| Part III |
WHILE KATE EXPLAINED why she’d followed Wayne to Seattle and how Kian
had come into the room and even while she explained how Joey lunged into the air
and stuck the knife into Kian’s chest, Catlynn imagined the shining strands of
barbed wire fence she’d strung down the line of pale-blond wooden posts. The
strands converged and the gray and brown posts fell more rapidly behind one
another into the distance. She and a friend had built that fence, eye-balling the
alignment of the posts across a blank field. Her friend’s long curly brown hair
blowing out of a ponytail; blue button-up shirt. Her dirt-smudged jeans from a
week of digging postholes; knees stained green from kneeling in the alfalfa and
weeds. She saw her friend resting on one knee, brown curls falling across her
eyes. The scenes gave her pleasure. Now that the kids and Wayne were gone, she
spent hours of emotionally simple, uninterrupted time working on things the way
she wanted to and with whomever she wanted. She shaped the farm and it shaped
her. She smiled when she thought of Elizabeth pulling hair away from her sweat-
covered face. The strands so long they clung to her wet, freckled cheek, even as
her arm reached its length. She had smiled at Catlynn, a big white smile and sun-
wrinkled eyes. With Kate’s voice still rattling in her ear, Catlynn thought about
how building that fence had been the most pleasurable work she’d ever done. The
edge of her pasture and her neighbor’s alfalfa field had been a point of contention
between them for nearly twenty years and Wayne would never truly address it.
Looking down the slivery strong fact of a new straight fence, done right, shining
in the sun, she felt whole.
“The police say it’s going to be tough finding Joey because of a bunch of riots in
the city. He can disappear for awhile, Nollette told me, but they’ll catch him
eventually. I don’t think I’m going to stay here while they look. I’m coming back
with Kian.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll be home tonight.”
Catlynn pushed the button that killed the connection and set it face down on the
table. She looked at her face in the window. The blur hid what she felt. She stood
up and turned toward the bottle of gin on the cupboard. She put her dark thin hand
on the clear neck and let it slide down the glass to the cupboard top. She wanted
to drink, but couldn’t. She saw in her mind a bonfire of clothes and books and
boxes.
“This is the break from everything,” she said to the gin.
She ran her hands through her thick hair and gathered the mass into a ponytail
then let it go. It was a good idea. She pulled the hem of her white T-shirt out from
under the red and brown sweater. The hem made a band around her stomach, and
she pulled it tight, strangling her midriff. “Goddamn it!” she scream and stomped
her boot heel. She struggled to rip the fabric, but it stayed connected, whole.
Anything would work to tie her hair back, but she wanted the white hem around
her hair and she was going to have it. She stepped to the yellow kitchen counter,
speckled like a robin’s egg, and took the scissors from a jar. She pulled the hem
out, clipped it in half and ripped it the full length from around her waist. She
pushed her hair back into a ponytail and tied it off with the strip, tattered threads
dangling. This is the way everything is going to go for her now. Everything will
bend to her will or it will be broken and burned to the ground. She walked through
the house, the same frozen, small smile on her mouth, feeling the same cold
humor at her purpose. She stepped from drawer to drawer pulling them open and
examining their contents, making an inventory. A fire sale, she thought and
laughed. She was searching too, but for what she couldn’t say. She knew she
would know it when she saw it, the way a match stands out above all else, red
bulb with a white tip. The cupboards and closets. After one pass through the
house, she went back through the rooms.
Her bedroom was first. She cleared the closet and drawers of all of Wayne’s old
clothes, boots, vests, a leather jacket and two pairs of boots. She reached under
the bed and took out the old stack of magazines of nude women. She rifled the
drawers and emptied them by more than half. In a top drawer of the black
dresser, she collected three notebooks that had Wayne’s handwritten songs in
them. That stuff all went out to the yard, where she started a pile. Back inside, she
picked up one of Wayne’s old guitars, kept in the corners of the living room. She
took the Martin D-18 outside, swung it wide and smashed it against the trunk of a
tree. The wood exploded. Catlynn tossed the neck and spent strings onto the pile
of clothes. She repeated that destruction two more times. Wood splinters
punctured her face in the last burst. She touched her cheek where there was pain
from a shard of guitar wood. A piece still stuck into her skin, just below her eye.
She jerked it out. Blood ran down her face to her chin and dripped onto a pebble.
Laughing, she walked back into the house letting the blood drip. It mostly fell on
the shelf of her ample breasts. Under the twin bed that Kian had slept in, she
unearthed a leather-man’s set of tools and scraps of partially tooled leather that the
boy had worked at passionately for several months after Christmas when he was
ten-years-old. He made wallets, coin pouches and belts like a machine until Wayne
stopped buying leather for him. She set the box on the brown, tightly spread
covers of the bed and opened it. She remembered that as soon as he had pounded
a shape and design into every strip of leather he could get his hands on, the tools
went neatly into the box and back under his bed where it stayed. Kian moved on to
his next thing with as much singular dedication as he had shown leather tooling.
His new passion became riding his bicycle over ramps made of scraps of wood.
He had seen a movie about Evil Kenival. She watched him, peddling from the
gravel lane at faster and faster speeds. She’d watch his progress from window to
window until he cleared the yard and hit a plank of wood balanced on a crate and
flew, elbows up like wings. He put the board on the top rail of the pole fence. She
hoped he wouldn’t break his neck, but it wouldn’t hurt him to smash up his bike
and skin his knees a little. Bumps and bruises would make him tougher, let him
know he can survive the blood and cuts that life brings. He jumped things,
anything he could drag to the front of the ramp. He hurled himself higher and
higher into the air while she watched and smiled and laughed. Finally, he jumped
too far off the side of a ramp made too tall with nails and boards on the top fence
pole and smashed straight into the gnarled trunk of a cottonwood tree. He fell onto
his back, the bike landed on top of him. He crawled out from under it. He stood up
and starred at his pants, bewildered. When she reached him, his pants were dark
around the cuffs. She lifted the legs up. Blood seeped into his tennis shoes and ran
over onto the grass. She took him inside and stripped him. Kian had nearly cut his
penis and testicles off on the bike’s handlebars. The doctor said he was lucky.
Catlynn joked, “I wonder.” The doctor didn’t laugh. Uptight prick, she thought,
just like her straight-laced father. She took the leather-tooling box outside and set it
on top of the stack, in the middle. Then she got a gas can from the shed and
doused the pile of family history with diesel and put a match to a frilly corner of
Kate’s yellowing, once-pure white senior prom dress. The pile smoldered until the
diesel got hot, then the fire took off. It’s orange and red spread into the reaches of
the night.
WHEN KATE WOKE, Joey was already out of the trailer. She sat up and looked
out the dusty trailer window. A hundred yards away, a black semi-truck sat on
one of the sloped concrete pads and there was Joey, she assumed, in a bright
yellow slicker spraying the side of the cattle trailer. The hard spray exploded into
rainbows in the angled morning sunlight and he moved it up and down the side.
She remembered her makeup-and-face-cream dilemma of the night before and
laughed. She checked the makeup on her face to see if it would last through
breakfast. It would. Her spirits were lifted by the presence of the sun and she
stretched. She brushed her pants smooth and pulled hard at the hem of her shirt to
get the biggest wrinkles out. Breakfast would be good. Country food is good for
the soul. Now if only she could find a place that had a decent cup of coffee. She
looked back out the window. The water and its rainbow were gone, and Joey
stood by a pickup stopped in front of the truck. His hood was off, and his black
hair was slicked down by water and lord knew what else. He was talking to a fat
man with a straw cowboy hat. “The land of pregnant men,” she said. She took her
ponytail out, ran her fingers through her hair and recaptured it all back under the
elastic hair band. The pregnant man shook Joey’s hand and turned to his pick up.
Kate put her old cowboy boots back on. The old boots chaffed her heals. They
used to be broken in perfectly, but they had grown dry and hard from years of
sitting under her childhood bed. Her feet, she was happy to think, were no longer
callused in any of the right places for farm work.
She met Joey outside and they drove to breakfast. The waitress at “Smokey Jim’s
Interstate Cabin” set the menus on the table between Kate and Joey and poured
coffee with her left hand. Kate didn’t recognize the poufy blond waitress, though
they were about the same age. She must be a city girl. The restaurant was new.
Huntley had become a bedroom community for the working poor from Billings.
There were no more farmers’ sons now, just managers for the corporations, like
Coors, that owned the land. In her first pass through Huntley the day before, it
seemed like a bright little community on the little flat spot next to the Yellowstone
River. The road widens and next to it civic leaders created a park with a few
swings, horseshoe rings and mown grass. But on the other side of the road, the
big grocery store windows where busted out and the plywood put over them had
warped and streaked black. The few dozen houses on the blocks behind the main
road were weathered, broken kid toys out front. The gas station on the corner
was abandoned. It’s garage doors leaning open and old car parts spilled out like
they had been disgorged. A flood of time laced with poverty had poured through
here for years. The white, stucco front of the gas station had big gaping holes and
its windows too had been haphazardly boarded up. Even the two blocks of
concrete curbs in front of the store and leading to the garage had crumbled. When
she looked closer, Kate hardly recognized her little hometown where she rode
bicycles with nearly a dozen other kids, racing down smooth gravel alleys and
hiding out in the corners of the park. The alleys were a roller coaster of potholes
now and there were no kids on the streets. They must all be in daycares or at their
grandparents in Billings while their parents worked two jobs. Two houses, where
the co-op’s boss and the owner of the grocery store had lived, were freshly
painted. The sprucing up was an effort to support the proposition that they were a
great deal at their newly reduced prices. Anything new in this part of the state was
built next to the interstate, where it could beg from the world as it drove by. The
little log cabin restaurant and bar that served a few of the remaining locals, like
Joey, had been built to resemble a mountain lodge. It was set up at the bottom of
the exit ramp where the interstate crossed over the one road leading into Huntley.
Long timbers made the high peaked ceiling of the mountain lodge feel like a lid.
Several black fans spun slowly and awkwardly. A potbelly wood stove sat against
the wall.
He round young waitress sauntered toward them. “Hey, Joey,” she sang. She
pasted her glittering eyes on him. “Who’s your friend?” She winked at him but
looked worried.
“Emily, this is my sister Kate.” Joey opened his palm and stretched it across the
table, as if displaying her.
Joey kept eye-contact with the waitress and that impressed Kate. She had
assumed that he was shy around all women and not just her, but he kept his eyes
locked into this girl’s. She was round but pretty. Kate wondered if Joey could
actually have real romantic feelings, something more conscious or in addition to
his repressed and violently self-hating lust. In his eyes, she saw what looked like
affection. The waitress wiped her palm on her apron in anticipation of a
handshake. Kate wondered if they knew each other outside of the Smokey Cabin,
then the answer came.
“Spreading the Word today, Joey?”
“I spread the Word every day, Emily,” Joey answered in a tone that meant he felt
accused. He turned and looked at Kate, but avoided her eyes. “Emily goes to my
church.”
If Emily had heard his defensiveness, she didn’t appear to give it any thought.
Perhaps she knew him well enough to know he was defensive in any
conversation. He felt accused by everyone. Then it struck her that Joey had kept
eye contact so Emily wouldn’t think him guilty of some negligence or trespass of
god’s rules.
Emily finally took her eyes off Joey and reached her hand to Kate. They clasped
and held. Emily’s hand was soft and warm. Kate guessed that Joey and Emily had
been set up by church members more than once for a chaste date or two with a
PG movie thrown in. But that’s not Joey’s gig, Kate guessed. Then she
understood that Joey not only had a dark side, but he was attached to it, like
codependency with a bad friend. She’d learned to spot men like that in New York.
They tended to be married men from some suburb. She’d learned the hard way to
avoid them. As soon as she got alone with a man like Joey, he’d turn into a
menace. He’d be nice and polite on a date with any woman outside of his church
or circle of friends, but then once alone he would become focused on just one
thing – pornographic sex like that stuff he’s seen over and over again on the
Internet. Tormented and guilty, he’d want to rush to a bed or car or alley even, do
it (don’t talk and don’t kiss) and run. Not a fun date. But Emily didn’t know this
about Joey, Kate guessed.
“Sister, huh? Well if you say so,” Emily sang. She let go of Kate’s hand and left
the table.
“Nice girl,” Kate said. “You should take her on a date. Marry her and make little
church babies.”
“Thanks, Kate. You’re always such a big help.” Joey put the menu up in front of
his reddened face.
They ordered and Kate decided to mind her own business. She wasn’t home to
take care of Joey. It’s Kian. Thinking of him, she remembered the newspaper. At
least he still had a job.
“Hey, is there a newspaper around here?” Kate asked Emily, who was several
tables away.
“I’ve got one behind the counter. More coffee?”
“No, no thanks,” Kate said, “just the paper.”
Joey nodded his head. His eyes on the menu still, even though they had already
ordered. Joey had gone back under.
What a little Prozac wouldn’t do for you, Kate thought.
Emily set the paper down and stepped off to the only other table with customers.
An old man and woman who ordered quickly.
Kate flattened the front page and scanned it.
“Oh shit! Jesus, Kian. What is it with you boys?” She flung the paper across the
table at Joey. It hit him in the chest.
He put the paper in front of his face and the burning image of Kate’s breasts came
to his mind. Every time he closed his eyes, her breasts came to his mind. He
focused on the paper. There was Kian’s face in a mug shot, smiling and clear
eyed, proud but open to the reader like an actor’s pose. Thick black eyebrows,
narrow nose, strong jaw and blue eyes. The bastard, Joey thought. Then he
noticed the headline.
“Yeah,” he said, sitting forward and tossing the paper onto the table next to them.
“He’s always loved the spotlight.”
Emily was at their table with the food arrayed in both hands.
“Fuck, Joey, get over yourself.”
Emily blanched, stepped back.
“Watch your language,” Joey said, bringing his fist down on the table.
“Fuck you,” Kate said and pushed her chair back.
“Honey, you can just get out of here and stay out.” Emily cocked her hip, dishes
leaning, eggs sliding.
Kate walked to the door. Her hands in fists.
“Wait, Kate!” Joey got out of his chair and trotted toward her. “I’ll give you a ride
to the house.”
“No thanks,” Kate yelled and pushed outside.
“Family can be such a heavy cross to bear,” Emily said, righting the food just as
the eggs had gathered on the edge of the white dish. She set Joey’s food down.
He sat and looked at the plate for a moment. He grabbed a fork and cut his eggs.
“I’m afraid my family is full of sin,” he said and stuffed a piece of toast in his
mouth right behind the yellow eggs. “Sin and rebellion from God.”
Emily sat down in Kate’s seat and put the plate down. She salted the eggs. Then
she set the silver shaker down and reached across the table and put her hand in
Joey’s. “You want to pray about it?”
“Thank you,” Joey said. His voice croaked and tears tipped over his eyelids. “I
would like that.”
Emily put her other white, porcine hand in his cabled talon and they bowed their
heads. Joey’s shoulders shook as he sobbed.
KIAN PRESSED THE brakes until the car skidded in the gravel at the Delilah. He
elbowed the car door open and jumped out. Dust swarmed him like flies. Even the
front door weighed in against him. He got in the building and pushed on down the
levered hall to the bar, where he ordered a scotch from the papery old woman and
shot it. She settled her top dentures with a jaw twist. The gasoline settled into a
slow burn and his chest and esophagus felt lit. He settled into his panic, slowing
his breathing. He stepped on the stairs one at a time. Each one creaked at the
footfall. He slowed his steps to release the creaks more steadily. There has to be a
way out of this predicament. He’s got no story and no more excuses. At the top
of the steps, he turned back and looked down the cascade and asked God, “Where
are the creaks now?”
In his room, the scotch warmed him like a forgiving hug. He turned on the brown
clock radio next to the bed and fell back onto the covers. The bed’s sagging
center pulled him. “Doggone it,” the disc jockey said, “more hot and dry weather
on the way. Will it never rain?” Kian rolled over and picked up the receiver from
the red phone. He lifted it to his ear. He stopped to think of a lie. Then he had one.
He would tell his editor that the story was still on. The Indians were meeting inside
the council offices and would come out late at night or early in the morning with a
new plan. A voice gurgled out of the receiver and he put cold plastic harder
against his ear. A man’s gin voice said “soon as the ceiling dries.” A woman’s
“You better” sounded like an empty glass. Kian slowly replaced the receiver. The
weight of the hard plastic piece clacked down on one raised side of the cradle and
then the other. “Radar Love” leaked out of the radio and he settled back on the bed
to listen. This song had played to his yearning as a boy to get out beyond those
dry hills and brown fields to the world out there, to the cities where there was
water and lights and people he didn’t know.
“One more radar lover gone,” they sang.
A word streamed to him out of the center of the naked light bulb. He couldn’t
grasp it. Maybe it was her name. He woke with a start and sat up. The clock radio
said 1:12 p.m. with black and white cards. One more flipped over and suddenly it
was 1:13 p.m. Kian swung his feet over the edge. He had to find something, some
kind of story. If he didn’t have one by tonight, they’d call him back and then cut
off his expenses. He picked up two black pens from the table and his notebook.
He flipped the pages to see how many blank pages he had left, almost all of them,
and then he stuffed it into his back pocket. The pens in the front pocket. Back
down the steps.
The wooden and badly painted buildings of the minimal center of town came up
around him as if in a dream. He pinched himself to stay sober. The noon sky
overhead was clear, light blue and cold. Gray clouds had gathered on the horizon.
