The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (23 page)

“I’m sure you know why you’re here,” he said to my father.

“It’s about Jerry Vincent.”

“Yes, it is. And I see here that you’ve been questioned about this before.”

“Annually,” my father said.

“Do you have anything new to add?”

“I’ve told you guys everything I know about what happened.”

“And nothing has changed? You haven’t remembered something different, some detail you may have forgotten?”

“Nothing.”

The detective wrote for a while, his tongue poking out of his mouth a little. Like a little kid. Like I did when I was six, seven, and eight years old. I laughed.

“What’s so funny?” the detective and my father asked me. They were both smiling.

I shook my head and laughed harder. Soon all three of us were laughing, at mostly nothing. Maybe we were all nervous or bored. Or both. The detective opened his desk drawer, pulled out a piece of hard candy, and handed it to me.

“There you go,” he said.

I looked at the candy for a while and gave it to my father. He looked at it for a while, too, and handed it back to the detective.

“I’m sorry, Detective Clayton,” my father said. “But my son and I are diabetics.”

“Oh, sorry,” the detective said and looked at us with sad eyes. Especially at me. Juvenile diabetes. A tough life. I learned how to use a hypodermic needle before I could ride a bike. I lost more of my own blood to glucose tests than I ever did to childhood accidents.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” my father said. “It’s under control.”

The detective looked at us both like he didn’t believe it. All he knew was criminals and how they worked. He must have figured diabetes worked like a criminal, breaking and entering. But he had it wrong. Diabetes is just like a lover, hurting you from the inside. I was closer to my diabetes than to any of my family or friends. Even when I was all alone, quiet, thinking, wanting no company at all, my diabetes was there. That’s the truth.

“Well,” the detective said. “I don’t think I have anything else to ask you. But if you remember anything else, make sure you contact me.”

“Okay,” my father said and we stood up. The detective and my father shook hands again.

“Was Jerry Vincent your friend?” the detective asked.

“He still is,” my father said.

My father and I walked out of the police station, feeling guilty. I kept wondering if they knew I shoplifted a deck of cards from Sears when I was ten years old. Or if they knew that I once beat up a little kid for the fun of it. Or if they knew I stole my cousin’s bike and wrecked it on purpose. Kept wrecking it until it was useless.

Anyway, my father and I walked to the car, climbed in, and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Ready to head home?” he asked.

“Been ready.”

There wasn’t much to say during the drive back to the reservation. I mean, Jerry Vincent was gone. What more could I ask my father about him? At what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives? Jerry Vincent might have been a mean drunk. He might have had stinky feet and a bad haircut. Nobody talks about that kind of stuff. He was almost a hero now, Jerry Vincent, who probably got shot in the head and might be buried somewhere in Manito Park. Sometimes it seems like all Indians can do is talk about the disappeared.

My father got completely out of control once because he lost the car keys. Explain that to a sociologist.

It was dark by the time we got home. Mom had fry bread and chili waiting for us. My sisters and brothers were all home, watching television, playing cards. Believe me. When we got home everybody was there, everybody. My father sat at the table and nearly cried into his food. Then, of course, he did cry into his food and we all watched him. All of us.

J
OHN-JOHN HAD BEEN SAVING
dollar bills toward a dream and when he had a shoebox full of bills he sat down to count out his future. “One, two, three,” he counted, all the way up to ten to make a neat stack on the floor, and soon he had two hundred neat stacks in exact rows and columns.

How much is enough?

John-John packed a suitcase with his dollar bills, a change of underwear, a toothbrush, and a photograph of his older brother, Joseph. The photograph was folded, spindled, mutilated. Joseph, the jet pilot, sat in full military dress in front of an American flag.

Dear Mr. and Mrs._______, we regret to inform you that your son,________, was shot down and taken prisoner by the enemy during a routine military operation. At this time, we are doing everything within our power to assure the immediate and safe release of your son.

Sincerely, they said.

