The Witch Tree, page 4
“Why was glue sticky?” he asked. “Why was the sky blue?” “Why didn’t ants get to be as big as dogs or deer?”
Stupid, people said, but Eli was anything but. Early on, he seemed not able to do the simplest things, like tie his own shoelaces, then invented a way to do it using one loop. Stubborn, to the point of self-destruction, he’d had a sharp tongue that invited punishment.
“It’s elegant,” he said, back from school, standing in the kitchen, seven years old. One of his eyes was lazy and looked off to the left. They didn’t have money for the special lenses. Elegant, their new-to-them Salvation Army table and chairs?
“Where’d you get that, Wabooson?” he’d asked.
“I read it,” he replied, Eli smiling, and his smile like the sun itself.
Why was it that the very kid who was the problem, who didn’t fit, was the one who’d most won his heart? Who, just the thought of losing had made him feel as if he were dying?
Bear, whom he loved in other ways, well, Bear could take care of himself, but Eli?
“The kid belongs… elsewhere,” the principal of the off reserve school told him in his office, Eli in trouble again. “We can’t help him here, and he’s getting picked on, and it’s only going to get worse.”
And it had, until he found a teacher to work with him, a retired professor up from the Cities, and he’d pulled Eli from school, and nights after when they were in the cabin they read together – whole evenings, and what had seemed at first “too highfaluting,” as Bear had put it, became familiar, and Eli read, aloud, from his assignments, history, philosophy, books of all sorts, all while Buck repaired an outboard motor, or rods and reels, and Bear, albeit happily, carved cult figures out of basswood or pine, Wenebojo, or Chakabesh, or Pukwanjanini, pretending not to be listening, but chiming in now and then.
“What’s center is everywhere, and circumference nowhere?” Bear’d reply. “I’ll tell you what, Eli, it’s a donut…. One I’ve eaten.
“God? That old bearded guy’s for Catholics….”
It was an idyllic time, and life easier for Martha, their grieving mother, having by then wholly abandoned them.
So, when Eli was picked on, just before he quit working with Joe to play Double A ball, he lumbered onto the playground to find the biggest of the bullies, and stood behind him.
“What do you want,” the kid spat over his shoulder. It was all there in the tone of his voice; and was it the boy’s fault? His father was a bully, too, an enormous hulk of a man.
“Tell your father I want to talk to him,” he said.
“Says who?”
“Just tell him Michael, the ‘Uppity Timber Nigger,’” he replied, echoing what the kid had said earlier.
When the boy’s father came for him where he’d been patiently waiting outside on a chair tilted back against the cabin’s tarpaper siding, he put his cigarette under his heel, crushed it out.
“My boy tells me you got something to say,” this oversized farmer said. “So whyn’t you go ahead and say it?”
Since he’d needed to make a statement, one that would stick, what he’d said had broken every bone in the man’s face, a few ribs, a finger or two, and nearly blinded him in one eye – in it a too-long-waited-for truth telling, one he’d had to reinforce from time to time when he visited later.
– the thought of which, running up Lake Street now, Eli’s later troubles, caused him to take a deep breath and renew his charge.
He’d get to Eli, and deal with it, whatever it was. One. Two. Three. Then find Sally.
At Little Earth, drearily government-built cinderblock boxes built around a common area bordered by blighted maples, he paused at the office door, the line on the flagpole behind him ringing like a bell in the wind.
Ding, ding, di-di-ding. Ding ding da ding….
Pay attention, he thought, the hair on the back of his neck bristling. He was being watched, but then you were always watched here. Shinobs, or Anishinabe, like himself, were alert for the arrival of the police or strangers. And, granted his size, he was always too visible.
In the office, the clerk, a woman in braids and a beaded vest behind thick glass, looked up.
“Can I help you?” she said.
When he asked after Eli, she said, “And you are…?”
He took his enrollment card from his wallet and slipped it through the slot under the glass. “I’m his half-brother,” he said. “That’s how come the different family name there. Fineday. See?” The clerk looked from him, to the card, then back again, and nodded.