The street he was on bent left. He bent with it and ended up rocking over a
cratered alleyway. He slowed the car to a crawl. The garbage piled along the sides
of the street spilled on the road and edges of paper crushed into the dirt flickered
in the light. A dark, maybe red, splotch crossed the glass of the rear view mirror.
He looked back, but the rocking car frame launched his head into the center roof
light. The dash rose over his vision. He stomped the brakes. The engine stalled.
Sitting up, he cursed the world. The warped and paneled, pre-framed houses
standing against the alley, backed up by the aggressive street, looked like they’d
been stapled together and half the staples hadn’t held. Starting the car and pushing
lightly on the gas, the car lunged into a pothole and back out onto the broken
pavement of a cross street. He looked left up the street and right. The house on
the corner had a big hole busted into the side of the house. The bathtub, full of
green water, angled out resting against the bottom of the hole. A skinny brown
horse, halter tied to a stake, stared at him from the back corner of the yard. Kian
swiveled around and gassed it up the street. He saw a convenience store several
blocks away and made for it. He was going to get in a wreck, or run over a little
Indian or something and get tossed in prison. He didn’t feel drunk in his head. He
just couldn’t keep the car from lunging from side to side.
The tires scratched and the car rocked inches from the wooden railing protecting
a large window. He decided coffee would set his equilibrium right. Outside the
car, he found his feet more reliable and went in the store. On the way out, the
styrofoam cup against his lower lip, sun in his eyes, he noticed the same red
Dodge Dart from the night before. The guy in it was the same too. He blew across
the hole in the cup lid, stirring the steam as it rose. The air between him and the
red car tightened and clarified.
“Hey,” the man said. The wind flipped the blue-checkered collar of his button-up
shirt against his jaw. He jutted his chin out, “Whacha up to?”
“We meet again,” Kian said, forcing lift into his voice. He stepped up to the car
and put his hand on the front fender where it molded back into the door panel. He
bent down to see the man’s face under the roof. “I’m just checking out what
people think about what’s been happening with the council and Linda.” He paused
and waited for a sign. The man’s brown face remained closed. Strands of his long
black hair lifted and fell. “I guess they’re talking now. You were pretty involved,
what do you think? Think this will change your life in any particular way?”
The man’s lips moved. “We’re going to recall the whole council and start over.”
He clenching his right hand and shook it, but his expression remained unmoved.
“We’ve got petitions going around for new elections. We’ll kick them all out.”
“Really?” Kian said and stood up. Christ, he thought. A story. “What about
Linda?” He dragged the notebook from his back pocket. “I thought you supported
her?”
“I do,” the Indian said, looking at Kian’s mouth so hard Kian ditched the smile that
had sprung to life there. “She’ll be reelected. But the others won’t, then we’ll be
done with all of this.”
Kian wrote all that down.
“So, the battle continues?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s your name?”
“Large At Night, but my friends just call me Large.”
Kian flashed his eyes into the man’s and the disappointment was palpable. “All one
word or broken up?” he said, smiling falsely.
“All broken up and each word capped, even ‘At.’ ”
Kian stood up to hide his frown. The man was just fucking around and now he
was back at the beginning. He stuck the notebook in his back pocket. Grabbed the
coffee and turned stiffly away.
“You need to lighten up, man! The look on your face!”
Kian looked back. “Yeah, well, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate humor, but I’ve
got a job to do. And not too many Indians make fun of their names. Their
meanings tend to be important to them. Are you even from this reservation?”
“The reservation I’m from Indians have French names,” he said. “But I live here.
My mother was on the rolls here. I’m Chippewa, from the Turtle Mountains in
North Dakota.”
“Is the petition real or did you make that up?”
“No, it’s real. Hop in and I’ll take you to my cousin’s house. He’s been organizing
the petitions. He’s close by. You can leave your car here.”
Kian stood up. Stalling. He suspected more tomfoolery but he didn’t have anything
else, except maybe death on the highway. He sipped and looked down the road to
where it turned into the homes of a packed and ragged neighborhood. They were
like mushroom patches. Nothing and then a bunch of them.
“Will your cousin give me his real name?”
“He’ll give you his name.”
Kian walked around the front of the car and then slipped into the passenger seat
just as Large started the motor. He clicked and clunked the automatic
transmission into reverse. The car moved out from under Kian’s weight. The store
and Kian’s Subaru slid across the front windshield as they backed and turned. A
glint of sunlight slipped off the hood. Kian put his notebook and pens next to his
leg in the seat. He noticed the floor mats.
“Well-kept car,” he said over the rattle of the muffler.
“I hang out with myself a lot. It cuts down on the beer cans.”
“Funny.”
“See, I’m like that, but not everyone around here is.” Large looked over at Kian.
The reporter’s eyes were watery and blood shot. His face distorted by clenched
jaws and furrowed brow. Large had been following him for two days, watching
him drink and smoke in his car, in the hotel lobby, walking into the fields in the
dark, as he drove the streets aimlessly, scribbled notes in that little notebook. Now
here he was in his car – his long-lost half-brother – reeking of booze and
cigarettes with grass stains on his knees and veins bulging out of his neck. Large
had found out Kian was a reporter in Billings just weeks after his mother told him
his father’s name. Then there was the blowup at the tribal council, and Kian came
to him.
The heater blew hot air into their faces. Kian rolled the window down a turn.
“It’s broken,” Large said. “I can’t turn it off.”
Kian smiled at him, his eyes fogged over. They entered the heart of town.
“So,” Kian slurred, “where were you headed before I got you sidetracked?”
“To work,” Large said. Now that he had Kian in his car he wasn’t sure what to do
with him. He had hoped for, imagined a moment when he would say, “I know this
is going to sound crazy – I’m your brother!”
“Where do you work?”
“At the Triumph of the Last Stand.”
“Come on..”
“Really.” Large pointing out his window. “There it is.”
Kian looked beyond Large. The fast-food joint was hunkered at the back of a
sparsely paved parking lot. Hand-painted on a big section of plywood leaning
against the building was, “Triumph at the Last Stand Burgers and Snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“The paint’s faded a bit here and there,” Large said. “Snakes sounds about right
though.”
They stopped at the only light on Main Street. An old man stepped gingerly off the
curb on Kian’s side and Kian thought of driftwood as the man stepped closer.
Large waved and the man noticed, but looked at Large without recognition. He
only stiffened the index finger on his left hand, raising it slightly. He walked on to
the other broken curb.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Just a few months.”
“Huh,” Kian said. “So, you live with your cousin?”
“I came here with a girl.”
“The woman I saw you with in front of the council building?”
“That’s her?”
“Who’s she?”
“She’s the devil’s handmaiden.”
“So things have turned out well?”
“Things have turned out about as I expected.”
Large veered off the blacktop onto a rutted dirt road. After two-hundred yards of
gravel road, they bumped right onto a driveway overgrown with still-frosted
mounds of tall dead grass. Crusty patches of snow covered the base of the bare,
tangled bushes. Nothing much traveled down this lane. The twin ruts were nearly
grown over. The rusty trailer, on flattened wheels, blocks under the corners,
hunkered at the forward edge of a thicket of ash. The trailer was white with jaunty
curves trimmed in dark blue. Dark rust poured from the bottom corners of every
window. It squatted unevenly.
Large let the car coast up to the trailer’s bleached-wood steps. He turned the
motor off and popped open the door. He looked at Kian and winked.
“Give me a second.” He rose out. At the crappy steps, he turned and waved for
Kian to stay put. He swung the tin door out and yelled inside, “Cousin!” Kian got
out of the car and stood in the open door. A row of long-fallen, inch-round stems
of sunflowers surrounded the trailer.
“Hey! Cousin!” Large’s voice pinged off the metal. “You decent? I’m coming in.”
He door shut behind him.
A few minutes later, the door swung wide open and a tall, overweight man filled
the frame. Like Large, he had long black hair, but his hair was rumpled and
matted. The bottom moon of his brown belly stuck out from under a white T-
shirt. His face was stern. He waved Kian inside.
Kian climbed the rotting, squishy steps and edged by Large’s cousin. The living
room smelled like old firewood and sweat and food. The cousin held a white
cordless phone to his ear and then burst out “HOLD ON!” like he was talking to a
deaf person over a bad connection. Kian flinched and the cousin opened his face
and smiled at him. Then he extended his index finger and turned away. He turned
the finger at the brown chair in the dark corner. “OKAY!” he boomed into the
phone. “Tell him I told you to do this, get those signatures and call me tonight. If I’
m gone the first time he calls, tell him to call me again. Now I have to go, there’s
a white man in my house!” Without turning it off, he tossed the phone onto the
broken-down couch next to the chair Kian sat in.
“What’s up?” he yelled to Large.
“This reporter would like to talk to you about the petition!” Large answered him in
the same manner of projecting, like bad stage actors.
Kian’s sense of security fell from bad to worse. He frowned at Large for the
abrupt introduction and said, “Large At Night ... er ...” Cousin blanched at the
name. “This joker ...” Kian tried to recover.
“Thought you’d come here and insult MY people? Large AT NIGHT?”
Kian jumped out of the chair and stepped toward the door.
Large stepped into the center of the room.
“Hold on,” he said as much to Kian as the cousin. “I called myself that earlier as a
joke.” He moved his hands up and down, pumping the anger back into his cousin.
Kian backed to the door, but the big man stepped backward too and crashed on to
the couch, with a woof that blew dust out of its cushions. He put his hands over
his eyes and rubbed down his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been working on this petition for a long time. You’d think I
was trying to petition myself into Heaven.”
Kian remained by the door but took out the note pad. “So why are you working on
the petition? Or, rather, how long have you been working on the petition?”
Large stepped toward the kitchen entryway and motioned Kian to have a seat back
in the chair, and he did. Heavy blue and red curtains killed the light and the only
thing hanging on the walls was a wood-framed, glassless photo of the cousin,
much younger but still big, squinting into the sun and holding a long lake trout by
the gills.
“You here tah see how us Indians live?” the cousin asked, leaning his head down
and feigning interest.
Kian shrugged.
“You want to see that place where my Indian mind interfaces with the modern
world?”
Kian sank back into the chair, whatever. He would have thrown the notebook, but
he didn’t have the energy.
“Where the howls of the wolf echo through the realities of the plastic age?” The
cousin watched Kian’s eyes and then his own hands. “You want me tah tell you
how we create the world now that all the power in it is technological? Do we hold
our secret dog society meetings over the Internet in chat sessions? Chant over the
video connection and express deliver our sacred bundles into the urban jungles of
the world?”
For just a brief second Kian wished he was writing this down. Large disappeared
into the kitchen.
“Keep our souls clean through traditional practices and secret rituals? One set for
the world. One set for us, the genetic inheritors of the Knowledge. Or, do you
want to see the whipping scars on the back of my legs, laid there by the tragic,
drunken, lost father who had nothing to lose and nothing to gain and no antelope
to hunt. Hear the stories of wasted parents and bonfire parties where beer cans are
stacked high and long black hair bursts into flames?”
Large, out of sight, laughed. There was a jangle of glasses and a squeak of a
refrigerator door opening.
“I want to hear whatever stories you want to tell,” Kian said. “Screw the petition.
If there ever was one.”
The cousin settled back into the cushions and laughed. “The question is, what
stories do you want to hear? I could tell you any one story in any number of ways
and what difference would you know?”
“Hey,” Kian said and leaned forward. “For that matter, what difference would it
possibly make? I just came here to hear about a petition that doesn’t exist because
LARGE AT NIGHT lied to me.”
“No you didn’t,” Cousin said.
“No I didn’t what?”
“Come here for the petition,” Large said, leaning against the post in the entryway
to the kitchen. He cracked open a beer can.
“Bullshit.”
“You came here to waste time,” Large said.
“I see now why you brought him to me, cousin. He’s confused about his stories.”
“Yeah well,” Kian said and leaned up out of the chair. “I don’t mean to be rude but
... ” he looked at Large, who was looking at the cousin.
“You don’t even know what you’ve done.”
“Whatever,” Kian said and passed in front of Large and reached the doorknob.
“Sure. Take off,” Large said. “You should be able to find lots of people to
interview along the way. Or you can just make it up again.”
Kian let go of the door.
“What are you talking about?” He put his hands on his hips. “Just the normal, The
story didn’t go my way so you made it up bullshit? Or is it wrong in some fucking
real way?” Kian had begun to wonder if he would ever get out of this day. He was
thinking just then, a glow of laughter inside his gut, that he would call his editor
and say he was sick. Say he ate a bad taco. What the fuck did the editor know
from Mexico or Indian reservation?
“What is it with you anyway?” Kian asked. “Were you looking for me today or did
I just fall into your lap?”
“Truth is,” Large said, relaxing against the plastic pole, “I was looking for you
today because of what you wrote in the paper.”
Despite himself Kian cringed again.
“You nearly caused a riot this morning,” Large said. “But in the end, you, your
story rather, brought the two sides together. You’re just lucky I found you before
some of Linda’s rougher friends did.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What’s wrong with the story?”
“Here,” the big man said and pushed a copy of the Billings Post across the coffee
table at Kian. “Read it out loud so we can all enjoy it.”
Kian leaned to the paper and picked it up. He turned the paper over and then back
to the top of the front page. There was the headline he expected: “Tribal Anger
boils over.”
“I don’t even know what ‘tribal anger’ means, but I don’t write the headlines,”
Kian said.
“Keep reading, slick,” Large said.
Kian let the paper fall back flat in front of his face. The next-smaller headline said,
“Political battle on reservation nears riot as chairwoman seeks refuge behind
barricades.”
“Definitely over the top, but that’s the business nowadays.”
The lead paragraph: “The struggle for political control over the Crow Indian
Reservation neared critical mass last night when the chairwoman, Linda Two
Horses, bellowed through a bullhorn from on top of a car: ‘I’ve seen what the
people want. They want blood and that’s what we’ll give them BLOOD!’ ”
Kian stepped back and sat down. He dug through the pages to the jump of the
story to find the contributors note at the end of it. But the byline was his alone.
“Jesus Christ,” Kian said. “Jesus Christ. I don’t know what could have happened.
I don’t know why they put that in there.” The memory from the night before
followed the words of his denial. He was laughing and yelling into the black holes
of the red phone’s mouthpiece. Laughter and words. And the words started
coming clear, “Yes, ‘Blood!’ ” He was straining into the phone, “Yes, I’m sure. I’
m fucking positive.”
“Why would they take me seriously?”
Large huffed derisively and drank from the beer can. He turned back into the
kitchen and the refrigerator door opened. Kian started laughing. The swelling
started growing like balloons expanding in his chest. Growing and growing and
forcing him to laugh harder and harder until he started coughing.
“Want a beer?” Large yelled.
“Yes,” both men in the living room said. “Hell yes,” Kian added.
Large handed out beers.
“I was at the rally all night last night, Kian, and Linda didn’t say anything about
blood. But when I read the paper this morning I thought, ‘Now there’s an ex-
journalist in need of a friend.’ ”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” Kian said, drinking big gulps from the can. “You don’t
want a friend, though. You want a victim or something. But I’m not going to be
much fun to torture, in fact, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I’d rather enjoy a
couple of jabs to the gut or eyes with a knife. And. And. I don’t have any money.
Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“To be honest back,” Large said, “I don’t know what I want with you.”
“Like I said,” the big cousin said, “it’s not about what we want. This is all about
what you want. Maybe you want blood, but I’m not going to give you that. Yours
or mine.”
The three were silent until Large opened the refrigerator again.
A water glass half full of booze landed in Kian’s hand. The cousin had a thin sliver
remote in his big brown hand, pointed at the television. He flipped through
channels. Large clanked stuff in the kitchen. Kian killed the entire glass and waited
for the fun to start.
HAVING REACHED A détente with her mother spawned by tragedy, Kate was
recovering in her childhood room when her former high school teacher, Trisha
Anderson, showed up one afternoon. She had aged a lot in five years, though her
wrinkles might have been due more to the sun and weather. She was just as heavy
as before and round. She had survived the early years of taunting and sexual
harassment at the country school to become something of a conduit for bright
young country women finding their way into universities and colleges across the
nation, mostly on the East Coast where Montana girls were still a bit of a novelty.
Kate had been her first success, but modern society had made her work harder in
a short time.
“The Internet has created a generation of exhibitionists if not downright porn
addicts,” Anderson said, speaking to the challenges her newest young protégés
faced. Her New York accent gone, replaced by the flat and accent-less diction of
the dry dirt plains. “So much for the sexual revolution. I guess girls will be girls.”
“Tell me you’re joking,” Kate said. She carefully leaned forward on her bed and
smiled at the big woman in a flowered and tie-dyed moo moo.
“I’ve had to come to terms with the facts, my dear. Some girls are destined to
become sexy barmaids and use their looks and sex as tools and some men are
genetically unable to see women as anything except some animal that has tits and
ass and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. After all, as the boys around here say, it
takes all kinds.”
“My dad used to say to those men that ‘It don’t take all kinds, we just got ’em.’
But, really, how can you say that, after all you told me? You’ve just been out here
fucking cowboys for too long.” Mrs. Anderson had been so important to her that
Kate didn’t want to think badly of her but it did seem that she has lost her way out
here on the wide open plains. She was so pure and driven and unshakable in her
faith that women were going to break free and rule with feminine compassion,
creating powerful social communities and loving relationships and … now she was
just a farm wife with a good vocabulary.
