Ordinary Grace

At the lean-to I knelt and crawled into the shade inside. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for and at first there seemed to be nothing to see. Then I spotted a slight mounding of the sand in one corner and began to dig and quickly uncovered a large tin can that stood a foot high and was maybe eight inches in diameter. It was covered with a white rag that was secured with a rubber band. I pulled the can from the sand and brought it into the sunlight where Jake stood looking on unhappily. I popped the rubber band free and drew off the rag and peered inside. In the can were many items. The first thing I pulled out was a rolled-up magazine. Playboy. I knew about this publication but I’d never seen a real issue. I spent a few minutes going through it with my mouth wide open and Jake leaning over my shoulder so he could see too. Finally I laid it aside and dug in the can again. There was a Mickey Mouse wristwatch with one of Mickey’s hands missing. There was a ceramic frog no larger than my thumb. There was a little Indian doll dressed in buckskin and a comb that was carved from ivory and decorated with scrimshaw and a military medal, a Purple Heart. Among these and the many other small items were the glasses that had once been Bobby Cole’s and the photograph that had belonged to the dead man. I didn’t understand the importance of most of these things but to Danny’s uncle they clearly held value. I wondered what interest Doyle had in the contents of the can.

  “What is all that stuff?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he find those things, you think?”

  “Or stole them, maybe. Get me some of those reeds,” I said nodding toward the bulrushes.

  “What for?”

  “Just get them.”

  While Jake did as I’d asked I put everything back in the can, returning the Playboy with great reluctance, and lidded the tin with the rag and slipped the rubber band into place and set it all back in the hole in the corner of the lean-to and covered it with sand just as I’d found it. Jake brought me half a dozen reeds which I clumped together so their bushy ends formed the kind of broom I’d seen Doyle create many days earlier.

  I said to Jake, “Follow our tracks back the way we came.”

  He went and I went after him, trying to sweep from the sand any sign that we’d ever been there.

  13

  Jake and I did our Saturday yard work at my grandfather’s house and when we got home Danny O’Keefe called and asked if we wanted to come over to his house to play Risk. Danny was there and another kid named Lee Kelly who was okay but never brushed his teeth so his breath always smelled like sour cabbage. We played at the dining room table which was unusual. Usually we played in the basement. In Risk, Jake always conducted himself with conservative fervor, holing up in Australia and stacking an Everest of armies on Indonesia so that only the very foolish would attempt to take his continent. That would be me. I spread myself over Asia and then viciously tried to breach Jake’s stronghold. I didn’t succeed and the next turn he decimated me before retiring to his little Australian sanctuary. After that Danny and Lee attacked me from America and Africa and less than half an hour later I was out of the game and Jake got all my cards. I generally played a little fast and loose with my resources but I figured hell, a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, especially in a stupid board game.

  I hung around for a while watching the others play then asked Danny if I could get a grape Nehi out of the refrigerator. When I got the bottle of soda pop I heard the broadcast of a Twins game coming up the basement stairs and I drifted that way. The basement of the O’Keefes’ house had been finished in dark wood paneling. There was a sofa and some end tables that looked as if they’d been reconstructed from old wagon wheels and a couple of lamps with shades that turned and had pretty women on them in skimpy clothing, one of the reasons we liked playing Risk and other games down there. Seated on the sofa watching the ball game on television was Danny’s great-uncle. His hair was neatly combed and he was dressed in a clean plaid shirt and chinos and loafers. He looked very different from the day I’d seen him sitting beside the dead man.

  When I hit the bottom of the stairs he glanced away from the screen and said, “Twins are getting shellacked.” There was no emotion in his dark eyes, no sign of recognition.

  “What inning?” I asked.

  “Bottom of the eighth. Barring a miracle it’s all over.” He was holding a can of Brandt beer and he took a sip. He didn’t seem to mind me being there, busting in on his solitude. He said, “What’s your name?”

  “Frank Drum.”

