| Part IV |
WALDO BENSON LOVED it when big city deputies came to town. He reclined in
the tall-back leather chair and clasped his hands behind his giant head. He rocked
himself with his toes. City cops came ready to lead investigations of murder and
fraud, swaggering with big city knowledge and college educations. He got a lot of
work out of them. They were arrogant, but they were also eager to show off. Out
of town and away from the politics of their home office, these deputies worked
long hours and frequently uncovered and gathered evidence for a whole range of
shenanigans. This one was a bit different because she was looking for a colleague
in some of Waldo’s own shenanigans. So, he thought, I’ll have to help her. He
stretched back, lengthening his long legs. He stood and twisted his midriff.
Yawned and picked up his wallet, bundle of keys and cell phone.
In the front seat of one of a cruiser, he flipped open the glove box and tossed his
wallet and phone inside. His chiropractor had browbeat him into keeping the wallet
out of his back pocket. He hated it flopping around in a jacket pocket or in his shirt
pocket, so he left it in the car when he was out on the job. He just had to
remember to get the damn thing out when he returned. There was a candy
wrapper on the passenger-side floorboard. He reached it with little bending and
tossed it out of his door. Time for another memo. Pure laziness. He pulled the
shifter into reverse, rolled back and then surged out of the underground garage,
breaking into the cold but still sunny early evening. He pushed the gas down and
rocketed the cruiser over the ramp, nearly jetting the car off its front wheels. Then
he gunned it harder right and slipped fast into a gap among the few cars just
coming off the traffic light. These little cars were like driving a motorcycle
compared to his Cadillac.
The Seattle cop said she’d be carrying a big blue duffle with her gear. The deputy
said she couldn’t ID the young man who was hanging out with Wayne, apparently
one of his kids from the reservation. She said she’d called around but no one, not
even the BIA knew anyone that fit the description or said everyone fit it. It’s like
no one at all lives on the reservation, she said. Waldo didn’t argue with her about
his chances of finding him either. It was true that people and even the BIA cops on
the reservation were highly unlikely to admit to knowing anyone, let alone someone
wanted by a cop.
He told her that he didn’t know this one either, this Large At Night. Never heard of
him. He said that wasn’t unusual. He didn’t get to know the Indian boys until they
got old enough to get their government checks and drink in Billings. He was
curious about this reported son of Wayne, though, because Wayne was on an
errand for him and, while it would be highly unlikely, he may have fucked it up
somehow after Waldo had driven back to Billings. This Large guy may know too
much. So, Waldo considered as he reclined the seat a notch and put his hat on the
dashboard, he was going to have to help officer Nollette a whole bunch. He cruise-
controlled the car up Airport Road. Too bad about Kian, though. He was a good
kid, bit of a drinker. Waldo passed through a gate leading to the airport’s hangers
and parked on the south end of the terminal. He clicked on the radio.
JOEY LOOKED AT his hands and there, still in the unwashed creases was the
dried blood of his brother. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. He turned them
over. In the cuticles and under the nails, more blood. But it couldn’t be. He
dropped his hands to his side. He heard the thunk and felt the jolt and give as the
knife punched through Kian’s rib cage. Then, he closed his eyes against the images
and the blood and he heard her voice, pleading and crying and loving him, wanting
him to give up his sin and walk away with her. He concentrated to see the face of
the woman from the morning, black eyes and suffering. The Madonna. Mary. He
listened to her voice, a tube of hollowed glass pouring a liquid into his ears. Then it
changed to high-pitched cries as she pleaded. With the protesters streaming down
the street in front of him, he too pleaded with the world to see straight, to see like
Jesus made the blind man see. He lifted his hands and imagined holding her head
between them. Her white face smiling and streaked with black. He said her name,
“Erin.”
“Look,” a man walking beside him, “she’s gone okay? So, stop moaning about her
and let’s get on with it.”
“Go ahead,” Joey said. “I’m going to stay back. Maybe take my chances at the
building.”
“You’re not going to run into her. So, just come along. I let you in last night, but
some of the people don’t want you around. Okay?”
“I’ll just walk downtown another way then,” Joey said. He dropped his hands and
turned away from the young man and stepped down a sidewalk running left. He
disagreed with the young man. He believed he would find the woman again. He
would hold her and she would help him clean his hands. She would pour the
beautiful golden perfume over his head, just as she had done for Jesus. It would
wash down his neck and down his back, coat his legs and fill his boots. He would
walk on water. He will become a perfect substance, a divine substance, a thing of
the other world. When he turned a corner, following another mass of people to the
center of town, he stepped into the throng of a hundred people spread across a
small blacktop parking lot. An open-air bazaar for protest signs, gas masks, knee
shoulder pads. The people were gathered in clumps around long card tables
stacked with reams of copied leaflets and piles of signs and socialist newspapers in
plastic bags. There were men and women in equal number all around him. Joey
searched the women for his Madonna. The people looked similar in their ragtag
dress of tattered slickers and patched jeans.
He walked down the street to the center of the trouble. Thousands of people
thronged the middle of the intersection. He pushed through the crowd of protesters
and looked over the faces. They were all turned toward a line of cops. He searched
their faces for her, because she was possibly the only one out of this whole horde
who could be saved, the kernel of wheat in a basket of chafe. He wanted, needed
God’s help and he realized he hadn’t prayed over any of his new problems. He
dropped to his knees. The pain shot through his hips. He thrust his hands together
in front of his face and bent his head back, countenance to the mist, “Please,
Jesus! Christ God All Mighty!” His voice cracked and he slumped forward, face in
his hands, crying. “Lord God save them from their sins. Please God. Please Lord
give them peace and send me a sign.”
A ROARING WOKE Large. There was a flicker of red on the white curtains. A
fire outside. A big fucking fire outside somewhere in the pasture. He sat up and
studied the patterns on the curtains. Red, like a pale cheek. The fire flared and
seemed to scatter. He jumped up and went outside. The fire was several hundred
yards away down at the bottom of the pasture. Whatever had been on fire had
collapsed into a heap of tangled timbers, flames climbing them, dragging them
down into the white center of the blaze. A human silhouette appeared in relief
against the fire. It moved in a regular pattern, and Large squinted to cut the glare.
The figure was swinging a flaming piece of wood at the end of some sort of
tether, around and around causing the person to sway back and forth like the
warble of a planet circled by a rogue moon. He stepped closer to the fire, up to the
pole fence. Just as he put his leg up to get over it, a giant tree next to the fire burst
into flames. Its vast network of branches went up all at once. The heat and light
from the blast knocked him back. When he caught his balance, he squinted to see
the silhouette. When he couldn’t find it, he jumped the fence and ran toward the
fire. The finer branches of the tree had flamed out and now the fire was in the
thicker green wood. An explosion inside one of the big branches caused a whole
network of the tree to fall out of the air and shatter on the ground. The heat
challenged him again, burning his face and making his pants hot. He found Catlynn
laying flat on her stomach, hands over the back of her head. He grabbed her arm
and dragged her to her feet.
He pulled her from the edge of the fire. When they got to the fence, he let her fall
to the ground. He bent over. Catlynn came alive and threw her arms around his
neck and squeezed him. Her arms locked so tight, Large lost his breath for a gulp.
He stood up and lifted her to her feet. She let go. For a moment, she was a young
woman standing in the headlights of an on-coming life.
Catlynn felt it too. For a moment, all her life had been hadn’t happened. She was a
young woman again, a decision away from a life of school and home and possibly
a husband with a good job and the life she had, the one that began when she
followed a tough kid to Las Vegas. The boy ended up stabbed because he wasn’t
tough enough, and she ended up making ends meet in a hotel bed. That decision
flashed, like gasoline tossed on a fire and no amount of wishing could bring the
decision back. Once it burns, that’s it. She looked into Large’s face, handsome
with Wayne’s eyes. She wanted to burn something else. She glanced over Large’s
shoulder at the little white farmhouse with red trim. She saw it in flames. She
blinked at the heat of the flames around her.
“Hey,” Large said. “You got pretty hot. Looks like you’ve got some blisters on
your face. Let’s go into house to look at those and get you a drink of water.”
“I think you better just get out of here,” Catlynn said, her voice scratched and
pitched to the high end of the scale. “You better just get the hell out of here
because the cops will be here any minute. You can’t just set a barn on fire and
expect to get away with it.”
“What! Hey, you set …”
“Fuck you!” Catlynn darted to Large’s side to get around him.
Large caught her arm and twisted her to the ground. He landed on top of her and
pinned her under his chest. He tangled her legs in his and squeezed them until she
stopped struggling.
“This has to stop. Somehow this has to end,” he said. “When the cops do get here,
I’m going to make this stop.”
“Get off me you fucking Indian rapist sonofabitch!”
He squeezed her legs tighter.
“You burned the barn and raped me and now you’re going to jail with the rest of
your wagon-burning family.”
“Listen to me.” Large felt her cold breath on his face. She was small under his
body. Her frame was frail like a spider’s. His hair had fallen on her face. They
were so close, her face lost its youth and he realized how old she was and that
made him fear that he wouldn’t be able to untangle himself from the disaster that
had been growing in her since who knew when.
“Listen,” he barked. “If you promise to let me tie you to the fence I’ll get off,
otherwise I’m going to hurt you and then tie you to the fence. I’m not kidding.”
Catlynn’s body remembered what she had tamped down in her mind. The men on
her, holding her. Their stinking breath in her face, their eyes wide and wet and
slathering her face. The big fat hands fumbling her, sticking her, spreading her.
She heaved, but couldn’t shake them. She threatened and scratched but she couldn’
t get them off. She couldn’t get their hands off of her. That’s when it first opened
in her. That was the night, in the hotel when her boyfriend died and she was
opened all the way to nothing. It was always there.
“Now,” Large said when she had relaxed under him. “Now just lay here. I won’t
tie you up if you’ll lay here.”
Catlynn nodded.
Large got off of her, keeping her pinned with one arm, but she had stopped
fighting.
“We have to get you and Joey to a doctor. This has gone on long enough.”
He helped her up. She was compliant, though stiff. He walked her toward the
house. Red and blue lights and headlights blew through the smoke in the air. The
cop car lurched over a small berm and up onto the grass of the yard. The
headlights fell on them. Catlynn jerked to pull free, but Large’s reflex held her tight.
PUSHING THE VAN hard across the rock desert of eastern Washington, two
beers settled in his stomach and Joey tied up in the back, Wayne looked into the
dark at the pins of light made by the sparse and distant farms. On the right, there
were no lights and out over the left side of the road, there were only a few. After
all his years on the road with his many bands, Wayne still never liked these long
stretches of black. He wanted to see houses and lights, the homes of those who
will come to the bar and dance to his music. Unless he was hunting or fishing, he
didn’t care to be alone. Empty space was purposeless. He felt the same way about
being home after a tour. When he drove down the country lane to his hidden
house, he crossed over into an empty, blank space. There was nothing for him to
be when he was there. He didn’t get that sense of rootedness his wife talked about.
He didn’t have any sense of himself out there on the creek, surrounded by barren
sandstone cliffs and sagebrush hills. So he stayed on the road and out of the life of
farms and families. He was doing them all a favor and most of them, including his
wife, had sense enough to know it. The desires in his life could not be lived out on
the farm or any of these small Montana towns. He’d done his time in them, playing
music, fist-fighting and dreaming of the Grand Ol’ Opera while living in that dingy
Miles City hotel. It was the war that got him out of there, but like it did to his
father (or at least the man married to his mother), it was also war that nearly killed
all his plans. What a waste that would have been, he thought. All those old men
who came ahead of him in all those dusty goddamn ranches and farms and inbred
towns had thrown him out as the last of the line. Wayne was it, the last
opportunity for the family to reestablish itself. His mother had nearly screwed all
that up, too. There was something self-destructive in his family. They all ground
down to nothing. Wayne had always believed that he had dodged that bullet though
because his father was probably a Hutterite and not one of those goddamn Irish but
that trouble must have come down the line through his mother.
After the fire killed the old man, Ida and his mother lived off Ida’s Hutterite family
even though she had left the commune to shack up with the old man. The Hutts
had bought the worthless ranch. Several of her cousins and uncles dropped by
every couple of weeks for dinner and to drop off meat and vegetables. It must
have been one of them who was his real father and that’s why they moved to
Miles City. His mother had been married to Richard Waters. He worked in the
Roundup coalfields. They all lived with Ida and Richard was fine with the Hutts.
When the war came along he signed up. It was during the Battle of the Bulge that
Dick Waters disappeared along with thousands of other men. Probably dead and
frozen in all that snow, mud and blood, but maybe not. Dick had gotten word that
Wayne had been born September 14, 1945, too late for her to have gotten pregnant
by him. He never wrote her back. He just disappeared.
Dick wasn’t the only one who could do the math. His friends could add and his
family could count and they ran Waneeda off. It seemed like the whole community
came out against them – not just for the infidelity. Mostly it was because of the
rumor that the Hutts were shacking up with them every time they came into town.
Back then people hated the Hutts because they wouldn’t fight in the war and were
buying up all the land from families who couldn’t keep the payments up or do the
work because their sons, husbands and fathers were fighting the Germans and
Japs. It was as if they had been sleeping with the enemy. So, Waneeda was forced
to Miles City where she got work as a hotel bar waitress. Ida went back to the
commune.
Thank god mom didn’t go to the commune, Wayne thought.
The hotel was a crap hole, but he learned to play music there. The old man who
taught him (for what favors in return from his mother Wayne never cared to ask)
was a solid musician and knew thousands of old songs and a lot of the new ones.
Wayne played every night and working during the days feeding cattle on the old
codger’s little ranch down on the Yellowstone. That’s where he was when his
number came up for Vietnam.
It was after 8 p.m. on December 1, 1969, and he had stayed past dark to help the
old man get his cars and truck and animals inside the big barn and out of what was
going to be a 40-below-zero night. Clear and the sky so black it was almost gone
and the stars bright and crisp. Back at the bar, everyone watched as some fucking
politician stuck his arm in a fish tank and pulled out a little bingo ball.
Number 258 – September 14.
Waneeda was standing at the bar, smoking, a glass of beer in her hand and a plate
of fried chicken and mashed potatoes in front of her. She turned to the bartender, a
fat man with a jolly look and asked him, “What the hell does that supposed to
mean?”
“Means Wayne’s going to Vietnam.”
The engine grinding away, Wayne thought about the last music tour he was on and
where it ended – in a hotel room in Red Lodge, Montana. He had heard about Kian’
s trouble and wanted to help out. But that wasn’t the real reason he swung back
through. No, he had to admit to himself, the gigs had all dried up. His momentum
had died. There was nowhere else to go but back home to regroup, make some
money and try to get his career back off the ground with that one piece of good
luck still in front of him – the job in Seattle. Melissa Brown, the bass player, had
laid her head of black curly hair on his chest. A pillow propped his head up high
enough to see over her head. He watched her index finger dive into his pubic hair
and reemerge pallid next to the red irritated skin of his flaccid dick.
“Wayne?” she asked in her singsong voice. Her breath moved the hair on his
stomach. “I think you ought to take a break. You haven’t slept since we left
California. Just relax for a few weeks on the farm with your wife and kids. Enjoy
yourself and her company. I can get by on my own for a couple months.”
“I don’t think you should worry about my sleep. Things are going good. We’ve
got that big gig in Seattle.”
“But nothing until then, Wayne. John’s band has a tour set up and said I could play
a few of my songs with them.”
“I love your songs and I’ll play behind you any time you want. I’d love to record
them. So don’t worry about sleep. We’ll get plenty of that later. Hopefully much
later.”
“You and John don’t exactly see eye to eye.”
“Yeah.”
She slid up next to his face on the pillows and put her hand out for his cigarette.
He placed it between her index and middle finger. She smoked.
“He’s just jacking off out there,” Wayne said. “Sure the people like him, but I want
more than that.”
“What? What more?” Melissa asked, plaintively, playfully wondering. “We just
drove from California and you got that job in Seattle and we’ll all play there in a
few weeks. Just let down for a bit. What more could you want?”
“To step into a recording studio, money dropping out of our pockets with the right
to sing and play whatever we want. We have the talent. We just need to get more
exposure. John is young and has a lot in front of him, but I’m hitting my last
stretch here.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have slugged him in the eye.”
“Maybe, but goddamn it he needs to know that I can help him and you and help
myself. What is it that’s keeping us back?”
“Songs, Wayne,” Melissa said. “Songs written to pull your heart from your chest.
Songs sung so right that no one can imagine them sung by anyone else but you.”
“Maybe,” Wayne said to the black expanse beyond the windshield.
“Songs and style,” she said. “We’ve got no style.”
He disagreed with her. He had style, why the fuck did he get her and every other
women he had ever wanted? She admitted he was good looking and hard, but she
put her hand on his throat and squeezed. “Times have changed, Wayne. People ain’
t looking for killers to be their country music stars any more. They want those
cuddly little church boys like John and songs about nice little farms and granma
and granpa just hugging and kissing and playing cards by the fire.”
She squeezed and Wayne saw spots and then she swung her leg over and entwined
his legs. He didn’t resist. I’ve got a nice little farm. I can be cuddly, he thought. I’ll
go home and get the family all patched up and sell myself as a family man. Melissa
took her hand off his throat and he spun her onto her stomach.
LARGE WADED THROUGH protesters, police and onlookers to get to the service
entry of the tall cylindrical hotel where Wayne’s band was playing. Climbing the
back steps, he toyed with the image of what his father would look like, how “his
father” would move, what he would talk like. He would watch him for a while. See
what he was like and then decide whether he wanted to approach him or not. It
was a stretch to think that Wayne would somehow be glad to see him or to know
that he had an Indian son. But Large experienced his curiosity like a small light in a
darkened room or a glint off the end of one of the chrome shelves in that
storeroom. He had felt the same way about Kian and that had turned out alright. He
left the room and took up a silver pitcher of cold water, cradling it’s wet bottom in
a white towel in his right hand.
From the doorway to the massive ballroom at the top of the Westin Hotel, Large
looked over the round tables spread across the gilded room. On the stage was a
tall, big breasted woman carrying a bass low in front of her pelvis and bumping it
with her hips, and a skinny man in a checkered green shirt sitting up straight
behind the pearl-green drums, his hair combed tight and flat all the way from one
side of his balding head to the other. Another man had his eyes were closed,
wearing a dark blue jacket and Western tie, picking notes off of an electric guitar.
In front of them was the person who must have been Wayne. His wide shoulders
squared under a black leather jacket long enough to fall over his hips. His right
hand, lean and long, held a pick between finger and thumb, pumped up and down
across the face of the electrified acoustic guitar. His face was Kian’s, wrinkled and
a little gaunt. His sideburns came even with the bottom of his ears. The ballroom in
front of Wayne was nearly empty. Only fifteen economic advisors had made it
through the lines of protesters to the party. Wayne’s song was tight and strong
with the high twang of Western style coming off the strings of the electric guitar.
He looked so much like Kian that it was hard to have a reaction to him. Large tried
to wonder if perhaps finding Wayne hadn’t been the worse decision he’d ever
made in his life. But even that practiced exploration of just how meeting a new
person can lead to all kinds of trouble didn’t bring any real premonitions or
feelings. The few dancers who had shown up for the night had hit the booze and
were now mostly congealed in front of the stage, fat hips swaying.
Wayne’s band let go of the song and it flew away.
“This next song, ladies and gentlemen, is one I wrote several years ago,” Wayne
said, looking down as he toed several toggle switches at his feet. His high, smooth
cheeks glowed. His pick hand tapped one two thee on the scraped wooden body of
the guitar. He looked up and said into the mike, “It’s called ‘I Love You Little
Darling, but You Just Don’t Give a Shit.’ ”
The men in the crowd burst out with a collective yahoo! and Wayne hit the strings.
