The Antelope Wife (10 page)

“Let’s leave them out of our world,” they say in unison. “Jinx!”

They slap hands, spin hands, rap their hands up and down, and ruffle the air four times to seal in the luck of words spoken together. Rozin walks out the door and says to Richard, “Watch the girls. I have to go buy a loaf of bread.” The descendant of Sorrow slides along the foundation to the alley dense with buckthorn and mulberry. The dog ambles close to and settles down by Sweetheart Calico, who stands very still in the leaves, believing she is invisible.

Chapter 8

Why I Am No Longer Friends with Whiteheart Beads

K
LAUS

When people ask me why I am no longer friends with Whiteheart Beads, I hedge around and come up with a neutral type of explanation. I say something innocuous, to keep things going on the surface. I have to do that. The reason is I’m afraid. My fear is this—if I ever begin to tell the story it will all flood out of me. It will be gone, unfixed, into the mouths of others. I’m afraid the story might stop being mine. Which would be dangerous. I rely on the story, you see. I keep it inside me because without it I might forget or dismiss the reason I no longer trust him. And once I did that, there is no telling what could happen.

Richard Whiteheart Beads, I’ve thought so often, foe or friend? I decided on the first because he cost me everything I had. I did manage to keep my life, but aside from that—my clothes, my savings, and even, yes, my wife, Sweetheart Calico. My Antelope Girl. Gone. Due to Whiteheart.

Now you’ll say to yourself there is no human on this earth with power of that magnitude. None. You wouldn’t believe it surely if you did meet him. He has a handsome, bland, forgettable face. Forgettable unless of course he has ripped out your heart. So me, I remember his face just fine.

S
OME THINGS HAPPEN
easy, and you feel like they were meant to be. And some things, oh god, they come so hard. The party we attended together, put on by the regional waste collection association, that was the easy part that led to the impossible.

I am standing before the salads and cheeses and deli meat with Richard Whiteheart Beads. We start loading our plates. While we are selecting food, he tells me about yet a newer truck he is thinking of buying—he’s always thinking of what he can acquire. This truck, it is just another example of Whiteheart’s imaginary surround. I know that. But I listen as though I believe in its pinstripes and refurbished engine, its Thirstbuster cup holders.

“Wish I could get an automatic sunroof, too,” Whiteheart Beads is saying. “Then you could travel with the wind in your hair.”

“What hair?”

I’m an Indian with a buzz cut now. I got it when she left the first time. I cut my hair for sorrow. She left again. More sorrow. And again. Yet shorter. Anyway, now that she’s back my hair says to her, I hope, what I have reformed myself to believe. Plain living. Hard work. The simple life, unadorned, ridding the world of waste. “People You Can Count On.” My new motto in garbage management. My belief.

“You should grow it out again. Long. Women love it.”

Whiteheart Beads is referring to his own ponytail, a serious thick rope reaching halfway down his suit-jacket back. We, the two of us, present a very different image and I must admit that his is probably the more selling look in terms of women. And for sure, since from our association raffle he has won two Appreciation Top Prize all-expense-paid tickets to Maui, a fact revealed shortly after the soda pop stops flowing at this lunch, his ponytail might bring good luck.

We mill around. We eat more. Used to be us Indians had nothing to throw away—we used it all up to the last scrap. Now we have a lot of casino trash, of course, and used diapers, disposable and yet eternal, like the rest of the country. Keep this up and we’ll all one day be a landfill of diapers, living as adults right on top of our own baby shit. Makes sense to me. Of course, our main business is that we deal with EPA staff. Richard aims to be the first Native-owned waste disposal company in the whole U.S. He’s already proud of it. Proud of our imaginary management expertise and good old-fashioned ability to haul shit. Not to mention stabilize it. Let’s not talk about carpet.

A cake is wheeled in and it is shaped like a collection vehicle with bright colors of thick frosting, the lard and sugar kind, heart-stopping artery paste.

“You want ’em?”

Whiteheart holds the tickets out casually in the lucky presentation envelope. I take the envelope: pictures of windsurfing Barbies and Kens, a couple of sea turtles winging through the gloom. Native Hawaiians dressed in flowers, holding torches, paddling a huge wooden canoe.

“Right,” I say, reluctant to hand the envelope back. I notice it’s not transferable, his name is filled in the blanks.

Whiteheart waves his hands at me, fanning out his fingers.

