The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

It was a mountain lion, the first she’d ever seen. There was the flow of it, her lights glancing off its pelt, the ruthless slope of its head.

Mountain Lion

Getting close to someone whose angel was as powerful as Gary’s was asking for trouble.

K

being consciously bored reminded her of what her cynical best friend, Stockton, had said—how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept. She wasn’t drunk now. She wasn’t drunk very often. She did think that if she spent much time with Gary, though, she’d have to have a bottle handy.

Poor Kismet. Not in love!

As happened so often since Kismet had become a teenager, Crystal pictured a rickety wooden bridge and plotted her way across.

It wasn’t a bad place at all if you didn’t mind the food.

K

Sometimes an actor plays a part so well he just becomes it. So Martin could still count himself among the experts because like the most expert of the experts he was getting blown out of the water.

U

What a limp fish he had become, he thought. Where was his flair? He must not give in to gloom or allow Crystal to grow distant. Their ancestors had hunted on horseback, then settled down to plant gardens and beg help from the Blessed Virgin. They would have been overjoyed by the Mazda, the highways, the boiler in the basement, and the popcorn in the carpet.

Martin

Martin slung his arm over Crystal’s shoulders. 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.

Like the mighty red, history was a flood.

Winnie felt a sifting of hope and pulled down the mirror to see if she’d bitten off all of her lipstick.

And here Karleen came—stocky, rock-jawed, blond-bobbed, in an apricot tunic, fluffy white vest, and white leggings. She was in her late forties, with sun-damaged skin and small cold eyes. She entered right behind Jeniver and said, ‘You missed your town council meeting.’

‘My question is, are we just going to ignore things?’

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.

O

They sipped their wine, picked their glasses up, and put them down. A sense of mountainous impossibility bore down on Hugo’s parents.

Ichor gripped his chin as if in pain, and Bev sobbed out loud. Hugo watched them with the distant sympathy of a young man who knows what he’s doing is stupid only to the people who love him, therefore of no consequence.

Hugo has made a deciision, Poor parents!

But here and all, numb in the river, she remembered she must live, even though she was pretty sure that all the wrong things were gathering into a big ball that would come rolling at her, maybe crush her, and her chest was already bursting for air.

Kismet in the river

But her mother sensed the struggle. Nobody let themselves fall in the river, not this time of year, not ever. It was the region’s life giver, but also it was a treacherous brown vein of trifluralin, atrazine, polychlorinated biphenyls, VOCs, and mercury, not to mention uprooted trees and sunken cars.

A streetlight blinked off and night entered the dim room where the layaway bridal gown hung like an apparition on the outside of the closet door.

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.

Martin is so very self-absorbed...

And so love dies, Crystal thought, pulled down to earth by the tedious weight of a partner’s habits.

They were like the people in movies and TV shows so it seemed they were Americans but lately Crystal and Kismet had come to know on some level that they were the real Americans—the rattled, scratching, always-in-debt Americans.

What kind of carnival ride am I on right now? She’d loved the teacup. She had thought she was on a very slow teacup, so slow that she’d be able to drink a cup of tea without a dribble. She saw herself spinning incrementally across the field to the horizon.

Kismet raised the skinny glass to her lips and the gentle bubbles grazed her nose. She took her first-ever sip of champagne. The ghost of a taste, an emotion in her mouth, unreadable. She drank again to try and understand. But it was too fleeting. Then she got it and smiled. An ephemeral blip. She drank until the champagne stopped thought, stopped taste, stopped emotion.

Kismet's wedding reception

Nothing had been dislodged, except, wait, something had definitely been dislodged. Yes. Something that had perhaps been too loosely attached in the first place had been dislodged. They bumped down to an access road and kept driving toward the house. ‘Aren’t you going to say something?’ she asked after a while. ‘About what?’ said Gary.

N

‘You know when you rolled the truck? I lost something,’ she said. ‘I lost my love for you. Whatever I thought was love is back there in Pavlecky’s field.’

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.

