| Part II |
WAYNE PUT his hand into the wind blowing past the semi-truck’s open window
and imagined silent sailing on a lake, the calm of the water and the depth beneath
him as he began his descent into the Yellowstone River Valley. He never grew tired
of the road. Only one cloud, back-lit pink by the setting sun, blemished the
otherwise clear and pale sky. Small, slapped together houses and rows of trailers
scattered past. Some of the trailers had kept their skirting intact. On others, the
wheels, blocks and plumbing were exposed. The winter would, if it hadn’t already,
kill those trailers that had lost their skirting. The burned-out Motor Inn, set on fire
by bums more than ten years ago, was still there, hollow. The sign at the top of the
weed covered drive leading onto the grassed-over parking lot said $6.50 SINGLE in
a type that made Wayne think of his mother and the old Miles City hotel he grew up
in. Four miles later came the Exxon refinery, where he had spent a few miserable
months working off debts from a bad run through California. That was the last time
he’d come home. The gigs that summer had fallen apart when John Sims, steel
guitar player, fell in love with a married woman and ended up with a dead wife back
in Montana. The refinery, blazing with a thousand halogen lights, poured smoke
from its many stacks high into the evening sky.
The overblown cow town itself, booming in the seventies with oil discoveries and
strip-mined coal fields, gathered at the gateway of sandstone cliffs that rose up a
thousand feet. They hemmed in the city on its eastern and southern edges. The
cliffs gave Billings its individuality over the hundred other small cities scattered
across the plains. He split the truck’s high gear from overdrive to direct. The engine
compression against the lower gear slowed the black truck and its empty aluminum
trailer down to sixty-two miles an hour. A rise in the road brought the yellow sun
into his mirror just as the sun dropped onto the jagged horizon where it punctured
itself and blew orange and red all along the Rocky Mountain Front. He put his foot
on the air brake and with a feather touch brought the rig down to fifty miles an
hour. He jabbed the clutch and pulled the shifter out of gear, tapped the fuel pedal to
race the motor and brought the shifter into the synchronized ninth and direct. He
veered off Interstate 94 onto the single-lane ribbon of pavement and slowly powered
the engine back up. The pitch of the engine turbine grew higher as the truck gained
sixty and stormed the ramp that laced him onto Interstate 90, cutting south. The
raging and exploding sun painted both mirrors red. He was on the last leg of a run
and due in at the Sundown, a bar he’d made good money in.
East of the mountains was Wayne’s homeland. His family came to the flat half of
Montana at the turn of the century and the goddamn place had nearly destroyed
them all. His mother said the Waters’ fortunes in the West started out fine, but
changed all of a sudden and forever the day a prairie fire swept north across a
corner of the Judith Basin and ran headlong into the Little Snowy Mountains. His
mother’s mother was just a little girl at the time, living with her parents in a log and
sod cabin near the Snowies. The cabin was more like one of those sod huts the
prairie farmers lived in. It was dug into the side of a grass hill on the boarder
between the prairie and the granite mountains. Her parents had been running the
Kinnick ranch, which her grandfather had cobbled together from the land of several
busted farmers at the tail end of the land-rush failure. Those farmers had learned the
hard way that a scrub life, burning cow shit for heat, wasn’t worth the freedom of
owning their own land. Since the old man, Wayne’s great-grandfather hated
solitude, he put his newly wedded daughter and her husband out there and moved
back into town.
The 1929 fire that destroyed the ranch had run fast and hot, the papers said, more
than 100 miles an hour. It burned so intensely that in the superheated wind rushing
just ahead of the ground fire, trees, buildings and animals burst into flames. The fire
hit the Kinnick Ranch the first time early in the afternoon. Wayne’s mother was six-
years-old and lonely. The winter they had just come out of was their second at the
homestead. Waneeda Kinnick had not seen another kid since the fall. She was left
alone most of the day while her mother and father tried to make a living between
battles with the elements, wolves and bears, cattle sickness, injuries and religion.
Old Man Kinnick said he would send out hired help as soon as cattle prices went up,
but he never did. He pushed Waneeda’s parents to exhaustion. She rarely saw her
father, because he spent so much time out on the range or in the barn. Her mother
had started talking to herself early on in the second winter. She read and reread the
pages at the end of the Bible. Waneeda’s father yelled at the old woman on Sundays,
but she wouldn’t stop reading from those last pages. She would read and then say a
fire was coming and the righteous would inherit a new Eden. “Goddamn you
woman if you don’t stop reading that book!” her father would say and then storm
off to the barn, where he would bang and crash late into the night. Waneeda said
she never went in there. She had a deep fear of the barn. Her fear of it wasn’t
because the barn was old, scary or rundown. In fact, it was the best structure on
the ranch. It stood at least two full stories high, with a steep roof that fell in several
pitches. Her grandfather had built it pretty much on his own and built it so well that
the big doors rolled easily. The prairie men knew how to build things, but they didn’
t waste their talents on women. Her mother begged for wood floors in the house
and used to scream at her father as he walked fast across the yard away from the
house that the barn had a better floor than her home. Her father yelled back, over
his thick and stooped shoulders, that yes it did because the barn was where the
valuable things were kept. Like the old man who had built the place up, her father
was short and round. His hair was thick and it ran down his neck and over his
shoulders. He was more like a troll than a man. He didn’t speak often and when he
did, he yelled.
“But I can understand that,” Waneeda told Wayne on the frozen nights in Mile City
when no one came to the hotel for dinner and music. “From what I remember of
my mother, she was a tough woman to live with. The Old Man’s second wife, Ida,
who was younger than my mother, always said my mother had an unnatural
attraction to the roughest, most least-spoken men. Quiet and hard working and
mean as hell. But I’m not even sure he was my father. Guess I’ll never know for
sure. The only people who ever knew who it was were dead before I got old
enough to ask. Ida herself was a Hutterite, I believe. She didn’t know anything
about the family, either. Hardly spoke anything but German anyway.”
She told the story of the fire and how it killed the Old Man the way she had pieced it
together from memory and rumor. This was the only account of his family, told on
those cold nights with the space heater rattling and glowing at their feet, Wayne
ever got.
“When news reached Grassrange that the big cloud of smoke they saw high in the
sky was coming from what later was called the Judith Basin Fire, it had already
crashed into the foot of the Little Snowies. Old Man Kinnick saddled his horse and
raced across the burned-up prairie. A lot of people said he was trying to save his
cows, but I think that was unfair. He didn’t try to circle the fire to get into the
mountains where the cows would have run to. No, he ran that horse straight into
the fire’s tail. The ranch house and the barns and everything was gone by the time
he got there. The ground was so hot it burned the hooves off his horse and when he
got off its back, it fell over. He shot it to put it out of its misery. I was down in the
well when I heard the gun go off and started crying for help. But just before then,
before the fire itself reached us, the smoke and heat had begun pouring into the
house, and glowing embers filled the air. My father said we were all dead. He
grabbed me by my arm, here up high on it, and carried me through the front door
and out over the yard. He lifted me over the well and let go. I fell looking up at his
whiskered face and then hit the water flat on my back, must have been thirty feet,
but I landed just right in the shallow water so I didn’t get hurt. I can tell you I was
scared. I touched the walls but they were so cold and slimy that I couldn’t bear to
climb them and stood in the middle of the water. It only came up to my hips. I didn’
t know what was going on or why he put me in there. I remember knowing there
was a fire out there, but of course I had no idea what that meant. When I heard my
mother screaming and crying to Jesus to save her, I tell you that made me glad I
was down in that well. I was just sure my father was killing her or had taken her to
the barn and was doing things to her there I couldn’t imagine but felt a terror over.
Then I saw a big stream of flame like an arch of fire, like water thrown from a
bucket, stretch right over the opening of the well and I figured it was Jesus come to
save my mother. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I remember thinking Jesus
should mind his own business. She was a hard woman, I’m telling you.”
Here Waneeda would laugh and nudge Wayne, who would be plucking the plastic
strings of a little guitar.
“Then a bit later I heard the gunshot and yelled out, believing my father had won
against Jesus and my mother, but it was the old man’s gray bearded face and black
hat that showed over the rim of the well. He lowered one of the new lariats he had
on his saddle and I put the loop up under my armpits and he pulled me up. The
smoke and heat was horrible and I remember coughing and wanting to get back into
the well, but he said the fire was coming back and we had to run. He soaked a
blanket, wrapped me up in it and covered my face with it. He walked fast for hours
with me in his arms, rolled up in that wet, hot blanket. When he stopped and took
the cover off my face, he was all black and blood was coming out of his mouth.
The old man died a few months later from the heat, smoke and ash he inhaled while
saving me. He never did get out of bed once we got to Grassrange. Just laid there in
that dark, hot room coughing and gagging. Doctors gave him laudanum and by the
end he was drinking big gulps of it and saying crazy things. Ida took charge of me
then and we lived off the money the old man got before he died when he sold the
burned up ranch to the Hutterrites. They were good people, them Hutts. They made
sure we were cared for, in lots of ways.”
Wayne let the memories go as he approached a rare cluster of cars on the interstate.
He throttled down. The yard lights of the Sundown parking lot gleamed in the
distance, like a rodeo grounds. He drummed his thumbs on the center of the
steering column, glad to be back. There was something about this time of night out
here on the plains, even after a hot day, when the sun had finally gone down and the
bugs were out, clouding the windshield. The air was cooling off and the stars
blinked open. This early part of the night when the day’s work was over and the
night’s party was just about to begin, that first blush of flame as the whiskey hit his
stomach and the steak melted in his mouth, those were the kinds of moments
Wayne lived for.
He had been gone a long time, but after a few calls he had booked a show and a run
to Seattle for Waldo. He had also heard that in addition to Kian being on the run, his
other son by his first marriage was working out at Bill’s Cattle Trailer Washout. The
interstate rolled out in front of him like the back of a raven. The dots of light that
had been the Sundown in the distance were now bright and the gravel parking lot
was a solid gray pool. Few cars. The bar’s sign on the top was a yellow happy sun
with a drink in one of its sunrays as it went down on the white mountain
background, falling behind the big blue letters. He shifted down and hit the exit
ramp, breaking and using the engine’s compression on each lower gear. The truck
rattled across the cattle guard and he stopped at the intersection. Darkness had
gathered there and the red stop sign blew a hole in the black. He popped the
transmission out of gear and let his foot off the clutch. The whiskey bottle tucked
into a pouch just under the seat said his name. He took another drink. The idle of the
engine pulled the empty trailer through the intersection and around the corner and
back under the interstate. The Sundown parking lot was quiet. He was early and
could get a few hours sleep before the show and before he’d find Bill and get paid.
He idled across the gravel lot to the back of the low, sheet metal building, out of the
lights and then shut the motor down. It rattled to a loose and ragged stop. He let one
more drink of whiskey burn through his mouth. He lifted the cowboy hat off and
set it in the passenger seat and pushed his boots off behind the peddles. His brown
socks stuck inside. He took them out and laid them on the steering wheel to air out.
He turned to the sleeper and stepped through the little aisle between the seats and
into the black compartment. Little red lights showed 7:03 p.m. Then she rustled
under the sleeping bags. Wayne again felt that itch and decided to have sex with her
one more time before catching a nap. She was a luxury, a sweet and luscious
brunette he had slept with off and on for the past three years. She was very
feminine, very curvy. He was with her under an arrangement that kept her from
going nuts while her husband, a friend of Wayne’s, was in prison for burglary. In a
way, he was doing his friend a favor by keeping her out of the bars. He put his hand
under the covers and ran it over her cool, smooth cheeks. He slipped his pants off
and slid into the bed. He moved her hips into his. She’d gotten in the truck in the Tri-
Cities in Washington where her husband was imprisoned. She needed a ride to her
sister’s house in Huntley, a little town not too far from his farm. Of course, this
was one favor his friend wouldn’t know he owed Wayne.
When he woke up, Jolene was gone. She had snuck out of the truck sometime just
after he fell asleep. She’d probably called a sister or aunt. These women out here in
the country learned to not ask questions when they picked up a sister, standing at
the end of a gravel driveway, hair that is usually tied tight, blowing softly in the
morning breeze, arms tight across their chests, faces flush.
He stretched under the slick fabric of the sleeping bag, got up and slouched into the
passenger seat, snapped the socks off the steering wheel and pulled them on. He
had a half hour to get dressed and get things ironed out with Bill before hitting the
stage. There were twenty cars in the parking lot. Bill’s said he was holding a wet T-
shirt contest. A little preliminary action before the band kicked up, he said. There
would be a lot more cars. Men with wives who didn’t care for wet breasts and didn’
t care for their husbands to care either would come later. It was Wayne’s big return
show and Bill had even advertised it in the Billings Post. He walked past the front of
the truck, into the deep black of the moonless countryside and pissed while looking
up at the stars. Roaring cheers of playful lust came from inside the Sundown. The
wet T-shirt contest was an old bar trick. It’s open to any woman who wanted to
compete, but the prize money always went to the professionals hired out of Billings.
He remembered that Catlynn and Kate were coming to the show. He hoped they
weren’t in there early. Catlynn had sounded pleased over the phone, maybe ten
years had worn away the bitterness. Maybe tomorrow he’d go out to his house and
see if he couldn’t get his wife to let him back in. He went in the front door and
walked through the main room, the ceiling black and hovering low. Dimmed lights
hung from wagon wheels suspended by chains. On the stage, deep in the corner of
the bar, bathed in poorly constructed spotlights, a woman had one leg behind her
head and her panties pulled aside. The men in the front row sat stunned. She was
one of the professionals, no doubt. A local woman began shyly exposing her
overlarge, wet breasts. Always competitive, these local girls. At once, the stun wore
off and the grunting and howling kicked back up to chorus level. The men in the
second row remained quiet on-lookers, serious about filling their minds with this
stark new development in the wet t-shirt contest. A little something for later recall
when they got back to their slapped-together shacks and bunk houses. Wayne
walked around the outer rim of tables to the bar. He recognized the bartender from
many years ago, Jim was his name, Silent Jim. He ordered a double scotch. It went
down like a streak of gasoline.
“Whew!” Wayne said loud enough to be heard over the drone of the chorus of lust
and thunder of strip music. He winked at Jim, who was tall even behind the dark
glossy bar counter. Jim was an old man twenty-five years ago when Wayne first
played at the Horseshoe Bar in Billings. His thick hair has growing whiter, refined
sugar white. He winked and then looked down the bar. Bill was at the end, black
hair pushed to one side, hat in his hand. His arms were too long for his torso and he
fiddled with a gray hat practically hanging at his knees. A naked woman stood next
to him. She smiled without flirting. Business. She was after more money, per usual,
Wayne suspected. And, per usual, Bill would act dumb and shy and coy about her
standing there naked. He wouldn’t give her a dime more. She was definitely pretty.
Fine round breasts and tight, dark nipples. She probably was worth more than she
was getting. Wayne would have given her more money. He didn’t care that much
about money, but Bill did. Bill loved money and so had a lot of it.
Bill looked up and saw Wayne. He smiled dumbly. He put his head down to listen to
the naked woman, pretending to shy away from looking at her nipples, which she
was clearly offering up as either a decoy or bargaining chip. Wayne pulled up short,
set his hat on the bar and waved Jim over. The old bar tender walked like a crane
walked on dry land.
“I guess he’s busy, Jim,” Wayne said. “I better have a beer while he finishes up.
Wouldn’t mind a roll in the hay with that one, I tell you.”
“Couldn’t agree more Wayne, couldn’t agree more,” Jim said. He crane-walked two
steps to the cooler, reached a beer from inside and popped it open with one hand as
he set it down in front of Wayne. His hands were gnarled and banged up from
rodeos, fistfights and arthritis. Hell of a thing to get old, Wayne thought. He put two
dollars on the counter and waved off the change. Bill shook his head slowly. The
hooting course of lust had subsided and both he and Wayne looked up at the empty
stage. The woman’s shoulders dropped and she unfurled a tiny T-shirt and panties
from her right hand, stepped into the panties and slipped the shirt over her brown
shoulders, fast and in one motion, a professional athlete. Wayne handed her his beer
as she sulked past him. She put the beer to her glistening mouth and emptied it. She
handed the bottle back and winked. Her smile said fuck it. You win some, you lose
some. Now she had to make up the difference in tips, which she would no doubt
do. Her small round ass jiggled like a teenager’s at the beach. Wayne put the mouth
of the bottle to his nose and smelled her spit and lip gloss.
“Wayne! Goddamn it,” Bill said and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Damn fine woman there Bill. What’ll you have?” Wayne waved at Jim.
“I better have a scotch,” Bill said.
Wayne paid for the drink and one for himself. While the last of the scotch ran
across his tongue, Bill slipped a wad of cash from his front pocket and counted out
hundreds.
“Here you go, Wayne,” Bill said. “Fine job as always.”
“Well, I thank you very much Bill.” He put the cash in his pocket.
The lust chorus began crowding the stage as the professional began earning real
money now. Together with the music, the boys made one long howl and even the
quiet, serious lads in the second row played along, getting their dollars over the
shoulders of the men in front to win the privilege of an up-close look. The pro put
her long heel on some farmer’s broad, thick back, threw her hips forward and wide
and entered their minds pussy first.
“Damn girl’s going to get all of their beer money,” Bill said.
“I imagine that’s pretty much what she was trying to tell you.”
“Yes, but a deal is a deal,” Bill said and sulked away toward the end of the bar. He
leaned back on his heals like his feet couldn’t wait to get out of the place while his
head surveyed the line of bottles against the mirror, judging volume and seeing
money. Bill was tight and twisted about money, which he would never have enough
of, just like the quiet boys leering at the dancer were tight and twisted about the sex
lives they would never have enough of. Wayne moved to the stage and caught the
eye of that woman and winked at her and moved his head sideways. Come on over
here. When the rock song ended and two other women jumped up on the stage, she
hopped down and made straight for Wayne, drawing the little half T-shirt over her
head. Wayne took her into Bill’s office for a private show. Young women are
wasted on young men, he told her. She laughed and moved her hips and shoulders
just a little, feeling her own fluidity. They just don’t understand it, he said. His hand
moved around the hard softness of her cold hot bottom.
When they came out of the office, his band members were there. He waved at
them, sinking his head deep into his black cowboy hat. The woman left his side and
joined the line of dancers who were showing their wares in a rising frenzy – the
grand finale. A natural wonder, how so little can become so much. Wayne decided
he would give these boys a hell of a show. He knew their lives were shitty and
dusty and going nowhere and he wanted to raise their spirits.
ON THE WAY to an interview a few weeks before his life came completely apart,
Kian stopped at his neighborhood bar. He had one drink and told himself while
waiting for the second to keep his head. His wife and daughters were waiting for
him to come home, to be the father he told them he wanted to be. He and Wendy
were going to get counseling and learn how to leap over their problems. But what
nagged him and kept him feeling unhopeful was that he wanted to drink every
minute of every day. He wanted to drink until he was blasted drunk. He didn’t know
why except that every time he downed a drink he felt better and when he was the
least bit sober he felt bad. So it was in vain that he told himself, step after step
down the sidewalk, “Don’t get drunk. Don’t stay out late. Just get the job done.”
The night was warm for late fall. He would go right home after work tomorrow
night, like he said he would. This was his last night out. He might have to sneak a
drink or so out in the garage. He doesn’t have to go out. Step by step his resolve
faded. Maybe he could write a Western novel or teach the girls something, read to
them. Watch a little television and why not? Just slow down and be a husband and
father. He flexed his arms. Even get back in shape. He swung his arms around,
overhead and back and forth like a runner warming up. He’d worked hard and been
a fair wrestler in high school. He could take up boxing maybe or just running,
though he hated running. He thought about the time he’d have in the evening if he
didn’t go to a bar. In fact, most men did not go to a bar every night and get loaded
every morning before work. He could live that way, too, at least the not-going-to-a-
bar part. “I’ll do it,” he said. “They deserve it. They need me.” When he stepped off
the sidewalk onto the Post’s parking lot, after a quick stop over at the next bar, too,
he was already out of the house after all, he spotted the man he was supposed to
interview, Burton, sitting behind the wheel of an old, gray Volvo parked near the
paper’s front doors. The town’s leading women hated Burton, so the paper wanted
Kian to find out just how bad a person he was and write a story. He could do that.
He walked to the car and saw that Burton had guests. The backseat was splashed
with youth and chrome and leather, exposed knees and pierced, white bellies, three
of them, a punk rock, modern girl tableau.
“Burton,” Kian said, shifting his eyes, “what’s up?”
“Climb in,” Burton said, motioning with his head to the passenger side of the car.
“We’re all ready for you.” He winked. Burton’s hair was graying around his ears.