The drums and bass jumped in.
“What the hell am I doing?” Large asked himself. He lowered the pitcher of water.
Then set it on a table and took off the black vest and shirt, his own black shirt still
under it.
The drummer started hammering out an Indian beat and Wayne cried “hey hey hey
hey heyyyyyyy Yey yey yo.” He cycled through the fake Indian song over and
over. The woman holding the bass pumped the back with her hips. The long curls
of her brown hair hung down in front of her face. The lead guitar player picked
high, whining notes to match Wayne’s tenor and rising “Hey Hey.” Wayne slipped
his guitar behind his back, put both hands on the mike and yelled his rising tenor
into the empty ballroom. He rocked back and forth to the beat. The sound coming
from the band grew and filled the room with the warm thunder of the bass, the
thwack tom tom of the drum and high whine of the guitar. Wayne hunkered down,
lowered his shoulders and opened his mouth into a big black cave. Large glanced
around. A man in the service entry next to him was rocking back and forth,
smiling, his eyes on Wayne’s mouth. Out of that hole streamed a high-pitched, but
still throaty yell. A vibration ran up Large’s back and up his neck. The sound
coming from Wayne felt like a cry from inside the Earth or from the people outside
the building clashing with the cops. The small group in front of the band was too
stunned to dance but rocking back and forth on the dance floor as if before a great
rock band. Wayne’s hey heys were growing more horse and raw now, like he was
so fucking mad at everything that he was going to kill himself saying so. Large felt
strange. A sense of pride or joy filled his stomach. He smiled and shook his head.
Then Wayne got on his knees and arched his neck back, opening his mouth to the
sky and wailed again. A sound that Large had trouble placing as coming from that
hole in Wayne’s face. The sound filled up the room again. The bass player dropped
her arm and lowered her head and rocked with Wayne’s torment. Large looked
around and the other waiters and busboys had come into the ballroom from the
swinging doors to watch the world tear open and howl. The drummer dropped off
and now it was only Wayne, immersed. Instead of weakening and growing small,
the voice grew and filled the void left by the dead bass. The guitar player fell off.
Wayne voice drained and he closed his mouth, put his head down for a second and
then bounced up to his feet. “Good night folks! Hope you had a good time!” He
smiled like nothing had just happened. He put the mike back in the stand and
walked off the stage and out the exit in the back of the room. The drummer
hammered on, reluctant to let go. The guitar player stood and rocked out of
courtesy. The bass brought the drummer back to the planet with a few thumb
beats and shut him down.
The man in the service entry looked at Large. “What the hell was that?” he said
laughing.
“Hell if I know,” Large said.
Wayne stepped down from the stage and out through a back door. Large followed.
Now he had a reason to talk with him, the appreciation of the song. When he got
down a dozen flights of concrete steps, he found Wayne at the bottom, nose-
sucking a pile of white powder off the tan and spotted back of his hand. Large
stopped and stared, struck by the strange banality of a man with a black cowboy
hat snorting drugs at the ground floor of a Seattle hotel, hidden away in the bowels
of the building after tearing himself wide open in probably the best live act Large
had ever heard. His father no less.
Wayne looked up and winked.
“Good for what ails ya,” he said and held out a small plastic bag with a clump of
the powder. “Not the good stuff, I’m afraid,” Wayne said. “Just a taste to get back
to the hotel. You?” He shook the bag.
“Ah, sure,” Large said and took the bag. He fumbled with it. “Man, great last song.”
“Yep,” Wayne said and sniffed loud and long. “Amazing what a man can do if he
lays off the hooch a bit. Sometimes those old songs will open up like a woman.”
Large snorted, then laughed, holding the little bag shut to keep from spilling it.
Wayne laughed and rubbed his face. “You better hit that. I’ve got to go back up
there and get all that equipment out to the van. We had this place booked for four
fucking nights and now we got shit because of all these dumbasses outside.
Fucking best paying gig I ever had, ruined by a bunch of goddamn hippies.” He
rubbed his face vigorously.
Large finally got a small pile of methaphetmine on the back of his hand and snorted
it all into one nostril. The drug melted deep in his sinuses and against the back of
his throat. The sensation was at once cool and warm and tasted like honey.
Wayne patted him on the shoulder. “What’s your name, High Roller in the Bush!”
“Large At Night.”
“No shit!” Wayne straightened and put his hands on his hips. “I knew your
mother, Judy.”
“You’re my goddamn father,” Large said and laughed.
“For fucking Christ sakes,” Wayne said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Nope,” Large said. He handed the packet of drugs to Wayne. “Sorry, I spilled
some.”
“Cheap shit anyway.” He pocketed the drugs, took Large’s hand and shook it.
“Sorry, I never knew you. She said you were the fucking bass-player’s kid or I
would have at least dropped in once and a while. How is your mother?”
“Fine. Living on the reservation.”
“Ha ha,” Wayne said. “I don’t know who put you up to this, but it’s funny.”
“Put me up to what?”
“I know the kid you’re talking about and I know his mom, but he’s not my kid.”
“I’m your kid,” Large said, angry and wondering why. “I’m Large At Night and
my mother said you’re my father.”
“Now don’t get your piss hot, Large. It’s just a lot to take in all of a sudden.”
“I just found out myself.”
“Huh.”
Wayne opened the door that led to the lobby. He nodded in the direction of the
elevators. “Come on up. We’ll have a couple of beers.”
Large stepped by him through the door. They both fell silent, both wondering how
this had happen. They stepped into an elevator and Wayne touched the top button.
“Do you want something?” he asked, looking into Large’s eyes. He kept his
expression open, but set his eyes hard. No shit, now.
The lack of fear or judgment in Wayne’s eyes made Large smile again. Wayne
wasn’t worried about him or the future of this arrangement. So Large wasn’t
either. It’d just be a dead connection, like a family name on a tombstone.
“Nothing. Just wanted to meet you. My mother never told me who my father was
until recently.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked, I guess.”
“Crazy fucking world’s all I got to say about it.” The doors slid open. “Crazy
goddamn world.” He walked down the corridor to the ballroom.
“Hey,” Large yelled after him. Wayne stopped and turned. “Why don’t I just catch
up with you in a couple of hours. I dropped Kian off at your motel. Maybe we can
have breakfast or something.”
“Sounds great,” Wayne said. “See you then, partner.”
HE SAW THE cop standing by the door to his room just as he slid off Aurora into
the parking lot of the flat and low Rainy City Motel. The cop, a woman was partly
in the shadow but enough in the light for her hips and chest to give her sex away.
Her arms were spread wide, forced out by the flak jacket, and she had stuck her
thumbs in behind her black utility belt. Bright yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed
the door. Wayne parked in front of her, blasting her with his lights. She ducked her
head, shielding her eyes with the brim of her hat. He killed the motor and the lights
fell to the ground and dissolved. The penumbra of the streetlights lifted and he saw
her sharp nose and plain face. He popped the door but remained in the seat, one
hand on the wheel. A cop at the door is never a good sign. The cop pushed herself
off the door and walked up to the driver’s side, looking into his eyes. Her face
turned square. He had stayed in the van because where there was one cop there
was always another one somewhere near by.
“Wayne Waters?” Her light blue corneas gleamed suddenly in the wet glare of a
passing car. She smiled, like she was approaching a strange dog. The skin on her
temples flared into well-creased wrinkles.
She knows a thing or two about men, Wayne thought.
“Yep,” Wayne said and he looked around for the others who must be there in the
dark. He pealed the hat off of his head and dropped it into the passenger seat. He
combed his graying hair back with a sweep of his hand.
“Is Joey with you?” She nodded her head up and looked beyond him into the back
of the van.
“Nope,” Wayne said. He slouched down in the seat to let her know that he wasn’t
going to step out where they could easily get around him and bring him down.
“What’s this about?” He pulled a toothpick out of the crease where the fabric on
the roof tucked in behind the window and picked at a crevasse between two side
teeth.
“You don’t know?”
“No clue.” They must know about the clothes, he thought. What can I do now?
They probably already have that little shit Joey, and he’s told them everything in
the name of Jesus.
The cop, her thumbs still in her belt, rolled her shoulders back to loosen the
tension. She let the pause drag out.
“Well, I’m officer Nollette with the Seattle Police Department and we want to
speak to your sons,” she said. “They are both wanted for questioning.”
“For what?” Wayne’s mind had begun turning through the possibilities … run on
foot? Get the van going and then ditch it? But he had all that equipment in the back,
hell, his guitar and all his other shit was back there. Then it hit him. She had said
both.
“Both?”
“We want to talk with Joey and a man, a Native American, that your daughter said
came to Seattle with Kian.”
“Kian’s here?”
“Apparently he came with another of your sons. We don’t know his name.”
“Large.”
“Excuse me?”
“Large At Night.” Wayne rubbed his temples. The dots connected. “His mother is a
Crow Indian and she said the baby cried so much that he filled the house at night
and she was always so surprised to see such a small baby the next morning. She
said he was the drummer’s or base player’s, but not mine. He said last night that
he was mine. Is this about him?”
“I don’t know,” Nollette said.
“So, do I have to guess what’s going on behind that door or will you eventually tell
me what the fuck this is all about?”
“Are any of your sons here with you?”
“I left Joey inside early last night. I saw Large early this morning and haven’t seen
Kian.”
“Okay, look,” she said and took her thumbs out of her belt. She stepped around the
door and put her hand on the edge. “I know this is confusing, but we need to talk
with your sons and I’m not sure what you do or don’t know, so I have to take this
one step at a time.”
“First step is, I don’t know dick.”
“Kian is dead.”
Wayne felt a drop of acid hit the back of his head. It burned and soaked in. There
was a popping noise. He petted his hair. “Where?” Wayne pointed to the door. “In
there?”
“Someone stabbed him,” Nollette stood straight and put her thumbs back in her
belt.
“Is he in there?” Wayne wanted to know and didn’t want to know.
“No,” the cop said. “We took him to the coroner.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Joey,” she said.
“You’re sure he did it?”
“No, that’s just what your daughter said.”
Jesus Christ, he thought, the whole damn family is here.
“Where’s she?”
“Downtown. Where’s Large?”
“I don’t know, I told you already.” Wayne stepped down out of the van and stood
in front of her. He waved toward the door. “Can I go in and get my stuff. I guess I
can’t stay in there?”
“I don’t think you’ll want to. The room hasn’t been cleaned yet.”
Wayne reached into the van and grabbed the hat off the passenger seat and stuffed
it down on his head.
“Large came around after the show last night.” Wayne took his hat off. “We had a
drink and he left. I don’t know where he went.”
She reached up and brushed the meth from his shirtfront.
“Let’s get your stuff,” she said and stepped toward the hotel door.
Inside, the room was black. Wayne couldn’t see anything. He felt drunk now. He
couldn’t focus his eyes on anything and so his mind swam. He heard the cop step
forward into the dark behind him. A full yellow light poured out across the end of
the beds, the dull black glass of the television reflected the flashlight like a white
hole in deep space. The beer bottles lying on their sides on the table and the floor
glowed brown. There were shoes and a pair of pants crumpled on the floor in
front of the still-black closet. The quiet of the room surprised him. He hadn’t
thought about it before hand, but now that the door was open and the lights
clacked on inside, he realized that he had expected to see a fight still happening.
Instead, all he’s got was all those damn things sitting there like nothing had
happened. Maybe she’d got it wrong. Maybe it was another room and he’d been
swept up into a mistake. He wanted to turn and slap her for making such a stupid
mistake, but he knew that was just his own bullshit talk. He stepped forward and
repeated the stiff action, mechanically and without slowing, entered the room. The
pants on the floor shrank and they weren’t his. He didn’t look at the beds in the
mirror, either of them. He pulled open the top drawer and scooped up socks and
white boxer underwear, two white t-shirts and a pair of Levis. He put the pants
into his arms and felt the flask heavy in one of the pockets. That will come in
handy. Then he stepped to the closet and caught sight of Nollette standing between
the beds, her hands over her chest. She had her head down. She was looking at
her shoes. She didn’t want to see whatever he might pull out of the dresser drawer
because she was lying in wait for him to take her to Joey and Large. He put his
clothes down on the floor. He should have taken his duffle bag out first, so he got
it and then stuffed the clothes in.
“Do you want to take anything of Joey’s?”
“Fuck no,” Wayne yelled. He set the bag down and looked at Nollette and slid his
eyes from her to the blackened stain on the rumpled bed. He saw that boy
nervously fidgeting with a leather strap in his hands down in front of the
bandstand. He was playing at a country fair in Huntley and the boy had come
around behind the big hay wagon to talk with him. The last beat of the set died out.
He bent down and smiled at Kian. He really liked that boy. “Hey, son,” he said, loud
enough for the other kids around to hear him. He felt proud that the boy wanted his
friends to know that his dad was playing in the band. “What can I do for you?”
Kian fidgeted with the leather strap and then found his strength and asked, “Do you
know Proud Mary?” Wayne laughed and looked at the kids, winking, and there
was that pretty girl with the long brown hair that would become his wife. “You bet
I know it and I’ll play it for you as soon as we start the next set.” Kian smiled,
grabbed Wendy’s hand and ran off with her, nearly pulling her off her feet. Wayne
hadn’t known the song and he didn’t play it, but Kian never said anything. The
song didn’t matter to Kian. He’d gotten what he wanted. He’d impressed the girl
and knocked the other boys back a step or two. Wayne remember how proud he
was to be there for his son. No man had ever done anything for him but fuck his
mother and punch him in the face. And now that boy was dead. God be damned if
someone wasn’t going to pay dearly for that.
Nollette put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him toward the door.
“You’ll have plenty of time to come back in tonight after you’ve had some rest,”
she said.
Outside, Wayne answered questions about where Joey might go and who he might
know – he didn’t have answers to either. Nollette said they were doing the best
they could, but it would take time to find him in that mess downtown. She said she
was going, but would put the tape back up and come see him again later in the day.
When her car was out of sight, he got in the van. He’d wait there until Large
showed up. He wanted Large to go with him, break him into the family. Two can
hunt better than one. The first feeling of sobriety, when the happy side of the
drugs has dissipated and only the dread and guilt side of the booze is left, started to
dawn in his head. This was a side of boozing that Wayne never let linger and he
wasn’t going to start now. He lifted the plastic bag of meth out of his left breast
pocket and shook it to get the powder way from the plastic zipper.
There was Large, standing by the window, face shut off, waiting.
He rolled the window down. “Hop in,” he said and nodded to the passenger side of
the van. “We’ve got some chores to do.”
Large slipped into the seat. “What happened here?” he said pointing his thumb at
the door. He was thinking cops had tracked Kian down, finally, and that that
wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“Joey stabbed Kian,” Wayne said. He let an impulse drive his hand to the bag of
meth. He pulled it to him, opened it and snorted. Fuck it.
Large looked at the door. “Who’s Joey?”
“My son.”
“Where’s Kian?”
“Dead.” Wayne reached over Large’s legs, popped the glove box and took out a
pint of scotch.
“Shit,” Large said. “So much for the great family reunion.”
“I guess so,” Wayne said and took a drink. He reached the bottle across the aisle to
Large. “And now we need to find Joey before the cops do and take him to a
special place I have in Montana.”
WHEN THE PHONE woke Kate at 7 a.m., she had been sleeping for an hour, REM
sleeping, mostly. She rolled toward the sound. The room was dark. The curtains
tight against the streetlights. By the forth ring, she got the earpiece to her head. It
was Nollette. She said she was sorry to wake her, but she had set up a fast and
free way for Kate and Kian to get back to Billings. A Mercy Flight had been
ordered to the airport in Billings to pickup a sick child and bring her to the children’
s hospital in Seattle. Anyway, she told Kate, the crew had agreed to take her and
Kian to Billings in the small jet ambulance. They were leaving in two hours, just in
time for the night coroner to finish his autopsy of Kian and get him to the Boeing
airport. She told Kate to be ready in an hour for a cab to pick her up. She’d take
care of the rented car.
“Is he going to be in a body bag or coffin?” Kate asked. She didn’t want to reject
Kian, but she didn’t think she could stand to fly with him if he was only covered
by a sheet. What if his head stuck out or she could see his cut up chest?
“He’ll be in a transport box. A temporary coffin that will keep his body safe and
from view.” Nollette’s voice then shallowed. “Have you heard at all from Joey or
Large or Wayne?”
Kate said she hadn’t, but Nollette’s question meant they hadn’t found Joey either.
She saw him just as he was before stabbing Kian, leaning back on the dresser,
leaning too far to one side. His right hand buried deep in his front pocket. She had
wondered about his hand stuffed so far in his pocket, curled into a fist, stiff. Was
he holding himself, like he used to as a boy? She remembered thinking that. His
face screwed up at his eyes and mouth, his too small mouth. His thin lips red and
wet. He was so desperate for Kian to leave.
“Have you talked to Catlynn?”
“Do you help all your white trash families like this?”
“Not all of them.” Nollette said. “It’s just a few phone calls from here is all.”
“Well thanks. You’ve been a big help.” Kate pulled the widow curtains back. The
light outside was still mostly the ambient light of the city.
“Hey, like I said, you should thank the people I’ve called. They’re the ones doing
the helping. I’m just calling.”
“How will you ever find him?” A large band of people carrying yellow and blue
signs with “NO WTO” on them walked under her window.
“He’ll turn up, probably in Billings. When you get there, keep an eye out. If you see
him, call 911. I’ve talked to the city police chief as well as the county sheriff, they’
re ready for him if he shows up. I’ll probably come down to talk with you and
your mother some more. Call her and tell her you’re coming back with Kian.”
“Yes,” Kate said, “Yes, but” She paused.
“But?”
“But but but but,” Kate said and put the white phone down in its cradle. She
stepped over to the widow, its curtains glowing with the damp light. She split the
fabric and stood back, the Torah, like her Jewish friends described, and she waited
for the revelation. But there is no revelation for white trash, just beer cans and
Jiffy, black rubber hairbrushes and cheap, chalky, wax lipstick.
“GODDAMN IT KIAN.” Catlynn brushed her black-gloved hand across the top of
the silver box containing her son’s body. The casket lay on a gurney next to the
sleek red and white jet at rest on the dry tarmac. A hearse stopped twenty-five
yards away, next to the glass double doors of the terminal entrance, lurched
slightly then awkwardly turned its back to them. Catlynn, in her best brown leather
coat, ran her worn-gloved hand along the handle of the stainless steal. The oiled
leather left a sheen on the steel. When she wanted, she could see the shadows of
the bonfire, blackened outlines of boxes, belts and lamps against the embers
glowing at the center. She closed her eyes to take in the image, to feel the heat and
the release of letting all of these people’s lives go. She closed her arms around her
chest and stepped away from the casket.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Kate lifted her eyes from the silver transport box and nodded at her mother.
Mascara streaked her cheeks and was smeared over her eyelids. She sniffed,
wiped her nose then ran her hand up into her hair and pulled.
“Don’t do that, sweetie.”
Catlynn walked back to her and put her arm around her shoulders. They were the
same height, though Kate’s shoulders were broader than Catlynn’s. She led her
daughter through the cavernous airport. Noticing all the men looking at her child,
just like they had since she was a teenager. Poor girl, she thought. At the entrance,
the big brown car was parked where she left it in front of the pneumatic doors.
When the door slid back, they were hit by the hard wind, dry as summer but cold,
like steel is cold. The two women hunched their shoulders against the steady force,
closing the gaps between collar and hair, covering neck and the little space
between the front of their dresses and the space above their breasts. The cold wind
always found that little hole and dove inside. The air smelled of sandstone rocks.
The airport was on the large plateau above the massive Yellowstone River cut.