  “Drum.” He took another sip of beer. “What kind of name is Drum? Sounds like it could be Indian.”

  “It’s Scottish.”

  He nodded then Killebrew hit a home run and Danny’s great-uncle seemed to forget about me.

  I waited until the excitement in the ballpark had passed then I said, “What did you do with the picture?”

  “Picture?” He squinted at me.

  “The one we found on the dead guy.”

  “What difference does it make to you?”

  “I just wondered. When we buried him nobody knew his name. I thought maybe the photograph might help.”

  He put his beer down. “Did you say anything to anyone about it? About me?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You think I had something to do with that man dying?”

  “No.”

  He stared at me and I stood there with the grape Nehi growing warm in my hand. He finally asked, “Do you want the photograph?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What would you do with it? Give it to the police?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And when they ask where you got it what would you say?”

  “I found it. Down by the trestle.”

  “In a place you’re not supposed to be?”

  “I can be there.”

  “That’s not what Danny tells me.”

  I thought about Danny reporting my activities to his great-uncle. It gave me the creeps.

  “I heard you were in jail,” I said.

  “Who told you that?”

  “I just heard. Is it true?”

  “Only part of the truth.”

  “What’s the rest?”

  “Did you hear why I was in jail?”

  “No.”

  “The rest of the truth is why.”

  “Okay why?”

  “Wo iyokihi.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means responsibility. We who are Sioux have a responsibility to make sure the past isn’t distorted by the lies whites tell each other and try to tell us. Do you know about the war the Dakota fought against the white people here in eighteen sixty-two?”

  “Sure. Your people attacked New Bremen and killed a bunch of settlers.”

  “Do you know why our people did that?”

  The truth was I didn’t. I pretty much figured that’s just what Indians did, but I didn’t say that.

  “Our people were starving,” Redstone said. “The whites trespassed on our land, feeding our grass to their animals, cutting our trees for their houses, shooting what little game we still had. Our crops failed, and the winter was hard, hard. We asked for the food the whites had promised us in the treaty we’d signed. Know what they said to our starving people? They said, ‘Let them eat grass.’ Sure we fought. We fought for food. We fought because promises were broken. We fought because we refused to be crushed under the boots of the whites. The man who told us to eat grass, he was killed, and our warriors stuffed grass into his mouth. It was a hopeless thing we tried to do, because the whites, they had soldiers and guns and money and newspapers that repeated all the lies. In the end, our people lost everything and were sent away from here. Thirty-eight of our warriors were hung in one day, and the whites who watched it cheered.”

  I didn’t know what to believe. I’d heard a different spin in school when they taught us about the uprising but I was always ready to discount what was fed to us in the classroom. Schoo
l had never been my favorite place and I’d never been a favorite of my teachers many of whom said I asked too many questions and asked them in a way that sometimes sounded disrespectful. Parent-teacher conferences could be dicey. Ariel and Jake were different. All they ever got was praise.

  “What does that have to do with you and jail?” I asked.

  He finished his beer, stood up, and went to a small refrigerator in the corner where he pulled out another can of Brandt which he opened with a church key. He took a long draw. It was the first time I’d seen him up close standing to his full height and I suddenly realized how tall he was and how despite his age which must have been at least sixty he looked powerful. He wiped his mouth with the back of a huge hand the color of faded red brick.

  “I spoke the truth. And for that I was labeled a troublemaker and put in jail.”

  “In America, people don’t get thrown in jail just for being troublemakers,” I shot back.

  He stared down at me and I thought I understood how disconcerting it must have been for one of those slaughtered settlers to have faced an angry Sioux warrior. He said in a flat voice, “That’s how they get away with it.”

  Danny called from upstairs, “Hey! Game’s over. Want to go swimming?”

  Warren Redstone held me paralyzed for a moment with the anger in his dark stare. Then he said, “Go on and play, white boy.” And he turned his back to me.

