The Round House (12 page)

Heart to heart, Joe. Listen, this is a sadist. Beyond the limits, someone who has no . . . way beyond . . .

Way beyond
your jurisdiction
, I said. There was an edge of juvenile sarcasm in my voice.

Well, you understand a bit about jurisdiction issues, he said, catching my scorn, then ignoring it. Joe, please. I am asking you now as your father to quit. It is a police matter, do you understand?

Who? Tribal? Smokies? FBI? What do they care?

Look, Joe, you know Soren Bjerke.

Yes, I said. I remember what you said once about FBI agents who draw Indian Country.

What did I say? he asked warily.

You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority.

Did I really? said my father. He nodded, almost smiled.

Soren is not a rookie, he said.

All right, Dad. So why didn't he find the gas can?

I don't know, said my father.

I know. Because he doesn't care about her. Not really. Not like we do.

I had worked myself into a fury now, or planted myself into one with every puny hothouse plant that would not succeed in gaining my mother's attention. It seemed that anything my father did, or said, was calculated to drive me crazy. I was strangling there alone with my father in the quiet late afternoon. A rough cloud had boiled over me—I wanted all of a sudden nothing else but to escape from my father, and my mother too, rip away their web of guilt and protection and nameless sickening emotions.

I gotta go.

A tick started crawling up my leg. I pulled up the cuff of my trousers, caught it, and ripped it savagely apart with my nails.

All right, my father said quietly. Where do you want to go?

Anywhere.

Joe, he said carefully. I should have told you I am proud of you. I am proud of how you love your mother. Proud of how you figured this out. But do you understand that if something should happen to you, Joe, that your mother and I would . . . we couldn't bear it. You give us life . . .

I jumped up. Yellow spots pulsed before my eyes.

You gave
me
life, I said. That's how it's supposed to work. So let me do what I want with it!

I ran for my bike, jumped on it, and pedaled right around him. He tried to catch at me with his arms but I swerved at the last moment and put on a burst of speed that put me out of his reach.

I
knew my father would call Clemence and Edward's. The gas station was out for the same reason. Cappy's and Zack's parents both had telephones. That left Angus. I pedaled straight over to find him outside, crushing last night's haul of beer cans. None of the cans were Hamm's. Angus had a scraped cheek and a fat lip. The fact is, sometimes Star would belt him. And when drunk, Elwin had a sly way of trapping Angus and slapping him up—it just about killed Elwin laughing. We wished it would. Besides that, there was a bunch of other guys who didn't like Angus's hair, or something, anything. Angus was glad to see me.

Those assholes again?

Nah, he said. So I knew his aunt or Elwin had done it.

As I helped Angus stomp the cans flat in the rock-hard dirt behind the building, I told him all that I'd overheard my father and Edward say about the priest the night before.

If we could find out that the priest drank Hamm's, I said. Do priests even drink?

Do they drink? said Angus. Hell, yes. They start with wine at mass. After that, I think they get shitfaced every night.

Every time Angus stamped down a can, his hair flew up in a brown mat. Angus had a round face and innocent long eyelashes. He had a crazy disarray of big, gleaming, dangerous-looking teeth. His fat bottom lip bared them in a helpless snarl.

I want to go to mass, I said.

Angus stopped with his foot in midair. What? You wanna go to mass? What for?

Is there a mass?

Sure, there's a five o'clock. We could just make it.

Angus's aunt was as pious as Clemence, though I doubted she'd confessed to slugging Angus.

We could check that priest out, I said.

Father Travis.

Right.

Okay, man.

