Did You Ever Have A Family (21 page)

The porch door creaks open and he hears footsteps. They are coming around the house. Then he sees a man. It’s Luke. He’s wearing a white Izod shirt and dark pants and walking to the back of the lawn toward the trees. He must be taking a leak, Silas thinks as he watches the white of his shirt hover in the far dark like a ghost. He stays there for what feels like a long time, longer than he’d need to piss. Eventually, he makes his way back toward the house, walking directly toward Silas at first and then veering toward the porch door. The voices kick up but then they seem to move into the kitchen. Faintly, he hears footsteps on the stairs, the water in the second-floor bathroom turn on, and a toilet flush. A door shuts and then the house is quiet.

In the kitchen above him he hears the water in the
sink run briefly. Cupboard doors shutting. And a slow ticking.
Tick. Tick. Tick
. Luke and June are talking and between the words the ticking. She is saying something about beating a dead horse and he is saying her name. She speaks and he simply repeats her name. It’s as if he is trying to talk someone down from the edge of a building or bridge.
June,
he says, and the ticking stops. She speaks, but Silas cannot hear the words. She is too far from the window. It’s stressful, whatever they are talking about, and Silas can tell by the tones and their volume that it’s getting worse. Shadows block the light from the window above him. They are right there, inches from his head. And now he hears every word.

June,
he says,
I’m not going to apologize for answering her truthfully. And it’s true: I’ve asked you twice now.

It’s not so simple. You know that.
June’s voice is strict, like his mother’s.

But I don’t! Why the fuck is it not simple? I’m missing something here and you need to explain it to me.
Silas has never heard Luke sound so upset. At work he can get serious, tense, but not like this.

June’s voice fades and Silas can only hear bits but he catches her last words because she shouts them.
Because it can’t!

Luke, still by the window, says,
Can’t is a lie and you know it. I love you and you say you love me, and not that I have a lot of good examples, but in my book that means you get married.
His voice has risen to near shouting. Silas can hear
June; she says something but she’s crossed the kitchen toward the stove and her words are just sound. Sound that ends the conversation, launches Luke across the kitchen and out the back porch. The screen door slaps shut and suddenly Luke is outside, walking swiftly and in a straight line to the back of the lawn, to the field, toward the far tree line, which leads to a maze of trails on the Moon. Silas watches his white shirt glide purposefully into the woods and disappear. He hears movement in the kitchen and then the screen door opens and shuts again. This time it is June, running, not walking, across the lawn, toward the woods. Her blond hair is what Silas sees flash along the same path Luke had taken just a minute before. Against the silver-blue field at night, her hair appears lit by a single beam of moonlight, as if it was following her across a great stage, like a spotlight following a rock star at a concert. When she reaches the dark border where the field meets the woods, she disappears, too.

They are gone, but in their place the ticking, which had stopped minutes ago, resumes. At first he thinks someone else must be in the kitchen. He waits a few seconds and the ticking goes on and there is no movement, no break in the light from the window. Did she leave the stove on? Is that even possible? Slowly, Silas stands. His legs and back are stiff from crouching. He steps to the other side of the window where a garden hose is coiled against the side of the house. He holds the window ledge,
steps up to the top of the coiled hose, and hoists himself to see inside the kitchen. No one is there. The stove is on the opposite end to the window Silas is looking through—one of those old ones that rich New Yorkers spend thousands of dollars fixing up because they like the way they look. But this one doesn’t look fixed up. There is rust along the bottom and some of the knobs look like they’ve been replaced with makeshift knobs from other stoves. Silas loses his grip on the ledge and jumps down. His foot lands on the hose nozzle and his ankle twists and he collapses awkwardly on the lawn. He stays down. Again, he hears the ticking.
Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick
. What the fuck am I supposed to do? he thinks as he looks out to the field for any trace of Luke’s shirt or June’s hair. He sees nothing but the dark outline of the reception tent looming in the moonlit grass. No one is around, no one can hear. It’s time. He holds his breath and lurches across the short distance between the house and the shed. His hands scramble along the door until he feels and frees the iron latch. The door squeaks like a dying cat as it opens, and for a second he pauses to hear if there is movement or sound from inside the house. Nothing. Just the ticking, which has with the new distance from the house almost disappeared into the hum of the cicadas. It is hidden in the noise of the world and heard only if you stop to listen for it. Silas stops listening for it. Still on his knees, he feels behind the stack of Ball-jar boxes for his knapsack, and
YES-HOLY-FUCK-YES
it is there.
He slides it around the boxes and holds it like a long-lost and beloved puppy.
Time to go,
he leans down and whispers into the bag, imagining the first hit he will take from his bong once he’s cleared the property. He closes the squeaking shed door, folds the latch shut, looks toward the driveway, and pictures his bike hidden in the weeds.