The black t-shirt showed he was still in shape.
“I don’t want to spoil any revelations you may have had planned for me,” Kian said,
leaning down to Burton, “but I’ve been to a party or two in my time. I want to talk
to a few people about your punk concerts and come right back here. I don’t have all
night. Unless, of course, one of these young women are among the organizers I can
interview right now.” Kian held his resolve. Just talk and go home. But it’s like God
had set him up. He stood and looked around. He bent back down.
“Nope,” Burton said. He nodded at the seat again. Kian walked around the front of
the car. He wasn’t sure what part of the sentence Burton was noping. Burton leaned
across the red bench seat of the old Volvo.
“These are my daughters,” he said.
“All of them?”
“Yes, all of the daughters I have.”
“All of these kids,” Kian said, making mock effort to count heads as if there were a
dozen of them, “are your flesh and blood?”
“Unless there’s something my wife isn’t telling me.”
“You’re married and have kids?”
“I see you’ve done your homework.” Burton leaned over and patted the seat.
“Huh,” Kian said. He opened the passenger door and slid onto the slick black vinyl.
When the door shut, Burton put the car in reverse. He backed and swung the car
toward the street. Kian swung around to look into the back seat. He would say
howdy and ask about their father. His glance slid up a white inner thigh to plump,
shaved, grayish and red vagina sporting a small polished chrome ball. He swung
back to the front and wondered if perhaps Burton wasn’t pulling his leg about his
filial relationship to these pierced and pretty much evenly-aged young women. The
naked vagina punctured his mind. Jesus, he thought. He cleared his throat.
“So where are we headed?”
The numb feeling of death welled up in him. If he doesn’t drink any more, he’ll be
okay. Nothing has happened. Just take a few notes and get the hell out of there. The
words in his head carried no resonance.
“Out just past Lockwood to the Widmore subdivision. The gravel company out
there has rented us their shop.”
Burton pushed a cassette into the dash and shards of steel and glass blasted from
the doors. The punk girls bounced up and down, and Kian stole another glance back
at thigh and vortex. He was there already, after all. Black leather and pink skin
shaped into easy strangers. He thought he could smell her flesh, the one girl, the
woman inside her skirt. His face grew hot, his arms heavy. It’s like it was
everywhere. People just threw open their arms to parties and each other with so
little concern. It was just so easy that it was impossible to resist. Everywhere he
turned, his old high school pals were drinking and taking drugs, driving from
rundown farm house to trailer court, running the gravel back roads like it was
another country and they were on vacation forever. A couple hours of work,
stoned, and then back to their cars and the drinking and driving. Cheap gas. Cheap
booze. Cheap drugs. The girls were mindless of whose boyfriend or husband they
were jumping into the sack or backseat with. All Kian had to do was walk to a bar
and the party, like a UFO, swooped down and scooped him up. It was like most
people spent some part of everyday in a music video. Wendy wasn’t like that since
the twins and the baby and Kian didn’t want to be, but there it was, like that first
drink, and when he was there he felt great and when he wasn’t he felt bad about
everything. It was just so easy to feel good, even if it wouldn’t last. Burton turned
off the highway, over a culvert that wasn’t flush with the road, bouncing them all
off the seat. The girls squealed. Kian quickly turned to see what he could see. No
one wants him to avert his eyes. Burton gunned the motor and rocketed up to the
building fast, sliding to a hard stop in front of the steel door. A person simply didn’t
have to face reality if he didn’t want to. Just keep playing like you’re in Neverland.
The drugs will help. He had given up this life the same as Wendy had, but there was
just something about a dead daughter that changed his motivations. The building
hunkered over them, square, two-stories tall without windows, covered in rust-
streaked steel siding. Burton and Kian got out simultaneously, each hot to see the
women arch out of the car. The girls paid off the watch and the last one out put her
face to Kian’s, smiled into his eyes with her red hot mouth. She wasn’t much
younger than he was. He was still a carefree kid, too. Why did he had have to
become an old man when no one else was? After all, look at his father.
“Those are not your daughters,” Kian said, as the girl turned from him.
“Well,” Burton said, expansive, “I’m like a father to them.” He opened his arms.
Cars and pickups lined the gravel driveway and fanned out into the small gravel and
mud parking lot. Moonlight gleamed on monochrome metal contours. The girls
were waiting by the door, but Burton waved them on. They opened the heavy steel
door and the beast’s roar poured out. They waded in and slammed the door behind
them. The warm night air coated Kian and soaked his shirt. He looked up through
the empty night at the distant, cold, glinting stars. Why must I do this? The stars
didn’t answer. The shadowed outlines of the sagebrush hills and the clouds of
webbed, interlacing bare cottonwood tree branches along the irrigation ditch next to
the road didn’t answer either. Nature told him to take what he wanted right now,
because tomorrow some fucking vine will climb your trunk and break your limbs.
There’s flesh and bone and then it’s all dust. The miracle of life.
Burton handed a cigarette to Kian. Then he reached into the sky and rumbled inside
his creaking black leather jacket, like a man makes fire from his guts. He flicked his
outstretched thumb and flame leapt up from the wood match sticking out of his
hand. Kian shook his head. Burton laughed and lit Kian’s cigarette and lit his own.
He waved his right hand, dismissing the lights of the suburban tract along the road.
“You know,” Burton said, “right now there are people in this world, in this state and
town and neighborhood who think Jesus Christ is coming soon and He will right the
wrongs through violence unspeakable.” He took a drag from his cigarette and blew
a great plume into the air above them. He held his hands before him, moving them
with each word, keeping time. “Jesus’ll send the evil to Hell, he will. And he will
save and pamper the righteous.” More smoke. The faint light brought out the gray in
his short hair, the wrinkles in his tan skin. “But, they lack the imagination to really
understand what that means for this neighborhood, for their family and friends. It’s
just, Yahoo! Bring on the end of the world! Joe there, who owns that blue King Cab
Ford will be torn from his wife’s side and convicted by demons of being a friendly.
He’ll be sucked into Hell to burn in excruciating pain forever. His wife begged him
to go to church, but the poor bastard always had to work. He sweated it out every
Sunday down at the grain elevator trying to get ahead of the bills and save up to buy
her a goddamn China set made in Korea. Joe’s youngest son is swept up in glory
and his oldest drops to his knees to repent for fucking the neighbor girl, who’s only
fourteen. At eighteen, he knew better and now he has confessed it and asked for the
cleaning bath of the blood of Christ to rejuvenate his soul. He starts to glow and
rise. Just down the street, right there,” – Burton pointed hard twice in the direction
of a split level 1970s ranch home, light blue with pearl white trim – “just a mere
fucking block away, the earth opens and out comes hell’s bloodied, horrific
demons. They climb the side and break into the upper bedroom window. They
clutch the fourteen-year-old tart’s throat and rip her out of her soft, warm bed and
drag her down into the bowels of the earth through the fiery chasm from whence
they came. Fourteen years old and unrepentant for having sex with a boy who said
he loved her and now she’s fucked for eternity. Her mom and dad stand there at the
edge of that driveway, already beginning to rise, scared by the demons and hoping
they are satisfied with the feast of their daughter.”
Burton had struck a familiar cord, the drunkard’s disregard of god. Kian hated God
and told Him so regularly. Every drunken asshole, not unlike Kian, allowed to
recover while children around the world suffered, like his daughter suffered,
unspeakable torments that caused them to scream so hard they screeched, only to
survive the physical catastrophes for a few weeks or months or even years and then
die. Well fuck Him and every asshole banging on the door with a knife drawn in the
shape of a Bible. He hated God because people are just blood and bones and should
have been left alone back when all they did was hunt and fuck.
“I hear you,” Kian said to Burton.
“Great, because this is what I wanted you to know. I’m making some money and
having fun and they want to stop that. They want to make me afraid of God and of
them and of their fucking morals and heebejeebe bullshit. But I’m not ever going to,
Kian. I’m not ever going to care. That’s why I wanted you to come out here. That’
s what I want you to know first and foremost, no matter what else I say in an
effort to promote what I do and keep the cops at bay.”
“Makes as much sense as anything else.”
“Let’s go inside.” Burton threw his cigarette into the bushes. “I hope I start a
fucking fire.”
He did. Just not in the bushes.
Kian followed him to the door and a young man with cords of matted hair hanging
off the top of his head stepped out. Purple and gold flamed across them as they
entered the doorway and the punk rock pummeled them. Inside the bright lights and
thunder was happy drinking and drug use, enough for days. There was also jumping
and hopping and falling in Burton’s office, a small room up stairs with matrices and
beanbags covering the floor. Slashing music cut Kian’s brain into ribbons and tore
his clothes off and licked him to the floor. Bliss. He is happy. But for just one
moment, his torso still above the fray, he thought, “this doesn’t have to happen.”
But when he looked down because her laugh was so young and happy and
immediate and soulless and her mouth was so red, he fell.
Two days later, the police came looking for the husband of a scared wife and found
Kian et al. Wendy didn’t said goodbye. She left a note on the door just above his
suitcase. “Don’t come back,” it read. A man started crying in Kian’s chest, but Kian
had found the remedy for this crying man down the street, dispensed liberally from
bottles behind the bar.
JOEY SAT ON the edge of the hard square bed in the motel room and waited for
Kate. He tried not to think. Thoughts were doubts. He wanted Kate instead. They
would start a family and be saved from this terrible curse, even if she was his sister,
which he thought she might not have been. The hotel door was slightly ajar. When it
finally did open, it took Joey several seconds to realize who the man was suddenly
standing in the opening. His brother’s white snap-up shirt was pulled out; his oil-
stained, dirt-crusted pants hung from hipbones, empty.
“Hey,” Kian said. His voice surprisingly strong and clear.
Joey jumped to his feet.
“What are you doing here?”
He stepped to the television and pushed the off button. “How did you get here?”
Kian swiped his hand through his coarsened hair. He was baffled by that very same
question.
“Large found you,” he said, “and I … I … I …”
He wanted to get right to the point and ask for money, but couldn’t. Those glue
fumes he huffed out of a bag under I-5 had hit him hard.
“Oh! You got any money?” Kian slumped.
“Fuck no!” Joey yelled. He stood up and switched the television back on and
cranked up the volume. A man on a treadmill laughed and cried out how wonderful
the technique was. Joey imagined Kate opening the door. He wanted Kian gone.
“What do you want?” he said over the cries of adulation from the television. “I was
just about to leave.”
Kian met Joey’s eyes for the first time in about eight years. Several thoughts about
his current situation swirled through Kian’s mind and then disappeared into the dark
and one came back. He’d probably have a hard time taking Joey now that Joey had
been working hard and he had been drinking so much. He closed his eyes and tried
to remember why he was there.
“Kian!” Joey yelled. “Get out!”
“Money!” Kian yelled back. “Money. Loan me a bit will ya, and I’ll be on my way.”
Joey grabbed his wallet from his back pocket, but he was too late. The door moved.
Joey twisted his face up. Kian spun around and stepped to the side as the metal slab
came open. Joey popped the television off and stepped forward. Kate put her head
into the room. She made eye contact with Joey and stepped inside.
“Goddamn family reunion,” Kian slurred and horse-laughed. He fell across Kate’s
path and onto the bed, arms spread eagle.
“I can’t believe you and Wayne have kept him here,” Kate said. She looked at Joey
like he was dog shit. Her blue shirt was wrinkled, partly unbuttoned. “What the hell
are you two doing with him?” Her voice quivered with anger. “What has happened
to him?” She stepped over to Kian and put her hand over her mouth. “Damn it. He
looks like he’s dead. We have to get him to a hospital.”
Joey waved his hands around, like a kid trying to keep a parent from knowing the
truth. “I swear to God he just showed up. The last time I saw him was in Billings
lying on the sidewalk.”
Kate dropped her hands from her mouth. “Sidewalk? What the hell is the matter
with you!” She stepped forward fast and slapped him. Joey’s face went red. His
eyes ran cold into hers. She backed up. “You saw him lying on the fucking
sidewalk. He’s going to die and leave Wendy and those two girls fatherless you son
of a bitch!”
“Look at him! He did it to himself.”
“Just call a ambulance or get out of the way so I can!”
“No!” Kian sat up. His eyes blurry and unfocused. “No. I’ll leave.”
Kate sat on the bed next to him and held him down.
“I’ll call,” Joey said.
“Don’t call anyone.” Kian lunged sideways out of Kate’s grip. She dragged him
back and he fell back onto the bed. “They’ll call the cops,” he said secretly. “I can’t
have cops.”
Joey had the beige receiver in his hand and his fingers on the square gray buttons.
He couldn’t think of the numbers.
Kian turned out of Kate’s arms, got his feet and grabbed Joey’s arm. He dove into
Joey’s chest, pushing him off balance into the dresser. The phone clattered on the
tabletop and the television rocked. Kate held onto Kian’s shirtsleeve and pulled.
“Okay, Kian,” she yelled. “We won’t call anyone.” She pulled him back to the edge
of the bed. Joey pushed Kian down the rest of the way.
“We’ll let him sleep here tonight,” Kate said.
“Sleep hell. I need a drink.”
Kate waved at Joey. “Get him some beer.”
“Now look whose pushing the booze on him,” Joey said.
“He’ll stay if we give him something to drink.” She kept a hand on Kian’s shoulder.
“That’s right,” Kian said.
“Shit!” Joey yelled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“One of dad’s illegitimate children brought me here. He’s looking for him. He found
him here.”
“Illegitimate children?” Kate said. “Where is he?”
“He took after Wayne. I don’t know where they went. Let’s get a drink and talk
about it. Let’s leave this fucker.”
“I can’t believe this!” Joey yelled. He paced in a circle. “He’s like a plague or a
demon or something. A horrible abomination wondering the planet casting his ill
seed around like salt, like death casting his shadow over everything. And now I have
another half-brother out there somewhere?”
“I guess that’s right,” Kian said.
Kate pulled his shoulder until he laid back. “Where is he?”
“He just said he went after Wayne!”
“But why? What does he want?”
“Maybe he wants to kill him. How the fuck should I know?”
“Does Wayne know?” Joey rubbing his face fast and hard.
“You have to find them. I’ll stay here with Kian and you have to find them.”
“He could be anywhere Kate!” Joey lied. He didn’t want to leave her. “I’ll never find
him.” He sat on the edge of the bed. He bowed his head and angled his eyes up at
Kian. “Why are you here?” His heart beat one long, torturous throb. He wasn’t
asking Kian. Joey was asking God. He put his face in his hands. He rubbed and
rubbed his eyes. He stood up and stepped toward Kate. He felt so ashamed of
himself. At a blink of her eye, he’d go get the beer. He was stupid. Just leave, he
told himself. These people make you sick.
“I have to go for a walk,” Joey said, straining the words through his shattered
hopes. “I have to get out of here. I am a man of God. I am not a filthy animal like
this thing and Wayne.”
“This thing! is your brother.”
Joey, feeling a cord snap in his neck, jammed his left hand into the front pocket of
his jeans and grabbed his pocketknife. He unclasped the blade. God brought Kian
here to die. He jumped onto his knees on the bed and shoved the fat blade of the
pocketknife into Kian’s chest, scraping a rib. He jerked the blade back, and it came
out as fast and easy as it went in, like it hadn’t.
The three of them stopped moving and talking and looked at the little slit in Kian’s
shirt.
“Now he’s not,” Joey said, almost a whisper.
“I’m burning,” Kian said.
Blood spread across the fabric of his dirty white shirt. Rivulets streamed from under
the shirttail across the slick, polyurethane bed covers. Kian looked up and moved his
mouth. A secret. His eyes opened wide. Joey backed up against the wall. Kian’s
eyes fell dull. Joey thought again of the sin of the father running through not only
Kian’s veins, but now through the veins of another. He pulled the hotel door open
and stepped outside. Rain was falling out of the dark gray clouds lighted from
underneath by the city. The world outside suddenly seemed so big and the hotel
room so small. He felt that now he could go anywhere and he’d be free. He
wondered if anyone would even notice what had happened in that little room, one of
millions. He took two steps toward the dark street, walking. He felt light and tall.
Then he heard a distant siren and felt a burn of panic in his neck and the back of his
head and he sprinted to the street. Running felt good, just pumping his legs,
pounding the pavement. He slowed after several hundred yards and then settled into
a jogging pace down Aurora toward the city lights. He felt like laughing. He felt
open to the rain. The big drops fell through him like he was an angel.
KIAN SAT UP on the hard hotel bed, awake suddenly and still wearing his boots.
He had forgotten something, something terribly important, so important that his
head hurts from trying to remember it. It’s something about his daughter. He
squeezed his fists and flexed his arms to waken them. He’s left her some place.
Where could he have left her? How? Then he remembered – she’s dead. She’s dead
and you didn’t leave her anywhere. The relief he felt was quickly overwhelmed by a
passion to hold her. He swung his legs off the bed and took a bottle of tequila from
the shelf next to the door. He drank from the bottle’s mouth.
He made his ablutions under the dim morning light seeping into the hotel room. He
patted his face dry with the damp, gray hand towel, stuffed his shirttail into his
pants. He attempted the door, difficult given its new, odd angle to the floor. The
narrow hallway bent the other way. He stopped and put his hand against the
yellowing wall to reorient his balance, then descended the wooden steps to the front
door in a rush. Outside, the Subaru was parked halfway into the street. The cops
had left it alone, nothing unusual on the reservation. He got in it, spun the motor and
gunned it through the mist and light fog along the curving highway bordered by
pastures. Ghost horses appeared dark brown in the diffused light. They turned their
head toward him as he swerved past, a dead thing still breathing.
The headquarters of the Crow Reservation Tribal Government was a dark, brick
building. The glass and steel doors closed tight. A handful of cars, windows fogged,
were scattered around the parking lot. The engine clicked down. Barren trees, low
bushes and ramshackle houses crowded in around the headquarters. He was early to
see if the reservation cops were going to storm the building. They probably wouldn’
t, but he needed to know for sure.
To help pass the time, Kian decided to smoke pot. He reached behind his head to the
dome light and flipped it on. The world outside died, blocked out by the sudden
appearance of the inside of his car. The world as the inside of his car seemed calm
enough. He took the road map off the passenger seat, unfolded it on his lap and put
the baggie down. The cigarette papers came one at a time from their folds. He took
two and creased one in half and lined it. He thought about his father. Evidently Dad
was back in town to dry out and make repairs to the farm and mom’s checkbook.
The joint smoked and sputtered and a runner of fire nearly ripped the side open until
he stopped it with a spit-wet finger. He let the hand with the joint rest on his leg.
Kian was like his father in a lot of bad ways. The light of the morning seeped into
the sky like piss into water. He pulled his mind into the new morning light. He was
good and stoned now. It’d be tough getting through this buzz to the story. Then
Wendy and her body floated up, pale, like a body rising in murky water. Her eyes
open and wet. Her chest still. He hit the joint again and stubbed it out in the ashtray.
He leaned forward and punched the side of his head.
Later, a crowd had gathered like a flock of crows. Kian glanced down at the man in
the car again, and the man’s black eyes were still on him. Kian cringed at the
mistake. Now he would have to hear this man’s arguments and act like he was
taking notes. The man’s shoulder rolled and the car window came down.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Kian said.
“You with the paper?”
“In Billings.” Kian leaned closer to the car.
“Who do you think is right?” the Indian said. “Linda or Tom.”
“I’m only here to report what happens,” Kian said. “I don’t know who’s right or
wrong.”
“Do you care?”
“I don’t know how to care. I don’t live here.”
The man turned away and looked out the front window at the barricaded doors and
nodded his head slowly.
“Some of us are ready to do anything for her,” he said. He put his hands on the
steering wheel and squeezed, causing his knuckles to rise. “She’s going to bring
justice to this reservation and put those criminals out of power for good.”
Kian took his notebook out of his back pocket, the pen from inside his coat and
wrote that down. He couldn’t help it. He envied the man his certainty and his clarity.
Kian didn’t think he had ever felt that simplicity of motivation, that clarity of
purpose, but he had. He’s just forgotten. The man didn’t turn away, but Kian closed
the notepad and stuck his pen back under his arm. He stepped away from the car,
deeper into the crowd and closer to the car backed against the doors at the
entrance. Expectation agitated the masses, pulling them toward the building again.
Then Linda Two Horses came out. She was a tall woman with a matronly form.
She stepped up on the bumper of the car. Dean, her henchman, reached up and held
her arm at the elbow. An ebullient, loquacious queen at her coronation. She bobbled
as she ascended to the Impala’s shiny hood. The women inside looked at each other
with wide eyes. She steadied and put her hands in the air. Triumphantly still on her
feet, she led the charge against injustice. Kian looked at her with scorn. She said
something, but he couldn’t understand her words. The night fog wrapped his head
in a wet shawl and he stuck the pen back into his armpit. He walked by the car and
the man with shiny black hair. Down the sidewalk from them, a pickup was parked
on a strip of grass in front of the windowless side of the brick building. A mound of
white-bread sandwiches was stacked on the tailgate next to a big silver coffee pot.
