Love Medicine (11 page)

Even the writing on the back of those photographs was probably, now that he thought of it, Lulu’s.

They went away, started shooting their guns, and then Bev was left with the unexpected problem of the mother of his son, the woman He would just as soon forget. During a moment of adjustment, however, he decided to go through whatever set of ma nip80 MEN–ado W WON Ulations were necessary. He wanted to handle the situation in the ideal, firm, but diplomatic manner. And then, after he’d recovered from the strength of her hug, he had absolutely no doubt that things would go on according to his plan.

“My my my,” he said to Lulu now. She was buttering a piece of bread soft as the plump undersides of her arms. “Lot of water under the dam.”

She agreed, taking alert nips of her perfectly covered slice. She had sprinkled a teaspoon of sugar over it, carefully distributing the grains. That was how she was. Even with eight boys her house was neat as a pin. The candy bowl on the table sat precisely on its doily. All her furniture was brushed and straightened. Her coffee table held a neat stack of Fate and True Adventure magazines. On her walls she’d hung matching framed portraits of poodles, kittens, and an elaborate embroidered portrait of Chief Joseph. Her windowsills were decorated with pincushions in the shapes of plump little hats and shoes.

“I make these.” She cupped a tiny blue sequined pump in her hand.

“You have a girl friend? I’ll give it to you. Here.”

She pushed the little shoe across the table. It skittered over the edge, fell into his lap, and Beverly retrieved it quickly, for he saw that her hand was following. He set the blue slipper between them without addressing her implicit question on his status-girl friend, married, or just looking around. He was intent on bringing up the subject of Henry junior.

“Remember that time . he started. Then he didn’t know what he was going to say. What did come out surprised him.

“You and me and Henry were playing cards before you got married and the boys were sleeping?”

He could have kicked himself for having blurted that out. Even after all these years he couldn’t touch on the memory without running a hand across his face or whistling tunelessly to drive it from his mind. It didn’t seem to have bothered her all these years though. She picked up the story smoothly and went on.

“Oh, you men,” she laughed chidingly. Her face was so little like Beverly’s flour sacking doll he wondered how he had stood imagining her that way all these years. Her mouth was small, mobile, like a puckering flower, and her teeth were unusually tiny and white. He remembered having the urge to lick their smoothness once. But now she was talking.

“I suppose you thought you could take advantage of a poor young woman. I don’t know who it was, you or Henry, that suggested after several too many beers that we change our penny ante poker game to strip. Well I still have to laugh. I had you men right down to your boxer shorts in no time flat, and I was sitting there, warm and cozy as you please. I was still in my dress with my shoes on my feet.”

“You had them beads on, clip earrings, bangle bracelets, silk stockings,” Beverly pouted.

“Garters and other numerous foundation garments. Of course I did. I am a woman of detachable parts. You should know by now. You simply weren’t playing in your league with strip poker.”

She had the grace to put a hand to her lips as they un curved hiding the little gap-toothed smile he’d doted over at the time of that game.

“Want to know something I never told before?” she said. “It was after I won your shorts with my pair of deuces and Henry’s with my eights, and you were naked, that I decided which one to marry.

Beverly was shocked at this statement, bold even for Lulu. His wind felt knocked out of him for a moment, because her words called up the old times so clearly, the way he felt when she decided to marry his brother. He’d buried the feelings eventually in the knowledge that she wasn’t right for him, man of the world that he was becoming. He congratulated himself for years after i A W7 F_ mom… ……… on getting free of her slack, ambition less but mindlessly powerful female clutches. Right now his reasoning had ripped wide open, however, and jealousy kicked him in the stomach.

Lulu cooed. Her voice was like a wind chime rattling. Cheap, sweet, maddening. “Some men react in that situation and some don’t,” she told him. “It was reaction I looked for, if you know what I mean.”

Beverly was silent.

Lulu winked at him with her bold gleaming blackberry eyes.

