| Part I continued |
OF HIS CHILDHOOD, Large At Night remembers that the sun was a continuous
pale-white burst in the cold blue sky and the wind howled through him like he
was an abandoned house. The wind embraced him with its current. It streamed
between his fingers, crystalline, like a substance nearly water. It flowed through
the long black hair of his friends, blowing the black manes of girls and boys into
the sky. They were crows soaring together over the knee-banging dirt clods and
ankle-twisting gofer holes. That was his childhood. There were a few hours of
laughing and pushing each other in school halls and between the seats in class.
The old people came and told them they were beautiful and special, the saviors of
the Human Being. But the rest of every day, they ran across and tried to hide in
the open ground and the busted-up and burned-out trailers and government
houses. The wind blew through his head, around his legs, flapping his jeans
around his calves. Then came the drinking and the cars and the dead. That’s
what made Large want to know about his father. His girlfriends chose trouble
and self-destruction to get away from the crushing boredom and the howling,
pressing wind. It always pressed. It never let up. When his friends started dying
in cars, falling off cliffs, bleeding from the edge of a knife, dying at the bonfire,
hot on one side and cold on the other, he looked for another world in his white
blood. When his friends started dying and the mothers started crying and the
fathers, when they were around, wished out loud that the reservation would save
their children instead of filling its belly with their blood, when he moved back
with his mother and she wouldn’t let him come in the house if he was drunk so
he slept on the lawn, that’s when he asked about his father and that other life out
there somewhere.
That’s what had led him to this late-night ride in a van with his father. They were
driving east across Washington, back to Montana. One of his half-brothers was
tied up in the back and the other had been stabbed in hotel in Seattle.
“I have to admit,” Wayne said, looking into the cave of the van through the
rearview mirror, the sky black in his windows, the road crawling into the
headlights, “I am at a loss as to what to do with him.” He shifted his eyes back to
the road, shifted the toothpick across his lips.
Large looked back at his half-brother, Joey. He was curled into a fetal position in
the far back of the van, stuffed behind Wayne’s amplifiers and speakers. They
had tied Joey to the side panels of the van with yellow nylon ropes. The bony
points of his spine rippled down his stained t-shirt. His hands and feet were tied
together with a softer white rope. He was hogtied.
For the first time in Large’s life, he had understood, while helping Wayne tie up
his half-brother, what that word meant. Hogtied. Hands and feet lashed together
so tight that the person or the hog can’t move. He had known what the words
meant, but until he saw it, he didn’t really know what it meant. Large liked
mulling over phrases like that on long car trips. He and his mother used to talk
about them on their long drives to cousins and grandparents. They words or
phrases couldn’t really be understood without seeing what they referred to, like
“roadside tables.” You think of tables along the roadside, but what the sign means
is a picnic area off the road, sometimes almost a mile off the road. Some states
called those areas “rest areas,” and in time that phrase took over. That phrase
doesn’t draw an image in your mind that you have to overcome in order to
understand its meaning. So, it was a better phrase for a place off the road to stop
your car and rest, which really meant piss. “A roadside hole to piss in” would be
more accurate, maybe, Large thought. He also considered that he never really
understood the phrase “at a loss” until hearing Wayne say it to Joey. Large’s
mother would say it to him, “I try to get through to you, but I’m at a loss.” It
was a wash of words that meant she was disappointed in him. He knew that was
the way to understand it. But it meant more. It meant the person who said it didn’
t know how to act in a situation or toward another person, not because there was
not enough information or things they could do or say, but because there were
too many options, too much conflicting information or things one could do. Such
that, if Wayne took Joey to the police he would lose the chance to punish him for
what he did to Kian, but if he punishes Joey and revenges Kian’s death, then he’s
cut another piece of flesh from his own hide. For that matter, Large thought, he
also never really understood the phrase “panel van” until Wayne told him to
hogtie Joey to the ribs in the side panels. Thus, they were driving in a panel van.
He was tired, Large acknowledged and laid his head back against the seat. He
thought he should have called his mother sometime in the past couple of weeks,
but whenever he thought about calling her, he heard her say, “No news is good
news.” She said that a lot because people frequently disappeared off the
reservation and she’d had to get used to it. But Large didn’t know exactly what
that saying meant. Either it meant the negative, pessimistic outlook on what that
person was capable of achieving in his or her absence such as, “There is no
news you can hear about that missing person that will be good news.” Or if she
meant the more practical and light-hearted view of life, “Not hearing any news is
by itself good news.” Either way, of course, she was telling him he need not
break the bank trying to get a hold of her in his absence. She would assume the
best or the worst and the only true measure of his absence will be taken when or
if he walks back in the door.
The countryside out his window was a black cloth sprinkled with tiny lights.
He remembered an older girl at a dance at the reservation community center
giggling when he told her his name. He didn’t think about why she had giggled at
the time, because he wanted to hold her and dance with her. So he didn’t say
anything. He stood there mute – “dumb struck” – after she giggled, and it
worked. She stepped close and he smelled her hair. He held her and they danced
slow and close. He remembered the smell of her and the long, slow song “Love
Hurts.” Even now he feels a little ache inside, a little lovesickness just hearing the
tune in his mind. But at home, later that night in his bed, he opened his name. His
mother said she named him that because he was a big person, bigger than he
seemed in the daylight. When one didn’t look at him, but just listened to him or
read one of his long letters describing what he did at camp or the sweat lodge, he
was large, a big and full person. He had accepted that explanation of his name
and relished it, but the girl’s giggle told him there was another meaning there
under that one, one he should know. He searched all the meanings of the words
but stumbled on that other meaning when he thought again about the girl and the
way she smelled. He laughed out loud and loved his name even more. He
searched out the images of his mother’s face when she told people his name, and
there was the smile. He loved his mother’s sense of humor and that she had
given him a name with a joke in it.
“I ought to kill you,” Wayne said.
Large, startled, turned his head. Wayne was looking in the mirror again. Large
turned in the seat more and looked at Joey. He might have been unconscious or
just asleep. They had worked him over pretty hard in the alley. The woman they
discovered him on top of had kicked him square on the chin once he and Wayne
had Joey down. He probably had a broken jaw and for sure a concussion.
“I wonder if he was trying to rape that woman,” he said.
“I don’t know. Looked like it,” Wayne said.
“Joey!” Wayne barked.
Large jumped, late, and looked back again. Joey turned his head to them, leaning
over his shoulder. His eyes were swollen shut. Thin cuts etched his face, bruises
clouded his puffy complexion.
“Why’d you do it?”
Joey shook his head slightly and started to turn away from them.
“You better answer me,” Wayne said, his voice cold and just strong enough to be
heard over the grind of the road.
Joey opened his mouth but only a gurgle came out. His voice clotted with blood
and phlegm. He coughed hard, worked his mouth and pushed out a glob. He
gargled again, but a word was there.
“Love,” he said and rolled back to facing the rear doors.
Wayne looked over at Large, who shrugged and turned back to the road.
“Of all the reasons, I suspect that will make as much sense as any other,” Wayne
said.
“No one needs Kian,” Joey said.
“And how the hell did that become your decision to make? You suppose his kids
didn’t need him? Boy, your brain has always been a mess. You are as good as
dead.”
“Jesus won’t let you kill me.”
“We’ll see about that,” Wayne said.
Large wondered then if he wasn’t in the right place at the right time to get twenty
years in prison. His quest to find his white family had become a disaster and he
wondered what role he might have played in it and what role the blood of his
family was playing in him. They were four completely different kinds of people –
Kian, Joey, Wayne and Large – with nothing else in common, just that little
blood. Seeing what it had made of them, he wondered what it would make of
him – a half-white Crow with some Mexican tossed in. He had barely enough of
Indian in him to be on the rolls. Before graduating high school, he never wanted
his white father. He had been ashamed. White blood pumped through his veins. It
built his muscles, skin and bones in ways different from all of his friends and his
mother. A white man had had sex with her. She had been fifteen and in Billings
for the first time with friends. She never meant to fuck a white man, but she
never blamed him that Large ever heard, or tried to cover her pregnancy with an
Indian boyfriend either. Large was her son, and she gave him a good name and
his own life.
Whatever was growing in him can’t ever be rooted out, but he hoped he could
have power over it. He hopes he can have power over the disaster coursing
through his veins, killing his friends too. It’s got something to do with white
people, but it also can’t be that simple. There is just too much trouble around.
Kian Waters was an oddity in this regard. Large had never been around a living
dead man before Kian. He was like a walking memory. Something had gone
wrong inside Kian even before Large found him on the reservation when he came
there to writing a story for the Billings newspaper. Maybe it was the death of his
daughter. Maybe it was just alcoholism.
“I don’t know,” Large said to his faint reflection in the side glass, “but I hope I
find out before it kills all of us.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
KATE WATERS ducked her head as she stepped into the small cabin of the
plane. It was parked on a remote section of tarmac at the Denver International
Airport, headed for Billings. Two days earlier, when her mother told her that
Wayne was coming home after nearly ten years to try to help Kian get back on
his feet, Kate withdrew from her final semester at Columbia, emptied her bank
account and started getting on airplanes. She had let Kian down once already
when his baby died and she was having a hard time living that down in herself.
So she reversed her life direction and went home. If anyone in her family could
save Kian, it was her, or at least she hoped so because it sure wasn’t going to be
Wayne. She waited as the people sitting in the front of the plane stuck bags in the
overheads and one by one sat down. She found her row, just ahead of the wing.
No one was in it yet, so both seats on her side were open. She thought for a
moment. She liked sitting next to the window so she could look out. She hadn’t
flown very much and the view of the country sliding by below still awed her,
though she was slightly conflicted over her lack of cosmopolitan ennui. The
problem was that as a young woman, sitting by the window put her on the inside
where she’d have less control over the situation when some big, fat business
man and his eyes sat next to her. It’s such a short flight, she thought. People
behind her were getting impatient, so she took a chance and sat against the
window. The people gushed forward. The seats behind her filled up. For a
second, she had the unrealistic optimism she would be left alone. Then an a
attractive young man came down the aisle and she retooled her optimism. He
could be a little something to play with on the way to Billings. He sat next to her
and she smiled at him.
After the plane got airborne with the usual delays and safety demonstrations, the
young man unclasped his seatbelt and dug a pamphlet out of his black carryon.
He looked at her face and then put the pamphlet in front of her eyes. Kate looked
around it at him. He smiled and nodded his head at the pamphlet. So, she took it.
