Stallion Gate (19 page)

“Like you.” Sophie tapped Anna’s stick with her own. “His other women were all sluts.”

“Thanks,” Joe said.

“That came from leaving here and going to New York and the Army,” Sophie told Anna. She looked up at him and demanded, “Why did you go into the Army?”

“Yes, Joe,” Anna asked. “Why did you?”

This night-blooming conversation was unreal, he thought. “It’s complicated.”

“You were in the Army at the beginning of the war,” Anna said. “You must have enlisted.”

“See how smart she is,” Sophie said.

“Not exactly enlisted.”

“Then you must have been in trouble,” Anna said.

“See?” Sophie said.

“Okay. I was with some friends in New York. We decided to give a free concert to soldiers in New Jersey—at Fort Dix—which was for Negro soldiers. We thought we’d give them some jazz, maybe a parade.”

“This was arranged with the officers, Joe?”

“No. Our arrival was not expected.”

“What time of day was this, Joe?”

“About three in the morning. About this time. A lot of dumb things are done at this hour.”

“You mean you were drunk, Joe.”

“See?” Sophie said.

“There was some damage, Joe?”

“Some of the musical instruments got pretty banged up when we hit the main gate. I vaguely remember a scuffle on the way to the parade ground, and a holding action around the bandstand. Then I mostly recall seventy or eighty MPs sitting on me. Anyway, the Army was after men. They offered us a choice: jail or enlistment. We all chose enlistment. I was the only one who passed the physical.”

“That is a crazy way to enlist in the Army.”

“Enlisting sober in broad daylight is crazier.”

“Men are so dumb,” Sophie told Anna. “My husband should be here where there are things for him to do, but he wants to go hide in the canyons, he wants to be a hero. Men don’t talk to women, you know. They have too much dignity for us. Sometimes I think they go through life just working on a good death. One way or another, they kill themselves. Ben’s old, this could be his last chance. And I’m the one who has to walk all day and take him food and cigarettes.”

“He’s with Roberto?” Joe asked.

“Where else would he be?”

So that was why Sophie was firing pots at night. Things finally made sense if you just waited long enough.

“The Indian Service has riders from here to Utah looking for Roberto, and you toddle by with his bacon and eggs?”

“You walk by them?” Anna asked.

“Yes. They don’t pay attention to an old woman getting clay. They’re looking for Joe.”

“I’m not involved with Roberto.”

“That’s not what Roberto says,” Sophie told Anna. “He talks about Joe all the time.”

“You miss your husband,” Anna said.

“Yes. Tonight the devil went by my window. He had yellow skin, silver horns and a rifle.”

Joe said, “Sophie, do me a favor. Next time you see Roberto, tell him I’m not involved. He wants to play cowboys and Indians. I don’t. It has nothing to do with me.”

In his house, Joe lit a kerosene lamp and poured two glasses of scotch while she looked at the photographs on the wall.

“No pictures of you.”

“They’re of my brother, Rudy. I don’t think he made it off Bataan. Funny, I can picture him better at night than during the day because we used to keep animals out back. I took care of the horses. Rudy had a rabbit hutch. We used to go back and feed them in the evening, and I can still see Rudy and those white does in the hutch, their fuzzy whiteness in the dark.”

“But no pictures of you?”

“I left home. When I was fifteen I went to El Paso.
A circus had its winter quarters down there, and I caught on hauling water and hay.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“Hauling hay for elephants? Mainly I remember sneezing,” he said, and gave her a glass. “Well, that was more words from Sophie than I can remember. You like being Thinking Woman?”

“I like the idea that I thought you up, that you’re my idea.”

“Your idea?”

“My biggest. What else did you do at the circus? I feel responsible.”

“There was an old sideshow fighter. Local boys paid five dollars against fifty dollars if they could knock him down. No one ever knocked him down. He showed me the first things about boxing—that’s probably why I’m basically a counterpuncher. But the best was the circus bandleader. I played a pedal organ a little bit here at the church, but he taught me the piano. He used to describe himself as ‘a gentleman of the Negro persuasion,’ and he drove the Texans crazy because he dressed better and acted finer than any of them. He was a ragtime player. And stride. Name it. He hated me fighting, but that’s where the money was; that was the ticket North.”

