The Night Watchman

by Louise Erdrich

  “Yep. Bye,” said Juggie, walking over to Valentine.

  “Hi, auntie.”

  “Hi, girlie. Hay Stack wants to ask you out.”

  “Well,” said Valentine, pouting at her mittens, which she only wore when Doris or Pixie weren’t around, “I am tired of taking Pixie’s used men.”

  “Pixie never used him,” said Juggie. “He’s brand-new, at least around here.”

  “Never used him, but still. Secondhand.”

  “For cripe sakes. You’re the only one who used him. Gnawed on him. He’s scared of you. And even,” lied Juggie, “he’s tired of that Pixie.”

  “Is he?”

  “Very tired of her.”

  “Well then, he may ask me himself.” Valentine’s tone of voice was insulting.

  “I don’t know why he would, Miss High Tone Jack,” Juggie said. “In fact, I don’t think he should get mixed up with you now. I changed my mind.”

  Juggie stomped off to her car, muttering.

  “Wait!” cried Valentine.

  But Juggie punched the gas and roared off.

  That evening, well after dinner, Barnes came around and offered Juggie another cigarette.

  “Quitting,” she said.

  “Just trying to say thank you.”

  Barnes looked suspiciously cheerful. Juggie just looked suspicious.

  “Valentine came over by herself and asked me out.”

  “Well well well,” said Juggie, taking the cigarette. “My little half niece comes to her senses. That’s a first.”

  “Don’t you go talking down my girlfriend,” said Barnes.

  “Girlfriend! My my my.” She blew out a ring of smoke, then another right through it, and grinned with satisfaction. “You want my advice?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “I’ll give it anyway. For another Lucky. My last before I really quit. Don’t chase her. Not too much. She’s the type who likes a man to hold off a little bit.”

  “Do you think I chased Pixie too much?”

  “For the last time.”

  “Okay, forget her. I know. I’ll be suave and debonair.”

  Like hell you will, thought Juggie. That’s just the thing a man who’s neither of those things would say.

  “Be like Cary Grant,” she said, finally. “Don’t let your feelings play out all over your face. Just use your eyes. And the corner of your mouth.”

  Mouth?

  A look of distress passed over Barnes’s face. He was thinking of Valentine’s pretty bow-shaped mouth and the glint of her sharp teeth between her lips. How could a man willing to take a punch be so unnerved by a woman’s pearly whites?

  The Runner

  On the way home from work, Thomas saw something disturbing out of the corner of his eye. A boy was running alongside the car, keeping right up with him. Thomas was going twenty, thirty, sped up to forty, then fifty, and still the boy kept running. He could feel the boy’s eyes on him. Thomas knew that if he glanced over he would not be able to turn his attention back to the road. Because of course the boy would be Roderick. He knew that the running boy was a hallucination and that the two or three hours a night he’d been getting this week were not enough. The boy veered away once Thomas reached town and Thomas drove carefully the rest of the way home. By then, the fright had awakened him so thoroughly that he was afraid he’d have trouble falling asleep.

  “I saw Roderick again,” he told Rose over his breakfast, a bit of venison, potatoes, oatmeal. “He was running beside me on the road.”

  “I’m coming with you tonight,” said Rose.

  That night she rode with him to work. The cold was deep and the wind was up. The snow was drifting along the surface of the road in shapes that twined and twisted in the headlights.

  “Sometimes I get hypnotized by the snow snakes,” said Thomas.

  “I’ll pinch you if you look glassy,” said Rose.

  “Well, pinch me nice then, in a good place.”

  “You’re bad. Anyway, I’m not singing to you.”

  The only songs Rose ever sang were wordless and repetitive lullabies that put her babies straight to sleep.

  “Also, I brought you a few surprises for lunch,” she said. “And the biggest surprise of all is that I am going to make you put your head down on your desk. I’ll keep watch while you take a good nap.”

  “I believe that would be against the rules.”

  “Who’s going to know?”

  They rolled along quietly.

  “Except Roderick,” she said. “But he won’t tell.”

  “Now don’t you go joking about my ghost,” said Thomas. “We’ve gotten reacquainted pretty good since the old days.”

  “The two of you talk?”

