Prudence

by David Treuer

  “I like how you think, kid,” said Frankie. “I really like how you think. I appreciate your vision.”

  Billy was one year younger, but he was just as big as Frankie now, bigger. Stronger, for sure. The “kid” thing must be from some movie. Frankie wrote about the movies he saw at the Princeton Garden Theatre. And the lawn parties they had at Ivy—he’d buzzed one in the Piper Cub, he’d reported gleefully. His trips to New York. Worlds Billy couldn’t quite imagine without Frankie’s help. Frankie sent books, too: The Iliad, This Side of Paradise, Tropic of Cancer, Goodbye to Berlin. These he read and reread and kept in a wooden crate under his bed. Billy wasn’t sure he understood the books but he tried, if only to understand Frankie, who had lived among the kinds of people in those books, visited houses like theirs, walked the streets of the cities they described. As for movies, the ones Billy saw were years old, not even current, just whatever the movie man brought in the circular tins on the back of his Model A. The man went from town to town throughout the summer—a little old man in a Model A in an antique suit—and projected the movies on the back wall of the town hall. Once the projector had broken and the movie couldn’t be shown, but the man had quieted the villagers with his hands and told the movie to them instead, and he’d done a pretty good job, with all the voices and the action and suspense and all that, but it hadn’t been the same. The village didn’t have a library, either, other than the long shelf in the schoolhouse. Billy had read all of those books at least once by the sixth grade. Twenty miles away, the high school library was bigger, but not by much. He’d read all those books, too.

  “Hey,” said Frankie over his shoulder, “look who’s here.”

  Just then Ernie came tumbling out of the train. He had on a linen suit, too. But his was crumpled and his hair was sweaty and plastered to his head. He must have lost his hat somewhere between Chicago and Saint Paul. He had grown a small black mustache. His hands were hairy. But it was the same wide, square face; the same barrel body; the same keen, cruel, round, sharp, piggish, stubborn, sly body. Another boy filed out behind Ernie. He was slender and quiet. Davey Gardner. His parents owned the mill and he was just done with college, too.

  He nodded. “Hey, Billy.”

  “Dave.”

  Ernie looked at Billy but not with the same warmth as Frankie. Ernie rubbed his eyes and stretched, as if he had just gotten out of bed, and the train and the depot and the prospect of the Pines all constituted some chore, some duty he must submit to. He walked over to where Billy and Frankie stood gaping at each other, their handshake still thrumming up and down, slowing noticeably, but still a warm, full grip. He stood with his fists on his hips and then moved them around to push against his lower back. He seemed distracted and drunk but Billy knew that Ernie saw everything in that shrewd way small, mean people see everything. He studied Billy as though looking at something for sale.

  “Look what Billy’s got,” said Frankie.

  Billy opened his coat again the same way he had before. But it felt awkward, like he was on display. Like he was acting without an audience. The coat felt shabby now, like something he paid five dollars for at Niesen’s rather than Langrock’s on Palmer Square.

  Ernie leaned toward Billy, his head low, and squinted. He kept one fist on his hip and reached out with his other hand and plucked one of the bottles from its pocket right there on the platform in front of everyone—in front of the loggers and the station agent and the vacationers. Ernie held it up to the sun and then cradled it in his palm.

  “It’s got no bond. No mark, either.”

  “It’ll work, won’t it?” asked Frankie.

  “It’s not for us anyway,” lied Billy. “It’s for girls.” He’d gotten the pints from Bolton, who had charged him a dollar each. Forty sticks of balsam. Forty sticks peeled and piled for those two bottles.

  “Indian girls, maybe,” said Ernie. “Or other kinds, I suppose,” he said, looking at Billy with that look of his. “Come on, let’s see what we can do.” Ernie led the way and the four of them left the station agent to manage the luggage while they crossed the street to the Wigwam. Ernie opened the door and Frankie and David followed him.

  “I’ll wait out here,” said Billy. “On lookout,” he added.

  “Sure,” said Ernie. “Sure, sure.”

  Billy felt the day going terribly wrong. It had gotten off its track. Already things seemed beyond fixing, and this was the last time Frankie would be there in a long while, who knew how long?

