The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [86]
The restaurant had once been the National Bank of Pluto, and it was solid. The ceilings were high and the lights hung down on elegant brass fixtures fixed to decorative scalloped plaster bowls. There were brass rails along the counters and the floors were old terrazzo, the walls sheeted with marble, and in the corners there were a set of dignified marble half columns. The orange booths were set alongside the tall windows and light flooded from three sides under the old cornices.
Across from us there was a gas station and a reeking movie house that showed B movies. At times, a fake flower or decorative basket shop would spring up—some farm wife’s hopeful crafts project outlet—or a secondhand clothing store that smelled of sweat and mice would suddenly appear in an old closed-down storefront.
Marn Wolde was brooding while her kids ate a second helping of pie when Mama dropped off Mooshum. He sat down in the booth with Earl, whom he liked to annoy. Earl left. Marn’s children were so full their eyes drooped. She let them keel over in the booth. I brought their jackets for pillows, then poured out more fresh coffee. I brought Mooshum’s sour cream and raisin pie. He would usually draw a line down the middle with his knife, and we’d each eat toward the mark. But that day we shared the pie three ways, with Marn.
“I think I look French, don’t you?” I said to Marn.
“Well, you are French, aren’t you?”
“La zhem feey katawashishiew,” said Mooshum.
“Watch out,” I said to Marn, “he’s going to flirt with you.”
“Aren’t French girls pretty? You are.”
“I’d rather be chic,” I said. “Of course, I have to wear this uniform. But my brother Joseph is at the University of Minnesota. I’ve visited him twice. He’s in science. I’m going to go into literature. I’m learning French, see?”
I showed her the Berlitz book I’d found on a stellar day in the mission rummage, brand-new, not a mark in it.
“Say something, say something!” Marn cried.
“La nord, le sud, l’ouest, et l’est sont les quatre points cardinaux!”
Mooshum looked disgusted. “That’s not how it goes! She tries to speak Michif and she sounds like a damn chimookamaan.”
“I sound French, Mooshum. Je parle franais!”
“Ehhh, the French, Lee Kenayaen!” He swiped his hand at me and bit daintily, gingerly, into his pie. His new teeth had been hard to fit and loosened easily. I still missed his old teeth, how he used to shovel the food right past them. He seemed happier then, even when they hurt. And the toothaches had always been a good excuse for whiskey.
“You!” he said. “My girl, you’re going to be famous in school. Like your brother.” He nodded at Marn and winked. “No surprise coming from such forebears. She’s outta the royal line, anyway, on both sides. The great chiefs and the blue blood Scots, she’s related to Antoinette herself and through that the German—”
“The Mormons have come around the house again with their genealogy charts and they’re trying to suck Mooshum into their religion by telling him that he’s got kingly ancestors,” I told Marn.
“I know it to be so,” said Mooshum firmly, licking his fork. “And the Chippewa side, we’re also hereditary chiefs. And we’re quick. I escaped from Liver-Eating Johnson—he just got half my ear.”
He tugged his damaged ear.
“What?”
“Listen,” I said to Marn. Her children had gotten up and were coloring quietly in the next booth. “We’ll split up the hours, you’ve got kids, so you take first pick.”
“We’ll adjust,” she smiled, a little wan now. “And I think I’ll cut my hair.”
“What’s this I hear,”