The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [82]
I took the needle filled with the venom of the snake and tipped with the apple of good and evil from beneath the child’s drawing paper, and popped off the apple. Then I pushed the needle quickly, gently, like an expert, for I’d seen this many times in my pictures, right into the loud muscle of his heart.
There, I said, stroking his skin where I withdrew the needle, there, as his eyes opened, there it will be scorched.
And as he bucked and sank away I got the picture. I’d tie a loud necktie around his throat, winch him up into the rafters. Got Bliss cutting him down. Got the sight of him lying still in the eyes of others, got the power of it and the sorrow. I got my children’s old gaze, got them holding me with quiet hands, and got them not weeping but staring out calmly over the hills. I got Bliss running mad, foaming, blowing her guts, laughing and then retrieving Billy’s spirit from its path crawling slowly toward heaven, got the understanding she would organize the others and take over from Billy, but that before they could pin me down in the Manual of Discipline we’d have scooped up the money already and run.
Oh yes, I got us eating those eggs at the 4-B’s, me and my children, and the land deed in my name.
Evelina
The 4-B’s
I WAS PULLING a double shift and it was that slow time in the afternoon between the lunch and early supper crowd. To keep busy, because you never knew when Earl the manager would poke his fat head out the door of his office, I was filling ketchup bottles. Earl called it consolidating. We had a hollow plastic ring with threads on both ends. You put the ring on a half-full ketchup bottle, then upended another bottle on top and let it drain into the first bottle. We had only two of these rings, so it took a while to fill all thirty-five ketchup bottles at the restaurant. Sometimes, if everything was very dull, like on that afternoon, I’d balance half the bottles on the others, mouth to mouth, without the rings. The arrangement was precarious. After filling each bottle I’d wipe it clean and set it on the booth, make sure the salt, pepper, and napkin dispensers were filled up too. Then I’d either study French in my Berlitz Self-Teacher or sneak-read the paperback I had in my pocket (a little black and purple copy of The Fall by Camus) or I’d stare out the window.
That afternoon, I was doing all three things. The ketchup bottles were balanced in the back booth. I had just put down Camus and was now muttering, Je vais Paris, je vais Paris. Je n’ai jamais visit la belle capitale de la France. I was also staring out the window. So I saw Marn Peace arrive with her two children—I guessed they were hers, though I’d never seen her with children before. I knew Marn from the summer before, when she’d worked at the 4-B’s. I also knew she had married Corwin’s uncle, Billy Peace. I was just about to graduate and was working at the 4-B’s, saving money up for college.
Marn parked across the street, got out of the car, an old beat-up Chevy, and she and her children walked across the street to the 4-B’s front door. There was a stiff, spring wind and they pushed into it, hair flying, as they crossed. Marn’s hands were white and knotted and she was gripping her kids, hard, but the kids didn’t look like they minded it. They weren’t pulling away. They didn’t look punished or grim or sad, like you might expect knowing where they came from. They looked amazed, that’s what I thought. They looked like they were walking out of the funnel of a tornado. Like they couldn’t believe the things they’d seen whirling around in there. After a few moments, I went to let them in, because they were standing in front of the old wood and glass