“Come on dear, the women’s rights revolution was never going to set us all free
or make us all equal. But it did give a few of you a leg up.”
“Jesus Christ” Kate was truly shocked. After all she’d been through, after seeing
the males in her family destroy each other in a fine Oedipal fashion, after the
weeks of shame and depression … “That’s not the revolution I’m fighting for.
The one you’re talking about is just another kind of classism.”
“Honey, feminism is not socialism.”
“I suppose you vote Republican now.”
“When in Rome.”
“Church?”
“Well, not all Romans worship Apollo. Most of them worship the Goddess.”
“The goddess between your legs.”
“Let’s not fight,” Mrs. Anderson said. “We’re on the same side of the bed.”
“What side could that be?”
“The country side. I’ve been thinking a lot about you. All this talk of white trash.
And murder. We’re not white trash, honey. We’re country trash.”
“Thanks.”
“Embrace it dear. Your parents didn’t have summer houses or arguments in
multiple languages. They didn’t have libraries or streets named after them. They
don’t have villas in Spain or PhD’s. But they had cabins in the canyons up in the
mountains. And they owned bars. And suffered terrible fires and disease and all
the plagues that rush through the poor, the canon fodder of the world. They were
not equestrians but they were horsemen. They did not govern those horses, like
the British snobs that run all the horse farms in New York, because they lived with
the horses. They ate out of the same buckets. They control them from the very
slight vantage of the ability to seek revenge with opposable thumbs. Violence is a
horse’s language. Oh, I know those retards in Hollywood would like to think a
horse is a supreme and calm animal like a whale, but they’re not. They are a
violent and terrible beast. I know, honey, I’ve been living with a couple of them
for years now. A horse is a monster, but a beautiful monster.
Their masters wear tooled leather belts and get status from the stitching of their
boots. They get their education in bars instead of libraries or classrooms, but they
get an education. They don’t go to operas, they live them, albeit with somewhat
courser language. These bastards didn’t snort cocaine, but they’ll hoover up a
whole cup full of crystlemeth in a snap. They didn’t drink wine with corks or
scotch that’s more than a day old and they don’t care to know its name. The more
it tastes like gasoline, the better they liked it. The better I like it. The better you like
it.”
Kate began to smile at Mrs. Anderson and the years pealed away from between
them. This was her mentor and all that language that had built a mind in her.
“Oh, they don’t smoke pipes in studios, but there is no more contemplative
moment lived by any human anywhere than when I’m horseback, looking down
over the gray and dusty fields from the edge of a sandstone cliff.”
Mrs. Anderson turned her coffee cup in her hands and her eyes became wet and
clear and bright blue, like she was now out there over that cliff, a horse under her
swishing it’s tail against horseflies.
“The difference is between contemplating with the distance of language and
contemplating with little or no difference between you and the viscosity of the
world.
“You always turn my world upside down.”
“Well, dear,” she said looking down at Kate’s face. “I know you’ve been through
a lot, but there is power in you. There is power coming through your history,
through your culture. It’s in you, you just have to grasp it.”
She set the coffee cup on the desk corner and slapped her knees.
“I’ve got chores to do and it’s time to get after them, as they say out here. Sure
do like what your mom’s been doing to the house.”
“Don’t go. All I have is TV and I can’t get anyone to bring me a book.”
“I’ll send some right over. You’ll have them by tonight.”
“Thank you.” Kate tried to hold her back by her hand but didn’t have the strength
in her shoulders yet. Mrs. Anderson rose as if she weighed very little. She kissed
Kate’s forehead and left her.
WAYNE CLENCHED HIS jaws and punched the shovel blade into the damp
gravel. The light hanging from a drop cord swung around him, causing the walls
to heave and loom and die away. Shelves of murky jars tilted then were gone.
They came back into his eyes, red beets and milky potatoes, pale peaches
dissolved among long strands of white veins. He clinched his jaws because almost
every time he lifted the shovel, he forgot about the light and his elbow hit the
naked bulb. It swung over his head, careening in semi circles and crazy loops.
Wayne had stopped and tried to hang another loop in the cord, but there wasn’t
anything to attach it to. He could have gone back up to get a hammer and a nail,
but the world up there was full of too many complications. He wanted simple
work. Joey opened his eyes and mumbled a prayer. He lay on his side against the
exposed wall. Wayne dug. His shoulders hurt and his drug-fueled heart beat fast
and loud. After an hour, the hole was about five feet long and two feet wide and
about six inches deep. A shallow grave. His brain was drained of any internal
voice, but he was conscious of weighing whether to put Joey in the hole or not.
He wanted to punish him, scare him, for sure, but he hadn’t decided whether to
put him in it or not. Digging felt right. He bent his back and put his hips into a
thrust of the blade. He raised it up and tossed the gravel against the far wall.
Recoiling for another stab, his elbow struck the light bulb. It swung around him
like a horsefly. What the fucking hell did he think he was doing? His elbow hit the
light and it swung hard behind him and then back, just over his head and the walls
crawled with shadows and the shelves of red and milk-white fruits swam and then
disappeared and swam at him and into his eyes and brain and then, blink, they
were gone. He refocused on shoveling, on putting his back into it. Goddamn
fucking sonofabitch. He reared back and hit the light on purpose and it swung high
and came back fast. It popped off his head. He swung the shovel blade at it and
missed just as it came back toward his forehead. He ducked and it went over and
the fruit came at him and then the fruit was gone and the bulb pocked off the side
of his head. He stepped up out of the grave. The light swung in shrinking circles
until it was almost stopped. He looked down at his son’s body. Joey was curled
up, his face against the dirt. Poor bastard. “I have to get him out of here,” Wayne
said. But the drugs had worn off and left Wayne with three feet and the brain for
one. He stumbled on the rim of the hole and hit his head and shoulder on the lip of
the side next to Joey. He scrambled to his feet, staying bent over to catch his
breath. His heart was pounding loud in his brain. He stood straight and his head hit
the resilient little light bulb. It began swinging in little circles again, obscuring his
son and tipping the red and white liquid onto his face. Wayne caught his breath
inside his mouth. He turned the shovel over in his hands and stabbed the ground, a
hard jab that gave him only two inches of blade into the hard-packed gravel. When
he tipped the shovel to get the dirt up water began filling the hole. He had punched
into the water table. He brought the shovel up and his elbow sent the light
careening through the air. The motion of the light and heaving walls made him
want to puke. He let the shovel tip over into the water. He noticed Joey looking at
him, a grin on his face. He was trying to speak, his mouth moving like a fish out
of water and then the bulb came back and smacked Wayne in the back of the head
hard enough to hurt. It rocked and bobbed at the end of the electrical cord. Wayne
put the shovel just next to Joey’s face and swung hard and up. He hit the bulb and
it exploded. The hot glass blew up and shards shot into his eyes. He cussed and
took a stepped back. His heal skidded off the edge of the hole and he fell back
against the fruit shelves. A big quart of something bounced off of his head,
sending light through his skull. Wayne sat still. Just barely breathing. The pain
from the quart jar had snapped him from a slumber. The first thing he realized
after the blow was that his eyes balls were all cut to shit and he could hardly see.
Then, with his cussing gone and the light in the room gone, he heard Joey’s
breathing. It was shallow and gurgling, like he was partly under water. Wayne
lunged forward, thinking that his son must have fallen into the grave. When he
found him in the dark. Joey struggled harder to breath. He put both hands under
Joey’s shoulders and pulled, trying to straighten him out and get the air flowing
into his lungs. But Joey only groaned and then stopped breathing. Wayne
panicked. He pushed Joey over to his side and pulled his head back and then a
stream of air found passage into his son’s lungs. Wayne had to get him out of
there and to hospital or he really was going to die. He pushed his arms under Joey’
s shoulders just below his hips and lifted him. His eyes burned now and he felt the
glass tearing at his corneas. He staggered upright with Joey in his arms. He found
the steps from guess work and then took the first one in a lunge through the dark
and up. He ascended into the faint light of the back room. Joey’s head cleared the
floor and he gasped as his airway came open somehow and then the gurgling
started again. Wayne felt the hot blood flowing down his arm and over his hip.
Something had given way within Joey and he bled out of his mouth in a gush.
Wayne stepped out of the hole and rushed into the back room and into the kitchen
light. He picked up the phone, but it was dead. He threw it. The front door pushed
open and a woman yelled, “Put your hands up!” She was scared and her voice
screeched. Wayne saw the end of the gun.
“Hold on, now, hold on.”
The cop pushed into the room.
“Goddamn it my son is dying here and we need an ambulance,” Wayne eyes were
burning and he could just see that it was cop and a woman but he blinked and his
eyes felt like acid had been poured into them and then he couldn’t see anything but
blurred light and dark shapes.
“Stand back! Hands up!”
Wayne stepped back, reached fast behind his back and pulled the little derringer .
22 out of the belt holster and fired twice. The door swung over wider and Wayne
swung the gun. He bent slightly to his right to aim at the blur in his field of vision.
He recognized the tall man with a big head and held his fire. A funny feeling came
over him, like a rush of some kind of drug, and Wayne let his hands fall. He
opened his mouth to drink from the drug that was pouring over him now in giant
waves. The feeling was just like that first skin when he was entering a woman.
Then he dissolved into the field of that feeling.
JOEY WAS COLD and wet. He looked around a corner of a brick building and
there were the kids again. A clot of young men standing in the open doorway of
the ramshackle, six-story brownstone. The high rises downtown towered over it.
He stepped into the crowd and angled up the steps, eyes down. His legs felt weak
and pumped up. He had run several miles toward lights, toward the water of Lake
Union, toward the masses. There were sirens everywhere it seemed, hunting him
from all sides. A helicopter hovered overhead with a big spot light pouring off its
underside. Joey pushed up the steps, angry voices in his ears. He had a bad
feeling. He had to make sure he wasn’t being fooled by Satan.
The landing at the top of the stairs was packed with young men and women.
Some of them wore curtains of loose hair, others had deadlocks bunched and
strapped back by bandanas. He climbed another set of steps, up through hips and
bare arms until he reached a doorway with no lights behind it. He stumbled at the
threshold of the room, fell in the dark. His knees landed on lumps that squirmed
and then wood. He scrambled over a dozen soft and bony lumps covered in
blankets and sleeping bags until his head hit the wall. He slid along it until he hit a
corner. He curled into a ball and put his hand over the back of his head. You never
know when you will need a sharp knife, Wayne had always said. He saw himself
quickly raise the knife and pound it into Kian’s chest. He heard the pop sound
when the knife punctured the lung cavity. Joey groaned. Why did Kian have to
come to the hotel? Why didn’t he just leave? Why didn’t he stay on the sidewalk in
Billings? The rush of the moment raced through him again and he raised his fist up
and brought it down on the floor. He just wanted to stop Kian, stop him from
always being a problem, from always getting between him and Kate.
“I’m mad, too,” a man’s voice in the dark. “But this is the sleeping room, please
be quiet.”
To Joey, the disembodied voice, young and clarion, placed him in front of a
tribunal of angels who, pointing to Kian, said in a chorus – “You saved your
brother!”
He struggled with his doubt and the tricks of Satan in order to keep that image
before him. The panel of nine angels in white, large white sleeves, pointing at the
smiling ragged figure of Kian on his knees, staring wet-eyed up to Heaven: “You
saved him.” A host of sirens blared through the dark at him and he recoiled back
into the cold corner. He feared them. If Kian was before Jesus, why did he say he
burned?
The questions chased themselves around in his head till early morning. It was
barely dawn, when fingers poked his shoulder. The light outside came more from
streetlights than the sun or the moon, whichever it was that glowed weakly behind
a veil of heavy dark cloud. Then he saw the rain falling in front of the glass, sheets
of it. He felt cold, clammy and empty. He wracked his mind for the source of the
terrible dread inside that made it hard to lift his eyelids. He held his chest and
closed his eyes, seeking that sleep where he could be alone with God.
“Hey,” the young man said, shaking Joey. “Get up. We’ve got signs to make.”
Joey took his hands from his face and looked up. The man who had shaken him
had light brown and blond hair hanging over his face as he bent over Joey. Blue
eyes and tan skin. He said his name was Lewis. He said he’d watched Joey come
in the night before and curl up on the floor, so he made Joey a deal. He could stay
there and work for world justice or he had to leave. Inside Joey’s chest, his heart
was like a sack of stones hanging by thin threads strung from his collar bones,
cold and turning slowly. He looked around the room. All the little square glass
panes of the old windows were either broken out or cracked; and the walls were
torn open between the studs. Plaster had been swept into piles. The room was
rectangular and the sleeping bags, black or blue with light tan linings, were
scattered on the floor around them most were empty now. No light bulbs swung
from sockets. Joey heard crowds of people talking outside on the street. From
another room, he heard pounding – hammer blows to the floor. The skin around
his eyes felt as if it were sagging to his cheeks. He rubbed them and heard the
popping sound of the knife puncturing Kian’s chest. He flinched and opened his
eyes fast, afraid of what images had been burned in them. He felt compelled to
hug Jim and cry and tell him that he’d done a terrible thing. Jim looked away from
Joey.
“This isn’t a place for people on the run or crazy people, because the cops came
through here all the time and will probably shut the building down now that the
protests have shut down the city. They’ll be looking for heads to bust and here we
are,” Jim said. He was thin and as tall as Joey. “So we need to get our signs
finished and get back on the streets.” He turned to two others sitting up in their
sleeping bags. “That means you can’t leave anything behind because they will be
here and they will bust you for something if you’re here or if you try to come
back.”
Joey felt as if he was a flame faltering under the crushing cold of his brother’s
death. The sound of the knife punching through cartilage reverberated. The blank
oooff sound Kian made. Then Kian grasped at his chest.
“Sure,” Joey said. “Sure, let’s make some signs.” He wanted to get to work on
something and stop hearing. Get busy. He heard the sound again, like a spike
driven into a plastic milk jug.
“Come on then,” Jim said, turning. His dreadlocks lifted and clattered across his
face. “Let’s make signs.”
He left the room and Joey followed him down a flight of stairs to the next, where
a crowd had stalled out behind a young woman near the bottom. She stood one
step up from a cop, staring into his face. The woman’s straight black hair lay over
her back, nearly to the humps of her khaki pant bottoms. She had one pale hand
on the deep blue of the cop’s shoulder. The cop, brown hair hanging a little long
out of his hat, smiled. His thumbs stuck in his belt. His blue eyes laughing into the
woman’s.
“You and all the other workers, laborers have to understand that the industrial
revolution will collapse and that we are all just jockeying for the survival of our
genes, our knowledge, our points of view. It will either be us,” she pointed at his
chin and then at her chest, “or it will be theirs, those rich fucking assholes who
suck champagne and poison your children. They gave you that gun.”
“There are winners and losers in every social arrangement, in every economy,” the
cop said, cool, unhurried.
“That’s what I’m saying and you can’t be a winner carrying a gun for rich white
men.” She squeezed the cop’s shoulder. The tension jump up a notch among all
the black-clad punks on the steps lined up behind her. The cop’s shoulders
remained relaxed. He smiled.
“Look,” the cop said, bowing his head. “You’ve got one hour to get everyone out
of this building before we come in and clear it by force.”
The young woman dropped her hand. “Thanks.” She turned into the crowd and
edged her way through her comrades. Her shoulder bumped Joey’s and she
looked at him. She moved her mouth into a faint, sullen smile. Her face was flush
and tears ran down her cheeks. The cop turned and stepped down the few steps
to the door and strutted out, shoulders still down. Joey looked back up the steps.
The woman’s tear-streaked face was in his mind. Her eyes blackened and
smeared, corneas glowing white. He wanted to tell the young woman what he had
done. She would understand that it was because of a corruption in the society,
because of the blood of sin running through society that left ruin and destruction
everywhere. It flowed through veins and made monsters of men. She would
forgive him.
THE BARTENDER AT the Horseshoe wiped the bar top in front of Kate again. He
was debating with himself. She came in several days in a row and plied him with
smiles. She could tell he was thinking about what she’d said about Kian drinking
himself to death. The grizzled old barman, a couple of teeth on one side of his
mouth and a cigarette in the other, knew Kian since he came in morning, noon and
night.
“Alright, look here,” Bertrand said. “They’ll be at the Gray Stone Warehouse in
Seattle Tuesday next week. I don’t know who all’s going, but they were all
staying in Blue Street Hotel, just back there, for a while and they all left about the
same time.”
“That damn Wayne,” she said.
“Don’t you dare tell him I told you so or that fucking Waldo will bust my head
open.”
“Don’t worry. I know better then to talk.”
“Good girl. Now how about a kiss.” He took his cigarette out and puckered.
She kissed her open hand and blew it at him.
“Damn nice,” he said and put the cigarette back.
Kate left for Seattle without packing. Wayne had been a step ahead of her all the
way and she wasn’t going to settle for that.
In Seattle, she crawled around the circle of highways and byways and on ramps
for most of the morning. It was late when she found the right warehouse. It was
under the sprawling, sky-high web of bridges where the Duwamish River entered
the Sound at the southern end of the West Marginal Way. She steered the rented
car off the pavement onto a deeply rutted gravel lane. The road slipped through a
silver chain-link fence. She idled the small blue car over to the left-hand side of the
road to where a ridge of gravel raised several feet. The little motor clattered and
the car slumped half onto the rise and died just as she shoved in the clutch. She
reclined in the seat, sedated, thanks to mom’s medicine cabinet. When Kian got
out into the open, she’d rush up to him and nab him. Becalmed by chemistry, she
thought about drugs and alcohol and their necessity in the West. Maybe she’d
study that little correlation. Why was a different state of mind so necessary out
here? Was it because everyone was so pissed off all the time? So desperate?
