American Masculine (17 page)

“I wasn’t much of a husband to Cherise,” Devin said finally, and he looked south along the river, off to where the color of the water became less distinct and the mountains crowded the river from vision.

“Where is she now?” his father asked.

“She’s gone, Dad. Lives in Boston. She took Bethen with her.”

His father took a smooth stone in his hand. He began rubbing the dirt from it with his fingers. “I’m a fool, Devin,” he said.

“We’re both fools,” Devin said.

WHEN HIS FATHER began again the sun was white and high. The mountains went up into the blue; the sky was their companion. Bright clouds flung snow that gathered in the tops of the crags and fell sustained, sweeping to the river, to the shore. Devin’s father was silver and brown, beaten of weather and stone, hair like mercury, skin like copper. He caught five straight.

“They’re on,” he said. “Better go give it a try.”

Devin did as he suggested and walked upstream to a small bend in the river where he readied his line. He cast the line into the air and began again the rhythm. He drew it back to reach the mountains. He set it forth to touch the river.

In the late afternoon they turned toward home. Driving, Devin’s father had the wheel in one hand, the other he rested on Devin’s shoulder. At day’s end the mountains had gone blue again. He waits for me, Devin thought. From the horizon the sun gave way and it was long after dark when they arrived. The apartment was quiet. There was a light on in the kitchen. When Devin turned to his father to say good night the two were face-to-face. Devin leaned toward him. His father gathered him in his arms.

—for the two we lost before they were born

EARLY MORNING, April 4, in the small square of their bedroom a thin light opened the dark. When the light became stronger, Zeb emerged and imagined the sunrise on the edge of the world. The sun shone to the city and struck the sidewall of the trailer—a single-wide shortbox, late sixties, early seventies. He felt the light, and the stiffening of her body. She was awake and trying not to wake him, and he thought he would let himself come fully up from sleep to behold her. But he was unable to wake himself, still in the clarity of the dream, the clean disoriented line of reason. The great lighted neural pathways made everything crisp and alive, and he slept the sleep of the dead. Sara lay on her back, staring toward the ceiling, her body straight under the covers, arms to her sides. Watching her, he felt pressure in his chest.

Born in the same year, they were thirty-three.

Beside her in the yellow light, Zeb took her hand and brought her fingers to his lips. Before he’d fallen asleep last night he had done what Sara asked of him, sung the song she wanted, her favorite song, a love song whose words now, in the dream, eluded him. Pregnant, she needed him to help keep her back from using. He admitted they were users. Two miscarriages. A third seemed sure. Open your mind, he told himself. Believe. If not for you, then for her. Holding Sara’s hand he felt her bones and the tightness in her body. He was trying to soften her, hoping his head was wrong, but her voice became shrill, alarming him. Before they were married she had cut off the tip of her ring finger at the sawmill in Ashland and her mother said she never uttered a word, just went to the hospital in Lame Deer with a straight face. This is no good, Zeb thought. “Water,” she said. “Washcloth.”

He slid from the bed, ran down the hall to the kitchen. His body seemed ethereal to him, caught as he was in another world, and as he returned he didn’t know what to do. In the bedroom the shades formed dark rectangles, white-blind at the edges, linear and numinous. Zeb held the glass of water in one hand, the wet washcloth in the other. The star quilt her mother made was thrown from the bed, the slip sheet coiled around Sara’s lower body and entwined with her legs. The crazed sounds from her mouth intensified, and she made fists on the hem of her nightshirt—sleeveless gown, yellow pastel and calf-length, of the rayon blend she liked. She opened her hands, bent them upward to the hair at her temples, entangled her fingers in her hair, made more fists.

He felt dumb. He stared at the glass in his hand. He leaned down and touched her face with the glass and she took it from him, drinking hastily. He gave her the wet washcloth.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Sara shook her head, warding him off. “Please,” he said.