Kian picked up a sandwich and poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup. In a world full
of garbage what’s one more dead animal? One more dead species? Kian’s normal
melancholy. He turned around and looked back at Linda. She was bending slightly
on the hood of the car. The henchman’s hand on her calf. “We’re not ...” Blah blah
blah. Kian turned away. Whatever. He picked up another sandwich wedge. He
noticed then that the man in the Dodge was looking at him again. He had started
something with that guy, and he wondered how it would end. Kian smiled and
nodded backward in Linda’s direction. The man in the car gave him a thumbs up.
Kian lifted his cup. You bet. What’s a world full of beautiful dead people matter?
Wendy hated when he talked like this. Kian turned back to the big silver
coffeemaker and topped off his cup with one finger on the lever. There has to be
hope, Wendy said. There has to be meaning in the world. Something has to matter if
only because we need it to. Kian stuffed a wedge in his mouth to occupy himself.
He tossed the remaining bite of the practical finger food into the bush next to the
pickup. He took a little bottle of gin out of his coat pocket and poured it all into his
mouth. As he slouched at the tailgate wanting something he couldn’t put his finger
on, his sister, Kate, the oldest, conceived in illegitimacy, was hurtling through the air
from East to West, from the cool waters of intellect and gleaming New York City to
the hard-packed desert of heredity. The earth here remembered her. It turned under
Kian’s feet indescribably toward her. The Earth was a little anxious. Kate had tried
to escape and that always makes an impression. None shall leave the land that has
spawned them.
KATE SQUEEZED THROUGH the crowd at the door of the Sundown and shot
outside. She spotted Joey moving between cars.
“Joey!” she yelled and trotted after him. “Joe!”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. He had black hair like Wayne but kept it
short, nearly a buzz cut. He was taller and leaner than Wayne. The veins and
tendons in his thin neck jumped out when he moved his head. He had grown into an
attractive man, but he was sulky and depressed. He shrugged his shoulders a lot and
let his chin drop in conversations. He had been like this since they were kids.
Confused, distant and fearful. It made her mad at him, especially since he blamed
Wayne for the way he felt and his failures. He had been through hell as a kid, it was
true. But they all had been through hell and now they needed to get on with the rest
of their lives.
“Joe,” she said when she caught up to him between the two cars. “I need a ride. In
fact,” she added, smiling and pushing her hands into the air, “I need a place to stay
tonight. Wayne’s coming home, and I definitely don’t want to be there.”
Joey didn’t say anything. His face was long and forlorn. His eyes were tortured,
enflamed like he had been crying.
“Are you okay?”
He turned away and stepped, a crumpled cottonwood leaf skittering across the
gravel. He would soon be blown up against the fence, piled up with all the other
inconsequential, tortured and confused men. He was a small flame that didn’t have
the language or experience or cultural education to know what he was or what was
possible for his life. He can never be at peace. Kate knew this. She felt enormous
pity for all of them, especially this one, Joey. Cast out of his father’s life, doomed to
circle the family like a meteor-smashed moon. He had lived with his mother in a
small apartment in Billings, where she still lived, while Kate and Kian got the run of
the farm. Horses and cows and plenty of food. Dental care. A little money now and
then in high school to go out on. Meanwhile, Joey had grown up on a skateboard
and eaten a lot of spaghetti. Wayne had allowed him to stay on the farm a few
summers, but he never gave him much. In fact, Kate had heard that he never gave
them money and that Joey and his mother, Angel, had lived off food stamps.
“Just tired,” he said. “It’s good to see you, but I’m just so tired of this whole mess.”
“I am too, Joey. I am too. So what do you say? Got any room out at that trailer?”
She crossed her arms, closing the light jacket across her chest where his eyes had
wandered. The two boys, Joey and Kian, had always had a strong affection for her,
a natural thing that grew out of proportion when planted out on an isolated farm.
Kian had securely grown out of it, but Joey was still confused by his affection for
her.
“Yes,” he said. “I got room.”
When they made the interstate, Joey accelerated through the gears to match
highway speeds of ninety mph. Traffic stretched out sparse on the black ribbons,
red pairs and white pairs. As they sped toward his camper at the cattle-trailer wash,
yard lights bunched and scattered all along the northern horizon where Worden,
Huntley, Shepherd and the Heights neighborhoods were strung together, outposts in
the wide expanse of black. To the south, where the Crow Indian reservation spread
out its desolate waves of sagebrush, ponies and government shacks, Joey noted the
absence of lights. Just the black stretch all the way to the ragged Pryor Mountains
somewhere out there. There were a few isolated and desperate individual lights
flickering on that sea of waste. Kate pushed the cassette tape into the player and the
wild picking of skillful bluegrass skittled around the cab. Joey grabbed the round
can of chewing tobacco from the dash, removed the lid and took a pinch of the
pungent grinds. He put the tobacco in his lip and looked over at Kate. She was
staring out, no doubt thinking of all those city lights and handsome boys back East.
Inside the camper, Kate waited by the small door in front of the bathroom, her hand
on the refrigerator handle. Yellow light from the battery-run lamps cast a pall on the
wood paneling and orange, cloth bench seats. Joey twisted the dining table,
unscrewing it from the chrome post. He put the tabletop under the seat cushions
and spread out the backrest cushions.
“I’ve got a clean sleeping bag,” he said. He rubbed his hands on his pants and took
down a stuffed blue nylon bag from an overhead storage cabinet. He tossed it onto
the makeshift bed. It bounced taut. He turned his back to her and pulled the bottom
of the couch at the other end of the trailer out from one side. The cushion fell into
place. Kate picked up the bag and pulled the draw string. She started feeding the
fabric onto the bed. He had said it was clean, but who knows whether that meant he
wasn’t dirty the last time he slept in it or if he had actually washed it. Meanwhile,
Joey’s mind was locked on its own problem, how would the two of them get ready
for bed? He didn’t know if he should come out and say, You step into the bathroom
and I strip and hop into bed … or to just climb into his bed with his clothes on and
risk her telling him to get over himself and go to bed right. Either way he felt
exposed, embarrassed. Kate kicked her boots off and jumped into the bag with her
clothes on. Joey flopped down on the couch, relieved, and pulled his blankets up.
They were silent long enough for him to wonder if Kate had fallen asleep. He sat up
and reached the light switch, snapping the inside of the trailer black.
“Remember when Kian’s daughter died last year?” Kate said.
“Yes. I never could talk to Kian, but he really wouldn’t listen to me at all after that.”
“Yeah, well,” Kate said, wanting to get to the real reason why she had come home.
She imagined it would inspire Joey and they could team up in the effort to save their
brother from himself and from Wayne. “Remember how the preacher said we
needed to watch him because no one knows just how profoundly, how deeply the
death of a child will change a person? And how Kian kept saying he wasn’t angry at
God.”
“Yes,” Joey said. He leaned up on his elbow to look at her, warming up to the
theological potential of Kate’s comments.
“Well, Kian later told me that he wasn’t so mad at God for letting his daughter die.
He was angry because God had let him fail her. I think that’s still hurting him,
making him do crazy, self-destructive things. He’s even left Wendy and the kids.
She wouldn’t say what happened except that he didn’t come home for a couple of
days and she took the kids to her parent’s in South Dakota.”
“God has a plan,” Joey said. He chastised himself for feeling satisfaction at the
news of Kian’s failures. “There is the sin of the father to be dealt with.” His voice
was cold and faint, talking to himself.
Despite herself, despite her desire to reach out and lead Joey to health, Kate shivered
and pulled the sleeping bag over her eyes to block the outdoor lights. That distant
tone in his voice, that same hopeless religiosity that had plagued him and kept him
depressed. Those things made her feel weak. The whole night weakened her. She
felt small under the slick bag, small and helpless against the troubles in her family.
She dreaded her dreams but she didn’t want to stay awake for the long dark hours
of a sleepless, power-draining night. She tried to think of New York. The buildings
and taxis and miles of window-shopping with girlfriends. All-night conversations
over coffee and the occasional martini. The freedom to read and write and talk.
Then she remembered that her makeup was all at her mother’s house. Shit. I’ll have
to get my bag right away. I am definitely not going through tomorrow without
makeup. The hair she could put in a ponytail, but she didn’t need any challenges to
her confidence tomorrow when she goes hunting for Kian. She felt relieved to have
that little mundane problem to solve in the morning and she focused on it, she
imagined the little blue compact in the side pocket of her black suitcase, which was
… she searched the house in her mind… just inside Kian’s bedroom next to his old
bed.
CATLYNN STOOD facing the large picture window. Her reflection strong in the
milky black. The narrow driveway wound from the gravel in front of the window
across a small dike between two sloughs, choked with the long, narrow leaves and
bursts of cattails. The meandering lane faded into the darkness just beyond the dike.
The heavy cold had set in and froze the ground. The weeds were white with hoar
frost. The sky cut by the brown hills up by the main road was just turning blue, like
the dark blue of an eye, and Catlynn hugged her chest. She held the pale white
phone against her head. Her gaze stretched out unfocussed and the world fell flat
and distant. So this is how that happens, she said to herself. This is how history
repeats itself.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“I’m here. Who did you say you were again?”
“Sergeant Nollette ...”
“Now what are those little girls going to do?”
“Girls?”
“His daughters. Those poor little girls have been through an awful lot lately.”
“Your daughter didn’t mention them. Is he married?” Nollette decided she would go
back to talk with Kate to see what else she had left out of her family history. She
had been called off the case twice to take up a position on a long-running protest-
turn-riot downtown. With all those interruptions, she hadn’t done a very good job
interviewing Kate. Maybe the man’s father will be of some use, if he shows up at
the motel. She leaned back in the office chair, the desk she shared with several
other beat-cops cluttered with loose papers, two phones and several coffee cups.
She tapped the pen on the rim of a blue and black cup with a negative image of
Glock 9 pistol bent around it.
“Yes or he was. I think they still are.”
“Trouble?”
“Some.”
“Can you tell me how to contact his wife?” She rocked the chair forward and put
the pen point on the note pad. As Catlynn said the numbers slowly. Nollette
scratched Wendy’s name and a phone number on the little note pad at an angle to
the blue lines.
“How long have they been separated?”
“Do you know who killed him?”.
“We believe so.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“You’re breathing too fast.”
“Just what exactly do you mean he’s dead?” Catlynn sat down in a kitchen chair
and put her hand over her eyes. “Kian Waters. You have the right person. What the
hell was he doing in Seattle? He was just in Billings, running around drinking himself
stupid every day. How could he get to Seattle?”
“I’m sorry,” Nollette said. “He came with a son of your husband’s.”
“Joey?”
“No. We don’t know his name right now. Kate said Kian came to Seattle with him,
but he didn’t say his name. Do you know any other sons of Wayne’s?”
Catlynn looked up and saw her face reflected in overlapping double images in the
two panes of glass in the big window, the light outside long gone. No moon. The
kitchen floated in the black. Her face and shoulders in the center of the blurred
kitchen, the shape of a head and brown hair. Her features blurred into generality.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“No, but I can’t say I’m too surprised.” There had been growing in her a feeling of
disappointment or sorrow, she couldn’t tell which it was. She had been a good
mother. She had tried to keep Wayne in line long enough to at least get the kids
through high school. She had married Wayne knowing exactly who he was and
couldn’t blame him for her marital losses. But she could blame him for wrecking the
lives of those poor boys. He was all too happy to make children by nearly any
woman who’d let him. She had to be the one to make him take responsibility for
them. She’d kept on with him partly out of love. He had made her life both painful
and pleasurable. She also pried all the money and fatherly support she could out of
him for those kids, including that weird stepson Joey. She tried to make Wayne
treat the kids well, and she spent all she could on them. She practically adopted Joey
out of fairness to him, to get him the hell out of that church where his mother spent
all her time. Joey hadn’t asked for a father like Wayne. She had tried her best for
them, but they were all ungrateful. So the flame of disappointment flickered to life
again for a moment. The fact was that as soon as the kids got old enough to leave,
they ran out on her and disappeared off the face of the Earth. So, no, she wouldn’t
cry over Kian.
“Who killed him?”
“According to your daughter, it was Joey who stabbed him.”
“Boy, doesn’t that just figure.”
“Let’s get down to business.”
“This isn’t Joey’s home. He isn’t my son.”
“Wayne’s?”
“Prolific isn’t he.” She exhaled the last bit of concern she had for that beautiful wild
man who, for many years, led her outside of her own misery. Wayne was easy to
fall in love with and impossible to live with. He knew how to work, build things and
bring in money. He just didn’t know how to stay home.
“I only have pictures of Joey from when he was a kid.”
WAYNE EMERGED THROUGH Catlynn’s front door dragging Joey, who
struggled to get his feet under his weight after losing his heals against the doorjamb.
Joey’s arm was slung across Wayne’s shoulders. Wayne smiled shyly like Santa
Clause surprised.
Catlynn stepped into the living room. She held her shoulders down and her fingers
spread out.
“What the hell happened to my yard?” Wayne said, a bright, laughing tone.
“Don’t you bring him in here.”
Wayne let go of Joey’s arm. Joey collapsed onto the floor and flattened himself out.
He breathed fast and ragged. He pushed up on an elbow. Wayne kicked it out. He
thudded on the thin eggshell carpet, coughed and red splatters bloomed in the carpet
around his head. Wayne stepped toward Catlynn. He looked over his shoulder and
then back.
“We’ll leave you to whatever it is you’ve got going on here Cat, but you’re going to
have to share for a few more days, got that? There’s no choice in this for any of
us. We’re going to get this business settled and then we’ll all go our separate ways.”
Wayne put his hand out palm up.
“Where the hell are you going to keep him? The police will come here looking for
him. You know that.” Catlynn looked down at her hands. “Why the hell do I have to
look at him? Why does he have to be here?”
Large stepped into the room behind Wayne and stood over Joey. His long black hair
laid over his shoulders and down his chest. “Looks like you’ve had a fire out there.
Feels like there’s another one coming.”
Catlynn looked up at Large then back to Wayne. “You and your off-springs need to
just get the fuck out of here.”
“I …” Wayne stopped. He looked down at Joey and then up at Large, who was
nodding his head, though he didn’t appear to be agreeing or disagreeing with
anything. Wayne looked back a Joey. “I just can’t let this go. I don’t know.”
“This is what the police are for,” Catlynn said. She stepped closer. She looked at
her hands. Turning them over and back and then over and then she started rubbing
off spray paint. “Wayne,” she threw her hands down, “just get him out of my sight.
Put him in the cellar and bury him. ”
Wayne reached down, stunned by the clarity of Catlynn’s wish, and grabbed Joey’s
arm. He raised him half off the floor. Joey grunted and grabbed Wayne’s sleeve and
pulled. Wayne dragged him in to the room.
Catlynn stepped aside and let them pass. She rubbed at the paint on her hands. She
looked up at the angular shadow of Wayne and his son, entering the lowlight of the
kitchen. Joey wasn’t kicking or holding any part of himself now. The toes of his
boots stuttered along the floor. Wayne pull him relentlessly. The waistline of Joey’s
pants had fallen down low on his narrow hips. Two long steps dragged him out of
the light and into the dark bedroom. Catlynn turned around and looked at Large.
Only his eyebrows and his cheekbones were Wayne’s. The rest were his mother’s,
whoever she was.
“You better just turn right around and get back to the rez,” Catlynn said. Her hands
in her hair. She dragged them through the knots. “This isn’t going to end well. But
if you have to stay, then shut the goddamn door before you freeze us all out of
here.”
Large stepped into the room and swung the door to the jamb and then pushed it
hard until it clicked.
“Shit,” Catlynn said and waved him away. “Those cops get here, you’ll wish you’d
have gotten the hell out of here. Wayne may be your father, but you don’t know
him. Once he gets bent on revenge, he wont stop.”
“It’s like a curse,” Large said. He sat on the couch and leaned back. “It’s like every
where you go out here there someone dying. Wrecks. Drunks. Drugs. Murder.
Suicide. Disease. It’s like a weight. A heavy blanket that we all live under. Outside,”
Large looked up at Catlynn, “I had this feeling, like a voice in my head, it said a fire
was coming.”
“Ha,” Catlynn said, “a fire is always coming.”
“I guess you’re right, but this is pretty weird though. Your husband is down in the
basement …”
“It’s not a basement. It’s a cellar.”
“Right.”
Catlynn slipped her arms into a dark blue down-filled coat with strips of silver duct
tape on one shoulder and across the back. She put her hands in the coat’s poofy
pockets and pushed up with her shoulders until the collar floated up to her nose.
Inside the neck of the coat, Catlynn diminished. Her loopy brown hair, streaked
with silver and ragged at its ends, fell out over her shoulders. Her nose, pale and
white. Catlynn let her eyes meet Large’s big black orbs.
“But don’t you have that sense of panic? Like this doesn’t have to happen. We
could go back there and tell Wayne that we’ve called the police and an ambulance
and that they’ll take care of Joey?”
A bang fell from the back room.
Large twitched.
Catlynn turned her head and then turned back. “Just the cellar door.” It banged flat
against the concrete whenever someone let it fall open. Wayne would have yelled at
the kids for that. Catlynn opened the front door. On her way past Large, she looked
into his black eyes again. He was looking into the kitchen. Joey groaned long and
low. She thought Joey said “dad.” She ducked her head deeper into the coat and
stepped outside. She slammed the door closed behind her.
The lace curtains settled down against the glass. Large heard the sound of metal
cutting into gravel, rhythmically. Wayne is wasting time, trying to figure himself
out, Large thought. He’ll come out of there in a minute. He’ll call the sheriffs and
ambulance. He’s just working up to it. Large also considered that he had helped take
Joey from Seattle and had given him a boot or two as well. That’s just not going to
go over well with the authorities.
“I’ll wait for Wayne to make the call and when he does I’ll take off. If he doesn’t
call in a bit I’ll call, but then they will know there was another person here. If he
calls and I take off, even if the crazy old woman says I was here, I’ll be more like a
mirage than a man with a name. I could leave right now, but then my brother will
die. This is a conundrum or maybe I am just at a loss.”
KIAN TOSSED his notebook into the passenger seat of the Subaru and arched up to
look into the back for stragglers. He got the heavy cell phone out from between the
seats and dialed the tribal judge’s home number with his thumb. No answer. He
started the car and drove out of the lot. On the highway, he called the late night
editor and gave him the new stuff, reading from the notebook on his right leg, the
phone pinched between his head and shoulder. He flipped the pages over and back
reading quotes, glancing up at the road and steering back to his side of the
pavement. The road had succumbed to a low level fog caused by the freak mist
hitting the sun-burned ground. He read through the scrawl on the narrow white
pages. Then he said, “Cheers!” and killed the connection. He tossed the phone back
into the passenger seat. As he neared the boarder of the reservation and the little
town there, in the night fog, a car became a globe of light that intensified, shot by
and then turned wet-red. A globe of light came up behind Kian, split and four small
eyes stared at him through the rearview mirror. Some asshole was going to pass
them all on this half-frozen wet stretch of highway. Then the globe became one
again, only closer; its two bright fires burning on high-beam. The car drew nearer,
slowly, over a mile and a half and then settled in behind Kian at about 50 yards. Kian
braked hard to make the turn onto the shallow parking lot of the hotel. The Delilah
was a Victorian-style three-story wooden house sitting alone next to the highway,
its crown lost in the black fog. He watched the rearview mirror for the car to pull in
to the lot next to him, but it drove slowly by. Lit in the red of his brake lights, Kian
thought he recognized the man with the long black hair. The car drove on and then
dissolved in the wet air. Kian settled back in his seat, rolled another small joint and
smoked it. He was relieved that the day was behind him and especially relieved that
the tribal battle hadn’t been resolved. He would get to stay another day and night on
the reservation and in his small room at the Delilah. He gathered the notebook and
phone from the seat and got out. The cold grass fields around the hotel were silent.
White lights appeared on the little highway. Tires rushed across wet pavement.
Silence returned. The cold wrought-iron handle squealed quietly in his hand. The
door whined inward, slowly suffering against the rust in its hinges. The hall was
dark except for a yellow light near its end, spilling out from around the corner
where the bar was. He stopped there before going up stairs. He ordered a shot and a
beer from the old woman bartender.
“I’ll catch that drink when I come back down,” he said to the old wisp of a woman.
She nodded and wiped the mahogany counter where his class had left a ring.