Probably. The train of thought drifted away. She felt transcendent to her body,
still tired and stiff. The longer she was in the West, the more she felt lucky to have
escaped it. That was the work of Mrs. Anderson. She taught her that being a
woman meant more than being a sex object for men, getting knocked up and
dancing the country jig. The boys and even her mother called Mrs. Anderson a big
fat hippy women’s libber. And she was, she told Kate. She was a big fat hippy
women’s libber and Kate could be too (minus the fat!) if she wanted to. But she
would have to give up on the dream of being another piece of country bumpkin
ass. Kate had already been that, against her will. Anderson told Kate about New
York and life among smart sisters. She said no one sleeps in the East. They are all
artists and political activists and it’s exciting as hell. The more powerful you
become, she told Kate during one of their late night study sessions in her
apartment in Billings, the more we can shape our own reality, define our
relationships, build out our own system of values. The more powerful a person is,
the more she can create her own reality, rather than having to choose between the
elements of realities already made by men.
Say no more, Kate thought, sitting in the car, I’m hooked.
She dozed off then. When she woke, the sun’s rays were pouring into the car
from between high sections of the overpasses making her lap and chest hot and
uncomfortable. The muscles in her hips and lower back hurt, but her head felt
clear like her mind was in jar, resting in a state of athletic poise. She had the
energy to be curious. She experienced a crazy jumble of images as she skipped
through a second low-grade nap in the front seat of the rented car. After several
minutes, she woke up fully. An aluminum trailer had hit a pothole and the loud
banging clash of the metal fell off the trailer, as if a chunk of metal had shattered
on the concrete.
Dad.
She started the car and gunned it out of the little hole and followed the truck down
the lane. It passed between large concrete pillars that soared up to a ribbon of
airborne roadway. The road dipped down to the water toward decrepit
warehouses and ironwork shops. Hulking stacks of rusting steel bars and pipes
were stacked against the walls, the two-by-fours meant to keep the stacks upright
had rotted years ago. Long shoots of grass mixed with blackberry bramble
concealed them. The end of the road ran up to two concrete docking births, black
tires bolted to the gray and rust-streaked front. She turned the little car off the
road again. She killed the motor and stuffed the gear shifter into park and slipped
down in the seat.
The truck swung around in front of the dock, facing the water line when it
stopped. The faces of two men behind the gleaming glass looked like ghosts. The
dust around the tires settled and the driver’s door swung out. Wayne stepped
down onto the fuel tank and then to the ground. Joey, it looked like, had slumped
down in his seat, looking forward. Maybe he saw her. Either way she was going
to wait for him to get out before she left her car. She didn’t want to deal with
Joey. She only wanted to find Kian and get him away from Wayne.
Then the passenger door to the truck opened and Joey swung out and jumped to
the ground. He limped and stretched, thin and tall, as he walked out of sight down
the side of the truck and trailer. Kian must be in the sleeper. If he was, she’d
sneak him off, back to Wendy. Kate opened the door and the key alarm in the dash
bonged several times before she got the key ripped out of the ignition. She stepped
out and closed the door quietly. She’d wake Kian and coax him into her car where
she had booze and some snacks. She’d drive like hell to South Dakota and his wife
before he came to his senses, just keep him loaded and fed until she could get him
into a detox hospital in Rapid City. She walked down the middle of the gravel road,
out of sight of anyone standing at the sides and the back of the truck. At the
passenger side, she looked around the fender and then unlatched the door. She
stepped up into the cab and pushed her head over the seat. The sleeper was empty.
“Shit,” she said and slumped.
Voices were coming up the side of the truck, so she slipped out of the cab and ran
down the road to her car. When she opened the door and sat down, she saw a tall
man standing on the concrete dock looking at her. Waldo. She pulled forward. He
walked to the edge of the concrete, bent his knees and dropped to the gravel. He
continued toward her, a tall broad-shouldered man with a huge head and curly
sandy blond hair. He must have recognized her. She turned the car around in the
road and spun the little tires driving away. They must have dropped Kian off at a
bar or a hotel before going to the warehouse. She’d have to try to tail them when
they left.
“SHE LOOKED LIKE your daughter,” Waldo said.
Wayne looked down the road where the car had gone.
“She’s awfully pretty, Wayne. Must have been the mailman.”
“Probably,” Wayne said. “She say what the hell she was doing?”
“Never caught up with her. She took off too fast.”
“Huh. Well, let’s get this stuff unloaded. I’ve got a to get this truck over to T.J.’s.”
Joey’s heart was thudding. He couldn’t help himself. She must have been here for
him. She said she was going back to New York, but she didn’t. She followed him
instead.
“Come on, Joe,” Wayne said. “Flip those latches and lets get this fucker unloaded.”
When they finished, Joey and Wayne drove back to West Marginal Way and
toward Boeing Field to drop off the truck and pick up a car. As they rattled and
bounced between the tall pillars holding up miles of stacked interstate ramps, Joey
noticed the little blue car turn onto the road behind them. He looked over at Wayne
whose eyes were on the road, toothpick in his mouth.
Wayne’s not her father or not my father and she knows it, Joey decided. She’s
just found it out and is waiting to get me alone to tell me, to be with me. This
happy delusion took Joey’s mind off the agony he had been in during the trip,
searching for Wayne’s vulnerable spot. But as he rode with Wayne, who was
humming a tune and sucking on that damn toothpick, closing in on the towering
buildings of Seattle, he simply wished for a life free of Wayne’s blood, free of the
terrible weight of having a madman as a father. There was no dignity possible with
Wayne. No hope of a normal life, of a nice house with spacious rooms and clean
windows, of a wife and children, of the steady calm presence of a family.
Grandma and Grandpa coming over after church on Sunday. Kate smiling. A
sunny Sunday dress and silky flaxen hair combed down around her shoulders.
Laughter and the ease of knowing you were good people. But that’s not how it
was with Wayne. With him there’s misery and hard feelings. Dark curtains and
boozy breath. Cigarette smoke and the tension tight and sharp between everyone,
the tension that at any moment all the grievances, all the punching and fucking and
drunken screaming will bust out and rip them apart, like a demon loosed. He
leaned forward, pretending to stretch the muscles in his back, and searched the
cars in the rearview mirror. He found the little blue car. It was too far back for
him to make out the driver, but it was her. It had to be. Wayne turned the rig into
the T.J.’s Trucking parking lot. Joey sat in the cab, while Wayne made
arrangements with the owner to use a panel van. When he came out, Joey helped
him move the band equipment from the upper deck at the front of the trailer into
the van, looking over his shoulder all the while.
LARGE SLAMMED THE newspaper down on the end of the bed. It bounced
once on the plastic covered mattress and woke Kian.
At first, Kian thought it was still dark but then his eyes opened and the off-white,
water-stained ceiling became clear. What remained unclear was why was he
awake. Then Large lifted the paper and hit his leg with it and then someone called
him a princess. He sat up and his butt sank into the stuffed-cardboard mattress.
The hotel room, dim with wood paneled walls, smelled of diesel and bug spray. He
rubbed his face hard and swallowed. Fuck, bathroom, he thought, leaning to his
left, falling until his hand hit the dresser. He swirled slightly. “I had better get some
alcohol in me before I wake up very much.” His right hand hit the table at the
bottle of gin. The bottle teetered. He got it up and dumped what was left into his
mouth. He rolled onto the bed. He hated being sick. There was a time when he
wasn’t sick. The sludge and hell of it all inside. It’s just drinking, he told himself.
It’s something you can stop. He remembered he used to wake up feeling good,
stretching and flexing. He remembered when the smell of bacon didn’t make him
puke in the morning. He remembered Wendy and sunny mornings and white
sheets. Fuck.
“Look it over,” Large said, tossing the paper into Kian’s lap. Large wondered how
a man could drink so much and still be alive, though Kian was barely that.
“What,” Kian said. He clenched his eyes shut and squeezed what no longer
belonged to him out of his mind. He slipped off the bed and stood in the corner.
“Use the bathroom!” Cousin yelled from the other bed across the little room.
“Damn you! Someone has to clean that piss up.”
“Just get the piss out and look at the fucking paper.” Large said.
Kian fell down. “WHAT! DAMN IT! WHAT?”
“Just read the paper. I don’t want to spoil the fun.” Large flipped the paper over
onto the floor in front of Kian and jabbed at a story in the corner with the toe of
his tennis shoe.
Kian got to his knees and leaned against the bed. He looked. Then he looked some
more. Then he saw the mug shot if himself. It was in the middle of two columns
of type with his name in bold under it. “What the fuck?” he said. The byline on the
story around his mug was from The Associated Press. The headline said “Billings
Post Retracts Story.” He crawled back on the bed, bringing his knees under his
chest and pushing his white underpants into the air. The story said the Post had
reported erroneously that Linda Two Horses had called on her people to riot and
had said the word “blood.” It said that the story on the reservation power struggle
had been a “complete fabrication” from a troubled reporter who could not be
located.
In a gray box inset into the story: “Apology from the Editor.”
“Well,” Kian said and fell back onto the cardboard bed, “that certainly clears up
that.”
“Man, you do know how to fuck up a life,” Large said.
Kian blacked out.
He woke later when Cousin punched the front door open. The rattle of a truck
engine idling outside in the parking lot came in with him. Cousin had on the same
shirt he’d worn for several days and his hair was an even bigger mess. He set two
six packs of beer down on the end of the bed.
“I borrowed some of your money.”
He and Kian reached for the beer and Kian won the impromptu contest by blowing
the tab on his first. Then he took two hard swigs and leaned back into the foam
pillows.
“I guess this is the point where I run away,” Kian said. “Go into hiding and never
come back. Discovered in a ditch somewhere. I’m relieved, actually.”
“I hate it when justice rears it’s ugly head,” Cousin said.
“Justice can be pernicious,” Large said from a small chair in front of the
television, on without the sound.
Large considered that he was now completely in control of his big brother’s life
and the turn of events awed him a little. What should he do? Turn him in? Help
him run? This control over the now-blitzed-out shell of a person also made this a
critical moment in his own life. Thus that symbiosis put Kian in control of Large,
too, or at least tied their fates. Their lives were twined now and Large wasn’t clear
on what to do. In the universe, the way the world worked, you never knew the
right thing until it was passed already and maybe you had done it or maybe you
hadn’t. Large was at one of those junctures. He could leave Kian, take him to the
cops or take him along for the ride as he hunted Wayne in Seattle. He had gotten a
tip from a cousin who worked at a hotel that Wayne would be playing there at
some sort of world economy summit.
Cowboy Wayne’s Authentic Western Music, the cousin said, sounded like the man
Large had described as his long lost, great white father.
“Cousin,” Large said, “let’s take him with us to Seattle.”
“Right Large,” Cousin said and he saluted. Then he rocked out of the chair and
grabbed a beer and flung himself back into it.
That afternoon, they walked to the bus station. When they got there, Cuz had
second thoughts about going to Seattle. This life had taught him a thing or two
about running around with white people. Something always went wrong. He had
had a white friend when he was a boy, before he even realized that his friend was
white and he wasn’t. They played cowboys and Indians and fought over who had
to be the Indian. They chased one another out to the cornfield that spread out next
to the white kid’s barns. The field corn was high and particles shook loose from
the tassels and coated their hair as they ran down the rows. A few stalks cracked
and fell. Pollen floated thick in the air, a yellow dust storm. I got you! No, I shot
first! Bullshit! You dick! They laughed. Then: GET THE HELL OUT OF THE
GODDAMN CORN! They beat it left and through several rows, but his friend’s
father quickly caught up to them and grabbed them by their shirts. He shook them
and then tossed Cuz aside. Then he smacked his son on the head with his open
hand, shook him and hit him again. The blows shocking his hair from side to side,
a dull and deep sound. The sudden intense violence froze the space around them.
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU THIS IS MONEY! EACH ONE OF
THESE STALKS IS MONEY! He let go of the boy’s collar, and then slapped his
head hard again knocking him off of his feet. He turned toward Cuz, who stood
between two bending corn stalks. Cuz had never seen a person hit so hard. GO
HOME YOU FUCKING INDIAN BASTARD! Cuz took off and was thinking to
himself “I’m the Indian Bastard” and feeling lucky. I’m the Indian Bastard and that
makes me free. He trotted down the row as fast as he could without knocking
over corn stalks. But, before he got out of earshot he heard the first shallow and
sharp smack of a loose belt hitting his friend. Now this sound he knew well.
Smack and the boy screams. The cries and screams and the smack of the belt. He’
d had a few sharp smacks himself from his mother’s boyfriends, but this father
didn’t stop after a few hits and screams. He hit the boy harder and harder. His
grunting eclipsed by the snap and rip and screams. Those screams buzzed around
in his head as we took a step with the others in line to get on the Greyhound bus.
The screams were a swarm of biting flies. He stopped hanging out with white
people after that. White people just didn’t know when to stop. Cuz did. He stopped
at the door to the gray and chrome bus in front of the long, loping dog. Kian and
Large had stepped up onto the bus steps, tickets out. Cuz turned around and
without a word walked back through the crowd behind him. He walked against the
flow, and out of the building and into the street, where he stretched his torso up
and breathed in.
The bus driver leaned forward in his seat to reach Kian’s ticket. Kian wavered. He
grabbed Kian’s ticket and punched a hole, bisecting the yellow border and blue
inner color while Kian held it. When the driver let go of the ticket, as if he had
been providing the key tension for Kian to remain upright, Kian tilted backward
onto Large and his foot slipped down one black rubber step. Large caught him and
shoved him back up straight. He kept a hand planted in the middle of Kian’s back.
“No drunks on my bus,” the driver said and put his hand on Kian’s chest.
“He’s not drunk,” Large said. “We’re headed to the University of Washington
Medical Center in Seattle for an experimental ear surgery.”
Kian gained his balance between these opposing forces.
“Sorry,” Kian said, tightening his tongue and lips against the onslaught of slurring.
“Climbing stairs does it to me all the time.”
“Come on,” the driver said. He lifted his hand off Kian’s chest and waved him in,
shaking his head. “Inner ear my ass.” But he didn’t care to fight. Pay up and jump
on, just don’t for god sakes stab anyone. You wouldn’t believe the paper work.
Kian and Large went to the back of the bus, and Large sat on the back bench.
Kian spun around one row up and slumped into a seat next to a woman. He closed
his eyes. The bus lunged out of the parking lot and onto the street. The engine
whined through several gears. The young woman sitting next to Kian, her long
wispy blond hair in a wiry, slept-in ponytail, nudged his arm. The first thing into
Kian’s brain was that the thin flower print dress laying across her legs converged
into the vortex between her uppermost thighs. A pair of thin female legs went on
from there. He reached toward the center of the dress, slowly, to make sure that it
was really there. He lifted his head to see what the vortex was attached to and
looked into her simple pale face. A person! Hey! He pushed his smile bigger.
“Hold on,” she said. “Hold on. I just want to sit by my husband. He had to go
back out to get a bag … he’s … ” She looked passed Kian. Her eyes were terrified
eyes.
Kian turned his head to the seat across the aisle. The young man sitting there had a
thin goatee and glared at him and was clearly panicked. He stood in the aisle,
frozen in mid-rescue. The bus leaned heavy to the right and all the heads shifted
left. Kian looked back at the girl and laughed. She was getting pretty mad and was
about to burst. Kian turned back to the boy and saw that his skinny arms were
shaking. Then the fear and confusion and the hate registered with Kian like a
foreign language suddenly making sense. He jumped to his feet and pushed himself
back to where Large was sprawled.
“Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sorry,” Kian said.
The young man spun into the seat and buried all his own fear into his effort to
console the young woman, his arms over her neck.
“For crying out loud,” Kian said and looked down the aisle, a cleave in the sea of
heads. The driver was looking at him through the wide oval mirror. Kian raised his
hands, palms up and smiled. The impulse to jump forward and hit the boy in the
head rocked his legs and hips, but he didn’t jump. Instead, he wiggled his hips,
like he was just settling into his balance after an attack of inner ear disease. Kian
then remembered that he was following Large for no more reason than he had
nowhere else to go and didn’t want to turn himself in yet. He had no money. No
job. No family. A few more passed out nights on the sidewalks in Billings and the
cops would get him. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out he’s the
journalist wanted in a libel case. He looked behind at his friend. Large winked and
motioned to the empty corner next to him. Kian swayed with the bus and tossed
himself into the padded corner.
