Love Medicine Part 3

"How do you skin your skunk?" he asked Eli.

"You got to take the glands off first," Eli explained carefully, MLa"-also IN pointing at different parts of his body. "Here, here, here. Then you skin it just like anything else. You have to boll it in three waters.

"Then you honestly eat it?" said Lynette. She had come into the room with a fresh beer and was now biting contentedly on a frayed end string of hair fallen from her ponytail.

Ell sat up straight and tilted his little green hat back.

"You picky too? Like Zelda! One time she came over to visit me with her first husband, that Swede Johnson. It was around dinnertime. I had a skunk dressed out, and so I fed it to them.

Ooooooh when she found out what she ate she was mad at me, boy.

"Skunk!" she says. "How disgusting! You old guys will eat anything!"

Lipsha laughed.

"I'd eat it," Lynette declared to him, flipping her hair back with a chopping motion of her hand. "I'd eat it Just like that."

"You'd eat s.h.i.+t," said King.

I stared at his clean profile. He was staring across the table at Lipsha, who suddenly got up from his chair and walked out the door.

The screen door slammed. King's lip curled down in some imitation of soap-opera bravado, but his chin trembled. I saw him clench his jaw and then felt a kind of wet blanket sadness coming down over us all. I wanted to follow Lipsha. I knew where he had gone. But I didn't leave.

Lynette shrugged brightly and brushed away King's remark. But it stayed at the table, as if it had opened a door on something-some sad, ugly scene we could not help but enter. I took a long drink and leaned toward Uncle Eli, "A fox sleeps hard, eh?" said Eli after a few moments.

King leaned forward and pulled his hat still lower so it seemed to rest on his nose.

"I've shot a fox sleeping before," he said. "You know that little black hole underneath a fox's tall? I shot right through there. I was using a bow and my arrow went right through that fox. It got stiff.

It went straight through the air. Flattened out like a flash and was gone down its hole. I never did get it out."

"Never shot a bow either," said Gordie.

"Hah, you're right. I never shot a bow either," admitted King with a strange, snarling little laugh. "But I heard of this guy once who put his arrow through a fox then left it thrash around in the bush until he thought it was dead. He went in there after it. You know what he found? That fox had chewed the arrow off either side of its body and it was gone."

"They don't got that name for nothing," Ell said.

"Fox," said Gordie, peering closely at the keyhole in his beer.

"Can you gimme a cigarette, Ell?" King asked.

"When you ask for a cigarette around here," said Gordie, "you d on't say can I have a cigarette. You say ciga swa?"

"Them Michifs ask like that," Eli said. "You got to ask a real old Cree like me for the right words."

"Tell *em Uncle Eli," Lynette said with a quick burst of drunken enthusiasm. "They've got to learn their own heritage!

When you go it will all be gone!"

"What you saying there, woman. Hey!" King shouted, filling the kitchen with the jagged tear of his voice. "When you talk to my relatives have a little respect. " He put his arms up and shoved at her b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"You bet your life, Uncle Eli," he said more quietly, leaning back on the table. "You're the greatest hunter. But I'm the World's Greatest Fisherman."

"No you ain't," Eli said. His voice was effortless and happy- "I caught a fourteen-inch trout."

King looked at him carefully, focusing with difficulty. "You're the greatest then," he admitted. "Here."

He reached over and plucked away Eli's greasy olive-drab hat.

Eli's head was brown, s.h.i.+ny through the white crew-cut stubble.

want King took off his blue hat and pushed it down on Eli's head.

The hat slipped over Eli's eyes.

"It's too big for him!" Lynette screamed in a tiny outraged voice.

King adjusted the hat's plastic tab.

"I gave you that hat, King! That's your best hat!" Her voice rose sharply in its trill. "You don't give that hat away!"

Ell sat calmly underneath the hat. It fit him perfectly. He seemed oblivious to King's sacrifice and just sat, his old cap perched on his knee, turning the can around and around in his hand without drinking.