  Five minutes later, Ernie and Frankie and David came out. Ernie held a paper bag in which two fifths clanked together. “What did you get?” asked Billy.

  “Eight Roses,” said Ernie, smiling to himself. “Here,” he said, and he handed the bag to Billy and lit a cigarette. He didn’t move to take the bag back after the cigarette was lit.

  “Got the scoop from Harris,” said Ernie through his cigarette smoke. “Seems some German from the camp escaped. Guess he plans on heading down the Mississippi for a rendezvous with a U-boat.”

  “He escaped yesterday,” said Billy, grateful that he had more of the story than Ernie did.

  Frankie was excited. “Maybe I’ll get a German before I even leave the States,” he said. “I can paint a swastika on my plane before I leave the ground.”

  “Those are for planes you shoot down, not for returning escaped prisoners,” said Ernie.

  “Still,” said Frankie, “we can do our part. They’re organizing search parties. How about it, Billy?”

  “Sure,” said Billy, “swell.” But it wasn’t swell. He’d been hoping for the usual ritual of the Pines—the big meal on the front porch and waterskiing behind the Chris-Craft, and a chance to go fishing with Frankie. With any luck Ernie would pass out early. They walked to the Confederate and took drinks from one of the bottles while the station agent loaded the luggage. When he was done, they all got in the cab, shoulder to shoulder. Ernie was behind the wheel and David was next to him. Next was Frankie. Billy got the window. Frankie put his arms on the backrest as though they were all members of the same club.

  “We are going to have ourselves a time, boys. We are definitely going to have a time,” said Frankie.

  Ernie lit another cigarette and talked about the fishing tackle he had brought. Frankie talked about the USAAF and B-17s, forecasting all the daring exploits he was to have. He switched from topic to topic without completing his thoughts. His hat was pushed back on his head and his words were a little slurred with liquor or excitement or both. Frankie’s arm was heavy and light across Billy’s shoulders. Billy’s heart felt heavy and light, too. Frankie’s hand cupped Billy’s shoulder and stayed there. Billy looked out over the fields and clear-cuts and scrub as Ernie drove them to the landing so they could cross the river to the Pines. The day was already half over.

  * * *

  They didn’t get across the river to the Pines till three o’clock. The ride had taken longer than they expected because Ernie had stopped twice to piss against a tree, jiggling his whole body up and down, and then when they parked on the bluff near the camp, Frankie insisted they find the prison guards and asked them, his cheeks aflame and his arms folded importantly across his chest, about the prisoner. How old? What did he look like? Any defining physical characteristics? Was he armed? The guards had taken the cigarettes Frankie offered them, but when put to the question, they looked at one another and shrugged. He looks like a German. Sounds like one, too. Look around, they said. Billy was sweating in his coat and he took it off and waited patiently while Frankie asked his questions, and when even Ernie got impatient and started bringing their luggage down to the dock, Billy helped him.

  “Wouldn’t you know it,” said Ernie. “No goddamn boat.”

  It was true. The Chris-Craft was gone. And so were the rowboats. Ernie took off his linen jacket and draped it over a red willow and stomped back up to get Frankie and Davey. Billy looked around.
There was a wood-and-canvas Old Town drawn up into the brush and turtled. He flipped it over and was surprised when a fog of fish flies flew out. He batted them away and pulled the canoe out and slid it into the water. It looked sound. He tied the painter to the dock cleat and waited. Soon Frankie and Ernie came stomping down the hill, careless of their pants in the fireweed. They looked at Billy skeptically.

  “You know how to paddle that thing, Chief?” asked Ernie, fanning his fat face with his hat. “Joke,” he said, a beat too late.

  The boys piled their luggage in. It mounded up in the middle and made the canoe very tippy. Ernie made another trip up the hill to fetch paddles from the camp. Billy and Frankie looked at each other. They smiled but said nothing as Ernie came skidding back down the riverbank. Billy took charge.

  “You better get in the front, Ernie. Frankie, David, you take the middle.”