She didn’t move. Her voice hitched like that of a broken animal and it seemed he saw the noises she made, gray-colored as they issued from her mouth. She won’t give herself permission, he told himself. When had he dreamed of her ring finger, elegant and tan and perfect? He freed her legs from the sheets and lifted her in his arms, surprised at his own strength, and as he held her it seemed she was there as a calf or a lamb, she was that small.

ZEB WAS ON the reservation, walking an open field in the morning of a new snowfall. The snow fell slow and big in the gray sky. A white veil covered the ground. He was six months into his life on the rez. The night before, he’d been tired and drunk enough to sleep where he was, so he had lain down on the sidewalk outside the Boys and Girls Club at 2:00 a.m. A few hours later the cold came and he woke and decided he would walk to warm himself. The blood to his legs felt better, the movement, and he blew heat into his hands, forgot about the cold, and kept walking.

He found himself three miles from Lame Deer in an open field that ended on a thin forest of jack pine. Still below the line of the world, the sun had started its burn, red-gold, far off among the trees. Snow filled the sky, and it surprised him, the loud hush of it among the timothy grass and young sage. His shoes were soaking wet.

He thought of himself as a child, and of his father. A slight wind carried the damp, pungent odor of the sagebrush, the smell of grasses, the wet smell of dark soil. In a rage the old man had thrown a cue ball at him, striking him on the skull behind the ear, knocking him out. He was ten years old. Walking, he felt the heat of it even now, a ridge of pain at his neck and up into the bones of his head. When he had come to, he couldn’t see, and he felt warm blood on his skin. He was in his father’s arms, hanging limp. He didn’t know where his mother was.

A meadowlark’s song at first light beckoned the sun. The sun crested and flared long gold beams through the trees and out over the field. He decided to enter the forest and walk into the light, in through the dead growth to the end of the treeline. From there he could look down to where the sun had come from and then he would head back to town. He had started that way but when he neared the first line of the forest, something drew his attention—a throaty sound, far off on his right. In the distance, in the curve of a draw he saw a rust-colored form. He made it out to be a cow on its side, bawling and straining its head and neck upward. He thought of killing the cow, getting some steak for himself, cooking it and eating it and drinking some milk back at the house where he was staying. He was on rez land, fenceless, without bounds. Stranger things had happened, like back when a big eighteen-wheel pig truck overturned on the highway and everyone cut school or left their jobs to kill pigs for supper. No one would care if he claimed some for himself, he thought.

Yes they would.

He was white and he felt it.

He moved toward the sound, the cow’s noise loud over the plushing his tennis shoes made in the snow. It took him some time to get to the animal, the sage grown tight in the draw, and the cow being farther off than he imagined. When he reached the cow he saw she was a heifer, and she had given birth to a dark brown calf. The mother lay on her side, the glistening calf curled in a ball between her front and hind legs, up against her stomach. She licked the calf, cleaning the nose and mouth, the sleek fur of the head. Keeping his distance, he sat cross-legged on the snowy ground and watched the scene. His head felt watery from how drunk he was. He liked the feel of the soft earth, bendable as clay beneath him. He liked how the snow soaked through his jeans. The mother nuzzled the calf’s face. Seeing the simple, expectant look in her eyes dismantled him and he put his face in his hands.

HE CARRIED SARA through the bedroom door and bumped his shoulder on the doorjamb. His actions all felt literal, his

choices predetermined. I could be a good father, he thought. In the hall he hit her knee squarely on the wall. She winced and struck at him with her nails. He jerked back and forced the anger down, fearing something darker in him would awaken, something unalterable. Near the front of the trailer he crossed the main room as he braced Sara to his chest and cradled her so that he wouldn’t harm the bulb that was her stomach. He couldn’t decipher the dream from reality. He pressed his face to hers and whispered I love you. He pushed the door wide and emerged into the day as from a cave.

