Mauser by Erdrich

Mauser by Louise Erdrich What Seems Hard to Believe Turns out to be Believable and Satisfying Mauser, by Louise Erdrich, is a short story that is so well-written and packs so many emotions (love, heartbreak, infidelity, corruption, lust, rage) into so few pages -- taking a highly unlikely set of personalities and dynamics and making them actually seem highly likely, believable -- it leaves the reader frustrated and yet entertained at the same time. Clearly, Louise Erdrich has created a piece of fiction that is both realistic and unbelievable.

The story causes a reader to wonder: how could a woman -- though obviously emotionally unsettled while going through the anguish and heartache of being dumped by a man who works in the same place as she does -- take such risks to help a guy who was very flaky, married, and dangerously lackluster in his values? But in the end, in the last scene, that flaky man, whose job was partly sustained through false reports regarding the weight of gravel in his truck, gets his punishment, meets his own negative karma, as he is buried in his own gravel.

What was there about this story that made it bizarre and yet believable? It would seem that though the narrator gave readers plenty of reasons in the earlier part of the story to believe that she knew better than to allow the cheating brother-in-law of her boss to sneak over to her house and have sex with her; and she seemed to have better sense than to fudge company reports to help the good-looking yet cheating brother-in-law of the boss.

Still, she was heartbroken over being dumped and she was sensually attracted to Travis the flake: she was very taken by his good looks, his charm, "Christ-like eyes," "tanned and muscular" forearms and the fact that he appeared to be "a man worth meeting" in the eyes of any woman. And she had had enough, and wasn't going to take any more, in a manner of speaking.

What happened in the final scene to bring the theme to a head, and a conclusion at the same time? "When I love someone, that's it," the narrator states, suggesting that she just had to take a stand, even if it was as nutty and rage-inspired as the scene in the movie, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," where Ferris's friend allows his dad's expensive sports car to crash through the garage window and down into the canyon. "This feeling had been building in me for the past two days ..

A wild fever that made me throw things at the wall," she explained. "Now everything felt right," she said, as she prepared to run Travis off the road.

How did the author create the scene to prepare the reader for the crushing, crazy climax? The narrator explains that the boss, Mauser, now knows that the narrator "cooked" the books to allow Mauser's cheating brother-in-law to get by on the job; and Mauser is approaching like "a thunderhead building in the sky, a blistering rose color." Mauser's rage was a combination of that thunderhead, and a "boot-camp sergeant" in a "bad movie." Mauser, approaching Travis and seeing that Travis' gravel truck was stuck, was described by Erdrich as a "natural disaster mixed with dumb old saws." His face "went purple" and his neck "bulged from the collar of his shirt.

He puffed up like a bullfrog. Then he snapped." So at this point, the reader is sure that all the times at work when Mauser put up with Travis, and let Travis get away with murder, and the build up in Mauser's mind from those incidents along with having just seen Travis having a romantic embrace with the narrator -- this is revenge, this is sweet revenge for Mauser.