declared a controlled substance, he thinks now. I am experiencing severe withdrawal. He shakes as he stuffs ripped carpet down the seams of the next layer of carpet-roll floor. He should not have done what he did—stolen her, gotten her drunk, loved her, tied her up—except she asked for it with her eyes. Which Rozin will tell him should get him ten to twenty years in Stillwater Pen.

  “She never asked for nothing with her eyes,” Rozin says when she finds Klaus’s sweetheart. “Except for you to let her go. You compartmentalized. You put your mental processes in only part of your brain so you can enjoy yourself. Even when what you are doing is a crime.”