  14

  In New Bremen there were three places to swim. One was the public pool which was crowded and loud and the lifeguards were always blowing their whistles at you. The second was the country club but you had to have money or be friends with people who did. The third was an old stone quarry south of town which had been abandoned years before when an underground spring filled the great gaping hole with water so quickly that much of the equipment had to be left in place. Word was that if you swam deep enough you could still make out the vague disturbing shapes of massive machinery like monsters asleep on the bottom. The quarry was fenced and posted against trespassing but no one paid any attention. Though it was a place our parents warned us away from it was one of our favorite destinations on hot summer days. Even Jake so pure of heart ignored my folks’ stricture and always tagged along with the rest of us.

  We rode our bikes through New Bremen, Jake, Danny, Lee, and I, past the town limits, and in another mile turned west along a couple of dirt ruts overgrown with weeds. The quarry was on the far side of a line of birch trees that isolated the area even further. The rock that had been taken was red granite and the area around the quarry was littered with great jumbles of red spoil unsuitable for construction. To this day whenever I think of that quarry I have the sense of a place of deep and mindless wounding. When we pulled up I was dismayed to find a black ’32 Deuce Coupe parked near the break in the Cyclone fence which everyone used to access the quarry. The shattered headlights and taillights had been replaced.

  “Morris Engdahl’s car,” Danny said.

  “He’s probably out here torturing ducks,” I said.

  Jake turned back disappointed. “Let’s go home.”

  Danny and Lee turned their bikes with him.

  “Not me,” I said. “I came here to swim.” I walked my bike to the fence and popped the kickstand down.

  Jake opened his mouth then closed it then opened and closed it again and not a word came out. Like a fish trying to suck air.

  “I don’t know,” Danny said. He sat astride his bike and looked with great uncertainty at the others.

  Lee said, “You’re really going?”

  “Hell, just watch me.” I ducked through the break in the fence and walked along a path worn in the weeds, walked slowly. In a minute I heard the sound of the others running to catch up.

  At the western edge of the quarry was a large flat table of red rock that stood half a dozen feet above the water and was surrounded by willows that curtained it from view. This was the favorite place for swimming because the water dropped immediately and deeply and you could jump and dive from the rock without worrying about what might be under the surface and when you were ready to climb out there were natural steps and handholds in the face of the rock. I heard music coming from the willows, the tinny sound of a transistor radio on which Roy Orbison was singing Running Scared. We walked silently and in single file along the trail and when we reached the willows I held up my hand signaling the others to stop and I crept forward.

  They lay on a big blanket that had been spread over the wide flat ledge of rock. Morris Engdahl in his white swimming trunks had pretty much glued himself to a girl who wore a red bathing suit and had long blond hair. On top of a cooler sat a couple of bottles of beer and the transistor radio which was now playing Del Shannon’s Runaway. While I stood watching from the shadows of the willows Morris Engdahl’s left hand crawled over the girl’s right breast like a big white spider and began to knead the fabric of her suit. In response she arched her back and pressed harder against him.

  Though we were trying to be quiet Engdahl must have heard us because he turned his head in our direction. “Jesus, if it ain’t Frankfarter,” he said. “And Howdy D-D-D-Doody. And a couple of Mouseketeers. Getting a good eyeful?”

  “We just came to swim,” I said.

  Morris continued to lie atop the girl. “Yeah well we were here ahead of you,” he said. “So beat it.”

  “There’s lots of room.”

  “Let’s g-g-g-go,” Jake said.

  “That’s a g-g-g-good idea,” Engdahl said with a laugh.

  “Come on, Frank,” Danny said.

  “No. We can swim here. There’s lots of room.”

  Engdahl shook his head and finally rolled off the girl. “Not the way I see it,” he said.

  I gestured to the others to follow me. “We’ll go around to the other side,” I told them.

  “I don’t want them here at all, Morrie,” the girl said. She sat up and her breasts in her red suit stuck out big as traffic cones. Her lips were a ruby pout. She reached for one of the beers on the cooler.