“Keep ’em. Keep. My wedding present.”

“Wedding?” My heart jumps.

“Or pretend wedding honeymoon only. It’s up to you.”

Whiteheart looks at me and shrugs, very modest, as though any gratitude will just embarrass him, as though it makes him very nervous, which I notice he has been all along, that day, through the cheese and crackers, fruit, cold meats, the cake. He’s been looking over his shoulder, staring into corners, behaving in this distracted and jumpy fashion I know so well. Woman trouble.

“Whiteheart, Whiteheart my friend.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Who is she? You can tell me.”

His smile snaps across his face like a banner pulled tight.

“Not a woman. Not a woman. You take those tickets, Klaus. You can borrow my ID. You have a good time—hey, I mean it.”

Then, with surprisingly little fuss or bother, Whiteheart exits through a side door, disappears almost. Unlike him until the eleventh hour.

N
EXT THING
I
KNOW,
my sweetheart and me are getting ready for the trip. Maui. Glorious. Tropical. Hotel on the beach. We decide to go immediately in case Whiteheart’s mind changes or he comes along, a thing he is fond of doing on our dates. I was always the one who minded those lopsided occasions worse than Sweetheart. I think back on that now. I should have known from the beginning, but love blinded me the way it does. She probably would have rather been with Whiteheart even then! But no, no. Don’t get ahead of the next event.

It all happens bang right out of the gates. These guys. Two guys at the airport looking us over in that special way I am familiar with from getting kicked out of the army. Big guys. In suits. Four words to cause concern.
Big guys in suits.
I’ll never look at life the same.

We check in.

Apparently there is some sort of seating arrangement that goes with these tickets, and it involves my wife and I split up in separate seats. Not only that, but the middle row seats.

“Hey, this can’t be right. We’re together, on our honeymoon,” I tell the check-in personnel—exotic-looking woman, nails to here.

She chews her lip and fiddles with the keyboard, scowls at what blips up on the screen, and then looks at us with a blank, closed expression. Lots of purple eye shadow.

“I can’t do a thing about it.” Her declaration is such that I don’t even think to argue. She stamps our tickets, asks us if anyone had given us anything to carry on board the plane, waves us on.

“We’ll switch once we’re on the plane,” I say to my lady love, reassuring her. “Someone will be glad to change places with a couple newlyweds.”

I like your faith in human nature
, her look tells me. I am proud of her pessimism, read it as an answer. And she is right about those guys. One of them sits next to each of us. I ask, politely, lying. “We’re newlyweds. Our seats got screwed up. Would one of you fellows mind switching?”

Like asking a favor of a set of bowling balls. These guys are muscle-bound and thick of neck, ponytailed like Whiteheart. One with a gold ring in the chunky lobe of his ear. The seatmate I address is the color of a Hereford, too, reddish and whitish. Dull eyes of a slab of meat. And you know what it’s like in the middle seat of an airplane anyway, that stuffed-in-a-cat-carrier feeling, claustrophobic. I am directly behind my love and to take my mind off my panic, I watch with longing the only part of her that I can see—top of her head and dark hair ponytailed in something I’ve heard called a scrunchie, a purple satin cloth band thing that bobs and slides up and down as she nervously mimics the flight attendant’s demonstration.

It concerns me, her sitting next to that guy.

Quite apart from the weirdness in the first place, she’s that sort of taut-bodied, fine-boned woman who arouses instant lust. From the back, especially, one of her most attractive angles. She has a sloping deer-haunch bottom. I am glad it is pressed against the seat. Her mouth now that her tooth is broken always looks as though she’s just bit into a sweet tart candy, pursed together like her scrunchie. When she smiles, though, it looks real witchy. I find her broken tooth something to adore, though I admit it is not to every man’s taste. Anyway, what I’m trying to say, politely, is that her front side, grinning, though lovely to me, is not her most attractive to the less discerning. I hoped she wouldn’t have to rise, say, to visit the bathroom, putting that lovely rear of hers within a handsbreadth of that ape.

No chance of that, I later find.

I was in perfect agony
, she communicates, slumping against me once we have deplaned,
and do you think they would so much as let me stir? Pretended to speak another sign language, or not understand me. I ended up pointing you know where and hissing.
I wince.
They didn’t get it.
She shrugs.
Pretended not to. What’s going on?