Angus went up to his aunt's apartment and brought down the bike seat for his pink BMX. He attached it to the hollow rod with a bolt. He put the wrench in his pocket. Whitey had suggested this tactic and given him the wrench when his second mission bike was stolen. Next time someone steals your bike he'll get his ass reamed anyway, said Whitey. We took off and pedaled the long way to stay out of sight of the gas station, and we made it to the doors of Sacred Heart just before mass started. I followed Angus's lead, genuflected, and sat down. We took front-row seats. I had meant to observe the priest with a cool and objective calm—the same way, say, Captain Picard viewed the murderous Ligonian who had abducted Chief Security Officer Yar. I summoned to my face Picard's motionless yet searching gaze as the bell rang to draw the worshippers to their feet. I thought I had prepared myself. But when Father Travis swept in wearing a green robe that looked like a rough blanket, my head seemed to balloon out and fill with bees.

Hey, Starboy, my head is buzzing like a fucking hive, I whispered to Angus.

Shut up, he said.

The little group of twenty or so people began to murmur and Angus thrust a folded paper into my hands. It bore a typed set of responses and the words to hymns. My eyes stuck to Father Travis. I'd seen him before, of course, but I had never really looked at him closely. Boys called Father Travis Pan Face for his expressionless features. Girls called him Father What-a-Waste because his pale eyes glowed over romance-novel cheekbones. His skin was markless and had that redhead's milky pallor except for the snake of livid scar tissue that traveled up his neck. He had close-set little ears, a grave slash of a mouth, and a buzz cut cap of fox-colored hair that receded back from his temples but came to a slashing point in the center. His teeth did not show when he talked and his boxy chin remained motionless so that the lips alone moved in his still face and the words seemed to wiggle out. Now, the mechanical regularity of his features in which the ever-moving slot of a mouth worked made me dizzy enough to sit down. I had the presence of mind to drop the paper so that I could pretend to search for it between my knees. Angus kicked me.

I'll puke if you do that again, I hissed. As soon as we could, pretending to find the end of the line for Holy Communion, we slipped out of the church and went down to the playground. Angus had a cigarette. We painstakingly halved it and I smoked my piece even though it brought back the whirling sense of misery. I must have looked as bad as I felt.

I'm gonna go find Cappy.

Yeah, I said. Why don't you. Tell him I ran away from my dad and to bring some food.

You ran away? Angus frowned. I'd always had the perfect family—loving, rich by reservation standards, stable—the family you would never run away from. No more. His eyes went sharp with pity and he rode off. I wheeled my bicycle into a ruffle of brush and spindly trees, mowed underneath, that marked the edge of the church's land. I leaned my bike against the tree and lay down in spite of the ticks. I shut my eyes. As I lay there I felt the earth pulling at my body. It seemed I could actually feel the gravity, which I pictured somehow as a huge molten magnet sitting at the center of the earth. I could feel it drawing on me and draining me of strength. I was going past limits, boundaries, to where nothing made sense and Q was high judge in red velvet robes. I fell into a drowse sudden as a fainting spell. Then woke to the vibrations of a quick-moving set of footsteps. I opened my eyes and stared straight up the flowing lines of black cloth to the wooden cross and Father Travis's rope belt. Above his rigid torso, broad chest, and undercliff of chin, his colorless eyes shone on me under the flat lids.

There's no smoking on the playground, he said. One of the nuns saw you.

I opened my lips and a hoarse little sound emerged. Father Travis continued.

But you are welcome at Holy Mass. And if catechism interests you, I teach Saturdays at ten a.m.

He waited.

Again, I made some sound.

You're Clemence Milk's nephew. . . .

The drawing flow of gravity suddenly reversed and I sat straight up, filled with an electric energy of purpose.

Yes, I said. Clemence Milk is my auntie.

Now, remarkably, I found my legs under me. I stood. I actually stepped toward the priest, a small step, but toward him. My father's phrasing left my mouth.

May I ask you a question?

Shoot.

Where were you, I asked, between three and six o'clock on the afternoon of May fifteenth?

What day was that?

The grave mouth tucked at the corners.

It was a Sunday.

I suppose I was officiating. I don't really remember. And then after mass there was the Adoration. Why?

Just asking. No reason.

There is always a reason, said Father Travis.

Can I ask you another question?

