Red Earth White Earth. Will Weaver
sipped his wine, which outlasted the waltzes by a full hour. When he swallowed the last drop he stood up, called for Kennedy, and began to pack.
He would not stay long, two weeks at most. He took jeans, sweaters—there would still be snow in Minnesota—heavy socks. Leather gloves. Boots. A down jacket. More.
Music for the trip. He paged through his cassette tapes, picked out Strauss. Haydn. Gershwin. Brubeck. B. B. King. Duane Allman. Boz Scaggs. Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Who. Bob Dylan. Leo Kottke. Emmylou Harris. Buffy Sainte-Marie.
He took his briefcase. Inside were miscellaneous company papers. From his coffee table he added a couple of books, plus the latest issue of Rose Grower’s Monthly.
He called Karen, his secretary. He called Mrs. Cadillo, his housekeeper. He called Susan, a dark-eyed, black-haired Ph.D. candidate in literature whom he had met not long ago in the Stanford stacks. He told them he would be gone on business for two weeks.
He talked longest with Susan. They had dated enough times to sense that each saw large flaws in the other, but flaws not so large as to prevent them from sleeping together when either of them wanted to. Dating a grad student was like making hurried-up popcorn: lots of butter, high heat, instant noise. He thought briefly of seeing her before he left, but the faint puzzlement in her voice told him she was studying. She would finish her degree in the spring. There would be more time. They would see what developed then.
Last, he inspected his plants on his deck. The knobby jade plant he moved a bit more to shade. His tubs of roses he pushed farther into sunlight. The Simon Bolivar was past prime, and he cut away one of its orange-red blooms and two suckers. His Flaming Peace was only now opening, blood red inside with gold reverses. It would be in full bloom when he returned.
Fifty hours, a quarter gram of cocaine, and three speeding tickets later—one in Reno, a second near Idaho Falls, the third somewhere in dark North Dakota—Guy drove across the bridge in Fargo and entered Minnesota.
It was just after midnight. He held his gray Mercedes sedan carefully at ten miles over the speed limit. The oncoming headlights in Moorhead burned behind his eyes. Without slowing, he tipped back his head for more eyedrops, then blinked into the mirror. Oncoming headlights gathered in his white-blond hair, then slid down the long thin slightly bent line of his nose. Closer, the headlights revealed his eyes, small and blue in daylight, squinted and dark tonight. In their eclipse, the headlights illuminated his sharply Nordic features.
He blinked and rolled his eyes to see if they still worked. For a moment in the dark glass of the mirror he saw his father’s face. He looked away and concentrated on the road.
On the outskirts of Moorhead he drove beyond the last streetlight. He thought of the Robert Frost poem “Acquainted with the Night,” of the line about outwalking “the furthest city light.”
His mother had read him that poem once when he was young. Guy did not understand it, but the poem felt lonely. Madeline began to talk about the poem, but then Martin, his father, came in from the barn. She put the book away.
Beyond Moorhead the darker landscape and the eyedrops soothed his vision. But then the ache behind his eyes slid to his belly. He had not eaten since Salt Lake City. Yet there were only sixty miles left to drive. Then the farm. He could eat there.
The Strauss tape ended. He had forgotten it was playing. He replaced it with a Buffy Sainte-Marie tape. For a few miles he listened to her high, wailing songs, the Indian drums behind. It was good night music, full of bonfires and torches and dancing, music to stay awake by. But soon he turned that off too. There was always a point on a long trip when one drove beyond music or talk or even sleep. It was the point at which he drove from the present into the past.
I
1
The summer he was five, Guy saw an Indian woman with four feet.
It was June. The ground was finally dry enough to play ball outside. Guy was in the yard pitching his leather softball against the side of the granary, for in that way he could play catch with himself. A car came from the south on the gravel road. Guy stopped to watch. He watched every car that passed the farm. The car, an old, rusted, blue, four-door Pontiac, slowed at the farm driveway and turned in. The car stopped far away from the house and turned around so that its nose faced the road.
For a moment nothing happened. In the flat yard, in the bright sunlight, far away a crow cawed. Then the rider’s door of the Pontiac swung open with a squeak. An Indian woman got out. Guy picked up his ball and held it. When he looked again the Indian woman was crossing the yard. She was short but straight and walked on four feet. Guy’s mouth fell open. Beneath the hem of her long skirt were certainly four feet. The feet moved her across the gravel and onto the grass like some weird insect on the ground beneath the yard lamp only on the hottest, most humid evenings of the summer.
An Indian Bug Woman.
The Bug Woman came toward Guy. Two of her feet wore shoes like the ones Guy’s mother wore. The other pair was smaller, and wore moccasins. As the Bug Woman came closer, Guy watched the smaller feet. He thought of the little safety wheels on some of the farm machinery; if the big wheels went flat or gave way, the little wheels grabbed and kept things from tipping. Guy blinked against the bright sunlight.
“Eggs,” the Indian woman said to Guy.
Eggs. Guy stared. He turned and pointed to the chicken coop beside the barn. There his mother’s flock of Leghorns bobbed within the square, chicken-wire yard.
“You have extra to sell?” the Indian woman asked.
Guy nodded and pointed to his mother’s house. There were two houses on the farm. The big, white one was his grandparents’, the smaller, brown one his parents’. The Indian woman nodded. Her eyes were as shiny brown as pocket-polished buckeyes and for a moment they gleamed wider and shinier. Then her bug feet propelled her forward.
Guy stared for a moment, then let his ball drop and followed the Bug Woman. He circled to one side of her. He saw something more. Not only did the woman have four feet, she had four eyes. Two smaller brown eyes peeped from around her skirt. The lower set of brown eyes could have been woven into the pattern of her skirt, but polka dots did not have black eyebrows. Polka dots did not peep out, then disappear, then peep out again. Guy thought of a chipmunk on a tree. No matter which way Guy or the Indian woman turned, the small brown eyes stayed on the far, safe side of her trunk.
Guy’s mother brought the eggs out to the front steps. Without speaking, the Indian woman opened the cartons. She ran her short brown fingers across the white crowns of the eggs to inspect them for broken shells. Then she paid two dimes for two dozen, nodded to Madeline, and left. Her extra eyes and extra feet followed her across the yard to the Pontiac where an Indian man waited behind the wheel. Before the Bug Woman was halfway to the car, the Pontiac’s engine started up. The door squeaked and slammed. Then the Pontiac’s wheels crunched on gravel. Guy watched the car head south, then turn west. It continued across the flat plane of the fields and finally disappeared into the hazy green hills of the inner reservation.
In two weeks the Indian car came again. So did the Bug Woman’s extra eyes and feet. This time Guy spotted on her a crow’s wing of black hair connected to the smaller eyes. Then a brown ear. On each visit Guy saw more parts—a hand, an elbow—of the brown jigsaw puzzle he knew to be some sort of kid.
Once, toward midsummer, Guy was tossing his ball against the granary when the Indians’ Pontiac came into the yard again. The Indian woman crossed the yard. As Guy leaned low to look for the kid beside her, he took his eye off the bounce of his ball. The ball rolled past him across the lawn toward the road. But the ball did not reach the ditch. The jigsaw puzzle of kid parts leaped away from the woman and formed itself into an Indian boy about Guy’s age. The boy caught up with the ball. Like a red-tailed hawk slamming onto a stray chicken, he nailed it to the ground. Then he whirled and threw the ball to Guy so hard that Guy’s hands stung.
Guy returned the favor. For a short while they threw the ball at each other as hard as they could fling it. But soon their throws began to arch into higher, softer lofts.