Catlynn looked at the mountain ranges, the Beartooths and Pryor ridges, and
noticed the absence of snow. She opened the door for Kate and held it against the
wind to let her in. Kate slumped onto the big bench seat and slouched. Catlynn let
the door shut while holding it back, so it wouldn’t slam on her daughter’s hand or
leg. The wind pushed her black skirt against and between her legs. It was
relentless now, always wearing her down, chaffing her skin, cutting channels
through her face, always in her ears, in her head, even in the dark of night, lying in
bed. She didn’t remember the wind being this persistent, this relentless twenty-five
years ago when she and Wayne bought the little farm. Now the wind brushed
through all the branches and canyons of her brain without letting up. She walked
around the back of the car. Head down, hand on black hat, she stepped into the
wind like a wayward ship trying to get right by running into the black emptiness of
the eye of the storm. The big door was the sail and the wind fought against her.
She slipped behind it and the wind slammed it shut, mad at her for leaving, for
closing herself off from it. It loves her. It’s sick for her. It wants her to lay down
on the ground so it can cover her in Earth. It was what Catlynn wanted, too. She
drove away from the airport, down a two-lane stretch of black top that ran next to
the sandstone rim of the cliffs. Tumble weeds skidded and rolled across the road at
sharp, wind-driven angles.
“Boy, this country,” Catlynn said, both hands on the large, hard plastic wheel.
“Going to blow clean away one of these days, if we don’t get some rain.”
When they arrived home, Kate was hungry and thirsty, like the inside of a blown-
out egg. She noticed the smoldering black heap in the front lawn and threw open
the door. She ran to it and saw the blue satin hem of her prom dress, the one she
wore when she was a freshman and went with William, a senior football player.
She pulled the hem from the ash and it tore away from charred fabric melted into
the stack of burned clothes. She looked at the leatherman’s set and the still-
smoking box of melted records and her heart broke again.
“Mom!” she yelled. “Mom! What happened? What happened to all of my stuff?”
She pushed a smoldering stack of coats aside, brushing the black soot off her
hands onto her pants. Under the pile were nearly a dozen shapes and charred metal
pieces that used to be photo albums. She sorted through the fragile, blackened
sheets. At the bottom of the pile, she found a couple of pages with the pictures still
intact. The clearest was of Kian when he was eight sitting on the back of the big
yellow horse. A giant, gentle horse. Kian sat in the saddle, his cowboy hat back on
his head and off to one side, his mouth straight, holsters and plastic guns on his
hips. She put the picture in her shirt pocket. Her screwed up mother didn’t even
understand that this stuff wasn’t hers. It belonged to them, the kids. This stuff
was all that they would ever have for helping them understand just what the hell
they had gone through out here. Just these few cheap things, a cheap prom dress,
plastic toys that broke hours after getting them. Artifacts of a white-trash life, but
they were all she had. She didn’t have a culture or history or family name, just
these pathetic little things sold by the millions all across the nation, and now she
didn’t even have those.
“Mother!” she yelled. “Goddamn you mother!”
Kate got up and ran into the house.
“What have you done!” she screamed at her mother when she found her sitting at
the big table in the dining area. “Did you burn everything?”
“Yes, I did.” She shot Kate with hard look. “You kids don’t need any of that stuff.
You’ve all got your own lives. You’ve got your plane ticket already in your pocket,
I imagine.”
“It’s a round trip ticket, mother. That’s the way you buy them.”
“Yeah, a round trip the hell out of here. Well, I’m glad for it. I’m tired of it. I want
a new life with none of you in it.” She put a glass to her lips and then lit a cigarette.
“Stop yelling at me,” Kate said. She let herself down the front of the cabinets and
sat on the light green floor. Her legs sprawled out. “Why did this family have to be
so screwed up? Why couldn’t we just be a normal family?”
“We were a normal family. They’re all screwed up.”
“No they’re not. I’ve seen plenty of families that weren’t. Kids who were raised by
adults instead of other children.”
“You just keep telling yourself that and maybe some day you’ll get a chance to
make it all happen for yourself. Every family has secrets, even those rich families
in New York you’ve been crying about since you left here.”
She wanted to keep Kate humbled because Kate had spent nearly every waking
hour at home torturing her and pestering her about how great other families were.
How she wished she could live in a nice house. A nice house! How the father was
at home and how they ate dinner and played cards every night. She didn’t even
wonder whether Catlynn had any choices in the matter. She didn’t wonder that
perhaps Catlynn too wanted a nice house, a different life, that perhaps Catlynn
hadn’t had such a rosy childhood either, that perhaps Catlynn had never had a
childhood at all. She was too self-centered to realize that Catlynn swallowed her
pride every day just to keep them off the street, working down at the bar and
begging Wayne not to abandon them. Wearing worn-out clothes. The furniture
was old and tattered and it embarrassed her, but what could she do about it? Let
the kids go without clothes? Let that girl go to the third or fourth prom in the same
dress she’d worn the year before? She even let Kate dream about how great life
outside of the farm would be, because she wanted Kate to have a life that was
better than her own. She let her hang out with that puffy fat teacher who filled her
head with all those fantasies of New York City and college. The girl was just so
selfish, so blind to anything but her own desires. And yet she thought of herself as
so giving, so considerate. Everything revolved around her and her dreams. Catlynn
had let that happen, but not anymore. She wasn’t going to nurse that girl’s
selfishness anymore. She was going to have a life of her own now and no one was
going to get in the way of it.
The pregnant silence between mother and daughter was broken by a car coming
down the lane. The vehicle rolled over gravel to the front of the house and stopped.
A car door slammed. A moment later, the front door opened without a knock and
Wendy stepped into the living room. Kate felt small and pathetic looking up at her.
Wendy’s dark brown hair was still long and shiny and smooth despite the wind.
The long, jealousy-inspiring hair hung loose over her back, like a curtain, like it had
since they were little. Her pretty face was more mature, lines in the skin and she’d
put on a few pounds, but Wendy was as handsome as ever and probably more so.
Time had enhanced her looks. Kate had admired Wendy, the oldest of the bunch,
since they were little. She was always so sure of herself. She had been impervious
to teasing about Kian being younger than her or about being pregnant in high
school and to Catlynn’s outbursts. She didn’t have any questions about herself, so
no self-doubt. Wendy let go of her long black coat where she was holding the
front together against the cold.
“Hi, Kate,” she said. She set the small suitcase in her other hand on the floor and
stepped into the room. “It’s good to see you.”
“You, too,” Kate said.
“Is Catlynn around?”
“I’m in here,” Catlynn sang. “Are the girls with you?”
Wendy walked up next to Kate, gingerly, soft-stepping like she was approaching a
wounded animal and then crouched and sat on the floor next to her. She looked up
to where Catlynn sat in the dining room and smiled. Kate felt grateful.
“I left the girls in Rapid City with my parents,” she said.
“Why didn’t you bring the girls?” Catlynn whined. She looked into Wendy’s eyes.
Catlynn didn’t want to accuse her of being unfaithful to them all, but that was how
she felt.
“It just wouldn’t have been good for them. They would have heard that their father
was stabbed by his own brother and while they know he is dead like the baby is
dead, they don’t have to worry about him because he was stabbed. You know
what I mean? They would have been scared for him, but now all they know is that
he is with the baby and that he’s okay but not coming back.”
It’s hard to argue with Wendy, Kate thought. She just said things so plainly and
clearly that how could you? Catlynn turned her head away. She never argued with
Wendy either.
“So, where is Kian?” Wendy asked. She put her arm around Kate’s shoulder.
“At the funeral home,” Kate said. She was grateful again that Wendy had asked her
and not Catlynn.
“I want to go see him alone, but I’ll be back in the morning. Where is it?”
Kate told her how to get to the place. It was a new funeral home in a suburb of
Billings “with a gravel parking lot.”
Wendy put her hand on Kate’s forearm.
“That’s just the kind of place he would have wanted to be,” she said. She squinted
and nodded to bolster the reassurance. “Where is Wayne?”
“We don’t know,” Catlynn said. “I hope he’s dead.”
“And Joey and this new son, Large At Night?”
“The police are looking for Joey, but there are big protests in Seattle and they can’t
find him,” Kate said.
“His new son, whatever his name, who knows where he is or if he even exists,”
Catlynn said.
“Basically,” Wendy said resolutely as she stood up, “the only one of Wayne’s sons
that has been found is dead.”
“I hope he’s not the last one that falls into that category,” Catlynn said.
“Well,” Wendy said, “Hoping’s not doing.”
She was clearly angry and disappointed by all of it. She stepped away from Kate.
At the door, she turned and smiled small at her.
“You know,” Kate said when Wendy had gone through the door and her car
started, “I’m not staying here tonight.”
“Good riddance.”
LARGE WALKED BETWEEN the low brick buildings and down the wide, empty
streets of Billings. The one skyscraper in town was an expensive hotel made of red
brick. One of the high windows was boarded up, must have been a gun shot. No
one could throw a rock that high. The hotel stood on the railroad tracks that
divided good from bad in the town where so many of his friends and relatives had
lost themselves to drugs and alcohol, where his mom had succumbed to his father.
As he crossed the four sets of tracks, bits and pieces of paper and plastic, pop and
beer cans were suddenly everywhere. The street on the other side of the tracks,
the “wrong side,” was dirty with rocks and sand. This was where he belongs, on
the wrong side. Mexicans, Blacks and Indians and poor white trash. The moon had
been out all day and was setting as the night began in earnest. The businesses along
this street changed from steel and polished glass, to rust, flaking paint and cracks
in windows behind iron grates. Drunks slept in the doorways here, and in the alleys
and even on the sidewalks. Black hair, greasy and long, hung over haggard, brown
faces. He turned right and entered the side streets. The lights were few and far
between. A pack of kids made him want to cross the street even though they
shared dark skin.
Large’s old girlfriend, who had been with him the night he first met Kian, said he
could hide out at her uncle’s house until the Sheriff gave up looking for him. He
wasn’t wanted for shooting any of those people, but the Sheriff wanted to question
him and had put a lot of pressure on all the community leaders to cough him up.
She had agreed to go out tonight, though, thinking maybe Large had money and
they would party. He liked her, Reye Gonzalez. He wanted to get her away from
booze, bricks, pavement and glass, into a wooded area and get to know her, sober,
if she would let him. He wanted to shake her loose. He wanted to tell someone
what he’s seen.
Her uncle’s house was on the street corner. She stood at the top of several steps in
a pool of light from the porch light. He stepped into the light and nodded at her,
long black hair, broad cheekbones, plush lips and dark eyes. Her long legs sticking
out of out-of-date bellbottoms.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
He nodded at her and led her to the corner in silence.
“So, what are we going to do?”
“I’ve set up a camp at the river,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s go there and have
a fire and talk.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, asking what the hell for.
But Large didn’t answer. He walked without talking, which didn’t bother Reye.
The less men talked, the better anyway.
They cut across a field, climbed a fence and headed for the interstate. Large had
started a fire next to the river, but behind a thicket of trees and out of sight of the
highway. He pointed to a round hump covered in blankets and sleeping bags. Reye
sat on a log and stretched her legs toward the fire. Large handed her a beer and she
smiled. That was the best thing that had happened on the date so far.
He gathered twenty big, round river rocks and stacked them next to the fire. Then
he placed the rocks in specific places in the pyre, so that when the wood stack
crumbled, the rocks would rest on a bed of coals. Then he sat next to Reye and
cracked his beer. The stars above them pulsed and Reye, her hands around the
beer can on her legs, was illuminated irregularly. After half his beer was down, he
stood and walked around the sweat lodge. He had built it earlier in the day out of
twelve-foot long, one-inch willow trees that grew like weeds along the Yellowstone
River bank. A couple hours in a good lodge, and one could easily understand at
least one of the lodge’s more secular purposes – deep cleaning.
He pushed wood around in the fire, which was now burning at half the size but
twice as hot. He spread bed of coals around and was meticulous with the rocks. If
they busted or didn’t get hot enough, he and Raye would have a bad sweat. After
dragging her all the way out here in the middle of the night, that would be a
bummer. He checked the lodge, moving sleeping bags and blankets to make sure
the heat would stay inside.
Raye kept thinking that Large was cute and looking at him. Thinking about the rest
of the night was making her stomach flutter. She was also thinking that the motley
hump looked like a dead animal as the fire began to die and burn out. Large turned
on a small, bright flashlight, a pool of grass and dirt appeared at her feet. She
looked toward Large, but could only see the light from the flashlight.
“Almost ready,” he said, sounding eager, like a boy.
He shined the light then at the base of the sweat lodge, looking at the bottom to
make sure it was sealed tight against drafts. He tamped lightly with his foot. Her
eyes were adjusted back to the dark and she could make out his silhouette, long
hair hanging over his profile. Then he swung the light out to a large cottonwood
tree and followed it. At the base of the tree, he shoved his hand in hole and pulled
out a small glass vial. Back at the sweat lodge, he put two drops from the vial into
a gallon ice-cream bucket of water. He walked the vial back. She liked his legs and
his narrow hips, his lanky arms.
“Where’s your pipe and drum?”
“You were supposed to bring ’em.”
She laughed. She liked his laugh.
“You know,” she said, setting the beer on the ground. “I sort of believe in all that
stuff.”
“I sort of do, too.”
The fire died out completely, leaving a few glowing but cooling coals. Large told
her to take her clothes off. He set the flashlight down at his feet and began taking
his clothes off. She took off all but her underwear. She noticed his penis laid out
smooth, brown and sheathed. Somehow he had escaped the circumciser’s knife.
“I put a blanket down inside,” he said. “You can get naked.”
He picked up a short shovel and began digging for a rock in the coals.
“You have to get all of the ashes and coals off of the rocks, or they’ll burn in the
pit and get the lodge too smoky.”
He tossed and rattled glowing rocks on the shovel blade while blowing over each
one, sending the bits of coal and ash back into the fire pit. The rocks, alone in the
dark on the shovel, glowed a deep anemic red. After all the rocks were inside, he
shined the light at the entrance to the sweat lodge.
“Follow me in.” He bent down and crawled in.
Raye had stepped closer when his head disappeared and admired his butt as he bent
low and wiggled in the small opening. When he was in, the light from his flashlight
filled the inside and poured out of the door. She was anxious to join him. She was
getting cold. She didn’t like being on the outside of the lodge while he was on the
inside. She was also glad, however, that he had gone in first. She would have been
shy about sticking her butt up in the air the way Large had. The thought made her
giggle. She bent over and crawled in. The small opening was tight on her hips and
Large reached over her and pushed the flap of plastic back. He yearned to touch
the smooth brown skin. He refrained. Reading his mind, Raye wished he hadn’t.
“I hope it gets hot,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“I think it will.” He turned off the flashlight. The rocks glowed in the pit, small red
orbs floating in space.
“Shit! It’s smoky in here,” she said, beginning to catch her breath. “It’s killing my
eyes.”
“The steam will clear the smoke away.”
“Hurry up then. I’ve got to get out. I’ll come back in when you get the smoke
cleared.” She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed shallow.
Then there was a sudden burst as he dashed water onto the rocks. He did that
twice and the lodge warmed up and the smoke disappeared.
“That’s better,” she said. “Whew.”
“It’s tough to get all of the organic matter out of the pit, so even when the rocks
are clean, it can get pretty smoky.”
“I’ll say,” but she wasn’t thinking about what he had said. Now that she was
warm, she was back to thinking about his lean body. While she was looking in the
dark, imagining his frame, he put more water on the rocks. It was hot enough now
that sweat formed on her brow and upper lip and on her chest.
“This feels great,” she said. And she moved her knee so it touched his.
“I’ll say,” he said and more water burst into steam on the rocks. “When it starts to
get hot, don’t lean up against the plastic or you might get a burn. The plastic gets
pretty hot.”
“That must be eucalyptus you put in the water. It smells great and is clearing my
sinuses right up.”
“When you start to get uncomfortable, just remember to relax. When you feel like
you can’t breath put your face down on the ground and that will help.” More water
hit the rocks. “I’m going to take us up.”
“Go slow,” she said, when the steam hit her face and chest. “Go slow.”
“Try to relax. You’re okay.”
Another shake of water blew up on the rocks.
“I wonder of you can run out of oxygen in here?”
“You won’t. I never have.”
That didn’t make her feel better.
“Goddang,” she said. “Please. Lay off the water for a bit.”
“I will. Relax. Here, wash your face.” He turned on the light, and through the thick
fog, looked for her black nipples. To her, he was surprisingly close. In the dark,
she had imagined him far away even though her knee still touched his. Then he
reached his cupped hands over hers and released the water. She splashed her face
and patted the cool of her hands against her skin, smooth and glistening.
Large shut off the light, then he sprinkled more water onto the rocks.
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe when the water bursts into steam, oxygen is released.”
“Quit worrying.”
“I’m trying.”
Their breath came heavy and sweet to each other through the dark.
Large slashed two big dips of the branch onto the rocks.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, panting.
“Don’t get any part of your body over the pit, the steam will burn you. Lay your
head on the ground.”
She tried to lean over onto the ground, but she felt like she was breathing fire itself
and she needed out.
“I’ve got to get out,” she said.
“Count to ten.”
“One. Two. I’ve got to leave.”
She grasped at the plastic, brushing her hands across it.
“Here,” Large said quick, concerned. “Here’s the door.”
She ducked her head through.
“When you’re ready, come back in or if you don’t want to, wait for me.”
He spoke these last words at her butt as she scrambled and wiggled her hips
through the opening. When her feet disappeared outside, he reached over and
tightened the door down again. He focused on nothing, soundless, void. He tried to
clear his mind, in the dark, by punishing his body. The age-old trick.
A healthy fire, a cleansing fire. Why can’t the world still be innocent enough for
healthy fire? The world was supposed to be inside the sweat lodge, but it was a
fictional world. Large saw stars, constellations and nebula. He slithered out of the
tent, condensed water and sweat coming off him in sheets. Raye had started a
smaller fire in the center of the pit and stood with her back to it, staring up at the
stars. Her firm, lean legs and hips, not wide but there. Her smooth stomach …
these attributes spoke to him first. He stood, wavered and nearly fell over from
light-headedness. All of her contours turned to shadows and washed over him in
waves of recognition. He had seen this woman, this one woman several times in
many forms and this vision was more important to him than sex ever was, this
awareness of the person as a woman. In the flickering light, their bodies danced in
and out of color and solid form, brown flesh tones moved across them, dancing
under the rolling illumination of their consciousness. Raye looked at him and
smiled. Large smiled back.
“How’s it going?” he asked her.
“Really good.”
“This is great, isn’t it.”
“The last time I felt this way, I had taken a whole handful of liberty caps.”
“I know what you mean.”
They stood next to each other, their minds out with the stars and the black
between them. After a few minutes Large asked her to come back in, and she
agreed.
“I’ll take us up slow,” Large said. “We’ve got plenty of heat left in the rocks.”
“How long will the rocks last?”
“Three sweats if they’re good and hot.” Large’s voice sounded to him like it was
at the end of a tunnel. In the dark, he reached out his hand and found her leg miles
away from him. He stretched his neck and body and leaned over the arc of the
world to find her and he kissed her mouth. He splashed water on the rocks and the
heat grew. Her hands reached him from across the ocean. He took them higher and
the sweat began to pour again. He moved over next to her. She had grass on her
hands as she put him in. Sometimes the knot unraveled and the flood of heat felt
like a revelation. Afterward, Large told her about his white family and the murder
he’d seen. She held him.
They left camp at sun up and walked back to her house without. When they
rounded the corner to her uncle’s house, Large saw him first. Sheriff Waldo stood
up out of the lawn chair and put on his hat.