She looked it over to use it as a prop for starting a conversation. Heaven in blue
and white and Hell in black and red made up the top and bottom halves of the
cover. She skipped to the center pages. One big panel depicted a giant Jesus
wielding a scythe through a herd of people, cutting them in half, beheading some.
Kate pretended to read the pamphlet while she examined the young man. He was
dressed in a very sharp black suit jacket and white shirt, his tan neck striated and
strong, blond curls in his short hair. He looked at her face, but slid down her
legs. He closed his eyes, turned away. He looked back at her legs. This all fit
with her experience. Montana was full of these beautiful young preacher boys
with wondering eyes.
In the pamphlet, Jenny, a cartoon notion of a 1960’s girl with black bobbed hair,
had always felt for the poor people of the streets. In the first inside panel, they
looked up to her from their tattered lives on the sidewalk, staring at her with eyes
that had in them the vision of an ascending Jesus. She gave the poor money in
the half-frame cut into the first page, but by the next full frame Jenny had
stopped noticing them as she walked next to a boy wearing a tight white T-shirt
and leather jacket. By the very next frame, the bad boy had talked Jenny into
ingesting drugs and in a cut-in half-frame she was surrounded by the boy’s
leering friends. Then one day (the next to last page), Jenny had a high fever. In
her hospital bed (the last, big panel), demons were coming out of the corners of
the square blank walls of the hospital room. Her parents were huddled together at
the bedside, holding each other, crying big black tears. The demons were smiling
and twisting their hands, waiting for her last breath. In the last black and white
cut-in frame, Jenny’s face was contorted. She screamed as the demons closed in
on her.
“This is just a silly sexual fantasy.” Kate tossed the pamphlet into the preacher
boy’s lap. She wagged her lean leg, tightly wrapped in blue jeans. “I think you
should just embrace your sexual repressions so you can see God plainly without
all this pent up sexual paranoia. Women are not evil.”
The boy preacher sat back in his seat, his eyes conflicted, half looking at her legs
and half trying to obey the Jesus in his head.
“That’s just a load of modern clap trap,” he finally said.
“Load? Clap trap? Boy you got it bad,” Kate said. Her low but ringing laugh made
him chuckle too.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s just be people without any of that over-holy non-
sense.”
“With God, all things are possible,” he said, a friendly lilt in his voice. “We
cannot be simple and direct with others because we are not first simple and
direct with God.” He toyed with the ever-sharp pencil in his hand. He looked in
her eyes, down at the pamphlet in her hands and up at the consol above them.
“We can’t get there on our own.” He reached up and twisted the plastic air-vent
knob.
Kate looked out her window at the landscape of clouds.
“We must open our minds to God,” his voice in her ear like he was still looking
up at the ceiling, “and be prepared for His call. You don’t have to be perfect, just
ready.” He dug through his backpack. She looking back at him and watched him
take out a black, leather-bound Bible. He started reading where his eyes fell.
Kate turned back to the window and scanned the horizon of the cloud continent.
It’s always something with these Montana boys. The white clouds were rolling
like sand dunes, and in the distance the top of a tall thunder head stood out above
the horizon looking like an airship. Religion, intellectual simplicity, drinking, fast
driving, stultified emotions. She had hoped her brothers would escape that scrub
oak existence, but most never escape who they were brought up to be. In that
way, she considered, her half-brother Joey, who suffered from the same disease
as this kid next to her, was right about the sins of the father passing down
through the generations – violence, intolerance, bigotry and chauvinism. Her
brothers had had a chance just like she did when Wayne left. The boys swam up
stream, but they didn’t get far enough and they got sucked back into the rapids.
They could have joined her in New York, especially since she was already
enrolled at the private college and attended for practically nothing. But the boys
just didn’t get around to it. Part of that was Wendy’s fault. She was older than
Kian, and could have made her little country life with just about anyone. It’s hard
to blame her though because she almost made a great life for them and helped
Kian get his job as a newspaper reporter. Maybe one last try will work with him.
He had verbal talent like Wayne. They all did. He could write an essay as good as
a college paper, just like Wayne knew hundreds of songs by heart and wrote
many of his own. She noticed the boy preacher’s gaze had slid over to her
breasts. She didn’t want to play anymore. She felt exasperation at this kid and
her brothers and all those boys. She stood, said excuse me and stepped over him.
She looked up and down the plane. There was one row of seats open near the
back.
“Excuse me,” she tapped the older woman in a blue uniform. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure thing. We couldn’t let those two on because they were too drunk, poor
boys!” The stewardess laughed.
Kate went to the bathroom. She reclined in the other window seat. She thought
about having a drink herself. She thought about Kian drinking. She thought about
Kian after the baby’s death. His problem intellectually and emotionally was that
nothing matter more or less than anything else and everything that mattered,
mattered a lot. Kian had no sense of Truth. The plane banked and the sun shot
through her window. She pulled the shade down. Stealing candy, shooting deer,
petting a cat – it all revolved around how much emotional pain or pleasure the
things out in the world caused him. He had empathy. He just didn’t seem to have
a solid internal place where he could go to be himself. As the little plane slid over
and the sun left her window, it struck Kate that it was no wonder Kian had
slowly come apart after his daughter’s long and painful death. When something
came along that he could give himself to, he poured himself into the relationship.
After she died, Kian kept fighting for her. And what do these Montana boys do
when they are damaged by life, injured and hurt? They turn to self-destruction.
They are like Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, killing their way through the
wilderness, soothing their pain one murder at a time. So Kian fought back against
himself, his failure and his emotions, because the baby had died of cancer and
there was no bad guy, no marauding band of Indians to kill. He had been taught
no other way. Wayne relied on his strength and meanness and Kian was a
cowboy like Wayne. He had trained Kian to fight to the death. She thought about
the cold morning he firmly established in Kian the will to dominate or die trying.
Kian never spoke of it, but Kate had written about it as one of those events that
forged a young man into an unrelenting, hell-bent adult.
The morning had started with chores. Wayne got up early with her and Kian and
told them he was going to load San Juan, their stud horse, into the trailer. Kian
got the horse. Wayne backed the pickup to the trailer with Kate guiding. They got
the ball on the bumper under the tongue of the trailer on the first try, to their
mutual relief. Wayne let the trailer’s loading ramp down. Kian came around the
corral with San Juan and Wayne took the halter rope from him. He led the horse
to the ramp. San Juan’s front hooves clopped on the wood. He stopped and
pulled his head up.
“Kian, hit this sonofabitch on the rear-end, would ya?”
Kate had stepped back. San Juan was a difficult, mean-spirited horse that kicked.
Kian picked up a stick and touched San Juan’s rear with it. The horse startled
and stepped forward as he flung a hind leg out in a broad swipe at Kian. Wayne
pulled while going to the end of the long halter rope. He emerged out of the
escape door at the front, pulling the rope tight. The stud horse was half inside the
two-horse trailer, he began pulling back against the rope. Wayne dug in his heals.
He pulled and the veins and tendons in his neck flared out. He groaned as he
pulled with all he would ever have in himself to give. No matter what happened,
no matter who or what got hurt, Wayne would pull the horse into the trailer. At
first, Kate felt anger at the horse. Her mother came out of the house then. “That
damn horse,” Kate heard her say. Catlynn stopped by the front door and folded
her arms, a white dish towel thrown over her shoulder. “Get back, Kian,” she
yelled. Kian looked at her and took a small step back. Catlynn knew there would
be a battle because it happened every time. Kate stepped forward. She was
angry, too, but now more at Wayne for picking this fight. He was making
excuses to be away from them and this was probably just another one. Why he
didn’t just go back to the road, Kate didn’t know. He had been home too long
and had started beating them and the animals more and more for less and less.
Kate could fight back, but she was too small to win. Catlynn yelled at Wayne to
stop. “You’re going to get somebody killed!” But Wayne couldn’t or wouldn’t
hear her. After the first few minutes of the tug of war, the stud horse suddenly
reared up, scrambled backward and skidded off the side of the ramp onto the
grass. The weight pulled the rope through Wayne’s hands. He squalled and put
his hands together, tucking them between his legs.
Kate had thought through this story once before for a class on men, sexuality and
their relationships to animals. In her view, the horse and Wayne were the same.
The horse wasn’t a victim. A point of view that was eagerly and haughtily
dismissed by the class and the professor. She argued that Wayne and the horse
had both decided to fight. But no one wanted to agree that the horse bore some
responsibility for the fight. Kate said that was because none of them knew horses
that hadn’t had their personalities trained out of them. She didn’t get a good
grade on the paper and she was proud of that.
The plane turned again as if it was on a slalom course. The pilot coughed over
the intercom and said he was taking them around a big thunderstorm
That morning in the pasture, the sun in the light blue sky stung her face even
though the air was cold. The grass was dead under her knees. The cottonwood
tree limbs wove a net in the air. Puffs of dirt bloomed from under the horse as it
scrambled to its hooves. “Get the rope! Get the rope goddamn it!” Wayne yelled.
Kian ran up to the horse, stopped and started making kissing sounds with the side
of his mouth. The horse settled and he grabbed the lariat. He braced himself for
the horse to pull, but San Juan perked his ears and stood still. The horse shook
himself and let his penis slide out of its covering. He pissed a steaming torrent.
Kate sat back on her ankles, praying to something, anything that would help
them. But there is nothing out there to answer the call to aid even though people
need it more than anything, she criticized her airborne self.
As Wayne gathered himself, Kian held onto the rope up high, close to the horse’s
throat. He patted the flat cheek and looked over his shoulder at Wayne. His azure
eyes cut down to slits. Kian loved a good fight, like his dad. Wayne smiled at
Kian, winked and walked away toward the barn. She knew better than to think
the fight was over. Kian pulled the rope to coax the horse into the trailer, to save
them all, but the horse too wanted to fight. A stud horse, like her father and
brother, loved to fight. Lived to fight and breed. The horse took one step with a
front hoof and jerked his head up, pulling Kian off his feet. It stepped back and
bobbed its head higher to get the rope out of Kian’s hand, pulling him back and
back, but Kian held on. Then stud settled down again several feet from the trailer.
Wayne came back with another rope. He took the lead rope from Kian and pulled
the horse’s head inside the trailer. He waved Kian inside too and handed the lead
rope back to him. He got out with the lariat and tied one end of it to the back of
the trailer and walked it wide around the horse’s flanks. He pulled the rope up
against horse’s rump slowly, the horse’s flesh rippled with anticipation, but
Wayne didn’t lash the horse’s rump. He left the rope loose and strung his end
through a round steel eye on the side of the trailer. He rolled his shoulders and
settled the heals of his boots into the frozen dirt. “Pull hard, goddamn it!” Kian
lunged backward and Wayne snapped his rope up hard against the stud’s ass and
it cut into his muscles. San Juan blew snot and steam. His eyes went wide again.