He woke as Laurel slid behind them. He watched the Rocky Mountain range
dragging themselves closer, blue where there were forests and white with snow
on the tops and in the ridges and higher plains leading up to them. Miles later, the
bus swung off the interstate, just after the long climb over the pass that had them
all slightly sick from the diesel exhaust. When the bus stopped in the wide parking
lot of a truck stop, Kian didn’t follow the rest of the riders in for a snack and a
break from the exhaust. Instead, he laid his head back into the corner, hard on one
side and soft on the other, and told himself that the girl had overreacted. It’s not
like he would really grab her crotch. He isn’t a rapist or bastard. He isn’t hurting
anyone any more, not if he can help it.
had come into the room and even while she explained how Joey lunged into the air
and stuck the knife into Kian’s chest, Catlynn imagined the shining strands of
barbed wire fence she’d strung down the line of pale-blond wooden posts. The
strands converged and the gray and brown posts fell more rapidly behind one
another into the distance. She and a friend had built that fence, eye-balling the
alignment of the posts across a blank field. Her friend’s long curly brown hair
blowing out of a ponytail; blue button-up shirt. Her dirt-smudged jeans from a
week of digging postholes; knees stained green from kneeling in the alfalfa and
weeds. She saw her friend resting on one knee, brown curls falling across her
eyes. The scenes gave her pleasure. Now that the kids and Wayne were gone, she
spent hours of emotionally simple, uninterrupted time working on things the way
she wanted to and with whomever she wanted. She shaped the farm and it shaped
her. She smiled when she thought of Elizabeth pulling hair away from her sweat-
covered face. The strands so long they clung to her wet, freckled cheek, even as
her arm reached its length. She had smiled at Catlynn, a big white smile and sun-
wrinkled eyes. With Kate’s voice still rattling in her ear, Catlynn thought about
how building that fence had been the most pleasurable work she’d ever done. The
edge of her pasture and her neighbor’s alfalfa field had been a point of contention
between them for nearly twenty years and Wayne would never truly address it.
Looking down the slivery strong fact of a new straight fence, done right, shining
in the sun, she felt whole.
“The police say it’s going to be tough finding Joey because of a bunch of riots in
the city. He can disappear for awhile, Nollette told me, but they’ll catch him
eventually. I don’t think I’m going to stay here while they look. I’m coming back
with Kian.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll be home tonight.”
Catlynn pushed the button that killed the connection and set it face down on the
table. She looked at her face in the window. The blur hid what she felt. She stood
up and turned toward the bottle of gin on the cupboard. She put her dark thin hand
on the clear neck and let it slide down the glass to the cupboard top. She wanted
to drink, but couldn’t. She saw in her mind a bonfire of clothes and books and
boxes.
“This is the break from everything,” she said to the gin.
She ran her hands through her thick hair and gathered the mass into a ponytail
then let it go. It was a good idea. She pulled the hem of her white T-shirt out from
under the red and brown sweater. The hem made a band around her stomach, and
she pulled it tight, strangling her midriff. “Goddamn it!” she scream and stomped
her boot heel. She struggled to rip the fabric, but it stayed connected, whole.
Anything would work to tie her hair back, but she wanted the white hem around
her hair and she was going to have it. She stepped to the yellow kitchen counter,
speckled like a robin’s egg, and took the scissors from a jar. She pulled the hem
out, clipped it in half and ripped it the full length from around her waist. She
pushed her hair back into a ponytail and tied it off with the strip, tattered threads
dangling. This is the way everything is going to go for her now. Everything will
bend to her will or it will be broken and burned to the ground. She walked through
the house, the same frozen, small smile on her mouth, feeling the same cold
humor at her purpose. She stepped from drawer to drawer pulling them open and
examining their contents, making an inventory. A fire sale, she thought and
laughed. She was searching too, but for what she couldn’t say. She knew she
would know it when she saw it, the way a match stands out above all else, red
bulb with a white tip. The cupboards and closets. After one pass through the
house, she went back through the rooms.
Her bedroom was first. She cleared the closet and drawers of all of Wayne’s old
clothes, boots, vests, a leather jacket and two pairs of boots. She reached under
the bed and took out the old stack of magazines of nude women. She rifled the
drawers and emptied them by more than half. In a top drawer of the black
dresser, she collected three notebooks that had Wayne’s handwritten songs in
them. That stuff all went out to the yard, where she started a pile. Back inside, she
picked up one of Wayne’s old guitars, kept in the corners of the living room. She
took the Martin D-18 outside, swung it wide and smashed it against the trunk of a
tree. The wood exploded. Catlynn tossed the neck and spent strings onto the pile
of clothes. She repeated that destruction two more times. Wood splinters
punctured her face in the last burst. She touched her cheek where there was pain
from a shard of guitar wood. A piece still stuck into her skin, just below her eye.
She jerked it out. Blood ran down her face to her chin and dripped onto a pebble.
Laughing, she walked back into the house letting the blood drip. It mostly fell on
the shelf of her ample breasts. Under the twin bed that Kian had slept in, she
unearthed a leather-man’s set of tools and scraps of partially tooled leather that the
boy had worked at passionately for several months after Christmas when he was
ten-years-old. He made wallets, coin pouches and belts like a machine until Wayne
stopped buying leather for him. She set the box on the brown, tightly spread
covers of the bed and opened it. She remembered that as soon as he had pounded
a shape and design into every strip of leather he could get his hands on, the tools
went neatly into the box and back under his bed where it stayed. Kian moved on to
his next thing with as much singular dedication as he had shown leather tooling.
His new passion became riding his bicycle over ramps made of scraps of wood.
He had seen a movie about Evil Kenival. She watched him, peddling from the
gravel lane at faster and faster speeds. She’d watch his progress from window to
window until he cleared the yard and hit a plank of wood balanced on a crate and
flew, elbows up like wings. He put the board on the top rail of the pole fence. She
hoped he wouldn’t break his neck, but it wouldn’t hurt him to smash up his bike
and skin his knees a little. Bumps and bruises would make him tougher, let him
know he can survive the blood and cuts that life brings. He jumped things,
anything he could drag to the front of the ramp. He hurled himself higher and
higher into the air while she watched and smiled and laughed. Finally, he jumped
too far off the side of a ramp made too tall with nails and boards on the top fence
pole and smashed straight into the gnarled trunk of a cottonwood tree. He fell onto
his back, the bike landed on top of him. He crawled out from under it. He stood up
and starred at his pants, bewildered. When she reached him, his pants were dark
around the cuffs. She lifted the legs up. Blood seeped into his tennis shoes and ran
over onto the grass. She took him inside and stripped him. Kian had nearly cut his
penis and testicles off on the bike’s handlebars. The doctor said he was lucky.
Catlynn joked, “I wonder.” The doctor didn’t laugh. Uptight prick, she thought,
just like her straight-laced father. She took the leather-tooling box outside and set it
on top of the stack, in the middle. Then she got a gas can from the shed and
doused the pile of family history with diesel and put a match to a frilly corner of
Kate’s yellowing, once-pure white senior prom dress. The pile smoldered until the
diesel got hot, then the fire took off. It’s orange and red spread into the reaches of
the night.
WHEN KATE WOKE, Joey was already out of the trailer. She sat up and looked
out the dusty trailer window. A hundred yards away, a black semi-truck sat on
one of the sloped concrete pads and there was Joey, she assumed, in a bright
yellow slicker spraying the side of the cattle trailer. The hard spray exploded into
rainbows in the angled morning sunlight and he moved it up and down the side.
She remembered her makeup-and-face-cream dilemma of the night before and
laughed. She checked the makeup on her face to see if it would last through
breakfast. It would. Her spirits were lifted by the presence of the sun and she
stretched. She brushed her pants smooth and pulled hard at the hem of her shirt to
get the biggest wrinkles out. Breakfast would be good. Country food is good for
the soul. Now if only she could find a place that had a decent cup of coffee. She
looked back out the window. The water and its rainbow were gone, and Joey
stood by a pickup stopped in front of the truck. His hood was off, and his black
hair was slicked down by water and lord knew what else. He was talking to a fat
man with a straw cowboy hat. “The land of pregnant men,” she said. She took her
ponytail out, ran her fingers through her hair and recaptured it all back under the
elastic hair band. The pregnant man shook Joey’s hand and turned to his pick up.
Kate put her old cowboy boots back on. The old boots chaffed her heals. They
used to be broken in perfectly, but they had grown dry and hard from years of
sitting under her childhood bed. Her feet, she was happy to think, were no longer
callused in any of the right places for farm work.
She met Joey outside and they drove to breakfast. The waitress at “Smokey Jim’s
Interstate Cabin” set the menus on the table between Kate and Joey and poured
coffee with her left hand. Kate didn’t recognize the poufy blond waitress, though
they were about the same age. She must be a city girl. The restaurant was new.
Huntley had become a bedroom community for the working poor from Billings.
There were no more farmers’ sons now, just managers for the corporations, like
Coors, that owned the land. In her first pass through Huntley the day before, it
seemed like a bright little community on the little flat spot next to the Yellowstone
River. The road widens and next to it civic leaders created a park with a few
swings, horseshoe rings and mown grass. But on the other side of the road, the
big grocery store windows where busted out and the plywood put over them had
warped and streaked black. The few dozen houses on the blocks behind the main
road were weathered, broken kid toys out front. The gas station on the corner
was abandoned. It’s garage doors leaning open and old car parts spilled out like
they had been disgorged. A flood of time laced with poverty had poured through
here for years. The white, stucco front of the gas station had big gaping holes and
its windows too had been haphazardly boarded up. Even the two blocks of
concrete curbs in front of the store and leading to the garage had crumbled. When
she looked closer, Kate hardly recognized her little hometown where she rode
bicycles with nearly a dozen other kids, racing down smooth gravel alleys and
hiding out in the corners of the park. The alleys were a roller coaster of potholes
now and there were no kids on the streets. They must all be in daycares or at their
grandparents in Billings while their parents worked two jobs. Two houses, where
the co-op’s boss and the owner of the grocery store had lived, were freshly
painted. The sprucing up was an effort to support the proposition that they were a
great deal at their newly reduced prices. Anything new in this part of the state was
built next to the interstate, where it could beg from the world as it drove by. The
little log cabin restaurant and bar that served a few of the remaining locals, like
Joey, had been built to resemble a mountain lodge. It was set up at the bottom of
the exit ramp where the interstate crossed over the one road leading into Huntley.
Long timbers made the high peaked ceiling of the mountain lodge feel like a lid.
Several black fans spun slowly and awkwardly. A potbelly wood stove sat against
the wall.
He round young waitress sauntered toward them. “Hey, Joey,” she sang. She
pasted her glittering eyes on him. “Who’s your friend?” She winked at him but
looked worried.
“Emily, this is my sister Kate.” Joey opened his palm and stretched it across the
table, as if displaying her.
Joey kept eye-contact with the waitress and that impressed Kate. She had
assumed that he was shy around all women and not just her, but he kept his eyes
locked into this girl’s. She was round but pretty. Kate wondered if Joey could
actually have real romantic feelings, something more conscious or in addition to
his repressed and violently self-hating lust. In his eyes, she saw what looked like
affection. The waitress wiped her palm on her apron in anticipation of a
handshake. Kate wondered if they knew each other outside of the Smokey Cabin,
then the answer came.
“Spreading the Word today, Joey?”
“I spread the Word every day, Emily,” Joey answered in a tone that meant he felt
accused. He turned and looked at Kate, but avoided her eyes. “Emily goes to my
church.”
If Emily had heard his defensiveness, she didn’t appear to give it any thought.
Perhaps she knew him well enough to know he was defensive in any
conversation. He felt accused by everyone. Then it struck her that Joey had kept
eye contact so Emily wouldn’t think him guilty of some negligence or trespass of
god’s rules.
Emily finally took her eyes off Joey and reached her hand to Kate. They clasped
and held. Emily’s hand was soft and warm. Kate guessed that Joey and Emily had
been set up by church members more than once for a chaste date or two with a
PG movie thrown in. But that’s not Joey’s gig, Kate guessed. Then she
understood that Joey not only had a dark side, but he was attached to it, like
codependency with a bad friend. She’d learned to spot men like that in New York.
They tended to be married men from some suburb. She’d learned the hard way to
avoid them. As soon as she got alone with a man like Joey, he’d turn into a
menace. He’d be nice and polite on a date with any woman outside of his church
or circle of friends, but then once alone he would become focused on just one
thing – pornographic sex like that stuff he’s seen over and over again on the
Internet. Tormented and guilty, he’d want to rush to a bed or car or alley even, do
it (don’t talk and don’t kiss) and run. Not a fun date. But Emily didn’t know this
about Joey, Kate guessed.
“Sister, huh? Well if you say so,” Emily sang. She let go of Kate’s hand and left
the table.
“Nice girl,” Kate said. “You should take her on a date. Marry her and make little
church babies.”
“Thanks, Kate. You’re always such a big help.” Joey put the menu up in front of
his reddened face.
They ordered and Kate decided to mind her own business. She wasn’t home to
take care of Joey. It’s Kian. Thinking of him, she remembered the newspaper. At
least he still had a job.
“Hey, is there a newspaper around here?” Kate asked Emily, who was several
tables away.
“I’ve got one behind the counter. More coffee?”
“No, no thanks,” Kate said, “just the paper.”
Joey nodded his head. His eyes on the menu still, even though they had already
ordered. Joey had gone back under.
What a little Prozac wouldn’t do for you, Kate thought.
Emily set the paper down and stepped off to the only other table with customers.
An old man and woman who ordered quickly.
Kate flattened the front page and scanned it.
“Oh shit! Jesus, Kian. What is it with you boys?” She flung the paper across the
table at Joey. It hit him in the chest.
He put the paper in front of his face and the burning image of Kate’s breasts came
to his mind. Every time he closed his eyes, her breasts came to his mind. He
focused on the paper. There was Kian’s face in a mug shot, smiling and clear
eyed, proud but open to the reader like an actor’s pose. Thick black eyebrows,
narrow nose, strong jaw and blue eyes. The bastard, Joey thought. Then he
noticed the headline.
“Yeah,” he said, sitting forward and tossing the paper onto the table next to them.
“He’s always loved the spotlight.”
Emily was at their table with the food arrayed in both hands.
“Fuck, Joey, get over yourself.”
Emily blanched, stepped back.
“Watch your language,” Joey said, bringing his fist down on the table.
“Fuck you,” Kate said and pushed her chair back.
“Honey, you can just get out of here and stay out.” Emily cocked her hip, dishes
leaning, eggs sliding.
Kate walked to the door. Her hands in fists.
“Wait, Kate!” Joey got out of his chair and trotted toward her. “I’ll give you a ride
to the house.”
“No thanks,” Kate yelled and pushed outside.
“Family can be such a heavy cross to bear,” Emily said, righting the food just as
the eggs had gathered on the edge of the white dish. She set Joey’s food down.
He sat and looked at the plate for a moment. He grabbed a fork and cut his eggs.
“I’m afraid my family is full of sin,” he said and stuffed a piece of toast in his
mouth right behind the yellow eggs. “Sin and rebellion from God.”
Emily sat down in Kate’s seat and put the plate down. She salted the eggs. Then
she set the silver shaker down and reached across the table and put her hand in
Joey’s. “You want to pray about it?”
“Thank you,” Joey said. His voice croaked and tears tipped over his eyelids. “I
would like that.”
Emily put her other white, porcine hand in his cabled talon and they bowed their
heads. Joey’s shoulders shook as he sobbed.
KIAN PRESSED THE brakes until the car skidded in the gravel at the Delilah. He
elbowed the car door open and jumped out. Dust swarmed him like flies. Even the
front door weighed in against him. He got in the building and pushed on down the
levered hall to the bar, where he ordered a scotch from the papery old woman and
shot it. She settled her top dentures with a jaw twist. The gasoline settled into a
slow burn and his chest and esophagus felt lit. He settled into his panic, slowing
his breathing. He stepped on the stairs one at a time. Each one creaked at the
footfall. He slowed his steps to release the creaks more steadily. There has to be a
way out of this predicament. He’s got no story and no more excuses. At the top
of the steps, he turned back and looked down the cascade and asked God, “Where
are the creaks now?”
In his room, the scotch warmed him like a forgiving hug. He turned on the brown
clock radio next to the bed and fell back onto the covers. The bed’s sagging
center pulled him. “Doggone it,” the disc jockey said, “more hot and dry weather
on the way. Will it never rain?” Kian rolled over and picked up the receiver from
the red phone. He lifted it to his ear. He stopped to think of a lie. Then he had one.
He would tell his editor that the story was still on. The Indians were meeting inside
the council offices and would come out late at night or early in the morning with a
new plan. A voice gurgled out of the receiver and he put cold plastic harder
against his ear. A man’s gin voice said “soon as the ceiling dries.” A woman’s
“You better” sounded like an empty glass. Kian slowly replaced the receiver. The
weight of the hard plastic piece clacked down on one raised side of the cradle and
then the other. “Radar Love” leaked out of the radio and he settled back on the bed
to listen. This song had played to his yearning as a boy to get out beyond those
dry hills and brown fields to the world out there, to the cities where there was
water and lights and people he didn’t know.
“One more radar lover gone,” they sang.
A word streamed to him out of the center of the naked light bulb. He couldn’t
grasp it. Maybe it was her name. He woke with a start and sat up. The clock radio
said 1:12 p.m. with black and white cards. One more flipped over and suddenly it
was 1:13 p.m. Kian swung his feet over the edge. He had to find something, some
kind of story. If he didn’t have one by tonight, they’d call him back and then cut
off his expenses. He picked up two black pens from the table and his notebook.
He flipped the pages to see how many blank pages he had left, almost all of them,
and then he stuffed it into his back pocket. The pens in the front pocket. Back
down the steps.
The wooden and badly painted buildings of the minimal center of town came up
around him as if in a dream. He pinched himself to stay sober. The noon sky
overhead was clear, light blue and cold. Gray clouds had gathered on the horizon.