John-John remembered the world before, remembered the four walls and one window of the HUD house on the reservation. So most Indians had no job and they counted change to buy the next bottle of wine. Maybe the wells went dry every summer and maybe any water still left was too radioactive to drink.

“Uranium has a half-life of one hundred thirty-five million years,” somebody told Joseph, and he said, “Shit, I can tell you stories that will last longer than that.”

Then there was music.

Joseph sang in a voice so pure even the drunkest Indians threw their bottles down. He sang in a voice so sharp even the oldest Indians could hear him clearly. He sang in a voice so deep even the whitest Indians remembered the words.

Sometimes, he danced.

Joseph had big feet and he stumbled, often lost the rhythm of drums. But he smiled and picked himself up from the ground after he fell. He whistled. He slapped his thighs. He crow-hopped and sprained his ankle. He danced.

Joseph paid the rent.

After Joseph was taken as a prisoner of war, John-John waited at the window for years. He ate and drank at that window; he slept with his eyes open. John-John’s friends grew up, graduated or dropped out of school, married, had children, got drunk too much, but he stood there at the window and waited.

John-John remembered: the sky and ground disappeared into the horizon, that imaginary line forever rolling away. Snow. Ice. Cold wind. Joseph in blue parka and military-surplus boots. After Christmas but before New Year’s Eve. Everyone was sober. Standing in some anonymous field while his Chevy sat a few feet away on the other side of a fence, Joseph raised his arms and said,
Someday, the world will be mine
. Maybe he just said,
Goddamn, I need a drink
. Joseph had already dug through the ashtray, in the glove compartment, under seats. There was no money left in the world. Not even loose coins.
We ain’t got gas and I’m out of miracles
, Joseph said and walked fifteen miles for help.

Now John-John stood on the front porch with his suitcase, a key hanging on a string around his neck. No lock, no door. The key was just a small mystery. It didn’t fit any lock on the reservation. Maybe it opened a garage door in Seattle; maybe it started a car in Spokane.

John-John watched the sky for signs, read the sun for the correct time, and checked his watch to be sure.
It’s time to go
, he thought just as the jet ripped through the sound barrier and shook the air. John-John tumbled down the stairs, landed on his tailbone. He stood up, rubbed his ass, and searched the sky for evidence. He could see vapor trails stretched across the sky.

John-John ran for the football field, down the reservation highway, three miles of smooth, smooth pavement It happens that way: the tribe had a government grant to fix the roads, but half the Indians on the reservation still lived on commodities. John-John ran until his chest hurt and legs trembled. He ran to the end of the highway and stared back toward his house, at the jet approaching, then landing with a concussion of noise.

The jet taxied down the highway, turbines slowing, and came to a stop a few feet from John-John. Power. Heat. Noise. It all felt and sounded like possibilities; it was the machinery of dreams. John-John stared at the jet until it grew beyond his vision. His eyes watered, ached. He rubbed at them with fists until they grew out of proportion. Minutes went by until the jet was silent in the silence its arrival created.

Has Christopher Columbus come back?

John-John walked toward the jet, slowly, carefully. His steps were measured and precise. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. A balance beam is only four inches wide; the reservation is only half that width. John-John reached out and touched the jet with a fingertip. Hot and cold. He jumped back as the cockpit opened and a voice called out.

“Sir, ace jet pilot Joseph Victor, code name Geronimo, reporting for duty, sir!”

A tall man climbed down from the cockpit and stood at attention. His unbraided hair fell out from under his flight helmet, reached down to the small of his back. The tall man saluted John-John, then wheeled and saluted the crowd of Indians quickly gathering. He turned back to John-John.

“Sir, may I have permission to remove my helmet, sir?”

John-John was stunned. He raised his arm in a half-salute, the heels of his tennis shoes clicked together.

“Joseph, is that you?”

“Sir, yes, sir. May I please remove my helmet, sir?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

Joseph removed his helmet, leaned it against a hip, still at attention. His face was scarred, battered. The purple scar between his eyes was shaped like a cigar butt; the symmetrical scars up and down his cheeks looked like gills.

“Joseph, your face. What happened?”

