dog and I wasn’t sure I wanted her, but my father did.
She’s too old to teach to fetch and stuff, I complained to him when he got home that night.
We were sitting downstairs, eating heated-up casserole brought once again by Clemence. My father had made his usual pot of weak coffee and he was drinking it like water. My mother was in the bedroom, not hungry. My father put down his fork. From the way he did it (he was a man who liked his food and to stop eating was usually a relinquishment, though these days he wasn’t eating much), I thought he was angry. But although his gestures of recent were abrupt and he often clenched his fists, he did not raise his voice. He spoke very quietly, reasonably, telling me why we needed Pearl.
Joe, we need a protection dog. There is a man we suspect. But he has cleared out. Which means he could be anywhere. Or, he might not have done it but the real attacker could still be in the area.
I asked what I thought was a police TV question.
What evidence do you have that this one guy did it?
My father considered not answering, I could tell. But he finally did. He had trouble saying some of the words.
The perpetrator or the suspect . . . the attacker . . . dropped a book of matches. The matches were from the golf course. They give them out at the desk.
So they’re starting with the golfers, I said. This meant the attacker could be Indian or white. That golf course fascinated everyone—it was a kind of fad. Golf was for rich people, supposedly, but here we had a course of scraggly grass and natural water pits. With a special introductory rate. People passed their clubs around and everybody seemed to have tried it—except my dad.
Yes, the golf course.
Why’d he drop the matches?
My father rubbed a hand across his eyes and again had trouble speaking.
He wanted to, tried to, he was having trouble lighting a match.
A book match?
Yes.
Oh. Did he get it lit?
No . . . the match was wet.
So then what happened?
Suddenly my eyes began to water and I bent over my plate.
My father picked his fork back up. He quickly shoveled Clemence’s well-known macaroni and tomato sauce/hamburger concoction into his mouth. He saw that I had stopped eating and was waiting, and he sat back. He drained another cup of coffee from his favorite heavy white china diner mug. He put a napkin to his lips, shut his eyes, opened them, and looked at me directly.
All right, Joe, you’re asking a lot of questions. You are developing an order to things in your mind. You’re thinking this out. So am I. Joe, the perpetrator couldn’t light the match. He went to look for another book of matches. Some way of lighting a fire. While he was gone, your mother managed to escape.
How?
For the first time since we’d pulled out those trees the Sunday before, my father smiled, or it was some version of a smile, I should say. There was no amusement in it. Later on, if I had to classify that smile, I would say it was a smile like Mooshum’s. A smile of remembrance of lost times.
Joe, do you remember how I used to get so exasperated when your mother locked herself out of her car? She had—still has—a habit of leaving the car keys on the dashboard. After she parks, she always gathers her papers or groceries off the passenger seat, then she puts her keys on the dash, gets out, and locks the car. She forgets that she left her keys in the car until she needs to go home. Then she rummages through her purse and can’t find her keys. Oh no, she says, not again! She goes out, sees her car keys are on the dashboard, locked inside, and then calls me. Remember?
Yeah. I almost smiled too as he described what had been her habit, the whole rigmarole we went through. Yeah, Dad, she calls you. You use a mild swear word, then you get the extra set of keys and take a long walk over to the tribal offices.
Mild swear word. Where’d you get that?
Damn, I don’t know.
He smiled again, put his hand out and nicked at my cheek with his knuckle.
I never really minded, he said. But one day it occurred to me that your mom would be really stuck if I wasn’t home. We don’t go