  The other boys did as they were told, and once they were settled, Billy let go of the gunwale and stepped in the back and knelt on the cedar ribs and stroked away from the dock. They hadn’t gotten farther than ten yards when he noticed water sloshing between the ribs.

  “We’re taking on water!” he said.

  “Paddle fast, boys, or we’re going down!” cried Ernie. Frankie laughed. There was nothing for it. So paddling fiercely, the bottom slowly filling with water, the canoe canting dangerously to one side and then the other, they sprinted across the river.

  “Ballast!” shouted Ernie.

  “No! My uniform is in there. You can’t. I don’t have time to get another!”

  They made it across without drowning and without drowning their luggage. Ernie jumped out when the water was still knee deep, ruining his pants. Frankie and David followed suit. But once the nose was secure next to the boathouse, Billy, using his paddle as a cane, walked down the middle of the canoe and off the bow and onto dry land.

  “Well, look at him!” said Frankie in open admiration.

  Felix met them on the dock. He called Frankie “Mr. Frankie,” and it sounded solemn and funny at the same time. He shook Ernie’s and David’s and Billy’s hands in turn. Within moments, Emma was fluttering across the open yard, and Jonathan sauntered out of the house with his pipe in his hand and talk turned to the German.

  FOUR

  The morning had been all Jonathan could bear. As he sat in the chair next to the fireplace and tried to read the papers, he could actually hear Emma’s worry, even though she said very little from where she stood looking out the front windows across the river. When she brushed past him—flounced was more like it—her anxiety and meddlesomeness trailed after her, carried in the breeze of her skirt with those stupid little bohemian plaits of straw that made such an annoying sound. It was not a sexy sound. Not like the sound of high heels on the linoleum of his office floor or the clink of earrings hitting the metal tray he kept on his desk or the slight snap of garters slipping their stays.

  The sound of Emma’s skirt, as she flounced down the hall and into the kitchen, was to him the sound of sweeping, a broom sound, a broom that did little to clean but made the emotional dust she was always trailing billow up around him. In that dust was her worry about Frankie. He was, in addition to the Pines, her chief project, her principal worry.

  He heard the kitchen door swing open and shut. Felix, for all his diligence, hadn’t gotten around to oiling that blessed door yet. It could be heard throughout the main house, and during a busy day it groaned without stop, like the braying of an abused mule. He tried to resume his reading, but the papers were of no use. His mind had somehow been pulled along after Emma. She had been successful in capturing his consciousness even if she had not convinced him to go with the others, the yokels and Indians, after the German. He could hear Emma’s voice posing questions in her high whine, and the brief, soft, self-effacing answers of the Indian girls at work around the table: yes, ma’am and no, ma’am and almost finished, ma’am.

  It was sad, really, that they shrank to such small size when Emma was in the room. Usually, after she left, Jonathan heard them erupt into excited talk, which would continue until Emma came back to the kitchen. Even if he had heard what they were saying, he could not have understood it; they spoke in their language, a concatenated glide of syllables with precious few consonants as far as Jonathan could tell. But it was nice, how they spoke to one another. They sounded like the family of otters that had collected at the dock for a summer years back, most likely trying to break into the bait cage. Jonathan had liked the otters, and he had, for the two weeks he’d been there that year, brought a folding canvas chair down to the dock to read. No one spoke to him down there. Not the otters. Not Felix. It had been pleasant. Those kitchen girls would be good company in bed. That’s how they seemed anyway. Sure, they wilted when Emma came into the kitchen to scold them and make a great show of how advanced she was, but the girls knew the score. In bed . . . now, that would be different. Jonathan imagined their true nature would show; they would become as sexually sleek as their skin looked; as glossy, as liquid, as sure, cavorting like otters around his supine body.

  Not that he had tried to get any of them to give it up to him. Not that he had made any advances to any of them, even after Emma caught that one—was it Betty, the older one, or Stella, the youngest?—with Ernie and Frankie in one of the guest cabins. Ernie was a robust drinking, card-playing college boy. He was the kind of son Jonathan had always imagined having, with grass stains on his chinos and skinned elbows and mischief in his heart. Emma had been outraged, but Jonathan couldn’t see the harm in it. That’s what it was to be young, and the girls weren’t complaining. A little whiskey and a warm room and attention were all they really required. And why not? What was the harm? Where was the hurt in finding some pleasure between the smooth, stout, clasping legs of an Indian girl?

