“Robert didn’t tell me; I heard the girls talking. That’s when I realized—the boy had nothing to do with it, or very little. It was money. He’d lost money, he told me that much, and he borrowed. Kathy, I’m sure it’s those people at the casino. They won’t stop at anything. They’re pressuring him to repay. I know that’s what it is.” She choked on tears. “Maybe it started with the boy, I don’t know. But it’s over the gambling. He’d never had money before, and he threw it around. It’s my fault too, I didn’t ask where it came from. . . . Then the tide turned. He started to lose. He knows how rough those people play and he’s terrified. That hurts the most—instead of confiding in me, he sicked this lowlife on me.”
I didn’t know how to comfort or reassure her.
“They suckered him in, Kathy.”
Sin city, Mama had said. “Could you describe the man who did this?”
Mandy shook her head. “I told you, he had a stocking cap over his face.”
“But height? Weight? Was he French?”
“Medium height, medium build. And as far as being French, he didn’t say anything.”
“So there’s no way you could identify him?”
She hesitated. “By his hair. He smelled of hair tonic.”
“Brilliantine,” I said, placing him.
“I’m so ashamed and so frightened,” Mandy said into her hands. “Do you think the Sisters will find out?”
I hesitated, but there was no avoiding the truth. “When they take inventory the count won’t match.”
Of course Mandy knew this. Elongated moments passed between us. Then she began speaking very fast. “I thought maybe you’d fudge it for me. You know, make it come out. I hate to ask, but I don’t see any other way.”
“No, Mandy, I won’t do it.” I saw immediately that she had expected to talk me around. She’d have to have come from my background to know what being a nurse meant to me. It’s not only a career. It’s having a place in the world.
“Don’t refuse. Don’t say no, Kathy.”
“I’m not even on that service. It’s been months since I worked in the dispensary.”
“They’re always short-handed. You could request it.”
“And then alter the books? No, Mandy.”
Another pause filled with unuttered argument. “I’d do it for you.”
“Then you’d be very foolish. What I will do is get to work on this face of yours. We need ice to bring the swelling down.”
“No.” She drew away from me. “Either you’re my friend and help me, or you’re not.”
“You’re not thinking straight, Mandy. They’ll come after Robert again. He can’t stall. He’s got to pay up. And the only way he can do it is through the drugs. He’s going to sic this Frankie on you again.”
“Frankie?” Her hand grasped mine in a paroxysm of fear.
“Yes, the name came back to me. There’s no question that’s who it is. The brilliantine gave him away. I saw him huddled with Robert at the casino.”
“I remember. Every time I looked up, he was watching me. You really think he’ll come after me again?”
“If you don’t give them what they want, yes, I do.”
“Robert knows I won’t continue.”
“He doesn’t know anything of the sort. He knows that this one beating didn’t force you into it. The threat of more might.”
“And he’d be right.” Mandy grabbed both my hands. “I couldn’t go through this again. Kathy, I loved him. That’s the worst part, that Robert is behind this.”
I could see the croupier bending forward, raking in the chips, le rouge et le noir.
Eight
A TRAVELING FAIR was in town. A few stubbled fields had been transformed with whirligig rides that featured a Ferris wheel and calliope. On the Ferris wheel Crazy Dancer held my hand. On the rocket ride he put his arm around me.
The best part was having our picture taken sitting on the moon. Crazy Dancer studied the small strip of pictures carefully. “Many older Mohawks still won’t have their picture taken. They believe that this”—he waved the pictures—“can catch their soul.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “If that’s so, then I give mine to you and keep yours in return.” And he divided the pictures between us.
We strolled past tents and sideshows arm in arm. He bought us cotton candy that dissolved into sticky pink sugar as we ate them down to their paper cones. We passed along a row of flag-draped booths, the Canadian Red Ensign, the French Tricoleur, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes. Crazy Dancer stopped to throw balls at a target of moving ducks. We walked on arm in arm. It was almost dusk. No lights were allowed to show, and the carny was closing down. I hadn’t realized we had left it behind until we were surrounded.
A gang of French Canadian toughs began taunting us from behind one of the outlying wagons, telling us to go home to the reservation. One of them came toward us. I saw to my horror he had a gun. He was quite drunk and, going up to Crazy Dancer, kept sticking it in his ribs and telling him to fork over his money.
Crazy Dancer pretended not to understand his accent, and asked politely if he would mind repeating what he had said. The guy repeated his demand for money, but Crazy Dancer only shook his head. “Sorry, I still don’t understand. What is it you want?”
The gun was twisted in his side. “Money, you dumb Indian. Money. You understand money, no?”
Crazy Dancer seemed to make a great effort. “You lost money? In that case we must look for it. Where can it be?” And he jumped on top of a packing case and peered through the slats. “Not here.” Then, throwing himself at air, he did a complete somersault, landing on a side rail that had been stowed out of the way on top of the crates. He walked this backward, pretending to look to the right and then the left for money. He felt in his own pockets and shook his head. “Not there.”