The street he was on bent left. He bent with it and ended up rocking over a
cratered alleyway. He slowed the car to a crawl. The garbage piled along the sides
of the street spilled on the road and edges of paper crushed into the dirt flickered
in the light. A dark, maybe red, splotch crossed the glass of the rear view mirror.
He looked back, but the rocking car frame launched his head into the center roof
light. The dash rose over his vision. He stomped the brakes. The engine stalled.
Sitting up, he cursed the world. The warped and paneled, pre-framed houses
standing against the alley, backed up by the aggressive street, looked like they’d
been stapled together and half the staples hadn’t held. Starting the car and pushing
lightly on the gas, the car lunged into a pothole and back out onto the broken
pavement of a cross street. He looked left up the street and right. The house on
the corner had a big hole busted into the side of the house. The bathtub, full of
green water, angled out resting against the bottom of the hole. A skinny brown
horse, halter tied to a stake, stared at him from the back corner of the yard. Kian
swiveled around and gassed it up the street. He saw a convenience store several
blocks away and made for it. He was going to get in a wreck, or run over a little
Indian or something and get tossed in prison. He didn’t feel drunk in his head. He
just couldn’t keep the car from lunging from side to side.
The tires scratched and the car rocked inches from the wooden railing protecting
a large window. He decided coffee would set his equilibrium right. Outside the
car, he found his feet more reliable and went in the store. On the way out, the
styrofoam cup against his lower lip, sun in his eyes, he noticed the same red
Dodge Dart from the night before. The guy in it was the same too. He blew across
the hole in the cup lid, stirring the steam as it rose. The air between him and the
red car tightened and clarified.
“Hey,” the man said. The wind flipped the blue-checkered collar of his button-up
shirt against his jaw. He jutted his chin out, “Whacha up to?”
“We meet again,” Kian said, forcing lift into his voice. He stepped up to the car
and put his hand on the front fender where it molded back into the door panel. He
bent down to see the man’s face under the roof. “I’m just checking out what
people think about what’s been happening with the council and Linda.” He paused
and waited for a sign. The man’s brown face remained closed. Strands of his long
black hair lifted and fell. “I guess they’re talking now. You were pretty involved,
what do you think? Think this will change your life in any particular way?”
The man’s lips moved. “We’re going to recall the whole council and start over.”
He clenching his right hand and shook it, but his expression remained unmoved.
“We’ve got petitions going around for new elections. We’ll kick them all out.”
“Really?” Kian said and stood up. Christ, he thought. A story. “What about
Linda?” He dragged the notebook from his back pocket. “I thought you supported
her?”
“I do,” the Indian said, looking at Kian’s mouth so hard Kian ditched the smile that
had sprung to life there. “She’ll be reelected. But the others won’t, then we’ll be
done with all of this.”
Kian wrote all that down.
“So, the battle continues?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s your name?”
“Large At Night, but my friends just call me Large.”
Kian flashed his eyes into the man’s and the disappointment was palpable. “All one
word or broken up?” he said, smiling falsely.
“All broken up and each word capped, even ‘At.’ ”
Kian stood up to hide his frown. The man was just fucking around and now he
was back at the beginning. He stuck the notebook in his back pocket. Grabbed the
coffee and turned stiffly away.
“You need to lighten up, man! The look on your face!”
Kian looked back. “Yeah, well, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate humor, but I’ve
got a job to do. And not too many Indians make fun of their names. Their
meanings tend to be important to them. Are you even from this reservation?”
“The reservation I’m from Indians have French names,” he said. “But I live here.
My mother was on the rolls here. I’m Chippewa, from the Turtle Mountains in
North Dakota.”
“Is the petition real or did you make that up?”
“No, it’s real. Hop in and I’ll take you to my cousin’s house. He’s been organizing
the petitions. He’s close by. You can leave your car here.”
Kian stood up. Stalling. He suspected more tomfoolery but he didn’t have anything
else, except maybe death on the highway. He sipped and looked down the road to
where it turned into the homes of a packed and ragged neighborhood. They were
like mushroom patches. Nothing and then a bunch of them.
“Will your cousin give me his real name?”
“He’ll give you his name.”
Kian walked around the front of the car and then slipped into the passenger seat
just as Large started the motor. He clicked and clunked the automatic
transmission into reverse. The car moved out from under Kian’s weight. The store
and Kian’s Subaru slid across the front windshield as they backed and turned. A
glint of sunlight slipped off the hood. Kian put his notebook and pens next to his
leg in the seat. He noticed the floor mats.
“Well-kept car,” he said over the rattle of the muffler.
“I hang out with myself a lot. It cuts down on the beer cans.”
“Funny.”
“See, I’m like that, but not everyone around here is.” Large looked over at Kian.
The reporter’s eyes were watery and blood shot. His face distorted by clenched
jaws and furrowed brow. Large had been following him for two days, watching
him drink and smoke in his car, in the hotel lobby, walking into the fields in the
dark, as he drove the streets aimlessly, scribbled notes in that little notebook. Now
here he was in his car – his long-lost half-brother – reeking of booze and
cigarettes with grass stains on his knees and veins bulging out of his neck. Large
had found out Kian was a reporter in Billings just weeks after his mother told him
his father’s name. Then there was the blowup at the tribal council, and Kian came
to him.
The heater blew hot air into their faces. Kian rolled the window down a turn.
“It’s broken,” Large said. “I can’t turn it off.”
Kian smiled at him, his eyes fogged over. They entered the heart of town.
“So,” Kian slurred, “where were you headed before I got you sidetracked?”
“To work,” Large said. Now that he had Kian in his car he wasn’t sure what to do
with him. He had hoped for, imagined a moment when he would say, “I know this
is going to sound crazy – I’m your brother!”
“Where do you work?”
“At the Triumph of the Last Stand.”
“Come on..”
“Really.” Large pointing out his window. “There it is.”
Kian looked beyond Large. The fast-food joint was hunkered at the back of a
sparsely paved parking lot. Hand-painted on a big section of plywood leaning
against the building was, “Triumph at the Last Stand Burgers and Snakes.”
“Snakes?”
“The paint’s faded a bit here and there,” Large said. “Snakes sounds about right
though.”
They stopped at the only light on Main Street. An old man stepped gingerly off the
curb on Kian’s side and Kian thought of driftwood as the man stepped closer.
Large waved and the man noticed, but looked at Large without recognition. He
only stiffened the index finger on his left hand, raising it slightly. He walked on to
the other broken curb.
“How long have you lived here?”
“Just a few months.”
“Huh,” Kian said. “So, you live with your cousin?”
“I came here with a girl.”
“The woman I saw you with in front of the council building?”
“That’s her?”
“Who’s she?”
“She’s the devil’s handmaiden.”
“So things have turned out well?”
“Things have turned out about as I expected.”
Large veered off the blacktop onto a rutted dirt road. After two-hundred yards of
gravel road, they bumped right onto a driveway overgrown with still-frosted
mounds of tall dead grass. Crusty patches of snow covered the base of the bare,
tangled bushes. Nothing much traveled down this lane. The twin ruts were nearly
grown over. The rusty trailer, on flattened wheels, blocks under the corners,
hunkered at the forward edge of a thicket of ash. The trailer was white with jaunty
curves trimmed in dark blue. Dark rust poured from the bottom corners of every
window. It squatted unevenly.
Large let the car coast up to the trailer’s bleached-wood steps. He turned the
motor off and popped open the door. He looked at Kian and winked.
“Give me a second.” He rose out. At the crappy steps, he turned and waved for
Kian to stay put. He swung the tin door out and yelled inside, “Cousin!” Kian got
out of the car and stood in the open door. A row of long-fallen, inch-round stems
of sunflowers surrounded the trailer.
“Hey! Cousin!” Large’s voice pinged off the metal. “You decent? I’m coming in.”
He door shut behind him.
A few minutes later, the door swung wide open and a tall, overweight man filled
the frame. Like Large, he had long black hair, but his hair was rumpled and
matted. The bottom moon of his brown belly stuck out from under a white T-
shirt. His face was stern. He waved Kian inside.
Kian climbed the rotting, squishy steps and edged by Large’s cousin. The living
room smelled like old firewood and sweat and food. The cousin held a white
cordless phone to his ear and then burst out “HOLD ON!” like he was talking to a
deaf person over a bad connection. Kian flinched and the cousin opened his face
and smiled at him. Then he extended his index finger and turned away. He turned
the finger at the brown chair in the dark corner. “OKAY!” he boomed into the
phone. “Tell him I told you to do this, get those signatures and call me tonight. If I’
m gone the first time he calls, tell him to call me again. Now I have to go, there’s
a white man in my house!” Without turning it off, he tossed the phone onto the
broken-down couch next to the chair Kian sat in.
“What’s up?” he yelled to Large.
“This reporter would like to talk to you about the petition!” Large answered him in
the same manner of projecting, like bad stage actors.
Kian’s sense of security fell from bad to worse. He frowned at Large for the
abrupt introduction and said, “Large At Night ... er ...” Cousin blanched at the
name. “This joker ...” Kian tried to recover.
“Thought you’d come here and insult MY people? Large AT NIGHT?”
Kian jumped out of the chair and stepped toward the door.
Large stepped into the center of the room.
“Hold on,” he said as much to Kian as the cousin. “I called myself that earlier as a
joke.” He moved his hands up and down, pumping the anger back into his cousin.
Kian backed to the door, but the big man stepped backward too and crashed on to
the couch, with a woof that blew dust out of its cushions. He put his hands over
his eyes and rubbed down his face.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ve been working on this petition for a long time. You’d think I
was trying to petition myself into Heaven.”
Kian remained by the door but took out the note pad. “So why are you working on
the petition? Or, rather, how long have you been working on the petition?”
Large stepped toward the kitchen entryway and motioned Kian to have a seat back
in the chair, and he did. Heavy blue and red curtains killed the light and the only
thing hanging on the walls was a wood-framed, glassless photo of the cousin,
much younger but still big, squinting into the sun and holding a long lake trout by
the gills.
“You here tah see how us Indians live?” the cousin asked, leaning his head down
and feigning interest.
Kian shrugged.
“You want to see that place where my Indian mind interfaces with the modern
world?”
Kian sank back into the chair, whatever. He would have thrown the notebook, but
he didn’t have the energy.
“Where the howls of the wolf echo through the realities of the plastic age?” The
cousin watched Kian’s eyes and then his own hands. “You want me tah tell you
how we create the world now that all the power in it is technological? Do we hold
our secret dog society meetings over the Internet in chat sessions? Chant over the
video connection and express deliver our sacred bundles into the urban jungles of
the world?”
For just a brief second Kian wished he was writing this down. Large disappeared
into the kitchen.
“Keep our souls clean through traditional practices and secret rituals? One set for
the world. One set for us, the genetic inheritors of the Knowledge. Or, do you
want to see the whipping scars on the back of my legs, laid there by the tragic,
drunken, lost father who had nothing to lose and nothing to gain and no antelope
to hunt. Hear the stories of wasted parents and bonfire parties where beer cans are
stacked high and long black hair bursts into flames?”
Large, out of sight, laughed. There was a jangle of glasses and a squeak of a
refrigerator door opening.
“I want to hear whatever stories you want to tell,” Kian said. “Screw the petition.
If there ever was one.”
The cousin settled back into the cushions and laughed. “The question is, what
stories do you want to hear? I could tell you any one story in any number of ways
and what difference would you know?”
“Hey,” Kian said and leaned forward. “For that matter, what difference would it
possibly make? I just came here to hear about a petition that doesn’t exist because
LARGE AT NIGHT lied to me.”
“No you didn’t,” Cousin said.
“No I didn’t what?”
“Come here for the petition,” Large said, leaning against the post in the entryway
to the kitchen. He cracked open a beer can.
“Bullshit.”
“You came here to waste time,” Large said.
“I see now why you brought him to me, cousin. He’s confused about his stories.”
“Yeah well,” Kian said and leaned up out of the chair. “I don’t mean to be rude but
... ” he looked at Large, who was looking at the cousin.
“You don’t even know what you’ve done.”
“Whatever,” Kian said and passed in front of Large and reached the doorknob.
“Sure. Take off,” Large said. “You should be able to find lots of people to
interview along the way. Or you can just make it up again.”
Kian let go of the door.
“What are you talking about?” He put his hands on his hips. “Just the normal, The
story didn’t go my way so you made it up bullshit? Or is it wrong in some fucking
real way?” Kian had begun to wonder if he would ever get out of this day. He was
thinking just then, a glow of laughter inside his gut, that he would call his editor
and say he was sick. Say he ate a bad taco. What the fuck did the editor know
from Mexico or Indian reservation?
“What is it with you anyway?” Kian asked. “Were you looking for me today or did
I just fall into your lap?”
“Truth is,” Large said, relaxing against the plastic pole, “I was looking for you
today because of what you wrote in the paper.”
Despite himself Kian cringed again.
“You nearly caused a riot this morning,” Large said. “But in the end, you, your
story rather, brought the two sides together. You’re just lucky I found you before
some of Linda’s rougher friends did.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What’s wrong with the story?”
“Here,” the big man said and pushed a copy of the Billings Post across the coffee
table at Kian. “Read it out loud so we can all enjoy it.”
Kian leaned to the paper and picked it up. He turned the paper over and then back
to the top of the front page. There was the headline he expected: “Tribal Anger
boils over.”
“I don’t even know what ‘tribal anger’ means, but I don’t write the headlines,”
Kian said.
“Keep reading, slick,” Large said.
Kian let the paper fall back flat in front of his face. The next-smaller headline said,
“Political battle on reservation nears riot as chairwoman seeks refuge behind
barricades.”
“Definitely over the top, but that’s the business nowadays.”
The lead paragraph: “The struggle for political control over the Crow Indian
Reservation neared critical mass last night when the chairwoman, Linda Two
Horses, bellowed through a bullhorn from on top of a car: ‘I’ve seen what the
people want. They want blood and that’s what we’ll give them BLOOD!’ ”
Kian stepped back and sat down. He dug through the pages to the jump of the
story to find the contributors note at the end of it. But the byline was his alone.
“Jesus Christ,” Kian said. “Jesus Christ. I don’t know what could have happened.
I don’t know why they put that in there.” The memory from the night before
followed the words of his denial. He was laughing and yelling into the black holes
of the red phone’s mouthpiece. Laughter and words. And the words started
coming clear, “Yes, ‘Blood!’ ” He was straining into the phone, “Yes, I’m sure. I’
m fucking positive.”
“Why would they take me seriously?”
Large huffed derisively and drank from the beer can. He turned back into the
kitchen and the refrigerator door opened. Kian started laughing. The swelling
started growing like balloons expanding in his chest. Growing and growing and
forcing him to laugh harder and harder until he started coughing.
“Want a beer?” Large yelled.
“Yes,” both men in the living room said. “Hell yes,” Kian added.
Large handed out beers.
“I was at the rally all night last night, Kian, and Linda didn’t say anything about
blood. But when I read the paper this morning I thought, ‘Now there’s an ex-
journalist in need of a friend.’ ”
“That’s thoughtful of you,” Kian said, drinking big gulps from the can. “You don’t
want a friend, though. You want a victim or something. But I’m not going to be
much fun to torture, in fact, now that the cat’s out of the bag, I’d rather enjoy a
couple of jabs to the gut or eyes with a knife. And. And. I don’t have any money.
Ha. Ha. Ha.”
“To be honest back,” Large said, “I don’t know what I want with you.”
“Like I said,” the big cousin said, “it’s not about what we want. This is all about
what you want. Maybe you want blood, but I’m not going to give you that. Yours
or mine.”
The three were silent until Large opened the refrigerator again.
A water glass half full of booze landed in Kian’s hand. The cousin had a thin sliver
remote in his big brown hand, pointed at the television. He flipped through
channels. Large clanked stuff in the kitchen. Kian killed the entire glass and waited
for the fun to start.
HAVING REACHED A détente with her mother spawned by tragedy, Kate was
recovering in her childhood room when her former high school teacher, Trisha
Anderson, showed up one afternoon. She had aged a lot in five years, though her
wrinkles might have been due more to the sun and weather. She was just as heavy
as before and round. She had survived the early years of taunting and sexual
harassment at the country school to become something of a conduit for bright
young country women finding their way into universities and colleges across the
nation, mostly on the East Coast where Montana girls were still a bit of a novelty.
Kate had been her first success, but modern society had made her work harder in
a short time.
“The Internet has created a generation of exhibitionists if not downright porn
addicts,” Anderson said, speaking to the challenges her newest young protégés
faced. Her New York accent gone, replaced by the flat and accent-less diction of
the dry dirt plains. “So much for the sexual revolution. I guess girls will be girls.”
“Tell me you’re joking,” Kate said. She carefully leaned forward on her bed and
smiled at the big woman in a flowered and tie-dyed moo moo.
“I’ve had to come to terms with the facts, my dear. Some girls are destined to
become sexy barmaids and use their looks and sex as tools and some men are
genetically unable to see women as anything except some animal that has tits and
ass and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. After all, as the boys around here say, it
takes all kinds.”
“My dad used to say to those men that ‘It don’t take all kinds, we just got ’em.’
But, really, how can you say that, after all you told me? You’ve just been out here
fucking cowboys for too long.” Mrs. Anderson had been so important to her that
Kate didn’t want to think badly of her but it did seem that she has lost her way out
here on the wide open plains. She was so pure and driven and unshakable in her
faith that women were going to break free and rule with feminine compassion,
creating powerful social communities and loving relationships and … now she was
just a farm wife with a good vocabulary.