King swayed to his feet, clutched the stuffed plastic backrest of the chair. His voice was ripped and swollen. "Uncle Ell." He bent over the old man. "Uncle Ell, you're my uncle."

"d.a.m.n right," Eli agreed.

"I always thought so much of you, my uncle!" cried King in a loud, unhappy wall.

"d.a.m.n right," said Eli. He turned to Gordie. "He's drunk on his behind. I got to agree with him."

"I think the f.u.c.kin' world of you, Uncle!"

"d.a.m.n right. I'm an old man," Eli said in a flat, soft voice.

King suddenly put his hands up around his ears and stumbled out the door.

"Fresh air be good for him," said Gordie, relieved. "Say there, Albertine. You ever hear this one joke about the Indian, the Frenchman, and the Norwegian in the French Revolution?"

"Issat a Norwegian joke?" Lynette asked. "Hey. I'm full blooded Norwegian. I don't know nothing about my family, but I know I'm full-blooded Norwegian."

"No, it's not about the Norwegians really," Gordie went on.

"So anyway a"

Nevertheless she followed King out the door.

At JO" "There were these three. An Indian. A Frenchman. A Norwegian.

They were all in the French Revolution. And they were all set for the guillotine, right? But when they put the Indian in there the blade *just came halfway down and got stuck."

"f.u.c.kin' b.i.t.c.h! Gimme the keys!" King screamed *just outside the door.

Gordie paused a moment. There was silence. He continued the joke.

"So they said it was the judgment of G.o.d. You can go, they said to the Indian. So the Indian got up and went. Then it was the Frenchman's turn. They put his neck in the vise and were all set to execute him!

But it happened the same. The blade stuck."

"f.u.c.kin'b.i.t.c.h! f.u.c.kin'b.i.t.c.h!" King shrieked again.

The car door slammed. Gordie's eyes darted to the door, back to me with questions.

"Should we go out?" I said.

But he continued the story. "And so the Frenchman went off and he was saved. But when it came to the Norwegian, see, the Norwegian looks up at the uillotine and says: "You guys are sure dumb. If you put a little grease on it that thing would work fine!" "b.i.t.c.h! b.i.t.c.h! I'll kill you! Girrime the keys!" We heard a quick shattering sound, gla.s.s breaking, and left Eli sitting at the table.

Lynette was locked in the Firebird, crouched on the pa.s.sen'de. King screamed at her and threw his whole body against her side of the car, thudded on the hood with hollow booms, banged his way across the roof, ripped at antennae and side-view mirrors with his fists, kicked into the broken sockets of headlights. Finally he ripped a mirror off the driver's side and began to beat the car rhythmically, gasping. But though He swung the mirror time after time into the winds.h.i.+eld and side windows he couldn't smash them.

"King, baby!" Gordie jumped off the steps and hugged King to the ground with the solid drop of his weight. "It's her car. You're June's boy, King. Don't cry." For as they lay there, welded ina"Mom shock, King's face was grinding deep into the cinders and his shoulders shook with heavy sobs. He screamed up through dirt at his father.

"It's awful to be dead. Oh my G.o.d, she's so cold."

They were up on their feet suddenly. King twisted out of Gordie's arms and balanced in a wrestler's stance. "It's your fault and you wanna take the car," he said wildly. He sprang at his -father but Gordie stepped back, bracing himself, and once again he folded King violently into his arms, and again King sobbed and sagged against his father.

Gordic lowered him back into the cinders. While they were clenched, Lynette slipped from the car and ran into the house. I followed her.

She rushed through the kitchen, checked the baby, and then she came back.

"Sit down," I said. I had taken a chair beside Eli.

"Uh, uh."

She walked over to Eli. She couldn't be still.

"You got troubles out there," he stated.