Kian climbed up two flights of creaking stairs, each step covered in thread-bare
carpeting, purple paisley where it wasn’t worn out. His room was on the left of the
landing on the top floor. One hundred layers of white paint made the door to the
room feel heavy, like the door to a vault. The heavy bolt moved smooth and solid.
Inside his room, the overhead bulb swayed minutely, moved by his entrance.
Hanging from its naked cord from a silver plate screwed into the high ceiling, it
caused a disturbance among the shadows in the short and wide room. The bed took
most of the space and jetted out almost to the door. A small round table sat under
the rippled-glass window. Two wooden chairs without cushions approached it at an
angle. A simple, red poppy made of stiffened silk leaned in a clear glass vase,
opaque with dust, sitting on the wood-panel nightstand. The red telephone’s
industrial design encouraged short declarative sentences. Sometimes Kian turned the
rotor just to hear the ratcheting return to zero. The practical heartiness of it felt like
a truth, a stone in water. The closet was cut into the wall behind the door. A
wooden rod stretched from end to end with two wire hangers dangling from it. The
closet was so shallow that a guest’s clothes stuck out when hanging there. Kian
didn’t hang his clothes, so this didn’t bother him. An old sink and speckled mirror
met his eyes. He shut the door and dropped his small bag, phone and notepad on the
floor of the closet space and stepped to the sink. His face felt oily and grimy from
standing around in the wind all day. He bent over the sink, avoiding the man in the
mirror. Black spots speckled the old porcelain bowl where the white had chipped
off. He twisted the faucet and brown water coughed out. Then the water cleared
and he splashed it on his eyes. He felt better now. The evening’s first shot of scotch
had warmed him. He dried his face on a shirt and went back down stairs to the bar.
He drank several more shots and beer all in a rush. He put some cash on the table
and swirled out of the bar. The silent bartender leaned in the corner, smoking and
coughing. He climbed back into his room. He pissed and unwound himself onto the
bed. The phone appeared next to him and he picked up the handset. He weighed it in
his hand. It felt right.
A headache started and then dissipated and then came back stronger. A blister on
his brain.
To distract himself, he dialed work and laughed at them. “Blood!” he heard himself
saying. “Yes! Blood!” He laughed harder into the little black holes of the phone’s
thick handset. Then he hung up. He laughed some more and felt the wonderful
absence of connection to any emotion. What a neat trick, he thought. This oblivion
thing is just right. He reached over his right and groped around inside the mini
refrigerator. The tequila folded space and unfolded time. A particularly good trick
performed by this type of liquor. Each drink had its own gimmick. Gin made your
body light like you weighed less than a feather. The sweet liquors made you think of
squeezing girls. Vodka, of course, turned you into a potato.
He relaxed back onto the bed and ruminated. He had that desired distance from all of
life now, and he watched dispassionately, but with humor. He slept. A little later, he
stumbled out of his room to escape the ghosts in his bed. He went downstairs
because the bar at the Delilah never closed. The red carpet fell into vanishing points.
The floor humped several times, like a heart beat. He cleared his throat and checked
the change in his pockets. A twenty came out. Two ones fell to the floor. The old
lady – paper-thin skin stretched tight over sharp knuckles – grasped a bottle off the
top shelf. Her silvery lace shirtsleeve slid down her arm toward her elbow. She blew
the dust off its blue neck. The bottle looked medicinal. She brought the scotch to
him and sat it down on the bar top and smiled. Her straight, white, fake teeth
gleamed in the poor light, slightly off kilter in her mouth. When she noticed him
looking at her mouth, she clacked the top row of teeth into place.
“How much?” Kian asked.
“Hey, for a newspaper man,” clack, “it’s the same as the other stuff.”
The old lady leaned down. Her spine ripped up through the fabric of her shirt. She
straightened with a water glass in her right hand and put it down in front of him and
poured a half a glass.
“These damn Indians will drive you to drink,” she said.
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t quite sound fair to them,” Kian said. “Mostly, it’s
politicians who drive me to drink, Indian or white.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she said.
The old woman reached below the bar, and Kian tried not to see the pelvic bones
rotating up out of her nearly absent ass. Then she stood triumphant with another
bottle of clear booze and poured herself a drink and toasted Kian. She slipped the
drink through slightly parted, blue lips and took the bottle to the opposite corner of
the bar where an equally old man dressed in a yellow shirt and baked tallow skin,
waggled his glass at her. He had appeared from out of nowhere. The woman poured
his glass half full, and he too toasted Kian in the air. She sat on a stool in front of
the tallowed old man, feet on the bottom rung. Kian’s mind was where he wanted it
– on the world, where everything, according to all mythology and the gods too were
focused. It seems that all existence everywhere is focused on us, Kian thought. He
took the twenty from his pocket and floated it onto the bar. The next time he looked
up, the twenty was gone and he was alone. His head was so full of clouds he could
barely see out of his eyes. He found himself inside his room in the middle of black
space. The faucet burped red then cleared and he drank from his hands. Iron, he
thought, his mind slowed by booze, operating just enough to keep his heart beating.
Sometime in the morning, the dream began again.
He sat at a table in a small, dark cafe. Light pouring in the windows, hitting only the
table tops and making hard shadows. Kian sat across from his wife, whose black
hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She’s wearing a white shirt with lace
ruffles at her wrists. The kind of shirt she wore when they were in junior high. Kian’
s holding the baby in his arms. The table had been set with eggs and toast on heavy
white plates. The coffee cups with thick rims matched them. Chrome silverware.
The egg yolks were broken and seeped across the plate, soaking into the hash
browns. Wendy tucked a half-piece of toast in with the smeared egg yolks and sat
back in her chair. She looked at him, then away. Her face expectant but
disappointed, like she knew what was coming just as he did and just because she
was there in the dream for him didn’t mean she’d have to watch. Big black birds
scored the sky in front of the window. The baby slept in Kian’s arms, wrapped in a
soft, cotton blanket, white and patterned with small handprints, each a different
pastel color. His brain said, She’s alive. Now’s the chance. Give everything.
Then it started.
Kian moved to uncover her face. He knew he was dreaming her, but still he wanted
to save her from dying, even if only in a dream. That didn’t seem like too much to
ask from a dream. Wendy stared out the window. The birds had frozen, stenciled
on the glass. The baby moved, an arm turned.
“She can’t die again,” Kian said without voice. Water poured into a glass behind
him. He held his daughter tighter because it was coming and he was going to die
instead of her this time. He put out his right hand, crouching over her. But the man
was already there, standing too close. Her white skin just showing out of the blanket
she had pulled from her eyes. “No,” Kian said and he cradled her with both arms.
“No.” He put his face in the blanket, crying. When he looked up the birds flew away
and Wendy wiped a tear. He let the blanket slide across his legs onto the floor. A
moan from deep inside poured out of his mouth, silent. It filled the air with misery.
Wendy’s eyes went dark. She watched the ravens score the window with their
black wings. A hole opened in his chest and the moan rushed back into him, the
velocity of it pulling him inside the black too.
Kian’s misery woke him. It was still dark in the room and he weaved toward the
sink to drink water. Two rusty swallows got down before a reddened bile and slick
booze came back up, splashing into the bowl and up the wall. He folded up onto the
linoleum.
The phone woke Kian at noon. Three sharp rings. He fought his way out of the
dream of her in his arms, first with a cigarette and then, after sloppily dressing, with
coffee and a shot of tequila from the last little bit left in the bottle next to the bed.
When he got into his car, he exhaled hard, fogging the windows. He pulled a
cigarette from the pack on the seat and swallowed a mouthful of fuzz and lit it. He
drove to the council building, returning to other people’s lives, seeking answers he
didn’t care about. The scotch and coffee had smoothed out some of the wrinkles,
but he felt heavy, old. Dread was all over him, like he had been dipped in it.
The parking lot at the tribal headquarters was mostly empty. He sighed relief. The
crowd was gone, and he hoped that the whole mess had resolved itself while he lay
passed out in his room. He dragged another cigarette out of the pack. The few cars
still in the lot had been parked neatly, within the white grid. The lines lifted off the
black pavement and turned and fell, jumped up and fell back into place. He shut his
eyes, but even with his eyes squeezed shut, the grid bounced up and danced and
turned. He felt nauseous and opened his eyes again, literally looking for purchase.
The Earth settled down. Kian punched the dashboard as hard as he could swing.
The glove box popped open.
When he shut it and looked up, it dawned on him that the people weren’t just getting
a late start, something had changed. Somehow the crisis had left this location or
lifted from the reservation altogether. He got out of his car and went to the doors of
the tribal council building. The naked sunlight cut along the building’s edges, the
brown paint pealing all along the eves, around the doors and windows. Not only
were the cars gone from the front, but also the chain that had held the doors
together had been removed. Of the night’s turmoil, only the brown crust from a
piece of white bread remained in the bush next to the sidewalk by the door.
Apparently, the business of running the tribe had recommenced. Kian’s arms felt
small, his legs thin. His head had been punctured and acid pumped in through a
straw.
Inside the building, he went to the information window, an opening cut into the
brick wall, a narrow, wooden counter and behind that the illusion of dozens of
people sitting at desks in a bright and clean room. He asked the big woman sitting in
a chair behind the window where was Linda. The woman looked right through him,
like he was there but insubstantial.
“Is she in today?”
The woman looked up at his hairline and slowly down his haggard, puffy face.
Then he felt a hand on his arm. He didn’t recognize the woman who had touched
him. She was taller than Kian by an inch and was more black than Indian. She was
beautiful. Her hair was braided over her head into tight, shining rows.
“Who are you looking for?” She spoke in a high clear tone. Kian yearned to hold her.
“Oh, I know you,” she said.
His heart thunked once and then fell into his pelvis.
“Linda is in a meeting,”
“What happened? Are you a new spokesperson?”
“Yes, from the Mitchell and Krank law firm.”
“Oh,” he said. “So,” taking his note pad out of his back pocket, “what happened?”
“She came to an agreement with the judge this morning, and they will be in a
meeting all day, without any comments afterward.” The woman stood perfectly
still, but not stiff, one hand held the other in front of her closed suit jacket. “She
said to tell you reporters that she will not be making any statements until tomorrow
at 10 a.m.”
“What’s your name?” Kian asked.
“Just a spokesperson,” she said.
“But that’s useless to me. Without your name, I can’t use your comments.”
The woman shrugged. “Why is that my concern?”
“Who else is in the meeting?”
“The council and judges.” She put her hand back on Kian’s forearm and turned him
toward the door. “She’ll talk tomorrow. And,” she squeezed his arm and her face
hardened, “we’ll be in touch.”
He stepped back from her toward the doors. Guilt swarmed his guts. Why had she
threatened him? What had he done now? He was being so nice and calm. He turned
to the door and pushed through into the light, his eyes pained by the shock and heat
of it. He stumbled, but kept his feet on the sidewalk. Remaining upright, he looked
back and the woman stood at the door, arms across her chest. She was smiling a
mean smile at him. Kian stumbled off the curb to his car.
He drove fast to the Delilah, feeling like too little water stretched over too much
ground. He stopped on the strip of gravel in front of the building. He didn’t want to
pack his things and leave. He had nowhere to go and he liked the Delilah and its bar.
Maybe he just stank of booze and pot and she was going to turn him in.
“That’s just stupid,” he said to his mirrored image behind the rows of liquor. He
pictured sitting at his desk in the newsroom and felt sick. All those eyes on him,
expressing disappointment because he didn’t have good stories anymore, too many
corrections and long lunches. The pall of a question hanging in the air, “Why hasn’t
he been fired?”
JOEY WALKED UP to the driver’s door of the red truck parked on the concrete
slab. The door swung open at face-level and just missed him. This was exactly the
kind of casual intentional aggression he’d come to expect from his father. Wayne
stuck his leg out of the opening and pointed his toe at Joey’s nose. Joey noticed
what he was supposed to – a silver toe-guard on the pointed end of a new boot,
light brown with a thick leather sole and walking heals. Wayne’s pants looked new
as well, maybe it was the morning sun. He looked like a magazine advertisement.
Joey sipped from his coffee cup, caffeine and nicotine his only drugs now that he
had gotten serious about saving his soul. He hoped the coffee would help him screw
up his courage and have that talk with Wayne, get it all out in the open.
He felt screwed up so he jumped right in.
“Wayne I’m a Christian,” he said. “And I’ve changed my ways and want you to
know Christ, too.”
Wayne set his heel down on the edge of the floor mat and wagged the toe.
“I hear you son. That ol’ religion bug bites us all now and again. The trick is to keep
your head. You never want to give your mind completely over to anything.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Wayne.”
“Well, I figure it works just about any way a person wants it to. But enough of this
philosophy, I’ve got to get this trailer clean and new straw bails loaded up.”
Wayne stepped down onto the aluminum fuel tank. Joey stepped aside. His father
jumped down to the ground.
“Come on,” Wayne said. “You shovel and I’ll run the hose.”
Just like that, Joey marveled, Wayne had slipped right through. But I’ll get to him.
Like the pastor said, no one is without the torments of sin. The trick is to help him
see it, to give him a taste of the pure joy of salvation. Now that he’d said it, he felt
that terrible weight around his shoulders again. He followed Wayne to the pump
shed and helped him uncoil the fire hose from the wall brackets and stretch it
around the end of the aluminum cattle trailer. Wayne held the hose and Joey walked
back and flipped the pump on.
Wayne felt the boyish glee at waving around such a powerful gush of water. Then
he thought about Joey. Poor mixed up bastard. He had already decided to use the
kid’s help on the run to Seattle. When he saw him, he started to reconsider. He
turned the hose off. It tightened and pulsed in his hands. He went into the shed, one
naked light bulb swinging from the low slanted steel roof. Joey handed him a yellow
slicker. Rubber boots and goggles.
Covered in thick plastic, the two men stepped out into the hot sun and began
sweating. Joey reached back into the shed and grabbed a flat-nosed shovel. Wayne
had the hose and opened again. The trailer was a new aluminum model with oblong
holes punched into the sides and back. The loading gate at the end pulled out easily
and thudded on the concrete, heavy with cow shit. Joey pulled the ropes that raised
the gate and tied them off on the twin-fingered hook. He went inside and unlatched
the ramp to the trailer’s second level and let it down. Both the deck and the ramp
were thick with manure, but the very top deck at the nose of the trailer hadn’t seen
any action in a couple of trips and that would make Joey’s job tougher because the
shit in there had dried. He tromped back down the ramp and found Wayne at the
front of the bottom level. He put his hand on his shoulder and then on the hose. He
motioned upward with his thumb. Wayne twisted the nozzle and cut the flow.
“I need to wet the top,” Joey yelled over the wine of the massive water pump. “I’ll
bring it back down in a second.”
Wayne handed him the hose and walked back for the shovel and started in on the
thicker layers of crap in the corners. Joey pulled the heavy hose back up the ramp,
the hood of his raincoat singing against the aluminum ceiling. At the front, he turned
to make his assault on the crap. He braced himself and turned the nozzle wide open.
A two-inch jet of water shot forth and drummed against the aluminum side,
exploding into a whiteout of shattered water and bits of grainy cow shit.
When the aluminum shined and the gates clang with sharp metal on metal
satisfaction, Wayne and Joey went back to the pump house to change out of the
slickers and boots. At the door, Wayne stripped the jacket and his shirt. His white
chest and shoulders, covered in black hair, were muscled, defined and hard. Even in
his farmer’s tan, Wayne looked like the picture-perfect form of a movie star or a
model in a magazine. At fifty-plus, he was fit and better off than most men at thirty.
He left the shed and came back with a boot box and the new boots he’d had on
when he drove up. He held out the box as he stepped into the shed. Joey stooped
and tucked in the last bit of his shirt tale. Wayne noticed Joey’s wet and dirty socks
on the ground.
“I bought you a pair of boots,” he said, setting the box down on the dirt and gravel.
“I hope you have some clean socks.”
“Are they stolen?”
“Are they stolen? No, Joey, they are not stolen.” He looked his son in the eyes, lying
to him for his own good. “Paid for fair and square.”
“As a Christian, I won’t wear stolen clothes. God provides.”
“And he just has!” Wayne smiled. “Take the boots Joey. Take the boots, and I’ll
give you a job to boot, unless you want to stay on out here.”
Joey lifted a black boot with tan stitching out of the box. He reached inside the
barrel and took the loose light paper and wadding from the toe.
“Those are good boots, so it won’t be too hard on your feet breaking them in.”
Wayne winked at Joey, who looked down. The only thing that set Joey off from all
the other men in Wayne’s life, was that Wayne wanted to help him, to make his life
better. Other men he would entertain, make laugh or knock down, but he wanted
good things for his boys. Too bad Kian had disappeared. The last time Wayne had
tried to connect with Kian was at the edge of a wrestling mat in his high school gym
after one of Kian’s matches. He had been pinned in the first round after winning
every single match for some twenty meets in a row, none of which Wayne had
seen. He had put his hand on Kian’s shoulder and said, “Hell of a try.”
“What the hell do you know about it!” Kian yelled back, embarrassingly loud.
“Don’t get your piss hot, boy,” Wayne scolded. But he didn’t mean to. He didn’t
know what else to say. He knew Kian had just slipped on the mat, but he didn’t
know how to talk to him and gave up trying. Kian, at 15, had already made up his
mind about what kind of man he would be and he didn’t need Wayne’s advice. As
an act of charity Wayne had left him alone after that. At the baby’s funeral, Wayne
said he was sorry and that he didn’t have any idea what Kian was going through but
hoped he’d be alright. Kian had nodded and walked away.
Joey, dirty and wet sock on, slipped his foot into the top and then forced his heal all
the way in.
“Man,” he said, “how’d you get the right size?”
“Lucky guess.” Wayne cringed when he saw the dirty sock disappear into the new
leather. “You better go in and get some clean socks. A good pair of boots, broken in
well, can last you a long time and those are good boots.”
Joey said Wayne was right and he walked out of the pump shed and across the
gravel to his camper trailer. Wayne followed. Joey remembered one summer he
stayed at the farm and new clothes in a dozen or more boxes showed up with
several of Wayne’s friends. It was late, near midnight when their car lights on the
lane leading to the house woke Wayne, and Wayne’s cursing and fumbling woke
everyone else. Then out of the dark of the front room came, “Jesus Christ, Ralph!
Come on in. Jim. Conway. What the hell brings you boys all out here this time of
night?” And, then the boxes of boots, stacks of jeans and shirts and down-filled
coats. A box of leather gloves. Glasses and a bottle of booze hit the dining room
table and Catlynn came in to the back bedroom where Kian, Kate and Joey slept,
saying “come on kids, looks like Christmas has come early.” They all slipped out of
their covers and trotted after her through the light of the kitchen and dining room –
Kate in her long sleeping dress and hair blown out all over, rose colors burning
through the tanned cheeks. The men had settled in around the table, glasses half-full
of whiskey, their white shirts reflected in the large dining room window. In the
living room, a frenzy of jeans and boots and shirts. Kate hopping on one leg with the
other trapped in a folded leg and down she went onto her side, a wave of hair flying
across the carpet. Kian in his underwear walking around with one boot on and a t-
shirt over his face, his arms half through the sleeves. Catlynn strutting around in
new red boots, holding her filmy nightgown above her knees and looking down. In
the dinning room, laughter and horse sounds as the men drank and passed around
magazines with pictures of naked women.
In the little trailer, Wayne flopped boyishly onto the bed where Kate had slept. He
crossed his ankles and stuffed a pillow behind his head. He shut his eyes. Joey
rummaged through a paper shopping bag rumpled on the floor and found two white
tube socks. He pushed the boot off with his toe and stripped off the old, offending
socks.
“I suppose you’ve heard about Kian’s big screw up?” Joey asked.
“I haven’t heard from Kian since his child died.” Wayne remembered the pat on the
shoulder and his desire for Kian to kill the pain inside before it had a chance to hurt
him.
“Apparently, he disappeared for a few days and the cops found him drunk in some
whorehouse west of Billings.”
“I heard about it. Anyone around here seen him since?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll check it out. Waldo might know where he’s at.”
Joey sat back, new socks and boots on.
“I suppose we should go looking for him,” Joey said, his face passive.
“Does he got any friends? Girl friends, I mean.”
“How should I know?”
“Well,” Wayne said and yawned, “he’ll turn up. He’s just drowning his sorrows, but
he’ll come up for air and then we’ll all help him get back on track. Why don’t you
make a few runs with me? I need someone to help drive and load and unload.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” Joey already knew he would go with
Wayne. If God was going to call to him to witness, then he would go just as Jesus
would go.
