The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [84]
“Take that word back,” said Whitey, “or I’ll fight you. Thou shalt not take that word in vain.”
Earl opened his mouth, but Uncle Whitey kept talking. “Besides, my niece is going to Paris. She is in love with Paris. She’s a saucy Francophile.”
Whitey thought he was so clever.
“Okay, I take back the pussy part,” said Earl. His face was red and his neck was getting thick. “But you scrape that damn cream off there,” he said to me.
“I’ll pay for the whipped cream out of my tips.”
Often, once Earl left, we’d fry up a whole bag of popcorn shrimp and eat it. Plus I stole sugars, boxes of jelly, and especially the ketchup. I liked ketchup, hated running out. Earl couldn’t fire Whitey because Whitey had married Earl’s sister and she wouldn’t let him.
“Jesus,” said Whitey to Earl, “so what about the whipped cream? There’s no other customers. I don’t think those kids ever saw whipped cream before.”
Earl peered out the slot of a kitchen window and saw Marn. I’d forgotten that he had a crush on Marn.
“Yeah,” I said, “they’re her kids.”
“Oh,” he said, disappointed, and I knew he hadn’t realized that Marn had children, either. I put the desserts on a tray and backed through the swinging doors into the restaurant. Marn was smoking a cigarette and the children were watching her with fascination, as if they had never seen their mother smoke a cigarette before.
“Voil,” I said. The kids’ eyes opened wide.
“Oh, nice,” said Marn. She looked up at me and smiled, for real now, and she had the sweetest smile, with deep shadows at the corner of her mouth. She was almost beautiful when she smiled and looked into a person’s eyes. There was something that drew you. I could see why Billy, I guess, and Earl, had crushes on her. She had a facile, tough, energetic little body.
Earl came to the booth and started offering Marn her old job back, trying to convince her, but she waved her hand and said, “You don’t have to harangue me. I’ll start whenever.” Earl drew his head back into the hump of his shoulder, almost shy. Marn said that she’d come to town looking for Coutts, the lawyer. Earl looked over at me. I decided I’d better take down the ketchup bottles before he realized I had them all subtly balanced end to end.
“I need to get my land back,” Marn said.
That’s the first we heard of it.
“What are you going to do with it?” Earl asked.
“Start a snake ranch.” Marn raised her eyebrows and tapped a cigarette smoothly from its package.
Just then the door opened, this time with a windy crack, and a heavyset blond woman in a quilted green jacket barged through, bawling, “There you are, there you are! Defilement!”
Marn threw down her cigarette, whirled, and jumped up, out of the booth. I heard her say to the children, “Bliss!” Then all of a sudden Marn was standing in the aisle of the restaurant with a steak knife in one fist. And a hammer in the other. What she’d had in her coat pocket. The children slipped underneath the table like they were practiced at evading this sort of danger. Bliss surged forward but halted when she saw the steak knife and hammer. Her skin was thick and pitted with old acne scars and her eyes and lips were swollen, red as if from weeping or a bad cold. Her coxcomb of rough, spiky hair shivered as she launched into a torrent of accusation. She lambasted Marn for murdering Billy Peace and taking money from the group. As a result, Marn was going to be struck dead by something or someone who might be Bliss herself.
“Whoa,” said Earl, planting himself, legs apart in a bravado stance, behind Marn and her tool-utensil weapons. “You’re outta line,” he told Bliss.
“Call the cops, then,” Bliss bawled. “Call the cops and dump her in the slammer too!”
“She wasn’t doing anything,” said Earl.
“I was enjoying a peaceful meal with my children,” said Marn, dancing a little on her toes. She was shedding electricity. This confrontation seemed to make her happy and it looked to me like she was ready to stick that knife right into the big woman. She was moving the point of it back