On the tan bench seat of the Impala he set her down, then ran to his side of the car and drove. She moaned and curled fetal on the wide vinyl, her head on his thigh, her feet on the passenger door. He drove blind, spinning from the square lot of trailers, down the straightaway on Fifty-first, descending the down ramp until he merged blatantly with the traffic on I-5.

He hardened his face and made his vehicle a fist. The other motorists, equally aggressive, rode their engines, forcing the fast metal of their cars. He heard the high whine of the tires. In the air ahead a thick bloom of exhaust belched from the back of an old truck. The fumes in oily charred clouds came on, rising before they went vaporous and disappeared behind him. He smelled the road smell, his wife’s perfume, the sweetness of her sweat. He was free, speeding from space to space, then blocked in again. He jammed the brake, punched the gas. The ocean, the blue lie of the sound and its bays, and out far the Olympics shrouded in white, the grid of concrete and wires—Seattle—to him everything was nothing.

On the seat beside him, he saw things he wanted to avoid seeing. Sara’s head was pressed to the right front pocket of his jeans. Her nightgown, tucked at her feet earlier, was up near midthigh now. Her hands touched the gown at her crotch and he found in that bunching of hands and gathered cloth precisely what he hoped he wouldn’t. No blood showed, yet he imagined her body a river. He watched her fine-boned fingers, slender, translucent, nearly hueless and pale brown. He envisioned again a real ring on her finger, not the thin one he had given her, the one bought in Billings, used, simple as a band of copper. He saw her finger healed, not stunted from the saw blade, no absent last knuckle making her hand awkward, and deformed. In his mind he saw a very fine ring, graced by diamonds. Only what’s real, that’s what we need. That’s all. But driving, he couldn’t remember a single thing he and she had ever talked about, or why they might have pressed their faces to one another as they had, why their hands would be locked together in his dreams. In dreams of his own fury, his own discord. In every dream.

He remembered at the start he had exerted so much energy fighting the idea that he needed her, finally killing it and succeeding in not needing her, then staring into her ashen face with his own expressionless eyes so that she’d know he had overcome her. He’d felt ill about himself then, and now he felt out of sorts again. His mind kept warping things and the distortion felt familiar like kin, or the way mescaline bent his thoughts and sent him undulating. A run of meth could unravel him. He hadn’t slept for days.

She sat up and stared out the windshield, out over the hood to the roadway, to the push of cars. If there is blood her hands cover it, he thought, they cover where it must be spotting her gown. Even without evidence, he convinced himself there was blood, down beneath where her fingers had dug in, and he felt his thoughts constrict and he couldn’t shake them. He’d been clean for nearly six months, hadn’t he? Now he couldn’t remember if he was still clean or blown to oblivion. Sara was silent. He kept looking at her to be sure and each time though he knew his head was bent, his bulky zigzagged mind ruined things and his thoughts flared. She sat there so quiet. He felt lost.

THEY MET in the alley behind Lucky Lil’s, the modernized gas station/casino in Lame Deer. January, southeast Montana, Northern Cheyenne reservation: Zebulon Sindelar and Sara Runs Too Far. His family had called him Zeb, but she called him “Z” and it was the first time he liked his name. He wished everyone would call him Z, the sound as smooth as he wanted to be.

“Ha ho,” she’d said when he sat down next to her. “Cold, enit.”

He had nodded.

“Will you get me some more?” She tipped an empty Styrofoam cup his way.

He walked around the building into Lucky Lil’s to get two coffees. From the start he loved how she said
enit,
an affectionate word, a connecting word that everyone on the rez seemed to use. The two of them sat with their backs to the wall of the gas station, knees in their arms. They held the Styrofoam cups in their hands and steam lifted from the small round openings, up into their faces. Keep warm, he thought, let the alcohol burn down. She was Northern Cheyenne and, he decided, not as ugly as him. Her looks weren’t much. Her frame could be attractive. She was lithe, and powerful, a descendant of Chief Morning Star, she said.