The Search for Joyful (10 page)

“You play games? How does that get anyone well?”

He seemed surprised. “The life force is in motion. Kickball is a good way to release it, or kickstick—even making a patch.”

“Don't you have medicines?”

“Of course. But first we put the heart of the healer in sympathy with the spirits. Then we give medicine. Bear gallbladder is strong against poison. Skunk oil is good for sore throat. Rub on grease from a wild goose for cramps or stomach pain. If you can't get a goose, duck is pretty good. Moose and beaver soups boiled with milkweed or red mulberry poured through wood ashes is strong against rattlesnake bite. Brings down the swelling. Even better, if you can catch the snake, cut it up and put it on the wound. Sure we got medicine.”

“It all sounds very strange to me and I can't believe it does any good.”

“What do you expect? You can't learn to be an Indian in one lesson.” He regarded me quite soberly. “Are you sure you want to be an Indian?”

“No, I'm not at all sure.”

“You are like me, stuck between worlds. That's why I joined up.”

“That doesn't make sense. They're fighting over countries you don't even know about.”

“My reasoning is this. I offer my life and perhaps my death in their battle, so I've won a place in white Canada. I have a right to it.”

“Well, maybe,” I said, not convinced. Privately I thought he would have to scrub at his lovely copper-colored skin harder than even I had and that in the end it wouldn't do any good.

“Will your unit be called up?” I asked.

“Who knows? For now we're detailed to drive lorries and keep 'em running. . . . There”—he straightened and patted the seat of the three-wheeler—“this should get us back. Let's give it a try. I thought we'd start at the top of that grade.”

He dragged the machine over to the hill, and in one of those swift movements typical of him had the motorcycle in an upright position. Straddling it, he kicked up the motor. “Listen to that,” he exclaimed, “purring like a bobcat.”

I approached somewhat reluctantly. “So it was the center of gravity?”

“That's right—when it's too high, the motorcycle wants to steer itself.”

“But you won't let it?”

“Now I know this habit, I'll hold it down. Perhaps a regular two-wheeler is better.”

“Personally I like four wheels. It seems more stable.”

“Four wheels? You're talking a car. You don't like cars.”

“Under the right circumstances I like them.”

He looked dejected. “A car eats gas and I only have a green ration card.” To reassure and persuade me back to the motorcycle, he pointed out a gray and white feather attached to his key ring. “Don't be afraid. The spirit of this bird protects us.”

“He must have looked away for a moment,” I said.

But Crazy Dancer had his own interpretation. “He reminds me not to try to fly like him, because this is only a machine.”

I mounted, my arms once more around him.

To reassure me, he explained his plan for reconnecting with the road. “We're going downhill in neutral and at the bottom shift into second. We'll have to get up to thirty or thirty-five or stall, so hang on.”

It was like a runaway roller coaster, but I hung on and we made it.

Crazy Dancer took the ride back a bit more cautiously, because while the motor purred like a bobcat, there was an occasional hiccup.

We stopped at a drugstore for ice cream. It reminded me of the one back home, but this had small round marble-top tables and wire-backed chairs. “I used to work in a drugstore.”

“You did?”

“Yes, only it wasn't fancy like this.”

“I bet you made good milk shakes.”

“I did.”

Two white kids came in and were served ahead of us. Crazy Dancer didn't say anything but went to the counter and gave our order there. When he came back he said, “I'll leave a big tip.”

“Why would you do that when they ignored us?”

“It is a contrary lesson, one of my bad examples. It makes them think, Why would he have done that? And they will feel bad that they don't deserve it.”

I couldn't help laughing at his logic. “Oh, Crazy Dancer, I don't think so.”

“My backward examples work. After all, I cracked us up and yet here you are having a malted with me. How do you explain that?”

“It must be your strong medicine.”

He laughed, delighted. “Now you are sounding like Oh-Be-Joyful's Daughter.”