DRIVING AWAY FROM the old farm, where she had spent a large part of her
own youth, hanging out in the barns, kissing Kian and swimming in the creek,
sledding in deep snow down the rocky slopes of the surrounding hills, Wendy felt
relief. She hadn’t thought much about Kian’s family since she married him. She
had taken him from them and the two had a beautiful life until the baby got in
trouble. Then it was like all the hell bred in that family sprang to life in him and
burned him down. She pushed her thoughts from Kian and that pain. She now had
to think about their daughters. They needed a life as far removed from Kian’s
family as possible. Wendy had moved to her parent’s new home in South Dakota
to start a new life divorced from Kian. She drove the road through Huntley, where
her father had run the regional university’s agricultural station. She drove past the
small, quaint, two-story house where she grew up. There was a tan horse in the
back pasture, its backside turned to the cold wind. She remembered her own
brown horse, Silly. It was a good place to grow up. Her father came home every
night and her mother cooked dinner for them all. No one talked a lot, but then they
didn’t have a lot to talk about. Just pleasantries. Not like Kian’s house where the
fights and banter never ended. Those kids even talked in their sleep.
She thought about the girls and how they were growing up. Not what she had
wanted for them. Christmas was coming soon. She had a lot of activities planned.
Sledding and days at the skating rink. She wanted this Christmas above all the
others to be the one they remembered as the Christmas of their youth when they
got older. She wanted this Christmas to be the clear and obvious point where their
new lives began.
The Christmas of Wendy’s youth, the one she remembered most vividly, was a
party at the Waters’ farm. She was fifteen and some of Wayne’s music friends
and their families came to the farm early in the day. By four in the afternoon, the
house was packed with laughing, reeling men and women, kids running between
legs, stealing drinks and cigarettes and taking them outside to the barn where the
they had set up fort. Steam from the vast array of food hung in the air, mingling
with the smoke, making a fog that hung a foot off the ceiling. Wendy’s mom and
dad drank and had dinner, but then left.
Wendy guessed that her parents had no idea what a party at the Waters’ house
became once the sun went down. She used Kate as the excuse for spending the
night. She never mentioned Kian and they never acted interested in each other
around her parents. Her parents didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.
It wasn’t just the booze, cigarettes and stories of thievery, fights and debauchery,
yelled out by both men and women, that made the parties a poor place for kids.
Around midnight came the nudity and hot tub. The kids, nine of them of which
Kate and Wendy were the oldest, set up a poker game at a card table in the back
bedroom after it got too dark and cold to play in the barn. They had cigarettes and
beer stashed in the room. The youngest kids, especially the spry little blond-headed
girl who was about six years old, watched the short hallway that connected the
back bedroom to the party. When an adult came around the corner the girl would
laugh and stumble forward like she had just heard a great joke and was trying to
get a hold of herself. That was the signal and the other kids would put the
cigarettes into a dollop of water in a dish and stuff it along with the beer under the
bed. When the coast was clear, the little girl would walk back to the door and wait
for another chance to be useful. Around midnight one of the boys rushed into the
bedroom from a beer-and-cigarette forage yelling and laughing that all the adults
were out in the lawn getting naked. As one, Wendy, Kate and Kian jumped up and
ran to the front room. It was empty. They crawled across the floor to the big
picture window and peeked out over the ledge. The adults were indeed naked,
ghost flesh with bursts of black hair. They trotted to the big round horse trough.
Then the kids understood the events earlier in the day. Wayne had dragged the big
water trough from a neighbor’s field to the middle of the pasture. He pumped it full
of creek water, using a big irrigation pump on wheels. He used a backhoe to dig
three big holes next to and partly under the trough. Then he started bonfires in
each one. The fires swirled around the tub throughout the day until the water was
nearly boiling. The adults splashed into the water yelping and wooing at the heat.
Kian jumped up and grabbed the beer cooler, dragged it out the front door and
across the lawn to the hot tub. The adults laughed and whooped while Kian handed
out beer and lit cigarettes.
This was Christmas with the Waters.
WALDO LEFT THE station with Nollette and headed as far from Wayne’s house
as possible for as long as possible. He had people looking for Wayne to clear this
up before the big city cop got her tits in an uproar. He had tried to call Wayne’s
house, but there was no service. That looked bad, but he had blown it off in a
showy way like that happens all the time out here in the country and it didn’t mean
anything. Nollette seemed like a smart woman. He was a little worried and that
irritated him. She was hot to know why Wayne was in Seattle and Waldo knew of
no other reason than he was out there delivering a load of stolen clothes. She was
hot to track down this Indian, too. Some cops just hate mystery men. Some cops
just get all worked up over a murder. Some cops – like himself, Waldo decided as
they cruised down I-90, far south of Wayne’s house toward Joey’s trailer – some
guys like him accept that bad things happen and capturing people and stuffing them
into the back seat of the cruiser doesn’t change anything. It’s just what people do
to make themselves feel like they have control over the world, that they can make
up for the horrible nature of being alive. Night was down all around them as they
turned onto Pryor Creek Road with the yard lights of the truck wash blazing in
front of them. Waldo had learned during his first tour in Vietnam, where he met
Wayne, that there was no slowing the crushing blows of people against people.
You just had to learn to use their fighting for your own gain.
“Well here we are,” Waldo said, swinging his giant head around to look at Nollette.
“He lives in the trailer. But if he’s in there, I’ll eat my hat.”
“I don’t expect him to be in there either,” Nollette said, thinking this guy can’t be
that bad of a cop. She had heard he was very protective of his jurisdiction and
attempted to keep other cops out of his hair by being friendly and kind and helpful.
Just like criminals when you start getting close to their operation, but she wasn’t
here to ferret out a bad cop. She was here to find Joey.
Yep, people were going to kill, rape and steal from each other and that was that,
Waldo thought as he turned to the door of the crappy little trailer. They noticed the
shadow of a head in the window at the same time.
“I’ll go up there,” Nollette said.
“No. No. No,” Waldo said. “If he’s in there, he’ll listen to me. I know him.”
He stepped out and rose. Two strides and he had the door to the trailer open.
Nollette had unlatched her door and put her foot in position to get out and give
chase if Joey was in there and got passed Waldo, however unlikely that seemed.
Waldo put his long arm into the trailer and led out a woman with long brown hair.
The woman stepped down into Waldo’s arms and put hers around his neck. She
hugged him. Her thick brown hair falling across his arm.
Waldo led Kate out of the bright headlights, to the side of the cruiser. They stood
outside the car, far enough away that their voices couldn’t be heard inside. They
spoke softly.
“What happened?” Waldo was looking down into the shadows of Kate’s eyes. Her
face was pale and her hair disheveled.
“Joey just jumped up and stabbed Kian. I don’t know why he did it. I’ve been
trying to figure it out, but I can’t remember anything that would make him do that.
We were talking about Kian drinking too much and Joey just jumps up and jams
the knife into Kian’s chest then he runs away.”
“Was he on drugs?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t seen him before I went in there. I went in there to find
Kian, which I did. Kian needs help. He’s so skinny. I just wanted to help Kian and
then Joey just jumps up and hit him. I couldn’t believe it at first. He jumped back
and blood pumped out of Kian’s chest like a little geyser.” Kate laughed at the
stupidity of it.
“Okay, take it easy,” Waldo said, his long arm reached just behind her shoulder and
he lightly rubbed her back. “I need you to be quiet, but … wait” Waldo heard a
window on the cruiser coming down. “Hey!” he yelled back at the car, “Give me
just a moment here. You’ve already got her statement right, so give me just a
minute here, detective.”
The window rolled back up. “Bastard knows I’m not a detective,” Nollette said.
“What was Joey doing in Seattle, anyway?” Waldo was exasperated. “He was
supposed to be working here. I got him this fucking job to keep him out of
trouble.”
“He was with Wayne.”
“What was Wayne doing there?”
“I don’t know, but he took a truck load of something there in a cattle trailer.”
“Look,” Waldo put both hands on her shoulders and she looked up into his face.
“You can’t tell her what Wayne was doing there. Did you?”
“No,” Kate said. “I never tell anyone what my father does or who he knows. I
learned that lesson a long time ago.”
“Good girl.” Waldo put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her again. “Let’
s go find Wayne and Joey and see if we can’t get this all worked out.”
They turned back to the car. Kate just wanted to get out of town. It had been a big
mistake thinking she could come out here and save her brother, her family or
anyone. She had let her highest hopes back in the New York delude her into
thinking that the men of the West could be saved. They were all fucked up and
nothing would change that. The quickest way out of Montana for her was to do
whatever Waldo said because he would smooth it all out, put the pieces in place
and then she would be allowed to get the fuck out and once she was out she was
never ever coming back for any reason whatsoever.
Waldo put the shifter into reverse.
Nollette decided she wasn’t going to sit in the car again. Waldo was just too slick
for her. She didn’t trust him before, but now she just felt for sure that he wasn’t
being honest. He was keeping something from her. They drove in silence to the
gravel lane leading to the farm.
“Shit,” Waldo said.
When they crested the little hill that overlooked the farm, the barn fire lighted a low
hanging cloud of smoke with flames in random hot spots. A giant tree was on fire,
its limbs glowed like red hot lines shot through a fractured window. The smoke
drifted over the ground and up the lane, slowly growing more dense. When they
pulled up to the house, it floated in the gray sea. Only the windows glowed
distinctly. Light spilled around the half-open front door.
The fire appeared to be nearly out, though the smoke glowed red and orange
around it. They saw the form of two people hugging and stumbling toward the car.
Nollette popped her door, so Waldo jumped out fast and took two long steps
toward the two people. He quickly outpaced her. He recognized Catlynn’s voice
before he saw her. The other person looked like a woman and Waldo let his
shoulders down. Waldo flinched and grabbed his gun out, more because he saw
Nollette pulling hers out. He pointed the long barrel at the woman who was holding
Catlynn.
Large and Catlynn stopped. Catlynn struggled to get free but now Large didn’t
want to let her go and stand there all alone. So, he held her tight. Her legs began to
fail.
“Let her go,” Nollette yelled at Large. “Let her go and get down.”
“Help me!” Catlynn screamed.
“Jesus Christ!” Kate was out of the car now, too. She stepped fast and broke into
a run, but hit the ground hard when Waldo kicked her legs out.
“Everybody stand the fuck still!” Waldo yelled. “Boy, let her go or I’m going to
blow your head off.”
Convinced me, Large thought. He released Catlynn.
She fell onto her butt and then scrambled away from him like he was on fire. Large
put his hands in the air. Crazy goddamn white people everywhere. Catlynn
practically flew off the ground into Kate’s arms. Kate quickly turned away with
her and went back to the cruiser.
“Get down now,” Nollette said.
Large flattened himself onto the wet grass. Waldo stepped to him and put his foot
on Large’s back.
“Where’s Wayne?” Nollette yelled.
“In the house,” Large said. The ground jumped and for a second he wondered
what could make the ground move so hard and so fast, then he was gone.
Nollette had turned away and Waldo kicked the Indian to keep him down because
she was heading to the house too fast, too eager. She was going to get killed and
then all kinds of shit would go wrong. She yelled something into the house, her
arms holding the gun straight and hard at something inside, something that made
her eyes wide. Just as he stepped behind her and pushed the door open out of his
way, her face jerked. A loud clap smashed the air, and then another breaking the
smoke into shards all around him. He put his gun up and shot at the figure standing
in the inner dark. He aimed for the heavy meat of the shoulder and fired. Wayne’s
head bobbed forward and then his upper body flew backward. He landed on his
back, his torso just in the rim of the bright light falling out of the kitchen. His arms
flung out and the little gun tipped out of his hand. The sudden silence was broken
by screaming. Wayne’s arms and hands and the front of his pearl-snap blue
Western shirt were covered in blood. Waldo’s eyes adjusted to the back lighting
from the kitchen and he saw the body at Wayne’s feet. Joey’s eyes were open,
searching. Blood oozed from his mouth and nose. He sputtered, trying to talk or
breath. Waldo lowered his gun and looked at Nollette. She had been shot in the
face. The bullet had entered through the bridge of her nose. The other had grazed
her cheek. She was still breathing. He stepped into the dark living room to Wayne
and gripped his gun tight. He had missed Wayne’s shoulder and hit him square in
the neck. The big gun had nearly cut Wayne’s head off. His eyes were open wide
with the surprised look of a billion years of people dying when they never expected
it would ever happen to them. Seeing his old friend dead stung. He turned back to
Nollette. He kneeled over her and put his hand on her mouth and nose. The big city
detective had brought this whole fucking nightmare to his little city out here in the
country and she was not going to live to tell the tale. Nollette’s hands grasped his
arm. She struggled and then shuddered and her muscles relaxed. Waldo lifted his
hand tentatively, making sure the last breath had been taken. He looked up, and
right in front of him was Large, still laying on the ground. He looked directly into
Large’s eyes. Waldo moved to shift his gun from his left hand to his right, but
Large was faster on his feet than Waldo was at shifting the gun. Large sprinted
back toward the house, cutting off any angle Waldo could get on him, and he
disappeared behind it. Waldo trotted around the side of the house, but the Indian
was gone. He walked back to the yard. Catlynn was kneeling over Kate, leaning
over one knee behind the cruiser. Waldo touched her shoulder and she crawled
away.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Kate’s eyes were staring up at the stars. She was breathing fast, gulping. Blood
spread out around her breast.
“Mom,” she said. Then her eyes flattened and closed. Her breathing shallow.
“Goddamn it!”
Waldo ripped her shirt open and there was the tiny hole just above her breast,
bubbling. He opened the cruiser’s door and called in on the radio that there was an
officer down. There had been a shooting and they needed ambulances down at 301
Pryor Creek Drive. He told Catlynn to hold Kate. When he checked on Joey, the
boy had died. Waldo threw his hat on the floor.
AS SHE CONVOLESCED, Kate thought about the conversation with her former
high school teacher and about her family. She remembered Kian and Joey. She had
plenty of time to think about it. They were the Sons of Wayne, no different or less
powerfully than Cain and Able were the Sons of Adam. They led cursed lives that
were no less complicated or emotionally driven as any other brothers in society.
Without language, they lived their emotions. They wrote their lives into space and
time as much as any other family. They just wrote their books in the one big book
of genetics and on the land, the land that wouldn’t forget. They wrote their names
into the wooden table tops in bars across the plains. They left their guts out on the
sidewalk and gravel alleyways the way gladiators left their guts spread across the
streets of Rome. They left their blood on the course and waterproofed sheets in
smoke-stained hotels out at the edges of every city and small town in the world.
They popped out kids and spread their seed and left each other crying on the
broken steps leading into the rusted out trailer. But they were human and human
beings make culture everywhere they are. They make society and history, even if it
is a history remembered only by the Earth, written, erased by wind and rewritten
on the plains or in the dirt gutters of small towns. They left themselves wherever
they drew their last breath, like Kian in that hotel room in Seattle. Kian hadn’t died
there alone or without meaning. In fact, he died exactly where men like him were
born to die and that is meaningful. They spoke to God like every human has ever
spoken to god, with their defiance and willful intensity to make god believe in
them. They lived out their holy lives in profanity. Survival, she understood, was
not the first instinct of her people.
When she had recovered and before she left for New York, she learned that Waldo
had found Large and given him a job driving vans for a movie company. The little
Hollywood encampment was just up the creek from her mother’s place, where she
had spent the past several weeks. She borrowed a pickup from her mother’s
friend, a woman who had been spending a lot of time there, and drove to the
camp. At the gate leading on to the pasture stood Large, wearing a loose white T-
shirt and blue jeans. Waldo had arranged the meeting. The mid-august sun had
begun to set in for another day of torching faces and burning the land. Large
opened the door and stepped back behind it. When Kate cleared the car roof, she
was nearly as tall as Large. They caught each other’s eyes and smiled. She stayed
behind the open door for a moment, looking over his shoulder at the encampment
of scaffolding, lights, white panels of light diffusers and camera cranes. She
looked back at him and they laughed.
“You look just like him,” Kate said.
“So do you,” Large said. “You’ve lost weight”
“Well, getting shot will do that.” She felt nervous now. Large was indeed striking
in much the same way that Wayne had been, especially the eyes. Medium size
irises, but the color, blue for Wayne and nearly black for Large, was set back from
the cornea – a flat disk swimming far back inside the eye, like a door or a flower
or a window. She couldn’t decide.
Large put his hand around the door and led her out onto the pasture. He turned her
toward the lights and equipment.
“They’re shooting a wagon wreck. It’s fun.”
“Great,” she said.
They walked up to the edge of the film equipment and stood, watching for a
moment. In front of them, a covered wagon was being pushed up onto its wooden
wheels. A man stood up from behind a tall, woody sagebrush and a woman with a
headset walked two children away from the wagon.
“Can’t they just clip this scene from any of the fifty movies with scenes just like it
and then tape it onto the roll?” Kate said.
“I don’t know. I’d ask but they’re really touchy about that stuff around here. No
joking around, which can be tough on an Indian.” Large looked at her face. “Let’s
go to my pickup. I have something I want you to have.”
She turned with him, stepping over a round patch of prickly pear. At the
impromptu parking lot, cars and pickups lined up in neat rows on the hardpan and
brown grass, she remembered something about Kian.
“Kian hated it that people parked their cars in regular, prescribed patterns no matter
where they were, as if they were machines just following instructions.”
“Kian was a smart guy. I’d have to say I never met anyone like him until I met
Wayne and your mother.” He stopped at the driver’s side of a blue Ford pickup
with bullet holes all along the side and large sections of rust, like a flesh-eating
disease under the skin.
“So you’re in with Waldo now?”
“I’m not in with anyone, but I need a job now and then and Waldo is interested in
giving me one.”
He popped the handle on the door and jerked it open.
“There it is. That’s what I want you to have.”
Inside on the bench seat was a guitar. A reddish brown Martin D-18 with bright
new strings. The body’s veneer was worn and cracked and had several deep
scratches in it. The wood between the frets was worn into deep groves. Kate
recognized the guitar. She had watched her father play it a million times. She
remembered him sitting in the chair in the living room of their house singing the
“Big Rock Candy Mountain” to her. Before going to the bar, he would swing the
guitar onto his lap and belt out a few tunes. Sometimes just for her. His black hair
slicked back. He wore a red and black Western shirt with a deep red V laying over
the black shoulders and onto his chest and the white pearl snaps shined and
glimmered. He’s smiling, performing to her and she’s transfixed, gazing into his
clear blue eyes, the smile lines converging. She remembers she loved him, but she
doesn’t have the feeling. Just the memory of having had it. She remembers she
used to imagine that he was a magic person, like in her books, and he was passing
something to her, a power or a knowledge that would someday transform her into
a queen or a witch. She feels that power in her, a feeling that makes her want to
wear cowboy boots and walk through deserts. She picked the guitar up by its neck
and swung in out of the pickup and into the sun. She held the neck tight enough
that the strings hummed.
“Thank you,” she said.
Large smiled shyly and nodded, looking down at his boots.
Kate twirled the guitar and looked it over again, one hand on the bottom, letting the
neck spin in her hands. “Thank you.”
“When I saw you, you reminded me of Wayne. The first time I saw him was on
stage in Seattle. He played this crazy Indian song. It was great.”
Kate pushed Large’s black hair away from his cheek and kiss it. He smelled like a
brother and lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“I have to catch my plane,” she said. “Come to New York.”
“I’d like that,” Large said.
Kate walked away. She took long strides, maybe longer than she’s ever had.
Wayne’s guitar swung at her side.