Kate saw Kian through the little door. He was pulling hard, teeth clenched and
face red like his father’s. The stud’s nostrils flared with each blast from his lungs
and his front hooves danced and chipped against the wood, spattering Kian with
bits of frozen manure.
“Get in there!” Wayne yelled. “Get in there you son of a bitch. Pull on that
goddamn rope Kian!”
The stud’s vast neck and shoulders bulged as it strained against the ropes.
“Pull on that goddamn rope Kian or I’m going to bust your ass!”
The horse lurched back and got his head clear of the trailer’s roof. He shot
straight into the air. The lead rope spun through Kian’s hands. He fell back
against the metal side as Wayne grunted and strained, holding the weight of the
horse. San Juan was up on his hind legs, nearly sitting on the rope. Then Wayne’
s heal slipped and the whole scene fell apart. The stud plunged down and hit the
ground hard on his side. Wayne fell onto his chest, knocking his head against the
trailer’s wheel well. His cowboy hat rolled away. The stud scrambled to his feet
and trotted a few yards and stopped. San Juan looked back, ears up. Wayne got
to his knees and then his feet, silent as death. He walked by Kate without looking
at her.
Kian walked San Juan down at the back of the pasture and led him back to the
trailer. They waited there, the rope hanging loose in his hand. San Juan looked
slightly stunned, his head down and his penis fully sheathed. A car started and
for a moment Kate thought a miracle was about to happen, but then Wayne’s
Riviera appeared from around the house coming toward them. The big brown car
rolled slowly to the front of the trailer like it was picking its way between rocks.
Wayne reclined inside like he was on a long trip across the country. The horse
stood at ease. Its muscles loose, one hoof resting on its tip. Wayne took the rope
from Kian. He let slack out as he walked into the trailer and tossed the remaining
length through the window. He tightened the horse’s halter one notch and came
out through the little door. Kian held onto the lead rope with both hands, tight.
Kate put her face in her hands. She didn’t know what was happening, but it
couldn’t be good. Wayne tied the rope to the front bumper of the car. He looked
over his shoulder, “Better let that rope go, Kian.” He slid into the car, propped the
door open with his foot and started on the gas. The horse dug its hind hooves
into the dirt and it’s front hooves scrambled on the ramp. Kian, half way between
Kate and the trailer, clenched his fists and crouched to go on attack. The horse
blew air and then made a sound like a woman screaming. As the car dragged the
stud up the ramp, its hooves splintered the frozen and dried shit into a shower.
San Juan skidded and stumbled and pounded the wood. Then his hooves all
skipped at once and he fell onto his chest, head and neck angled up. The car
pulled him the rest of the way into the trailer and stopped. Wayne set the parking
break and got out. He walked to the back of the trailer and lifted the gate behind
the horse. He leaned in the side door, untied the rope and walked to the car
tossing the ropes inside. The car lurched and he drove away, passed the house
and up the lane. Kate and Kian ran to the trailer’s side door, expecting the horse
to be crippled or dead. But he wasn’t. He was already back on his hooves. San
Juan shook his head vigorously and snorted at the grain piled up on the shelf in
front of him. He nibbled at it and then took a mouthful.
Kate had hoped the horse would be dead, guts falling out, just to punish Wayne
for what he had done. But the horse was fine. Later, when he came home,
Wayne too had calmed. He left the horse in the trailer all afternoon. That night, he
backed the stud out, easily, and told Kian and Kate to feed him and brush him
down good.
The professor said she had missed the opportunity in her paper to explore how
Wayne was a slave owner driven to cruel acts because of the inhuman nature of
his relationship to his animals. She told him he didn’t understand and found
herself in the crazy position of actually defending Wayne, a position she didn’t
really believe either. She was her father’s daughter after all. As the plane banked
over Billings, its low buildings stark in the sunlight, Kate believed the real lesson
of that story was that these boys could never come away from their lives in the
West with anything less than a fundamental drive for self-destruction. In every
struggle, these boys that smelled like prairie grass and sagebrush would win or
cripple themselves trying. Because of that, Kian really was in danger. The plane’s
tires squelched under her, and she thought how Wayne was something else all
together. She thought of Wayne as one of those wild men running mean and hard
in Western movies. Indefensible and yet without fault. His sons were wild too,
but in an unformed way. They were shapeless, more or less harmless to others,
but their sense of self easily dispersed, like smoke in a strong wind. She saw
Kian – a broad-shouldered, 9-year-old boy running down the gravel lane to their
red and white house. When she saw him as a boy, she always imagined him
running. She hoped she could save him.
The plane stopped moving and the engines whined down. The boy preacher
entered the aisle, bent over and tucked several of the soul-saving pamphlets into
the pouch on the seat back. He stood with his bag and squeezed into the aisle just
a head of an old woman, crowding her enough that she looked up at the back of
his head. Kate could tell he was trying to get off the plane before her to get away
from her. Watching the strong, intelligent-looking boy preacher run away from
her like she was a tidal wave or a hurricane made her angry and depressed her at
the same time. How could she ever get through all of that failure with Kian? She
felt desperate to leave, to go back to New York. All she had to do was buy a
ticket and hop another plane and disappear. But she couldn’t turn way, even from
a battle already lost.
JOEY WATERS leaned against the yellow plastic sink in the camper and thought
again about the night Wayne came home and tried to kill his mother. He looked
absently into the dark through the rectangle of a window. Across the gravel
parking lot, the two concrete pads for parking cattle trailers and spraying the
cow manure out of them glowed lightly in the moonlight. Wayne was coming
home again. He’d pull in to wash the trailer he had picked up for Bill, Joey’s
boss, or go straight to the Sundown bar to play music sometime the next day.
Apparently, Wayne had been talked into coming home to help Kian. Joey held his
breath. He listened to the rattle of a cow trailer banging down the road. The
trucks come anytime. Some drivers, like Mike, called ahead. Joey looked out the
window behind him. The truck was still a long way down the road, traveling
slow over the gravel road.
“No one can fix Kian,” Joey said. “Especially not Wayne.”
He poured himself more coffee out of the glass decanter. The last time Wayne
came back, it had been early morning, like now, back from a long, unsuccessful
stretch on the road. Joey was eight. Wayne was drunk. He stumbled into the
house and slammed the door hard behind him. The dog sleeping next to Joey
jumped and Joey grabbed him. The dachshund’s smooth coat and rolls of fat
made him easy to hold. Joey’s mother squawked out of bed and said loudly,
“Damn it Wayne I said no!”
“Just Goddamn it listen!”
“Don’t you cuss in my house! Let me go!”
As the fight got underway in the front room, the dog fought to get free. Joey’s
mother spoke softly, changing into a weak and plaintive tone. He couldn’t
understand what she was saying. He struggled against the dog in the sagging
twin-size bed. A light poured yellow through the door into his mother’s bedroom
from the kitchen. His room was linked to his mother’s as if through a kink in a
daisy chain, the light didn’t reach him. He wrapped his legs around the dog,
holding its jaws closed. The dog grew frantic as the first of two rapid smacks
sounded. She started crying. Joey put all his strength against the dog’s every spin
and turn. He squeezed the dog’s throat to stifle even the animal’s cries. The
covers trapped their heat and breath, smothering them, but he held on. He had to
save the dog’s life. Wayne would kill it, if it ran into the living room. At the top
of the daisy chain, things started breaking. His mother gurgled and squawked.
Joey held onto the dog. Higher in the house, there were a few more minutes of
choking and things breaking, choking and the sound of legs thrashing. His
mother got free or Wayne let her go and she began breaking stuff. She grunted
and cussed with each throw. Glass and wood, shatters and thuds. It had to be
her. Wayne only threw punches. She was screaming. Joey felt a rush of pride.
Then the front door banged, rattling the walls all through the daisy chain and he
let the dog go. It spun and bit his hand. He ran straight to the front, barking hard
and fast. “Thanks, you little bastard,” Joey’s mom said. “A lot of help you
were.” Her voice raspy. Joey relaxed in his bed as she began to cry. She was up
there somewhere, out of sight, near the top of the daisy chain. He turned his hips
and pissed.
What would my life be like if I didn’t have memories like that? He set the coffee
cup into the plastic dish tub. The truck banged and rattle across the lot. Joey
went outside. He worked straight through to dinner. During the long day, he had
also worked through a host of religious ideas and plans for when he met Wayne.
After fried chicken and gravy at the restaurant by the interstate, he climbed back
in his pickup and went to the church where he and his mother went for many
years. The pastor had given him a key. Joey hoped the pastor would still be
there. He needed to have his confidence bolstered and he wanted to pray for
strength and the wisdom to say the right words.
Cleaned up and prayed over, Joey blazed a trail down Interstate 90 to join his
liquor-breathed brethren once again. Not for his own hidden sin this time, but
because he wanted to formally end his emotional dependence on the hate of his
father. The pastor had told him there would be no easy way out for Joey, the
bastard son of a profligate country music singer. He was going to have to
struggle spiritually his whole life against that sin in his veins. His mother had
given him Wayne’s last name, but Wayne never married her. Religion and the
Foursquare Church had saved him and her from a lonely life. It had given her
peace. But his emotions were too complicated, church leaders said. Often, he felt
more anger, more despair, when he spoke with them or sat through a sermon.
The pastor said that the Truth, the purity of the church, was agitating Joey’s
soul, burning it to cleanse it, but Joey was resisting, holding onto the hate,
holding on to the desire for power over his father and therefore clinging to sin.
Joey needed to forgive his father the way Jesus forgave all those who had sinned
against him. Joey needed to forgive God for making Wayne his father. He also
needed to tell Wayne how he felt about Jesus. Joey was full of doubt, especially
when the Sundown, hunkered in the center of a wide gravel parking lot, came
into view.
Inside the wide entry to the Sundown’s parking lot, its corner wooden posts
knocked outward by drunken drivers, Joey swerved right to park on the rough
edge where the weeds started. The cars deeper in on the hardened dirt parking lot
wouldn’t get out until the numerous fights and fender benders and last minute
hookups had been resolved. He slammed the door to his old pickup. A boundless
whoop, a howl of abandonment, blew through the sides of the building and
gathered in the sky over Joey like a plague. Wayne’s songs rarely changed and
this one he knew well. A fake Indian song with yelling and whoops. He stood still
with his hand on the chrome door handle. Feeling out of his depth, what sounded
possible in the light and freedom of the Church Sanctuary was an empty fiction
here in the face of what his father was. Joey felt God abandoning him. “Father,
why hast thou forsaken me,” he said, the meaning of that phrase nearer to him
now. Through the thin metal sheeting that was the wall, he heard Wayne saying,
“We’re Wayne Staggers and we’ll be right back.”