No, said the priest. One question per day. His scar jumped to life on the side of his throat. It glowed red. You're a good kid, I hear from your aunt, get good grades. You don't give your parents trouble. We would love to have you in our youth group. He smiled. I saw his teeth for the first time. They were too white and even to be real. Young as he was, but with false teeth! And that scar like a thick rope of paint up his neck. He put his hand out. The callow artist's rendering of features resolved. Too handsome to be handsome, Clemence had said. We stood there. The sheen off his cassock reflecting up into his eyes spooked me. He held his hand out steady. I tried to hold back but my hand reached out of its own accord. His palm was cool. The callus smooth and tough, like Cappy's dad.

So we'll see you then. He turned away. Then looked back with the hint of a grin.

Cigarettes will kill you.

I stood rooted until he'd entered the church basement door far up the hill. I put my back against a tree and leaned there—not slumping. I was filled with that odd energy. I was allowing the tree to help me think. I decided first of all not to hate myself for what had just passed between the priest and me, that moment. I could hardly have refused. To refuse to shake a person's hand on the reservation was like wishing them dead. Although I did wish Father Travis Wozniak dead and wanted to burn him alive, even, my wish was contingent on secure proof that he was my mother's attacker. Guilty. My father would not have condoned a conclusion bereft of factual support. I scratched my back with the ridged tree bark and stared at the place where the priest had disappeared. The door to the church basement. I intended to get those facts, and when my friends came, I would have help.

Cappy appeared with Angus. He had a bread bag half full of potato salad and a plastic spoon. I made a bowl out of the bag by folding down the top, then I ate the salad. It was the kind with mustard in the mayonnaise and pickles and eggs. Cappy's aunts must have made the salad. My mother made it that way. I scraped my spoon against the inside of the bag. Then I told Cappy and Angus about the conversation I had overheard and how my father's suspicion had landed on the priest.

My dad said he was in Lebanon.

Whatever, said Cappy.

He was a Marine.

So was my dad, said Cappy.

I'm thinking we should find out if he drinks Hamm's beer, I said. I was going to ask him but figured I'd give away the game. I did get his alibi. I have to check it.

Angus said, His what?

His excuse. He says he officiated at mass that Sunday afternoon. All I have to do is ask Clemence.

Should we set some Hamm's on his doorstep and see if he drinks it? said Angus.

Anybody would drink free beer, especially you, Starboy, said Cappy. We got to catch him drinking Hamm's in private. Spy on him.

Look in a priest's window?

Yes, said Cappy. We'll bike around back of the church and convent up to the old cemetery. Then we can slip around through the fence, take our bikes down through the graves. The back of the priest's house faces the cemetery, and the fence is padlocked, but you can slip through. When it's dark, we'll sneak up to the house.

Do the priests have a dog? I asked.

No dog, said Angus.

Good, I said. But at the moment I wasn't actually afraid of getting caught by the priest. It was the cemetery that unnerved me. I had recently seen a ghost. One was enough, and my father had told me how they visited the cemetery when he worked. This cemetery was the place where Mooshum's father, who had fought at Batoche with Louis Riel, was buried after he was killed years later racing a fast horse. It was where Mooshum's brother Severine, who had briefly served at the church as a priest, was buried in a plot specially marked off by white-painted brick. One of the three who were lynched by a mob in Hoopdance were also buried there—they'd taken the boy's body there because he was only thirteen. My age. And hanged. Mooshum remembered it. Mooshum's brother Shamengwa, whose name meant the Monarch Butterfly, was buried there. Mooshum's first wife, alongside whom he would be buried, was marked by a gravestone covered with fine gray lichen. His mother was buried in that place, the one who'd stopped talking entirely for ten years after Mooshum's baby brother died. And there was my father's family too, my grandmother's family and her mother's family, some of whom had converted. The men were buried to the west with the traditionals. They vanished into the earth. Small houses had been built over them to house and feed their spirits, but those had collapsed in advance of everything else, into nothingness. I knew the names of our ancestors from Mooshum and from my mother and father.