  “It’s mostly a one-sided conversation. But then again sometimes I hear words in my head. Things he said long time ago.”

  “You’re going bats, old man.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of, wife.”

  “How long is this business going to last?”

  “After we go to Washington, I am taking a break.”

  “You don’t notice, but it’s hard on us.”

  “I do notice.”

  Thomas took her hand, her strong knobby hand, which had never been a girlish hand. Ever since she was a little girl, she’d been known as a worker. She could outwork anyone. Her own mother had said so. The base of their marriage was work, each pitching in when the other flagged, like tonight. He squeezed her hand. She squeezed his hand back. That’s how they sometimes talked. They got to the door just as LaBatte was leaving. He saluted. Went out and coaxed his car to life. They could hear it sputter and pop a few times before LaBatte roared off with a backfire down the road that stalled him out, then another backfire, and a slow roll toward home.

  “He works on his own car,” said Thomas. “He should take it to Lemon.”

  Rose put her things near the desk, pulling up a bench. She trailed along when he made his first round, then spent a long time in the ladies’ room. She couldn’t help but like the plumbing. When she came out she was smiling. Her hair was combed and she was wearing lipstick.

  “Hot running water.”

  “Someday,” said Thomas. He looked at her again and suddenly felt shy. “You’re dolled up.”

  “Just trying to keep you awake.”

  “It’s working, real good.”

  They drank a cup of coffee together. He was moved that she’d come with him, Rose with her household burdens, her make-do challenges, her care for their parents and the endless children of people in trouble. She took care of everyone around him and now she was taking care of him, and wearing lipstick. She looked demurely down into her cup of coffee and then raised her eyes to his. He looked back at her and everything else fell away. It was only Rose and always Rose. They held each other’s eyes for so long the tension made them laugh. And then there was a noise from the darkest corner.

  They waited. A shadow shifted. There was a small creak. Maybe a slight settling of the building. Then the shadow crept away, distinctly crept away, and the back of Rose’s neck prickled.

  “It’s him,” she whispered.

  Thomas said nothing. If it was Roderick, he wanted her to see him. But nothing else happened and eventually they relaxed. Rose told him to put his head down on the desk. He refused. They made the next round and Rose led with the flashlight. When they sat back down she gave him a sandwich out of the lunch box. It was a boiled chicken sandwich dressed with a little gravy. She had canned six chickens that fall. This was the last of them.

  “Put your head down and sleep,” she ordered when he had finished.

  Her voice was so strict that he relented. The moment he put his head down on his folded arms he was filled with a crushing sense of relief and comfort. In an instant, he was gone.

  Roderick was sitting behind the motor, not on it, not where Rose could see him. He had his hands out in front of his face and was pretending to eat that chicken sandwich. Homemade bun. He used to
work in the school bakery. Working in the bakery was how a kid could have a full belly at night. You stole whatever dough you could get and put it in your pocket. It was called fringing. You fringed the dough. Then you ate it in bed at night and it swelled up and filled your belly enough so you didn’t wake up hollow and sick. To get a job in the bakery, you had to be good and keeping that job was the only thing Roderick cared about, so for a long time he was good. Then a kid got caught and Mrs. Burton Bell checked all their pockets. He was fired. So he no longer cared and all the bad he had resisted came right out. He ran away. Again and again. He became a runner. That’s how he ended up in the cellar and got so cold. All because of bread dough. And he couldn’t taste it anymore even if he could have had some of that sandwich. He’d started coming here, to the jewel bearing plant, because it was a new place and he was tired of all the old places on the reservation. Plus, of course, he liked to be around his old pal Thomas. Sometimes Roderick found a place to sleep for a year or two. But when he woke up he was always a ghost, still a ghost, and it was getting old.

  When Thomas woke up he didn’t know where he was, that’s how deeply he’d slept. He raised his head off his arms and opened his eyes and there was Rose, keeled over on the bench. Her head was pillowed on her coat and she had draped a sweater over her breast and arms. She looked so peaceful there. He made the next round but didn’t go outside to smoke his cigar; instead, he sat down at his desk and fiddled with his pen. He was so close to getting the county commissioner from the next county over to write a letter that would strenuously object to taking over federal responsibilities for his people. There was not a sufficient tax base on the reservation to care for roads, not to mention schools. Oh yes, in this case they needed all the minor officials of white townships and counties that they could scare from behind their office desks. Thomas began to write.