“Come on dear, the women’s rights revolution was never going to set us all free
or make us all equal. But it did give a few of you a leg up.”
“Jesus Christ” Kate was truly shocked. After all she’d been through, after seeing
the males in her family destroy each other in a fine Oedipal fashion, after the
weeks of shame and depression … “That’s not the revolution I’m fighting for.
The one you’re talking about is just another kind of classism.”
“Honey, feminism is not socialism.”
“I suppose you vote Republican now.”
“When in Rome.”
“Church?”
“Well, not all Romans worship Apollo. Most of them worship the Goddess.”
“The goddess between your legs.”
“Let’s not fight,” Mrs. Anderson said. “We’re on the same side of the bed.”
“What side could that be?”
“The country side. I’ve been thinking a lot about you. All this talk of white trash.
And murder. We’re not white trash, honey. We’re country trash.”
“Thanks.”
“Embrace it dear. Your parents didn’t have summer houses or arguments in
multiple languages. They didn’t have libraries or streets named after them. They
don’t have villas in Spain or PhD’s. But they had cabins in the canyons up in the
mountains. And they owned bars. And suffered terrible fires and disease and all
the plagues that rush through the poor, the canon fodder of the world. They were
not equestrians but they were horsemen. They did not govern those horses, like
the British snobs that run all the horse farms in New York, because they lived with
the horses. They ate out of the same buckets. They control them from the very
slight vantage of the ability to seek revenge with opposable thumbs. Violence is a
horse’s language. Oh, I know those retards in Hollywood would like to think a
horse is a supreme and calm animal like a whale, but they’re not. They are a
violent and terrible beast. I know, honey, I’ve been living with a couple of them
for years now. A horse is a monster, but a beautiful monster.
Their masters wear tooled leather belts and get status from the stitching of their
boots. They get their education in bars instead of libraries or classrooms, but they
get an education. They don’t go to operas, they live them, albeit with somewhat
courser language. These bastards didn’t snort cocaine, but they’ll hoover up a
whole cup full of crystlemeth in a snap. They didn’t drink wine with corks or
scotch that’s more than a day old and they don’t care to know its name. The more
it tastes like gasoline, the better they liked it. The better I like it. The better you like
it.”
Kate began to smile at Mrs. Anderson and the years pealed away from between
them. This was her mentor and all that language that had built a mind in her.
“Oh, they don’t smoke pipes in studios, but there is no more contemplative
moment lived by any human anywhere than when I’m horseback, looking down
over the gray and dusty fields from the edge of a sandstone cliff.”
Mrs. Anderson turned her coffee cup in her hands and her eyes became wet and
clear and bright blue, like she was now out there over that cliff, a horse under her
swishing it’s tail against horseflies.
“The difference is between contemplating with the distance of language and
contemplating with little or no difference between you and the viscosity of the
world.
“You always turn my world upside down.”
“Well, dear,” she said looking down at Kate’s face. “I know you’ve been through
a lot, but there is power in you. There is power coming through your history,
through your culture. It’s in you, you just have to grasp it.”
She set the coffee cup on the desk corner and slapped her knees.
“I’ve got chores to do and it’s time to get after them, as they say out here. Sure
do like what your mom’s been doing to the house.”
“Don’t go. All I have is TV and I can’t get anyone to bring me a book.”
“I’ll send some right over. You’ll have them by tonight.”
“Thank you.” Kate tried to hold her back by her hand but didn’t have the strength
in her shoulders yet. Mrs. Anderson rose as if she weighed very little. She kissed
Kate’s forehead and left her.
WAYNE CLENCHED HIS jaws and punched the shovel blade into the damp
gravel. The light hanging from a drop cord swung around him, causing the walls
to heave and loom and die away. Shelves of murky jars tilted then were gone.
They came back into his eyes, red beets and milky potatoes, pale peaches
dissolved among long strands of white veins. He clinched his jaws because almost
every time he lifted the shovel, he forgot about the light and his elbow hit the
naked bulb. It swung over his head, careening in semi circles and crazy loops.
Wayne had stopped and tried to hang another loop in the cord, but there wasn’t
anything to attach it to. He could have gone back up to get a hammer and a nail,
but the world up there was full of too many complications. He wanted simple
work. Joey opened his eyes and mumbled a prayer. He lay on his side against the
exposed wall. Wayne dug. His shoulders hurt and his drug-fueled heart beat fast
and loud. After an hour, the hole was about five feet long and two feet wide and
about six inches deep. A shallow grave. His brain was drained of any internal
voice, but he was conscious of weighing whether to put Joey in the hole or not.
He wanted to punish him, scare him, for sure, but he hadn’t decided whether to
put him in it or not. Digging felt right. He bent his back and put his hips into a
thrust of the blade. He raised it up and tossed the gravel against the far wall.
Recoiling for another stab, his elbow struck the light bulb. It swung around him
like a horsefly. What the fucking hell did he think he was doing? His elbow hit the
light and it swung hard behind him and then back, just over his head and the walls
crawled with shadows and the shelves of red and milk-white fruits swam and then
disappeared and swam at him and into his eyes and brain and then, blink, they
were gone. He refocused on shoveling, on putting his back into it. Goddamn
fucking sonofabitch. He reared back and hit the light on purpose and it swung high
and came back fast. It popped off his head. He swung the shovel blade at it and
missed just as it came back toward his forehead. He ducked and it went over and
the fruit came at him and then the fruit was gone and the bulb pocked off the side
of his head. He stepped up out of the grave. The light swung in shrinking circles
until it was almost stopped. He looked down at his son’s body. Joey was curled
up, his face against the dirt. Poor bastard. “I have to get him out of here,” Wayne
said. But the drugs had worn off and left Wayne with three feet and the brain for
one. He stumbled on the rim of the hole and hit his head and shoulder on the lip of
the side next to Joey. He scrambled to his feet, staying bent over to catch his
breath. His heart was pounding loud in his brain. He stood straight and his head hit
the resilient little light bulb. It began swinging in little circles again, obscuring his
son and tipping the red and white liquid onto his face. Wayne caught his breath
inside his mouth. He turned the shovel over in his hands and stabbed the ground, a
hard jab that gave him only two inches of blade into the hard-packed gravel. When
he tipped the shovel to get the dirt up water began filling the hole. He had punched
into the water table. He brought the shovel up and his elbow sent the light
careening through the air. The motion of the light and heaving walls made him
want to puke. He let the shovel tip over into the water. He noticed Joey looking at
him, a grin on his face. He was trying to speak, his mouth moving like a fish out
of water and then the bulb came back and smacked Wayne in the back of the head
hard enough to hurt. It rocked and bobbed at the end of the electrical cord. Wayne
put the shovel just next to Joey’s face and swung hard and up. He hit the bulb and
it exploded. The hot glass blew up and shards shot into his eyes. He cussed and
took a stepped back. His heal skidded off the edge of the hole and he fell back
against the fruit shelves. A big quart of something bounced off of his head,
sending light through his skull. Wayne sat still. Just barely breathing. The pain
from the quart jar had snapped him from a slumber. The first thing he realized
after the blow was that his eyes balls were all cut to shit and he could hardly see.
Then, with his cussing gone and the light in the room gone, he heard Joey’s
breathing. It was shallow and gurgling, like he was partly under water. Wayne
lunged forward, thinking that his son must have fallen into the grave. When he
found him in the dark. Joey struggled harder to breath. He put both hands under
Joey’s shoulders and pulled, trying to straighten him out and get the air flowing
into his lungs. But Joey only groaned and then stopped breathing. Wayne
panicked. He pushed Joey over to his side and pulled his head back and then a
stream of air found passage into his son’s lungs. Wayne had to get him out of
there and to hospital or he really was going to die. He pushed his arms under Joey’
s shoulders just below his hips and lifted him. His eyes burned now and he felt the
glass tearing at his corneas. He staggered upright with Joey in his arms. He found
the steps from guess work and then took the first one in a lunge through the dark
and up. He ascended into the faint light of the back room. Joey’s head cleared the
floor and he gasped as his airway came open somehow and then the gurgling
started again. Wayne felt the hot blood flowing down his arm and over his hip.
Something had given way within Joey and he bled out of his mouth in a gush.
Wayne stepped out of the hole and rushed into the back room and into the kitchen
light. He picked up the phone, but it was dead. He threw it. The front door pushed
open and a woman yelled, “Put your hands up!” She was scared and her voice
screeched. Wayne saw the end of the gun.
“Hold on, now, hold on.”
The cop pushed into the room.
“Goddamn it my son is dying here and we need an ambulance,” Wayne eyes were
burning and he could just see that it was cop and a woman but he blinked and his
eyes felt like acid had been poured into them and then he couldn’t see anything but
blurred light and dark shapes.
“Stand back! Hands up!”
Wayne stepped back, reached fast behind his back and pulled the little derringer .
22 out of the belt holster and fired twice. The door swung over wider and Wayne
swung the gun. He bent slightly to his right to aim at the blur in his field of vision.
He recognized the tall man with a big head and held his fire. A funny feeling came
over him, like a rush of some kind of drug, and Wayne let his hands fall. He
opened his mouth to drink from the drug that was pouring over him now in giant
waves. The feeling was just like that first skin when he was entering a woman.
Then he dissolved into the field of that feeling.
JOEY WAS COLD and wet. He looked around a corner of a brick building and
there were the kids again. A clot of young men standing in the open doorway of
the ramshackle, six-story brownstone. The high rises downtown towered over it.
He stepped into the crowd and angled up the steps, eyes down. His legs felt weak
and pumped up. He had run several miles toward lights, toward the water of Lake
Union, toward the masses. There were sirens everywhere it seemed, hunting him
from all sides. A helicopter hovered overhead with a big spot light pouring off its
underside. Joey pushed up the steps, angry voices in his ears. He had a bad
feeling. He had to make sure he wasn’t being fooled by Satan.
The landing at the top of the stairs was packed with young men and women.
Some of them wore curtains of loose hair, others had deadlocks bunched and
strapped back by bandanas. He climbed another set of steps, up through hips and
bare arms until he reached a doorway with no lights behind it. He stumbled at the
threshold of the room, fell in the dark. His knees landed on lumps that squirmed
and then wood. He scrambled over a dozen soft and bony lumps covered in
blankets and sleeping bags until his head hit the wall. He slid along it until he hit a
corner. He curled into a ball and put his hand over the back of his head. You never
know when you will need a sharp knife, Wayne had always said. He saw himself
quickly raise the knife and pound it into Kian’s chest. He heard the pop sound
when the knife punctured the lung cavity. Joey groaned. Why did Kian have to
come to the hotel? Why didn’t he just leave? Why didn’t he stay on the sidewalk in
Billings? The rush of the moment raced through him again and he raised his fist up
and brought it down on the floor. He just wanted to stop Kian, stop him from
always being a problem, from always getting between him and Kate.
“I’m mad, too,” a man’s voice in the dark. “But this is the sleeping room, please
be quiet.”
To Joey, the disembodied voice, young and clarion, placed him in front of a
tribunal of angels who, pointing to Kian, said in a chorus – “You saved your
brother!”
He struggled with his doubt and the tricks of Satan in order to keep that image
before him. The panel of nine angels in white, large white sleeves, pointing at the
smiling ragged figure of Kian on his knees, staring wet-eyed up to Heaven: “You
saved him.” A host of sirens blared through the dark at him and he recoiled back
into the cold corner. He feared them. If Kian was before Jesus, why did he say he
burned?
The questions chased themselves around in his head till early morning. It was
barely dawn, when fingers poked his shoulder. The light outside came more from
streetlights than the sun or the moon, whichever it was that glowed weakly behind
a veil of heavy dark cloud. Then he saw the rain falling in front of the glass, sheets
of it. He felt cold, clammy and empty. He wracked his mind for the source of the
terrible dread inside that made it hard to lift his eyelids. He held his chest and
closed his eyes, seeking that sleep where he could be alone with God.
“Hey,” the young man said, shaking Joey. “Get up. We’ve got signs to make.”
Joey took his hands from his face and looked up. The man who had shaken him
had light brown and blond hair hanging over his face as he bent over Joey. Blue
eyes and tan skin. He said his name was Lewis. He said he’d watched Joey come
in the night before and curl up on the floor, so he made Joey a deal. He could stay
there and work for world justice or he had to leave. Inside Joey’s chest, his heart
was like a sack of stones hanging by thin threads strung from his collar bones,
cold and turning slowly. He looked around the room. All the little square glass
panes of the old windows were either broken out or cracked; and the walls were
torn open between the studs. Plaster had been swept into piles. The room was
rectangular and the sleeping bags, black or blue with light tan linings, were
scattered on the floor around them most were empty now. No light bulbs swung
from sockets. Joey heard crowds of people talking outside on the street. From
another room, he heard pounding – hammer blows to the floor. The skin around
his eyes felt as if it were sagging to his cheeks. He rubbed them and heard the
popping sound of the knife puncturing Kian’s chest. He flinched and opened his
eyes fast, afraid of what images had been burned in them. He felt compelled to
hug Jim and cry and tell him that he’d done a terrible thing. Jim looked away from
Joey.
“This isn’t a place for people on the run or crazy people, because the cops came
through here all the time and will probably shut the building down now that the
protests have shut down the city. They’ll be looking for heads to bust and here we
are,” Jim said. He was thin and as tall as Joey. “So we need to get our signs
finished and get back on the streets.” He turned to two others sitting up in their
sleeping bags. “That means you can’t leave anything behind because they will be
here and they will bust you for something if you’re here or if you try to come
back.”
Joey felt as if he was a flame faltering under the crushing cold of his brother’s
death. The sound of the knife punching through cartilage reverberated. The blank
oooff sound Kian made. Then Kian grasped at his chest.
“Sure,” Joey said. “Sure, let’s make some signs.” He wanted to get to work on
something and stop hearing. Get busy. He heard the sound again, like a spike
driven into a plastic milk jug.
“Come on then,” Jim said, turning. His dreadlocks lifted and clattered across his
face. “Let’s make signs.”
He left the room and Joey followed him down a flight of stairs to the next, where
a crowd had stalled out behind a young woman near the bottom. She stood one
step up from a cop, staring into his face. The woman’s straight black hair lay over
her back, nearly to the humps of her khaki pant bottoms. She had one pale hand
on the deep blue of the cop’s shoulder. The cop, brown hair hanging a little long
out of his hat, smiled. His thumbs stuck in his belt. His blue eyes laughing into the
woman’s.
“You and all the other workers, laborers have to understand that the industrial
revolution will collapse and that we are all just jockeying for the survival of our
genes, our knowledge, our points of view. It will either be us,” she pointed at his
chin and then at her chest, “or it will be theirs, those rich fucking assholes who
suck champagne and poison your children. They gave you that gun.”
“There are winners and losers in every social arrangement, in every economy,” the
cop said, cool, unhurried.
“That’s what I’m saying and you can’t be a winner carrying a gun for rich white
men.” She squeezed the cop’s shoulder. The tension jump up a notch among all
the black-clad punks on the steps lined up behind her. The cop’s shoulders
remained relaxed. He smiled.
“Look,” the cop said, bowing his head. “You’ve got one hour to get everyone out
of this building before we come in and clear it by force.”
The young woman dropped her hand. “Thanks.” She turned into the crowd and
edged her way through her comrades. Her shoulder bumped Joey’s and she
looked at him. She moved her mouth into a faint, sullen smile. Her face was flush
and tears ran down her cheeks. The cop turned and stepped down the few steps
to the door and strutted out, shoulders still down. Joey looked back up the steps.
The woman’s tear-streaked face was in his mind. Her eyes blackened and
smeared, corneas glowing white. He wanted to tell the young woman what he had
done. She would understand that it was because of a corruption in the society,
because of the blood of sin running through society that left ruin and destruction
everywhere. It flowed through veins and made monsters of men. She would
forgive him.
THE BARTENDER AT the Horseshoe wiped the bar top in front of Kate again. He
was debating with himself. She came in several days in a row and plied him with
smiles. She could tell he was thinking about what she’d said about Kian drinking
himself to death. The grizzled old barman, a couple of teeth on one side of his
mouth and a cigarette in the other, knew Kian since he came in morning, noon and
night.
“Alright, look here,” Bertrand said. “They’ll be at the Gray Stone Warehouse in
Seattle Tuesday next week. I don’t know who all’s going, but they were all
staying in Blue Street Hotel, just back there, for a while and they all left about the
same time.”
“That damn Wayne,” she said.
“Don’t you dare tell him I told you so or that fucking Waldo will bust my head
open.”
“Don’t worry. I know better then to talk.”
“Good girl. Now how about a kiss.” He took his cigarette out and puckered.
She kissed her open hand and blew it at him.
“Damn nice,” he said and put the cigarette back.
Kate left for Seattle without packing. Wayne had been a step ahead of her all the
way and she wasn’t going to settle for that.
In Seattle, she crawled around the circle of highways and byways and on ramps
for most of the morning. It was late when she found the right warehouse. It was
under the sprawling, sky-high web of bridges where the Duwamish River entered
the Sound at the southern end of the West Marginal Way. She steered the rented
car off the pavement onto a deeply rutted gravel lane. The road slipped through a
silver chain-link fence. She idled the small blue car over to the left-hand side of the
road to where a ridge of gravel raised several feet. The little motor clattered and
the car slumped half onto the rise and died just as she shoved in the clutch. She
reclined in the seat, sedated, thanks to mom’s medicine cabinet. When Kian got
out into the open, she’d rush up to him and nab him. Becalmed by chemistry, she
thought about drugs and alcohol and their necessity in the West. Maybe she’d
study that little correlation. Why was a different state of mind so necessary out
here? Was it because everyone was so pissed off all the time? So desperate?
