Given World (27 page)

The last time I looked, his eyes were blue, but they told me all babies’ eyes are blue at first, and that if they are going to change color, they do it over time. Aside from his eyes, whatever color they turned or stayed, he did not really resemble a white person—certainly not me—very much at all. He was a burnt-umber baby, with a little
Where the Wild Things Are
nose, and his hair was amazing: thick and black when he came to us, six weeks early and small enough to hold, like a drink of cold creek water, in two cupped hands. Darrell was gone by then, of course, so I couldn’t introduce them.

There are no farm animals anymore, save a whole new generation of frenetic and mangy barn cats. I want to remember to ask if they still call the cats Slick and Slim, interchangeably, just for the hell of it. I have to believe that calling the baby Slim started with me, although it could very well have been my dad, clumsily and chivalrously trying to take some of the pressure off. Even for the few weeks I tried to convince myself I could keep and raise him, I was afraid to give him a real name, afraid of what that would mean. Or afraid I would give him the wrong one. I knew that Darrell should be the one to do it, but I couldn’t even tell him. I probably wrote the letter six or seven times, but it didn’t seem right. It seemed cruel, where he was going, and it also seemed like he might ask me to at least try. I couldn’t chance it. I think I must have known all along.

I find my old helmet, and it still fits; the bike, after a bit of tinkering, runs fine, smooth, strong. I don’t usually stay gone more than an hour or two, and Dad mostly sleeps now anyway. For a while, he tried to do things the living do, like go out to the mailbox for the paper, rehang a picture that has fallen off the wall, cook eggs, play a whole Scrabble game. But it is all too much, too hard, and only deepens the lines in his face, exaggerates the curve in his back.

His frustration—with himself, with his lungs—shows in every movement, but he never says a word about it. He gets up in the morning for coffee and cornflakes and then goes back to bed. We, or I, if Mom is off wandering, generally see him again for supper, but except for rare occasions, that’s the extent of it. Unless I go and watch him sleep, which sometimes I do just to make sure he’s still breathing. It’s not always easy to tell. I catch myself trying to do it for him.

Mom has carved out a trail of sorts: a circuit that sometimes does lead to her lying on the railroad tracks, but the train stopped running on our spur before I was even born, and I hardly think that’s the point anyway.

There is an almost infinite number of back roads I can travel around here, to places where humans almost never go. The land is much flatter than it is west of here, but not as flat as people imagine when they think of the plains, and the roads do turn, and they do rise, and they do fall. There are mountains, even, scattered ranges disconnected from each other, and massive buttes like altars.

Sometimes I drive through the towns—deliberately, slowly, to see the people, maybe to feel some connection to them. It is summer, so there is no school, and small cadres of young men, both Indian and white, roam the streets, maybe in search of—like I once was—something to keep them here. I tell myself I am not looking for a certain face, for the father or the son, but of course I am, and sometimes I will circle a block two or three times to make sure. The white boys eye me suspiciously, but the other ones don’t give anything away. Nothing at all. In the towns, I do not find what I am not looking for.

I haven’t yet had the nerve to go onto the rez, so I get as close as I can, circling it on the boundary roads, seeing ghosts and real evidence of all the too-slow or terminally indecisive animals flattened on this stretch of highway. Fence posts that once cast a fairly regular pattern of shadow across the road are mostly down now, or lean into each other at crazy angles. I hear there has been some kind of economic upswing in this country over the past few years. The news does not seem to have reached this place yet.

One night, while I am outside lying in the grass, Mom comes with her own beer to join me. She sits cross-legged, making moustaches with her hair as her head bobbles like one of those baseball dolls, like it’s on a spring. She’s humming something that sounds like “I’m an Old Cowhand,” the shaking of her head adding a just-perceptible vibrato.

After a while she says, “Your brother—” and then she stops. But she has said it in such a way—or I have heard it in such a way—that for a second I think the rest of the sentence is going to create an entirely new reality; that she is going to tell me he really has been holed up in a cave in the mountains all this time—emulating Ho Chi Minh, writing his memoirs, collecting fossils and painting hieroglyphs—and that now he is ready to come home.