“Well, let me know in a couple hours because I’ll have to get someone. You’ll make
as much as you do here, maybe a little more,” he closed his eyes again.
and imagined silent sailing on a lake, the calm of the water and the depth beneath
him as he began his descent into the Yellowstone River Valley. He never grew tired
of the road. Only one cloud, back-lit pink by the setting sun, blemished the
otherwise clear and pale sky. Small, slapped together houses and rows of trailers
scattered past. Some of the trailers had kept their skirting intact. On others, the
wheels, blocks and plumbing were exposed. The winter would, if it hadn’t already,
kill those trailers that had lost their skirting. The burned-out Motor Inn, set on fire
by bums more than ten years ago, was still there, hollow. The sign at the top of the
weed covered drive leading onto the grassed-over parking lot said $6.50 SINGLE in
a type that made Wayne think of his mother and the old Miles City hotel he grew up
in. Four miles later came the Exxon refinery, where he had spent a few miserable
months working off debts from a bad run through California. That was the last time
he’d come home. The gigs that summer had fallen apart when John Sims, steel
guitar player, fell in love with a married woman and ended up with a dead wife back
in Montana. The refinery, blazing with a thousand halogen lights, poured smoke
from its many stacks high into the evening sky.
The overblown cow town itself, booming in the seventies with oil discoveries and
strip-mined coal fields, gathered at the gateway of sandstone cliffs that rose up a
thousand feet. They hemmed in the city on its eastern and southern edges. The
cliffs gave Billings its individuality over the hundred other small cities scattered
across the plains. He split the truck’s high gear from overdrive to direct. The engine
compression against the lower gear slowed the black truck and its empty aluminum
trailer down to sixty-two miles an hour. A rise in the road brought the yellow sun
into his mirror just as the sun dropped onto the jagged horizon where it punctured
itself and blew orange and red all along the Rocky Mountain Front. He put his foot
on the air brake and with a feather touch brought the rig down to fifty miles an
hour. He jabbed the clutch and pulled the shifter out of gear, tapped the fuel pedal to
race the motor and brought the shifter into the synchronized ninth and direct. He
veered off Interstate 94 onto the single-lane ribbon of pavement and slowly powered
the engine back up. The pitch of the engine turbine grew higher as the truck gained
sixty and stormed the ramp that laced him onto Interstate 90, cutting south. The
raging and exploding sun painted both mirrors red. He was on the last leg of a run
and due in at the Sundown, a bar he’d made good money in.
East of the mountains was Wayne’s homeland. His family came to the flat half of
Montana at the turn of the century and the goddamn place had nearly destroyed
them all. His mother said the Waters’ fortunes in the West started out fine, but
changed all of a sudden and forever the day a prairie fire swept north across a
corner of the Judith Basin and ran headlong into the Little Snowy Mountains. His
mother’s mother was just a little girl at the time, living with her parents in a log and
sod cabin near the Snowies. The cabin was more like one of those sod huts the
prairie farmers lived in. It was dug into the side of a grass hill on the boarder
between the prairie and the granite mountains. Her parents had been running the
Kinnick ranch, which her grandfather had cobbled together from the land of several
busted farmers at the tail end of the land-rush failure. Those farmers had learned the
hard way that a scrub life, burning cow shit for heat, wasn’t worth the freedom of
owning their own land. Since the old man, Wayne’s great-grandfather hated
solitude, he put his newly wedded daughter and her husband out there and moved
back into town.
The 1929 fire that destroyed the ranch had run fast and hot, the papers said, more
than 100 miles an hour. It burned so intensely that in the superheated wind rushing
just ahead of the ground fire, trees, buildings and animals burst into flames. The fire
hit the Kinnick Ranch the first time early in the afternoon. Wayne’s mother was six-
years-old and lonely. The winter they had just come out of was their second at the
homestead. Waneeda Kinnick had not seen another kid since the fall. She was left
alone most of the day while her mother and father tried to make a living between
battles with the elements, wolves and bears, cattle sickness, injuries and religion.
Old Man Kinnick said he would send out hired help as soon as cattle prices went up,
but he never did. He pushed Waneeda’s parents to exhaustion. She rarely saw her
father, because he spent so much time out on the range or in the barn. Her mother
had started talking to herself early on in the second winter. She read and reread the
pages at the end of the Bible. Waneeda’s father yelled at the old woman on Sundays,
but she wouldn’t stop reading from those last pages. She would read and then say a
fire was coming and the righteous would inherit a new Eden. “Goddamn you
woman if you don’t stop reading that book!” her father would say and then storm
off to the barn, where he would bang and crash late into the night. Waneeda said
she never went in there. She had a deep fear of the barn. Her fear of it wasn’t
because the barn was old, scary or rundown. In fact, it was the best structure on
the ranch. It stood at least two full stories high, with a steep roof that fell in several
pitches. Her grandfather had built it pretty much on his own and built it so well that
the big doors rolled easily. The prairie men knew how to build things, but they didn’
t waste their talents on women. Her mother begged for wood floors in the house
and used to scream at her father as he walked fast across the yard away from the
house that the barn had a better floor than her home. Her father yelled back, over
his thick and stooped shoulders, that yes it did because the barn was where the
valuable things were kept. Like the old man who had built the place up, her father
was short and round. His hair was thick and it ran down his neck and over his
shoulders. He was more like a troll than a man. He didn’t speak often and when he
did, he yelled.
“But I can understand that,” Waneeda told Wayne on the frozen nights in Mile City
when no one came to the hotel for dinner and music. “From what I remember of
my mother, she was a tough woman to live with. The Old Man’s second wife, Ida,
who was younger than my mother, always said my mother had an unnatural
attraction to the roughest, most least-spoken men. Quiet and hard working and
mean as hell. But I’m not even sure he was my father. Guess I’ll never know for
sure. The only people who ever knew who it was were dead before I got old
enough to ask. Ida herself was a Hutterite, I believe. She didn’t know anything
about the family, either. Hardly spoke anything but German anyway.”
She told the story of the fire and how it killed the Old Man the way she had pieced it
together from memory and rumor. This was the only account of his family, told on
those cold nights with the space heater rattling and glowing at their feet, Wayne
ever got.
“When news reached Grassrange that the big cloud of smoke they saw high in the
sky was coming from what later was called the Judith Basin Fire, it had already
crashed into the foot of the Little Snowies. Old Man Kinnick saddled his horse and
raced across the burned-up prairie. A lot of people said he was trying to save his
cows, but I think that was unfair. He didn’t try to circle the fire to get into the
mountains where the cows would have run to. No, he ran that horse straight into
the fire’s tail. The ranch house and the barns and everything was gone by the time
he got there. The ground was so hot it burned the hooves off his horse and when he
got off its back, it fell over. He shot it to put it out of its misery. I was down in the
well when I heard the gun go off and started crying for help. But just before then,
before the fire itself reached us, the smoke and heat had begun pouring into the
house, and glowing embers filled the air. My father said we were all dead. He
grabbed me by my arm, here up high on it, and carried me through the front door
and out over the yard. He lifted me over the well and let go. I fell looking up at his
whiskered face and then hit the water flat on my back, must have been thirty feet,
but I landed just right in the shallow water so I didn’t get hurt. I can tell you I was
scared. I touched the walls but they were so cold and slimy that I couldn’t bear to
climb them and stood in the middle of the water. It only came up to my hips. I didn’
t know what was going on or why he put me in there. I remember knowing there
was a fire out there, but of course I had no idea what that meant. When I heard my
mother screaming and crying to Jesus to save her, I tell you that made me glad I
was down in that well. I was just sure my father was killing her or had taken her to
the barn and was doing things to her there I couldn’t imagine but felt a terror over.
Then I saw a big stream of flame like an arch of fire, like water thrown from a
bucket, stretch right over the opening of the well and I figured it was Jesus come to
save my mother. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I remember thinking Jesus
should mind his own business. She was a hard woman, I’m telling you.”
Here Waneeda would laugh and nudge Wayne, who would be plucking the plastic
strings of a little guitar.
“Then a bit later I heard the gunshot and yelled out, believing my father had won
against Jesus and my mother, but it was the old man’s gray bearded face and black
hat that showed over the rim of the well. He lowered one of the new lariats he had
on his saddle and I put the loop up under my armpits and he pulled me up. The
smoke and heat was horrible and I remember coughing and wanting to get back into
the well, but he said the fire was coming back and we had to run. He soaked a
blanket, wrapped me up in it and covered my face with it. He walked fast for hours
with me in his arms, rolled up in that wet, hot blanket. When he stopped and took
the cover off my face, he was all black and blood was coming out of his mouth.
The old man died a few months later from the heat, smoke and ash he inhaled while
saving me. He never did get out of bed once we got to Grassrange. Just laid there in
that dark, hot room coughing and gagging. Doctors gave him laudanum and by the
end he was drinking big gulps of it and saying crazy things. Ida took charge of me
then and we lived off the money the old man got before he died when he sold the
burned up ranch to the Hutterrites. They were good people, them Hutts. They made
sure we were cared for, in lots of ways.”
Wayne let the memories go as he approached a rare cluster of cars on the interstate.
He throttled down. The yard lights of the Sundown parking lot gleamed in the
distance, like a rodeo grounds. He drummed his thumbs on the center of the
steering column, glad to be back. There was something about this time of night out
here on the plains, even after a hot day, when the sun had finally gone down and the
bugs were out, clouding the windshield. The air was cooling off and the stars
blinked open. This early part of the night when the day’s work was over and the
night’s party was just about to begin, that first blush of flame as the whiskey hit his
stomach and the steak melted in his mouth, those were the kinds of moments
Wayne lived for.
He had been gone a long time, but after a few calls he had booked a show and a run
to Seattle for Waldo. He had also heard that in addition to Kian being on the run, his
other son by his first marriage was working out at Bill’s Cattle Trailer Washout. The
interstate rolled out in front of him like the back of a raven. The dots of light that
had been the Sundown in the distance were now bright and the gravel parking lot
was a solid gray pool. Few cars. The bar’s sign on the top was a yellow happy sun
with a drink in one of its sunrays as it went down on the white mountain
background, falling behind the big blue letters. He shifted down and hit the exit
ramp, breaking and using the engine’s compression on each lower gear. The truck
rattled across the cattle guard and he stopped at the intersection. Darkness had
gathered there and the red stop sign blew a hole in the black. He popped the
transmission out of gear and let his foot off the clutch. The whiskey bottle tucked
into a pouch just under the seat said his name. He took another drink. The idle of the
engine pulled the empty trailer through the intersection and around the corner and
back under the interstate. The Sundown parking lot was quiet. He was early and
could get a few hours sleep before the show and before he’d find Bill and get paid.
He idled across the gravel lot to the back of the low, sheet metal building, out of the
lights and then shut the motor down. It rattled to a loose and ragged stop. He let one
more drink of whiskey burn through his mouth. He lifted the cowboy hat off and
set it in the passenger seat and pushed his boots off behind the peddles. His brown
socks stuck inside. He took them out and laid them on the steering wheel to air out.
He turned to the sleeper and stepped through the little aisle between the seats and
into the black compartment. Little red lights showed 7:03 p.m. Then she rustled
under the sleeping bags. Wayne again felt that itch and decided to have sex with her
one more time before catching a nap. She was a luxury, a sweet and luscious
brunette he had slept with off and on for the past three years. She was very
feminine, very curvy. He was with her under an arrangement that kept her from
going nuts while her husband, a friend of Wayne’s, was in prison for burglary. In a
way, he was doing his friend a favor by keeping her out of the bars. He put his hand
under the covers and ran it over her cool, smooth cheeks. He slipped his pants off
and slid into the bed. He moved her hips into his. She’d gotten in the truck in the Tri-
Cities in Washington where her husband was imprisoned. She needed a ride to her
sister’s house in Huntley, a little town not too far from his farm. Of course, this
was one favor his friend wouldn’t know he owed Wayne.
When he woke up, Jolene was gone. She had snuck out of the truck sometime just
after he fell asleep. She’d probably called a sister or aunt. These women out here in
the country learned to not ask questions when they picked up a sister, standing at
the end of a gravel driveway, hair that is usually tied tight, blowing softly in the
morning breeze, arms tight across their chests, faces flush.
He stretched under the slick fabric of the sleeping bag, got up and slouched into the
passenger seat, snapped the socks off the steering wheel and pulled them on. He
had a half hour to get dressed and get things ironed out with Bill before hitting the
stage. There were twenty cars in the parking lot. Bill’s said he was holding a wet T-
shirt contest. A little preliminary action before the band kicked up, he said. There
would be a lot more cars. Men with wives who didn’t care for wet breasts and didn’
t care for their husbands to care either would come later. It was Wayne’s big return
show and Bill had even advertised it in the Billings Post. He walked past the front of
the truck, into the deep black of the moonless countryside and pissed while looking
up at the stars. Roaring cheers of playful lust came from inside the Sundown. The
wet T-shirt contest was an old bar trick. It’s open to any woman who wanted to
compete, but the prize money always went to the professionals hired out of Billings.
He remembered that Catlynn and Kate were coming to the show. He hoped they
weren’t in there early. Catlynn had sounded pleased over the phone, maybe ten
years had worn away the bitterness. Maybe tomorrow he’d go out to his house and
see if he couldn’t get his wife to let him back in. He went in the front door and
walked through the main room, the ceiling black and hovering low. Dimmed lights
hung from wagon wheels suspended by chains. On the stage, deep in the corner of
the bar, bathed in poorly constructed spotlights, a woman had one leg behind her
head and her panties pulled aside. The men in the front row sat stunned. She was
one of the professionals, no doubt. A local woman began shyly exposing her
overlarge, wet breasts. Always competitive, these local girls. At once, the stun wore
off and the grunting and howling kicked back up to chorus level. The men in the
second row remained quiet on-lookers, serious about filling their minds with this
stark new development in the wet t-shirt contest. A little something for later recall
when they got back to their slapped-together shacks and bunk houses. Wayne
walked around the outer rim of tables to the bar. He recognized the bartender from
many years ago, Jim was his name, Silent Jim. He ordered a double scotch. It went
down like a streak of gasoline.
“Whew!” Wayne said loud enough to be heard over the drone of the chorus of lust
and thunder of strip music. He winked at Jim, who was tall even behind the dark
glossy bar counter. Jim was an old man twenty-five years ago when Wayne first
played at the Horseshoe Bar in Billings. His thick hair has growing whiter, refined
sugar white. He winked and then looked down the bar. Bill was at the end, black
hair pushed to one side, hat in his hand. His arms were too long for his torso and he
fiddled with a gray hat practically hanging at his knees. A naked woman stood next
to him. She smiled without flirting. Business. She was after more money, per usual,
Wayne suspected. And, per usual, Bill would act dumb and shy and coy about her
standing there naked. He wouldn’t give her a dime more. She was definitely pretty.
Fine round breasts and tight, dark nipples. She probably was worth more than she
was getting. Wayne would have given her more money. He didn’t care that much
about money, but Bill did. Bill loved money and so had a lot of it.
Bill looked up and saw Wayne. He smiled dumbly. He put his head down to listen to
the naked woman, pretending to shy away from looking at her nipples, which she
was clearly offering up as either a decoy or bargaining chip. Wayne pulled up short,
set his hat on the bar and waved Jim over. The old bar tender walked like a crane
walked on dry land.
“I guess he’s busy, Jim,” Wayne said. “I better have a beer while he finishes up.
Wouldn’t mind a roll in the hay with that one, I tell you.”
“Couldn’t agree more Wayne, couldn’t agree more,” Jim said. He crane-walked two
steps to the cooler, reached a beer from inside and popped it open with one hand as
he set it down in front of Wayne. His hands were gnarled and banged up from
rodeos, fistfights and arthritis. Hell of a thing to get old, Wayne thought. He put two
dollars on the counter and waved off the change. Bill shook his head slowly. The
hooting course of lust had subsided and both he and Wayne looked up at the empty
stage. The woman’s shoulders dropped and she unfurled a tiny T-shirt and panties
from her right hand, stepped into the panties and slipped the shirt over her brown
shoulders, fast and in one motion, a professional athlete. Wayne handed her his beer
as she sulked past him. She put the beer to her glistening mouth and emptied it. She
handed the bottle back and winked. Her smile said fuck it. You win some, you lose
some. Now she had to make up the difference in tips, which she would no doubt
do. Her small round ass jiggled like a teenager’s at the beach. Wayne put the mouth
of the bottle to his nose and smelled her spit and lip gloss.
“Wayne! Goddamn it,” Bill said and clapped him on the shoulder.
“Damn fine woman there Bill. What’ll you have?” Wayne waved at Jim.
“I better have a scotch,” Bill said.
Wayne paid for the drink and one for himself. While the last of the scotch ran
across his tongue, Bill slipped a wad of cash from his front pocket and counted out
hundreds.
“Here you go, Wayne,” Bill said. “Fine job as always.”
“Well, I thank you very much Bill.” He put the cash in his pocket.
The lust chorus began crowding the stage as the professional began earning real
money now. Together with the music, the boys made one long howl and even the
quiet, serious lads in the second row played along, getting their dollars over the
shoulders of the men in front to win the privilege of an up-close look. The pro put
her long heel on some farmer’s broad, thick back, threw her hips forward and wide
and entered their minds pussy first.
“Damn girl’s going to get all of their beer money,” Bill said.
“I imagine that’s pretty much what she was trying to tell you.”
“Yes, but a deal is a deal,” Bill said and sulked away toward the end of the bar. He
leaned back on his heals like his feet couldn’t wait to get out of the place while his
head surveyed the line of bottles against the mirror, judging volume and seeing
money. Bill was tight and twisted about money, which he would never have enough
of, just like the quiet boys leering at the dancer were tight and twisted about the sex
lives they would never have enough of. Wayne moved to the stage and caught the
eye of that woman and winked at her and moved his head sideways. Come on over
here. When the rock song ended and two other women jumped up on the stage, she
hopped down and made straight for Wayne, drawing the little half T-shirt over her
head. Wayne took her into Bill’s office for a private show. Young women are
wasted on young men, he told her. She laughed and moved her hips and shoulders
just a little, feeling her own fluidity. They just don’t understand it, he said. His hand
moved around the hard softness of her cold hot bottom.
When they came out of the office, his band members were there. He waved at
them, sinking his head deep into his black cowboy hat. The woman left his side and
joined the line of dancers who were showing their wares in a rising frenzy – the
grand finale. A natural wonder, how so little can become so much. Wayne decided
he would give these boys a hell of a show. He knew their lives were shitty and
dusty and going nowhere and he wanted to raise their spirits.
ON THE WAY to an interview a few weeks before his life came completely apart,
Kian stopped at his neighborhood bar. He had one drink and told himself while
waiting for the second to keep his head. His wife and daughters were waiting for
him to come home, to be the father he told them he wanted to be. He and Wendy
were going to get counseling and learn how to leap over their problems. But what
nagged him and kept him feeling unhopeful was that he wanted to drink every
minute of every day. He wanted to drink until he was blasted drunk. He didn’t know
why except that every time he downed a drink he felt better and when he was the
least bit sober he felt bad. So it was in vain that he told himself, step after step
down the sidewalk, “Don’t get drunk. Don’t stay out late. Just get the job done.”
The night was warm for late fall. He would go right home after work tomorrow
night, like he said he would. This was his last night out. He might have to sneak a
drink or so out in the garage. He doesn’t have to go out. Step by step his resolve
faded. Maybe he could write a Western novel or teach the girls something, read to
them. Watch a little television and why not? Just slow down and be a husband and
father. He flexed his arms. Even get back in shape. He swung his arms around,
overhead and back and forth like a runner warming up. He’d worked hard and been
a fair wrestler in high school. He could take up boxing maybe or just running,
though he hated running. He thought about the time he’d have in the evening if he
didn’t go to a bar. In fact, most men did not go to a bar every night and get loaded
every morning before work. He could live that way, too, at least the not-going-to-a-
bar part. “I’ll do it,” he said. “They deserve it. They need me.” When he stepped off
the sidewalk onto the Post’s parking lot, after a quick stop over at the next bar, too,
he was already out of the house after all, he spotted the man he was supposed to
interview, Burton, sitting behind the wheel of an old, gray Volvo parked near the
paper’s front doors. The town’s leading women hated Burton, so the paper wanted
Kian to find out just how bad a person he was and write a story. He could do that.
He walked to the car and saw that Burton had guests. The backseat was splashed
with youth and chrome and leather, exposed knees and pierced, white bellies, three
of them, a punk rock, modern girl tableau.
“Burton,” Kian said, shifting his eyes, “what’s up?”
“Climb in,” Burton said, motioning with his head to the passenger side of the car.
“We’re all ready for you.” He winked. Burton’s hair was graying around his ears.
The black t-shirt showed he was still in shape.