“You must have been a good fighter. I’ve asked you about the pictures twice and you’ve ducked the question each time. You must never have been hit.”

Joe studied a photo of Rudy on a horse. “You know, Sophie’s right. Indian men do work on their dignity.
They don’t talk a lot. As Oppy would say, they’re nonverbal. They keep things inside, and to outsiders, which may include women, they may not say a word. They’ll drink themselves to death or drive off a cliff, but they’ll do it with a sense of quiet dignity. I’m not that Indian. I’ve spent half my life away from here. I’ve got a half-breed brain now. Lost the old natural dignity.”

“You have better than that; you have invulnerability.”

He was astonished. “Me?”

“You seem to be the giant who has attracted all the men from here up to the Hill.”

“Look, Santiago is a poor place. This is still the Depression here—it’s always the Depression here. For the last twenty years the most dependable income here has been pottery, and that’s made by women. One reason the men work so hard on their dignity is that’s all they’ve got. Then the Army took over the Hill, and the men are happy to work up there; they don’t need me as an attraction. There’s a price, of course; if the lowest caste on the Hill is the soldiers, lower than them are the Indians.”

“Have you ever been hit, or hurt, or touched?”

“Lower than the Indians is me, because I’m not really from either place; I just serve as a go-between. At least the men from Santiago know who they are and have someplace to go home to. Who am I? I’m a driver, a joker, a mascot. I’m the most insignificant person on the Hill. I’m a has-been fighter, a so-so musician who’s
going to be scrambling for jobs in nightclubs for the rest of my life. A giant? That’s a joke. I feel like I’m committing a perpetual fraud, a hoax, because inside is a coward. Men are fooled, Oppy and Roberto are fooled, but I don’t want you to be. I didn’t mean to enlist in the Army, I wasn’t a hero on Bataan, I made a deal to get out of the stockade. I’m like the Gestapo—Fuchs was right about that. This is not self-contempt; it’s simple honesty. Rudy was fooled. Rudy joined the National Guard because he wanted to be like his big brother. Dolores wasn’t fooled. She said Rudy would be safe at home if it wasn’t for me. When I ran away, I took one son from her. When Rudy left, I took the other. She wrote me in the hospital in Australia and said as far as she was concerned, I was as dead as Rudy. Not to write and not to come home. That seemed unfair to me, but after a while I saw there was a grain of truth in what she said. I’d tried to cut everything Indian away from me, and maybe Rudy got caught and killed in the process. See, Dolores cut right through me. So that’s why there are no snapshots here of me. When Rudy comes home, that’s when my picture goes up.”

“Your mother’s dead. You said your brother’s dead. How can it go up?”

“You’re Thinking Woman? Think of something. Anyway, to answer your question, I have been hit and I have been hurt. And you, you could completely destroy me.”

* * *

She sat across the table from him. The moon in its downward transit no longer entered the house; the lamp flame was the only light.

“I didn’t run away from home. My childhood was very quiet and bourgeois compared with yours. I fantasized. I thought I would be an actress like Marlene Dietrich and have wealthy lovers. Then I thought I might be a female aviator who crash-landed and had to live with someone like Tarzan while the rest of the world searched for me. When I was rescued, they would understand that I had been forced to submit. There may have been wild Indians involved.”

“In any respectable fantasy.”

She took a deep breath. “But from the age of fourteen on, the central fantasy I had was of fear. Not anxiety: fear. That everyone wanted to hurt me, kill me. Not my mother or father, of course, or my family, but everyone else—the gardener, the streetcar conductor, the postman. Street cleaners, ladies in the candy store and police, naturally. I stopped going to school for weeks at a time. Our doctor said I was suffering from unspecified hysteria. An alienist came from Berlin and said I was suffering from a female castration complex. Perhaps so, but I thought he wanted to torture me. A crazy child! They took away my pencils, scissors, even my stockings.