“The best thing you can do is to stay away from white people,” Large’s mother
had told him. But that didn’t seem right to Large. They were already here and
already into everything, even his blood.
the tall-back leather chair and clasped his hands behind his giant head. He rocked
himself with his toes. City cops came ready to lead investigations of murder and
fraud, swaggering with big city knowledge and college educations. He got a lot of
work out of them. They were arrogant, but they were also eager to show off. Out
of town and away from the politics of their home office, these deputies worked
long hours and frequently uncovered and gathered evidence for a whole range of
shenanigans. This one was a bit different because she was looking for a colleague
in some of Waldo’s own shenanigans. So, he thought, I’ll have to help her. He
stretched back, lengthening his long legs. He stood and twisted his midriff.
Yawned and picked up his wallet, bundle of keys and cell phone.
In the front seat of one of a cruiser, he flipped open the glove box and tossed his
wallet and phone inside. His chiropractor had browbeat him into keeping the wallet
out of his back pocket. He hated it flopping around in a jacket pocket or in his shirt
pocket, so he left it in the car when he was out on the job. He just had to
remember to get the damn thing out when he returned. There was a candy
wrapper on the passenger-side floorboard. He reached it with little bending and
tossed it out of his door. Time for another memo. Pure laziness. He pulled the
shifter into reverse, rolled back and then surged out of the underground garage,
breaking into the cold but still sunny early evening. He pushed the gas down and
rocketed the cruiser over the ramp, nearly jetting the car off its front wheels. Then
he gunned it harder right and slipped fast into a gap among the few cars just
coming off the traffic light. These little cars were like driving a motorcycle
compared to his Cadillac.
The Seattle cop said she’d be carrying a big blue duffle with her gear. The deputy
said she couldn’t ID the young man who was hanging out with Wayne, apparently
one of his kids from the reservation. She said she’d called around but no one, not
even the BIA knew anyone that fit the description or said everyone fit it. It’s like
no one at all lives on the reservation, she said. Waldo didn’t argue with her about
his chances of finding him either. It was true that people and even the BIA cops on
the reservation were highly unlikely to admit to knowing anyone, let alone someone
wanted by a cop.
He told her that he didn’t know this one either, this Large At Night. Never heard of
him. He said that wasn’t unusual. He didn’t get to know the Indian boys until they
got old enough to get their government checks and drink in Billings. He was
curious about this reported son of Wayne, though, because Wayne was on an
errand for him and, while it would be highly unlikely, he may have fucked it up
somehow after Waldo had driven back to Billings. This Large guy may know too
much. So, Waldo considered as he reclined the seat a notch and put his hat on the
dashboard, he was going to have to help officer Nollette a whole bunch. He cruise-
controlled the car up Airport Road. Too bad about Kian, though. He was a good
kid, bit of a drinker. Waldo passed through a gate leading to the airport’s hangers
and parked on the south end of the terminal. He clicked on the radio.
JOEY LOOKED AT his hands and there, still in the unwashed creases was the
dried blood of his brother. He wasn’t sure what to make of that. He turned them
over. In the cuticles and under the nails, more blood. But it couldn’t be. He
dropped his hands to his side. He heard the thunk and felt the jolt and give as the
knife punched through Kian’s rib cage. Then, he closed his eyes against the images
and the blood and he heard her voice, pleading and crying and loving him, wanting
him to give up his sin and walk away with her. He concentrated to see the face of
the woman from the morning, black eyes and suffering. The Madonna. Mary. He
listened to her voice, a tube of hollowed glass pouring a liquid into his ears. Then it
changed to high-pitched cries as she pleaded. With the protesters streaming down
the street in front of him, he too pleaded with the world to see straight, to see like
Jesus made the blind man see. He lifted his hands and imagined holding her head
between them. Her white face smiling and streaked with black. He said her name,
“Erin.”
“Look,” a man walking beside him, “she’s gone okay? So, stop moaning about her
and let’s get on with it.”
“Go ahead,” Joey said. “I’m going to stay back. Maybe take my chances at the
building.”
“You’re not going to run into her. So, just come along. I let you in last night, but
some of the people don’t want you around. Okay?”
“I’ll just walk downtown another way then,” Joey said. He dropped his hands and
turned away from the young man and stepped down a sidewalk running left. He
disagreed with the young man. He believed he would find the woman again. He
would hold her and she would help him clean his hands. She would pour the
beautiful golden perfume over his head, just as she had done for Jesus. It would
wash down his neck and down his back, coat his legs and fill his boots. He would
walk on water. He will become a perfect substance, a divine substance, a thing of
the other world. When he turned a corner, following another mass of people to the
center of town, he stepped into the throng of a hundred people spread across a
small blacktop parking lot. An open-air bazaar for protest signs, gas masks, knee
shoulder pads. The people were gathered in clumps around long card tables
stacked with reams of copied leaflets and piles of signs and socialist newspapers in
plastic bags. There were men and women in equal number all around him. Joey
searched the women for his Madonna. The people looked similar in their ragtag
dress of tattered slickers and patched jeans.
He walked down the street to the center of the trouble. Thousands of people
thronged the middle of the intersection. He pushed through the crowd of protesters
and looked over the faces. They were all turned toward a line of cops. He searched
their faces for her, because she was possibly the only one out of this whole horde
who could be saved, the kernel of wheat in a basket of chafe. He wanted, needed
God’s help and he realized he hadn’t prayed over any of his new problems. He
dropped to his knees. The pain shot through his hips. He thrust his hands together
in front of his face and bent his head back, countenance to the mist, “Please,
Jesus! Christ God All Mighty!” His voice cracked and he slumped forward, face in
his hands, crying. “Lord God save them from their sins. Please God. Please Lord
give them peace and send me a sign.”
A ROARING WOKE Large. There was a flicker of red on the white curtains. A
fire outside. A big fucking fire outside somewhere in the pasture. He sat up and
studied the patterns on the curtains. Red, like a pale cheek. The fire flared and
seemed to scatter. He jumped up and went outside. The fire was several hundred
yards away down at the bottom of the pasture. Whatever had been on fire had
collapsed into a heap of tangled timbers, flames climbing them, dragging them
down into the white center of the blaze. A human silhouette appeared in relief
against the fire. It moved in a regular pattern, and Large squinted to cut the glare.
The figure was swinging a flaming piece of wood at the end of some sort of
tether, around and around causing the person to sway back and forth like the
warble of a planet circled by a rogue moon. He stepped closer to the fire, up to the
pole fence. Just as he put his leg up to get over it, a giant tree next to the fire burst
into flames. Its vast network of branches went up all at once. The heat and light
from the blast knocked him back. When he caught his balance, he squinted to see
the silhouette. When he couldn’t find it, he jumped the fence and ran toward the
fire. The finer branches of the tree had flamed out and now the fire was in the
thicker green wood. An explosion inside one of the big branches caused a whole
network of the tree to fall out of the air and shatter on the ground. The heat
challenged him again, burning his face and making his pants hot. He found Catlynn
laying flat on her stomach, hands over the back of her head. He grabbed her arm
and dragged her to her feet.
He pulled her from the edge of the fire. When they got to the fence, he let her fall
to the ground. He bent over. Catlynn came alive and threw her arms around his
neck and squeezed him. Her arms locked so tight, Large lost his breath for a gulp.
He stood up and lifted her to her feet. She let go. For a moment, she was a young
woman standing in the headlights of an on-coming life.
Catlynn felt it too. For a moment, all her life had been hadn’t happened. She was a
young woman again, a decision away from a life of school and home and possibly
a husband with a good job and the life she had, the one that began when she
followed a tough kid to Las Vegas. The boy ended up stabbed because he wasn’t
tough enough, and she ended up making ends meet in a hotel bed. That decision
flashed, like gasoline tossed on a fire and no amount of wishing could bring the
decision back. Once it burns, that’s it. She looked into Large’s face, handsome
with Wayne’s eyes. She wanted to burn something else. She glanced over Large’s
shoulder at the little white farmhouse with red trim. She saw it in flames. She
blinked at the heat of the flames around her.
“Hey,” Large said. “You got pretty hot. Looks like you’ve got some blisters on
your face. Let’s go into house to look at those and get you a drink of water.”
“I think you better just get out of here,” Catlynn said, her voice scratched and
pitched to the high end of the scale. “You better just get the hell out of here
because the cops will be here any minute. You can’t just set a barn on fire and
expect to get away with it.”
“What! Hey, you set …”
“Fuck you!” Catlynn darted to Large’s side to get around him.
Large caught her arm and twisted her to the ground. He landed on top of her and
pinned her under his chest. He tangled her legs in his and squeezed them until she
stopped struggling.
“This has to stop. Somehow this has to end,” he said. “When the cops do get here,
I’m going to make this stop.”
“Get off me you fucking Indian rapist sonofabitch!”
He squeezed her legs tighter.
“You burned the barn and raped me and now you’re going to jail with the rest of
your wagon-burning family.”
“Listen to me.” Large felt her cold breath on his face. She was small under his
body. Her frame was frail like a spider’s. His hair had fallen on her face. They
were so close, her face lost its youth and he realized how old she was and that
made him fear that he wouldn’t be able to untangle himself from the disaster that
had been growing in her since who knew when.
“Listen,” he barked. “If you promise to let me tie you to the fence I’ll get off,
otherwise I’m going to hurt you and then tie you to the fence. I’m not kidding.”
Catlynn’s body remembered what she had tamped down in her mind. The men on
her, holding her. Their stinking breath in her face, their eyes wide and wet and
slathering her face. The big fat hands fumbling her, sticking her, spreading her.
She heaved, but couldn’t shake them. She threatened and scratched but she couldn’
t get them off. She couldn’t get their hands off of her. That’s when it first opened
in her. That was the night, in the hotel when her boyfriend died and she was
opened all the way to nothing. It was always there.
“Now,” Large said when she had relaxed under him. “Now just lay here. I won’t
tie you up if you’ll lay here.”
Catlynn nodded.
Large got off of her, keeping her pinned with one arm, but she had stopped
fighting.
“We have to get you and Joey to a doctor. This has gone on long enough.”
He helped her up. She was compliant, though stiff. He walked her toward the
house. Red and blue lights and headlights blew through the smoke in the air. The
cop car lurched over a small berm and up onto the grass of the yard. The
headlights fell on them. Catlynn jerked to pull free, but Large’s reflex held her tight.
PUSHING THE VAN hard across the rock desert of eastern Washington, two
beers settled in his stomach and Joey tied up in the back, Wayne looked into the
dark at the pins of light made by the sparse and distant farms. On the right, there
were no lights and out over the left side of the road, there were only a few. After
all his years on the road with his many bands, Wayne still never liked these long
stretches of black. He wanted to see houses and lights, the homes of those who
will come to the bar and dance to his music. Unless he was hunting or fishing, he
didn’t care to be alone. Empty space was purposeless. He felt the same way about
being home after a tour. When he drove down the country lane to his hidden
house, he crossed over into an empty, blank space. There was nothing for him to
be when he was there. He didn’t get that sense of rootedness his wife talked about.
He didn’t have any sense of himself out there on the creek, surrounded by barren
sandstone cliffs and sagebrush hills. So he stayed on the road and out of the life of
farms and families. He was doing them all a favor and most of them, including his
wife, had sense enough to know it. The desires in his life could not be lived out on
the farm or any of these small Montana towns. He’d done his time in them, playing
music, fist-fighting and dreaming of the Grand Ol’ Opera while living in that dingy
Miles City hotel. It was the war that got him out of there, but like it did to his
father (or at least the man married to his mother), it was also war that nearly killed
all his plans. What a waste that would have been, he thought. All those old men
who came ahead of him in all those dusty goddamn ranches and farms and inbred
towns had thrown him out as the last of the line. Wayne was it, the last
opportunity for the family to reestablish itself. His mother had nearly screwed all
that up, too. There was something self-destructive in his family. They all ground
down to nothing. Wayne had always believed that he had dodged that bullet though
because his father was probably a Hutterite and not one of those goddamn Irish but
that trouble must have come down the line through his mother.
After the fire killed the old man, Ida and his mother lived off Ida’s Hutterite family
even though she had left the commune to shack up with the old man. The Hutts
had bought the worthless ranch. Several of her cousins and uncles dropped by
every couple of weeks for dinner and to drop off meat and vegetables. It must
have been one of them who was his real father and that’s why they moved to
Miles City. His mother had been married to Richard Waters. He worked in the
Roundup coalfields. They all lived with Ida and Richard was fine with the Hutts.
When the war came along he signed up. It was during the Battle of the Bulge that
Dick Waters disappeared along with thousands of other men. Probably dead and
frozen in all that snow, mud and blood, but maybe not. Dick had gotten word that
Wayne had been born September 14, 1945, too late for her to have gotten pregnant
by him. He never wrote her back. He just disappeared.
Dick wasn’t the only one who could do the math. His friends could add and his
family could count and they ran Waneeda off. It seemed like the whole community
came out against them – not just for the infidelity. Mostly it was because of the
rumor that the Hutts were shacking up with them every time they came into town.
Back then people hated the Hutts because they wouldn’t fight in the war and were
buying up all the land from families who couldn’t keep the payments up or do the
work because their sons, husbands and fathers were fighting the Germans and
Japs. It was as if they had been sleeping with the enemy. So, Waneeda was forced
to Miles City where she got work as a hotel bar waitress. Ida went back to the
commune.
Thank god mom didn’t go to the commune, Wayne thought.
The hotel was a crap hole, but he learned to play music there. The old man who
taught him (for what favors in return from his mother Wayne never cared to ask)
was a solid musician and knew thousands of old songs and a lot of the new ones.
Wayne played every night and working during the days feeding cattle on the old
codger’s little ranch down on the Yellowstone. That’s where he was when his
number came up for Vietnam.
It was after 8 p.m. on December 1, 1969, and he had stayed past dark to help the
old man get his cars and truck and animals inside the big barn and out of what was
going to be a 40-below-zero night. Clear and the sky so black it was almost gone
and the stars bright and crisp. Back at the bar, everyone watched as some fucking
politician stuck his arm in a fish tank and pulled out a little bingo ball.
Number 258 – September 14.
Waneeda was standing at the bar, smoking, a glass of beer in her hand and a plate
of fried chicken and mashed potatoes in front of her. She turned to the bartender, a
fat man with a jolly look and asked him, “What the hell does that supposed to
mean?”
“Means Wayne’s going to Vietnam.”
The engine grinding away, Wayne thought about the last music tour he was on and
where it ended – in a hotel room in Red Lodge, Montana. He had heard about Kian’
s trouble and wanted to help out. But that wasn’t the real reason he swung back
through. No, he had to admit to himself, the gigs had all dried up. His momentum
had died. There was nowhere else to go but back home to regroup, make some
money and try to get his career back off the ground with that one piece of good
luck still in front of him – the job in Seattle. Melissa Brown, the bass player, had
laid her head of black curly hair on his chest. A pillow propped his head up high
enough to see over her head. He watched her index finger dive into his pubic hair
and reemerge pallid next to the red irritated skin of his flaccid dick.
“Wayne?” she asked in her singsong voice. Her breath moved the hair on his
stomach. “I think you ought to take a break. You haven’t slept since we left
California. Just relax for a few weeks on the farm with your wife and kids. Enjoy
yourself and her company. I can get by on my own for a couple months.”
“I don’t think you should worry about my sleep. Things are going good. We’ve
got that big gig in Seattle.”
“But nothing until then, Wayne. John’s band has a tour set up and said I could play
a few of my songs with them.”
“I love your songs and I’ll play behind you any time you want. I’d love to record
them. So don’t worry about sleep. We’ll get plenty of that later. Hopefully much
later.”
“You and John don’t exactly see eye to eye.”
“Yeah.”
She slid up next to his face on the pillows and put her hand out for his cigarette.
He placed it between her index and middle finger. She smoked.
“He’s just jacking off out there,” Wayne said. “Sure the people like him, but I want
more than that.”
“What? What more?” Melissa asked, plaintively, playfully wondering. “We just
drove from California and you got that job in Seattle and we’ll all play there in a
few weeks. Just let down for a bit. What more could you want?”
“To step into a recording studio, money dropping out of our pockets with the right
to sing and play whatever we want. We have the talent. We just need to get more
exposure. John is young and has a lot in front of him, but I’m hitting my last
stretch here.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have slugged him in the eye.”
“Maybe, but goddamn it he needs to know that I can help him and you and help
myself. What is it that’s keeping us back?”
“Songs, Wayne,” Melissa said. “Songs written to pull your heart from your chest.
Songs sung so right that no one can imagine them sung by anyone else but you.”
“Maybe,” Wayne said to the black expanse beyond the windshield.
“Songs and style,” she said. “We’ve got no style.”
He disagreed with her. He had style, why the fuck did he get her and every other
women he had ever wanted? She admitted he was good looking and hard, but she
put her hand on his throat and squeezed. “Times have changed, Wayne. People ain’
t looking for killers to be their country music stars any more. They want those
cuddly little church boys like John and songs about nice little farms and granma
and granpa just hugging and kissing and playing cards by the fire.”
She squeezed and Wayne saw spots and then she swung her leg over and entwined
his legs. He didn’t resist. I’ve got a nice little farm. I can be cuddly, he thought. I’ll
go home and get the family all patched up and sell myself as a family man. Melissa
took her hand off his throat and he spun her onto her stomach.
LARGE WADED THROUGH protesters, police and onlookers to get to the service
entry of the tall cylindrical hotel where Wayne’s band was playing. Climbing the
back steps, he toyed with the image of what his father would look like, how “his
father” would move, what he would talk like. He would watch him for a while. See
what he was like and then decide whether he wanted to approach him or not. It
was a stretch to think that Wayne would somehow be glad to see him or to know
that he had an Indian son. But Large experienced his curiosity like a small light in a
darkened room or a glint off the end of one of the chrome shelves in that
storeroom. He had felt the same way about Kian and that had turned out alright. He
left the room and took up a silver pitcher of cold water, cradling it’s wet bottom in
a white towel in his right hand.
From the doorway to the massive ballroom at the top of the Westin Hotel, Large
looked over the round tables spread across the gilded room. On the stage was a
tall, big breasted woman carrying a bass low in front of her pelvis and bumping it
with her hips, and a skinny man in a checkered green shirt sitting up straight
behind the pearl-green drums, his hair combed tight and flat all the way from one
side of his balding head to the other. Another man had his eyes were closed,
wearing a dark blue jacket and Western tie, picking notes off of an electric guitar.
In front of them was the person who must have been Wayne. His wide shoulders
squared under a black leather jacket long enough to fall over his hips. His right
hand, lean and long, held a pick between finger and thumb, pumped up and down
across the face of the electrified acoustic guitar. His face was Kian’s, wrinkled and
a little gaunt. His sideburns came even with the bottom of his ears. The ballroom in
front of Wayne was nearly empty. Only fifteen economic advisors had made it
through the lines of protesters to the party. Wayne’s song was tight and strong
with the high twang of Western style coming off the strings of the electric guitar.
He looked so much like Kian that it was hard to have a reaction to him. Large tried
to wonder if perhaps finding Wayne hadn’t been the worse decision he’d ever
made in his life. But even that practiced exploration of just how meeting a new
person can lead to all kinds of trouble didn’t bring any real premonitions or
feelings. The few dancers who had shown up for the night had hit the booze and
were now mostly congealed in front of the stage, fat hips swaying.
Wayne’s band let go of the song and it flew away.
“This next song, ladies and gentlemen, is one I wrote several years ago,” Wayne
said, looking down as he toed several toggle switches at his feet. His high, smooth
cheeks glowed. His pick hand tapped one two thee on the scraped wooden body of
the guitar. He looked up and said into the mike, “It’s called ‘I Love You Little
Darling, but You Just Don’t Give a Shit.’ ”
The men in the crowd burst out with a collective yahoo! and Wayne hit the strings.
The drums and bass jumped in.