“I don’t want to spoil any revelations you may have had planned for me,” Kian said,
leaning down to Burton, “but I’ve been to a party or two in my time. I want to talk
to a few people about your punk concerts and come right back here. I don’t have all
night. Unless, of course, one of these young women are among the organizers I can
interview right now.” Kian held his resolve. Just talk and go home. But it’s like God
had set him up. He stood and looked around. He bent back down.
“Nope,” Burton said. He nodded at the seat again. Kian walked around the front of
the car. He wasn’t sure what part of the sentence Burton was noping. Burton leaned
across the red bench seat of the old Volvo.
“These are my daughters,” he said.
“All of them?”
“Yes, all of the daughters I have.”
“All of these kids,” Kian said, making mock effort to count heads as if there were a
dozen of them, “are your flesh and blood?”
“Unless there’s something my wife isn’t telling me.”
“You’re married and have kids?”
“I see you’ve done your homework.” Burton leaned over and patted the seat.
“Huh,” Kian said. He opened the passenger door and slid onto the slick black vinyl.
When the door shut, Burton put the car in reverse. He backed and swung the car
toward the street. Kian swung around to look into the back seat. He would say
howdy and ask about their father. His glance slid up a white inner thigh to plump,
shaved, grayish and red vagina sporting a small polished chrome ball. He swung
back to the front and wondered if perhaps Burton wasn’t pulling his leg about his
filial relationship to these pierced and pretty much evenly-aged young women. The
naked vagina punctured his mind. Jesus, he thought. He cleared his throat.
“So where are we headed?”
The numb feeling of death welled up in him. If he doesn’t drink any more, he’ll be
okay. Nothing has happened. Just take a few notes and get the hell out of there. The
words in his head carried no resonance.
“Out just past Lockwood to the Widmore subdivision. The gravel company out
there has rented us their shop.”
Burton pushed a cassette into the dash and shards of steel and glass blasted from
the doors. The punk girls bounced up and down, and Kian stole another glance back
at thigh and vortex. He was there already, after all. Black leather and pink skin
shaped into easy strangers. He thought he could smell her flesh, the one girl, the
woman inside her skirt. His face grew hot, his arms heavy. It’s like it was
everywhere. People just threw open their arms to parties and each other with so
little concern. It was just so easy that it was impossible to resist. Everywhere he
turned, his old high school pals were drinking and taking drugs, driving from
rundown farm house to trailer court, running the gravel back roads like it was
another country and they were on vacation forever. A couple hours of work,
stoned, and then back to their cars and the drinking and driving. Cheap gas. Cheap
booze. Cheap drugs. The girls were mindless of whose boyfriend or husband they
were jumping into the sack or backseat with. All Kian had to do was walk to a bar
and the party, like a UFO, swooped down and scooped him up. It was like most
people spent some part of everyday in a music video. Wendy wasn’t like that since
the twins and the baby and Kian didn’t want to be, but there it was, like that first
drink, and when he was there he felt great and when he wasn’t he felt bad about
everything. It was just so easy to feel good, even if it wouldn’t last. Burton turned
off the highway, over a culvert that wasn’t flush with the road, bouncing them all
off the seat. The girls squealed. Kian quickly turned to see what he could see. No
one wants him to avert his eyes. Burton gunned the motor and rocketed up to the
building fast, sliding to a hard stop in front of the steel door. A person simply didn’t
have to face reality if he didn’t want to. Just keep playing like you’re in Neverland.
The drugs will help. He had given up this life the same as Wendy had, but there was
just something about a dead daughter that changed his motivations. The building
hunkered over them, square, two-stories tall without windows, covered in rust-
streaked steel siding. Burton and Kian got out simultaneously, each hot to see the
women arch out of the car. The girls paid off the watch and the last one out put her
face to Kian’s, smiled into his eyes with her red hot mouth. She wasn’t much
younger than he was. He was still a carefree kid, too. Why did he had have to
become an old man when no one else was? After all, look at his father.
“Those are not your daughters,” Kian said, as the girl turned from him.
“Well,” Burton said, expansive, “I’m like a father to them.” He opened his arms.
Cars and pickups lined the gravel driveway and fanned out into the small gravel and
mud parking lot. Moonlight gleamed on monochrome metal contours. The girls
were waiting by the door, but Burton waved them on. They opened the heavy steel
door and the beast’s roar poured out. They waded in and slammed the door behind
them. The warm night air coated Kian and soaked his shirt. He looked up through
the empty night at the distant, cold, glinting stars. Why must I do this? The stars
didn’t answer. The shadowed outlines of the sagebrush hills and the clouds of
webbed, interlacing bare cottonwood tree branches along the irrigation ditch next to
the road didn’t answer either. Nature told him to take what he wanted right now,
because tomorrow some fucking vine will climb your trunk and break your limbs.
There’s flesh and bone and then it’s all dust. The miracle of life.
Burton handed a cigarette to Kian. Then he reached into the sky and rumbled inside
his creaking black leather jacket, like a man makes fire from his guts. He flicked his
outstretched thumb and flame leapt up from the wood match sticking out of his
hand. Kian shook his head. Burton laughed and lit Kian’s cigarette and lit his own.
He waved his right hand, dismissing the lights of the suburban tract along the road.
“You know,” Burton said, “right now there are people in this world, in this state and
town and neighborhood who think Jesus Christ is coming soon and He will right the
wrongs through violence unspeakable.” He took a drag from his cigarette and blew
a great plume into the air above them. He held his hands before him, moving them
with each word, keeping time. “Jesus’ll send the evil to Hell, he will. And he will
save and pamper the righteous.” More smoke. The faint light brought out the gray in
his short hair, the wrinkles in his tan skin. “But, they lack the imagination to really
understand what that means for this neighborhood, for their family and friends. It’s
just, Yahoo! Bring on the end of the world! Joe there, who owns that blue King Cab
Ford will be torn from his wife’s side and convicted by demons of being a friendly.
He’ll be sucked into Hell to burn in excruciating pain forever. His wife begged him
to go to church, but the poor bastard always had to work. He sweated it out every
Sunday down at the grain elevator trying to get ahead of the bills and save up to buy
her a goddamn China set made in Korea. Joe’s youngest son is swept up in glory
and his oldest drops to his knees to repent for fucking the neighbor girl, who’s only
fourteen. At eighteen, he knew better and now he has confessed it and asked for the
cleaning bath of the blood of Christ to rejuvenate his soul. He starts to glow and
rise. Just down the street, right there,” – Burton pointed hard twice in the direction
of a split level 1970s ranch home, light blue with pearl white trim – “just a mere
fucking block away, the earth opens and out comes hell’s bloodied, horrific
demons. They climb the side and break into the upper bedroom window. They
clutch the fourteen-year-old tart’s throat and rip her out of her soft, warm bed and
drag her down into the bowels of the earth through the fiery chasm from whence
they came. Fourteen years old and unrepentant for having sex with a boy who said
he loved her and now she’s fucked for eternity. Her mom and dad stand there at the
edge of that driveway, already beginning to rise, scared by the demons and hoping
they are satisfied with the feast of their daughter.”
Burton had struck a familiar cord, the drunkard’s disregard of god. Kian hated God
and told Him so regularly. Every drunken asshole, not unlike Kian, allowed to
recover while children around the world suffered, like his daughter suffered,
unspeakable torments that caused them to scream so hard they screeched, only to
survive the physical catastrophes for a few weeks or months or even years and then
die. Well fuck Him and every asshole banging on the door with a knife drawn in the
shape of a Bible. He hated God because people are just blood and bones and should
have been left alone back when all they did was hunt and fuck.
“I hear you,” Kian said to Burton.
“Great, because this is what I wanted you to know. I’m making some money and
having fun and they want to stop that. They want to make me afraid of God and of
them and of their fucking morals and heebejeebe bullshit. But I’m not ever going to,
Kian. I’m not ever going to care. That’s why I wanted you to come out here. That’
s what I want you to know first and foremost, no matter what else I say in an
effort to promote what I do and keep the cops at bay.”
“Makes as much sense as anything else.”
“Let’s go inside.” Burton threw his cigarette into the bushes. “I hope I start a
fucking fire.”
He did. Just not in the bushes.
Kian followed him to the door and a young man with cords of matted hair hanging
off the top of his head stepped out. Purple and gold flamed across them as they
entered the doorway and the punk rock pummeled them. Inside the bright lights and
thunder was happy drinking and drug use, enough for days. There was also jumping
and hopping and falling in Burton’s office, a small room up stairs with matrices and
beanbags covering the floor. Slashing music cut Kian’s brain into ribbons and tore
his clothes off and licked him to the floor. Bliss. He is happy. But for just one
moment, his torso still above the fray, he thought, “this doesn’t have to happen.”
But when he looked down because her laugh was so young and happy and
immediate and soulless and her mouth was so red, he fell.
Two days later, the police came looking for the husband of a scared wife and found
Kian et al. Wendy didn’t said goodbye. She left a note on the door just above his
suitcase. “Don’t come back,” it read. A man started crying in Kian’s chest, but Kian
had found the remedy for this crying man down the street, dispensed liberally from
bottles behind the bar.
JOEY SAT ON the edge of the hard square bed in the motel room and waited for
Kate. He tried not to think. Thoughts were doubts. He wanted Kate instead. They
would start a family and be saved from this terrible curse, even if she was his sister,
which he thought she might not have been. The hotel door was slightly ajar. When it
finally did open, it took Joey several seconds to realize who the man was suddenly
standing in the opening. His brother’s white snap-up shirt was pulled out; his oil-
stained, dirt-crusted pants hung from hipbones, empty.
“Hey,” Kian said. His voice surprisingly strong and clear.
Joey jumped to his feet.
“What are you doing here?”
He stepped to the television and pushed the off button. “How did you get here?”
Kian swiped his hand through his coarsened hair. He was baffled by that very same
question.
“Large found you,” he said, “and I … I … I …”
He wanted to get right to the point and ask for money, but couldn’t. Those glue
fumes he huffed out of a bag under I-5 had hit him hard.
“Oh! You got any money?” Kian slumped.
“Fuck no!” Joey yelled. He stood up and switched the television back on and
cranked up the volume. A man on a treadmill laughed and cried out how wonderful
the technique was. Joey imagined Kate opening the door. He wanted Kian gone.
“What do you want?” he said over the cries of adulation from the television. “I was
just about to leave.”
Kian met Joey’s eyes for the first time in about eight years. Several thoughts about
his current situation swirled through Kian’s mind and then disappeared into the dark
and one came back. He’d probably have a hard time taking Joey now that Joey had
been working hard and he had been drinking so much. He closed his eyes and tried
to remember why he was there.
“Kian!” Joey yelled. “Get out!”
“Money!” Kian yelled back. “Money. Loan me a bit will ya, and I’ll be on my way.”
Joey grabbed his wallet from his back pocket, but he was too late. The door moved.
Joey twisted his face up. Kian spun around and stepped to the side as the metal slab
came open. Joey popped the television off and stepped forward. Kate put her head
into the room. She made eye contact with Joey and stepped inside.
“Goddamn family reunion,” Kian slurred and horse-laughed. He fell across Kate’s
path and onto the bed, arms spread eagle.
“I can’t believe you and Wayne have kept him here,” Kate said. She looked at Joey
like he was dog shit. Her blue shirt was wrinkled, partly unbuttoned. “What the hell
are you two doing with him?” Her voice quivered with anger. “What has happened
to him?” She stepped over to Kian and put her hand over her mouth. “Damn it. He
looks like he’s dead. We have to get him to a hospital.”
Joey waved his hands around, like a kid trying to keep a parent from knowing the
truth. “I swear to God he just showed up. The last time I saw him was in Billings
lying on the sidewalk.”
Kate dropped her hands from her mouth. “Sidewalk? What the hell is the matter
with you!” She stepped forward fast and slapped him. Joey’s face went red. His
eyes ran cold into hers. She backed up. “You saw him lying on the fucking
sidewalk. He’s going to die and leave Wendy and those two girls fatherless you son
of a bitch!”
“Look at him! He did it to himself.”
“Just call a ambulance or get out of the way so I can!”
“No!” Kian sat up. His eyes blurry and unfocused. “No. I’ll leave.”
Kate sat on the bed next to him and held him down.
“I’ll call,” Joey said.
“Don’t call anyone.” Kian lunged sideways out of Kate’s grip. She dragged him
back and he fell back onto the bed. “They’ll call the cops,” he said secretly. “I can’t
have cops.”
Joey had the beige receiver in his hand and his fingers on the square gray buttons.
He couldn’t think of the numbers.
Kian turned out of Kate’s arms, got his feet and grabbed Joey’s arm. He dove into
Joey’s chest, pushing him off balance into the dresser. The phone clattered on the
tabletop and the television rocked. Kate held onto Kian’s shirtsleeve and pulled.
“Okay, Kian,” she yelled. “We won’t call anyone.” She pulled him back to the edge
of the bed. Joey pushed Kian down the rest of the way.
“We’ll let him sleep here tonight,” Kate said.
“Sleep hell. I need a drink.”
Kate waved at Joey. “Get him some beer.”
“Now look whose pushing the booze on him,” Joey said.
“He’ll stay if we give him something to drink.” She kept a hand on Kian’s shoulder.
“That’s right,” Kian said.
“Shit!” Joey yelled. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“One of dad’s illegitimate children brought me here. He’s looking for him. He found
him here.”
“Illegitimate children?” Kate said. “Where is he?”
“He took after Wayne. I don’t know where they went. Let’s get a drink and talk
about it. Let’s leave this fucker.”
“I can’t believe this!” Joey yelled. He paced in a circle. “He’s like a plague or a
demon or something. A horrible abomination wondering the planet casting his ill
seed around like salt, like death casting his shadow over everything. And now I have
another half-brother out there somewhere?”
“I guess that’s right,” Kian said.
Kate pulled his shoulder until he laid back. “Where is he?”
“He just said he went after Wayne!”
“But why? What does he want?”
“Maybe he wants to kill him. How the fuck should I know?”
“Does Wayne know?” Joey rubbing his face fast and hard.
“You have to find them. I’ll stay here with Kian and you have to find them.”
“He could be anywhere Kate!” Joey lied. He didn’t want to leave her. “I’ll never find
him.” He sat on the edge of the bed. He bowed his head and angled his eyes up at
Kian. “Why are you here?” His heart beat one long, torturous throb. He wasn’t
asking Kian. Joey was asking God. He put his face in his hands. He rubbed and
rubbed his eyes. He stood up and stepped toward Kate. He felt so ashamed of
himself. At a blink of her eye, he’d go get the beer. He was stupid. Just leave, he
told himself. These people make you sick.
“I have to go for a walk,” Joey said, straining the words through his shattered
hopes. “I have to get out of here. I am a man of God. I am not a filthy animal like
this thing and Wayne.”
“This thing! is your brother.”
Joey, feeling a cord snap in his neck, jammed his left hand into the front pocket of
his jeans and grabbed his pocketknife. He unclasped the blade. God brought Kian
here to die. He jumped onto his knees on the bed and shoved the fat blade of the
pocketknife into Kian’s chest, scraping a rib. He jerked the blade back, and it came
out as fast and easy as it went in, like it hadn’t.
The three of them stopped moving and talking and looked at the little slit in Kian’s
shirt.
“Now he’s not,” Joey said, almost a whisper.
“I’m burning,” Kian said.
Blood spread across the fabric of his dirty white shirt. Rivulets streamed from under
the shirttail across the slick, polyurethane bed covers. Kian looked up and moved his
mouth. A secret. His eyes opened wide. Joey backed up against the wall. Kian’s
eyes fell dull. Joey thought again of the sin of the father running through not only
Kian’s veins, but now through the veins of another. He pulled the hotel door open
and stepped outside. Rain was falling out of the dark gray clouds lighted from
underneath by the city. The world outside suddenly seemed so big and the hotel
room so small. He felt that now he could go anywhere and he’d be free. He
wondered if anyone would even notice what had happened in that little room, one of
millions. He took two steps toward the dark street, walking. He felt light and tall.
Then he heard a distant siren and felt a burn of panic in his neck and the back of his
head and he sprinted to the street. Running felt good, just pumping his legs,
pounding the pavement. He slowed after several hundred yards and then settled into
a jogging pace down Aurora toward the city lights. He felt like laughing. He felt
open to the rain. The big drops fell through him like he was an angel.
KIAN SAT UP on the hard hotel bed, awake suddenly and still wearing his boots.
He had forgotten something, something terribly important, so important that his
head hurts from trying to remember it. It’s something about his daughter. He
squeezed his fists and flexed his arms to waken them. He’s left her some place.
Where could he have left her? How? Then he remembered – she’s dead. She’s dead
and you didn’t leave her anywhere. The relief he felt was quickly overwhelmed by a
passion to hold her. He swung his legs off the bed and took a bottle of tequila from
the shelf next to the door. He drank from the bottle’s mouth.
He made his ablutions under the dim morning light seeping into the hotel room. He
patted his face dry with the damp, gray hand towel, stuffed his shirttail into his
pants. He attempted the door, difficult given its new, odd angle to the floor. The
narrow hallway bent the other way. He stopped and put his hand against the
yellowing wall to reorient his balance, then descended the wooden steps to the front
door in a rush. Outside, the Subaru was parked halfway into the street. The cops
had left it alone, nothing unusual on the reservation. He got in it, spun the motor and
gunned it through the mist and light fog along the curving highway bordered by
pastures. Ghost horses appeared dark brown in the diffused light. They turned their
head toward him as he swerved past, a dead thing still breathing.
The headquarters of the Crow Reservation Tribal Government was a dark, brick
building. The glass and steel doors closed tight. A handful of cars, windows fogged,
were scattered around the parking lot. The engine clicked down. Barren trees, low
bushes and ramshackle houses crowded in around the headquarters. He was early to
see if the reservation cops were going to storm the building. They probably wouldn’
t, but he needed to know for sure.
To help pass the time, Kian decided to smoke pot. He reached behind his head to the
dome light and flipped it on. The world outside died, blocked out by the sudden
appearance of the inside of his car. The world as the inside of his car seemed calm
enough. He took the road map off the passenger seat, unfolded it on his lap and put
the baggie down. The cigarette papers came one at a time from their folds. He took
two and creased one in half and lined it. He thought about his father. Evidently Dad
was back in town to dry out and make repairs to the farm and mom’s checkbook.
The joint smoked and sputtered and a runner of fire nearly ripped the side open until
he stopped it with a spit-wet finger. He let the hand with the joint rest on his leg.
Kian was like his father in a lot of bad ways. The light of the morning seeped into
the sky like piss into water. He pulled his mind into the new morning light. He was
good and stoned now. It’d be tough getting through this buzz to the story. Then
Wendy and her body floated up, pale, like a body rising in murky water. Her eyes
open and wet. Her chest still. He hit the joint again and stubbed it out in the ashtray.
He leaned forward and punched the side of his head.
Later, a crowd had gathered like a flock of crows. Kian glanced down at the man in
the car again, and the man’s black eyes were still on him. Kian cringed at the
mistake. Now he would have to hear this man’s arguments and act like he was
taking notes. The man’s shoulder rolled and the car window came down.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” Kian said.
“You with the paper?”
“In Billings.” Kian leaned closer to the car.
“Who do you think is right?” the Indian said. “Linda or Tom.”
“I’m only here to report what happens,” Kian said. “I don’t know who’s right or
wrong.”
“Do you care?”
“I don’t know how to care. I don’t live here.”
The man turned away and looked out the front window at the barricaded doors and
nodded his head slowly.
“Some of us are ready to do anything for her,” he said. He put his hands on the
steering wheel and squeezed, causing his knuckles to rise. “She’s going to bring
justice to this reservation and put those criminals out of power for good.”
Kian took his notebook out of his back pocket, the pen from inside his coat and
wrote that down. He couldn’t help it. He envied the man his certainty and his clarity.
Kian didn’t think he had ever felt that simplicity of motivation, that clarity of
purpose, but he had. He’s just forgotten. The man didn’t turn away, but Kian closed
the notepad and stuck his pen back under his arm. He stepped away from the car,
deeper into the crowd and closer to the car backed against the doors at the
entrance. Expectation agitated the masses, pulling them toward the building again.
Then Linda Two Horses came out. She was a tall woman with a matronly form.
She stepped up on the bumper of the car. Dean, her henchman, reached up and held
her arm at the elbow. An ebullient, loquacious queen at her coronation. She bobbled
as she ascended to the Impala’s shiny hood. The women inside looked at each other
with wide eyes. She steadied and put her hands in the air. Triumphantly still on her
feet, she led the charge against injustice. Kian looked at her with scorn. She said
something, but he couldn’t understand her words. The night fog wrapped his head
in a wet shawl and he stuck the pen back into his armpit. He walked by the car and
the man with shiny black hair. Down the sidewalk from them, a pickup was parked
on a strip of grass in front of the windowless side of the brick building. A mound of
white-bread sandwiches was stacked on the tailgate next to a big silver coffee pot.