  Missionary Feet

  Although this seemingly eternal mission was enough walking for a lifetime, and although Vernon looked forward to the end of the day (especially now that there would be Mrs. Hanson’s blessed food), at night, every night, he woke to find his feet moving. They ached, they needed rest, and yet his pale narrow bony long-toed feet would not be still. It was as though they had ideas of their own. He could not control them. He was grateful that the Lord had called the two of them, Elnath and Vernon, to be transferred soon, but he was also afraid that they would have to walk down to Fargo.

  Although the feet, he thought resentfully, wouldn’t mind even if they froze. It was as though they did not belong to him at all.

  The only thing worse than trying to fall back asleep as they twitched and shuddered was when he found that his feet had decided to travel farther from the bed. Sometimes the feet decided to take Vernon for a stroll. A couple of times he woke to find himself in Milda Hanson’s yard. Then the driveway, as though he’d gone to fetch the mail.

  He missed the family he’d been thrilled to leave behind. He missed his one-toothed grandmother and his fetching aunts and ugly uncles. Mostly he missed the fantasy that someone might love him. A someone sweet as pie who used to descend from the rafters of his childhood home and cuddle around him in his dreams. He had to be very careful not to let his mind go to meet that someone even in his sleep. And he must not, ever, ever, think of Grace. Most of his body complied, but not the feet. The sore and rebellious feet wouldn’t listen.

  One night he found himself out on a lonely road in moonlight. He was wearing his overcoat but the burning cold feet were shoeless and the stones of the gravel cut into the naked soles. On the way back to Milda’s, he saw an old jalopy parked beside the road. He stopped and peered in the windows. In the backseat there was a flailing sense of motion and the noises of animals fighting in the dirt. He drifted onward and only later, his damaged feet finally stilled beneath the covers, did it occur to him what he had witnessed. He froze in keen disappointment. He was disappointed with himself for not having intervened to stop two souls from sinning. Now they were lost.

  The Spirit Duplicator

  “Damp off the press,” said Juggie, delivering the droopy final page of the economic survey into Millie’s hands.

  Millie put the page straight to her nose. Like a child, thought Juggie.

  The page was indeed still damp and the scent of fresh aniline dye flooded Millie with euphoria. It was perhaps her favorite smell. She also liked newly pumped gasoline, fried celery drenched in buttermilk, and rubber cement. She had come along to the office to help Juggie. There were thirty-five copies in increasingly fuzzy purple type. But also, there were four special copies made by a ghostly hand with access to the more sophisticated photocopier located in the office of Superintendent Tosk.

  Those copies were for the file that Thomas was building. Juggie’s access to the superintendent’s office, however, was limited. The mimeograph machine that Thomas had requested had not arrived, might never arrive, and so they had to make do with dittos. After thirty copies, the master degraded and Millie was there to type a new one. The copies would be sent to all of the local and state officials, the newspapers and radio announcers, anyone who might be interested in the economic state of affairs that prevailed here.

  Millie removed the slip sheet and inserted the master sheet with the carbon into the typewriter. She was finicky about getting it straight from the get-go.

  “They’re always getting it wrong out there,” said Juggie. She’d brought her cinnamon rolls. A treat for Millie. Cinnamon rolls and coffee would take them far into the night.

  “Long time ago,” Juggie went on, “they sent a fool from Wahpeton named McCumber to count Indians. Of course he wasn’t a fool. He knew very well what he was doing. Most of us were off hunting and he counts only full-bloods so in consequence our reservation, which was already down to twenty townships, gets mashed down to only two townships. That’s what I mean by getting it wrong.”

  “Indeed,” said Millie, now cleaning the typewriter keys with a special brush, “indeed.”

  It was a word she had resolved to use instead of yeah.

  “Getting it wrong meant people starved dead. We don’t have enough land or all our people in one place ever since.”

  “The government was operating on a set of assumptions tantamount to wishful thinking,” said Millie. “I suspect as always they simply want our land.”