“What the hell am I doing?” Large asked himself. He lowered the pitcher of water.
Then set it on a table and took off the black vest and shirt, his own black shirt still
under it.
The drummer started hammering out an Indian beat and Wayne cried “hey hey hey
hey heyyyyyyy Yey yey yo.” He cycled through the fake Indian song over and
over. The woman holding the bass pumped the back with her hips. The long curls
of her brown hair hung down in front of her face. The lead guitar player picked
high, whining notes to match Wayne’s tenor and rising “Hey Hey.” Wayne slipped
his guitar behind his back, put both hands on the mike and yelled his rising tenor
into the empty ballroom. He rocked back and forth to the beat. The sound coming
from the band grew and filled the room with the warm thunder of the bass, the
thwack tom tom of the drum and high whine of the guitar. Wayne hunkered down,
lowered his shoulders and opened his mouth into a big black cave. Large glanced
around. A man in the service entry next to him was rocking back and forth,
smiling, his eyes on Wayne’s mouth. Out of that hole streamed a high-pitched, but
still throaty yell. A vibration ran up Large’s back and up his neck. The sound
coming from Wayne felt like a cry from inside the Earth or from the people outside
the building clashing with the cops. The small group in front of the band was too
stunned to dance but rocking back and forth on the dance floor as if before a great
rock band. Wayne’s hey heys were growing more horse and raw now, like he was
so fucking mad at everything that he was going to kill himself saying so. Large felt
strange. A sense of pride or joy filled his stomach. He smiled and shook his head.
Then Wayne got on his knees and arched his neck back, opening his mouth to the
sky and wailed again. A sound that Large had trouble placing as coming from that
hole in Wayne’s face. The sound filled up the room again. The bass player dropped
her arm and lowered her head and rocked with Wayne’s torment. Large looked
around and the other waiters and busboys had come into the ballroom from the
swinging doors to watch the world tear open and howl. The drummer dropped off
and now it was only Wayne, immersed. Instead of weakening and growing small,
the voice grew and filled the void left by the dead bass. The guitar player fell off.
Wayne voice drained and he closed his mouth, put his head down for a second and
then bounced up to his feet. “Good night folks! Hope you had a good time!” He
smiled like nothing had just happened. He put the mike back in the stand and
walked off the stage and out the exit in the back of the room. The drummer
hammered on, reluctant to let go. The guitar player stood and rocked out of
courtesy. The bass brought the drummer back to the planet with a few thumb
beats and shut him down.
The man in the service entry looked at Large. “What the hell was that?” he said
laughing.
“Hell if I know,” Large said.
Wayne stepped down from the stage and out through a back door. Large followed.
Now he had a reason to talk with him, the appreciation of the song. When he got
down a dozen flights of concrete steps, he found Wayne at the bottom, nose-
sucking a pile of white powder off the tan and spotted back of his hand. Large
stopped and stared, struck by the strange banality of a man with a black cowboy
hat snorting drugs at the ground floor of a Seattle hotel, hidden away in the bowels
of the building after tearing himself wide open in probably the best live act Large
had ever heard. His father no less.
Wayne looked up and winked.
“Good for what ails ya,” he said and held out a small plastic bag with a clump of
the powder. “Not the good stuff, I’m afraid,” Wayne said. “Just a taste to get back
to the hotel. You?” He shook the bag.
“Ah, sure,” Large said and took the bag. He fumbled with it. “Man, great last song.”
“Yep,” Wayne said and sniffed loud and long. “Amazing what a man can do if he
lays off the hooch a bit. Sometimes those old songs will open up like a woman.”
Large snorted, then laughed, holding the little bag shut to keep from spilling it.
Wayne laughed and rubbed his face. “You better hit that. I’ve got to go back up
there and get all that equipment out to the van. We had this place booked for four
fucking nights and now we got shit because of all these dumbasses outside.
Fucking best paying gig I ever had, ruined by a bunch of goddamn hippies.” He
rubbed his face vigorously.
Large finally got a small pile of methaphetmine on the back of his hand and snorted
it all into one nostril. The drug melted deep in his sinuses and against the back of
his throat. The sensation was at once cool and warm and tasted like honey.
Wayne patted him on the shoulder. “What’s your name, High Roller in the Bush!”
“Large At Night.”
“No shit!” Wayne straightened and put his hands on his hips. “I knew your
mother, Judy.”
“You’re my goddamn father,” Large said and laughed.
“For fucking Christ sakes,” Wayne said. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
“Nope,” Large said. He handed the packet of drugs to Wayne. “Sorry, I spilled
some.”
“Cheap shit anyway.” He pocketed the drugs, took Large’s hand and shook it.
“Sorry, I never knew you. She said you were the fucking bass-player’s kid or I
would have at least dropped in once and a while. How is your mother?”
“Fine. Living on the reservation.”
“Ha ha,” Wayne said. “I don’t know who put you up to this, but it’s funny.”
“Put me up to what?”
“I know the kid you’re talking about and I know his mom, but he’s not my kid.”
“I’m your kid,” Large said, angry and wondering why. “I’m Large At Night and
my mother said you’re my father.”
“Now don’t get your piss hot, Large. It’s just a lot to take in all of a sudden.”
“I just found out myself.”
“Huh.”
Wayne opened the door that led to the lobby. He nodded in the direction of the
elevators. “Come on up. We’ll have a couple of beers.”
Large stepped by him through the door. They both fell silent, both wondering how
this had happen. They stepped into an elevator and Wayne touched the top button.
“Do you want something?” he asked, looking into Large’s eyes. He kept his
expression open, but set his eyes hard. No shit, now.
The lack of fear or judgment in Wayne’s eyes made Large smile again. Wayne
wasn’t worried about him or the future of this arrangement. So Large wasn’t
either. It’d just be a dead connection, like a family name on a tombstone.
“Nothing. Just wanted to meet you. My mother never told me who my father was
until recently.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked, I guess.”
“Crazy fucking world’s all I got to say about it.” The doors slid open. “Crazy
goddamn world.” He walked down the corridor to the ballroom.
“Hey,” Large yelled after him. Wayne stopped and turned. “Why don’t I just catch
up with you in a couple of hours. I dropped Kian off at your motel. Maybe we can
have breakfast or something.”
“Sounds great,” Wayne said. “See you then, partner.”
HE SAW THE cop standing by the door to his room just as he slid off Aurora into
the parking lot of the flat and low Rainy City Motel. The cop, a woman was partly
in the shadow but enough in the light for her hips and chest to give her sex away.
Her arms were spread wide, forced out by the flak jacket, and she had stuck her
thumbs in behind her black utility belt. Bright yellow crime-scene tape crisscrossed
the door. Wayne parked in front of her, blasting her with his lights. She ducked her
head, shielding her eyes with the brim of her hat. He killed the motor and the lights
fell to the ground and dissolved. The penumbra of the streetlights lifted and he saw
her sharp nose and plain face. He popped the door but remained in the seat, one
hand on the wheel. A cop at the door is never a good sign. The cop pushed herself
off the door and walked up to the driver’s side, looking into his eyes. Her face
turned square. He had stayed in the van because where there was one cop there
was always another one somewhere near by.
“Wayne Waters?” Her light blue corneas gleamed suddenly in the wet glare of a
passing car. She smiled, like she was approaching a strange dog. The skin on her
temples flared into well-creased wrinkles.
She knows a thing or two about men, Wayne thought.
“Yep,” Wayne said and he looked around for the others who must be there in the
dark. He pealed the hat off of his head and dropped it into the passenger seat. He
combed his graying hair back with a sweep of his hand.
“Is Joey with you?” She nodded her head up and looked beyond him into the back
of the van.
“Nope,” Wayne said. He slouched down in the seat to let her know that he wasn’t
going to step out where they could easily get around him and bring him down.
“What’s this about?” He pulled a toothpick out of the crease where the fabric on
the roof tucked in behind the window and picked at a crevasse between two side
teeth.
“You don’t know?”
“No clue.” They must know about the clothes, he thought. What can I do now?
They probably already have that little shit Joey, and he’s told them everything in
the name of Jesus.
The cop, her thumbs still in her belt, rolled her shoulders back to loosen the
tension. She let the pause drag out.
“Well, I’m officer Nollette with the Seattle Police Department and we want to
speak to your sons,” she said. “They are both wanted for questioning.”
“For what?” Wayne’s mind had begun turning through the possibilities … run on
foot? Get the van going and then ditch it? But he had all that equipment in the back,
hell, his guitar and all his other shit was back there. Then it hit him. She had said
both.
“Both?”
“We want to talk with Joey and a man, a Native American, that your daughter said
came to Seattle with Kian.”
“Kian’s here?”
“Apparently he came with another of your sons. We don’t know his name.”
“Large.”
“Excuse me?”
“Large At Night.” Wayne rubbed his temples. The dots connected. “His mother is a
Crow Indian and she said the baby cried so much that he filled the house at night
and she was always so surprised to see such a small baby the next morning. She
said he was the drummer’s or base player’s, but not mine. He said last night that
he was mine. Is this about him?”
“I don’t know,” Nollette said.
“So, do I have to guess what’s going on behind that door or will you eventually tell
me what the fuck this is all about?”
“Are any of your sons here with you?”
“I left Joey inside early last night. I saw Large early this morning and haven’t seen
Kian.”
“Okay, look,” she said and took her thumbs out of her belt. She stepped around the
door and put her hand on the edge. “I know this is confusing, but we need to talk
with your sons and I’m not sure what you do or don’t know, so I have to take this
one step at a time.”
“First step is, I don’t know dick.”
“Kian is dead.”
Wayne felt a drop of acid hit the back of his head. It burned and soaked in. There
was a popping noise. He petted his hair. “Where?” Wayne pointed to the door. “In
there?”
“Someone stabbed him,” Nollette stood straight and put her thumbs back in her
belt.
“Is he in there?” Wayne wanted to know and didn’t want to know.
“No,” the cop said. “We took him to the coroner.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Joey,” she said.
“You’re sure he did it?”
“No, that’s just what your daughter said.”
Jesus Christ, he thought, the whole damn family is here.
“Where’s she?”
“Downtown. Where’s Large?”
“I don’t know, I told you already.” Wayne stepped down out of the van and stood
in front of her. He waved toward the door. “Can I go in and get my stuff. I guess I
can’t stay in there?”
“I don’t think you’ll want to. The room hasn’t been cleaned yet.”
Wayne reached into the van and grabbed the hat off the passenger seat and stuffed
it down on his head.
“Large came around after the show last night.” Wayne took his hat off. “We had a
drink and he left. I don’t know where he went.”
She reached up and brushed the meth from his shirtfront.
“Let’s get your stuff,” she said and stepped toward the hotel door.
Inside, the room was black. Wayne couldn’t see anything. He felt drunk now. He
couldn’t focus his eyes on anything and so his mind swam. He heard the cop step
forward into the dark behind him. A full yellow light poured out across the end of
the beds, the dull black glass of the television reflected the flashlight like a white
hole in deep space. The beer bottles lying on their sides on the table and the floor
glowed brown. There were shoes and a pair of pants crumpled on the floor in
front of the still-black closet. The quiet of the room surprised him. He hadn’t
thought about it before hand, but now that the door was open and the lights
clacked on inside, he realized that he had expected to see a fight still happening.
Instead, all he’s got was all those damn things sitting there like nothing had
happened. Maybe she’d got it wrong. Maybe it was another room and he’d been
swept up into a mistake. He wanted to turn and slap her for making such a stupid
mistake, but he knew that was just his own bullshit talk. He stepped forward and
repeated the stiff action, mechanically and without slowing, entered the room. The
pants on the floor shrank and they weren’t his. He didn’t look at the beds in the
mirror, either of them. He pulled open the top drawer and scooped up socks and
white boxer underwear, two white t-shirts and a pair of Levis. He put the pants
into his arms and felt the flask heavy in one of the pockets. That will come in
handy. Then he stepped to the closet and caught sight of Nollette standing between
the beds, her hands over her chest. She had her head down. She was looking at
her shoes. She didn’t want to see whatever he might pull out of the dresser drawer
because she was lying in wait for him to take her to Joey and Large. He put his
clothes down on the floor. He should have taken his duffle bag out first, so he got
it and then stuffed the clothes in.
“Do you want to take anything of Joey’s?”
“Fuck no,” Wayne yelled. He set the bag down and looked at Nollette and slid his
eyes from her to the blackened stain on the rumpled bed. He saw that boy
nervously fidgeting with a leather strap in his hands down in front of the
bandstand. He was playing at a country fair in Huntley and the boy had come
around behind the big hay wagon to talk with him. The last beat of the set died out.
He bent down and smiled at Kian. He really liked that boy. “Hey, son,” he said, loud
enough for the other kids around to hear him. He felt proud that the boy wanted his
friends to know that his dad was playing in the band. “What can I do for you?”
Kian fidgeted with the leather strap and then found his strength and asked, “Do you
know Proud Mary?” Wayne laughed and looked at the kids, winking, and there
was that pretty girl with the long brown hair that would become his wife. “You bet
I know it and I’ll play it for you as soon as we start the next set.” Kian smiled,
grabbed Wendy’s hand and ran off with her, nearly pulling her off her feet. Wayne
hadn’t known the song and he didn’t play it, but Kian never said anything. The
song didn’t matter to Kian. He’d gotten what he wanted. He’d impressed the girl
and knocked the other boys back a step or two. Wayne remember how proud he
was to be there for his son. No man had ever done anything for him but fuck his
mother and punch him in the face. And now that boy was dead. God be damned if
someone wasn’t going to pay dearly for that.
Nollette put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him toward the door.
“You’ll have plenty of time to come back in tonight after you’ve had some rest,”
she said.
Outside, Wayne answered questions about where Joey might go and who he might
know – he didn’t have answers to either. Nollette said they were doing the best
they could, but it would take time to find him in that mess downtown. She said she
was going, but would put the tape back up and come see him again later in the day.
When her car was out of sight, he got in the van. He’d wait there until Large
showed up. He wanted Large to go with him, break him into the family. Two can
hunt better than one. The first feeling of sobriety, when the happy side of the
drugs has dissipated and only the dread and guilt side of the booze is left, started to
dawn in his head. This was a side of boozing that Wayne never let linger and he
wasn’t going to start now. He lifted the plastic bag of meth out of his left breast
pocket and shook it to get the powder way from the plastic zipper.
There was Large, standing by the window, face shut off, waiting.
He rolled the window down. “Hop in,” he said and nodded to the passenger side of
the van. “We’ve got some chores to do.”
Large slipped into the seat. “What happened here?” he said pointing his thumb at
the door. He was thinking cops had tracked Kian down, finally, and that that
wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
“Joey stabbed Kian,” Wayne said. He let an impulse drive his hand to the bag of
meth. He pulled it to him, opened it and snorted. Fuck it.
Large looked at the door. “Who’s Joey?”
“My son.”
“Where’s Kian?”
“Dead.” Wayne reached over Large’s legs, popped the glove box and took out a
pint of scotch.
“Shit,” Large said. “So much for the great family reunion.”
“I guess so,” Wayne said and took a drink. He reached the bottle across the aisle to
Large. “And now we need to find Joey before the cops do and take him to a
special place I have in Montana.”
WHEN THE PHONE woke Kate at 7 a.m., she had been sleeping for an hour, REM
sleeping, mostly. She rolled toward the sound. The room was dark. The curtains
tight against the streetlights. By the forth ring, she got the earpiece to her head. It
was Nollette. She said she was sorry to wake her, but she had set up a fast and
free way for Kate and Kian to get back to Billings. A Mercy Flight had been
ordered to the airport in Billings to pickup a sick child and bring her to the children’
s hospital in Seattle. Anyway, she told Kate, the crew had agreed to take her and
Kian to Billings in the small jet ambulance. They were leaving in two hours, just in
time for the night coroner to finish his autopsy of Kian and get him to the Boeing
airport. She told Kate to be ready in an hour for a cab to pick her up. She’d take
care of the rented car.
“Is he going to be in a body bag or coffin?” Kate asked. She didn’t want to reject
Kian, but she didn’t think she could stand to fly with him if he was only covered
by a sheet. What if his head stuck out or she could see his cut up chest?
“He’ll be in a transport box. A temporary coffin that will keep his body safe and
from view.” Nollette’s voice then shallowed. “Have you heard at all from Joey or
Large or Wayne?”
Kate said she hadn’t, but Nollette’s question meant they hadn’t found Joey either.
She saw him just as he was before stabbing Kian, leaning back on the dresser,
leaning too far to one side. His right hand buried deep in his front pocket. She had
wondered about his hand stuffed so far in his pocket, curled into a fist, stiff. Was
he holding himself, like he used to as a boy? She remembered thinking that. His
face screwed up at his eyes and mouth, his too small mouth. His thin lips red and
wet. He was so desperate for Kian to leave.
“Have you talked to Catlynn?”
“Do you help all your white trash families like this?”
“Not all of them.” Nollette said. “It’s just a few phone calls from here is all.”
“Well thanks. You’ve been a big help.” Kate pulled the widow curtains back. The
light outside was still mostly the ambient light of the city.
“Hey, like I said, you should thank the people I’ve called. They’re the ones doing
the helping. I’m just calling.”
“How will you ever find him?” A large band of people carrying yellow and blue
signs with “NO WTO” on them walked under her window.
“He’ll turn up, probably in Billings. When you get there, keep an eye out. If you see
him, call 911. I’ve talked to the city police chief as well as the county sheriff, they’
re ready for him if he shows up. I’ll probably come down to talk with you and
your mother some more. Call her and tell her you’re coming back with Kian.”
“Yes,” Kate said, “Yes, but” She paused.
“But?”
“But but but but,” Kate said and put the white phone down in its cradle. She
stepped over to the widow, its curtains glowing with the damp light. She split the
fabric and stood back, the Torah, like her Jewish friends described, and she waited
for the revelation. But there is no revelation for white trash, just beer cans and
Jiffy, black rubber hairbrushes and cheap, chalky, wax lipstick.
“GODDAMN IT KIAN.” Catlynn brushed her black-gloved hand across the top of
the silver box containing her son’s body. The casket lay on a gurney next to the
sleek red and white jet at rest on the dry tarmac. A hearse stopped twenty-five
yards away, next to the glass double doors of the terminal entrance, lurched
slightly then awkwardly turned its back to them. Catlynn, in her best brown leather
coat, ran her worn-gloved hand along the handle of the stainless steal. The oiled
leather left a sheen on the steel. When she wanted, she could see the shadows of
the bonfire, blackened outlines of boxes, belts and lamps against the embers
glowing at the center. She closed her eyes to take in the image, to feel the heat and
the release of letting all of these people’s lives go. She closed her arms around her
chest and stepped away from the casket.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
Kate lifted her eyes from the silver transport box and nodded at her mother.
Mascara streaked her cheeks and was smeared over her eyelids. She sniffed,
wiped her nose then ran her hand up into her hair and pulled.
“Don’t do that, sweetie.”
Catlynn walked back to her and put her arm around her shoulders. They were the
same height, though Kate’s shoulders were broader than Catlynn’s. She led her
daughter through the cavernous airport. Noticing all the men looking at her child,
just like they had since she was a teenager. Poor girl, she thought. At the entrance,
the big brown car was parked where she left it in front of the pneumatic doors.
When the door slid back, they were hit by the hard wind, dry as summer but cold,
like steel is cold. The two women hunched their shoulders against the steady force,
closing the gaps between collar and hair, covering neck and the little space
between the front of their dresses and the space above their breasts. The cold wind
always found that little hole and dove inside. The air smelled of sandstone rocks.
The airport was on the large plateau above the massive Yellowstone River cut.