Kian picked up a sandwich and poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup. In a world full
of garbage what’s one more dead animal? One more dead species? Kian’s normal
melancholy. He turned around and looked back at Linda. She was bending slightly
on the hood of the car. The henchman’s hand on her calf. “We’re not ...” Blah blah
blah. Kian turned away. Whatever. He picked up another sandwich wedge. He
noticed then that the man in the Dodge was looking at him again. He had started
something with that guy, and he wondered how it would end. Kian smiled and
nodded backward in Linda’s direction. The man in the car gave him a thumbs up.
Kian lifted his cup. You bet. What’s a world full of beautiful dead people matter?
Wendy hated when he talked like this. Kian turned back to the big silver
coffeemaker and topped off his cup with one finger on the lever. There has to be
hope, Wendy said. There has to be meaning in the world. Something has to matter if
only because we need it to. Kian stuffed a wedge in his mouth to occupy himself.
He tossed the remaining bite of the practical finger food into the bush next to the
pickup. He took a little bottle of gin out of his coat pocket and poured it all into his
mouth. As he slouched at the tailgate wanting something he couldn’t put his finger
on, his sister, Kate, the oldest, conceived in illegitimacy, was hurtling through the air
from East to West, from the cool waters of intellect and gleaming New York City to
the hard-packed desert of heredity. The earth here remembered her. It turned under
Kian’s feet indescribably toward her. The Earth was a little anxious. Kate had tried
to escape and that always makes an impression. None shall leave the land that has
spawned them.
KATE SQUEEZED THROUGH the crowd at the door of the Sundown and shot
outside. She spotted Joey moving between cars.
“Joey!” she yelled and trotted after him. “Joe!”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder. He had black hair like Wayne but kept it
short, nearly a buzz cut. He was taller and leaner than Wayne. The veins and
tendons in his thin neck jumped out when he moved his head. He had grown into an
attractive man, but he was sulky and depressed. He shrugged his shoulders a lot and
let his chin drop in conversations. He had been like this since they were kids.
Confused, distant and fearful. It made her mad at him, especially since he blamed
Wayne for the way he felt and his failures. He had been through hell as a kid, it was
true. But they all had been through hell and now they needed to get on with the rest
of their lives.
“Joe,” she said when she caught up to him between the two cars. “I need a ride. In
fact,” she added, smiling and pushing her hands into the air, “I need a place to stay
tonight. Wayne’s coming home, and I definitely don’t want to be there.”
Joey didn’t say anything. His face was long and forlorn. His eyes were tortured,
enflamed like he had been crying.
“Are you okay?”
He turned away and stepped, a crumpled cottonwood leaf skittering across the
gravel. He would soon be blown up against the fence, piled up with all the other
inconsequential, tortured and confused men. He was a small flame that didn’t have
the language or experience or cultural education to know what he was or what was
possible for his life. He can never be at peace. Kate knew this. She felt enormous
pity for all of them, especially this one, Joey. Cast out of his father’s life, doomed to
circle the family like a meteor-smashed moon. He had lived with his mother in a
small apartment in Billings, where she still lived, while Kate and Kian got the run of
the farm. Horses and cows and plenty of food. Dental care. A little money now and
then in high school to go out on. Meanwhile, Joey had grown up on a skateboard
and eaten a lot of spaghetti. Wayne had allowed him to stay on the farm a few
summers, but he never gave him much. In fact, Kate had heard that he never gave
them money and that Joey and his mother, Angel, had lived off food stamps.
“Just tired,” he said. “It’s good to see you, but I’m just so tired of this whole mess.”
“I am too, Joey. I am too. So what do you say? Got any room out at that trailer?”
She crossed her arms, closing the light jacket across her chest where his eyes had
wandered. The two boys, Joey and Kian, had always had a strong affection for her,
a natural thing that grew out of proportion when planted out on an isolated farm.
Kian had securely grown out of it, but Joey was still confused by his affection for
her.
“Yes,” he said. “I got room.”
When they made the interstate, Joey accelerated through the gears to match
highway speeds of ninety mph. Traffic stretched out sparse on the black ribbons,
red pairs and white pairs. As they sped toward his camper at the cattle-trailer wash,
yard lights bunched and scattered all along the northern horizon where Worden,
Huntley, Shepherd and the Heights neighborhoods were strung together, outposts in
the wide expanse of black. To the south, where the Crow Indian reservation spread
out its desolate waves of sagebrush, ponies and government shacks, Joey noted the
absence of lights. Just the black stretch all the way to the ragged Pryor Mountains
somewhere out there. There were a few isolated and desperate individual lights
flickering on that sea of waste. Kate pushed the cassette tape into the player and the
wild picking of skillful bluegrass skittled around the cab. Joey grabbed the round
can of chewing tobacco from the dash, removed the lid and took a pinch of the
pungent grinds. He put the tobacco in his lip and looked over at Kate. She was
staring out, no doubt thinking of all those city lights and handsome boys back East.
Inside the camper, Kate waited by the small door in front of the bathroom, her hand
on the refrigerator handle. Yellow light from the battery-run lamps cast a pall on the
wood paneling and orange, cloth bench seats. Joey twisted the dining table,
unscrewing it from the chrome post. He put the tabletop under the seat cushions
and spread out the backrest cushions.
“I’ve got a clean sleeping bag,” he said. He rubbed his hands on his pants and took
down a stuffed blue nylon bag from an overhead storage cabinet. He tossed it onto
the makeshift bed. It bounced taut. He turned his back to her and pulled the bottom
of the couch at the other end of the trailer out from one side. The cushion fell into
place. Kate picked up the bag and pulled the draw string. She started feeding the
fabric onto the bed. He had said it was clean, but who knows whether that meant he
wasn’t dirty the last time he slept in it or if he had actually washed it. Meanwhile,
Joey’s mind was locked on its own problem, how would the two of them get ready
for bed? He didn’t know if he should come out and say, You step into the bathroom
and I strip and hop into bed … or to just climb into his bed with his clothes on and
risk her telling him to get over himself and go to bed right. Either way he felt
exposed, embarrassed. Kate kicked her boots off and jumped into the bag with her
clothes on. Joey flopped down on the couch, relieved, and pulled his blankets up.
They were silent long enough for him to wonder if Kate had fallen asleep. He sat up
and reached the light switch, snapping the inside of the trailer black.
“Remember when Kian’s daughter died last year?” Kate said.
“Yes. I never could talk to Kian, but he really wouldn’t listen to me at all after that.”
“Yeah, well,” Kate said, wanting to get to the real reason why she had come home.
She imagined it would inspire Joey and they could team up in the effort to save their
brother from himself and from Wayne. “Remember how the preacher said we
needed to watch him because no one knows just how profoundly, how deeply the
death of a child will change a person? And how Kian kept saying he wasn’t angry at
God.”
“Yes,” Joey said. He leaned up on his elbow to look at her, warming up to the
theological potential of Kate’s comments.
“Well, Kian later told me that he wasn’t so mad at God for letting his daughter die.
He was angry because God had let him fail her. I think that’s still hurting him,
making him do crazy, self-destructive things. He’s even left Wendy and the kids.
She wouldn’t say what happened except that he didn’t come home for a couple of
days and she took the kids to her parent’s in South Dakota.”
“God has a plan,” Joey said. He chastised himself for feeling satisfaction at the
news of Kian’s failures. “There is the sin of the father to be dealt with.” His voice
was cold and faint, talking to himself.
Despite herself, despite her desire to reach out and lead Joey to health, Kate shivered
and pulled the sleeping bag over her eyes to block the outdoor lights. That distant
tone in his voice, that same hopeless religiosity that had plagued him and kept him
depressed. Those things made her feel weak. The whole night weakened her. She
felt small under the slick bag, small and helpless against the troubles in her family.
She dreaded her dreams but she didn’t want to stay awake for the long dark hours
of a sleepless, power-draining night. She tried to think of New York. The buildings
and taxis and miles of window-shopping with girlfriends. All-night conversations
over coffee and the occasional martini. The freedom to read and write and talk.
Then she remembered that her makeup was all at her mother’s house. Shit. I’ll have
to get my bag right away. I am definitely not going through tomorrow without
makeup. The hair she could put in a ponytail, but she didn’t need any challenges to
her confidence tomorrow when she goes hunting for Kian. She felt relieved to have
that little mundane problem to solve in the morning and she focused on it, she
imagined the little blue compact in the side pocket of her black suitcase, which was
… she searched the house in her mind… just inside Kian’s bedroom next to his old
bed.
CATLYNN STOOD facing the large picture window. Her reflection strong in the
milky black. The narrow driveway wound from the gravel in front of the window
across a small dike between two sloughs, choked with the long, narrow leaves and
bursts of cattails. The meandering lane faded into the darkness just beyond the dike.
The heavy cold had set in and froze the ground. The weeds were white with hoar
frost. The sky cut by the brown hills up by the main road was just turning blue, like
the dark blue of an eye, and Catlynn hugged her chest. She held the pale white
phone against her head. Her gaze stretched out unfocussed and the world fell flat
and distant. So this is how that happens, she said to herself. This is how history
repeats itself.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“I’m here. Who did you say you were again?”
“Sergeant Nollette ...”
“Now what are those little girls going to do?”
“Girls?”
“His daughters. Those poor little girls have been through an awful lot lately.”
“Your daughter didn’t mention them. Is he married?” Nollette decided she would go
back to talk with Kate to see what else she had left out of her family history. She
had been called off the case twice to take up a position on a long-running protest-
turn-riot downtown. With all those interruptions, she hadn’t done a very good job
interviewing Kate. Maybe the man’s father will be of some use, if he shows up at
the motel. She leaned back in the office chair, the desk she shared with several
other beat-cops cluttered with loose papers, two phones and several coffee cups.
She tapped the pen on the rim of a blue and black cup with a negative image of
Glock 9 pistol bent around it.
“Yes or he was. I think they still are.”
“Trouble?”
“Some.”
“Can you tell me how to contact his wife?” She rocked the chair forward and put
the pen point on the note pad. As Catlynn said the numbers slowly. Nollette
scratched Wendy’s name and a phone number on the little note pad at an angle to
the blue lines.
“How long have they been separated?”
“Do you know who killed him?”.
“We believe so.”
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“You’re breathing too fast.”
“Just what exactly do you mean he’s dead?” Catlynn sat down in a kitchen chair
and put her hand over her eyes. “Kian Waters. You have the right person. What the
hell was he doing in Seattle? He was just in Billings, running around drinking himself
stupid every day. How could he get to Seattle?”
“I’m sorry,” Nollette said. “He came with a son of your husband’s.”
“Joey?”
“No. We don’t know his name right now. Kate said Kian came to Seattle with him,
but he didn’t say his name. Do you know any other sons of Wayne’s?”
Catlynn looked up and saw her face reflected in overlapping double images in the
two panes of glass in the big window, the light outside long gone. No moon. The
kitchen floated in the black. Her face and shoulders in the center of the blurred
kitchen, the shape of a head and brown hair. Her features blurred into generality.
“Mrs. Waters?”
“No, but I can’t say I’m too surprised.” There had been growing in her a feeling of
disappointment or sorrow, she couldn’t tell which it was. She had been a good
mother. She had tried to keep Wayne in line long enough to at least get the kids
through high school. She had married Wayne knowing exactly who he was and
couldn’t blame him for her marital losses. But she could blame him for wrecking the
lives of those poor boys. He was all too happy to make children by nearly any
woman who’d let him. She had to be the one to make him take responsibility for
them. She’d kept on with him partly out of love. He had made her life both painful
and pleasurable. She also pried all the money and fatherly support she could out of
him for those kids, including that weird stepson Joey. She tried to make Wayne
treat the kids well, and she spent all she could on them. She practically adopted Joey
out of fairness to him, to get him the hell out of that church where his mother spent
all her time. Joey hadn’t asked for a father like Wayne. She had tried her best for
them, but they were all ungrateful. So the flame of disappointment flickered to life
again for a moment. The fact was that as soon as the kids got old enough to leave,
they ran out on her and disappeared off the face of the Earth. So, no, she wouldn’t
cry over Kian.
“Who killed him?”
“According to your daughter, it was Joey who stabbed him.”
“Boy, doesn’t that just figure.”
“Let’s get down to business.”
“This isn’t Joey’s home. He isn’t my son.”
“Wayne’s?”
“Prolific isn’t he.” She exhaled the last bit of concern she had for that beautiful wild
man who, for many years, led her outside of her own misery. Wayne was easy to
fall in love with and impossible to live with. He knew how to work, build things and
bring in money. He just didn’t know how to stay home.
“I only have pictures of Joey from when he was a kid.”
WAYNE EMERGED THROUGH Catlynn’s front door dragging Joey, who
struggled to get his feet under his weight after losing his heals against the doorjamb.
Joey’s arm was slung across Wayne’s shoulders. Wayne smiled shyly like Santa
Clause surprised.
Catlynn stepped into the living room. She held her shoulders down and her fingers
spread out.
“What the hell happened to my yard?” Wayne said, a bright, laughing tone.
“Don’t you bring him in here.”
Wayne let go of Joey’s arm. Joey collapsed onto the floor and flattened himself out.
He breathed fast and ragged. He pushed up on an elbow. Wayne kicked it out. He
thudded on the thin eggshell carpet, coughed and red splatters bloomed in the carpet
around his head. Wayne stepped toward Catlynn. He looked over his shoulder and
then back.
“We’ll leave you to whatever it is you’ve got going on here Cat, but you’re going to
have to share for a few more days, got that? There’s no choice in this for any of
us. We’re going to get this business settled and then we’ll all go our separate ways.”
Wayne put his hand out palm up.
“Where the hell are you going to keep him? The police will come here looking for
him. You know that.” Catlynn looked down at her hands. “Why the hell do I have to
look at him? Why does he have to be here?”
Large stepped into the room behind Wayne and stood over Joey. His long black hair
laid over his shoulders and down his chest. “Looks like you’ve had a fire out there.
Feels like there’s another one coming.”
Catlynn looked up at Large then back to Wayne. “You and your off-springs need to
just get the fuck out of here.”
“I …” Wayne stopped. He looked down at Joey and then up at Large, who was
nodding his head, though he didn’t appear to be agreeing or disagreeing with
anything. Wayne looked back a Joey. “I just can’t let this go. I don’t know.”
“This is what the police are for,” Catlynn said. She stepped closer. She looked at
her hands. Turning them over and back and then over and then she started rubbing
off spray paint. “Wayne,” she threw her hands down, “just get him out of my sight.
Put him in the cellar and bury him. ”
Wayne reached down, stunned by the clarity of Catlynn’s wish, and grabbed Joey’s
arm. He raised him half off the floor. Joey grunted and grabbed Wayne’s sleeve and
pulled. Wayne dragged him in to the room.
Catlynn stepped aside and let them pass. She rubbed at the paint on her hands. She
looked up at the angular shadow of Wayne and his son, entering the lowlight of the
kitchen. Joey wasn’t kicking or holding any part of himself now. The toes of his
boots stuttered along the floor. Wayne pull him relentlessly. The waistline of Joey’s
pants had fallen down low on his narrow hips. Two long steps dragged him out of
the light and into the dark bedroom. Catlynn turned around and looked at Large.
Only his eyebrows and his cheekbones were Wayne’s. The rest were his mother’s,
whoever she was.
“You better just turn right around and get back to the rez,” Catlynn said. Her hands
in her hair. She dragged them through the knots. “This isn’t going to end well. But
if you have to stay, then shut the goddamn door before you freeze us all out of
here.”
Large stepped into the room and swung the door to the jamb and then pushed it
hard until it clicked.
“Shit,” Catlynn said and waved him away. “Those cops get here, you’ll wish you’d
have gotten the hell out of here. Wayne may be your father, but you don’t know
him. Once he gets bent on revenge, he wont stop.”
“It’s like a curse,” Large said. He sat on the couch and leaned back. “It’s like every
where you go out here there someone dying. Wrecks. Drunks. Drugs. Murder.
Suicide. Disease. It’s like a weight. A heavy blanket that we all live under. Outside,”
Large looked up at Catlynn, “I had this feeling, like a voice in my head, it said a fire
was coming.”
“Ha,” Catlynn said, “a fire is always coming.”
“I guess you’re right, but this is pretty weird though. Your husband is down in the
basement …”
“It’s not a basement. It’s a cellar.”
“Right.”
Catlynn slipped her arms into a dark blue down-filled coat with strips of silver duct
tape on one shoulder and across the back. She put her hands in the coat’s poofy
pockets and pushed up with her shoulders until the collar floated up to her nose.
Inside the neck of the coat, Catlynn diminished. Her loopy brown hair, streaked
with silver and ragged at its ends, fell out over her shoulders. Her nose, pale and
white. Catlynn let her eyes meet Large’s big black orbs.
“But don’t you have that sense of panic? Like this doesn’t have to happen. We
could go back there and tell Wayne that we’ve called the police and an ambulance
and that they’ll take care of Joey?”
A bang fell from the back room.
Large twitched.
Catlynn turned her head and then turned back. “Just the cellar door.” It banged flat
against the concrete whenever someone let it fall open. Wayne would have yelled at
the kids for that. Catlynn opened the front door. On her way past Large, she looked
into his black eyes again. He was looking into the kitchen. Joey groaned long and
low. She thought Joey said “dad.” She ducked her head deeper into the coat and
stepped outside. She slammed the door closed behind her.
The lace curtains settled down against the glass. Large heard the sound of metal
cutting into gravel, rhythmically. Wayne is wasting time, trying to figure himself
out, Large thought. He’ll come out of there in a minute. He’ll call the sheriffs and
ambulance. He’s just working up to it. Large also considered that he had helped take
Joey from Seattle and had given him a boot or two as well. That’s just not going to
go over well with the authorities.
“I’ll wait for Wayne to make the call and when he does I’ll take off. If he doesn’t
call in a bit I’ll call, but then they will know there was another person here. If he
calls and I take off, even if the crazy old woman says I was here, I’ll be more like a
mirage than a man with a name. I could leave right now, but then my brother will
die. This is a conundrum or maybe I am just at a loss.”
KIAN TOSSED his notebook into the passenger seat of the Subaru and arched up to
look into the back for stragglers. He got the heavy cell phone out from between the
seats and dialed the tribal judge’s home number with his thumb. No answer. He
started the car and drove out of the lot. On the highway, he called the late night
editor and gave him the new stuff, reading from the notebook on his right leg, the
phone pinched between his head and shoulder. He flipped the pages over and back
reading quotes, glancing up at the road and steering back to his side of the
pavement. The road had succumbed to a low level fog caused by the freak mist
hitting the sun-burned ground. He read through the scrawl on the narrow white
pages. Then he said, “Cheers!” and killed the connection. He tossed the phone back
into the passenger seat. As he neared the boarder of the reservation and the little
town there, in the night fog, a car became a globe of light that intensified, shot by
and then turned wet-red. A globe of light came up behind Kian, split and four small
eyes stared at him through the rearview mirror. Some asshole was going to pass
them all on this half-frozen wet stretch of highway. Then the globe became one
again, only closer; its two bright fires burning on high-beam. The car drew nearer,
slowly, over a mile and a half and then settled in behind Kian at about 50 yards. Kian
braked hard to make the turn onto the shallow parking lot of the hotel. The Delilah
was a Victorian-style three-story wooden house sitting alone next to the highway,
its crown lost in the black fog. He watched the rearview mirror for the car to pull in
to the lot next to him, but it drove slowly by. Lit in the red of his brake lights, Kian
thought he recognized the man with the long black hair. The car drove on and then
dissolved in the wet air. Kian settled back in his seat, rolled another small joint and
smoked it. He was relieved that the day was behind him and especially relieved that
the tribal battle hadn’t been resolved. He would get to stay another day and night on
the reservation and in his small room at the Delilah. He gathered the notebook and
phone from the seat and got out. The cold grass fields around the hotel were silent.
White lights appeared on the little highway. Tires rushed across wet pavement.
Silence returned. The cold wrought-iron handle squealed quietly in his hand. The
door whined inward, slowly suffering against the rust in its hinges. The hall was
dark except for a yellow light near its end, spilling out from around the corner
where the bar was. He stopped there before going up stairs. He ordered a shot and a
beer from the old woman bartender.
“I’ll catch that drink when I come back down,” he said to the old wisp of a woman.
She nodded and wiped the mahogany counter where his class had left a ring.
