The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

Kismet wanted to forestall Gary from sharing his thoughts. He might get solemn and talk about his farming ideas or his philosophy, which was that you should do what your mother told you to do. Kismet had met Gary’s mother and she questioned that. Gary believed that radio frequencies could carry disease. He started many sentences by declaring ‘There are two kinds of people . . .’ He didn’t believe in God but said he could get behind the idea that aliens had manufactured the skein of life. He also talked about, say, the Ten Commandments, and would wonder whether ‘Thou shalt not kill’ applied to deer. He loved deer. He cried when he saw a dead one. He also cried when he saw a living one.

She closed her eyes and wondered why she was spending her day off with Gary listening to the same things he said over and over. Though sometimes a surprising thought broke through. But not today.

He’d had expensive tastes, true, but that was in the past now. He missed really good coffee. The church coffee tasted of sackcloth and ashes. His joie de vivre was fading. No drinkable wine. No song! Crystal used to sing with him. At some point it had become an effort. He missed the lightness of their early days. There wasn’t even much conversation.

She didn’t mind him at that moment, but still thought she would leave him. He emanated a sort of hopeful sadness and contained the usual secrets. Crystal had once thought he owned some interior dramas and interesting thoughts, but then she went to great trouble to find out everything, only to fail. Martin either had no intention of revealing himself, or there was no ulterior self to reveal.

They didn’t speak. Kismet knew she’d gotten the truth and was trying to think what to do with it. Gary was appalled he’d told the truth and afraid of what she would do with it.

She loved Hugo with that superb kind of love a mother has for a male child, a love that is deeper and more pure for knowing that he’ll more than likely turn out a fool.

If only Crystal hadn’t been distracted by Martin’s crime, she might have realized that now was the time to act, to say something, to stop her daughter from making a serious mistake. At Kismet’s age, being open to reason from a parent comes in slim windows that slam shut fast.

Martin. He needed to stretch out and zumba in his sleep. To put in his night guard so he didn’t wear down his molars. To paste across the top of his nose the sticky butterfly that would open his nasal cavities. To ceremonially don his silk pajamas and sleep on his special pillow. He had many rigid sleep preparations and every so often he added another. It was all to ease his descent into unconsciousness, that scary place. He was filled with anxiety about nodding off, but also about not sleeping. Waking up during the night would ruin the next day.

When they switched on the motel television, Martin would sigh, pull down his eye mask, screw in foam earplugs. And so love dies, Crystal thought, pulled down to earth by the tedious weight of a partner’s habits.

To laugh felt good, though Crystal feared that once she started she might never stop. Crystal’s laugh was rich and warm, a whiskey-soda laugh, though she rarely drank. Jeniver’s laugh had been a raucous bray in high school, but practice of the law had squeezed it to a sharp series of knowing woofs—not dog woofs, but another kind of animal. A night animal. Jeniver’s laugh was the sort of laugh that might emerge from dense shrubbery and sink your heart. Her laugh always impressed Crystal, comforted her. She was in capable, clawed hands.

Sound was missing, very missing. Now the newness of the house took on a sinister aspect. It had taken sleep to help her realize how inhuman, maybe even violent, an extremely soundproofed new house was. The floors didn’t squeak to reassure her of another person’s presence or warn her, either. The plumbing didn’t groan, the doors opened and shut on soundless hinges.

But although sugar is a useless and even harmful substance, and although this nutritionless white killer is depleting the earth’s finest cropland, you forget that when you are eating blueberry crumble, thought Hugo, sweeping his finger across the blue stain and sweet crumbs on his plate.

Stingy was the worst thing you could call a Michif. She’d hoped to shut him up. But he hadn’t even blinked before he said, ‘Better stingy with money than emotion. You’re coldhearted.’ Coldhearted was the second worst thing you could call a Michif. And it was true. She was sometimes too tired to have emotions and had started acting rationally. She knew how men hated rational women. Crystal stopped showed her feelings in an argument. She was done with second chances, done with the opulent mercy of women.

A few hours before, after she had walked back out into the rain, Hugo had stared fixedly at the drips on the mat and at the streaming window of the door, much as a dog stares after its departing human. Now Hugo flipped the lamp off, closed the book, and set it gently upon his heart. Perhaps it was dangerous to love as a dog loves. To love with canine devotion was to live in a state of miserable exhilaration, to exist on a knife-thin edge of joy.

This disorder that Kismet kept working at seemed deeper than a month or two. The pockets of grease in the corners had an ancient, sullen quality. There was a level of despair to the mess that pierced Kismet’s heart. She and her mother maintained a level of cheerful order in their house, so to Kismet, the uncontrolled buildup spoke of personal disintegration. What she found shook her up. Cutlery glued together with molasses. An unopened bag of birdseed devoured by meal moths that had feasted and died within the sealed plastic. Knives rusting away in wet pans. There was an unreality to each discovery that pointed to a terrible underlying cause.

The bones were picked up by human hands and transported by animal effort, eight dollars, ten dollars, sixteen dollars a ton. They were piled beside the railroad tracks as each section was built farther west. Hills of bones, mountains of blind skulls, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped back east to process sugar. So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo.

Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.

She put coffee beans in the ice cubes and brought him iced coffee one morning. He gasped, smiled, and glanced up at her with a look she knew well—the doggish joy of a man pampered by a woman. Crystal smiled back.

He couldn’t talk about this to Winnie, or certainly Gary. Diz just didn’t have the words. He solved things by working on them with a wrench. He showed his love to Gary by building the new house. But there were times he became agitated inside. These episodes came upon him more often now that Kismet was there. It was as if her presence softened him, opened a door, stirred up things he didn’t want to relive. Those unspoken matters.

He completely forgave himself for selling Gary the Sextasy book. Because after all, he knew that what Gary had to learn about sex wasn’t taught in a book. It was taught by Ichor and his mushroom soup (ample dash of cayenne) and Bev’s face when Ichor kissed her hand. Both of them when Ichor suddenly fell to his knees one summer day, holding out a little moonstone ring (from downtown Tabor), and asked Bev to marry him again in front of their kids. Bev when she toppled him into the wading pool. Ichor when he pulled her in.

He longed for the hours before the party when he was allowed to make a stupid mistake or two, allowed to be a stupid asshole. He hadn’t had to think. There had been nobody to avoid. It seemed to him that he’d been a child, full of joy, though he knew he’d been the jocky top dog, irritable or scornful, conceited, and probably, yes, for sure, spoiled. Everybody said so. Now he guessed it could be true. But in those days he hadn’t killed Jordan and Travis yet, so those times must have been extraordinary. It must have been a beautiful life he had back then.

Charley had a cruel father. Once, Charley’s father had grabbed him behind the neck like a cat and lifted him off the ground, then slammed him down. Travis had seen it and challenged his dad to a fight. Another time, Travis had called the police, but nothing came of that except more hurt. Charley was fearless because he had no hope and Travis was fearless because he’d never been hurt. They figured out a way to kill Charley’s father.