She had smooth tight skin, wrinkled only where she laughed, always fragrantly powdered. At the time her hair was still dark and thickly curled. lAter-she would burn it off when her house caught fire, and it would never grow back. Because her face was soft and yet alert, vigilant as some small cat’s, plump and tame but with a wildness in its breast, Beverly had always felt exposed, preyed on, undressed around her, even before the game in which she’d stripped him naked and now, as he found, appraised him in his shame.

You got your reaction when you needed it, he wanted to say.

Yet, even in his mounting exasperation, he did not lose control and stoop to discussing what had happened after Henry’s wake, when they both went outside to get some air. He tolled his sleeves down and fished a soft pack of Marlboros from her side of the table. She watched his hand as he struck the match, and her eyes narrowed. They were so black the iris sometimes showed within like blue flames. He thought her heartless, suddenly, and wondered if she even remembered the two of them in the shed after Henry’s wake. But there was no good way he could think of to ask without getting back down to her level.

Henry junior came to the window, hungry, and Lulu made a sandwich for him with baloney and hot-dog relish. The boy was seven years old, sturdy, with Lulu’s delicate skin and the almost Asian-looking eyes of all the Lamartines. Beverly watched the ZA

AM

boy with electrified attention. He couldn’t really say if anything about the child reminded him of himself, unless it was the gaze.

Beverly had tried to train his gaze like a hawk to use in barroom stare-downs during his tour of duty. It came in handy, as well, when he made a sale, although civilian life had long ago taken the edge off his intensity, as it had his muscles, his hero’s stubborn, sagging flesh that, he could still muster in a crisis. There was a crisis now.

The boy seemed to have acquired the stare down technique naturally.

Beverly was the first to look away.

“Uncle Bev,” Henry Junior said. “I always heard about the bird on your arm. Could you make it fly?”

So Beverly rolled up shirts sleeve once more and forced his blood up.

He flexed powerfully, over and over, until the boy was bored, satisfied, and fled back to his brothers. Beverly let his arm down carefully. It was numb. The sound of the. 22 reports came thick and fast for a while, then all the boys paused to reload and set the jugs in a line against the fence and argue over whose shot went where.

“They’re teaching him to shoot,” explained Lulu. “We had two bucks brought down last fall. And pheasants? Those boys will always put meat on my table.”

She rambled on about them all, and Bev listened with relief, gathering his strength to pull the conversation back his way again.

One of the oldest boys was going down to Haskell Junior College, while another, Gerry, was testing the limits of the mission school system, at twelve. Lulu pointed Gerry out among the others. Bev could see Lulu most clearly in this boy. He laughed at everything, or seemed barely to be keeping amusement in. His eyes were black, sly, snapping with sparks. He led the rest in play without a hint of effort, just like Lulu, whose gestures worked as subtle magnets. He was a big boy, a born leader, light on his feet and powerful. His mind seemed quick.

It would not surprise Bev -WN to hear, after many years passed on, that this Gerry grew up to be both a natural criminal and a hero whose face appeared on the six-o’clock news.

Lulu managed to make the younger boys obey perfectly, Bev noticed, while the older ones adored her to the point that they did not tolerate anything less from anyone else. As her voice swirled on, Bev thought of some Tarzan book he had read. In that book there was a queen protected by bloodthirsty warriors who smoothly dispatched all of her enemies, Lulu’s boys had grown into a kind of pack. They always bung together.

When a shot went true, their gangling legs, encased alike in faded denim, shifted as if a ripple went through them collectively.

They moved in dance steps too intricate for the non initiated eye to Unitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.

Lulu had gone silent, suddenly, to fetch something from her icebox.

In that quiet moment something about the boys outside struck Beverly as almost dangerous.

He watched them close around Henry junior in an impenetrable mass of black-and-white sneakers, sweatshirts, baseball hats, and butts of Marlin rifles. Through the chinks between their bodies Beverly saw Gerry, dark and electric as his mother, kneel behind Henry junior and arm-over-arm instruct him how to cradle, aim, and squeeze-fire the

.22.

When Henry junior stumbled, kicked backward by the recoil, missing the ‘ug, the boys dusted him clean and set him back behind the rifle again.