He stands to leave and there it is again, the ticking.
Motherfucking fucker,
he grumbles under his breath. Though it is the last thing on earth he wants to do, he steps toward the house. The closer he gets, the louder the sound. He can’t believe the whole house isn’t awake by now. He imagines Lolly sleeping and wonders if she is upstairs, alone, the night before her wedding; or if that nerdy douche bag is with her. He wonders if they’ve fucked tonight or if they’re waiting for their honeymoon. Silas hasn’t fucked anyone, and so far he hasn’t come close. He imagines Lolly upstairs getting fucked, and for a second he thinks he even hears a moan. He steps closer to the house and listens. The only sound he can hear is the ticking, and without thinking his feet move toward it. Soon he is under the window where he stood before, and here the ticking is the loudest. The noise is relentless, louder with each spark. He is the only one who hears.

Dad was a looker. Tall guy, big shoulders, eyes as green as grass. Mom never stood a chance. They met when she was fifteen, pulling starfish from the sea or some nonsense. He was eighteen, engaged to marry a girl on the rez, and nine months later, upstairs in this same house, in the room my sister Pam now sleeps in, my sister Helen was born. All five of us were born in that room, up in Mom’s bed. And now all five of us, who got married and moved out, have come back, widows or divorcées, or just hopeless, to live here again. The only difference now is Mom’s been long dead. Buried in the Moclips cemetery next to her parents and nowhere near Dad, who was buried on the rez. I guess even at fifteen Mom knew what she wanted. She wanted Dad, and even though she couldn’t have him, she did. The story goes that when Dad went to his parents to tell them he’d knocked up a white girl from town, they didn’t bat an eyelash or raise their voices or hands to him. They moved fast and got him married within the month to that poor girl on the rez he was already engaged to. And that, as Mom used to say, was that. He had a son with that wife, and five
daughters with Mom. Mom stayed with Gramma and Granpa and the three of them raised us. Dad came by for lunches a few times a week. Never at night, always in the day. We’d line up like little girl soldiers awaiting inspection when he walked in. He’d give us kisses and butterscotch candies and ask us about school and boys and wink before sitting down for a sandwich and coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen with Mom.

Mom graduated from Moclips High School and went to Grays Harbor College and got an associate degree. She was pregnant on and off through most of that schooling time, and she always said she never minded the gossip. She had Dad and Gramma and Granpa and us, she said, and besides, it kept the boys away. She would have kept going in school but Grays only gives out a two-year degree and nothing else was close enough for her to go to classes and come home in the same day. She worked as an assistant librarian at the public library in Ocean Shores until she died in 2000. Dad died that same year. His wife is still alive and lives on the rez. She must be in her eighties, maybe older. She survived her husband and her son, who died not so long ago, and she lives, like me, with what’s left of her family. My sisters and I never had a problem with any of them, but we were always careful to steer clear. We knew no one there wanted anything to do with us and we stayed away. For the most part, we still do.