“Shit,” Joey said.
He straightened his belt and pushed open the heavy black portal. The air vibrated
with the energy of the crowd. Laughter and hoots jumped out of background
chatter. The wrought-iron handle, twisted and welded to the door felt hot in his
hand and he pushed the door shut. The flood of voices pooled around his legs.
The room was thick with cowboys and women dressed in button up pearl-snap
shirts, pointy boots and new, stiff blue Levis. Joey got up on his toes, but didn’t
see Wayne. He moved deeper. He recognized the bar tender and hoped he’d
know where his father was so he could say what he’d come to say and get out.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes, but he finally made the bar. He leaned over the
steel top and waved at that tall man with gray hair.
“What’ll you have?”
“A Coke.”
“That it?”
“Just a Coke. Where’s the band?”
“How the hell should I know?” The old man pushed a short glass of pop at him.
He hadn’t bothered putting in ice. He stepped away to another man who began
ordering shots and cans of beer.
Joey walked through the crowd, dodging hat brims and eye contact, heading for
the bathrooms and back offices. He noticed the song playing through the ceiling
speaker system, barely audible. Johnny Cash said he shot a man in Texas just to
watch him die. Cash was a man of faith and clarity and steadfast morals. Joey
thought for a moment that he could be like the Man in Black. But there will only
ever be one Johnny Cash. His shoulders fell. As he neared the end of the open
space at the back of the bar, he saw Kate and her mother, Catlynn. The two
women sat at a small round table at the edge of the crowd. Catlynn held the stem
of a glass of red wine. Her eyes quiet and vacant. Her head moved slightly with
the beat of her heart, hair rolled up into a bun. The tension of the bun had sprung
loose around the edges in many spots and rivulets of hair poured out. Catlynn
was petite and young looking. A surprisingly full figure and thin neck. The bones
of her collar pronounced, as if she were barely holding up under a great strain.
Long silver curls of earrings and her jaw line illuminated, like the light was a dust
gathering. Catlynn seemed like a small creature when he looked at individual
pieces of her. Tiny wrists and long thin fingers, nearly flat at the tips under short,
plain nails. But all together, she was unapproachable, intimidating, on the edge of
hysteria.
Kate’s open hand rested around a glass of water. The opposite of Catlynn
without being masculine. Strong, narrow, but soft. Maybe just different because
of youth. She had her mother’s full breasts and pronounced collar bones. He
loved Kate and had since they were kids. Kate stared blankly at the empty
bandstand. He didn’t know why she had come home. When she left the farm at
eighteen to go to college in New York, he had cried himself to sleep every night
for a month. When he looked back at the stage, Wayne was there, joining the
drummer in a toast. The water glasses half full of whiskey and raised into the
lights. Wayne brought his to his mouth and drained it. He rocked back from the
power of the drink and then set the glass on the top of a black speaker. He
removed his black cowboy hat and wiped his brow and pushed his brown hair
back over his head.
“Satan,” Joey said, “the Lord rebuke you.”
“Joey!” Kate yelled. He looked down and she was staring at him.
“What are you doing here? Grab a seat. It’s been forever!”
He shrank and stepped back, then recovered and slid a chair toward the table
between Kate and Catlynn. He avoided Kate’s eyes. Luckily, Wayne Staggers
jumped directly into a song. Thank you God, Joey thought. The two women
would have eaten him alive if he had had to talk with them, especially if he got
around to explaining what he was doing there. Catlynn hated his religious talk and
told him that she’s heard all she was ever going to hear about religion from her
Catholic mother. Kate loved to twist his religion into mish mash of weakness and
fear and laugh at him.
“When did you start drinking?” Kate yelled. Her scent washed over him.
“Pop!” he yelled back and tried to smile.
Without warning, Wayne and his band collapsed into a discord of broken voices
just when a guitar string snapped. A wire of piercing feedback shot through the
crowd. The sound, a demon, made the boys in the crowd want to drink and
throw chairs. They screamed their approval of the new twist in genres. Wayne,
holding the feedback like a snake in his hands, reached down into the front of the
crowd and pulled two women on stage, as if out of thin air.
Catlynn smiled, drunk and fierce.
“Any and all female singers welcome,” Wayne shouted. “Come on up.”
Somehow a song and beat fought to the surface of the feedback. Joey
remembered that his father was not only a profligate and a drunk and a bastard,
but he was also one hell of a country music singer.
Bill Stockton, owner of the Sundown and Joey’s boss, leaped up on stage with
the vigor of whiskey. He clumsily waved his arms around at the band. He
stepped through a mass of black electric cords. He turned to the crowd. Waving
his arms, he lunged at the microphone to get in a word or two. The women were
strumming Wayne’s squealing guitar and howling into space. Chairs clattered to
the floor and a wave of dancers crashed backward into several tables. Cowboy
hats came dislodged and a small fist swung into the face of a big man in a leather
jacket. He swung back at a man, whose head snapped. A woman screamed and
climbed straight into the air over the punched man and grabbed the big man’s
hair. Her mouth was wide and filled with blood. Joey smiled. Wayne pushed Bill.
Bill smiled and shrugged then yelled through the screeching, “Please everyone
finish your drinks and go on home.” Wayne’s hair was still slicked back and his
cheeks were red from heat and booze and he stepped back from the two women,
who were clinging to each other in laughter. He hit the remaining five strings
even harder just as one leg, angled at the knee, buckled and his stagger knocked
the mike stand out of Bill’s hands. He caught his balance on the sharp dogging
heals of his cowboy boots and hit the four remaining strings. Bill whipped the
straw hat off his head and pointed the brim at Wayne’s chest. Wayne laughed in
his face and cued the drummer to kick it up a notch by twirling his arm in a full
arching circle, striking the four, then three strings each time around. He leaned
into the base player and “ye-hawed” through the bass player’s mike. Bill caught
his balance and high-stepped through the wires up to Wayne. He grabbed the
guitar’s neck, killing a full 60 percent of the sound, and turned to the crowd. The
bass player thundered to pickup the loss of the guitar. Wayne shoved Bill, whose
flat heals caught in the cords. He stumbled to the edge of the stage and
disappeared into the crowd. The two women unfurled their arms and jumped on
Wayne, initiating a shoving and groping free-for-all at the front of the stage.
Joey’s grandmother, Wayne’s mother, who must have been in the bathroom,
appeared down the hall coming toward them. Joey realized why Catlynn had
stuck around. His grandmother was a big woman, round everywhere. She held a
small, shining white purse tight against her giant breasts, bumping into chairs and
tables as she wended her way through the outer edge of the seating area. Joey
looked again over at Catlynn. She was shaking her head, looking at her husband.
He felt remorse for her. When he glanced back at his grandmother, she was still
making her way toward the table, but her top half was leaning too far out over
her legs. She started to speed up to catch her balance, but became more parallel
to the floor, holding her purse tighter against her chest, her teeth bared in
grimace, and just as Joey lunged over the table to catcher her dive, his
grandmother disappeared under the table top, knocking it over into Kate. Catlynn’
s wine fell over and she moved her thin legs out of the way, letting it spill
between them onto the floor. His grandmother re-emerged into view on the other
side of the table, on her knees. Her gray hair had exploded and her eyes were like
balls of white glass. Joey reached her and helped her stand and guided her ass
onto the tiny chair, where she perched like a bird, purse still in both hands against
her chest.
“My god,” Joey said.
The band and the lights went out all at once. Some of the lights flicked back on
in one side of the building illuminating Bill, who stood against the wall with the
breaker box door in his hand. He squinted at the bandstand, braced for attack.
“Guess that’s it,” Joey yelled. “Shows over! You’re turn to drive, sis!”
Kate smirked at him and looked away. Singeing his heart. He stepped past the
table, moving toward the entrance.
“Good riddance Wayne,” Joey yelled into the din. He waved at the chaos and
walked out.
KIAN WATERS sat in his car on the side of the road in front of the Sundown.
He’d heard his father was in town and he wanted to see him but when he got
there, so did Joey, of all people, and he decided not to go in. When the people
started pouring out, he broke another beer open and drove away down the dark
back roads. The bar was setup out beyond the last cluster of houses, out where
the sky is high and wide and desolate. Those boys and girls have come out into
the hinterland to get wild and roam the gravel roads at three in the morning,
drunk and lost. He’d done it himself plenty of times. They were all living out their
captivity to the prairie, like their fathers and mothers before them. Each
generation came along, hot on the heels of the previous, clinging to the traditions
of early childrearing and raw, untutored fistfights and sex. They flung themselves
at hope in their early twenties, steeped in the belief that they have discovered how
to live life as a party and then, generation after generation, ground to a halt under
the weight of kids, poverty and heartburn. They came out here on Saturday
nights, overweight, prematurely balding, spending all but the twenty dollars they
owe the babysitter. To hell with the taxes they owe, goddamn government
anyway. To hell with the bare cupboards and empty refrigerators, too. The kids
can eat at school and mom’ll kick in on the trailer rent. It’s just too unfair that
their promising lives (Didn’t all the teachers say they were doctors and lawyers
and artists and fashion designers and thespians?) would come to this dull and
dusty grind. Well, not tonight. The world had let them down, had lied to them,
but they would fight back. Tonight we live up to the promises of the Wild West.
Kian raised his beer in toast. One wonders how long a myth of self-destruction
as glory can sustain a culture. The Earth knows. The ground has smiled on the
partiers and several will die tonight when the Earth rolls on its side and the driver
of the rusted Cadillac, whose occupants will dissolve into the screams and yells
of warriors charging the tree line, slides sideways over the gravel and wraps the
car around a telephone pole. Blood will pool in the floorboards, overrun the
gunnels and stream into the dust. Tomorrow the survivors will nurse hangovers
and laugh and laugh and groan, loving their pain. This is war, after all, and war
wounds are honored among the survivors. The dead, taken piecemeal from
crumpled cars at 5 a.m., will be remembered on Thursday with sandwiches,
giant cookies and cans of beer up at the new funeral home in Shepherd.