“Right,” she said and, spinning in her chair, she snatched an envelope from the top of a file cabinet. She slipped it, and his enrollment card, back to him. “He left this for you, in case you came by.”
“So… he’s not here?”
“Took off, just like that.”
He tore the end from the envelope, shucked out the folded sheet inside. On it, in Eli’s fine, looping cursive, In the event you’ve come down, sorry for the inconvenience. Had to run. Eli. He turned the page over, a business letterhead staring up at him – Paradise Autobody. It had been a point of pride, to hear Eli tell it, Eli making money “hand over fist” at an autobody shop with Ruben, only his cheer on the phone had been too brittle, and he’d sent Bear down that week to check on him, to see how he was really doing.
“Ruben LaChapelle, he around by any chance?” he asked.
“Left in the middle of the night, oh…. the day before your brother. Went out of here like a house afire.”
“He say where?”
“No.” The clerk cocked her head, thinking. “But Ruben told me to have Eli pick up what he’d left. Said I should drag Eli by his braids up to Ruben’s unit if I had to, only by the time I got to it–” She grimaced.
“So, what’d Ruben leave?”
“A damned mess, that’s what. Ruben must’ve gone out without lockin’ the door, ‘cause somebody got in and spray painted all over. And it was in fluorescent orange, which, let me tell you, was hell to cover. Took three coats of Kills primer so you’d never know.”
“What’d they paint?”
“Well, funny thing was, it was for your brother, ‘cause it had his name there. Eli, and a tag.” At his incomprehension, she added. “That’s what they call ‘em. His name, whoever done it, see?”
“Which was…?”
“Many Trees, maybe?” She shrugged. “I don’t know, you could read it all sorts of ways, since it was all artsy n shit… Had to be some… turf thing.”
“After Eli left, did anyone come looking?”
Here the clerk’s face darkened, her brows furrowing. “Yes,” she said. “Someone did. Ask after your brother. Or, a couple did. The first, he was short, like a… midget? I’ve seen him in town, and–”
“A shinob?”
“Yeah. He was. But the other….”
“Tall?” He was guessing, to elicit something from her.
“He was tall. And his eyes were…. The irises, they were different colors? One blue, and the other… whitish? Weird, you know? Like… in those dogs…. Huskies, that’s it.”
Buck grinned, for her – said, “Thanks!” – and went out. Tall. And the eyes…. Still, could be anybody. Could even be the police, given all of Ruben’s questionable messing around.
In the courtyard, in the wan sun, he got that feeling again, something… waiamamin, invisible, watching him. Ankle deep in snow, he resorted to an old hunting trick, holding himself still, then seeing, like a rabbit, out of the corners of his eyes, and – there! A blind moved, just the slightest. Moments later, a boy – but, no, whoever it was, he was too thick-legged, here someone hobbling – the midget? – crossed the snow-covered boulevard into traffic.
Following him, he crossed the lot, threaded through battered cars to the snowy boulevard where he looked down. Six prints. Disfigured feet, kids’-sized shoes, pigeon-toed, but well-balanced.
Gowenish, ashinangwan – weird. Or… significant? His having been here, the midget?
He looked over his shoulder. Counted the windows. “Three up, eight over,” Eli’d told him. “If the door’s locked, or if you don’t want to go to the desk, you can always pitch me awake, old Cy Young. Plenty of gravel in the lot. Just plink away and I’ll come down.”
Whoever he’d seen – was it the midget? – he’d been in Eli’s room – the blinds there parted. He could go up, he thought, but he knew the room would be empty. And whatever’d been put on the walls, earlier, had been painted over.
And, anyway, getting to Eli was what he wanted, and he struck off again, to the only place he could think to look.
It was nearly rush hour now, and on Hennepin cars caromed from lane to lane, their lights sabers, the drivers sparring. Horns blaring. Here a narrow canyon of stolid brown brick buildings, depression era. He lengthened his stride, squinting, trying to see up the block through the traffic.
Paradise Autobody was just to the south – he knew the neighborhood, from his time with Joe.