What she says, though, is, “When he was a baby, I could make him stop crying by singing that song. Just that one. He’d watch my mouth like it was some magical animal, making a sound only he could decipher. It worked every time.”

“What about me?” I say. “Did it make me stop crying too?”

“You never cried,” she says. “Never.”

I don’t believe it. No one doesn’t cry.

Then she tells me it worked on Slim too.

“Slim,” I say, as if I am trying to place the name. I say, “I did this all wrong, didn’t I? I fucked everything up.”

She goes back inside. She doesn’t have time for this.

•  •  •

I start a new letter to Darrell, even though I haven’t a clue where to send it.

They say tourists are flocking to Vietnam now. It is the new Thailand, or Bali; take your pick. Cheap hotel rooms and beer, the utter cachet of it all. Củ Chi has gotten so busy they have had to expand. They’ve opened up and widened tunnels the B-52s caved in. They find bones, dog tags, rotted scraps of green fatigues. DNA. They send letters that read something along the lines of: “We think we may have found someone you knew a long time ago. In another lifetime.” (That part, truthfully, they do not come right out and say.) Our letter is in the kitchen. It moves from table to counter to windowsill, apparently of its own accord. The dog tags will come soon. The bones after. Where are you?

Both our rooms are pretty much the way we left them. The dust is thick, but not twenty-five years’ thick. My mother has written her name in it, on the bookshelf in Mick’s room. “Rose,” it plainly says, with an arrow through it, but no heart. I pick up an old notebook, from a geology class Mick took in college. In his angled and rambling script, I read, “One section = one square mile = 640 acres. Sections are not always nice and square. Due to the geology and uneven surface of the earth, its curvature and the failure of neighboring sections to ‘butt up’ perfectly, there may be variations.” At the bottom of the page he has written, “Failure to butt up = Withholding of affections. Refusal to spoon. Spooning leads to forking, etc., etc., etc.”

No wonder he left. He must have been bored out of his skull. He probably knew more about rocks, and what’s under them, than the teacher did. All those books. All that digging.

•  •  •

It is late afternoon. I have circled the reservation twice. I am blindingly sad but afraid to explore, to even locate, all the precise causes. That is so me. I have always been so good at this.

A rise comes; I clear it, it flattens out, and there is a boy—no, a young man—standing in the dust and rocks beside the road. He is tall, lanky, and he has a bird. He is not actively hitchhiking but looks instead like he is waiting for a prearranged pickup.
I’ll meet you at four, at the corner of nowhere and nowhere else.
I slow the bike down, ease her onto the dirt. Take off my helmet. I see that the bird is a falcon, hooded, talons clamped to a piece of leather around the young man’s forearm, which he holds at an angle slightly away from his body, as if it is set in an invisible cast, held by an invisible sling.

I am afraid to look at his face, but I don’t have to. Something about the way he stands, slouchy but graceful, entirely comfortable in his skin. And his hands are identical to Darrell’s. Once I know, I can look up to see he looks like both our fathers, his and mine. That I did not expect. His eyes did not stay blue, but they are not completely green, either. They are nearly the color of the Flathead River in spring, when the glaciers begin to melt and turn the water turquoise. I wait to see how this is going to feel, and think it will be bad, but it is more a sense of déjà vu, a sense that I am dreaming, or that I am watching myself dream. Here he is. He was born. He survived. He grew up.

My voice, incredibly, works. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?”

He nods once, so slowly it is almost a bow, and mumbles something about “grateful,” something about “ma’am.”

Even though on the outside I am perfectly calm, on the inside I feel that bird’s wings flapping frantically in my chest. I imagine my heart could stop any second now. There is, you know, always the possibility.

So much this time of year is the color of mountain lions. Everything is dry, dry, dry, and grasshoppers appear in great hordes out of nowhere, smacking me in the face and arms and knees. I can sort of feel Slim (which is how he introduced himself, and to which I said, stupidly, “It certainly suits you”) trying to duck behind me, but since he is probably four or five inches taller than I am, I bet it’s difficult, especially since he also has to keep track of a bird. He directs me onto the rez, up a draw, toward the mountains, but not quite into them. The bottomland unrolls to either side of us, tall lion-colored grasses bending almost parallel to the ground in the constant wind.