Kian had hoped to escape that life, but hadn’t. He turned his car toward the Crow
Indian reservation.
pale-white burst in the cold blue sky and the wind howled through him like he
was an abandoned house. The wind embraced him with its current. It streamed
between his fingers, crystalline, like a substance nearly water. It flowed through
the long black hair of his friends, blowing the black manes of girls and boys into
the sky. They were crows soaring together over the knee-banging dirt clods and
ankle-twisting gofer holes. That was his childhood. There were a few hours of
laughing and pushing each other in school halls and between the seats in class.
The old people came and told them they were beautiful and special, the saviors of
the Human Being. But the rest of every day, they ran across and tried to hide in
the open ground and the busted-up and burned-out trailers and government
houses. The wind blew through his head, around his legs, flapping his jeans
around his calves. Then came the drinking and the cars and the dead. That’s
what made Large want to know about his father. His girlfriends chose trouble
and self-destruction to get away from the crushing boredom and the howling,
pressing wind. It always pressed. It never let up. When his friends started dying
in cars, falling off cliffs, bleeding from the edge of a knife, dying at the bonfire,
hot on one side and cold on the other, he looked for another world in his white
blood. When his friends started dying and the mothers started crying and the
fathers, when they were around, wished out loud that the reservation would save
their children instead of filling its belly with their blood, when he moved back
with his mother and she wouldn’t let him come in the house if he was drunk so
he slept on the lawn, that’s when he asked about his father and that other life out
there somewhere.
That’s what had led him to this late-night ride in a van with his father. They were
driving east across Washington, back to Montana. One of his half-brothers was
tied up in the back and the other had been stabbed in hotel in Seattle.
“I have to admit,” Wayne said, looking into the cave of the van through the
rearview mirror, the sky black in his windows, the road crawling into the
headlights, “I am at a loss as to what to do with him.” He shifted his eyes back to
the road, shifted the toothpick across his lips.
Large looked back at his half-brother, Joey. He was curled into a fetal position in
the far back of the van, stuffed behind Wayne’s amplifiers and speakers. They
had tied Joey to the side panels of the van with yellow nylon ropes. The bony
points of his spine rippled down his stained t-shirt. His hands and feet were tied
together with a softer white rope. He was hogtied.
For the first time in Large’s life, he had understood, while helping Wayne tie up
his half-brother, what that word meant. Hogtied. Hands and feet lashed together
so tight that the person or the hog can’t move. He had known what the words
meant, but until he saw it, he didn’t really know what it meant. Large liked
mulling over phrases like that on long car trips. He and his mother used to talk
about them on their long drives to cousins and grandparents. They words or
phrases couldn’t really be understood without seeing what they referred to, like
“roadside tables.” You think of tables along the roadside, but what the sign means
is a picnic area off the road, sometimes almost a mile off the road. Some states
called those areas “rest areas,” and in time that phrase took over. That phrase
doesn’t draw an image in your mind that you have to overcome in order to
understand its meaning. So, it was a better phrase for a place off the road to stop
your car and rest, which really meant piss. “A roadside hole to piss in” would be
more accurate, maybe, Large thought. He also considered that he never really
understood the phrase “at a loss” until hearing Wayne say it to Joey. Large’s
mother would say it to him, “I try to get through to you, but I’m at a loss.” It
was a wash of words that meant she was disappointed in him. He knew that was
the way to understand it. But it meant more. It meant the person who said it didn’
t know how to act in a situation or toward another person, not because there was
not enough information or things they could do or say, but because there were
too many options, too much conflicting information or things one could do. Such
that, if Wayne took Joey to the police he would lose the chance to punish him for
what he did to Kian, but if he punishes Joey and revenges Kian’s death, then he’s
cut another piece of flesh from his own hide. For that matter, Large thought, he
also never really understood the phrase “panel van” until Wayne told him to
hogtie Joey to the ribs in the side panels. Thus, they were driving in a panel van.
He was tired, Large acknowledged and laid his head back against the seat. He
thought he should have called his mother sometime in the past couple of weeks,
but whenever he thought about calling her, he heard her say, “No news is good
news.” She said that a lot because people frequently disappeared off the
reservation and she’d had to get used to it. But Large didn’t know exactly what
that saying meant. Either it meant the negative, pessimistic outlook on what that
person was capable of achieving in his or her absence such as, “There is no
news you can hear about that missing person that will be good news.” Or if she
meant the more practical and light-hearted view of life, “Not hearing any news is
by itself good news.” Either way, of course, she was telling him he need not
break the bank trying to get a hold of her in his absence. She would assume the
best or the worst and the only true measure of his absence will be taken when or
if he walks back in the door.
The countryside out his window was a black cloth sprinkled with tiny lights.
He remembered an older girl at a dance at the reservation community center
giggling when he told her his name. He didn’t think about why she had giggled at
the time, because he wanted to hold her and dance with her. So he didn’t say
anything. He stood there mute – “dumb struck” – after she giggled, and it
worked. She stepped close and he smelled her hair. He held her and they danced
slow and close. He remembered the smell of her and the long, slow song “Love
Hurts.” Even now he feels a little ache inside, a little lovesickness just hearing the
tune in his mind. But at home, later that night in his bed, he opened his name. His
mother said she named him that because he was a big person, bigger than he
seemed in the daylight. When one didn’t look at him, but just listened to him or
read one of his long letters describing what he did at camp or the sweat lodge, he
was large, a big and full person. He had accepted that explanation of his name
and relished it, but the girl’s giggle told him there was another meaning there
under that one, one he should know. He searched all the meanings of the words
but stumbled on that other meaning when he thought again about the girl and the
way she smelled. He laughed out loud and loved his name even more. He
searched out the images of his mother’s face when she told people his name, and
there was the smile. He loved his mother’s sense of humor and that she had
given him a name with a joke in it.
“I ought to kill you,” Wayne said.
Large, startled, turned his head. Wayne was looking in the mirror again. Large
turned in the seat more and looked at Joey. He might have been unconscious or
just asleep. They had worked him over pretty hard in the alley. The woman they
discovered him on top of had kicked him square on the chin once he and Wayne
had Joey down. He probably had a broken jaw and for sure a concussion.
“I wonder if he was trying to rape that woman,” he said.
“I don’t know. Looked like it,” Wayne said.
“Joey!” Wayne barked.
Large jumped, late, and looked back again. Joey turned his head to them, leaning
over his shoulder. His eyes were swollen shut. Thin cuts etched his face, bruises
clouded his puffy complexion.
“Why’d you do it?”
Joey shook his head slightly and started to turn away from them.
“You better answer me,” Wayne said, his voice cold and just strong enough to be
heard over the grind of the road.
Joey opened his mouth but only a gurgle came out. His voice clotted with blood
and phlegm. He coughed hard, worked his mouth and pushed out a glob. He
gargled again, but a word was there.
“Love,” he said and rolled back to facing the rear doors.
Wayne looked over at Large, who shrugged and turned back to the road.
“Of all the reasons, I suspect that will make as much sense as any other,” Wayne
said.
“No one needs Kian,” Joey said.
“And how the hell did that become your decision to make? You suppose his kids
didn’t need him? Boy, your brain has always been a mess. You are as good as
dead.”
“Jesus won’t let you kill me.”
“We’ll see about that,” Wayne said.
Large wondered then if he wasn’t in the right place at the right time to get twenty
years in prison. His quest to find his white family had become a disaster and he
wondered what role he might have played in it and what role the blood of his
family was playing in him. They were four completely different kinds of people –
Kian, Joey, Wayne and Large – with nothing else in common, just that little
blood. Seeing what it had made of them, he wondered what it would make of
him – a half-white Crow with some Mexican tossed in. He had barely enough of
Indian in him to be on the rolls. Before graduating high school, he never wanted
his white father. He had been ashamed. White blood pumped through his veins. It
built his muscles, skin and bones in ways different from all of his friends and his
mother. A white man had had sex with her. She had been fifteen and in Billings
for the first time with friends. She never meant to fuck a white man, but she
never blamed him that Large ever heard, or tried to cover her pregnancy with an
Indian boyfriend either. Large was her son, and she gave him a good name and
his own life.
Whatever was growing in him can’t ever be rooted out, but he hoped he could
have power over it. He hopes he can have power over the disaster coursing
through his veins, killing his friends too. It’s got something to do with white
people, but it also can’t be that simple. There is just too much trouble around.
Kian Waters was an oddity in this regard. Large had never been around a living
dead man before Kian. He was like a walking memory. Something had gone
wrong inside Kian even before Large found him on the reservation when he came
there to writing a story for the Billings newspaper. Maybe it was the death of his
daughter. Maybe it was just alcoholism.
“I don’t know,” Large said to his faint reflection in the side glass, “but I hope I
find out before it kills all of us.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.”
KATE WATERS ducked her head as she stepped into the small cabin of the
plane. It was parked on a remote section of tarmac at the Denver International
Airport, headed for Billings. Two days earlier, when her mother told her that
Wayne was coming home after nearly ten years to try to help Kian get back on
his feet, Kate withdrew from her final semester at Columbia, emptied her bank
account and started getting on airplanes. She had let Kian down once already
when his baby died and she was having a hard time living that down in herself.
So she reversed her life direction and went home. If anyone in her family could
save Kian, it was her, or at least she hoped so because it sure wasn’t going to be
Wayne. She waited as the people sitting in the front of the plane stuck bags in the
overheads and one by one sat down. She found her row, just ahead of the wing.
No one was in it yet, so both seats on her side were open. She thought for a
moment. She liked sitting next to the window so she could look out. She hadn’t
flown very much and the view of the country sliding by below still awed her,
though she was slightly conflicted over her lack of cosmopolitan ennui. The
problem was that as a young woman, sitting by the window put her on the inside
where she’d have less control over the situation when some big, fat business
man and his eyes sat next to her. It’s such a short flight, she thought. People
behind her were getting impatient, so she took a chance and sat against the
window. The people gushed forward. The seats behind her filled up. For a
second, she had the unrealistic optimism she would be left alone. Then an a
attractive young man came down the aisle and she retooled her optimism. He
could be a little something to play with on the way to Billings. He sat next to her
and she smiled at him.
After the plane got airborne with the usual delays and safety demonstrations, the
young man unclasped his seatbelt and dug a pamphlet out of his black carryon.
He looked at her face and then put the pamphlet in front of her eyes. Kate looked
around it at him. He smiled and nodded his head at the pamphlet. So, she took it.
She looked it over to use it as a prop for starting a conversation. Heaven in blue
and white and Hell in black and red made up the top and bottom halves of the
cover. She skipped to the center pages. One big panel depicted a giant Jesus
wielding a scythe through a herd of people, cutting them in half, beheading some.