“You’ll see it,” the clerk said when he’d ducked back into the office, “across the street from an eyesore.”
In the encroaching dark, signage, ass-over-teakettle and of all sizes, perched on humpbacked façades the length of the block. At the far end of which, in all its lurid neon splendor, was the eyesore: Moby’s, For a Whale of a Drink, the sign read. In the sign’s middle a cartoon whale, neon strobing from its big head in blue gouts like ejaculate.
He stopped out front, heard the crack of billiards. A broken ladder-backed chair held the door ajar, Motown playing inside.
In the steam-covered window, somebody put his face to the glass and glared, pink smudge of nose and forehead. Get out of my view, he seemed to be saying, and he turned, glanced across the street, there the Paradise, a yellow brick box, in the lot to the side of it cars badly dented, or totaled, or parted out, and the whole works surrounded by a high, barbed fence.
A lone window, like a cataract, fronted the street, now someone behind it at a desk. He stepped out of the office with a clipboard, stood on the curb. In his late thirties, he was tall and powerfully built, his eyes hooded, his mouth a wound meanly puckered as if by stitches.
In this landscape of nighttime businesses, scurrying people, and traffic, he fit right in, waiting for someone now, some street lieutenant of his, and Buck took it as his opportunity and crossed the street to him.
“Jardine?” he asked. There was a patch on his suit that read Lester. He glanced at the clipboard he was holding. “You’re early. We have you coming in an hour from now. You our man?” He was fishing for something, had thrown out the question to keep him there.
“I’m looking for Eli,” Buck said.
Lester rapped his pen on the clipboard and grimaced. “Hasn’t shown up for work since… last Wednesday?” He jotted something on the clipboard. “Who should I say stopped by?”
“Somebody from up north,” Buck replied. “You got a number where I can reach him?”
“No,” Lester said, “but I was wondering if you had an address? We’ve been holding his paycheck.
“He’d like to get it, don’t you think?”
The lie was shocking. He felt himself recoil at it, but fixed a blank look on his face.
This… Lester, he was certain now, had had everything to do with it, what Eli’d gotten messed up in.
“So?” Lester demanded.
“No idea,” he said, and with a nod, he was off.
From a phone booth on Lake Street he tried to call an old acquaintance, a Red Laker he’d guided with.
Over the day he’d rung five, none of whom had any idea where Eli might be. He’d tried all over, off Nicollet, and down by Minnehaha, knocked on doors in Loring Park, once known as Needle Park, hitting up old acquaintances for word of Eli and had come up with nothing. He’d even tried in the neighborhoods around Augsburg College, where Eli’d taken classes, and had – for the space of second – thought he’d seen Sally, in her yellow Eldorado.
The car’d turned sharply out of a gas station, and before he’d been sure it was her, it’d been gone.
Someone had pulled the metal top of the booth down, and he had to stoop so as not to knock his head on it. Phone in hand.
His breath condensed on the glass in front of him. Outside it was dark, the street ferociously lit in neon: Seven Eleven, Erikson Gas, Donna Lee’s Girls Girls Girls, legs kicking in lavender and pink, and the street walkers out, dipping into cars on fishnetted legs.
Someone in a low-slung sedan parked up the block, seemed to study him. Head big as a pumpkin behind tinted glass.
Or was it just someone doing business, of the kind one did here?
He dialed, the phone pressed to his ear, then ran his finger down the list he’d taken from his wallet.
He found an abandoned tenement, one with broken windows, and climbed in over a sill. The tenement floor was littered with old newspapers, Styrofoam hamburger boxes, and coffee cups. Kits, from addicts. No use pushing on now, he’d have to wait until morning. He bundled himself in newspapers, then sat with his back propped against the wall, intending sleep. Only his mind, like a tongue searching a decayed tooth, worked on the particulars, and painfully.
Christ! What had Eli been thinking, getting mixed up with Ruben LaChapelle? For the longest time they’d all known Ruben would end up dead in a ditch or some back alley.