Catlynn looked at the mountain ranges, the Beartooths and Pryor ridges, and
noticed the absence of snow. She opened the door for Kate and held it against the
wind to let her in. Kate slumped onto the big bench seat and slouched. Catlynn let
the door shut while holding it back, so it wouldn’t slam on her daughter’s hand or
leg. The wind pushed her black skirt against and between her legs. It was
relentless now, always wearing her down, chaffing her skin, cutting channels
through her face, always in her ears, in her head, even in the dark of night, lying in
bed. She didn’t remember the wind being this persistent, this relentless twenty-five
years ago when she and Wayne bought the little farm. Now the wind brushed
through all the branches and canyons of her brain without letting up. She walked
around the back of the car. Head down, hand on black hat, she stepped into the
wind like a wayward ship trying to get right by running into the black emptiness of
the eye of the storm. The big door was the sail and the wind fought against her.
She slipped behind it and the wind slammed it shut, mad at her for leaving, for
closing herself off from it. It loves her. It’s sick for her. It wants her to lay down
on the ground so it can cover her in Earth. It was what Catlynn wanted, too. She
drove away from the airport, down a two-lane stretch of black top that ran next to
the sandstone rim of the cliffs. Tumble weeds skidded and rolled across the road at
sharp, wind-driven angles.
“Boy, this country,” Catlynn said, both hands on the large, hard plastic wheel.
“Going to blow clean away one of these days, if we don’t get some rain.”
When they arrived home, Kate was hungry and thirsty, like the inside of a blown-
out egg. She noticed the smoldering black heap in the front lawn and threw open
the door. She ran to it and saw the blue satin hem of her prom dress, the one she
wore when she was a freshman and went with William, a senior football player.
She pulled the hem from the ash and it tore away from charred fabric melted into
the stack of burned clothes. She looked at the leatherman’s set and the still-
smoking box of melted records and her heart broke again.
“Mom!” she yelled. “Mom! What happened? What happened to all of my stuff?”
She pushed a smoldering stack of coats aside, brushing the black soot off her
hands onto her pants. Under the pile were nearly a dozen shapes and charred metal
pieces that used to be photo albums. She sorted through the fragile, blackened
sheets. At the bottom of the pile, she found a couple of pages with the pictures still
intact. The clearest was of Kian when he was eight sitting on the back of the big
yellow horse. A giant, gentle horse. Kian sat in the saddle, his cowboy hat back on
his head and off to one side, his mouth straight, holsters and plastic guns on his
hips. She put the picture in her shirt pocket. Her screwed up mother didn’t even
understand that this stuff wasn’t hers. It belonged to them, the kids. This stuff
was all that they would ever have for helping them understand just what the hell
they had gone through out here. Just these few cheap things, a cheap prom dress,
plastic toys that broke hours after getting them. Artifacts of a white-trash life, but
they were all she had. She didn’t have a culture or history or family name, just
these pathetic little things sold by the millions all across the nation, and now she
didn’t even have those.
“Mother!” she yelled. “Goddamn you mother!”
Kate got up and ran into the house.
“What have you done!” she screamed at her mother when she found her sitting at
the big table in the dining area. “Did you burn everything?”
“Yes, I did.” She shot Kate with hard look. “You kids don’t need any of that stuff.
You’ve all got your own lives. You’ve got your plane ticket already in your pocket,
I imagine.”
“It’s a round trip ticket, mother. That’s the way you buy them.”
“Yeah, a round trip the hell out of here. Well, I’m glad for it. I’m tired of it. I want
a new life with none of you in it.” She put a glass to her lips and then lit a cigarette.
“Stop yelling at me,” Kate said. She let herself down the front of the cabinets and
sat on the light green floor. Her legs sprawled out. “Why did this family have to be
so screwed up? Why couldn’t we just be a normal family?”
“We were a normal family. They’re all screwed up.”
“No they’re not. I’ve seen plenty of families that weren’t. Kids who were raised by
adults instead of other children.”
“You just keep telling yourself that and maybe some day you’ll get a chance to
make it all happen for yourself. Every family has secrets, even those rich families
in New York you’ve been crying about since you left here.”
She wanted to keep Kate humbled because Kate had spent nearly every waking
hour at home torturing her and pestering her about how great other families were.
How she wished she could live in a nice house. A nice house! How the father was
at home and how they ate dinner and played cards every night. She didn’t even
wonder whether Catlynn had any choices in the matter. She didn’t wonder that
perhaps Catlynn too wanted a nice house, a different life, that perhaps Catlynn
hadn’t had such a rosy childhood either, that perhaps Catlynn had never had a
childhood at all. She was too self-centered to realize that Catlynn swallowed her
pride every day just to keep them off the street, working down at the bar and
begging Wayne not to abandon them. Wearing worn-out clothes. The furniture
was old and tattered and it embarrassed her, but what could she do about it? Let
the kids go without clothes? Let that girl go to the third or fourth prom in the same
dress she’d worn the year before? She even let Kate dream about how great life
outside of the farm would be, because she wanted Kate to have a life that was
better than her own. She let her hang out with that puffy fat teacher who filled her
head with all those fantasies of New York City and college. The girl was just so
selfish, so blind to anything but her own desires. And yet she thought of herself as
so giving, so considerate. Everything revolved around her and her dreams. Catlynn
had let that happen, but not anymore. She wasn’t going to nurse that girl’s
selfishness anymore. She was going to have a life of her own now and no one was
going to get in the way of it.
The pregnant silence between mother and daughter was broken by a car coming
down the lane. The vehicle rolled over gravel to the front of the house and stopped.
A car door slammed. A moment later, the front door opened without a knock and
Wendy stepped into the living room. Kate felt small and pathetic looking up at her.
Wendy’s dark brown hair was still long and shiny and smooth despite the wind.
The long, jealousy-inspiring hair hung loose over her back, like a curtain, like it had
since they were little. Her pretty face was more mature, lines in the skin and she’d
put on a few pounds, but Wendy was as handsome as ever and probably more so.
Time had enhanced her looks. Kate had admired Wendy, the oldest of the bunch,
since they were little. She was always so sure of herself. She had been impervious
to teasing about Kian being younger than her or about being pregnant in high
school and to Catlynn’s outbursts. She didn’t have any questions about herself, so
no self-doubt. Wendy let go of her long black coat where she was holding the
front together against the cold.
“Hi, Kate,” she said. She set the small suitcase in her other hand on the floor and
stepped into the room. “It’s good to see you.”
“You, too,” Kate said.
“Is Catlynn around?”
“I’m in here,” Catlynn sang. “Are the girls with you?”
Wendy walked up next to Kate, gingerly, soft-stepping like she was approaching a
wounded animal and then crouched and sat on the floor next to her. She looked up
to where Catlynn sat in the dining room and smiled. Kate felt grateful.
“I left the girls in Rapid City with my parents,” she said.
“Why didn’t you bring the girls?” Catlynn whined. She looked into Wendy’s eyes.
Catlynn didn’t want to accuse her of being unfaithful to them all, but that was how
she felt.
“It just wouldn’t have been good for them. They would have heard that their father
was stabbed by his own brother and while they know he is dead like the baby is
dead, they don’t have to worry about him because he was stabbed. You know
what I mean? They would have been scared for him, but now all they know is that
he is with the baby and that he’s okay but not coming back.”
It’s hard to argue with Wendy, Kate thought. She just said things so plainly and
clearly that how could you? Catlynn turned her head away. She never argued with
Wendy either.
“So, where is Kian?” Wendy asked. She put her arm around Kate’s shoulder.
“At the funeral home,” Kate said. She was grateful again that Wendy had asked her
and not Catlynn.
“I want to go see him alone, but I’ll be back in the morning. Where is it?”
Kate told her how to get to the place. It was a new funeral home in a suburb of
Billings “with a gravel parking lot.”
Wendy put her hand on Kate’s forearm.
“That’s just the kind of place he would have wanted to be,” she said. She squinted
and nodded to bolster the reassurance. “Where is Wayne?”
“We don’t know,” Catlynn said. “I hope he’s dead.”
“And Joey and this new son, Large At Night?”
“The police are looking for Joey, but there are big protests in Seattle and they can’t
find him,” Kate said.
“His new son, whatever his name, who knows where he is or if he even exists,”
Catlynn said.
“Basically,” Wendy said resolutely as she stood up, “the only one of Wayne’s sons
that has been found is dead.”
“I hope he’s not the last one that falls into that category,” Catlynn said.
“Well,” Wendy said, “Hoping’s not doing.”
She was clearly angry and disappointed by all of it. She stepped away from Kate.
At the door, she turned and smiled small at her.
“You know,” Kate said when Wendy had gone through the door and her car
started, “I’m not staying here tonight.”
“Good riddance.”
LARGE WALKED BETWEEN the low brick buildings and down the wide, empty
streets of Billings. The one skyscraper in town was an expensive hotel made of red
brick. One of the high windows was boarded up, must have been a gun shot. No
one could throw a rock that high. The hotel stood on the railroad tracks that
divided good from bad in the town where so many of his friends and relatives had
lost themselves to drugs and alcohol, where his mom had succumbed to his father.
As he crossed the four sets of tracks, bits and pieces of paper and plastic, pop and
beer cans were suddenly everywhere. The street on the other side of the tracks,
the “wrong side,” was dirty with rocks and sand. This was where he belongs, on
the wrong side. Mexicans, Blacks and Indians and poor white trash. The moon had
been out all day and was setting as the night began in earnest. The businesses along
this street changed from steel and polished glass, to rust, flaking paint and cracks
in windows behind iron grates. Drunks slept in the doorways here, and in the alleys
and even on the sidewalks. Black hair, greasy and long, hung over haggard, brown
faces. He turned right and entered the side streets. The lights were few and far
between. A pack of kids made him want to cross the street even though they
shared dark skin.
Large’s old girlfriend, who had been with him the night he first met Kian, said he
could hide out at her uncle’s house until the Sheriff gave up looking for him. He
wasn’t wanted for shooting any of those people, but the Sheriff wanted to question
him and had put a lot of pressure on all the community leaders to cough him up.
She had agreed to go out tonight, though, thinking maybe Large had money and
they would party. He liked her, Reye Gonzalez. He wanted to get her away from
booze, bricks, pavement and glass, into a wooded area and get to know her, sober,
if she would let him. He wanted to shake her loose. He wanted to tell someone
what he’s seen.
Her uncle’s house was on the street corner. She stood at the top of several steps in
a pool of light from the porch light. He stepped into the light and nodded at her,
long black hair, broad cheekbones, plush lips and dark eyes. Her long legs sticking
out of out-of-date bellbottoms.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
He nodded at her and led her to the corner in silence.
“So, what are we going to do?”
“I’ve set up a camp at the river,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s go there and have
a fire and talk.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, asking what the hell for.
But Large didn’t answer. He walked without talking, which didn’t bother Reye.
The less men talked, the better anyway.
They cut across a field, climbed a fence and headed for the interstate. Large had
started a fire next to the river, but behind a thicket of trees and out of sight of the
highway. He pointed to a round hump covered in blankets and sleeping bags. Reye
sat on a log and stretched her legs toward the fire. Large handed her a beer and she
smiled. That was the best thing that had happened on the date so far.
He gathered twenty big, round river rocks and stacked them next to the fire. Then
he placed the rocks in specific places in the pyre, so that when the wood stack
crumbled, the rocks would rest on a bed of coals. Then he sat next to Reye and
cracked his beer. The stars above them pulsed and Reye, her hands around the
beer can on her legs, was illuminated irregularly. After half his beer was down, he
stood and walked around the sweat lodge. He had built it earlier in the day out of
twelve-foot long, one-inch willow trees that grew like weeds along the Yellowstone
River bank. A couple hours in a good lodge, and one could easily understand at
least one of the lodge’s more secular purposes – deep cleaning.
He pushed wood around in the fire, which was now burning at half the size but
twice as hot. He spread bed of coals around and was meticulous with the rocks. If
they busted or didn’t get hot enough, he and Raye would have a bad sweat. After
dragging her all the way out here in the middle of the night, that would be a
bummer. He checked the lodge, moving sleeping bags and blankets to make sure
the heat would stay inside.
Raye kept thinking that Large was cute and looking at him. Thinking about the rest
of the night was making her stomach flutter. She was also thinking that the motley
hump looked like a dead animal as the fire began to die and burn out. Large turned
on a small, bright flashlight, a pool of grass and dirt appeared at her feet. She
looked toward Large, but could only see the light from the flashlight.
“Almost ready,” he said, sounding eager, like a boy.
He shined the light then at the base of the sweat lodge, looking at the bottom to
make sure it was sealed tight against drafts. He tamped lightly with his foot. Her
eyes were adjusted back to the dark and she could make out his silhouette, long
hair hanging over his profile. Then he swung the light out to a large cottonwood
tree and followed it. At the base of the tree, he shoved his hand in hole and pulled
out a small glass vial. Back at the sweat lodge, he put two drops from the vial into
a gallon ice-cream bucket of water. He walked the vial back. She liked his legs and
his narrow hips, his lanky arms.
“Where’s your pipe and drum?”
“You were supposed to bring ’em.”
She laughed. She liked his laugh.
“You know,” she said, setting the beer on the ground. “I sort of believe in all that
stuff.”
“I sort of do, too.”
The fire died out completely, leaving a few glowing but cooling coals. Large told
her to take her clothes off. He set the flashlight down at his feet and began taking
his clothes off. She took off all but her underwear. She noticed his penis laid out
smooth, brown and sheathed. Somehow he had escaped the circumciser’s knife.
“I put a blanket down inside,” he said. “You can get naked.”
He picked up a short shovel and began digging for a rock in the coals.
“You have to get all of the ashes and coals off of the rocks, or they’ll burn in the
pit and get the lodge too smoky.”
He tossed and rattled glowing rocks on the shovel blade while blowing over each
one, sending the bits of coal and ash back into the fire pit. The rocks, alone in the
dark on the shovel, glowed a deep anemic red. After all the rocks were inside, he
shined the light at the entrance to the sweat lodge.
“Follow me in.” He bent down and crawled in.
Raye had stepped closer when his head disappeared and admired his butt as he bent
low and wiggled in the small opening. When he was in, the light from his flashlight
filled the inside and poured out of the door. She was anxious to join him. She was
getting cold. She didn’t like being on the outside of the lodge while he was on the
inside. She was also glad, however, that he had gone in first. She would have been
shy about sticking her butt up in the air the way Large had. The thought made her
giggle. She bent over and crawled in. The small opening was tight on her hips and
Large reached over her and pushed the flap of plastic back. He yearned to touch
the smooth brown skin. He refrained. Reading his mind, Raye wished he hadn’t.
“I hope it gets hot,” she said. “I’m cold.”
“I think it will.” He turned off the flashlight. The rocks glowed in the pit, small red
orbs floating in space.
“Shit! It’s smoky in here,” she said, beginning to catch her breath. “It’s killing my
eyes.”
“The steam will clear the smoke away.”
“Hurry up then. I’ve got to get out. I’ll come back in when you get the smoke
cleared.” She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed shallow.
Then there was a sudden burst as he dashed water onto the rocks. He did that
twice and the lodge warmed up and the smoke disappeared.
“That’s better,” she said. “Whew.”
“It’s tough to get all of the organic matter out of the pit, so even when the rocks
are clean, it can get pretty smoky.”
“I’ll say,” but she wasn’t thinking about what he had said. Now that she was
warm, she was back to thinking about his lean body. While she was looking in the
dark, imagining his frame, he put more water on the rocks. It was hot enough now
that sweat formed on her brow and upper lip and on her chest.
“This feels great,” she said. And she moved her knee so it touched his.
“I’ll say,” he said and more water burst into steam on the rocks. “When it starts to
get hot, don’t lean up against the plastic or you might get a burn. The plastic gets
pretty hot.”
“That must be eucalyptus you put in the water. It smells great and is clearing my
sinuses right up.”
“When you start to get uncomfortable, just remember to relax. When you feel like
you can’t breath put your face down on the ground and that will help.” More water
hit the rocks. “I’m going to take us up.”
“Go slow,” she said, when the steam hit her face and chest. “Go slow.”
“Try to relax. You’re okay.”
Another shake of water blew up on the rocks.
“I wonder of you can run out of oxygen in here?”
“You won’t. I never have.”
That didn’t make her feel better.
“Goddang,” she said. “Please. Lay off the water for a bit.”
“I will. Relax. Here, wash your face.” He turned on the light, and through the thick
fog, looked for her black nipples. To her, he was surprisingly close. In the dark,
she had imagined him far away even though her knee still touched his. Then he
reached his cupped hands over hers and released the water. She splashed her face
and patted the cool of her hands against her skin, smooth and glistening.
Large shut off the light, then he sprinkled more water onto the rocks.
“Maybe,” she said, “maybe when the water bursts into steam, oxygen is released.”
“Quit worrying.”
“I’m trying.”
Their breath came heavy and sweet to each other through the dark.
Large slashed two big dips of the branch onto the rocks.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, panting.
“Don’t get any part of your body over the pit, the steam will burn you. Lay your
head on the ground.”
She tried to lean over onto the ground, but she felt like she was breathing fire itself
and she needed out.
“I’ve got to get out,” she said.
“Count to ten.”
“One. Two. I’ve got to leave.”
She grasped at the plastic, brushing her hands across it.
“Here,” Large said quick, concerned. “Here’s the door.”
She ducked her head through.
“When you’re ready, come back in or if you don’t want to, wait for me.”
He spoke these last words at her butt as she scrambled and wiggled her hips
through the opening. When her feet disappeared outside, he reached over and
tightened the door down again. He focused on nothing, soundless, void. He tried to
clear his mind, in the dark, by punishing his body. The age-old trick.
A healthy fire, a cleansing fire. Why can’t the world still be innocent enough for
healthy fire? The world was supposed to be inside the sweat lodge, but it was a
fictional world. Large saw stars, constellations and nebula. He slithered out of the
tent, condensed water and sweat coming off him in sheets. Raye had started a
smaller fire in the center of the pit and stood with her back to it, staring up at the
stars. Her firm, lean legs and hips, not wide but there. Her smooth stomach …
these attributes spoke to him first. He stood, wavered and nearly fell over from
light-headedness. All of her contours turned to shadows and washed over him in
waves of recognition. He had seen this woman, this one woman several times in
many forms and this vision was more important to him than sex ever was, this
awareness of the person as a woman. In the flickering light, their bodies danced in
and out of color and solid form, brown flesh tones moved across them, dancing
under the rolling illumination of their consciousness. Raye looked at him and
smiled. Large smiled back.
“How’s it going?” he asked her.
“Really good.”
“This is great, isn’t it.”
“The last time I felt this way, I had taken a whole handful of liberty caps.”
“I know what you mean.”
They stood next to each other, their minds out with the stars and the black
between them. After a few minutes Large asked her to come back in, and she
agreed.
“I’ll take us up slow,” Large said. “We’ve got plenty of heat left in the rocks.”
“How long will the rocks last?”
“Three sweats if they’re good and hot.” Large’s voice sounded to him like it was
at the end of a tunnel. In the dark, he reached out his hand and found her leg miles
away from him. He stretched his neck and body and leaned over the arc of the
world to find her and he kissed her mouth. He splashed water on the rocks and the
heat grew. Her hands reached him from across the ocean. He took them higher and
the sweat began to pour again. He moved over next to her. She had grass on her
hands as she put him in. Sometimes the knot unraveled and the flood of heat felt
like a revelation. Afterward, Large told her about his white family and the murder
he’d seen. She held him.
They left camp at sun up and walked back to her house without. When they
rounded the corner to her uncle’s house, Large saw him first. Sheriff Waldo stood
up out of the lawn chair and put on his hat.
