The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich Page B

his eyes were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare.
    “My buddy, he took a stomach wound,” said Ogichidaa. “I had to stuff his guts in loops back into his body, and all the time he kept his eyes on me. He couldn’t look down. When I had them back in, his teeth were clicking together and he got these words out. ‘You sure you got them back in the right order?’ I said I did my best. ‘Because I don’t wanna be pissing out my ears,’ he said. His voice was real serious and I answered, ‘I checked. Your pisser made it. No damage, brother.’ He seemed real happy with that statement. The ground shook around us. Close one landed. I lost my hold and they all poured out of him again.”
    Ogichidaa was exhausted and his brothers urged him to sleep. Before he slept, though, he gave Asin a funny look and repeated himself, “Old man, I did what you told me. I sent as many as I could with him after that to be his slaves in the land of spirits. It didn’t help.”
    Old Asin looked at him long, deeply, watching.
    “Maybe,” said Asin at last, “you need to do the next thing.”
    “Which is what?”
    Asin hunched into his gnarled body and then tapped a leathery bone finger on the pocket of his shirt just over his heart.
    “Replace your war brother with a slave brother.”
    The Capture
    Ogichidaa mulled the idea over, took it in slowly. It was not a bad idea, he thought, a way to kill the rage that soured his heart and woke him in the night. A way to erase the picture of those guts. But he could hardly go all the way back to Germany, and the idea of taking revenge on a German immigrant who’d been turned into an American citizen seemed an act of weakness. In the morning he asked Asin where he could get a German.
    “Oh, they’re all over the place here,” Asin said, sweeping at the air side to side with the flat of his hand. “All over here like frogs. Perhaps they are called Omakakii-wininiwag because they popped out of nowhere,” said the old man. “In the beginning, there were whole village tribes of them, we heard, shipped over here to tear up our land. They took it over. They killed it. Most of the land is now half dead. Plowed up.
    “There is also a whole bunch of defeated soldiers who shipped over because of that money problem. They want to stay in this country now. They moved up north and work the timber, two on a cross-end saw. Ditch timber roads. Learn only swear English. Walk along piercing the earth with pointed iron bars, tamping in seedlings with their shoes.”
    Asin smiled. “You could take one of those.”
     
    O N A MOONLESS NIGHT then, Ogichidaa sneaked into the lumber camp.
    The men were summoned the next morning to his house.
    “I stole the German at night,” said Ogichidaa. “I crept right up to the barracks without detection.”
    “Without detection.” Asin gloated. He was excited by this ancient working out of the old-way vengeance, pleased young Ogichidaa had taken his advice. He nodded at Booch and Charlie, grinning. The old man’s teeth were little black stubs—all except for a gold one. That tooth glinted with a mad sheen.
    “I dropped the gunnysack over the Kraut’s head when he came outside to take a leak,” Ogichidaa went on. “Bound his arms behind him. Got him right back through the fence and from there, here.”
    Silent, they looked at the figure sitting bound in the corner. Barefooted. Wearing a baggy shirt and pants of no particular color. The man, his head covered by the gunnysack, was quiet with a peculiar stillness that was not exactly fear. Nor was it sleep. He was awake in there. The men could feel him straining to see through the loose weave over his face.
    Bagakaabi got spooked by the way the German composed himself, and suddenly he couldn’t stand it. He went over and ripped away the gunnysack hood. Maybe some expected to see a crazy eagle—how they stare mad into the air from their warrior hearts of ice—but they did not see an eagle.