Laughter of two friends

There was something deep and innocent, always, about Charley. His eyebrows had always been the eyebrows of a Vogue cover model. He’d grown three more inches. Everybody knew he was going somewhere.

They were all wearing Wet n Wild mascara so they could cry all they wanted. After each luxurious bout the girls went into the bathroom and reapplied makeup, tipping up their faces to concentrate on lip pencil, turning back and forth to study the contour of cheekbones, the flare of eyeliner, the arc of eye shadow. They sprayed their hair back up in artfully messy chignons. Then gave one another brave shrugs and stepped back out, tipping forward in their agonizing heels.

The Girls!

As she toppled down, a swoop of delight threaded through them and gathered their hearts up and tied a bow. They lay there together as an offering, a bouquet for the gods.

Kismet and Hugo

As they ate the rest of their lunch, the day started heating up. Gary loved how the shimmer of heat took up the whole horizon like a vast lake. He loved how the trees on the farmsteads looked like islands hovering over the water. Whenever he’d pointed out those islands as a child, and asked his mother what they were, she’d always said, ‘That’s the happy lands.’ They were out there, oh yes, the Happy Lands were out there today.

Diz knew, but he didn’t really know, the secret shame of losing all you love—the clapboard house, its back room the original logs, the white barn with the fieldstone foundation.

‘You may judge now the richness of these prairies,’ he wrote later. There was no end to the beasts. Just like it seems there is no end to us, in our billions. But everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.

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.

The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.

Winnie slowed down so they could open their windows and Kismet could watch the swallows perched in rows on the power lines. Killdeers veered from the ditches, uttering their shrill keering cries of alarm. Doves pecked up sand in the road and scattered before the car. The ditches were unmowed. Redwing blackbirds sang in the cattails.

Birds!

Barn swallows, tree swallows, swifts, were plucking insects off the tops of the flowers and grasses. The sun was low and the light was a golden barge floating through the trees.

Love this passage.

Practically everything she and the Geists did, and even her mother’s job, was destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation.

They were the sun when they bloomed, the moon when they formed seed heads, and the stars when you blew on the fragile globes.

Dandelions

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘While we’ve been talking about the end of the world like we’re looking forward to it, I’ve been thinking how the world as we know, used to know, it really is ending. I thought of what the world was like even when I was a kid, how it was more . . . it was more full.’

‘I don’t think this book is about the end of the world. That’s just the setting, to show what happens between people in extreme situations. The end is about consolation. The father goes to the end of the earth for his son, then dies, satisfied. I mean, it’s a really sentimental book. McCarthy’s not afraid of that. And it’s a brutal adventure book—exciting when they find the food cache, and then there’s that cannibal army.’ Jeniver stood up and spoke with urgency. ‘This book is about what’s most important. You know, this kind of love between a parent and a child.’

The Book Club discusses "The Road"

Winnie said in a sudden rush, ‘Why can’t we speak from the heart? That is all I want anymore. For someone to speak to me from the heart.’

That was the first time. When the tiger had approached on the inside of the fence, padding along in silent power, Gary knew he was safe and sat down. The great creature encircled him and made itself comfortable with a grunt of satisfaction. Gary sank back against its cushiony body and fell asleep within the cowl of its resounding purr. Other times he’d fallen heavily but swayed downward, light and insubstantial as a leaf, and landed in the yard. Then sat there quietly until Winnie noticed him.

Gary

One thing he especially liked about the beetles was that they controlled the weeds but never quite ate all of the spurge, never ate themselves entirely out of existence. They weren’t like people. They respected their existential limits.

Ichor

‘Suicide always leaves someone else holding your pain,’ said Ichor. ‘There’s no reasoning out what happened, Gary, why the ice was rotten right there. You’ll never get an answer.’

The cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.

She had survived the long haul. So why was it that she felt an unbearable pressure, a sense that she should weep but that weeping would never be enough? Although she’d been troubled sometimes at night, it seemed that she had ignored an altogether vaster grief or, perhaps, missed a vaster joy.