But what did Ruben dying the way he had have to do with Bear’s seemingly accidental death earlier?
Bear in the bottom of the boat, arm thrown over his head, his face torn back like the skin on a glove. He’d never seen so much blood, so much it had stained his boots. Blood, congealed on Bear’s face, the shocking blue-whiteness of bone under it, so that he had wanted, desperately, to bunch his brother’s features in his hands, put him back together.
He’d lifted him out of the boat, Dr. Miller saying, It was an accident, I didn’t mean to, and Bear, straining to lift his head, whispered in his ear, Keep your eyes open, Brother.
High over the lake in the floatplane into Warroad, Bear died, Buck cradling his head in his arms.
He’d taken Bear’s dibindowin from the chain around his neck, put it in his wallet, where it had been since, and still was.
Now, he squared his shoulders against the wall, tugged his thin collar up under his chin again. Thought, as he often did to bring on sleep, of his time in Florida, sun warm on his face. That first night, taking a cab to the stadium where he’d be pitching, circumnavigating the cool, cement bowels of it to emerge onto the field, under blinding lights, the field a green, radiant revelation.
In long, bold strides he’d ascended the mound, where he’d stood, just then, at the top of the world.
8
In a booth outside a KFC the following morning, he rang Eli’s once-AA sponsor, the name having come to him in the night. He couldn’t stand still. Tugged at the cord. It was a last, desperate attempt. He was surprised when someone said, only, “Who’s calling?”
Buck explained, and there was a long silence on the phone. “Your brother, what did you call him?”
Call him? And he remembered, Right, Eli hadn’t used that name, not since he’d left Red Lake.
“Waboos,” he said, which was short for wabooson – trickster.
The voice rattled off a number, so quickly he barely got it scrawled on a scrap of paper before the line went dead, and he found himself standing in the dull light, holding the receiver. He tried the new number and someone picked up, but said nothing. There was frost on the glass, delicate, silver ferns there, and he blew on them, melting them to see through.
A man in a three-piece suit, his car keys in his hand glittering, went past on the sidewalk.
“Wabooson,” he thought to say now, “you there?”
“Jesus, Buck,” Eli shot back, catching his breath. “I thought you were somebody else.”
“You did?” When, after too long Eli didn’t answer, he added, “Like Lester, your boss maybe?”
“Yeah, maybe,” Eli said. “And how’d you get this number, anyway?”
“A little bird.”
“No, seriously.”
“Ruben, your old pal.”
There was a great sigh of relief on the line. “Ah, great. You got Ruben with you then.”
The hope in his brother’s voice, the light in it, nearly broke his heart; that Ruben’s reappearance now would solve things, whatever they’d gotten messed up in. He and, earlier, Bear.
“I’d put him on, but he’s a little… out of sorts,” he said.
“‘Out of sorts’?”
“He ran into something that didn’t quite agree with him,” he said, “but it’s okay now. See? So, how ‘bout ol’ Ruben and I stop over?”
“What’d he tell you?”
Question of the day. “What he said spoke whole worlds, brother. So, whyn’t we talk it over at your place?”
Out front of a row of brownstone tenements he checked the address. The sun only put a glare on the blight. He looked up the block and back – in a glass transom over the front doors of Eli’s unit, painted in gold and black: The Evergreens. Fancy that, there being nothing green about the place, bars, like rusted teeth, over the windows at street level; boards and plastic covered many on the second; and over the entryway a gutter hanging like a deadfall.
A Styrofoam cup, caught in a draft, rattled up the gutter and came to rest at his bloodstained boot.
That his brother, college kid and self-professed “urban Indian,” had ended up here, made his skin crawl.
Only, it was convenient, too: if Sally was anywhere in the Twin Cities – and it had to have been her car he’d seen – she’d be nearby. She’d said she’d been living near Augsburg, so, in Whittier, or Longfellow, or Tangletown.
Or, maybe she’d been in Central? Was now? After all, it was a neighborhood the homeless camped out in. Close or not, he’d have to find her, and soon. The street could eat you alive.
