American Masculine (20 page)

But as the sunlight gave way, clouds came in from the north and cloaked the earth and pushed back the stars. The land became bulky, hard to see but for the shoulders of the road and the earthen embankments that rose and fell from view almost before he noticed. Hardly distinguishable now, the track of the moon lay in the southern quadrant of the sky. Darkness had taken up the largest part of his surroundings, but in glimpses across open fields pale remnants of light pulled at the world’s rim. As he drove, the headlights opened the night. Nathan tried to push his thoughts down. He knew the most difficult part lay ahead, over a rise and around one broad swell.

Down there the neon glow of Jimtown Bar was a weak pulse in the expanse of prairie. Descending the broad curve he lost sight of the bar for a time. He felt the pull of the engine, and heard the noise of it rapping out behind him. Then he rounded the hill and bearing down he saw Jimtown bright as bone. An ugly place, dark inside, lit up outside by the fluorescent bloom of the roadway sign. The building was a small raw square on the rez line, discolored, into which Indians and whites descended together, mostly Northern Cheyennes and some Crow, and in with them the white boys who worked the fields, or came out from Lame Deer. Last year a man had been knifed to death behind the building. Nathan and every man he worked with liked the feel of the place, always had. They’re all inside, thought Nathan, laughing and drinking at a table just inside the door. Jed’s cheeks would redden as he cackled, his large head would nod back to put another one down.

For a moment Nathan recognized how odd it was, how crazy in fact, that all this was so attractive to him. Then the notion died and he was caught again wanting to burn, wanting to throw off every resistance. The daughter he loved seemed distant, something faint, and far beyond his reach. He envisioned himself pulling into the parking lot, walking in the pseudolight of the neon sign as he hurried toward the door, his shirt half open, his eyes turned down. Thinking this way, his own face became foreign to him, the deep-set lines of his forehead, the tightening of his countenance. With his palm he tried to unfurrow it all, to push it up and back, but before he noticed, his hand was at his lips again, brushing at the shape of them, thumbing the smoothness there. Losing himself to the feel of it he knew the movement was no help. In the midst of it he was struck by the desire to press a bottle to his mouth and down liquor, as much of it as he could lay his hands on. He pounded his fists on the wheel and commanded himself aloud, “Right now. Knock it off!”

Back in early May he had come home late again and found his wife asleep on the couch, tired from the pregnancy. He had watched her for a moment, the way she lay on her side in one of his T-shirts, her small body round and tight from the baby. He approached her and smoothed her hair from her face. She turned to him. She kissed his mouth, and she asked him, “Nathan, will you name our daughter?” These words. Even after they had cursed each other when he called from the bar that night.

In a bent tone he asked her, “Why me?”

“Because,” she said openly, “you’re a good man. You’re her father, and I’d like it if you would.”

Almost without will he said, “Okay.” Face-to-face like this, she could do that to him, call him to a ground he’d have never taken alone. He carried her to the bedroom and wrapped her neatly in the down comforter her mother had given them. Over the covers he lay next to her and held her and gently pressed his cheek to her face, feeling against his own face the bones of her forehead, the circlet of bone around her eyes, and underlying her eyes the cheekbones. When she had fallen asleep, he whispered, “I’ll be her father.” And he knew the name he’d give.

IGNORING the bulky feel in his chest and back, the labor it was to breathe, he set his face to the road and stepped the gas to the floorboard. To avoid drawing his thumb to his lips he consciously gripped the wheel in his fists. Quietly, but aloud, he said his daughter’s name—“Noel.” At the sound of it something increased in him, and as he drew near to Jimtown he kept the pedal down. Neon flashed in the cab for a moment before it died behind him. In the rearview mirror he watched it narrow and fade, then disappear. Just like that, he thought, simpler than it seemed. But long after the bar had passed he looked in the mirror, eyeing the road ahead only for a moment at a time.