Kate pretended to read the pamphlet while she examined the young man. He was
dressed in a very sharp black suit jacket and white shirt, his tan neck striated and
strong, blond curls in his short hair. He looked at her face, but slid down her
legs. He closed his eyes, turned away. He looked back at her legs. This all fit
with her experience. Montana was full of these beautiful young preacher boys
with wondering eyes.
In the pamphlet, Jenny, a cartoon notion of a 1960’s girl with black bobbed hair,
had always felt for the poor people of the streets. In the first inside panel, they
looked up to her from their tattered lives on the sidewalk, staring at her with eyes
that had in them the vision of an ascending Jesus. She gave the poor money in
the half-frame cut into the first page, but by the next full frame Jenny had
stopped noticing them as she walked next to a boy wearing a tight white T-shirt
and leather jacket. By the very next frame, the bad boy had talked Jenny into
ingesting drugs and in a cut-in half-frame she was surrounded by the boy’s
leering friends. Then one day (the next to last page), Jenny had a high fever. In
her hospital bed (the last, big panel), demons were coming out of the corners of
the square blank walls of the hospital room. Her parents were huddled together at
the bedside, holding each other, crying big black tears. The demons were smiling
and twisting their hands, waiting for her last breath. In the last black and white
cut-in frame, Jenny’s face was contorted. She screamed as the demons closed in
on her.
“This is just a silly sexual fantasy.” Kate tossed the pamphlet into the preacher
boy’s lap. She wagged her lean leg, tightly wrapped in blue jeans. “I think you
should just embrace your sexual repressions so you can see God plainly without
all this pent up sexual paranoia. Women are not evil.”
The boy preacher sat back in his seat, his eyes conflicted, half looking at her legs
and half trying to obey the Jesus in his head.
“That’s just a load of modern clap trap,” he finally said.
“Load? Clap trap? Boy you got it bad,” Kate said. Her low but ringing laugh made
him chuckle too.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s just be people without any of that over-holy non-
sense.”
“With God, all things are possible,” he said, a friendly lilt in his voice. “We
cannot be simple and direct with others because we are not first simple and
direct with God.” He toyed with the ever-sharp pencil in his hand. He looked in
her eyes, down at the pamphlet in her hands and up at the consol above them.
“We can’t get there on our own.” He reached up and twisted the plastic air-vent
knob.
Kate looked out her window at the landscape of clouds.
“We must open our minds to God,” his voice in her ear like he was still looking
up at the ceiling, “and be prepared for His call. You don’t have to be perfect, just
ready.” He dug through his backpack. She looking back at him and watched him
take out a black, leather-bound Bible. He started reading where his eyes fell.
Kate turned back to the window and scanned the horizon of the cloud continent.
It’s always something with these Montana boys. The white clouds were rolling
like sand dunes, and in the distance the top of a tall thunder head stood out above
the horizon looking like an airship. Religion, intellectual simplicity, drinking, fast
driving, stultified emotions. She had hoped her brothers would escape that scrub
oak existence, but most never escape who they were brought up to be. In that
way, she considered, her half-brother Joey, who suffered from the same disease
as this kid next to her, was right about the sins of the father passing down
through the generations – violence, intolerance, bigotry and chauvinism. Her
brothers had had a chance just like she did when Wayne left. The boys swam up
stream, but they didn’t get far enough and they got sucked back into the rapids.
They could have joined her in New York, especially since she was already
enrolled at the private college and attended for practically nothing. But the boys
just didn’t get around to it. Part of that was Wendy’s fault. She was older than
Kian, and could have made her little country life with just about anyone. It’s hard
to blame her though because she almost made a great life for them and helped
Kian get his job as a newspaper reporter. Maybe one last try will work with him.
He had verbal talent like Wayne. They all did. He could write an essay as good as
a college paper, just like Wayne knew hundreds of songs by heart and wrote
many of his own. She noticed the boy preacher’s gaze had slid over to her
breasts. She didn’t want to play anymore. She felt exasperation at this kid and
her brothers and all those boys. She stood, said excuse me and stepped over him.
She looked up and down the plane. There was one row of seats open near the
back.
“Excuse me,” she tapped the older woman in a blue uniform. “Can I sit here?”
“Sure thing. We couldn’t let those two on because they were too drunk, poor
boys!” The stewardess laughed.
Kate went to the bathroom. She reclined in the other window seat. She thought
about having a drink herself. She thought about Kian drinking. She thought about
Kian after the baby’s death. His problem intellectually and emotionally was that
nothing matter more or less than anything else and everything that mattered,
mattered a lot. Kian had no sense of Truth. The plane banked and the sun shot
through her window. She pulled the shade down. Stealing candy, shooting deer,
petting a cat – it all revolved around how much emotional pain or pleasure the
things out in the world caused him. He had empathy. He just didn’t seem to have
a solid internal place where he could go to be himself. As the little plane slid over
and the sun left her window, it struck Kate that it was no wonder Kian had
slowly come apart after his daughter’s long and painful death. When something
came along that he could give himself to, he poured himself into the relationship.
After she died, Kian kept fighting for her. And what do these Montana boys do
when they are damaged by life, injured and hurt? They turn to self-destruction.
They are like Robert Redford as Jeremiah Johnson, killing their way through the
wilderness, soothing their pain one murder at a time. So Kian fought back against
himself, his failure and his emotions, because the baby had died of cancer and
there was no bad guy, no marauding band of Indians to kill. He had been taught
no other way. Wayne relied on his strength and meanness and Kian was a
cowboy like Wayne. He had trained Kian to fight to the death. She thought about
the cold morning he firmly established in Kian the will to dominate or die trying.
Kian never spoke of it, but Kate had written about it as one of those events that
forged a young man into an unrelenting, hell-bent adult.
The morning had started with chores. Wayne got up early with her and Kian and
told them he was going to load San Juan, their stud horse, into the trailer. Kian
got the horse. Wayne backed the pickup to the trailer with Kate guiding. They got
the ball on the bumper under the tongue of the trailer on the first try, to their
mutual relief. Wayne let the trailer’s loading ramp down. Kian came around the
corral with San Juan and Wayne took the halter rope from him. He led the horse
to the ramp. San Juan’s front hooves clopped on the wood. He stopped and
pulled his head up.
“Kian, hit this sonofabitch on the rear-end, would ya?”
Kate had stepped back. San Juan was a difficult, mean-spirited horse that kicked.
Kian picked up a stick and touched San Juan’s rear with it. The horse startled
and stepped forward as he flung a hind leg out in a broad swipe at Kian. Wayne
pulled while going to the end of the long halter rope. He emerged out of the
escape door at the front, pulling the rope tight. The stud horse was half inside the
two-horse trailer, he began pulling back against the rope. Wayne dug in his heals.
He pulled and the veins and tendons in his neck flared out. He groaned as he
pulled with all he would ever have in himself to give. No matter what happened,
no matter who or what got hurt, Wayne would pull the horse into the trailer. At
first, Kate felt anger at the horse. Her mother came out of the house then. “That
damn horse,” Kate heard her say. Catlynn stopped by the front door and folded
her arms, a white dish towel thrown over her shoulder. “Get back, Kian,” she
yelled. Kian looked at her and took a small step back. Catlynn knew there would
be a battle because it happened every time. Kate stepped forward. She was
angry, too, but now more at Wayne for picking this fight. He was making
excuses to be away from them and this was probably just another one. Why he
didn’t just go back to the road, Kate didn’t know. He had been home too long
and had started beating them and the animals more and more for less and less.
Kate could fight back, but she was too small to win. Catlynn yelled at Wayne to
stop. “You’re going to get somebody killed!” But Wayne couldn’t or wouldn’t
hear her. After the first few minutes of the tug of war, the stud horse suddenly
reared up, scrambled backward and skidded off the side of the ramp onto the
grass. The weight pulled the rope through Wayne’s hands. He squalled and put
his hands together, tucking them between his legs.
Kate had thought through this story once before for a class on men, sexuality and
their relationships to animals. In her view, the horse and Wayne were the same.
The horse wasn’t a victim. A point of view that was eagerly and haughtily
dismissed by the class and the professor. She argued that Wayne and the horse
had both decided to fight. But no one wanted to agree that the horse bore some
responsibility for the fight. Kate said that was because none of them knew horses
that hadn’t had their personalities trained out of them. She didn’t get a good
grade on the paper and she was proud of that.
The plane turned again as if it was on a slalom course. The pilot coughed over
the intercom and said he was taking them around a big thunderstorm
That morning in the pasture, the sun in the light blue sky stung her face even
though the air was cold. The grass was dead under her knees. The cottonwood
tree limbs wove a net in the air. Puffs of dirt bloomed from under the horse as it
scrambled to its hooves. “Get the rope! Get the rope goddamn it!” Wayne yelled.
Kian ran up to the horse, stopped and started making kissing sounds with the side
of his mouth. The horse settled and he grabbed the lariat. He braced himself for
the horse to pull, but San Juan perked his ears and stood still. The horse shook
himself and let his penis slide out of its covering. He pissed a steaming torrent.
Kate sat back on her ankles, praying to something, anything that would help
them. But there is nothing out there to answer the call to aid even though people
need it more than anything, she criticized her airborne self.
As Wayne gathered himself, Kian held onto the rope up high, close to the horse’s
throat. He patted the flat cheek and looked over his shoulder at Wayne. His azure
eyes cut down to slits. Kian loved a good fight, like his dad. Wayne smiled at
Kian, winked and walked away toward the barn. She knew better than to think
the fight was over. Kian pulled the rope to coax the horse into the trailer, to save
them all, but the horse too wanted to fight. A stud horse, like her father and
brother, loved to fight. Lived to fight and breed. The horse took one step with a
front hoof and jerked his head up, pulling Kian off his feet. It stepped back and
bobbed its head higher to get the rope out of Kian’s hand, pulling him back and
back, but Kian held on. Then stud settled down again several feet from the trailer.
Wayne came back with another rope. He took the lead rope from Kian and pulled
the horse’s head inside the trailer. He waved Kian inside too and handed the lead
rope back to him. He got out with the lariat and tied one end of it to the back of
the trailer and walked it wide around the horse’s flanks. He pulled the rope up
against horse’s rump slowly, the horse’s flesh rippled with anticipation, but
Wayne didn’t lash the horse’s rump. He left the rope loose and strung his end
through a round steel eye on the side of the trailer. He rolled his shoulders and
settled the heals of his boots into the frozen dirt. “Pull hard, goddamn it!” Kian
lunged backward and Wayne snapped his rope up hard against the stud’s ass and
it cut into his muscles. San Juan blew snot and steam. His eyes went wide again.