DRIVING AWAY FROM the old farm, where she had spent a large part of her
own youth, hanging out in the barns, kissing Kian and swimming in the creek,
sledding in deep snow down the rocky slopes of the surrounding hills, Wendy felt
relief. She hadn’t thought much about Kian’s family since she married him. She
had taken him from them and the two had a beautiful life until the baby got in
trouble. Then it was like all the hell bred in that family sprang to life in him and
burned him down. She pushed her thoughts from Kian and that pain. She now had
to think about their daughters. They needed a life as far removed from Kian’s
family as possible. Wendy had moved to her parent’s new home in South Dakota
to start a new life divorced from Kian. She drove the road through Huntley, where
her father had run the regional university’s agricultural station. She drove past the
small, quaint, two-story house where she grew up. There was a tan horse in the
back pasture, its backside turned to the cold wind. She remembered her own
brown horse, Silly. It was a good place to grow up. Her father came home every
night and her mother cooked dinner for them all. No one talked a lot, but then they
didn’t have a lot to talk about. Just pleasantries. Not like Kian’s house where the
fights and banter never ended. Those kids even talked in their sleep.
She thought about the girls and how they were growing up. Not what she had
wanted for them. Christmas was coming soon. She had a lot of activities planned.
Sledding and days at the skating rink. She wanted this Christmas above all the
others to be the one they remembered as the Christmas of their youth when they
got older. She wanted this Christmas to be the clear and obvious point where their
new lives began.
The Christmas of Wendy’s youth, the one she remembered most vividly, was a
party at the Waters’ farm. She was fifteen and some of Wayne’s music friends
and their families came to the farm early in the day. By four in the afternoon, the
house was packed with laughing, reeling men and women, kids running between
legs, stealing drinks and cigarettes and taking them outside to the barn where the
they had set up fort. Steam from the vast array of food hung in the air, mingling
with the smoke, making a fog that hung a foot off the ceiling. Wendy’s mom and
dad drank and had dinner, but then left.
Wendy guessed that her parents had no idea what a party at the Waters’ house
became once the sun went down. She used Kate as the excuse for spending the
night. She never mentioned Kian and they never acted interested in each other
around her parents. Her parents didn’t see what they didn’t want to see.
It wasn’t just the booze, cigarettes and stories of thievery, fights and debauchery,
yelled out by both men and women, that made the parties a poor place for kids.
Around midnight came the nudity and hot tub. The kids, nine of them of which
Kate and Wendy were the oldest, set up a poker game at a card table in the back
bedroom after it got too dark and cold to play in the barn. They had cigarettes and
beer stashed in the room. The youngest kids, especially the spry little blond-headed
girl who was about six years old, watched the short hallway that connected the
back bedroom to the party. When an adult came around the corner the girl would
laugh and stumble forward like she had just heard a great joke and was trying to
get a hold of herself. That was the signal and the other kids would put the
cigarettes into a dollop of water in a dish and stuff it along with the beer under the
bed. When the coast was clear, the little girl would walk back to the door and wait
for another chance to be useful. Around midnight one of the boys rushed into the
bedroom from a beer-and-cigarette forage yelling and laughing that all the adults
were out in the lawn getting naked. As one, Wendy, Kate and Kian jumped up and
ran to the front room. It was empty. They crawled across the floor to the big
picture window and peeked out over the ledge. The adults were indeed naked,
ghost flesh with bursts of black hair. They trotted to the big round horse trough.
Then the kids understood the events earlier in the day. Wayne had dragged the big
water trough from a neighbor’s field to the middle of the pasture. He pumped it full
of creek water, using a big irrigation pump on wheels. He used a backhoe to dig
three big holes next to and partly under the trough. Then he started bonfires in
each one. The fires swirled around the tub throughout the day until the water was
nearly boiling. The adults splashed into the water yelping and wooing at the heat.
Kian jumped up and grabbed the beer cooler, dragged it out the front door and
across the lawn to the hot tub. The adults laughed and whooped while Kian handed
out beer and lit cigarettes.
This was Christmas with the Waters.
WALDO LEFT THE station with Nollette and headed as far from Wayne’s house
as possible for as long as possible. He had people looking for Wayne to clear this
up before the big city cop got her tits in an uproar. He had tried to call Wayne’s
house, but there was no service. That looked bad, but he had blown it off in a
showy way like that happens all the time out here in the country and it didn’t mean
anything. Nollette seemed like a smart woman. He was a little worried and that
irritated him. She was hot to know why Wayne was in Seattle and Waldo knew of
no other reason than he was out there delivering a load of stolen clothes. She was
hot to track down this Indian, too. Some cops just hate mystery men. Some cops
just get all worked up over a murder. Some cops – like himself, Waldo decided as
they cruised down I-90, far south of Wayne’s house toward Joey’s trailer – some
guys like him accept that bad things happen and capturing people and stuffing them
into the back seat of the cruiser doesn’t change anything. It’s just what people do
to make themselves feel like they have control over the world, that they can make
up for the horrible nature of being alive. Night was down all around them as they
turned onto Pryor Creek Road with the yard lights of the truck wash blazing in
front of them. Waldo had learned during his first tour in Vietnam, where he met
Wayne, that there was no slowing the crushing blows of people against people.
You just had to learn to use their fighting for your own gain.
“Well here we are,” Waldo said, swinging his giant head around to look at Nollette.
“He lives in the trailer. But if he’s in there, I’ll eat my hat.”
“I don’t expect him to be in there either,” Nollette said, thinking this guy can’t be
that bad of a cop. She had heard he was very protective of his jurisdiction and
attempted to keep other cops out of his hair by being friendly and kind and helpful.
Just like criminals when you start getting close to their operation, but she wasn’t
here to ferret out a bad cop. She was here to find Joey.
Yep, people were going to kill, rape and steal from each other and that was that,
Waldo thought as he turned to the door of the crappy little trailer. They noticed the
shadow of a head in the window at the same time.
“I’ll go up there,” Nollette said.
“No. No. No,” Waldo said. “If he’s in there, he’ll listen to me. I know him.”
He stepped out and rose. Two strides and he had the door to the trailer open.
Nollette had unlatched her door and put her foot in position to get out and give
chase if Joey was in there and got passed Waldo, however unlikely that seemed.
Waldo put his long arm into the trailer and led out a woman with long brown hair.
The woman stepped down into Waldo’s arms and put hers around his neck. She
hugged him. Her thick brown hair falling across his arm.
Waldo led Kate out of the bright headlights, to the side of the cruiser. They stood
outside the car, far enough away that their voices couldn’t be heard inside. They
spoke softly.
“What happened?” Waldo was looking down into the shadows of Kate’s eyes. Her
face was pale and her hair disheveled.
“Joey just jumped up and stabbed Kian. I don’t know why he did it. I’ve been
trying to figure it out, but I can’t remember anything that would make him do that.
We were talking about Kian drinking too much and Joey just jumps up and jams
the knife into Kian’s chest then he runs away.”
“Was he on drugs?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t seen him before I went in there. I went in there to find
Kian, which I did. Kian needs help. He’s so skinny. I just wanted to help Kian and
then Joey just jumps up and hit him. I couldn’t believe it at first. He jumped back
and blood pumped out of Kian’s chest like a little geyser.” Kate laughed at the
stupidity of it.
“Okay, take it easy,” Waldo said, his long arm reached just behind her shoulder and
he lightly rubbed her back. “I need you to be quiet, but … wait” Waldo heard a
window on the cruiser coming down. “Hey!” he yelled back at the car, “Give me
just a moment here. You’ve already got her statement right, so give me just a
minute here, detective.”
The window rolled back up. “Bastard knows I’m not a detective,” Nollette said.
“What was Joey doing in Seattle, anyway?” Waldo was exasperated. “He was
supposed to be working here. I got him this fucking job to keep him out of
trouble.”
“He was with Wayne.”
“What was Wayne doing there?”
“I don’t know, but he took a truck load of something there in a cattle trailer.”
“Look,” Waldo put both hands on her shoulders and she looked up into his face.
“You can’t tell her what Wayne was doing there. Did you?”
“No,” Kate said. “I never tell anyone what my father does or who he knows. I
learned that lesson a long time ago.”
“Good girl.” Waldo put his arms around her shoulders and hugged her again. “Let’
s go find Wayne and Joey and see if we can’t get this all worked out.”
They turned back to the car. Kate just wanted to get out of town. It had been a big
mistake thinking she could come out here and save her brother, her family or
anyone. She had let her highest hopes back in the New York delude her into
thinking that the men of the West could be saved. They were all fucked up and
nothing would change that. The quickest way out of Montana for her was to do
whatever Waldo said because he would smooth it all out, put the pieces in place
and then she would be allowed to get the fuck out and once she was out she was
never ever coming back for any reason whatsoever.
Waldo put the shifter into reverse.
Nollette decided she wasn’t going to sit in the car again. Waldo was just too slick
for her. She didn’t trust him before, but now she just felt for sure that he wasn’t
being honest. He was keeping something from her. They drove in silence to the
gravel lane leading to the farm.
“Shit,” Waldo said.
When they crested the little hill that overlooked the farm, the barn fire lighted a low
hanging cloud of smoke with flames in random hot spots. A giant tree was on fire,
its limbs glowed like red hot lines shot through a fractured window. The smoke
drifted over the ground and up the lane, slowly growing more dense. When they
pulled up to the house, it floated in the gray sea. Only the windows glowed
distinctly. Light spilled around the half-open front door.
The fire appeared to be nearly out, though the smoke glowed red and orange
around it. They saw the form of two people hugging and stumbling toward the car.
Nollette popped her door, so Waldo jumped out fast and took two long steps
toward the two people. He quickly outpaced her. He recognized Catlynn’s voice
before he saw her. The other person looked like a woman and Waldo let his
shoulders down. Waldo flinched and grabbed his gun out, more because he saw
Nollette pulling hers out. He pointed the long barrel at the woman who was holding
Catlynn.
Large and Catlynn stopped. Catlynn struggled to get free but now Large didn’t
want to let her go and stand there all alone. So, he held her tight. Her legs began to
fail.
“Let her go,” Nollette yelled at Large. “Let her go and get down.”
“Help me!” Catlynn screamed.
“Jesus Christ!” Kate was out of the car now, too. She stepped fast and broke into
a run, but hit the ground hard when Waldo kicked her legs out.
“Everybody stand the fuck still!” Waldo yelled. “Boy, let her go or I’m going to
blow your head off.”
Convinced me, Large thought. He released Catlynn.
She fell onto her butt and then scrambled away from him like he was on fire. Large
put his hands in the air. Crazy goddamn white people everywhere. Catlynn
practically flew off the ground into Kate’s arms. Kate quickly turned away with
her and went back to the cruiser.
“Get down now,” Nollette said.
Large flattened himself onto the wet grass. Waldo stepped to him and put his foot
on Large’s back.
“Where’s Wayne?” Nollette yelled.
“In the house,” Large said. The ground jumped and for a second he wondered
what could make the ground move so hard and so fast, then he was gone.
Nollette had turned away and Waldo kicked the Indian to keep him down because
she was heading to the house too fast, too eager. She was going to get killed and
then all kinds of shit would go wrong. She yelled something into the house, her
arms holding the gun straight and hard at something inside, something that made
her eyes wide. Just as he stepped behind her and pushed the door open out of his
way, her face jerked. A loud clap smashed the air, and then another breaking the
smoke into shards all around him. He put his gun up and shot at the figure standing
in the inner dark. He aimed for the heavy meat of the shoulder and fired. Wayne’s
head bobbed forward and then his upper body flew backward. He landed on his
back, his torso just in the rim of the bright light falling out of the kitchen. His arms
flung out and the little gun tipped out of his hand. The sudden silence was broken
by screaming. Wayne’s arms and hands and the front of his pearl-snap blue
Western shirt were covered in blood. Waldo’s eyes adjusted to the back lighting
from the kitchen and he saw the body at Wayne’s feet. Joey’s eyes were open,
searching. Blood oozed from his mouth and nose. He sputtered, trying to talk or
breath. Waldo lowered his gun and looked at Nollette. She had been shot in the
face. The bullet had entered through the bridge of her nose. The other had grazed
her cheek. She was still breathing. He stepped into the dark living room to Wayne
and gripped his gun tight. He had missed Wayne’s shoulder and hit him square in
the neck. The big gun had nearly cut Wayne’s head off. His eyes were open wide
with the surprised look of a billion years of people dying when they never expected
it would ever happen to them. Seeing his old friend dead stung. He turned back to
Nollette. He kneeled over her and put his hand on her mouth and nose. The big city
detective had brought this whole fucking nightmare to his little city out here in the
country and she was not going to live to tell the tale. Nollette’s hands grasped his
arm. She struggled and then shuddered and her muscles relaxed. Waldo lifted his
hand tentatively, making sure the last breath had been taken. He looked up, and
right in front of him was Large, still laying on the ground. He looked directly into
Large’s eyes. Waldo moved to shift his gun from his left hand to his right, but
Large was faster on his feet than Waldo was at shifting the gun. Large sprinted
back toward the house, cutting off any angle Waldo could get on him, and he
disappeared behind it. Waldo trotted around the side of the house, but the Indian
was gone. He walked back to the yard. Catlynn was kneeling over Kate, leaning
over one knee behind the cruiser. Waldo touched her shoulder and she crawled
away.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Kate’s eyes were staring up at the stars. She was breathing fast, gulping. Blood
spread out around her breast.
“Mom,” she said. Then her eyes flattened and closed. Her breathing shallow.
“Goddamn it!”
Waldo ripped her shirt open and there was the tiny hole just above her breast,
bubbling. He opened the cruiser’s door and called in on the radio that there was an
officer down. There had been a shooting and they needed ambulances down at 301
Pryor Creek Drive. He told Catlynn to hold Kate. When he checked on Joey, the
boy had died. Waldo threw his hat on the floor.
AS SHE CONVOLESCED, Kate thought about the conversation with her former
high school teacher and about her family. She remembered Kian and Joey. She had
plenty of time to think about it. They were the Sons of Wayne, no different or less
powerfully than Cain and Able were the Sons of Adam. They led cursed lives that
were no less complicated or emotionally driven as any other brothers in society.
Without language, they lived their emotions. They wrote their lives into space and
time as much as any other family. They just wrote their books in the one big book
of genetics and on the land, the land that wouldn’t forget. They wrote their names
into the wooden table tops in bars across the plains. They left their guts out on the
sidewalk and gravel alleyways the way gladiators left their guts spread across the
streets of Rome. They left their blood on the course and waterproofed sheets in
smoke-stained hotels out at the edges of every city and small town in the world.
They popped out kids and spread their seed and left each other crying on the
broken steps leading into the rusted out trailer. But they were human and human
beings make culture everywhere they are. They make society and history, even if it
is a history remembered only by the Earth, written, erased by wind and rewritten
on the plains or in the dirt gutters of small towns. They left themselves wherever
they drew their last breath, like Kian in that hotel room in Seattle. Kian hadn’t died
there alone or without meaning. In fact, he died exactly where men like him were
born to die and that is meaningful. They spoke to God like every human has ever
spoken to god, with their defiance and willful intensity to make god believe in
them. They lived out their holy lives in profanity. Survival, she understood, was
not the first instinct of her people.
When she had recovered and before she left for New York, she learned that Waldo
had found Large and given him a job driving vans for a movie company. The little
Hollywood encampment was just up the creek from her mother’s place, where she
had spent the past several weeks. She borrowed a pickup from her mother’s
friend, a woman who had been spending a lot of time there, and drove to the
camp. At the gate leading on to the pasture stood Large, wearing a loose white T-
shirt and blue jeans. Waldo had arranged the meeting. The mid-august sun had
begun to set in for another day of torching faces and burning the land. Large
opened the door and stepped back behind it. When Kate cleared the car roof, she
was nearly as tall as Large. They caught each other’s eyes and smiled. She stayed
behind the open door for a moment, looking over his shoulder at the encampment
of scaffolding, lights, white panels of light diffusers and camera cranes. She
looked back at him and they laughed.
“You look just like him,” Kate said.
“So do you,” Large said. “You’ve lost weight”
“Well, getting shot will do that.” She felt nervous now. Large was indeed striking
in much the same way that Wayne had been, especially the eyes. Medium size
irises, but the color, blue for Wayne and nearly black for Large, was set back from
the cornea – a flat disk swimming far back inside the eye, like a door or a flower
or a window. She couldn’t decide.
Large put his hand around the door and led her out onto the pasture. He turned her
toward the lights and equipment.
“They’re shooting a wagon wreck. It’s fun.”
“Great,” she said.
They walked up to the edge of the film equipment and stood, watching for a
moment. In front of them, a covered wagon was being pushed up onto its wooden
wheels. A man stood up from behind a tall, woody sagebrush and a woman with a
headset walked two children away from the wagon.
“Can’t they just clip this scene from any of the fifty movies with scenes just like it
and then tape it onto the roll?” Kate said.
“I don’t know. I’d ask but they’re really touchy about that stuff around here. No
joking around, which can be tough on an Indian.” Large looked at her face. “Let’s
go to my pickup. I have something I want you to have.”
She turned with him, stepping over a round patch of prickly pear. At the
impromptu parking lot, cars and pickups lined up in neat rows on the hardpan and
brown grass, she remembered something about Kian.
“Kian hated it that people parked their cars in regular, prescribed patterns no matter
where they were, as if they were machines just following instructions.”
“Kian was a smart guy. I’d have to say I never met anyone like him until I met
Wayne and your mother.” He stopped at the driver’s side of a blue Ford pickup
with bullet holes all along the side and large sections of rust, like a flesh-eating
disease under the skin.
“So you’re in with Waldo now?”
“I’m not in with anyone, but I need a job now and then and Waldo is interested in
giving me one.”
He popped the handle on the door and jerked it open.
“There it is. That’s what I want you to have.”
Inside on the bench seat was a guitar. A reddish brown Martin D-18 with bright
new strings. The body’s veneer was worn and cracked and had several deep
scratches in it. The wood between the frets was worn into deep groves. Kate
recognized the guitar. She had watched her father play it a million times. She
remembered him sitting in the chair in the living room of their house singing the
“Big Rock Candy Mountain” to her. Before going to the bar, he would swing the
guitar onto his lap and belt out a few tunes. Sometimes just for her. His black hair
slicked back. He wore a red and black Western shirt with a deep red V laying over
the black shoulders and onto his chest and the white pearl snaps shined and
glimmered. He’s smiling, performing to her and she’s transfixed, gazing into his
clear blue eyes, the smile lines converging. She remembers she loved him, but she
doesn’t have the feeling. Just the memory of having had it. She remembers she
used to imagine that he was a magic person, like in her books, and he was passing
something to her, a power or a knowledge that would someday transform her into
a queen or a witch. She feels that power in her, a feeling that makes her want to
wear cowboy boots and walk through deserts. She picked the guitar up by its neck
and swung in out of the pickup and into the sun. She held the neck tight enough
that the strings hummed.
“Thank you,” she said.
Large smiled shyly and nodded, looking down at his boots.
Kate twirled the guitar and looked it over again, one hand on the bottom, letting the
neck spin in her hands. “Thank you.”
“When I saw you, you reminded me of Wayne. The first time I saw him was on
stage in Seattle. He played this crazy Indian song. It was great.”
Kate pushed Large’s black hair away from his cheek and kiss it. He smelled like a
brother and lifted his eyes to meet hers.
“I have to catch my plane,” she said. “Come to New York.”
“I’d like that,” Large said.
Kate walked away. She took long strides, maybe longer than she’s ever had.
Wayne’s guitar swung at her side.
“The best thing you can do is to stay away from white people,” Large’s mother
had told him. But that didn’t seem right to Large. They were already here and
already into everything, even his blood.