When we drove into the hospital parking area there were several people about. They sent curious glances our way, taking in Crazy Dancer and his machine. I didn't care what they thought. I'd had a good time. I was happy. In fact I was joyful.

“It will be better next Sunday,” Crazy Dancer said.

“Next Sunday?”

“Yes, when you come with me again.”

“Crazy Dancer, you forgot to ask me. You can't just assume things, you have to ask.”

“I did ask,” he said. “Do I always have to use words?”

“Yes, you always have to.”

He looked with a very sweet expression, I thought, into my eyes. “Will you come with me Sunday, in the Moon When the Pony Sheds?”

“Yes, I will.”

F
ive

HE CREPT INTO my mind at odd hours during the week. I had a suspicion that he seemed as unconventional to his own people as he did to me. But I liked the unexpectedness of him, the honesty. And I was touched by the fact that he hadn't tried even a kiss. He was feeling his way with me.

He lived by inner laws that perhaps I would never understand. The thrust of everything he did was to bring out the harmony in things. That made him a religious person. And I was reminded of my father, Jonathan Forquet. But Crazy Dancer's God was in everything, in motion, in doing, in being.

A clown, he said, made you think in new ways.

I hunted up Sister Egg to see what she thought.

“That God is in everything? St. Eckhardt in the sixth century wrote extensively on this very point. But scholarship isn't necessary. You just open your eyes and look.”

“I'm so glad we think alike. Would you go so far as to say His spirit is in dancing and even soccer?”

“Dancing and soccer? And lacrosse, I suppose? Well, now let me see. God enjoins us to be happy. And since we are happy when we do these things, I would say yes. Definitely yes.”

I could have hugged her, I was so pleased.

THE LAST FEW days Mandy was, as Mama Kathy would have put it, a bit off her feed. In anyone else it wouldn't have been noticeable, but I lived with her, and Mandy, usually open about everything, now was abstracted and jumped when I spoke to her unexpectedly.

I didn't pay much attention at first. I told myself she'd had a quarrel with Robert and they'd make it up.

That didn't happen. She continued withdrawn and uncommunicative.

Finally, I blurted out, “Mandy, what is it? What's wrong?”

She shook her head. “It's nothing.”

“You're not yourself. Something's happened. Can't you tell me?”

“It's nothing. Really. Just a problem Robert and I have to work out.”

It was a polite way of brushing me off, but I persisted. “Is Robert pressuring you to, you know . . . go all the way?”

That made her laugh and for a moment I thought things would be all right. “Oh, Kathy, you are funny, so full of good old-fashioned homespun morality. Robert and I have been sleeping together almost from the beginning. Oh, I know good girls don't. But the war's changed all that. It showed us we have to live in the present.”

There was a pause, which I didn't know how to fill, so I put my arms around her. I felt her sag. With a complete change from boisterous confidence, she crumpled.

“You don't think less of me, Kathy, do you?”

“Of course not. It's just that it didn't make you joyful.”

“I
was
happy. For a while it was wonderful. It still is, only . . .” She stopped herself and when she continued it was more carefully. “Robert's sensitive, you know. You wouldn't think it, a big, strapping guy like that. But he is. I keep telling him a doctor can't take everything to heart the way he does. He empathizes too much with his patients.”

Whatever was bothering Mandy, it was not Robert Whitaker's concern for his patients. I wasn't any closer to knowing what was going on than I had been before.

Sunday came. I dressed with care and scrutinized myself in the mirror. I wanted Crazy Dancer to be proud of me, to think I was pretty. I was in the parking lot at exactly one.

He must have been going on Indian time. He was late.

I watched various vehicles pull up, and leave again. A half hour dragged by in this way before it occurred to me that perhaps he wasn't going to show up. There was a sick spot in my stomach that expanded as minutes passed and it became increasingly obvious that he wasn't coming.

With a last look around I turned on my heel and went to my room.