Kate saw Kian through the little door. He was pulling hard, teeth clenched and
face red like his father’s. The stud’s nostrils flared with each blast from his lungs
and his front hooves danced and chipped against the wood, spattering Kian with
bits of frozen manure.
“Get in there!” Wayne yelled. “Get in there you son of a bitch. Pull on that
goddamn rope Kian!”
The stud’s vast neck and shoulders bulged as it strained against the ropes.
“Pull on that goddamn rope Kian or I’m going to bust your ass!”
The horse lurched back and got his head clear of the trailer’s roof. He shot
straight into the air. The lead rope spun through Kian’s hands. He fell back
against the metal side as Wayne grunted and strained, holding the weight of the
horse. San Juan was up on his hind legs, nearly sitting on the rope. Then Wayne’
s heal slipped and the whole scene fell apart. The stud plunged down and hit the
ground hard on his side. Wayne fell onto his chest, knocking his head against the
trailer’s wheel well. His cowboy hat rolled away. The stud scrambled to his feet
and trotted a few yards and stopped. San Juan looked back, ears up. Wayne got
to his knees and then his feet, silent as death. He walked by Kate without looking
at her.
Kian walked San Juan down at the back of the pasture and led him back to the
trailer. They waited there, the rope hanging loose in his hand. San Juan looked
slightly stunned, his head down and his penis fully sheathed. A car started and
for a moment Kate thought a miracle was about to happen, but then Wayne’s
Riviera appeared from around the house coming toward them. The big brown car
rolled slowly to the front of the trailer like it was picking its way between rocks.
Wayne reclined inside like he was on a long trip across the country. The horse
stood at ease. Its muscles loose, one hoof resting on its tip. Wayne took the rope
from Kian. He let slack out as he walked into the trailer and tossed the remaining
length through the window. He tightened the horse’s halter one notch and came
out through the little door. Kian held onto the lead rope with both hands, tight.
Kate put her face in her hands. She didn’t know what was happening, but it
couldn’t be good. Wayne tied the rope to the front bumper of the car. He looked
over his shoulder, “Better let that rope go, Kian.” He slid into the car, propped the
door open with his foot and started on the gas. The horse dug its hind hooves
into the dirt and it’s front hooves scrambled on the ramp. Kian, half way between
Kate and the trailer, clenched his fists and crouched to go on attack. The horse
blew air and then made a sound like a woman screaming. As the car dragged the
stud up the ramp, its hooves splintered the frozen and dried shit into a shower.
San Juan skidded and stumbled and pounded the wood. Then his hooves all
skipped at once and he fell onto his chest, head and neck angled up. The car
pulled him the rest of the way into the trailer and stopped. Wayne set the parking
break and got out. He walked to the back of the trailer and lifted the gate behind
the horse. He leaned in the side door, untied the rope and walked to the car
tossing the ropes inside. The car lurched and he drove away, passed the house
and up the lane. Kate and Kian ran to the trailer’s side door, expecting the horse
to be crippled or dead. But he wasn’t. He was already back on his hooves. San
Juan shook his head vigorously and snorted at the grain piled up on the shelf in
front of him. He nibbled at it and then took a mouthful.
Kate had hoped the horse would be dead, guts falling out, just to punish Wayne
for what he had done. But the horse was fine. Later, when he came home,
Wayne too had calmed. He left the horse in the trailer all afternoon. That night, he
backed the stud out, easily, and told Kian and Kate to feed him and brush him
down good.
The professor said she had missed the opportunity in her paper to explore how
Wayne was a slave owner driven to cruel acts because of the inhuman nature of
his relationship to his animals. She told him he didn’t understand and found
herself in the crazy position of actually defending Wayne, a position she didn’t
really believe either. She was her father’s daughter after all. As the plane banked
over Billings, its low buildings stark in the sunlight, Kate believed the real lesson
of that story was that these boys could never come away from their lives in the
West with anything less than a fundamental drive for self-destruction. In every
struggle, these boys that smelled like prairie grass and sagebrush would win or
cripple themselves trying. Because of that, Kian really was in danger. The plane’s
tires squelched under her, and she thought how Wayne was something else all
together. She thought of Wayne as one of those wild men running mean and hard
in Western movies. Indefensible and yet without fault. His sons were wild too,
but in an unformed way. They were shapeless, more or less harmless to others,
but their sense of self easily dispersed, like smoke in a strong wind. She saw
Kian – a broad-shouldered, 9-year-old boy running down the gravel lane to their
red and white house. When she saw him as a boy, she always imagined him
running. She hoped she could save him.
The plane stopped moving and the engines whined down. The boy preacher
entered the aisle, bent over and tucked several of the soul-saving pamphlets into
the pouch on the seat back. He stood with his bag and squeezed into the aisle just
a head of an old woman, crowding her enough that she looked up at the back of
his head. Kate could tell he was trying to get off the plane before her to get away
from her. Watching the strong, intelligent-looking boy preacher run away from
her like she was a tidal wave or a hurricane made her angry and depressed her at
the same time. How could she ever get through all of that failure with Kian? She
felt desperate to leave, to go back to New York. All she had to do was buy a
ticket and hop another plane and disappear. But she couldn’t turn way, even from
a battle already lost.
JOEY WATERS leaned against the yellow plastic sink in the camper and thought
again about the night Wayne came home and tried to kill his mother. He looked
absently into the dark through the rectangle of a window. Across the gravel
parking lot, the two concrete pads for parking cattle trailers and spraying the
cow manure out of them glowed lightly in the moonlight. Wayne was coming
home again. He’d pull in to wash the trailer he had picked up for Bill, Joey’s
boss, or go straight to the Sundown bar to play music sometime the next day.
Apparently, Wayne had been talked into coming home to help Kian. Joey held his
breath. He listened to the rattle of a cow trailer banging down the road. The
trucks come anytime. Some drivers, like Mike, called ahead. Joey looked out the
window behind him. The truck was still a long way down the road, traveling
slow over the gravel road.
“No one can fix Kian,” Joey said. “Especially not Wayne.”
He poured himself more coffee out of the glass decanter. The last time Wayne
came back, it had been early morning, like now, back from a long, unsuccessful
stretch on the road. Joey was eight. Wayne was drunk. He stumbled into the
house and slammed the door hard behind him. The dog sleeping next to Joey
jumped and Joey grabbed him. The dachshund’s smooth coat and rolls of fat
made him easy to hold. Joey’s mother squawked out of bed and said loudly,
“Damn it Wayne I said no!”
“Just Goddamn it listen!”
“Don’t you cuss in my house! Let me go!”
As the fight got underway in the front room, the dog fought to get free. Joey’s
mother spoke softly, changing into a weak and plaintive tone. He couldn’t
understand what she was saying. He struggled against the dog in the sagging
twin-size bed. A light poured yellow through the door into his mother’s bedroom
from the kitchen. His room was linked to his mother’s as if through a kink in a
daisy chain, the light didn’t reach him. He wrapped his legs around the dog,
holding its jaws closed. The dog grew frantic as the first of two rapid smacks
sounded. She started crying. Joey put all his strength against the dog’s every spin
and turn. He squeezed the dog’s throat to stifle even the animal’s cries. The
covers trapped their heat and breath, smothering them, but he held on. He had to
save the dog’s life. Wayne would kill it, if it ran into the living room. At the top
of the daisy chain, things started breaking. His mother gurgled and squawked.
Joey held onto the dog. Higher in the house, there were a few more minutes of
choking and things breaking, choking and the sound of legs thrashing. His
mother got free or Wayne let her go and she began breaking stuff. She grunted
and cussed with each throw. Glass and wood, shatters and thuds. It had to be
her. Wayne only threw punches. She was screaming. Joey felt a rush of pride.
Then the front door banged, rattling the walls all through the daisy chain and he
let the dog go. It spun and bit his hand. He ran straight to the front, barking hard
and fast. “Thanks, you little bastard,” Joey’s mom said. “A lot of help you
were.” Her voice raspy. Joey relaxed in his bed as she began to cry. She was up
there somewhere, out of sight, near the top of the daisy chain. He turned his hips
and pissed.
What would my life be like if I didn’t have memories like that? He set the coffee
cup into the plastic dish tub. The truck banged and rattle across the lot. Joey
went outside. He worked straight through to dinner. During the long day, he had
also worked through a host of religious ideas and plans for when he met Wayne.
After fried chicken and gravy at the restaurant by the interstate, he climbed back
in his pickup and went to the church where he and his mother went for many
years. The pastor had given him a key. Joey hoped the pastor would still be
there. He needed to have his confidence bolstered and he wanted to pray for
strength and the wisdom to say the right words.
Cleaned up and prayed over, Joey blazed a trail down Interstate 90 to join his
liquor-breathed brethren once again. Not for his own hidden sin this time, but
because he wanted to formally end his emotional dependence on the hate of his
father. The pastor had told him there would be no easy way out for Joey, the
bastard son of a profligate country music singer. He was going to have to
struggle spiritually his whole life against that sin in his veins. His mother had
given him Wayne’s last name, but Wayne never married her. Religion and the
Foursquare Church had saved him and her from a lonely life. It had given her
peace. But his emotions were too complicated, church leaders said. Often, he felt
more anger, more despair, when he spoke with them or sat through a sermon.
The pastor said that the Truth, the purity of the church, was agitating Joey’s
soul, burning it to cleanse it, but Joey was resisting, holding onto the hate,
holding on to the desire for power over his father and therefore clinging to sin.
Joey needed to forgive his father the way Jesus forgave all those who had sinned
against him. Joey needed to forgive God for making Wayne his father. He also
needed to tell Wayne how he felt about Jesus. Joey was full of doubt, especially
when the Sundown, hunkered in the center of a wide gravel parking lot, came
into view.
Inside the wide entry to the Sundown’s parking lot, its corner wooden posts
knocked outward by drunken drivers, Joey swerved right to park on the rough
edge where the weeds started. The cars deeper in on the hardened dirt parking lot
wouldn’t get out until the numerous fights and fender benders and last minute
hookups had been resolved. He slammed the door to his old pickup. A boundless
whoop, a howl of abandonment, blew through the sides of the building and
gathered in the sky over Joey like a plague. Wayne’s songs rarely changed and
this one he knew well. A fake Indian song with yelling and whoops. He stood still
with his hand on the chrome door handle. Feeling out of his depth, what sounded
possible in the light and freedom of the Church Sanctuary was an empty fiction
here in the face of what his father was. Joey felt God abandoning him. “Father,
why hast thou forsaken me,” he said, the meaning of that phrase nearer to him
now. Through the thin metal sheeting that was the wall, he heard Wayne saying,
“We’re Wayne Staggers and we’ll be right back.”
