“HE SHOULD’VE said ‘housewares.’ ” Late morning, I drive Perry to town. It looks like rain.
“He said ‘dishes.’ Said, ‘I sell dishes.’ It was more the way he said it that made you take notice, like he was ashamed to sell dishes.”
“And Dewey was there.”
“It was at the horse ring when I went to tell Matthew and them I was cutting away. I thought it was a bad sign they were crowded so near Beyer, but they weren’t bothering him. Anyway, that’s it. Beyer thought the guy sold satellite dishes and he wanted to scare him off.”
“No, he just wanted an honestly scared witness to this monster he’s invented. He wanted the story carried out of town. He won’t let go of the monster thing.”
“Toss, the guy’s nuts.”
“He’s just overcreative.”
“L double-O N.”
The cloud over us stays dry but it’s the outrider of a natural system stalled over town a few miles ahead, stalactites of rain dark and heavy enough to wash out the last day of the tournament, though the sheer irony of such hard luck seems likely to prevent it. From somewhere a new pain has surfaced below my left kneecap, and my right elbow is tucked close and hides a small bloodstain which has seeped through some bandages on my ribs. I intend to crash at Cora’s. Then I’m going to save my life.
“Bet you get a visit from Hall.”
“You just keep quiet and that’ll be the end of it. Mulwray won’t want too much digging around into his part in this.”
“It has to do with the Indian stuff?”
“It has for Mulwray.”
Perry reconstructs for me the reunion dance. At the pool Polly had said that she’d already agreed to go with someone else but she’d try to get out of it, at which point Perry realized he’d never liked her much to begin with and he could trust his own judgement at least as well as mine. She showed up with Wendel Irwin, another high-schooler, but she winked at Perry five times in the first hour. His rescue of me is somewhat as I’d imagined it. He corralled me just as I made a loud and open offer to sell my land for a dollar to the first woman who’d dance with me. With his help I now mostly recall that before he got me out the door I said something to a skinny cowboy standing alone in the entranceway, holding a full cup of beer and in full formal attire—many-galloned hat, flowered acrylic shirt, narrow and baggy-assed “dress” jeans, rider boots with what southern cowpokes call “roach-killer” toes. I addressed him as “Slim” and asked if he was lost, there being no movie sets in this part of the province and the nearest cow at least ten miles away.
“How did I get away with that?”
“He was ready to plant one of those boots in your lonesome parts when I offered him the rest of my drink tickets. He took them, and predicted you wouldn’t live much longer, but he let us go.”
“Long as he wasn’t a doctor. Or weatherman.” Seconds later I’m laughing aloud at the thought of Slim explaining pressure systems. Perry asks if maybe he shouldn’t be the one driving. He leans over and checks the speedometer, glances down at my right hand, the one on the steering wheel. A thumb and two fingers at six o’clock and the same grip I use to hold a pencil.
“Since when did you get so nervous?” I ask.
“Sometimes it sounds like you’re talking to yourself instead of me.”
Perry has no idea how I hurt my knee unless it was during the fire-pit wrestling or when he tackled me. I tell him that he must live the rest of his life in the knowledge that he’s a hero, though so local only the two of us know it, and that all his debts to me are naturally forgiven.
I gear up to sing a few lines from an old song by The Band. I can’t remember the title. Then I can’t remember the lines.
Irony being a part of life, we hit town inside a ten-ton rain that would have made more sense in the late afternoon. There’s little traffic. The fairgrounds are empty and impassable with mud. Rain never seems to set in any more, it just beats the hell out of the small patch of earth that least needs it and then gives up to higher skies that burn for weeks, not an inaccurate description of the general state of mind around here. Needing recovery time, I’m simply unable to contemplate particular concerns or the people who warrant them, their names unevocative, only the same dull yellow sound.
At the house Cora is waiting with chicken soup and saltines. After downing three spoonfuls I apologize and announce my intention to sleep for the rest of the day. I tell Cora that Perry looked after me last night and has set an example I hope to live by all my life, however little of it remains given my condition. Then I promise to be in serviceable shape for our journey to Saskatoon in the morning.
“Perry’s got some time off so he’s coming along, but maybe that’s not such a good idea if you two can’t stay out of trouble.”
“Who said anything about trouble?”
She says, “Your fat lip didn’t have to say anything.”
“Slipped in the mud. Looks like a washout.”
“Yeah,” comes Perry again to the rescue. “It’s sort of a crying shame. It’s hardly raining at all in the country.”
“Hey, it’s no tragedy.” I start up the stairs. “At least the garden’s happy. Think of all those petunias and impatiens and vegetables. Happy tomatoes in every yard, rhubarb, carrots, corn.…” I keep talking until I’m safely in my room and in bed, where I close my eyes and think about all that water seeping into the earth.
Though I feel horrible the sudden security of Cora’s home brings on an appreciative amazement at all that’s befallen me in the past few hours. The kicker was after sunrise, when I decided to take on a more direct role in the winter count-Mulwray question. The idea was to put the skin under my own keeps until I found a Blood tribe who might want it and then let them have the upper hand on the various Mulwrays, which seemed a fair enough solution all around. But when I arrived at the Nash house I found the basement window broken and bloodstained. The jagged opening required a sober negotiation that I was incapable of. Though I gashed my ribs at least I managed not to bleed on the floor, unlike Mulwray, whose blood led straight to the downstairs room.
The skin had been removed from the wall and laid across the table. On the wall where it had hung, another smaller skin had been revealed. It looked to be a winter count also, except that there were fewer figures and, though some were almost identical to those on the larger calendar, they had been drawn in a linear pattern rather than a spiral. I counted thirty-one years. Then I noticed on the skin’s border the left half of a Lazy N, the Nash family brand. What I was looking at was the first draft of a false story.