Joe Washington watched the three of them in the mirror. Him, Mickey, and Louis. Three Indians sitting at the bar in the Viking, their faces reflected in a blemished mirror through moving clouds of cigarette smoke. “We look like hell,” he thought, “especially Mickey. All the smoke in this place can’t be good for him.”
Mickey’s shoulders shuddered and heaved as he repressed a cough. He held a heavy white coffee cup up to the bartender, who filled it again; then he took a sip of coffee, set the cup down on the bar, and pulled a fistful of stained handkerchiefs out of his coat pocket. He retched heavily, wretchedly, into the handkerchiefs, the sound dry, as though he had coughed all of the moisture from his lungs. Joe knew the sound; before she had died his wife had sounded the same way. He put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder until it stopped heaving. Mickey took the brown-flecked wad of handkerchiefs off his mouth and stuffed them back into his pocket, smiling apologetically. On the rim of the coffee cup Joe saw a thin spray, a delicate mist of pink. His eyes and Louis’s met in the mirror.
“You doing all right, there? Hell of a cough,” Louis said.
“Medic!” Mickey tried to get them to laugh. “That’s you, Zho! Medic!” His thin, yellowed fingers gripped the sides of the wooden bar stool. Shoulders bowed, he swayed in an attempt to force air into his lungs.
Bracing his bandaged neck against one shoulder, Joe half-lifted Mickey, helping him to straighten up. “Take it slow, pal. Just breathe in slow; you’ll be all right.”
Mickey leaned against the wounded medic. “Hell of a sight,” thought Louis.
“Just got to catch my breath,” Mickey gasped, shallowly. “Hey, another beer for Zho.”
Louis told the bartender, “Another for our buddy, here. He just got out of the army.”
“On me, this one’s on me,” wheezed Mickey.
“Those black circles around his eyes make him look like an owl,” thought Louis. When he was younger, they had called him Waboos, “rabbit.” He had been small, quick-moving, somewhat timid. He grew into a tall, skinny kid, long-jawed and cautious, with a rangy loping gait, a loner who loved company. They then had called him Maingen, “wolf,” and still did, although as he got sicker he looked like a wolf at the end of a long winter. He was changing again, before Louis’s and Joe’s eyes, shifting shapes, like Nanaboozhoo, but weak, tired, wearing out. He smiled, and the dying wolf turned into a young rabbit who closed his mouth and became a gray owl.
As if Louis had said the words aloud, Mickey turned his owl head without moving his shoulders, to get a better look at something he saw in the mirror. He blinked, turned back to the bar, then did a double take. He sat still on the barstool, gray owl in a tree, his claws gripping his perch, the wooden seat, his head turned toward the bar, and stared. Louis and Joe turned, too, Joe a little more slowly because the wound on the side of his neck pulled, a cluster of small craters scabbing over, stiffening beneath a heavy bandage.
They saw him coming before they heard his old and familiar step, and although their memories of him were at different ages, they each recognized McGoun, the disciplinarian from the Harrod Indian School. Each recognized in the figure undying scenes from their childhoods at the boarding school.
Louis saw the outline of a shadow, a giant that shrank to become a man lurching toward the bar from a table near the front door, and in the transformation he saw—in days that he had buried but not deep enough—McGoun, the young handyman at the Harrod school, shoving Louis’s brother Frank into a pile of manure in the dairy barn, ordering him to get up, kicking him in the side when he tried to raise himself on his hands and knees. McGoun, big and powerful, whose very walk frightened the lonely and vulnerable boys and girls who lived at Harrod. McGoun, the mixed-blood, whose own mother was from north of Miskwaa River, who turned on his own people’s children.
Joe recalled McGoun after the tractor accident that crippled his hip, when he was the boys’ disciplinarian and walked with a dragging limp, heavy with the left foot, dragging the right, a doubled leather strap hooked over his belt. McGoun, slapping the strap against his hand as he smiled at the boy. “Say ‘Joe Washington,’ not ‘Zho Waash.’ Say it. ‘Joe Washington.’” Slapping the strap against his hand. Pushing Joe against the wall with his forearm, holding him there, smiling. Spitting the words into his face, “Say ‘My name is Joe Washington.’ Say it.” McGoun leaning, his weight heavy against Joe’s chest, the boy finally gasping, “Joe.” McGoun, pulling that little Rice Bird girl by the arm to behind the barn, lifting her by the arm so that her feet barely touched the ground, telling her to take down her bloomers, whipping her on the bare rear with that strap till she peed, water running down her legs, darkening the dirt under her feet. That worthless bag of shit, McGoun, who thought he was something because he could do whatever he wanted with other people’s children.
Mickey could only see McGoun the prefect, remembered McGoun beating him, young Waboos, in the basement of the laundry building, holding Waboos by the throat against the wall, ramming his fist into the little boy’s side. McGoun locked him in the discipline room, where he stayed for days at a time, his eyes getting used to the dark, his stomach to the meals of bread and water, every time McGoun decided that he needed discipline. McGoun played cat-and-mouse games with young Mickey, hurting him physically, torturing his mind, frightening his spirit as it grew from Waboos to Maingen, frightening the entity of the young wolf back into the timid rabbit, Waboos. Waboos turned, kneeling on one knee, to present his back for the strap, at the unspoken signal taught by McGoun. It had become, with practice, a ritual, the prefect looking at Mickey, then from Mickey to the ground in front of him, signaling with a flick of his hand, palm up to palm down. Maingen, the young wolf, fled in defeat and humiliation, leaving Waboos, who was unable to defend Mickey, who knelt.