The house is small and looks as if it has been painted not so long ago. It is a kind of orangey yellow and reminds me of the walls in Mexican restaurants in San Francisco, and the kitchen in Primo’s apartment in the Mission, where I lived only for a short time—nine months or so—but it seemed like so much longer.

I think about Primo adopting me when I was down to close to nothing, and who tried cold turkey first, and then treatment, and then God, and finally drove his newspaper truck into the ocean at Baker Beach. He was the second one to go, if my brother was the first. Lu kind of surprised me, tenacious as she was about living, but still the while trying to kill herself as indirectly as possible. I heard somewhere that Max had spent some time on the AIDS ward at General—Christopher at his side daily—and then made it back into the world. Cole got a new heart and Eddie finally got infected, needing to prove he was not immune, but the drugs have taken, and San Francisco takes care of her own. So some do make it out alive. Yay for people who can fix other people. Yay for the retrovirals. Yay for hanging in there.

After about fifteen lost years ending in exactly six excruciating church-basement meetings, I did finally realize I could save only myself. And as much as it goes against every reality I have ever created or lived through, those meetings—that passively but persistently annoying prodding—ultimately did make things about half as hard, more or less. I took Levon Helm’s word for it and took what I needed. The rest, I left. He also said (in a song about war) it was wrong to take the best ones. But aren’t they the easiest picking somehow? Standing there all bright and shiny and good, waving their stupid hands and calling attention to themselves, like they do. Did.
Pick me. Pick me.
How thoughtless. How fucking ill-advised.

Slim backs off the bike, arm still held aloft, talking softly now to the restless falcon. He doesn’t move away right away, and I can tell he is waiting for me to give some indication of what I am going to do. Maybe he thinks my instinct—paleface on the rez—is to say good-bye and go, but for right now, I am pretty much rooted to this spot.

The door opens, and an old man is standing there, too old to mistake for even one fleeting second for someone who would still be decades younger. He has a walking stick in one hand and shades his eyes with the other, even though the sun is behind the house—high still but heading for the horizon.

“Where’d you find this one?” he asks, but it is impossible to tell which one of us he is talking to. Slim tilts his head forward and raises his eyebrows at me. When I don’t say anything, he shrugs.

“She was out on the highway, Uncle. West side.”

“Does she want to come in? For coffee?”

Slim starts to open his mouth, probably to say, “Hard telling what she wants,” but I say, “No, I have to get back home. But thank you for asking.”

“Well, then,” the old man says, “if you’re sure. Thanks for bringing the kid back.” He salutes and disappears into the house. I turn the key in the ignition, put my foot on the kick-starter. The kid nods, as if this makes sense, and I stomp down once, but it is not hard enough, and the motor doesn’t catch.

“Crap,” I say. Then, “I’m sorry.”

He cocks his head, just like that bird, narrows his eyes, and pulls his eyebrows together. “Do I know you?”

I say, “I don’t think so. Why?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Just—I don’t know.”

“I only got back to town a few months ago,” I say.

“From where?”

“California.”

“Why’d you come back here?”

“Family stuff.”

“Yeah,” he says, “I get that.” He offers the hand that doesn’t have a bird attached, and I reach for it, squeeze, and let go. “Anyway,” he says, “thanks for the ride.”

I say, “No problem,” and give the bike another stomp. This time it starts. Slim backs away, waves, and turns to head for the house. I look past him at the still-open door, but since the sun is directly in my eyes now, I can’t see anything behind it—can’t see if anyone else is in there, watching me watch my son walk, for the first time.

M
y father dies. Peacefully, as they say, in his sleep. They also say dying like he did feels like drowning. Right now I wonder if there is anything that doesn’t.

We were never, that I can recall, very close to many of the neighbors or the folks in town, though we did know some well enough to call them friends. My mom and dad went to PTA meetings, gatherings at the grange hall, to dances sometimes. But we lived a long way out, and it never seemed to matter that we just had each other to hang around with. When it comes time to plan a memorial, or a wake, or whatever, then we are sort of at a loss. And by “we,” I guess I mean “I,” since my mother wants no part of it.