  “Wait,” said Juggie. “Let me write that down.”

  Millie was so pleased that she struck a wrong key and made an error. Bit her lip in vexation. She turned up the platen and used a razor blade to gently scrape the carbon off the back of the paper. Then she covered the mistake with correction pencil. She blotted with correction putty and inserted a small piece of carbon paper. She retyped the letter and removed the extra carbon paper and kept typing. What Juggie said was true. A mistaken census survey had been used to convince Congress that the Turtle Mountain people were prosperous. But it was much bigger than that. Millie couldn’t set out in sequence or exactly form the why of it into a paragraph. It was something about being an Indian. And the government. The government acted like Indians owed them something, but wasn’t it the other way around? She hadn’t been educated in a boarding school or educated in any way about Indians. From her Catholic schooling, she would never have known about Indians at all except as a bunch of heathens who were vanquished or conveniently died off. She’d hardly known her family and was as assimilated as an Indian could be. And people hardly ever recognized her as an Indian. So why did she firmly see herself as an Indian? Why did she value this? Why did she not long for the anonymity of whiteness, the ease of it, the pleasures of fitting in? When people found out why she looked a little different, they would often say, “I never thought of you as an Indian.” And it would be said as a compliment. But it felt more like an insult. And why was that? She thought about Pixie. Or Patrice. She wasn’t sure which name. The two of them were in the same league, not in prettiness, more in coloring, and maybe Pixie had thought these things out. Millie thought about Pixie’s mother,
so forceful, so elegant, so knowledgeable. And Pixie knew everything that Zhaanat knew. Did she know how extraordinary she was, Pixie, in being so much like her mother?

  “Oof.” Millie had made it through a couple of pages. Perfect. She was, of course, an excellent typist. But, thinking of Zhaanat and Pixie, she’d grown inattentive and misplaced her fingers on the keys, wrecking an entire line. And she’d almost reached the end of the page. So this time she had to entirely remove the paper, use a razor to excise the mistyped line, retype the line on other paper, razor that out and fix it into the master with transparent tape. Then the business with the scrap of carbon paper. And the exacting problem of precisely placing that repaired line below the previous line. Of course, she was very good at this. She had typed her entire master’s thesis, of which this was only part. All the men with her in the program had hired women to type theirs. She looked down on them for it.

  By the time she finished, the night was half over. And Juggie had fallen asleep on a blanket in the corner. Millie drank a cup of coffee, still hot, from the thermos, and ate an entire magnificently coiled roll, licking the icing and freckles of cinnamon off the fork that she meticulously used. Other people ate with their fingers. Indeed. Not Millie. Knowing that, Juggie had even brought cutlery and plates. So let her sleep, Millie thought, and fixed the first master sheet onto the drum of the spirit duplicator. She turned over the fluid tank, made the necessary adjustments in the pressure, the wick, the guide rail. Then she started turning the hand crank, lovingly, growing happier and happier as the intoxicating smell of duplicating fluid filled the office air.

  Prayer for 1954

  On this night who is awake in the hills?

  An increasingly delighted young woman operates the rotating drum of a spirit duplicator. A lanky missionary stumbles in his sleep along a frozen road. A traditional Chippewa-Cree woman rubs bear grease into the skin of a wakeful baby. A very old man is talking to the small lights that came to visit him and a very old woman is dreaming fiercely of having crossed the roiling Red River to escape her enemies. A big thatch-haired blond man tries to get to second base with a slender woman who sits up suddenly and says, “You’re sure clumsy.” An extremely drunk fellow is bawling in the snow, pleading that his curse be lifted. Another man, only half drunk, plays an endless card game with his brothers, who tell him that his conversion to Mormonism is ridiculous and will tarnish the good Catholic name of LaBatte. Yet another man, damaged, powerful, and bearing the name of the place where he was born, has fallen asleep in the horse stall by his small woodstove. In the next stall a horse named Gringo is the only horse covered with a blanket and still not satisfied. He presses his head to the thick boards and thoughtfully gnaws the rich wood. Gringo would certainly prefer oats or barley and throws his head back and forth, stomps, hoping that his servant will appear. But nothing happens and the night goes on and on.