Probably. The train of thought drifted away. She felt transcendent to her body,
still tired and stiff. The longer she was in the West, the more she felt lucky to have
escaped it. That was the work of Mrs. Anderson. She taught her that being a
woman meant more than being a sex object for men, getting knocked up and
dancing the country jig. The boys and even her mother called Mrs. Anderson a big
fat hippy women’s libber. And she was, she told Kate. She was a big fat hippy
women’s libber and Kate could be too (minus the fat!) if she wanted to. But she
would have to give up on the dream of being another piece of country bumpkin
ass. Kate had already been that, against her will. Anderson told Kate about New
York and life among smart sisters. She said no one sleeps in the East. They are all
artists and political activists and it’s exciting as hell. The more powerful you
become, she told Kate during one of their late night study sessions in her
apartment in Billings, the more we can shape our own reality, define our
relationships, build out our own system of values. The more powerful a person is,
the more she can create her own reality, rather than having to choose between the
elements of realities already made by men.
Say no more, Kate thought, sitting in the car, I’m hooked.
She dozed off then. When she woke, the sun’s rays were pouring into the car
from between high sections of the overpasses making her lap and chest hot and
uncomfortable. The muscles in her hips and lower back hurt, but her head felt
clear like her mind was in jar, resting in a state of athletic poise. She had the
energy to be curious. She experienced a crazy jumble of images as she skipped
through a second low-grade nap in the front seat of the rented car. After several
minutes, she woke up fully. An aluminum trailer had hit a pothole and the loud
banging clash of the metal fell off the trailer, as if a chunk of metal had shattered
on the concrete.
Dad.
She started the car and gunned it out of the little hole and followed the truck down
the lane. It passed between large concrete pillars that soared up to a ribbon of
airborne roadway. The road dipped down to the water toward decrepit
warehouses and ironwork shops. Hulking stacks of rusting steel bars and pipes
were stacked against the walls, the two-by-fours meant to keep the stacks upright
had rotted years ago. Long shoots of grass mixed with blackberry bramble
concealed them. The end of the road ran up to two concrete docking births, black
tires bolted to the gray and rust-streaked front. She turned the little car off the
road again. She killed the motor and stuffed the gear shifter into park and slipped
down in the seat.
The truck swung around in front of the dock, facing the water line when it
stopped. The faces of two men behind the gleaming glass looked like ghosts. The
dust around the tires settled and the driver’s door swung out. Wayne stepped
down onto the fuel tank and then to the ground. Joey, it looked like, had slumped
down in his seat, looking forward. Maybe he saw her. Either way she was going
to wait for him to get out before she left her car. She didn’t want to deal with
Joey. She only wanted to find Kian and get him away from Wayne.
Then the passenger door to the truck opened and Joey swung out and jumped to
the ground. He limped and stretched, thin and tall, as he walked out of sight down
the side of the truck and trailer. Kian must be in the sleeper. If he was, she’d
sneak him off, back to Wendy. Kate opened the door and the key alarm in the dash
bonged several times before she got the key ripped out of the ignition. She stepped
out and closed the door quietly. She’d wake Kian and coax him into her car where
she had booze and some snacks. She’d drive like hell to South Dakota and his wife
before he came to his senses, just keep him loaded and fed until she could get him
into a detox hospital in Rapid City. She walked down the middle of the gravel road,
out of sight of anyone standing at the sides and the back of the truck. At the
passenger side, she looked around the fender and then unlatched the door. She
stepped up into the cab and pushed her head over the seat. The sleeper was empty.
“Shit,” she said and slumped.
Voices were coming up the side of the truck, so she slipped out of the cab and ran
down the road to her car. When she opened the door and sat down, she saw a tall
man standing on the concrete dock looking at her. Waldo. She pulled forward. He
walked to the edge of the concrete, bent his knees and dropped to the gravel. He
continued toward her, a tall broad-shouldered man with a huge head and curly
sandy blond hair. He must have recognized her. She turned the car around in the
road and spun the little tires driving away. They must have dropped Kian off at a
bar or a hotel before going to the warehouse. She’d have to try to tail them when
they left.
“SHE LOOKED LIKE your daughter,” Waldo said.
Wayne looked down the road where the car had gone.
“She’s awfully pretty, Wayne. Must have been the mailman.”
“Probably,” Wayne said. “She say what the hell she was doing?”
“Never caught up with her. She took off too fast.”
“Huh. Well, let’s get this stuff unloaded. I’ve got a to get this truck over to T.J.’s.”
Joey’s heart was thudding. He couldn’t help himself. She must have been here for
him. She said she was going back to New York, but she didn’t. She followed him
instead.
“Come on, Joe,” Wayne said. “Flip those latches and lets get this fucker unloaded.”
When they finished, Joey and Wayne drove back to West Marginal Way and
toward Boeing Field to drop off the truck and pick up a car. As they rattled and
bounced between the tall pillars holding up miles of stacked interstate ramps, Joey
noticed the little blue car turn onto the road behind them. He looked over at Wayne
whose eyes were on the road, toothpick in his mouth.
Wayne’s not her father or not my father and she knows it, Joey decided. She’s
just found it out and is waiting to get me alone to tell me, to be with me. This
happy delusion took Joey’s mind off the agony he had been in during the trip,
searching for Wayne’s vulnerable spot. But as he rode with Wayne, who was
humming a tune and sucking on that damn toothpick, closing in on the towering
buildings of Seattle, he simply wished for a life free of Wayne’s blood, free of the
terrible weight of having a madman as a father. There was no dignity possible with
Wayne. No hope of a normal life, of a nice house with spacious rooms and clean
windows, of a wife and children, of the steady calm presence of a family.
Grandma and Grandpa coming over after church on Sunday. Kate smiling. A
sunny Sunday dress and silky flaxen hair combed down around her shoulders.
Laughter and the ease of knowing you were good people. But that’s not how it
was with Wayne. With him there’s misery and hard feelings. Dark curtains and
boozy breath. Cigarette smoke and the tension tight and sharp between everyone,
the tension that at any moment all the grievances, all the punching and fucking and
drunken screaming will bust out and rip them apart, like a demon loosed. He
leaned forward, pretending to stretch the muscles in his back, and searched the
cars in the rearview mirror. He found the little blue car. It was too far back for
him to make out the driver, but it was her. It had to be. Wayne turned the rig into
the T.J.’s Trucking parking lot. Joey sat in the cab, while Wayne made
arrangements with the owner to use a panel van. When he came out, Joey helped
him move the band equipment from the upper deck at the front of the trailer into
the van, looking over his shoulder all the while.
LARGE SLAMMED THE newspaper down on the end of the bed. It bounced
once on the plastic covered mattress and woke Kian.
At first, Kian thought it was still dark but then his eyes opened and the off-white,
water-stained ceiling became clear. What remained unclear was why was he
awake. Then Large lifted the paper and hit his leg with it and then someone called
him a princess. He sat up and his butt sank into the stuffed-cardboard mattress.
The hotel room, dim with wood paneled walls, smelled of diesel and bug spray. He
rubbed his face hard and swallowed. Fuck, bathroom, he thought, leaning to his
left, falling until his hand hit the dresser. He swirled slightly. “I had better get some
alcohol in me before I wake up very much.” His right hand hit the table at the
bottle of gin. The bottle teetered. He got it up and dumped what was left into his
mouth. He rolled onto the bed. He hated being sick. There was a time when he
wasn’t sick. The sludge and hell of it all inside. It’s just drinking, he told himself.
It’s something you can stop. He remembered he used to wake up feeling good,
stretching and flexing. He remembered when the smell of bacon didn’t make him
puke in the morning. He remembered Wendy and sunny mornings and white
sheets. Fuck.
“Look it over,” Large said, tossing the paper into Kian’s lap. Large wondered how
a man could drink so much and still be alive, though Kian was barely that.
“What,” Kian said. He clenched his eyes shut and squeezed what no longer
belonged to him out of his mind. He slipped off the bed and stood in the corner.
“Use the bathroom!” Cousin yelled from the other bed across the little room.
“Damn you! Someone has to clean that piss up.”
“Just get the piss out and look at the fucking paper.” Large said.
Kian fell down. “WHAT! DAMN IT! WHAT?”
“Just read the paper. I don’t want to spoil the fun.” Large flipped the paper over
onto the floor in front of Kian and jabbed at a story in the corner with the toe of
his tennis shoe.
Kian got to his knees and leaned against the bed. He looked. Then he looked some
more. Then he saw the mug shot if himself. It was in the middle of two columns
of type with his name in bold under it. “What the fuck?” he said. The byline on the
story around his mug was from The Associated Press. The headline said “Billings
Post Retracts Story.” He crawled back on the bed, bringing his knees under his
chest and pushing his white underpants into the air. The story said the Post had
reported erroneously that Linda Two Horses had called on her people to riot and
had said the word “blood.” It said that the story on the reservation power struggle
had been a “complete fabrication” from a troubled reporter who could not be
located.
In a gray box inset into the story: “Apology from the Editor.”
“Well,” Kian said and fell back onto the cardboard bed, “that certainly clears up
that.”
“Man, you do know how to fuck up a life,” Large said.
Kian blacked out.
He woke later when Cousin punched the front door open. The rattle of a truck
engine idling outside in the parking lot came in with him. Cousin had on the same
shirt he’d worn for several days and his hair was an even bigger mess. He set two
six packs of beer down on the end of the bed.
“I borrowed some of your money.”
He and Kian reached for the beer and Kian won the impromptu contest by blowing
the tab on his first. Then he took two hard swigs and leaned back into the foam
pillows.
“I guess this is the point where I run away,” Kian said. “Go into hiding and never
come back. Discovered in a ditch somewhere. I’m relieved, actually.”
“I hate it when justice rears it’s ugly head,” Cousin said.
“Justice can be pernicious,” Large said from a small chair in front of the
television, on without the sound.
Large considered that he was now completely in control of his big brother’s life
and the turn of events awed him a little. What should he do? Turn him in? Help
him run? This control over the now-blitzed-out shell of a person also made this a
critical moment in his own life. Thus that symbiosis put Kian in control of Large,
too, or at least tied their fates. Their lives were twined now and Large wasn’t clear
on what to do. In the universe, the way the world worked, you never knew the
right thing until it was passed already and maybe you had done it or maybe you
hadn’t. Large was at one of those junctures. He could leave Kian, take him to the
cops or take him along for the ride as he hunted Wayne in Seattle. He had gotten a
tip from a cousin who worked at a hotel that Wayne would be playing there at
some sort of world economy summit.
Cowboy Wayne’s Authentic Western Music, the cousin said, sounded like the man
Large had described as his long lost, great white father.
“Cousin,” Large said, “let’s take him with us to Seattle.”
“Right Large,” Cousin said and he saluted. Then he rocked out of the chair and
grabbed a beer and flung himself back into it.
That afternoon, they walked to the bus station. When they got there, Cuz had
second thoughts about going to Seattle. This life had taught him a thing or two
about running around with white people. Something always went wrong. He had
had a white friend when he was a boy, before he even realized that his friend was
white and he wasn’t. They played cowboys and Indians and fought over who had
to be the Indian. They chased one another out to the cornfield that spread out next
to the white kid’s barns. The field corn was high and particles shook loose from
the tassels and coated their hair as they ran down the rows. A few stalks cracked
and fell. Pollen floated thick in the air, a yellow dust storm. I got you! No, I shot
first! Bullshit! You dick! They laughed. Then: GET THE HELL OUT OF THE
GODDAMN CORN! They beat it left and through several rows, but his friend’s
father quickly caught up to them and grabbed them by their shirts. He shook them
and then tossed Cuz aside. Then he smacked his son on the head with his open
hand, shook him and hit him again. The blows shocking his hair from side to side,
a dull and deep sound. The sudden intense violence froze the space around them.
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I TOLD YOU THIS IS MONEY! EACH ONE OF
THESE STALKS IS MONEY! He let go of the boy’s collar, and then slapped his
head hard again knocking him off of his feet. He turned toward Cuz, who stood
between two bending corn stalks. Cuz had never seen a person hit so hard. GO
HOME YOU FUCKING INDIAN BASTARD! Cuz took off and was thinking to
himself “I’m the Indian Bastard” and feeling lucky. I’m the Indian Bastard and that
makes me free. He trotted down the row as fast as he could without knocking
over corn stalks. But, before he got out of earshot he heard the first shallow and
sharp smack of a loose belt hitting his friend. Now this sound he knew well.
Smack and the boy screams. The cries and screams and the smack of the belt. He’
d had a few sharp smacks himself from his mother’s boyfriends, but this father
didn’t stop after a few hits and screams. He hit the boy harder and harder. His
grunting eclipsed by the snap and rip and screams. Those screams buzzed around
in his head as we took a step with the others in line to get on the Greyhound bus.
The screams were a swarm of biting flies. He stopped hanging out with white
people after that. White people just didn’t know when to stop. Cuz did. He stopped
at the door to the gray and chrome bus in front of the long, loping dog. Kian and
Large had stepped up onto the bus steps, tickets out. Cuz turned around and
without a word walked back through the crowd behind him. He walked against the
flow, and out of the building and into the street, where he stretched his torso up
and breathed in.
The bus driver leaned forward in his seat to reach Kian’s ticket. Kian wavered. He
grabbed Kian’s ticket and punched a hole, bisecting the yellow border and blue
inner color while Kian held it. When the driver let go of the ticket, as if he had
been providing the key tension for Kian to remain upright, Kian tilted backward
onto Large and his foot slipped down one black rubber step. Large caught him and
shoved him back up straight. He kept a hand planted in the middle of Kian’s back.
“No drunks on my bus,” the driver said and put his hand on Kian’s chest.
“He’s not drunk,” Large said. “We’re headed to the University of Washington
Medical Center in Seattle for an experimental ear surgery.”
Kian gained his balance between these opposing forces.
“Sorry,” Kian said, tightening his tongue and lips against the onslaught of slurring.
“Climbing stairs does it to me all the time.”
“Come on,” the driver said. He lifted his hand off Kian’s chest and waved him in,
shaking his head. “Inner ear my ass.” But he didn’t care to fight. Pay up and jump
on, just don’t for god sakes stab anyone. You wouldn’t believe the paper work.
Kian and Large went to the back of the bus, and Large sat on the back bench.
Kian spun around one row up and slumped into a seat next to a woman. He closed
his eyes. The bus lunged out of the parking lot and onto the street. The engine
whined through several gears. The young woman sitting next to Kian, her long
wispy blond hair in a wiry, slept-in ponytail, nudged his arm. The first thing into
Kian’s brain was that the thin flower print dress laying across her legs converged
into the vortex between her uppermost thighs. A pair of thin female legs went on
from there. He reached toward the center of the dress, slowly, to make sure that it
was really there. He lifted his head to see what the vortex was attached to and
looked into her simple pale face. A person! Hey! He pushed his smile bigger.
“Hold on,” she said. “Hold on. I just want to sit by my husband. He had to go
back out to get a bag … he’s … ” She looked passed Kian. Her eyes were terrified
eyes.
Kian turned his head to the seat across the aisle. The young man sitting there had a
thin goatee and glared at him and was clearly panicked. He stood in the aisle,
frozen in mid-rescue. The bus leaned heavy to the right and all the heads shifted
left. Kian looked back at the girl and laughed. She was getting pretty mad and was
about to burst. Kian turned back to the boy and saw that his skinny arms were
shaking. Then the fear and confusion and the hate registered with Kian like a
foreign language suddenly making sense. He jumped to his feet and pushed himself
back to where Large was sprawled.
“Yeah. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sorry,” Kian said.
The young man spun into the seat and buried all his own fear into his effort to
console the young woman, his arms over her neck.
“For crying out loud,” Kian said and looked down the aisle, a cleave in the sea of
heads. The driver was looking at him through the wide oval mirror. Kian raised his
hands, palms up and smiled. The impulse to jump forward and hit the boy in the
head rocked his legs and hips, but he didn’t jump. Instead, he wiggled his hips,
like he was just settling into his balance after an attack of inner ear disease. Kian
then remembered that he was following Large for no more reason than he had
nowhere else to go and didn’t want to turn himself in yet. He had no money. No
job. No family. A few more passed out nights on the sidewalks in Billings and the
cops would get him. It wouldn’t take long for them to figure out he’s the
journalist wanted in a libel case. He looked behind at his friend. Large winked and
motioned to the empty corner next to him. Kian swayed with the bus and tossed
himself into the padded corner.
He woke as Laurel slid behind them. He watched the Rocky Mountain range
dragging themselves closer, blue where there were forests and white with snow
on the tops and in the ridges and higher plains leading up to them. Miles later, the
bus swung off the interstate, just after the long climb over the pass that had them
all slightly sick from the diesel exhaust. When the bus stopped in the wide parking
lot of a truck stop, Kian didn’t follow the rest of the riders in for a snack and a
break from the exhaust. Instead, he laid his head back into the corner, hard on one
side and soft on the other, and told himself that the girl had overreacted. It’s not
like he would really grab her crotch. He isn’t a rapist or bastard. He isn’t hurting
anyone any more, not if he can help it.