The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [81]
“Is she good-looking? Or is she ugly like you?” asked Ira, but she smiled to show she meant he was the opposite of ugly.
The people had turned away to resume their conversations, to drink or argue. Thirty or more sat scattered in the booths or at the tables, some in unzipped snowmobile suits or dressed in camou-flage hunting parkas. The man sitting beside Ira had given her the only friendly look in the place, so she’d sat down next to him.
“C’mon,” said Ira, smiling, “ugly like you?”
The man said with a kind of shy reluctance that his wife was beautiful, but for the scar on her lip. He passed his finger slantwise across his own mouth, and Ira remembered the woman he spoke of. Instead of mentioning her name, people often made a sign for her like that, and everybody knew who they meant.
“I’m almost beautiful, too,” said Ira. “I would be except for what’s in here.”
She tapped her breast over the heart, casually, then she took a drink of the beer that the man had just bought for her.
“Maybe you could clean that up,” the man suggested, nodding at that place Ira indicated.
“I’m trying to,” said Ira. “Alcohol kills germs.”
She took an abrupt swallow of her drink and tapped her face with her fingers. “I’m getting sterilized inside. You won’t catch anything from me.”
“Even if I did,” the man said, “my wife would cure it. She knows a lot of these old-time medicines?”
His voice rose as though he was asking a question of Ira, who nodded just as if she was giving a real answer to his question. She drank her beer, had another, and then one more. Now she was just drunk enough. She didn’t want to get any drunker, but she also did not want to get sober, not yet, not by any means. As she’d already said, she wasn’t ready to go home. She said it again in a vaguer, softer way than before.
“I’m not ready to go home.”
“Don’t say that around just anybody,” said the man, chiding her in a friendly way. “There’s dirty men in here.”
“Where, where,” said Ira, looking openly at the drinkers now. Their stares seemed comical. “I want a dirty man.
“But not that one,” she went on, following the chin-pointing nod of the man who was buying her drinks. “I’ve had him and he’s no good. His wife hired someone, maybe hired your own wife, to put a medicine upon his wiinag so it droops when he thinks of anyone but her.” She laughed and made a sad face as she held up her finger and then slowly curled it into her palm.
“I don’t want to go home, but I don’t want that, either.”
“What do you want?” asked the man.
“I want something else,” said Ira. “I definitely want something else.”
“Maybe you want spiritual help,” said the man.
Ira lowered her face and then cast her eyes up at him and shook her head back and forth.
“What are you doing in a bar, anyway?” she said. “What do you mean spiritual help? You don’t go talking about spiritual things when you’re drinking.”
“I do,” said the man. “I’m like that. Different because I know how to handle my drinking. Therefore, in a bar, I can talk of these things as though I was a regular person.”
“I’ll tell you what,” said Ira, “you’re not a regular person. You’re a windigo. You’re made of ice inside. You turn your drinks to slush in your belly, then you try and offer me spiritual help and you say your wife is beautiful, she has a scarred lip, she knows medicine. There’s something not right about this conversation.”
Ira pushed her finger around the lip of her glass, then scooped up some foam. She stuck her finger in her mouth. Looking at him curiously, she continued. “You know what I mean? Something off.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” said the man. “You’re a good-looking woman. You’ll get laid.”
“Any time I want,” said Ira, tossing her hair back, fluffing it with her hand like an old-time movie star, “I look in the mirror, don’t I? You should see me naked, but you never will. I’m so good-looking when I’m naked that it hurts to look at me. I have a painfully good-looking body that makes men beg like dogs. But you’ll never see it.”
“Another beer.” The