John-John moved closer to his brother, reached out and touched the scars, the skin. Hot and cold. Both close to tears.

“Sir, it’s been a long and glorious war but I am happy to be home, sir.”

“But your face. What did they do to you?”

“Sir, I am proud to say I withstood their tortures with courage and strength. I only gave them my name, rank, and serial number, sir.”

John-John cried then, took his brother’s hand. Swollen and scratched, Joseph’s hand felt like fear and failure. He had lost his left ring finger, his nails were torn, some missing altogether. Crude initials were carved into his palms.

“Joseph, don’t you recognize me? It’s your brother John-John.”

Joseph stared at his brother intently, searched his memory. He saw those eyes curved like a bow, colored like the center of the earth; that hair short and still untamed, black; that mouth, too small for the face; those teeth yellowed and healthy; those hands, that hand now holding his, so long and forgiving, skin like a woman’s.

Who are you? Who are you?

“Sir, I don’t remember. I’m sorry. I just don’t remember, sir.”

Memory, like a coin trick, like the French drop with one hand passing over the other, quarter dropping out of sight, then out of existence.
It was there! It was there!
The little Indian boys screaming at the sudden recognition of their first metaphor. Memory like an abandoned car, rusting and forgotten though it sits in plain view for decades. Dogs have litters there; generations of spiders live a terrible history. All of it goes unnoticed and no one bothers to tell the story.

This is not the story John-John tells himself just before he falls asleep. In his story, Joseph comes back on a bus, on a train, hitchhiking. In his story, Joseph’s feet never leave the ground again. But that kind of vision is costly; it rips sweat from John-John’s sleep and skin. He wakes up with a thirst that is so large that nothing can be forgiven. He wakes up with the sound of Joseph’s voice in his nose. Reverberation.

“Hey, John-John, why do you got two first names?”

“’Cuz you have to say anything twice to make it true?”

“No, that ain’t it.”

“’Cuz our parents really meant it when they named me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe it’s just a memory device?”

“Who knows?”

Joseph sitting at the kitchen table as they replay this conversation, this way of greeting, each day. Ever since John-John could form a sentence, Joseph began the morning with the same question.

“Hey, John-John, why do you got two first names?”

“’Cuz I’m supposed to be twins?”

“No, man, that’s too easy.”

“’Cuz Mother always had a stutter?”

Laugher. Then more laughter. Then coffee and buttered toast. Sometimes, a day-old doughnut. The sun came in through the windows. It was there, just as much as the tablecloth or the salt and pepper shakers.

Hey, John-John, why do you got two first names?

Now John-John waiting at the window. Watching. Telling the glass his stories, whispering to the pane, his breath fogging the world. His house, his family’s house, closed in all around him. Too many photographs. Too many stray papers and tattered magazines. The carpet has fleas.

There have been smaller disasters
.

Mother and father, sister and sister, rush, rush. Fumigate, bleach and vinegar in the laundry, old blankets driven to the dump. The dog, lonely and confused, chained to a spare tire in the yard.

“John-John,” his mother says. “You have to leave. I mean, we all have to leave the house for a few hours. It’ll be toxic for a while, you know?”

He is dragged from the window, sat down beside the dog on the lawn. They both howl.

Once, John-John dreamed of flight. He imagined a crazed run into the forest, into the pine. Maybe then they would search for him, search for Joseph out there in the dark. John-John wanted to build fires with no flame or smoke. He wanted to hide in the brush while searchers walked by, inches away, calling out his name. He wanted helicopters with spotlights, all-terrain vehicles, the local news. Together, they would lift stones and find Joseph; they would shake trees and Joseph would fall to the ground; they would drink Joseph from their canteens; they would take photographs of Joseph crawling like a bear across snow, stunned by winter. The rescue team would find John-John and Joseph huddled together like old men, like children, like small birds tensing their bodies for flight.

John-John sits at his window. Waits. Watches. His face touches the glass. Hot and cold. His eyes follow the vapor trails that appear in the reservation sky. They are ordinary and magical.