A series of flips landed him on the roof of the wagon, and the next second in the midst of the dumbfounded trio. Pulling off the cap of one of them, as though he still looked for money, he exchanged it for another cap, ramming the first on a totally different head. They stared blankly at him. Crazy Dancer pirouetted madly, cartwheeled exuberantly, and, uttering ear-splitting Mohawk war whoops, began to weave in and out, behind and in front and through them.
“This guy is fou!”
“Berserk.”
“Crazy, man, he’s crazy.”
“I’m out of here, tout de suite.”
“Crazy Dancer,” Crazy Dancer announced, taking a bow.
There was no applause. They ran, and I was still shaking from the encounter. “What a performance. My God, you really can dance. It was unbelievable. When you yanked off that guy’s hat I thought it was the end of us. But why didn’t you give them money? Wouldn’t that have been easier? They might have killed you.”
“It is a lesson from when I was young, that many times if you do not recognize evil, it goes away. Just as they are going now.”
“So you did understand what they were saying?”
“The gun in my side made it very plain.” He waited for this to sink in. “Sometimes you ignore evil,” he explained. “Sometimes you dance to calm it down, and sometimes you make a game and ask evil to join in.”
When I asked Crazy Dancer how he knew which to do, he replied, “How do you know which medicine to give?”
“The doctor writes a prescription,” I started to say—when it struck me. Crazy Dancer was the prescription for Mandy. It was Crazy Dancer, crazy and fearless, who would bring Frankie into line.
“I need a favor, Crazy Dancer.”
“It’s not every person I’ve sat on the moon with,” he replied.
I told him about Mandy, all he needed to know. “Her boyfriend had her beaten up, and she’s afraid the same goon will come after her again. Could you stop him?”
He considered this only a moment. “In the days of the buffalo a warrior like me would take his hair, a trick we learned from the French.”
“And today?”
“No. He hangs out at the casino. His name’s Frankie.”
Crazy Dancer clapped his hand to his forehead. “I know him. He stinks of hair tonic. This will be a pleasure,” he added. The relish of his tone alarmed me.
“I hope you’ll be careful.” I said this, wondering if I should have involved him, because I knew very well careful was not in his vocabulary.
A PERSON BURST into our room, a person whose tight curly hair glistened with brilliantine. No men were allowed on the floor, but here he was, disheveled and wild looking, yelling. “Call them off, call them off and we’re quits.”
I reached out and put my hand on Mandy’s arm. She had to stand her ground. She had to face down her attacker.
But I was the one he confronted. “Call off the shadows,” he said distractedly, “and I’ll do anything you want.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh you know, you know all right. Indian shadows dancing on my walls, and drums and bells clanging in my head. But when I open the door no one is there . . . nothing is there. I might have thought I’d dreamed it, but this is real enough.” He took a tomahawk from under his jacket. “What do you say? Is it yours?”
“No.”
“Don’t give me that. It’s real and it belongs to a real person. No ghost.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Then you know who it belongs to?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And it’s no ghost, no shadow? It belongs to someone who’s going to use it.”
“Maybe not. If he uses a tomahawk on you he goes to jail. If he uses ghost dancers there will be no mark on your body.”
“Look, this could all be in my head. I don’t care whether it is or not. I want it to stop.”
“It will stop if you don’t come near Mandy or threaten her or let her be threatened again.”
Frankie, for that’s who it was, fingered the edge of the tomahawk. “This is the end of it?”
“It can be if you stay away from her.”
“I woke up this morning with this thing beside my head on the pillow. I don’t know how it got there. I don’t know how he got into my room. That crazy dancing was bad enough, a war dance with godawful screeches. But a shadow is just a shadow. I figure the tomahawk is something else, it’s for killing, and that now he’s threatening to kill me.”
“I would read it like that,” I agreed.
“But it’s over? The Indian magic or whatever it was is over, right?”
“It’s up to you.”
“If it’s up to me, it’s over.”
BUT IT WASN’T up to him, not entirely.
I was about to monitor a labile blood pressure when I discovered I’d left my watch in my room. I went back for it, to find Mandy there.
She still showed the effects of the beating and refused to be seen, giving out that she had a bad cold. My watch was on the dresser, and, as I fastened it on, the door opened a crack, then more fully, and Robert was in the room. He took one look at Mandy’s face and sank down on the bed looking as though he would cry.
“I didn’t know. I swear to God, Mandy, I didn’t know.”
Mandy swayed on her feet. She seemed almost to believe him.
“Of course you knew,” I said. “You’re the one that set the thing up, that had that pervert waiting for her.”
Although he answered me, Robert didn’t take his eyes from Mandy. “Nothing physical was supposed to happen, nothing like this. Believe me, he was just supposed to let you know they were planning a little accident for me if I didn’t come up with the drugs. They’ve done it before. They like traffic accidents, that’s their thing.”
“Oh, my God, Robert.”
“The hell with them. Let them plaster me all over the sidewalk. I’d rather have that than—than what happened to you. Mandy, please don’t hate me or despise me.”
“It was so brutal, the way he grabbed me.”
“Oh, God.” Robert put his face in his hands. “I’ll kill him for hurting you. I’ll take that little sneak apart.”