More than ten miles on, the sky had opened and Nathan shut off the headlights before turning on the dirt road that led to his home. He entered the trailer and closed the door softly behind him. Pausing, he rested his hands on the back of a metal folding chair at the kitchen table. He heard the rhythm and the stillness of his wife’s breath, this with the breathing of his child, quiet like the whisper of willows and wild rose.

He walked the hall and stopped at the open doorway, the last door, the master bedroom. The moon was full in the room. A slight breeze from the window touched him. A cedar chest made by his wife’s father was at the foot of the bed. In the bed, his wife slept beneath the down coverlet, only the black veil of her hair visible up near the headboard. Words came to him that he’d heard her whisper on occasion when the babe slept in her arms: “The garment of praise instead of the spirit of despair.” He thought he remembered her reading those words somewhere. He loved the sound of them, the movement they made in his mind.

Beside the window he saw his daughter’s crib, the child asleep within, and drawing near he stood over her. Hardly breathing, he stared. He saw the line of her jaw, the small closed lids of her eyes. She is so perfect, he thought, so fresh and new. The moonlight is an angel in whose wings she breathes and sleeps. She was no longer than his forearm, and when he reached down her head fit in the palm of his hand. He smoothed her hair, then drew his hand back and folded his arms over the railing.

Here he beheld her, and in the lovely way of her form he found the echo of himself.

He went to the foot of the bed and folded his pants and shirt and placed them in a small pile on the floor. In bed, he touched his wife’s arm and whispered as she slept, I’m grateful for you, You are a good woman, I know a good woman, and as the last words left his lips he drifted, sleeping.

IN THE NIGHT he woke and heard the child’s breathing again, like a lost rhythm calling him. He got up and approached her crib, and from his place near the window, arms folded on the railing, he looked out. In the early light the line of the earth seemed a great distance away and barely visible, and there in the dim new world he saw everything: her tender form sleeping, his own faint reflection in the window, and out far the land, the stars, and water in between, the darkness and the dawn.

—for my grandfathers

THE SIMPLE TRUTH: John Sender believed in love.

Thirty-three. Still single. Driven, too driven. So much head work, and such solitude, but now into his self-doubt, love. Real love. A love he could hardly believe after such drought, but yes, he believed. He’d even gone home to Montana and borrowed his long-dead grandfather’s black Florsheim wingtips from his recently dead grandmother’s bedroom closet, and from her bureau the diamond ring she’d kept through two foreign wars—his mom wanted him to have it—the ring he’d be giving to his bride.

Only he hadn’t much spoken with his bride yet.

He pressed his hands down on the desk, flattening them, staring. Big boned, rough. Late night; everyone gone. Alone again. The day had been difficult, another without tone or hue, loans drawn up, rates unsecured or secured, monies meted out. Awkward, the bones of a hand, beautiful in their way. His were like his father’s, not afraid of work. Strong like his father’s too, but meek with women.

He had thought he might just stick to horses; they calmed him every bit as much as he calmed them, the kind-spirited ones, the wild ones too, like bolts of lightning he could get a heel into and fight. He missed it, breaking for Dad and the neighbors. That, and all the rodeoing he’d done.

Spooked since he could remember, he felt like a fool on every date he’d been on, which was few. Tall man: six feet five, wired tight. Bridge of the nose bony as a crowbar, broken on a fence in Flagstaff. Rodeo docs always salty, that one had laid him flat on the ground, shoved two metal rods up his nose and got on top of him, then jerked the rods hard. The sound was unnatural, the pain like a landslide in his brain. Straightened things out but left a crude notch. Too tall for saddle broncs the doc said, but he’d made do.

Hard-nosed, his dad said when he saw the nose.

Keeps the women away, John answered, and they chuckled.

But John was better looking than he gave himself credit for. Shoulder-length black hair, black enough it had a blue sheen, drawn back, crowlike. Vivid eyes. Bold features. Big. Just quiet with women. He put his hands through his hair. Easier to see couples enter his office hoping to secure something … a loan, a home. The men were anomalies. Their wives called them husband, or hubby, or honey—or silent, said nothing. The men didn’t know what they had, John thought. When it came to love, they should realize what they borrow is a woman: you borrow her from her family, from her mother and father, and mostly from God.