This is at the car rental place, in Maui herself, where we find ourselves waiting a mere ten hours after boarding that plane. We are standing in the patient headlights of those guys in suits.

“Something odd about those guys,” I mutter, tired, fed by a prescient insight. “Something that has to do with Whiteheart.”

Sweetheart always perks up when his name drops from my lips. She peers at me now through her tattered hair. Whiteheart. These burly types in suits. I keep not getting it even as we drive through the booming night air, light and sugary, blowing a pale salt through the windows of the car. They are going along the same road, it appears. I still don’t get it when they make the turnoff, directly behind us. When they park, next space. When they emerge just as we do and form an escort phalanx around us like Roman guards. Then, as we march into the huge waterfall-running Bird of Paradise lounge and check-in desk, I do get it. They’re going to kill us. They’re assassins.

O
NCE
I
UNDERSTAND THAT,
I’m okay. My mind is clear.

The hallways of this big elaborate jungle hotel lobby contrast with the long white light tunnels to the stacks of rooms. Walking toward our number we are of course accompanied off the elevator by the big guys in suits, whom I am tired of seeing at every turn. So tired of it all, in fact, so clear in my read, that without thinking or caring about the consequences I confront them.

I whirl, annoyed to the point where I do not have fear. I face them with stony resistance. They sweep right past, whereas I thought they’d halt, we’d speak, have words. No words. At least an exchange where I could ask who on earth they thought I was—a man worth pursuing and killing? How come?

“Hey”—I take on the smaller, bullnecked one—“what’s the rush?”

Both stop and look, eyes like marbles.

“You’re sent to kill, I know,” I say, amiable. “Obvious. So why not enjoy yourself first?”

“We’re not here to hurt you,” says the shorter one after a pause. “It’s nothing like that.”

The bigger one laughs. “Worse.”

My heart thumps. My voice comes out scratchy and small.

“IRS?”

“Not exactly. We’re here because of dumping practices. You’re part of a major sweep. It’s okay to tell you, we just got the word.”

“Might as well do the honors,” says the big guy.

“You’re under arrest.” It is the smaller one who shows his badge.

“You have to say his name,” the larger guy prompts, underneath his breath.

“Oh yeah,” says the newer cop, officer, whatever.

“Whiteheart. Richard Whiteheart.”

“Beads.”

“No! I’m not him!” A sudden wave of relief gushes through me. I start to laugh, to explain. “He gave these tickets to me for my honeymoon. He sent us here, made us a gift, changed our lives.”

“Oh, right.” They both grin little tight shark smiles and remind me that I’m on an island. We’ll leave in the morning. They’ll accompany me to the airport.

“Really, though. I’m not Whiteheart.
Look
.”

I take out my wallet, open it, slip my license from the interior of its pocket, and to my complete sincere suddenly remembering shock I find that I am carrying the ID pictures of Whiteheart—he gave them to me, of course, to present for the tickets. We look enough alike, I guess, being both the real thing Anishinaabe men.

“Wait,” I say, digging for the real me, which I can’t find. Where is it and where am I and worst of all who?

S
O THAT IS ABOUT
the extent of our honeymoon, me and Sweetheart. I decide, since we’ve got one night in paradise, to make the most of it. I purchase my babe mai tais in a big plastic cup. We go down in the elevator to the tile whirlpool hot tub, a hidden glade unit surrounded by flowers. Of course, the big guys follow.

We get in, her and me. She’s wearing a suit covered with blue hibiscus flowers. Something I bought her back in Gakaabikaang. And oh man, but is it ever good, this whirlpool bath of heat and chlorine. The hot jets rumble up and down my spine and the presence of my lady is all but too much for me. I’ll never forget this, never, I think, her face in the rushing blue lights. Her hair in smooth snakes and curlicues floating and drifting on the surface of the medicinal waters. The booze, which I suck down in order to enjoy the present moment, disremember the past, meet the stupid future, both knocks me down and buoys me up. The night progresses and the heat intensifies. Of course, there is a certain restraining factor in the presence of the gorilla.

“You have to sit there in that suit?” I say at last to the big boy in the shadows. “How come you don’t just hop in here?”

“Yeah, wish I could.”

“Why don’t you guys pretend not to catch me for a while and stay here, I mean, hang out and absorb some rays. Snorkel. Beachcomb. Hot tub. Swim.”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” he says, but in a wistful tone.