He did shut the door as he quickly left, which caused a burst of hilarity. It should have roused his suspicions, maybe, but they were always like that.
That night, at home, he decided to sell the rectals in a different bottle, but took a triple dose of the pills that didn’t crush. He took them with a full glass of water, as recommended, and waited. Nothing happened so he took one more. Perhaps half an hour passed. He looked at the date on the bottle, then peered closer and held the bottle in the light of the cockeyed lamp. One label had been carefully pasted over another label. He couldn’t scratch the second label off though he tried with his longest fingernail, tried with a razor blade, and then realized with a twisting rush of his guts that the contents of the bottle were effective in the place the old ladies said his brains were located.
God! The pain was sickening. He loped, slung over his stomach, to the door of the disability bathroom. Crashed through. The toilet still had a decent flush and that night he gave it hard use. The cramps were nails driven deep into his lower abdomen. Those ladies must have rocks in their bowels, he thought. How could they stand it? Even a fraction of a dose would have done the trick. He didn’t sleep. Dawn found him raving, exhausted, dehydrated, famished, gutted, unable to go to work. But no, it wasn’t over. Other feelings surfaced. His skin began to prickle and burn. His nose grew giant and his feet seemed far away. There was an abnormally disgusting taste in his mouth, then his penis turned rock hard and would not go down even if he thought of frog-shaped zipper pulls.
All day, blankets nailed over windows, Romeo lay in his pile of sleeping bags experiencing bouts of sickness, disorientation, and sexual excitement simultaneous with explosive gas. CNN wavered and sparked. Ann Kellan, one of his favorite reporters, was doing a comforting story about the language of elephants. When you hear these calls, you know there’s going to be a mating event, said Ann. Male bull elephants trumpeted. The competition was on. Trunks blared. Romeo’s penis throbbed. He flicked off the volume. He lay still underneath his sleeping bag. He didn’t dare move for fear of disrupting the weak equilibrium he’d gained below the waist.
Maybe the old ladies were right—his brains were in his ass and now it was cleared out—for he found himself thinking with uncommon clarity. Thinking with strange focus. Considering where he’d sell and how much he’d reap for the pills he’d stashed, even counting it all up in his head and deciding what he would do with the money. He thought of his aunt, who’d raised him at the edge of her household, Aunt Star. In spite of her evil trick, he would buy groceries for her. Clean her place up so it didn’t stink. He thought of ordinary and extraordinary things. Should he live this way? He asked himself that. Should he be subject to the cruel pecking of the buzzards at the Elders Lodge? How could he rise? How could he gain respect? Should he run for office? Which office? If he was on the tribal council he would immediately declare it against tribal law to store psychotropic laxative erection pills in a painkilling drug container. He spent the most time, though, reviewing bits, sorting words, scanning possibilities. Information. What certain knowledge might get him. He considered all aspects of what gossip gave him what sorts of power. He made up his mind to go deeper, investigate, maybe put up a bulletin board of clues like his Law & Order hero, Lennie Briscoe. He’d put everything together.
WOLFRED SORTED THROUGH the options: they could run away, but Mackinnon would not only pursue but pay Mashkiig to get them first. They could stick together at all times so Wolfred could watch over her, but that would make it obvious that Wolfred knew and they would lose the element of surprise. Xenophon had lain awake in the night, asking himself this question: What age am I waiting for to come to myself? This age, Wolfred thought. Because they had to kill Mackinnon of course. Really, it was the first thing Wolfred thought of doing, and the only way. To feel better about it, however, he had examined the options.
How to do it?
Shooting him was out. There might be justice. Killing him by ax, hatchet, knife, or rock, or tying him up and stuffing him under the ice, was also risky that way. As he lay in the faltering dark imagining each scenario, Wolfred remembered how he’d walked the woods with her. She knew everything there was to eat in the woods. She probably knew everything there was not to eat as well. She probably knew poisons.