Who did he think he was to treat me like this? He couldn't have forgotten. He had deliberately stood me up. In some recess of my being I still expected I would hear from him. He'd have some excuse, some story. And I didn't intend to listen, no matter what.

Monday there was no word. Nothing.

When Mandy invited me to go with her and Robert to Harry Sharp's, the casino that everyone talked about but that wasn't supposed to exist, I decided I'd go.

Mandy rarely asked me to join them, and I felt this might mean she was ready to take me into her confidence. Besides, in the mood I was in, I rather looked forward to investigating the darker side of Montreal. And Harry Sharp's casino was as close to Mama's sin city as I was liable to get.

For the occasion Mandy lent me a dress. It was a floaty chiffon in pale yellow. I wished Crazy Dancer could see me in it. I repressed that thought with annoyance.

“You look ravishing, Kathy.” The prospect of a nefarious evening brought color back to her cheeks and the old animation. “Have you any money?”

“Not much. Will I be needing any?”

“Well, there's no use going to a gambling casino if you don't gamble.”

“You're right,” I said. Where and how could I come by money? There was the money I saved during the week for movies, and I might borrow a similar amount from Sister Egg. I shut out of my mind Mama Kathy's reaction to such a scheme.

I knocked on the door of Egg's room. “It's for an emergency,” I explained.

The casino was on Cote Street, which everybody called Luck Road. All the swank places in Montreal were subterranean, and this cavern exploded in light and sound. Rapid French struck us from all sides and seemed to accelerate the more plodding English. Other languages intruded. People joked in Russian, laughed in French, and whispered in Armenian. One man wept bitterly in what sounded like Bulgarian or some other Slavic tongue, and seemed on the point of suicide, but allowed friends to restrain him. It was Dante's inferno mixed up with carnival.

The decor was elegant but far from tasteful. There was a crystal chandelier, a gaudy jukebox in conflict with it. Boxed palm trees were scattered about, and, in their shade, spittoons. The floor was marble, disfigured by black heel marks. At one end of the bar an enormous fresco beamed down on us of a woman in extremely high heels, garters, and a feathered boa that covered some essentials, but not all. The room was ringed by rows of slot machines, and people congregated around them. Gaming tables, however, were the focal point from which all other activities radiated like spokes of a wheel.

The crowd around the tables was as eccentric as the room. A conglomeration of expatriates from a dozen countries waved their money, collected chips, and placed their bets. I had a strong feeling they were not what they seemed, that nothing here was. The well-dressed gentleman with goatee, who resembled a French banker, I was sure I had seen driving a cab. It was carny time, and people dressed themselves in their wishes, their dreams.

I was one of them in my borrowed finery.

There were floor-length gowns and women in slacks. Among the men, zoot-suiters in the drape shape with the reet pleat and the stuff cuff mingled with starched ruffled shirtfronts and cummerbunds.

The closeness of the room intensified the sensations my nose picked up—brilliantine, that was a definite smell. It came from a head in front of me that glistened with it. The man turned a hawklike face in my direction. He wasn't looking at me, but at Mandy. It was an insolent look, bold and—He noticed I was observing him and ducked into the maze of people.

Expensive French perfumes were at variance with those picked up in the dime store. The atmosphere was invaded by stogies and cigarettes. Belinda Fancytails from Havana were advertised. They sold everything here.

Sharp's casino imitated both the discreet establishments of Nice and the flamboyance of Las Vegas. Mandy held onto me. We had somehow gotten separated from Robert and were scrutinizing the crowd for him. I followed a strobe light picking out face after face. There in an alcove was the man with the brilliantined hair and hawk face, talking to . . . I thought it was Robert, but the light moved on. When it completed its circuit and swung back, there was the hawk still in the alcove, but alone, nursing a drink. Someone called, “Frankie,
c'est va?
” and he answered with a smile and a wave of the hand. The smile was unpleasant. One front tooth lay on top of the other, giving him the appearance of a wolverine.

“Here's Robert,” Mandy called.