American Masculine (18 page)

They talked a lot and did little, and in late September, they married on a cutbank above the Powder River, a drunk priest officiating. Sara’s mother, her brother, and her uncle Benjamin were present. Her dad was knifed in the throat at a house party when she was three. On the bank, Zeb cussed under his breath at Sara’s uncle for trying to take over the wedding. The uncle had done some smudging with sweetgrass and used a gold eagle fan to waft smoke in their faces. Sara stared at Zeb, but kept silent. Zeb’s own family knew nothing.

“AT COLSTRIP, the health teacher said fifty percent of girls on the rez are sexually abused.” Zeb had grown up in Colstrip, white town, thirty-five miles away. They sat on the sidewalk in front of Lucky Lil’s, feet in the street. They’d been married six months. Beaters drove by trailing plumes of exhaust, broke-down boats from the seventies or early eighties. They’d seen Matthew Bird’s old Lincoln Continental, Blake Big Head in his Monte Carlo, and twice Jonas Woodenthigh’s white Cadillac Eldorado, rusted at the sideboards and wheel wells, cruising. Jonas rode low in the front seat with only his forehead and the black shock of his hair visible.

“White numbers, Custer,” she said. Then she thought about it, looking off. “Probably higher, really.” She looked at him. “Sad, enit.”

“Crazy,” he said.

She looked at the houses across the street and he followed her eyes and saw the dirt yards, the clear glass of the windows. The houses stood curtainless but for a bedsheet in the living room window of the house one down from where they sat. The sheet hung off kilter, likely put up with tape or nails. Set randomly on the slant of hills up and back from the road, the houses looked like square Easter eggs. In the late morning the buildings seemed sleepy. Beyond them, outhouses littered the hillsides. The outhouses had no doors and from where Zeb sat the openings were dark rectangular holes. Passageways to somewhere else.

“Four suicides in one month last year,” she said. “Two of them good friends of mine.”

“Girls?” he asked.

“Men,” she said. “Bobby Scalpcane. Buster Two Moons. C. L. Not Afraid. Lester Beartusk.” Her face was matter of fact. “They used guns.”

LIKE HIM, SHE FELT the need to get out. Lame Deer, no good jobs, the first miscarriage. They decided on Seattle and bought a ‘79 Impala with her rez money. Before leaving, though, she said her mind. “Z, you need to be at peace with Benjamin.” They were in her mom’s house, in bed watching a video animated with talking animals, a bright-lit land, a symphony of sounds and grave words. He told her he didn’t know how. Two nights later, past midnight, Zeb observed Benjamin leaning over a sleeping child. There were still fifteen or twenty people downstairs, all in the living room around three separate card tables, losing money at poker or blackjack, some playing cribbage. A gambling cult flick showed on the big TV, the giant box Sara’s mother had won at bingo. The lead actor, about man-sized on the huge screen, had set up his friend on a card scam by cheating him behind his back with a group of cops so they both ended up getting their faces beaten in. From the portable stereo in the kitchen, guitars burned clean and wild. Sara’s mom stood over a vat of oil, making fry bread tacos.

With the plumbing out Zeb had gone upstairs to relieve himself out the side window of the bathroom. When he emerged he saw Benjamin down the hall to his right, kneeling over one of his sons. The boy was his second born, a five-year-old asleep in the hall and Zeb hadn’t noticed him before. The boy lay on his stomach, one arm tucked under, the other extended, face to the side. Benjamin lay down next to the child. He smoothed the boy’s hair and stared at his face. He kissed the boy’s cheek. When Benjamin stood up to go back downstairs he noticed Zeb and smiled.

“Ha ho, Dirty White Boy,” he said. “Any more money for me to take?” He’d already taken Zeb for more than thirty.

“No,” said Zeb.

“Too bad,” said Benjamin, and he laughed and put his hand on Zeb’s shoulder. “White money is always the best, enit. How ‘bout we get some fry bread?” Benjamin motioned with his lips down toward the kitchen. The smell of the hot bread made Zeb’s mouth water.

“I’ll follow you,” Zeb said.

“You done that all night, enit,” said Benjamin, chuckling as he walked downstairs.

Zeb nodded and laughed. He was good and drunk and it felt good to laugh, to see Benjamin with his son and be given a second chance. He reached and touched Benjamin’s shoulder, and they paused on the stairs.