The shadow step-dragged his way through the Viking and stopped by the three Indians at the bar.
McGoun was older now and smaller than Joe remembered. His gray-brown overcoat was ripped in the front, his face lined; he needed a bath badly. His hands were shaking; he needed a drink even more. The old ghost opened his mouth to speak; rotten breath rolled like snoose between four broken, brown teeth. “Still a sack of shit,” Joe thought.
“He’s not that much older than me; I never realized that until just now,” thought Louis. McGoun stunk, like he had pissed in his pants. He was wearing old moccasins that were damp from rain or piss. The flowers and vine decorations on the vamps were losing beads, like tears falling off the old man’s feet. They had been beautiful once. “Where did he get them,” Louis wondered. Louis’s mother had made moccasins like those for her boys before they left for boarding school, he remembered. McGoun took all their clothes away when they got to school and he lied to his boss, said he burned them, but he sold the Gallette boys’ moccasins to the owner of the Harrod General Store. Cheater, traitor. Betrayed his people.
Mickey stared with owl eyes at the apparition. Was he real, he wondered, and he almost raised an arm to touch him, to find out, but found that his hands wouldn’t move. He was Waboos, the little boy frozen, mesmerized by the specter. He was Maingen, young wolf hungry for the day McGoun would get his, lowering his head, kneeling at the signal, humiliated and waiting for the chance to avenge his vulnerability.
The ghost spoke to the three. “Can you spare a nickel for a beer?” He passed a hand to Louis, to Joe, to Mickey, where he held it out.
Waboos remembered what to do without being told. He climbed off the bar stool and knelt on one knee, turned to present his back for the strap.
Louis grasped McGoun by the front of his stained overcoat and walked out the back door of the Viking into the parking lot, pulling the ghost who was real behind him. Outside, under the single light above the back door, he pushed the prefect in front of him to the back of the parking lot, then kicked him in the rear, hard enough to knock him to the ground. He rolled the man onto his back and straddled him, his knees on the man’s wrists.
“I wish this was a pile of shit you’re layin’ in here,” he said in his soft and distant voice, his mouth inches from the old man’s. “I wish Frank was here. You remember Frank Gallette? I wish he was here, I wish he could see you.” He hit McGoun across the face with the back of his hand. “I wish they could all see you.”
When Joe and Mickey came out the back door, they heard Louis before they saw him, heard his quiet voice talking nonstop, reminding McGoun of things that he had done. Louis’s speech was rhythmic; when they got close enough they could see that he was shaking the prefect by the shoulders and that McGoun’s head was hitting the ground with the cadence. Under jagged stars reflected in a hangnail moon, McGoun had shifted shapes himself, Joe thought. McGoun had become a rat lying beneath a leafless elm that stood between the three boys and the moon, swaying in the night breeze, moving shadows around the prefect. A shadow cast by his side became a rat’s tail switching in the wind; the oily black beads that were his eyes reflected the moon’s laughing scorn. From deep in his chest he blew damp, piss-scented breath that steamed in the cool night air. His upper lip lifted, and he half-smiled. He caught Mickey’s eye and winked. The hold he had over them would outlast anything tangible.
Mickey was unnerved. “He—he’s—”He tried to find words to speak, began to cough, braced his stomach with one hand and stuffed the ball of handkerchiefs against his mouth with the other. With nothing to lean on, he collapsed on the ground next to Louis and McGoun.
Joe crouched, with his arms around Mickey’s shoulders. “Louis,” he said, “listen, you’re going to kill him.”
Louis looked at him with calm eyes dark and muddy as the Grand Bois slough at night. “I know,” he answered in his soft and even way, and continued to shake McGoun’s shoulders and head.
Mickey’s cough changed to a whistle, then to a sob, as he tried to force his lungs to inhale. Joe knelt and held him in his arms, arching Mickey’s back to help him get some air.
“All right, Waboos? All right, Cousin?”
The intake of air blended with moaning of the leafless elm that swayed in the night wind, weaving shadows around the four.
Louis let go of McGoun. “Let’s get him out of here.” He put one arm around Mickey’s waist and with the other held Mickey’s hand across his own shoulders. Joe did the same.
McGoun rolled to his stomach and rose to his hands and knees, then to stand on two feet. He coughed, hawked, spit. “Wha’ kinda Indians are youse? Minikwe daa, boys. C’mon … let’s drink,” he muttered. “Get back here … snot-nosed coward…. Louis, ask your old lady … which of those kids were mine.” His legs quivered and he abruptly sat. Surprised, he chuckled. “Help me up, boys, will you?”
Louis braced Waboos against Joe and lifted the drunk by the waist of his pants. McGoun pivoted on his heels, waistband held from behind by Louis. “Maybe he’s mine, too,” he rasped. Louis swung him and he fell, a heap of old clothes and urine. His throat rattled, his eyes glittered and winked, black and shining as jet.
They left the prefect in the parking lot behind the Viking, under the blue-gray light of the moon, under stars that sprinkled broken glass onto the sidewalk, walking slowly away with their love and their grief.