“My father knew Freud. He wrote to him in Vienna. Freud wrote back to say I was suffering from a ‘flight motif.’ More and more German Jews, he said, were suffering from ‘flight motif,’ but it was his opinion that
Nazi brutalities were diminishing and that a young girl should ignore the threats in the newspapers and consider how extremely unpleasant it was to be a refugee. I remember he added in a postscript that all he ever wanted to see in America was Niagara Falls. There is some charm in Freud contemplating the great running bath of Niagara Falls. My mother and father were reassured because they were Germans first and Jews second. So I was sent to the sanatorium, where sometimes we were given water cures and sometimes sleep cures, and where I hid in my bower full of numbers and bees. At lunch we listened to Goebbels on the radio loudspeaker. Everyone had to.

“Actually, the doctors were kind. One who was a Communist suggested the trip to Sweden. He falsified the documents without telling my parents, but I think they knew he put me down as Aryan. How else would I be allowed to leave? It took a Communist to know how to do such things. He was going to escape too, so it was not all out of goodwill. It was an odd thing. We docked in Stockholm, and suddenly I was not crazy. I do wonder, Joe, why me? Why—out of all my family, good, rational people, uncles, aunts, rabbis, professors, babies—was I the only one to escape? The question is, Did God save me or did He just forget me? So I am ready for a new God. Thinking Woman sounds to me like a great improvement.”

“Did you see any more of the doctor who got you out?”

“He seduced me. A lot of men seduced me in the beginning.”

“Communists?”

“Who knows? The world is full of Communists. In Germany the only ones who stood up to the Nazis were Communists.”

“And Oppy?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did you run into Oppy again?”

“He needed a mathematician. He was rounding up refugees like stray cats. Do you know what my work is? I turn my equations into programs for an electronic computer. I turn each millionth of a second of an imaginary Trinity into a deck of punch cards so that we can estimate what will happen at the real Trinity. You see, everyone else is working toward Trinity. Oppy inspires everyone to work so hard.”

“Oppy feels personally about the bomb. There wouldn’t be a bomb without him.”

Anna refilled his glass and her own. “There wouldn’t be an Oppy without the bomb. There are other physicists here more brilliant by far.”

“Come on. If Harvey starts a sentence, Oppy finishes it for him.”

“He’s quick to finish other people’s thoughts. But they’re still other people’s thoughts. What I meant to say, though, is that no one looks ahead to after the bomb is used. Or asks whether the bomb
should
be used, or, at least, demonstrated to the Japanese first. Because they haven’t reached the event of Trinity itself,
they don’t think of the consequences. I have. On the punch cards are not only the fireball, the shock wave, the radiation, but also an imaginary city—so many structures of steel, of wood, of concrete. Houses shatter under shocks of one-tenth to one-fifth of an atmosphere. For steel buildings the duration of the shock is important. If the pulse lasts several vibration seconds, peak pressure is the important quantity. I can stop the blast at any point. I can go backwards or forwards. Nobody else sees it, as if they can’t imagine a shadow until the sun is up. I see it every day. Every day, I kill these thousands and thousands of imaginary people. The only way to do it is to be positive that they are purely imaginary, simply numbers. Unfortunately, this reinforces a new fantasy of mine. There are times when I feel as if I am one of those numbers in one of the columns on one of the punch cards flying through the machine. I feel myself fading away.”

“To where?”

“To Germany. Freud was right, after all. It is difficult to be a refugee once you think you are dead.”

Joe pulled a crate from under the bed and out of the crate took a wadded ball of newspaper. He unwrapped it at the table and set down by the lamp a small, gleaming black pot with a tiny top hole. “It’s a seed pot. It’s the last pot I have of my mother’s.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I was supposed to sell it with the rest, but I couldn’t. I wanted to have something of hers.”

“It’s a work of art.”

“Like a little, smooth earth. Nice, huh?” He let her admire the pot for a second more, then blew out the lamp flame and stepped back across the room.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to throw you a pot.”

“I can’t see.”

“I can’t see you, either. This could be interesting.”

“I can’t—”

“Catch!”

Joe tossed the pot lightly, underhand. It rolled from his fingertips into the dark. A last, faint nimbus of moonlight clung to the open window. He watched the pot tumble past the dim glow and disappear into the darkness on the other side. He waited for an explosion of clay. There was a sharp intake of breath from the other side, no other sound.

He stepped gently across the floor, reached into the dark and found her hands. She had caught the pot by her ear and still held it there tightly, off-balance. When he had first gone to the crate, he hadn’t known what he was going to do. An impulse was there, the start of an arc, the opportunity to risk all.