“I’m sorry for how I was at the wedding,” Zeb said.

“It’s nothing, Z,” said Benjamin, looking him in the face. He play-punched Zeb on the chest. Then he laughed again, shook his head, and said “Dirty White Boy, enit.”

TOPPING EIGHTY ON I-5 Zeb cut a line between two semis to the outside lane. He looked at Sara, still upright, head back, eyes closed. He watched the road. He wasn’t sure she was real. Reaching for her arm he touched a sheen of sweat that made him shudder. I don’t know her middle name, or why she parts her hair down the middle, why she slips her braids in front as she does, tied at the end in two-colored cloth—turquoise and black yesterday, orange and red the day before. Nothing today. Why that face, and why above her forehead the high abandon of her hair? Luminous like a woman made of filament, or fine glass. Backlit from the light of day, her body a fluted vase, her hair like fire, jet-black on her head, the shape of it plumed, not flat with the usual ravenlike texture, not parted, not braided. She’d pulled at it, making the root line at the temples pink and raw. The bones shone in her face: her jawline and cheekbones, the orbital bones around her eyes.

He liked her face, and it came to him now in the dream of Seattle, he knew her less, or not as purely as it seemed he had, but he found her more beautiful. He blamed it on the mescaline. She needs me, he told himself. The second miscarriage came a year ago. She’s too thin, he thought, her head tipped back on the seat, arms slack, her skin grayish and pale. He imagined her eyes behind the closed eyelids, the black minute disks of her irises, the darker black of the pupil at the center. He was struck by a sense that a song, or a prayer, or something sacred should be done, but he had nothing. And she had nothing. Or at least he’d never heard of what she had, or never asked. The sweat on her had started to dull and with the noise of the engine he couldn’t hear her next to him. She was no longer crying. He reached and touched her arm again. The skin was cool. He took his hand away. She looked straight ahead. “She’s dead,” she said.

Her voice, disembodied, too loud between him and the glass of the windshield, shocked him. It’s the way I’ve angled myself, he thought, and he moved some and leaned forward more, shifting his weight so that he glared over the wheel, out at the dividing lines. It scared him, the power she held. He lost something of himself. He saw his mother’s face. He pictured Sara next to him on the bank of the Powder River the day they were married. They wore the ribbon shirts her mother made, purple shirts with long pink and gold ribbons sewn to the shoulders and chest. In the wind the ribbons trailed behind them.

“The colors of earth and sunset,” Sara had said.

“Yes,” he’d answered.

“The baby’s dead,” she said now.

He said nothing. He stared at the road.

The hunger came, feral, like a disease.

With his left hand he drove. With his right he rifled the glove compartment, the crease of dash and windshield, under the seat. He wanted to leave and come back from somewhere else. He’d emerge from a place of dirt streets, from the hot space behind the middle-class houses back in Colstrip on post-Independence Day, where the food from the alley barrels could be had for the taking. From there he would succeed in rising back to where he needed to be, back to the driver’s seat for the April 4 drive on I-5 where the words remained like two loud claps, the twice-formed flowering of blue-yellow flames from the barrel of a gun alive in the dark.

It was what she said. He disliked words. He hated them. He wished he could be deaf. Everything is confusion, he thought, everything a dream. He felt the reach, the pulling upward. He considered his own death.

“She’s dead,” she said again.

“How do you know?” he said.

“She doesn’t move,” she whispered.

He stared at her. Her body had no luster. The muscles looked undefined: oblong shapes rounded downward at the calves; the thin oval of her tricep on the back of her arm, above her elbow, below the line of her armpit. Vague decisions are the slaying of things, he thought, the cutting off of her or me, the end of something, the beginning of what will not be reversed. The car felt brittle, like he might snap the wheel in his fingers or slam a hole in the floor with his foot. He thought of weeping, and wanted big tears on his face like mercury, thick and slow in the pocks and dents below his cheekbones, cresting the jawbone, running down his neck.

He wished she would say something.

She opened her eyes and looked over. He looked away.

He sped down the off-ramp, the route on Third Street among the square tall high-rises with clouds moving among them. Up ahead he saw the circle entrance of Good Samaritan, the rectangular jut of hospital against sky. Through the electric doors he carried her. She seemed smaller to him now, and boneless.