  Or masturbating, for that matter. He was a man of science. And in all his years he had never seen a male patient who was blind or had hair on his palms, or warts. He himself, when he wasn’t on with one of the nurses or other girls who worked in the building, masturbated every day, and with no ill effect. He wasn’t tired, or sapped of his will, or a degenerate. He supported his family and gave to charity and all that. He was no Rockefeller, but still, he did his part. One of the many attempts to toughen Frankie up a bit had been to make him join the Boy Scouts. It was supposed to make a man of him, to introduce him to the outdoors, and to a fellowship of adventurers. Baden-Powell had been onto something. But then, in a desperate moment, with nothing else to read, Jonathan had picked up the Boy Scout Handbook. He’d spent the evening laughing to himself in his study. The parts about puberty were especially hilarious. You might wake up with an erect penis, stated the book. Sometimes you might have funny dreams and feel a tickle and your undershorts will be damp because you’ve emitted a nocturnal fluid. The manual made it seem so mysterious, so complicated. And the “nocturnal fluid” sounded occult. What had they been thinking? What was their aim in writing this stuff? The Boy Scouts were supposed to make men of boys, not to make boys afraid of their own dicks.

  Frankie, however, did seem to be afraid of his cock. In all the years living at home, Jonathan never caught him in the act, never found the telltale washcloth (not that he did the laundry, but you find these things, even in a house as big as theirs), never caught him looking longingly at the women he, Jonathan, looked at as they walked down Michigan Avenue. He’d never even caught Frankie making small talk with the kitchen girls, much less making love to them. And, truth be told, he wouldn’t have minded at all if Frankie had been with one, or two, or three. It would have given him a wealth of pleasure, a catalog of experiences he could draw upon. It would give them something to joke about when Frankie had a family of his own and Jonathan was old, a pleasant old grandfather. But Frankie didn’t joke. He was cheerful but serious; pleasant in conversation and able to keep up, but underneath his banter, even Jonathan could sense a fearful reserve, a watchful, waiting,
measuring consciousness.

  He heard Emma leave the kitchen. The girls continued their work, but did not begin, at least not immediately, to speak to one another. Emma must still be close by, looking over the wretched garden, maybe. Oh, she loved that garden and went on and on about what good shape Felix kept it in, how he could get all the weeds out without even bending over; how it was simply a matter of using the hoe and using it regularly. And how they had to purchase so little—just cream and eggs and bacon, really—while the Pines was running from May through mid-September. It was nice to look at; the rows of peas and beans and carrots, turnips, radishes, and mounds of potatoes and squash (for the blossoms, since the squash themselves would come in, for the most part, too late for the Pines). And the corn, too, regal and green. The peas and beans were nice, garden-fresh beans were always nice. But the lettuce was bitter. The tomatoes were unevenly ripe. One had to wait too long for the corn. The raccoons always dug up the potatoes and bit into the melons. The vegetables, what there were of them, had too much individuality. You never knew what you were going to get. Vegetables these days—it was the 1940s, after all—should, with the help of science, be more dependable, more uniform; should ripen at the same time; should all be, more or less, of the same size.

  Jonathan sighed and was just folding the papers and stacking them in the copper bin next to the fireplace when he heard shouts and the banging of a canoe against the dock. He sauntered into the front room and peered out of the southeastern-most window down the slope of the hill to the dock. Maybe it was the returning search party. Perhaps they’d found the German and were returning in triumph, having saved the north woods from a single, solitary submariner sans submarine. But no.

  Frankie had arrived.

  Evidently, since the Chris-Craft was still being used by the search party, Frankie, Ernest, Billy, and that other boy had found a canoe, one of those big cedar-ribbed canvas ones, and with Ernie in the front and Frankie and that other boy in the middle, and Billy paddling stern, they’d crossed the river.