Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online Page B

this attachment to the old bones of people the Indians had never known, who’d lived and died before their own grandparents were even born—not to mention the other garbage under there. The Indians didn’t want the bones, even to sell to a museum or a gift shop in Detroit. They just wanted it all buried back under mud and grass again.
    Publicity, the paper speculated.
    Pity, publicity, and cold hard cash.
    Comparisons were made to try to convince us the Indians were sincere.
How would you feel if Sacred Heart Cemetery was dug up for condos and your grandma’s bones were sold to a professor in New York?
Still, no one in Suspicious River really believed we’d care. Briefly, maybe, but they’d just be bones, and we’d be over it by August.
    But the Supreme Court ordered the mounds to be remounded, and then that was over, too. Just now and again an arrowhead was found in the forest, which was no surprise. Anything could wait in that thick woods for a few hundred years to be found. That forest, surrounding the town, seemed to whisper all day and night to the condominium developers,
Surely there’s plenty of room for condominiums and Indian mounds on this empty planet
. But the Indians couldn’t hear it over the din of bulldozers and garbage trucks.
    As I’ve said, you might imagine this was a small and friendly town. Like the swans, you might think it was a good place to build a little wet nest at the river’s edge, hidden behind a wall of cattails and whistling reeds. Every March I’d watch them through the window in the office. Always in pairs. One of the big white birds would bring a beakful of uprooted river weeds to the other, who would stuff the weeds mechanically into the mud.
     
    22. I knocked. The door was the usual half-inch open. The curtains had been closed.
    He said, “Come in.”
    The room was cold. His maroon suitcase was open on the floor. Black socks and gray underwear spilled out of it. I said, “You could turn the heat on.”
    “Well,” he said, shrugging, “I couldn’t figure out how.”
    “Here,” I said, going to the radiator under the window, turning the dial to ON. Twisting the knob in the direction of the red arrow pointing to WARM.
    He looked over my shoulder as I did this. “Wow,” he said, “great. Is that all? Hmm.”
    Then he handed me a twenty and a ten, which he’d already had in his hand. I leaned down to slip it in my shoe, and I could smell him. Old Spice and Listerine. He was standing close to me in his undershirt and blue polyester pants. I could see black hairs on his chest sprouting out of his T-shirt. His belly was soft behind his belt, and he was breathing hard.
    I could hear country music drone above us. Someone singing 0-0-0 over and over. Twang and thump. Gary Jensen stomping in his cowboy boots over our heads while I undid the buckle of this man’s belt, unsnapped his pants and pulled them down.
    He was trembling, practically screaming, “Oh my god. Oh. Oh my god.”
    When it was over, he wanted more. I told him I had to go, but he held onto the sleeve of my blouse. “Please,” he said, “just let me see your titties.”
    “No,” I said.
     
    When I got back to the office, Gary W. Jensen was leaning on one elbow with his back toward the counter, smoking a cigarette. He wasn’t wearing the leather jacket, and he looked lean. His brown hair was combed now. The thin beard looked darker. He looked like someone vaguely familiar from a TV show—maybe the deputy on
Gunsmoke
, but sexy, clever.
    I didn’t look at him, just walked around the counter, took the money out of my shoe and reached under the cash drawer to put it in my purse, checking first to make sure the rest of my money was still where I’d left it. Then I stood back up and said, “Can I help you, Mr. Jensen?”
    “You sure are a busy little beaver, ain’t you?”
    “Yes.” I looked straight at him. “So what can I help you with now?” Not a hint of anything in it—sex, fear, anger,