“Shit,” Joey said.
He straightened his belt and pushed open the heavy black portal. The air vibrated
with the energy of the crowd. Laughter and hoots jumped out of background
chatter. The wrought-iron handle, twisted and welded to the door felt hot in his
hand and he pushed the door shut. The flood of voices pooled around his legs.
The room was thick with cowboys and women dressed in button up pearl-snap
shirts, pointy boots and new, stiff blue Levis. Joey got up on his toes, but didn’t
see Wayne. He moved deeper. He recognized the bar tender and hoped he’d
know where his father was so he could say what he’d come to say and get out.
It took him nearly fifteen minutes, but he finally made the bar. He leaned over the
steel top and waved at that tall man with gray hair.
“What’ll you have?”
“A Coke.”
“That it?”
“Just a Coke. Where’s the band?”
“How the hell should I know?” The old man pushed a short glass of pop at him.
He hadn’t bothered putting in ice. He stepped away to another man who began
ordering shots and cans of beer.
Joey walked through the crowd, dodging hat brims and eye contact, heading for
the bathrooms and back offices. He noticed the song playing through the ceiling
speaker system, barely audible. Johnny Cash said he shot a man in Texas just to
watch him die. Cash was a man of faith and clarity and steadfast morals. Joey
thought for a moment that he could be like the Man in Black. But there will only
ever be one Johnny Cash. His shoulders fell. As he neared the end of the open
space at the back of the bar, he saw Kate and her mother, Catlynn. The two
women sat at a small round table at the edge of the crowd. Catlynn held the stem
of a glass of red wine. Her eyes quiet and vacant. Her head moved slightly with
the beat of her heart, hair rolled up into a bun. The tension of the bun had sprung
loose around the edges in many spots and rivulets of hair poured out. Catlynn
was petite and young looking. A surprisingly full figure and thin neck. The bones
of her collar pronounced, as if she were barely holding up under a great strain.
Long silver curls of earrings and her jaw line illuminated, like the light was a dust
gathering. Catlynn seemed like a small creature when he looked at individual
pieces of her. Tiny wrists and long thin fingers, nearly flat at the tips under short,
plain nails. But all together, she was unapproachable, intimidating, on the edge of
hysteria.
Kate’s open hand rested around a glass of water. The opposite of Catlynn
without being masculine. Strong, narrow, but soft. Maybe just different because
of youth. She had her mother’s full breasts and pronounced collar bones. He
loved Kate and had since they were kids. Kate stared blankly at the empty
bandstand. He didn’t know why she had come home. When she left the farm at
eighteen to go to college in New York, he had cried himself to sleep every night
for a month. When he looked back at the stage, Wayne was there, joining the
drummer in a toast. The water glasses half full of whiskey and raised into the
lights. Wayne brought his to his mouth and drained it. He rocked back from the
power of the drink and then set the glass on the top of a black speaker. He
removed his black cowboy hat and wiped his brow and pushed his brown hair
back over his head.
“Satan,” Joey said, “the Lord rebuke you.”
“Joey!” Kate yelled. He looked down and she was staring at him.
“What are you doing here? Grab a seat. It’s been forever!”
He shrank and stepped back, then recovered and slid a chair toward the table
between Kate and Catlynn. He avoided Kate’s eyes. Luckily, Wayne Staggers
jumped directly into a song. Thank you God, Joey thought. The two women
would have eaten him alive if he had had to talk with them, especially if he got
around to explaining what he was doing there. Catlynn hated his religious talk and
told him that she’s heard all she was ever going to hear about religion from her
Catholic mother. Kate loved to twist his religion into mish mash of weakness and
fear and laugh at him.
“When did you start drinking?” Kate yelled. Her scent washed over him.
“Pop!” he yelled back and tried to smile.
Without warning, Wayne and his band collapsed into a discord of broken voices
just when a guitar string snapped. A wire of piercing feedback shot through the
crowd. The sound, a demon, made the boys in the crowd want to drink and
throw chairs. They screamed their approval of the new twist in genres. Wayne,
holding the feedback like a snake in his hands, reached down into the front of the
crowd and pulled two women on stage, as if out of thin air.
Catlynn smiled, drunk and fierce.
“Any and all female singers welcome,” Wayne shouted. “Come on up.”
Somehow a song and beat fought to the surface of the feedback. Joey
remembered that his father was not only a profligate and a drunk and a bastard,
but he was also one hell of a country music singer.
Bill Stockton, owner of the Sundown and Joey’s boss, leaped up on stage with
the vigor of whiskey. He clumsily waved his arms around at the band. He
stepped through a mass of black electric cords. He turned to the crowd. Waving
his arms, he lunged at the microphone to get in a word or two. The women were
strumming Wayne’s squealing guitar and howling into space. Chairs clattered to
the floor and a wave of dancers crashed backward into several tables. Cowboy
hats came dislodged and a small fist swung into the face of a big man in a leather
jacket. He swung back at a man, whose head snapped. A woman screamed and
climbed straight into the air over the punched man and grabbed the big man’s
hair. Her mouth was wide and filled with blood. Joey smiled. Wayne pushed Bill.
Bill smiled and shrugged then yelled through the screeching, “Please everyone
finish your drinks and go on home.” Wayne’s hair was still slicked back and his
cheeks were red from heat and booze and he stepped back from the two women,
who were clinging to each other in laughter. He hit the remaining five strings
even harder just as one leg, angled at the knee, buckled and his stagger knocked
the mike stand out of Bill’s hands. He caught his balance on the sharp dogging
heals of his cowboy boots and hit the four remaining strings. Bill whipped the
straw hat off his head and pointed the brim at Wayne’s chest. Wayne laughed in
his face and cued the drummer to kick it up a notch by twirling his arm in a full
arching circle, striking the four, then three strings each time around. He leaned
into the base player and “ye-hawed” through the bass player’s mike. Bill caught
his balance and high-stepped through the wires up to Wayne. He grabbed the
guitar’s neck, killing a full 60 percent of the sound, and turned to the crowd. The
bass player thundered to pickup the loss of the guitar. Wayne shoved Bill, whose
flat heals caught in the cords. He stumbled to the edge of the stage and
disappeared into the crowd. The two women unfurled their arms and jumped on
Wayne, initiating a shoving and groping free-for-all at the front of the stage.
Joey’s grandmother, Wayne’s mother, who must have been in the bathroom,
appeared down the hall coming toward them. Joey realized why Catlynn had
stuck around. His grandmother was a big woman, round everywhere. She held a
small, shining white purse tight against her giant breasts, bumping into chairs and
tables as she wended her way through the outer edge of the seating area. Joey
looked again over at Catlynn. She was shaking her head, looking at her husband.
He felt remorse for her. When he glanced back at his grandmother, she was still
making her way toward the table, but her top half was leaning too far out over
her legs. She started to speed up to catch her balance, but became more parallel
to the floor, holding her purse tighter against her chest, her teeth bared in
grimace, and just as Joey lunged over the table to catcher her dive, his
grandmother disappeared under the table top, knocking it over into Kate. Catlynn’
s wine fell over and she moved her thin legs out of the way, letting it spill
between them onto the floor. His grandmother re-emerged into view on the other
side of the table, on her knees. Her gray hair had exploded and her eyes were like
balls of white glass. Joey reached her and helped her stand and guided her ass
onto the tiny chair, where she perched like a bird, purse still in both hands against
her chest.
“My god,” Joey said.
The band and the lights went out all at once. Some of the lights flicked back on
in one side of the building illuminating Bill, who stood against the wall with the
breaker box door in his hand. He squinted at the bandstand, braced for attack.
“Guess that’s it,” Joey yelled. “Shows over! You’re turn to drive, sis!”
Kate smirked at him and looked away. Singeing his heart. He stepped past the
table, moving toward the entrance.
“Good riddance Wayne,” Joey yelled into the din. He waved at the chaos and
walked out.
KIAN WATERS sat in his car on the side of the road in front of the Sundown.
He’d heard his father was in town and he wanted to see him but when he got
there, so did Joey, of all people, and he decided not to go in. When the people
started pouring out, he broke another beer open and drove away down the dark
back roads. The bar was setup out beyond the last cluster of houses, out where
the sky is high and wide and desolate. Those boys and girls have come out into
the hinterland to get wild and roam the gravel roads at three in the morning,
drunk and lost. He’d done it himself plenty of times. They were all living out their
captivity to the prairie, like their fathers and mothers before them. Each
generation came along, hot on the heels of the previous, clinging to the traditions
of early childrearing and raw, untutored fistfights and sex. They flung themselves
at hope in their early twenties, steeped in the belief that they have discovered how
to live life as a party and then, generation after generation, ground to a halt under
the weight of kids, poverty and heartburn. They came out here on Saturday
nights, overweight, prematurely balding, spending all but the twenty dollars they
owe the babysitter. To hell with the taxes they owe, goddamn government
anyway. To hell with the bare cupboards and empty refrigerators, too. The kids
can eat at school and mom’ll kick in on the trailer rent. It’s just too unfair that
their promising lives (Didn’t all the teachers say they were doctors and lawyers
and artists and fashion designers and thespians?) would come to this dull and
dusty grind. Well, not tonight. The world had let them down, had lied to them,
but they would fight back. Tonight we live up to the promises of the Wild West.
Kian raised his beer in toast. One wonders how long a myth of self-destruction
as glory can sustain a culture. The Earth knows. The ground has smiled on the
partiers and several will die tonight when the Earth rolls on its side and the driver
of the rusted Cadillac, whose occupants will dissolve into the screams and yells
of warriors charging the tree line, slides sideways over the gravel and wraps the
car around a telephone pole. Blood will pool in the floorboards, overrun the
gunnels and stream into the dust. Tomorrow the survivors will nurse hangovers
and laugh and laugh and groan, loving their pain. This is war, after all, and war
wounds are honored among the survivors. The dead, taken piecemeal from
crumpled cars at 5 a.m., will be remembered on Thursday with sandwiches,
giant cookies and cans of beer up at the new funeral home in Shepherd.
Kian had hoped to escape that life, but hadn’t. He turned his car toward the Crow
Indian reservation.