His grandmother’s porcelain-faced doll lay on the bed at the ranch house outside Colstrip, its curled blond locks and blue eyes under the white bonnet. White blouse and fine-flowered dress, white stockings and tiny black shoes. He was five years old. It fascinated him, the play of the arms, the graceful feel of the body and the legs, the face so exquisite and hard as stone. He remembered he had never asked Sara what she played with as a child, or with whom, or what fears she might have had.

The doctors knew. They were as certain as she. He’d scream at them, he decided, throw curse words until his head blew. Say, “How? How do you know?!” He’d say nothing. Stand as a stuffed man with no mouth or ears, his arms and body so elongated that the shoulders narrowed straight to the neck. He’d pack cotton bunting into the back of his own head to fill the space inside his face. No mouth or ears, but eyes. Black buttons from his father’s first suit. In the silence he thought of men who abuse women, men with sisters, wives, children. He thought of himself as one of these men, empty and consumed by greed, given over.

HE DIDN’T KNOW anymore what was real; the car idling a few feet from the front porch at Sara’s mom’s house in Lame Deer; he and Sara leaving for Seattle? It was late September, the sun past the zenith. He sat in the driver’s seat and waited. The house, a two-story tower, set a slight shadow off east of itself. He heard Sara crying, and felt nothing. He was always shut down unless drunk or high, and then he broke wide open. He hated this about himself. She sat upright on her knees in the entryway. She clutched two of her nieces to her chest, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old. They touched her eyes as she cried. The younger one looked confused. The older appeared curious and she kissed Sara’s cheek. “Salty,” she said, and smiled.

Zeb watched the scene, glad to be free of family, not hers so much, but his—his father especially, the way the old man burned every bridge.

Sara took her time, and Zeb thought it brave, how hard people have to work to make something new. He’d left Colstrip at fifteen and hitchhiked to Lame Deer, thinking he would be white and weird, but largely unthreatened, as he had been in the summers when he worked the fireworks booths at Jimtown near the rez line. And people had taken him in, parents or uncles or aunts of friends he’d made at parties or at the odd jobs he held—fireworks in early summer, driving swather or shucking bales through August, pumping gas in the dead months of winter. Most of his host families didn’t seem to care if he came or went, white boy walking from the bright HUD houses. They hardly noticed, and Zeb had preferred it that way. Dirty White Boy, the older crowd called him, after the Foreigner song from
Head Games.
He liked that. But being white, and not pretty, he’d had to guard his own back when he was out late and the drink and drug reached full tilt.

Sara kissed her nieces’ hands, sat down cross-legged, and took both children on her lap. She began singing them a song.

Please, he thought. He sighed and settled back in the seat.

He looked up. The sun traveled soft and white and high. Early on, he had thought of her only rarely. He’d heard she and her mom were back from living ten years on the Sioux rez in Wolf Point. He’d seen Sara in town, but she always ran with Clifford Black Eagle, a Crow boy she’d met in school at St. Labre. Then Clifford moved to the Yakama rez in Washington. Zeb’s father had died the same year and Zeb mentioned it to her when they had coffee that first time. Montana Highway Patrol found the old man dead in a ditch on a dirt road five miles south of Colstrip. No one but Zeb’s mom attended the funeral.

“Did you like your dad?” Sara had asked him.

“No,” he’d said.

“Did you care if he died?” “Fine with me,” he said. “Really?” she asked.

ON THE DRIVE WEST, she spent the first five or six hours crying or sleeping. She’d turned herself from him and he couldn’t see her eyes, but he envisioned the dark sockets, the eyes burned

out. Her body leaned into the armrest. She rested her cheek on the bumper of the side window and stared away north. So petite, he thought, so full of sorrows. She sat this way for a great while, looking over the long white bench of the plains, over the rise of the land, the mountains.

Nine hours in, he said, “We can go back.” They had crossed the Great Divide near Butte and were past Missoula, on the upswing of Lolo Pass. Seattle waited, still only a dream. In the dark before Idaho, the high beams of the Impala shone like pale arms. To their left, the span of forest was endless. A low unseen moon opened the sky behind the mountains. He pictured tamaracks among the greater forest; he’d seen them in the light before dark, firing the land with their bright burnt orange. They passed high dark pines at the roadside, lodgepoles, eerily individualized, bands of onlookers peering over, looking in.