John’s daily business was loans. Tailored suit and silk tie. Late again, after dark, he needed to finish the paperwork and get home. Odd, he thought. Vicarious living or some kind of narrow foresight. No cowboy hat, no boots, he felt at odds with himself. A rodeo scholarship and a BA in English from the University of Montana, then three years on the circuit and an MBA along with a smattering of additional graduate work in philosophy from Seattle University. He’d been in loans now nearly a decade, and until he met Samantha everything had seemed caught in a time strange to him, and uglified. Hollow, missing the land and sky. The ranch. Mom and Dad by themselves and him a corporate hired hand, trapped like a pawn in some large thoughtless efficiency, all take, no give. To borrow implied not only responsibility but culpability. But men were made mostly of emptiness, he thought, palpable, burdensome.

And of the men who borrowed?

Their lives, like his, were made as much of confusion as clarity, edging toward death but wanting life, poised on the tipping point between dark and light. Tangibly they ranged the border between self-sabotage and a new country of grace, and it worried him, the threshold over which a man must pass, the crucible. He worried about them, and yet how easily he forgot them.

THE FORGOTTEN, two among many.

Sean Baden. Elias Pretty Horse.

Two he’d forgotten. Two who had forgotten him. He’d seen them in the beginning, way back when, and these days it was true, life so hectic, so recessed and depressed, no one felt compelled to remember, though even slight remembering might have meant help, and remembering well might have meant salvation. Men, dumb as animals, but like angels, majestic. Born into foolishness. Into love awakened. Unknowingly they willed themselves to succeed or die.

JOHN PLACED A STACK of loans in the processor’s in-box.

Past midnight locking the office door his hands felt very cold. He hoped beyond fear she’d come to like him but he had to laugh at himself, everything so unlikely still. He’d only been in her close proximity once, but as he merged onto I-5 for the forty-minute commute from downtown he pushed the ring over his right pinkie finger, a simple solitaire, firm hand at twelve o’clock, and watched the glow through the windshield, subdued usually but in the direct light of oncoming vehicles the stone a tiny torch of white, gold, and vermilion. He envisioned placing the ring on her slight hand, smiling into her eyes, receiving from her the smile she’d give. He dreamed of trips back home to Montana, where he drove Going to the Sun Road in Glacier, hiked the lakes region from Hidden Lake at Logan Pass, to Avalanche Lake and Two Medicine. He’d teach her to fly-fish. He’d make small bright fires under wide skies on nights that would deepen from light to dark blue then black as black silk, silver points like fine sand from east to west, the Milky Way an arm of clustered stars overhead. The Summer Triangle. Cygnus the Swan. Vega, Altair, Albireo. In the western night they’d shine, he and she like satellites.

That night in bed, he held his hands over his chest and stared at the ceiling. Chill air, down comforter his mother gave him a Christmas ago. The reasons men borrowed were simple, and not so simple. They borrowed what they felt they needed, and not just from him, from everyone, and not just money, they borrowed everything. He thought about the real needs: a job, sex, marriage? They borrowed against their line of credit, cash, jewels, furniture, paintings, vintage guitars, home theaters, cars. A house, a home. They borrowed money even to buy their own beds. In isolation it was nothing but combined it meant great debt, depending on who borrowed what, and for how much, and when.

SEAN BADEN borrowed his father’s Bible.

JOHN HAD TO admit he felt low in Seattle, real low away from home, boxed in by granite and glass, and the rain, no range or visibility, no sky, and out among the millions he’d nearly given up hope. It wasn’t the flats near Rock Springs where you could ride for miles and never see a soul and never feel alone. Here, you hit people constantly, bumped them on the sidewalk or in a grocery line, touching and being touched and never knowing anyone, you couldn’t get away from the sheer mass even if you wanted to; it made you feel bad.