"Yeah," she said. "His mom gave him the money!" She sneaked a cigarette from Eli's pack, giving him a coy smirk in return. "Because she wanted him to have responsibility. He never had responsibility.

She wanted him to take care of his' family Eli nodded and pushed the whole pack toward her when she stubbed out the cigarette half smoked. She lit another.

"You know he really must love his uncle," she cried in a small, hard voice. She plumped down next to Eli and steadily smiled at the blue hat. "That fis.h.i.+ng hat. It's his number-one hat. I got that patch for him. King. They think the world of him down in the Cities.

Everybody knows him. They know him by that hat. It's his number one.

You better never take it off."

Eli took the hat off and turned it around in his hands. He squinted at the patch and read it aloud. Then he nodded, as if it had finally dawned on him what she was talking about, and he turned it back around.

"Let me wear it for a while," Lynette cajoled. Then she took it.

L Put it on her head and adjusted the brim. "There it is."

Uncle Eli took his old cap off his knee and put it on his head.

"This one fits me," he said.

In the next room King junior began to cry "Oh, my baby!" Lynette shrieked as if he were in danger and darted out. I heard her murmuring King's name when the father and the son walked back inside. King sat down at the table and put his head in his folded arms, breathing hoa.r.s.ely. Gordie got the keys from Lynette and told Eli they were going home now.

"He's okay," Gordie said, nodding at King. "Just as long as you let him alone."

So they drove off on that clear blue night. I put a blanket around Lynette's shoulders, and she sank onto the couch. I walked out, past King. He was still breathing hopelessly into his crossed arms. I walked down to where I knew Lipsha was, at the bottom of the hill below the house. Sure enough, he was sitting there, back against a log from the woodpile. He pa.s.sed me a bottle of sweet ros;, I drank. I tipped the bottle, looked up at the sky, and nearly fell over, in amazement and too much beer, at the drenching beauty.

Northern lights. Something in the cold, wet atmosphere brought them out. I grabbed Lipsha's arm. We floated into the field and sank down, crus.h.i.+ng green wheat. We chewed the sweet kernels and stared up and were lost. Everything seemed to be one piece. The air, our faces, all cool, moist, and dark, and the ghostly sky. Pale green licks of light pulsed and faded across it.

Living lights. Their fires lobbed over, higher, higher, then died out in blackness. At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a Pttern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it.

As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. Or a dance hall.

And all the world's wandering souls were dancing there. I thought of June. She would be dancing if there was a dance hall in s.p.a.ce. She would be dancing a two-step for wandering souls.

Her long legs lifting and failing. Her laugh an ace. Her sweet perfume the way all grownup women were supposed to smell.

Her amus.e.m.e.nt at both the bad and the good. Her defeat. Her reckless victory. Her sons.

I had to close my eyes after a while. The mix of beer and rose made my head whirl. The lights, shooting high, made the ground rock underneath me. I waved away the bottle when Lipsha touched my hand with the cold end of it.

"Don't want no more?"

"Later on," I said. "Keep talking."

Lipsha's voice was a steady bridge over a deep black s.p.a.ce of sickness I was crossing. If I *just kept listening I knew I'd get past all right.

He was talking about King. His voice was slurred and dreamy.

"I'll admit that," he said, "I'm scared of his mind. You can't never predict when he'll turn. Once, a long time ago, we went out hunting gophers. I let him get behind me. You know what he did? He hid in the bushes and took a potshot."

"Lucky. " "That's right. I steer clear of King. I never turn my back on him, either. " "Don't be scared of him," I said. I was managing to keep a slim hold on the conversation. I could do this as long as I only moved my lips and not the rest of me.

Sure. King never took a potshot at you."

"He's scared underneath."

"Of what?" said Lipsha.

But I really didn't know. "Those vets," I said, "are really nuts."

"He's no vet," Lipsha began. But then blackness swung too hard, tipping me. For a while I heard nothing, saw nothing, and did not even dare move my lips to speak. That didn't matter.