American Chica (29 page)

Just who had that old man thought we were? He had said we belonged on
the niggah side
of town. Was Rawlins cut in half? Was there a Whites side and a Colored side, like the doors we’d run up against in the bathrooms of St. Louis? Would Mother be taken away from us? Would Papi be forced to
go back where he belonged?

“Your hair is black,” my mother had said to Vicki. “But you’re white, like me.”

I, on the other hand, had suspected my skin would fool no one. There was nothing white about me. I was colored, for sure.

There is a trait I recognize now in the child I was then, a curiosity about my own physical composition, an obsession bordering on fever. Perhaps that inquisitiveness is common to children of mixed parents. You till, you dig, you paw, searching for bits, scrabbling at roots, eager to learn to which tribe you belong. Are you more like one or more like the other? Are you one way when
you’re in one country, but another when you’re not? You dangle from that precipice, wondering where to drop.

It is exhausting work, that transit between worlds, that two-way vertigo. I was half and half. Dr. Birdseye had told me so. But I hardly thought I was better off for it. I had two heads, two hearts. I was as unwieldy as Siamese twins on a high wire: too awkward for equipoise, too curious about the other side.

FRIDAYS AFTER SCHOOL,
Huey and Nub would head for Rattlesnake Pass, Doc’s ranch at the foot of Elk Mountain. They were helping him build a house. Out there with them were two of Doc’s drinking pals: a beer-guzzling Mormon and a saloonkeeper from the oil-refinery town of Sinclair. Mondays, my cousins would come back full of stories about the men’s booze binges, each tale giddier than the last. The cabin floor, it seemed, had started out well enough—the tiles straight-edged and orderly—but by the time the last squares were laid, the rows were as swacked as the hands that had laid them. Grandpa Doc didn’t seem to mind. The boys were out on the prairie, out of harm’s way.

Each day in town, however, brought its grim turn, a shift in the bearing walls. Grandma Lo was in and out of a coma; her doctors’ efforts were proving futile. She was taken one day from her bed in the Ferguson and driven down the street to the Mormon’s house. Grandpa Doc’s weekend drinker had turned out to be married to a nurse. It was a matter of shepherding now.

Mother and Papi continued on their respective reveries—she at her mother’s bedside, he on his shop-by-shop tour of the latest American inventions. Vicki was lost to her books. With no one to mind us, George and I started combing Rawlins like truants on a spree. We shoplifted candy from the five-and-dime, provoked rumbles with the little gringos next door, snitched cigarettes
from our parents and puffed them out back. When George stole a toy truck at my instigation, Mother threatened to turn him in. She walked him, as he snorted and sniveled, all the way to the gate of The Pen. When she brought him home and thrashed him under the dining room table instead, he scrambled out with blood on his face. Soon after that we were marching down the street, our hands in Vicki’s firm grasp, headed for another kind of incarceration, on the very grounds where the
loco
had cursed us: the school with the pasty-faced children. Within its walls we spent endless days, freeing our parents to squarely face the anxieties, look death directly in the eye.

Grandpa Doc, too, was tense as a buckjump rider, numbing himself with work. He took on more surgery. He had always offered it free to Indians who needed it. Now he’d book himself solid for days, spelunking in heads, yanking his way through teeth, emerging one afternoon with four of my father’s molars. On weekends he was out on the ranch, working on his house, or down at The Rustic Bar. “Come with me, honey,” he’d say, when Georgie scampered off after Huey and Nub, volunteering to help them pound nails. “Let’s go look at them bobcats awhile.” We’d jiggle down the dirt road to Saratoga, where he’d sit and sip whiskey for hours. I’d sit at the oak bar beside him—silent as a stone—watching two stuffed mountain cats claw at the carcass of a doe.

The Clapp ranch spraddled out beyond the tracks of the Union Pacific, where Rattlesnake Pass cut through to a creek. The land was grave-slab flat, running a fast course to the horizon. But due east, just where the sun rose, Sheep Hill leaned up against Elk Mountain the way a calf in high wind leans into its mother. That bigger mountain rose haughty, unknowable, thrusting its snow-covered hump into a nimbus sky.

Doc’s brand—reverse Z, double quarter circle—was burned into the haunch of every cow, bull, and horse that grazed his
many acres. There was a cabin, an outhouse, a shed, and, behind these, his new house, going up all white and perfect, like a jewel box sitting out on a table. Out by the corral, where the animals were kept, a weathered wood fence traced the foot of Elk Mountain.

There were only two other houses the human eye could see from Doc’s land. One was an abandoned shack he had given to Clem Riley, a black ex-convict who had knocked on his cabin door one winter morning, looking for a place to stay. Ole Black Riley, my grandfather called him. The man had lived there for years, working a vegetable garden and hunting jackrabbit, until he woke up one morning and wandered away in search of a better life. “Hey, Grandpa Doc, what happened to Old Black Riley?” I asked, looking out toward that shack and feeling a certain affinity for a man who would have been consigned with me to the other side of the tracks in Rawlins proper. “Dunno, honey. Took off, I guess.”

On the other side of Grandpa Doc’s land, where stone cliffs ran west like a frill collar of gray, where coyotes bayed at the light of the moon, stood the second house. The Widener place: It was four miles down the Pass and barely visible from Doc’s new house. Jack Widener was the cattleman who had hired Aunt Erma to teach his children. On a good day, you could make out the pillbox that was her school.