Slowly, as he watched, Beverly’s uneasy sense of menace gave way to some sweet apprehension of their kinship. He was remembering the way he and Henry and Slick, the oldest of his brothers, used to put themselves on the line for each other in high school. People used to say you couldn’t drive a knife edge between the Larnartines. Nothing ever came between them. Nothing ever did or would.

Even while he was thinking that, Beverly knew it wasn’t true.

What had come between them was a who, and she was standing across from him now at the kitchen counter. Lulu licked some unseen sweetness from her fingers, having finished her sugared bread. Her tongue was small, flat, and pale as a little cat’s.

Her eyes had shut in mystery. He wondered if she knew his thoughts.

She padded easily toward him, and he stood up in an odd panic as she approached. He felt his heart knock urgently as a stranger in trouble, and then she touched him through his pants.

He was helpless. His mouth fell on hers and kept traveling, through the walls and ceilings, down the levels, through the broad, warm reaches of the years.

The boys came back very late in the afternoon. By then, Beverly had drastically revised his plans for Henry junior to the point where he had no plans at all. In a dazed, immediate, unhappy bewilderment he sat on the doily-bedecked couch opening and closing his hands in his lap. Lulu was bustling about the kitchen in a calm, automatic frenzy.

She seemed to fill pots with food by pointing at them and take things from the oven that she’d never put in. The table jumped to set itself The pop foamed into glasses, and the milk sighed to the lip. The youngest boy, Lyman, crushed in a high chair, watched eagerly while things placed themselves around him. Everyone sat down. Then the boys began to stuff themselves with a savage and astonishing efficiency.

Before Bev had cleaned his plate once, they’d had thirds, and by the time he looked up from dessert, they had melted through the walls. The youngest had levitated from his high chair and was sleeping out of sight. The room was empty except for Lulu and himself.

He looked at her. She turned to the sinkful of dishes and disappeared in a cloud of steam. Only the round rear of her blue flowered housedress was visible, so he watched that. It was too late now. He had fallen. He could not help but remember their one night together.

They had gone into the shed while the earth was-still damp and the cut flowers in their foam balls still exuded scent over Henry’s grave.

Beverly had kissed the small cries back onto Lulu’s lips. He remembered. Then passion overtook them. She hung on to him like they were riding the tossing ground, her teeth grinding in his ear. He wasn’t man or woman. None of that mattered.

Yet he was more of a man than he’d ever been. The grief of loss for the beloved made their tiny flames of life so sad and precious it hardly mattered who was what. the flesh was only given so that the flame could touch in a union however less than perfect. Afterward they lay together, breathing the dark in and out. He had wept the one other time in his life besides post combat, and after a while he came into her again, tasting his ownMiTaculous continuance.

Lulu left him sitting on the couch and went back into the sacred domain of her femininity. That was the bedroom with the locking door that she left open just a crack. She pulled down the blue-and-white-checked bedspread, put the pillows aside, and lay down carefully with her hands folded on her stomach. She closed her eyes and breathed deep. She went into herself, sinking through her body as if on a raft of darkness, until she reached the very bottom of her soul where there was nothing to do but wait.

Things had gotten by Beverly. Night came down. His sad dazzlement abated and he tried to avoid thinking of Elsa. But she was there filing her orange nails whichever way he ducked. And then there was the way he was proud of living his life. He wanted to go A back and sell word-enrichment books. No one on the reservation would buy them, he knew, and the thought panicked him. He realized that the depth and danger of his situation was great if he had forgotten that basic fact. The moon went black. The bushes seemed to close around the house.

Retrench, he told himself, as the boys turned heavily and mumbled in their invisible cots and all along the floors around him. Retreat if you have to and forget about Henry junior. He finally faced surrender and knew it was the only thing he could possibly have the strength for.

He planned to get into his car while it was still dark, before dawn, and drive back to Minneapolis without Henry junior. He would simply have to bolt without saying good-bye to Lulu. But when he rose from the couch, he walked down the hall to her bedroom door. He didn’t pause but walked right through. It was like routine he’d built up over time in marriage.