I’ve been on the reservation five times in my life, and
three of those times were because of Will Landis. This last time was to let folks there know that he’d died. He was not one of them, but he got under everyone’s skin over there, and I knew they’d want to know. That boy got under a lot of our skins whether we wanted him to or not. He was the kid of a couple of hippies from Portland who moved here in the early nineties to teach elementary school. They moved into the house Ben built us after we got married, same house he died in. I had no reason to stay on in the place, so my sister Pam sold it and I walked a few doors down to live with my sisters. I was the last one to come home, which made sense being that I’m the youngest. Will was the youngest, too, but that wasn’t what got to me about him. What got to me was that he worked. Tell him to paint a barn and he’d find the paint and brush and he’d do it until it was done. Tell him to clean the sea of seaweed and he’d run and get a rake. That kid didn’t blink, and the only other person I ever knew like that was Ben. So I let Will tag along. He came knocking on my door ready for work, and work I gave him. From ten to four and for a buck a day. The Hillworths didn’t like it at first. I think they thought they’d get fined by the state for exploiting a minor, but the kid made himself useful and got under their skins, too. He’d wash their old Ford wagon, bundle their newspapers and magazines and haul them out for recycling, run up to the hardware store or Laird’s for anything and everything. I’m telling you he was Ben, but a boy
and a tenth as tall. Nothing to say about Ben but that he woke early, came home late, worked hard, slept deep, and was true-blue. He was the one for me, and the only thing he ever did wrong was smoke and it killed him. I never thought I’d want anyone around like I did Ben, so the whole thing was a fluke to begin with. His leaving was less a surprise than his showing up in the first place, so after he died I just kept going and went back to plan A, which was the house I grew up in, with my sisters. And that’s when that Landis kid showed up. Ten years old and living with those hippies who didn’t know the first thing about keeping a house going. He’d come knocking each morning to go to work and keep going until I said so.

After I heard Will had died, I walked down Pacific Avenue to the rez. Thing was, that Landis kid also got under the skin of Joe Chenois. He was a leader, someone who fought to get back stolen land for the Quinault. The one time I ever asked him a favor was to give the Landis kid a shot. He was done cleaning gutters and stripping sheets and hauling trash at the Moonstone and was ready for something else. He never shut up about the rez and was itching to find out as much as he could. So I went down to Joe’s office and asked him to put him to work, and before long the whole place was calling him Little Cedar. He loved it there and he worshipped Joe. All of them over there did. Tall, like Dad. Had his green eyes, too. Will still came by a few times a week to help
out at the Moonstone, or he’d come by the house and barge up the front stairs full of stories from the rez: how Joe had scored some victory against the state, what the carvers who made the old canoes charged tourists for a paddle up the beach. Those old boys loved to tell him the legends and myths of the tribe, and he sucked it all up like a sponge. He’d get extra excited about the stories involving the spit of sand between here and the rez that used to be a camp for the young Quinault girls who’d come of age but were not yet married. The old-timers still say mermaids protected them from men or whatever else might harm them. Anyone who’s grown up around here has heard these stories a thousand times. But the way Will told them opened my ears. He loved every inch of this place. He couldn’t get enough of the people here and their history, and though I’d spent most of my life avoiding the rez and the shaming eyes of the tribe, I liked to hear his version of it.

Just before he went East to college, he talked me into going down to the rez to see a canoe he’d worked on. After four years and a mess of help from Joe and the carvers, he’d done it. I had no intention of going when he first brought it up in May, but by August he’d worn me down, and I agreed to walk down the beach with him one evening after work. I could hear Joe coughing before we entered the long woodshed. I hadn’t heard coughing like that—the kind that sounds like lungs ripping apart—since Ben. Joe was around my age, but standing in the bright
work lights of the woodshed he looked twenty years older, stooped, his skin wrinkled and dry. I could see a pack of Camels bulging from his shirt pocket.
You got quite a boy,
he said, greeting me as he always had: friendly, cautious.
He’s not mine
was what I think I said. Joe smiled and shook his head and half whispered,
We had no say in the matter.

He coughed, pointing to the only canoe in the shed, propped up on sawhorses and at least thirty feet long.
How do you like that?
I could see it was a traditional Quinault—long and wide and carved from a single cedar log. It had a high prow and a low, snug stern, with four cedar planks crossing the middle. I remember Dad telling us stories of how it could take as long as two years to make a canoe like this. How the master carvers would chisel the shell, and to seal it, they’d fill it with water and drop in burning rocks to make it boil. They’d then let it sit through the winter and spring to season. I hadn’t thought of him telling us those stories in a long time. I walked around the back to the prow and could see that every inch of the boat’s outside had been painted. I couldn’t make out the design right away, but as I got closer to the prow, I could see the face of a woman on one side and the face of a man on the other. Both had long, silver hair that flowed from the prow to the stern in waves that looked like the sea. In the waves were green fish, black whales, and blue and gold mermaids. Neither face was recognizable, but I knew. Joe came up beside me and put his arm around my shoulders. In all our years we never so much as held
hands. Even at our father’s funeral we kept our distance, just as we had our whole lives.