Over the rise, behind the Widener house, lived Old Joe Krozier. He was a wild man with a mysterious past—eyes as flared as roulette wheels, hair all a-kilter. “Now, he
truly
is a heavy drinker,” the Mormon and the saloonkeeper would say to each other, and then they’d both bellow and guffaw until tears ran down their cheeks. Rumor had it that after Old Joe’s wife had left him, he’d vowed never to own a car again. He was the only man in America—as far as I could tell—who had ever sworn off cars. There was good reason why: One hot August morning
his wife had taken his last one and torn down Rattlesnake Pass in it to meet her boy lover. She had never come home again. We’d see Old Joe hunched over a slung-back mare, making his way down the ruts of Rattlesnake Pass, or ambling along the railroad tracks on his thin bowed legs, alone.

“Get up, you lazybones, and get me a stone!” Gramp sang out to George and me when we were out at the ranch, to get us out of bed and into the morning. We’d scramble out and find one quickly, about the size of a mango, and run back to the house, knowing we’d hunt that day. Doc dropped the stone into the bottom of a large pot, rattled in some beans and a ham bone, added water, and left it to cook.

Learning to shoot was the first order of business when Doc took us out to Rattlesnake Pass. “You can’t live on this land and not learn how to handle a rifle,” he’d tell us. “I don’t care if you’re knee-high to a grasshopper. There are snakes out here. Bears. Wolves. And by my sights, you two look like juicy little morsels. You need to learn about guns.” At first we shot cans on the fence or potatoes set out on the brush. But soon we learned to fit the butt of a .22 into a shoulder, line up the crosshairs, finger the trigger, feel the
ping,
and see our bullets twig to their targets like
qosqos
to black light.

Doc killed deer. We killed rabbits. Doc killed antelope. We killed sage hen. Running after them through the brush as they warbled and lumbered away, eyeing us with alarm. When we were done, we would drag the carcasses onto the pickup truck for the ride back to the house. The beans would be waiting for us, fragrant and steamy, cooked evenly through by the stone. But we wouldn’t be allowed to sit down to them until all the animals were clean.

Doc taught us as equals, and taught us well. We knew to shoot heads, kill quick. We knew to snap necks, be sure. He had taught us to skin our game, chuckling at us when we crept away
pale and green. But it was cousin Nub who taught me how to gut a sage hen and cut fast to a butcher’s fortitude. Slit the throat so it bleeds to the ground. Grab the hen by the anus and pull. Take her wings and swing ‘til the guts fly. Pluck her to pink-butt tender.

“You’re the only one around here who ain’t flat-out bats,” Nub told me one day. “Course, you’re still young and all. You could go any minute.” He’d stick out his tongue and roll his eyes until I screeched with delight.

“Reckon I’m takin’ a big shine to you,” he’d say. He’d lift me up and set me down on the long fence at the edge of Doc’s land and listen to me talk a blue streak about the power of my
qosqo
and Peru’s
pishtacos
and the spirits in the trees. Then he’d yelp and pound his knees with his hands. Whether it was my accent or my tales about ghosts that amused him, I never knew, but the more he’d laugh, the more I’d perform: louder, faster, scarier. Then I’d sit back and survey his face.

Nub was almost golden, openly handsome, honey hair hanging down into his eyes. He was slim-hipped, slim-chested, with eyes that flashed up hot.

“Should I tell you some more?” I asked him. “About the Danish man with the worms in his head?”

“Yip. I’d like to hear that one. You’ve got the damnedest stories I ever heard, tyke.”

“Do you think I talk funny, Nub? You think I’m a foreigner?” I was remembering the large woman on the Pullman train, the old man who had growled at us in Rawlins, every gringo that raised his eyebrows when George and I walked into the shops, chattering.

“Naw, Cousin, sure don’t. I git what you’re saying fine. But tell you what. This’ll prove to me that you’re not.” Nub mounted the fence beside me, reached into his pocket, pulled out a pouch, and grinned. “Here.” He thrust it under my chin.

I looked down at the pungent brown strands in the bag. “Tobacco,” I said. “I know what that is.”

“Have some.” I looked up at his face. He was serious. “Go on, girl, take a hit.”

“Sure will,” I said, “yip,” and grabbed it. I pulled out a handful and shoved it in my mouth.

“Aw-raaat!” he sang out, and beamed a bright row of white.

That was how Nub introduced me to chaw and how I finally learned to spit. It took more than once—a great deal of hollering along the way—but I got so that months later, by the time I left Wyoming, I could hold my tobacco and squirt it from the side of my mouth just like him.

Hit the cowpie.
Squeet!
And Nub would hold his sides and laugh so hard I thought he’d fall off the fence and die.

“You know what you look like? You look like some pea-size cowboy on a drunk, that’s what!”

“Oh, yeah? How about a llama?”

“A what?”

“A llama. Aw, Nub, c’mon, you know—the Peruvian animal I was telling you about.”

“They chaw?”

“Naw, you dummy, but they spit!”

“Haw!”

“Yeehaw! Watch this. Just like a llama.
Peeew!”

“Well, I’ll be damned. More like a whale, I’d say. Out the ole blowhole. Pow!”

I reckon it was the ole blowhole that did it. In any case, something was pushing. I pulled up my shirt, aimed my belly at the stone cliffs, and howled,
“Qosqo-o-o-o!”

Nub gawked at me as if I were mad, his eyes glittering and wide. Then he threw back his head and roared his big laughter into the sky.

WHILE THE SKY
was getting our attention, it turned out there was much going on in the landscape. A strange phenomenon was under way, underfoot, in Wyoming. Nothing familiar. Nothing we understood. Nothing like shifting plates of subterranean rock. Nothing like forces that had bucked us before. Nothing like those moments in Peru, when Pachamama heaved and buildings collapsed and glass flew and we would run screaming for our lives.