“He kept hitting me and punching me until I was on the ground.”
Robert lifted a stricken face. “He didn’t . . . assault you?”
“I was making too much noise, screaming and crying. No one ever hurt me like that before. You don’t even beat an animal like that.”
“My poor girl. I don’t expect you to forgive me. I’d no idea—why, I’d lay down my own life for you, Mandy.”
“You may do just that if you don’t come up with the money,” I interpolated, because it seemed to me Mandy was ready to rush into his arms. And that was one spectacle I didn’t want to witness—Mandy comforting him.
We three looked at each other in silence, trapped in complexity we didn’t want to face.
At last I said, “It isn’t only the hospital, the army could be involved.”
Robert groaned. “If I could keep you out of it, Mandy, I’d confess my part in a minute and get it over with.”
“How could you keep me out of it? I’m the one that took the drugs. Besides, if what Kathy said is right and the army gets to know of it, you’d be court-martialed. It’s wartime—they could shoot you.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “But I doubt they will.”
Robert turned on me. “Oh, you doubt it, do you? Well, all I know is I’ve got a great choice: to be run down in the street or face a firing squad.”
Mandy, stifling a sob, wound up in his arms after all.
When he left, Mandy let me work on her face, and I was able to bring down the residual swelling with ice. Her “cold” improved, and she resumed her duties.
CONNIE’S WEDDING WAS approaching, and I’d written that I couldn’t come. But she telephoned. I heard her ask, and I couldn’t say no. I decided on the spot to borrow the money. After all, it was my sister.
The trip was accomplished over a weekend. I traveled, one of the few women, in a train jammed with servicemen on leave or posted to the west coast. The conductor put me up front where he could keep an eye on me, and I kept my nose in a book.
Mama Kathy was at the station. I recalled it later in almost snapshot highlights. Her arms around me made me remember the Kathy I had been. At the church I met Jeff and liked him. He was a big man, sandy colored. Hair, mustache, eyebrows all the same neutral shade.
It was just an impression because Connie was in the priest’s private chamber. I stopped at the threshold when I saw her. Mama Kathy had made Connie’s childhood dream true. The gown was the one she had described to us for years, the waist tucked with invisible stitches, the scalloped neckline, the filmy skirt cascading over satin. How often had I heard it described! The bouquet she carried, the orange blossoms for her hair—all matched the fairy tale.
I fastened on the beautiful dangling earrings Mandy had given me. The chords of the organ meant a final kiss, and I went with Mama to take my place in the pew.
It played out exactly as it was supposed to. It was her day. Twenty years later, and the groom and tiered wedding cake appeared as if by magic.
IT WAS AN unusually busy week. I must have passed and repassed the nurses’ station a dozen times. Sister Ursula came looking for me. “Kathy,” she said, “Colonel Boycroft wants to see you.”
“What about?”
“It’s Colonel Boycroft,” she repeated.
This was it. Colonel Boycroft was someone you saw when a complaint had been lodged against you, or you were brought up on charges. Even the room was oppressive, it seemed to close in on you. The colonel, from behind a massive desk, sent a keen glance in my direction. Nothing escaped him, not a strand of hair out of place or a pinned hem you hadn’t had time to sew.
He began amiably enough. “Well, Nurse Forquet, you’ve done very well here. I understand you are in the graduating class. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” I said and waited.
“We’ve all watched your pr
ogress with pride.”
“Thank you, sir.” The more he went on the more nervous I became.
“The reason I asked you to come in is that something disturbing has transpired. Was it last May you did your stint at the dispensary?”
“Let me see, yes, it was . . . ,” I was saying on one level. On another I was thinking—It’s caught up with Mandy.
“We have just inventoried our accounts and made the unfortunate discovery that the written record and the supplies on hand do not tally.”
“You mean some of the medicine is missing?”
“Drugs, Nurse Forquet. This is about drugs.”
My heart was pounding. “There isn’t a possibility of a mistake in the records?” I asked.
“I wish there were. They’ve been gone over meticulously. Naturally suspicion falls on those that had access. Now, if you’ve any knowledge of this affair you’d do well to tell me about it.”
I shook my head.
“It’s only fair to warn you that the matter is now under official investigation.”
“I didn’t take the drugs, sir, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I’m not thinking that at all. However, everyone who had access this past six months is under suspicion.”
“I see, sir,” I murmured, because he seemed to expect me to say something.
“My personal belief is that the matter will turn out to involve some outside source.”
“Yes, sir,” I said briskly, and left his office with a more hopeful attitude. An “outside source” was none of us, but a vague phantom figure to pin the theft on. It seemed to me a good solution. And I turned my attention to my upcoming graduation.
I knew Mama had spent every cent she had on Connie’s wedding. I knew they couldn’t come, but I wrote anyway. I was glad Connie had her wedding. I remembered how dream-like it had seemed, but I knew Mama Kathy had worked behind the scenes to match it to Connie’s expectations. Only Georges was missing from it. But he was showered with descriptions, as we all wrote blow-by-blow accounts. Connie enclosed pictures and a piece of wedding cake.
The Search for Joyful Page 13