Kian climbed up two flights of creaking stairs, each step covered in thread-bare
carpeting, purple paisley where it wasn’t worn out. His room was on the left of the
landing on the top floor. One hundred layers of white paint made the door to the
room feel heavy, like the door to a vault. The heavy bolt moved smooth and solid.
Inside his room, the overhead bulb swayed minutely, moved by his entrance.
Hanging from its naked cord from a silver plate screwed into the high ceiling, it
caused a disturbance among the shadows in the short and wide room. The bed took
most of the space and jetted out almost to the door. A small round table sat under
the rippled-glass window. Two wooden chairs without cushions approached it at an
angle. A simple, red poppy made of stiffened silk leaned in a clear glass vase,
opaque with dust, sitting on the wood-panel nightstand. The red telephone’s
industrial design encouraged short declarative sentences. Sometimes Kian turned the
rotor just to hear the ratcheting return to zero. The practical heartiness of it felt like
a truth, a stone in water. The closet was cut into the wall behind the door. A
wooden rod stretched from end to end with two wire hangers dangling from it. The
closet was so shallow that a guest’s clothes stuck out when hanging there. Kian
didn’t hang his clothes, so this didn’t bother him. An old sink and speckled mirror
met his eyes. He shut the door and dropped his small bag, phone and notepad on the
floor of the closet space and stepped to the sink. His face felt oily and grimy from
standing around in the wind all day. He bent over the sink, avoiding the man in the
mirror. Black spots speckled the old porcelain bowl where the white had chipped
off. He twisted the faucet and brown water coughed out. Then the water cleared
and he splashed it on his eyes. He felt better now. The evening’s first shot of scotch
had warmed him. He dried his face on a shirt and went back down stairs to the bar.
He drank several more shots and beer all in a rush. He put some cash on the table
and swirled out of the bar. The silent bartender leaned in the corner, smoking and
coughing. He climbed back into his room. He pissed and unwound himself onto the
bed. The phone appeared next to him and he picked up the handset. He weighed it in
his hand. It felt right.
A headache started and then dissipated and then came back stronger. A blister on
his brain.
To distract himself, he dialed work and laughed at them. “Blood!” he heard himself
saying. “Yes! Blood!” He laughed harder into the little black holes of the phone’s
thick handset. Then he hung up. He laughed some more and felt the wonderful
absence of connection to any emotion. What a neat trick, he thought. This oblivion
thing is just right. He reached over his right and groped around inside the mini
refrigerator. The tequila folded space and unfolded time. A particularly good trick
performed by this type of liquor. Each drink had its own gimmick. Gin made your
body light like you weighed less than a feather. The sweet liquors made you think of
squeezing girls. Vodka, of course, turned you into a potato.
He relaxed back onto the bed and ruminated. He had that desired distance from all of
life now, and he watched dispassionately, but with humor. He slept. A little later, he
stumbled out of his room to escape the ghosts in his bed. He went downstairs
because the bar at the Delilah never closed. The red carpet fell into vanishing points.
The floor humped several times, like a heart beat. He cleared his throat and checked
the change in his pockets. A twenty came out. Two ones fell to the floor. The old
lady – paper-thin skin stretched tight over sharp knuckles – grasped a bottle off the
top shelf. Her silvery lace shirtsleeve slid down her arm toward her elbow. She blew
the dust off its blue neck. The bottle looked medicinal. She brought the scotch to
him and sat it down on the bar top and smiled. Her straight, white, fake teeth
gleamed in the poor light, slightly off kilter in her mouth. When she noticed him
looking at her mouth, she clacked the top row of teeth into place.
“How much?” Kian asked.
“Hey, for a newspaper man,” clack, “it’s the same as the other stuff.”
The old lady leaned down. Her spine ripped up through the fabric of her shirt. She
straightened with a water glass in her right hand and put it down in front of him and
poured a half a glass.
“These damn Indians will drive you to drink,” she said.
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t quite sound fair to them,” Kian said. “Mostly, it’s
politicians who drive me to drink, Indian or white.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she said.
The old woman reached below the bar, and Kian tried not to see the pelvic bones
rotating up out of her nearly absent ass. Then she stood triumphant with another
bottle of clear booze and poured herself a drink and toasted Kian. She slipped the
drink through slightly parted, blue lips and took the bottle to the opposite corner of
the bar where an equally old man dressed in a yellow shirt and baked tallow skin,
waggled his glass at her. He had appeared from out of nowhere. The woman poured
his glass half full, and he too toasted Kian in the air. She sat on a stool in front of
the tallowed old man, feet on the bottom rung. Kian’s mind was where he wanted it
– on the world, where everything, according to all mythology and the gods too were
focused. It seems that all existence everywhere is focused on us, Kian thought. He
took the twenty from his pocket and floated it onto the bar. The next time he looked
up, the twenty was gone and he was alone. His head was so full of clouds he could
barely see out of his eyes. He found himself inside his room in the middle of black
space. The faucet burped red then cleared and he drank from his hands. Iron, he
thought, his mind slowed by booze, operating just enough to keep his heart beating.
Sometime in the morning, the dream began again.
He sat at a table in a small, dark cafe. Light pouring in the windows, hitting only the
table tops and making hard shadows. Kian sat across from his wife, whose black
hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. She’s wearing a white shirt with lace
ruffles at her wrists. The kind of shirt she wore when they were in junior high. Kian’
s holding the baby in his arms. The table had been set with eggs and toast on heavy
white plates. The coffee cups with thick rims matched them. Chrome silverware.
The egg yolks were broken and seeped across the plate, soaking into the hash
browns. Wendy tucked a half-piece of toast in with the smeared egg yolks and sat
back in her chair. She looked at him, then away. Her face expectant but
disappointed, like she knew what was coming just as he did and just because she
was there in the dream for him didn’t mean she’d have to watch. Big black birds
scored the sky in front of the window. The baby slept in Kian’s arms, wrapped in a
soft, cotton blanket, white and patterned with small handprints, each a different
pastel color. His brain said, She’s alive. Now’s the chance. Give everything.
Then it started.
Kian moved to uncover her face. He knew he was dreaming her, but still he wanted
to save her from dying, even if only in a dream. That didn’t seem like too much to
ask from a dream. Wendy stared out the window. The birds had frozen, stenciled
on the glass. The baby moved, an arm turned.
“She can’t die again,” Kian said without voice. Water poured into a glass behind
him. He held his daughter tighter because it was coming and he was going to die
instead of her this time. He put out his right hand, crouching over her. But the man
was already there, standing too close. Her white skin just showing out of the blanket
she had pulled from her eyes. “No,” Kian said and he cradled her with both arms.
“No.” He put his face in the blanket, crying. When he looked up the birds flew away
and Wendy wiped a tear. He let the blanket slide across his legs onto the floor. A
moan from deep inside poured out of his mouth, silent. It filled the air with misery.
Wendy’s eyes went dark. She watched the ravens score the window with their
black wings. A hole opened in his chest and the moan rushed back into him, the
velocity of it pulling him inside the black too.
Kian’s misery woke him. It was still dark in the room and he weaved toward the
sink to drink water. Two rusty swallows got down before a reddened bile and slick
booze came back up, splashing into the bowl and up the wall. He folded up onto the
linoleum.
The phone woke Kian at noon. Three sharp rings. He fought his way out of the
dream of her in his arms, first with a cigarette and then, after sloppily dressing, with
coffee and a shot of tequila from the last little bit left in the bottle next to the bed.
When he got into his car, he exhaled hard, fogging the windows. He pulled a
cigarette from the pack on the seat and swallowed a mouthful of fuzz and lit it. He
drove to the council building, returning to other people’s lives, seeking answers he
didn’t care about. The scotch and coffee had smoothed out some of the wrinkles,
but he felt heavy, old. Dread was all over him, like he had been dipped in it.
The parking lot at the tribal headquarters was mostly empty. He sighed relief. The
crowd was gone, and he hoped that the whole mess had resolved itself while he lay
passed out in his room. He dragged another cigarette out of the pack. The few cars
still in the lot had been parked neatly, within the white grid. The lines lifted off the
black pavement and turned and fell, jumped up and fell back into place. He shut his
eyes, but even with his eyes squeezed shut, the grid bounced up and danced and
turned. He felt nauseous and opened his eyes again, literally looking for purchase.
The Earth settled down. Kian punched the dashboard as hard as he could swing.
The glove box popped open.
When he shut it and looked up, it dawned on him that the people weren’t just getting
a late start, something had changed. Somehow the crisis had left this location or
lifted from the reservation altogether. He got out of his car and went to the doors of
the tribal council building. The naked sunlight cut along the building’s edges, the
brown paint pealing all along the eves, around the doors and windows. Not only
were the cars gone from the front, but also the chain that had held the doors
together had been removed. Of the night’s turmoil, only the brown crust from a
piece of white bread remained in the bush next to the sidewalk by the door.
Apparently, the business of running the tribe had recommenced. Kian’s arms felt
small, his legs thin. His head had been punctured and acid pumped in through a
straw.
Inside the building, he went to the information window, an opening cut into the
brick wall, a narrow, wooden counter and behind that the illusion of dozens of
people sitting at desks in a bright and clean room. He asked the big woman sitting in
a chair behind the window where was Linda. The woman looked right through him,
like he was there but insubstantial.
“Is she in today?”
The woman looked up at his hairline and slowly down his haggard, puffy face.
Then he felt a hand on his arm. He didn’t recognize the woman who had touched
him. She was taller than Kian by an inch and was more black than Indian. She was
beautiful. Her hair was braided over her head into tight, shining rows.
“Who are you looking for?” She spoke in a high clear tone. Kian yearned to hold her.
“Oh, I know you,” she said.
His heart thunked once and then fell into his pelvis.
“Linda is in a meeting,”
“What happened? Are you a new spokesperson?”
“Yes, from the Mitchell and Krank law firm.”
“Oh,” he said. “So,” taking his note pad out of his back pocket, “what happened?”
“She came to an agreement with the judge this morning, and they will be in a
meeting all day, without any comments afterward.” The woman stood perfectly
still, but not stiff, one hand held the other in front of her closed suit jacket. “She
said to tell you reporters that she will not be making any statements until tomorrow
at 10 a.m.”
“What’s your name?” Kian asked.
“Just a spokesperson,” she said.
“But that’s useless to me. Without your name, I can’t use your comments.”
The woman shrugged. “Why is that my concern?”
“Who else is in the meeting?”
“The council and judges.” She put her hand back on Kian’s forearm and turned him
toward the door. “She’ll talk tomorrow. And,” she squeezed his arm and her face
hardened, “we’ll be in touch.”
He stepped back from her toward the doors. Guilt swarmed his guts. Why had she
threatened him? What had he done now? He was being so nice and calm. He turned
to the door and pushed through into the light, his eyes pained by the shock and heat
of it. He stumbled, but kept his feet on the sidewalk. Remaining upright, he looked
back and the woman stood at the door, arms across her chest. She was smiling a
mean smile at him. Kian stumbled off the curb to his car.
He drove fast to the Delilah, feeling like too little water stretched over too much
ground. He stopped on the strip of gravel in front of the building. He didn’t want to
pack his things and leave. He had nowhere to go and he liked the Delilah and its bar.
Maybe he just stank of booze and pot and she was going to turn him in.
“That’s just stupid,” he said to his mirrored image behind the rows of liquor. He
pictured sitting at his desk in the newsroom and felt sick. All those eyes on him,
expressing disappointment because he didn’t have good stories anymore, too many
corrections and long lunches. The pall of a question hanging in the air, “Why hasn’t
he been fired?”
JOEY WALKED UP to the driver’s door of the red truck parked on the concrete
slab. The door swung open at face-level and just missed him. This was exactly the
kind of casual intentional aggression he’d come to expect from his father. Wayne
stuck his leg out of the opening and pointed his toe at Joey’s nose. Joey noticed
what he was supposed to – a silver toe-guard on the pointed end of a new boot,
light brown with a thick leather sole and walking heals. Wayne’s pants looked new
as well, maybe it was the morning sun. He looked like a magazine advertisement.
Joey sipped from his coffee cup, caffeine and nicotine his only drugs now that he
had gotten serious about saving his soul. He hoped the coffee would help him screw
up his courage and have that talk with Wayne, get it all out in the open.
He felt screwed up so he jumped right in.
“Wayne I’m a Christian,” he said. “And I’ve changed my ways and want you to
know Christ, too.”
Wayne set his heel down on the edge of the floor mat and wagged the toe.
“I hear you son. That ol’ religion bug bites us all now and again. The trick is to keep
your head. You never want to give your mind completely over to anything.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Wayne.”
“Well, I figure it works just about any way a person wants it to. But enough of this
philosophy, I’ve got to get this trailer clean and new straw bails loaded up.”
Wayne stepped down onto the aluminum fuel tank. Joey stepped aside. His father
jumped down to the ground.
“Come on,” Wayne said. “You shovel and I’ll run the hose.”
Just like that, Joey marveled, Wayne had slipped right through. But I’ll get to him.
Like the pastor said, no one is without the torments of sin. The trick is to help him
see it, to give him a taste of the pure joy of salvation. Now that he’d said it, he felt
that terrible weight around his shoulders again. He followed Wayne to the pump
shed and helped him uncoil the fire hose from the wall brackets and stretch it
around the end of the aluminum cattle trailer. Wayne held the hose and Joey walked
back and flipped the pump on.
Wayne felt the boyish glee at waving around such a powerful gush of water. Then
he thought about Joey. Poor mixed up bastard. He had already decided to use the
kid’s help on the run to Seattle. When he saw him, he started to reconsider. He
turned the hose off. It tightened and pulsed in his hands. He went into the shed, one
naked light bulb swinging from the low slanted steel roof. Joey handed him a yellow
slicker. Rubber boots and goggles.
Covered in thick plastic, the two men stepped out into the hot sun and began
sweating. Joey reached back into the shed and grabbed a flat-nosed shovel. Wayne
had the hose and opened again. The trailer was a new aluminum model with oblong
holes punched into the sides and back. The loading gate at the end pulled out easily
and thudded on the concrete, heavy with cow shit. Joey pulled the ropes that raised
the gate and tied them off on the twin-fingered hook. He went inside and unlatched
the ramp to the trailer’s second level and let it down. Both the deck and the ramp
were thick with manure, but the very top deck at the nose of the trailer hadn’t seen
any action in a couple of trips and that would make Joey’s job tougher because the
shit in there had dried. He tromped back down the ramp and found Wayne at the
front of the bottom level. He put his hand on his shoulder and then on the hose. He
motioned upward with his thumb. Wayne twisted the nozzle and cut the flow.
“I need to wet the top,” Joey yelled over the wine of the massive water pump. “I’ll
bring it back down in a second.”
Wayne handed him the hose and walked back for the shovel and started in on the
thicker layers of crap in the corners. Joey pulled the heavy hose back up the ramp,
the hood of his raincoat singing against the aluminum ceiling. At the front, he turned
to make his assault on the crap. He braced himself and turned the nozzle wide open.
A two-inch jet of water shot forth and drummed against the aluminum side,
exploding into a whiteout of shattered water and bits of grainy cow shit.
When the aluminum shined and the gates clang with sharp metal on metal
satisfaction, Wayne and Joey went back to the pump house to change out of the
slickers and boots. At the door, Wayne stripped the jacket and his shirt. His white
chest and shoulders, covered in black hair, were muscled, defined and hard. Even in
his farmer’s tan, Wayne looked like the picture-perfect form of a movie star or a
model in a magazine. At fifty-plus, he was fit and better off than most men at thirty.
He left the shed and came back with a boot box and the new boots he’d had on
when he drove up. He held out the box as he stepped into the shed. Joey stooped
and tucked in the last bit of his shirt tale. Wayne noticed Joey’s wet and dirty socks
on the ground.
“I bought you a pair of boots,” he said, setting the box down on the dirt and gravel.
“I hope you have some clean socks.”
“Are they stolen?”
“Are they stolen? No, Joey, they are not stolen.” He looked his son in the eyes, lying
to him for his own good. “Paid for fair and square.”
“As a Christian, I won’t wear stolen clothes. God provides.”
“And he just has!” Wayne smiled. “Take the boots Joey. Take the boots, and I’ll
give you a job to boot, unless you want to stay on out here.”
Joey lifted a black boot with tan stitching out of the box. He reached inside the
barrel and took the loose light paper and wadding from the toe.
“Those are good boots, so it won’t be too hard on your feet breaking them in.”
Wayne winked at Joey, who looked down. The only thing that set Joey off from all
the other men in Wayne’s life, was that Wayne wanted to help him, to make his life
better. Other men he would entertain, make laugh or knock down, but he wanted
good things for his boys. Too bad Kian had disappeared. The last time Wayne had
tried to connect with Kian was at the edge of a wrestling mat in his high school gym
after one of Kian’s matches. He had been pinned in the first round after winning
every single match for some twenty meets in a row, none of which Wayne had
seen. He had put his hand on Kian’s shoulder and said, “Hell of a try.”
“What the hell do you know about it!” Kian yelled back, embarrassingly loud.
“Don’t get your piss hot, boy,” Wayne scolded. But he didn’t mean to. He didn’t
know what else to say. He knew Kian had just slipped on the mat, but he didn’t
know how to talk to him and gave up trying. Kian, at 15, had already made up his
mind about what kind of man he would be and he didn’t need Wayne’s advice. As
an act of charity Wayne had left him alone after that. At the baby’s funeral, Wayne
said he was sorry and that he didn’t have any idea what Kian was going through but
hoped he’d be alright. Kian had nodded and walked away.
Joey, dirty and wet sock on, slipped his foot into the top and then forced his heal all
the way in.
“Man,” he said, “how’d you get the right size?”
“Lucky guess.” Wayne cringed when he saw the dirty sock disappear into the new
leather. “You better go in and get some clean socks. A good pair of boots, broken in
well, can last you a long time and those are good boots.”
Joey said Wayne was right and he walked out of the pump shed and across the
gravel to his camper trailer. Wayne followed. Joey remembered one summer he
stayed at the farm and new clothes in a dozen or more boxes showed up with
several of Wayne’s friends. It was late, near midnight when their car lights on the
lane leading to the house woke Wayne, and Wayne’s cursing and fumbling woke
everyone else. Then out of the dark of the front room came, “Jesus Christ, Ralph!
Come on in. Jim. Conway. What the hell brings you boys all out here this time of
night?” And, then the boxes of boots, stacks of jeans and shirts and down-filled
coats. A box of leather gloves. Glasses and a bottle of booze hit the dining room
table and Catlynn came in to the back bedroom where Kian, Kate and Joey slept,
saying “come on kids, looks like Christmas has come early.” They all slipped out of
their covers and trotted after her through the light of the kitchen and dining room –
Kate in her long sleeping dress and hair blown out all over, rose colors burning
through the tanned cheeks. The men had settled in around the table, glasses half-full
of whiskey, their white shirts reflected in the large dining room window. In the
living room, a frenzy of jeans and boots and shirts. Kate hopping on one leg with the
other trapped in a folded leg and down she went onto her side, a wave of hair flying
across the carpet. Kian in his underwear walking around with one boot on and a t-
shirt over his face, his arms half through the sleeves. Catlynn strutting around in
new red boots, holding her filmy nightgown above her knees and looking down. In
the dinning room, laughter and horse sounds as the men drank and passed around
magazines with pictures of naked women.
In the little trailer, Wayne flopped boyishly onto the bed where Kate had slept. He
crossed his ankles and stuffed a pillow behind his head. He shut his eyes. Joey
rummaged through a paper shopping bag rumpled on the floor and found two white
tube socks. He pushed the boot off with his toe and stripped off the old, offending
socks.
“I suppose you’ve heard about Kian’s big screw up?” Joey asked.
“I haven’t heard from Kian since his child died.” Wayne remembered the pat on the
shoulder and his desire for Kian to kill the pain inside before it had a chance to hurt
him.
“Apparently, he disappeared for a few days and the cops found him drunk in some
whorehouse west of Billings.”
“I heard about it. Anyone around here seen him since?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, we’ll check it out. Waldo might know where he’s at.”
Joey sat back, new socks and boots on.
“I suppose we should go looking for him,” Joey said, his face passive.
“Does he got any friends? Girl friends, I mean.”
“How should I know?”
“Well,” Wayne said and yawned, “he’ll turn up. He’s just drowning his sorrows, but
he’ll come up for air and then we’ll all help him get back on track. Why don’t you
make a few runs with me? I need someone to help drive and load and unload.”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.” Joey already knew he would go with
Wayne. If God was going to call to him to witness, then he would go just as Jesus
would go.
“Well, let me know in a couple hours because I’ll have to get someone. You’ll make
as much as you do here, maybe a little more,” he closed his eyes again.