  “You heard her,” Engdahl said. “Get lost.”

  “You get lost,” I said. “It’s a free country.”

  “Who are these little creeps, Morrie?”

  “His sister is Ariel Drum.”

  “Ariel Drum?” The girl’s face took on a look as if she’d just bit into a sandwich made of cow dung. “God, what a skag.”

  “She’s not a skag,” I shot back brilliantly, not entirely sure what the word even meant.

  “Listen, you little shit,” Engdahl said. “Just because it’s a rich boy putting it to your sister, that don’t mean she ain’t a skag.”

  “Nobody’s putting it to her,” I said and stepped toward Engdahl with my hands fisted. I spat out at the girl, “You’re the skag.”

  “You going to let him call me that, Morrie?”

  Engdahl got to his feet which were bare. He was a thin guy and white as biscuit dough but he was a head taller than me and had probably been in his share of fights and he didn’t look at all reluctant to bust my face wide open. In a swift panic of thought I figured I had two choices. One was to run. The other was to do what I did, which was to lower my shoulder and charge Morris Engdahl. I hit him square in the stomach, putting behind it the full force of my hundred and thirty pounds. I caught him off guard and together we tumbled into the water. I came up sputtering and swam fast back to the rock and climbed up before Engdahl had a chance to get his hands on me. I danced back to where the others stood and I spun around expecting Engdahl to be right behind me. He wasn’t. He was still in the water, flailing desperately.

  “He can’t swim,” the girl cried at us. She was on her knees, bent low toward the water, and I could see a good deal of her breasts and for a moment that view was far more riveting than the question of Morris Engdahl’s fate. In the next moment Jake was shaking a dead willow branch that was a good eight feet long in my face. I grabbed it and leaped to the edge of the rock and extended the end toward Engdahl.
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  I yelled, “Grab it!”

  His eyes had gone mostly white and his arms beat at the water around him shattering the surface into flying diamonds and he was coughing hard and I was afraid he was beyond having sense enough to save himself. But he managed to grasp the end of the branch. I pulled and the girl grabbed the branch too and pulled with me and together we hauled Engdahl back to the rock where his hands found purchase. He held to the stone a long time with most of him still in the water while he caught his breath then he began a slow climb out. He reached the top of the rock where I stood dripping wet in my shorts and T-shirt and sneakers. All of us stared at him in wordless fixation. His breathing was deep and raspy and his eyes held a desperate look. He brushed the long black hair out of his face.

  He sprang forward and grabbed me. He took two big fistfuls of my T-shirt, squeezing the thin cotton so viciously that he wrung out water. His lips were pressed tightly together and I was amazed he could speak through them but he did. He said, “I’m going to kill you.”

  I looked into his face, into eyes that were a dark menacing blue and so completely abandoned to anger that there was in them not the slightest glimmer of reason and I knew I was dead.

  “Let him g-g-g-g-go!” Jake yelled.

  And my friends echoed, “Let him go!”

  The girl with the mesmerizing breasts cried, “Morrie, don’t!” When he didn’t respond she stepped close and pushed herself against us both in a kind of wedging maneuver meant, I suppose, to separate Engdahl’s hands from my shirt. It was a surreal moment. Death looked me in the face but all I could feel was the warm press and yield of that girl’s breast against my shoulder. It was as if in the second before dying I’d been allowed to glimpse heaven and I was almost okay with my fate. “Morrie,” she purred in a deep-throated way that spoke to something instinctive and sexually primal in every male there. “Morrie, baby, let him go.”

  Engdahl was many things. Crude. Ignorant. Callous. Self-absorbed and at the moment embarrassed and angry. But he was also nineteen and one element of his being topped all others and with it the blonde had him hooked. I felt his fists soften and then release their grip on my T-shirt. He shot out a deep final breath like a horse clearing its nostrils and he stepped back. The girl stepped away too and stood in such an enticing pose that Morris Engdahl couldn’t take his eyes off her.