American Masculine (19 page)

“I’m just sad,” she’d said.

But the first day in Seattle she had looked in the paper, made a call, and landed a cheap rental off I-5, close to downtown. He’d brought her here for opportunity, though what they found was hardly better: him at the Vietnamese market up Fifty-first, her taking the bus to Pike’s each morning to sell bracelets she wove from colored thread. They threaded things with television, alcohol, and the drugs they could find, mostly mescaline, speed, and methadone. Easy to be invisible, he thought, so many people in the streets, a thousand vagabonds for every ten miles of city, most of them Anglo and hollow-eyed. People stare, he told himself, but I’m less conspicuous, though he knew he looked polar white and pocked up, his face gray-dented as the moon.

Two years in he found himself in the hull of the trailer at night, in an easy chair a short reach from the television. He liked the chamber dark, the length of his body encased in the bloom of light from the TV. “Too loud,” she’d say from the back, and he’d click the volume down with the remote.

He liked her voice, an edgy voice from down the hall, weary from the day and drifting off. It reminded him of the acidic, hateful way she came at him back in Lame Deer when he walked on her. It didn’t matter if they were in private or public, she’d tell him to shut up and curse him until he backed off. She’d call him Custer, or Evans, or some other white idiot from the past. Scratch his face, grab a fistful of hair. She’d jump on his back if she felt she had to, but mostly only when she was drunk. He would pull her off, and she’d calm if he said he was sorry. It was a mess if he didn’t. Once he had thought he might have to kill her. It hadn’t happened in a long time and he missed her quick anger, her fire.

He’d turn the volume down, and when he heard the sighs of her breathing again he’d push it back up. Broke, but they had cable. Had to have cable, he thought, to stay human. He’d get suspended in the globe of light the TV emitted and the thoughts would get him, images of Lame Deer and her family. He hated it but he’d go back to it, like a woman wearing long sleeves over the wounding she’s done. Draw the sleeve back and make it bleed; hide when others draw near. The memories pierced him like that, opening his skin, making him feel something akin to love, but more the shadow of love; a promise consumed by emptiness; a self to which he felt he had always been bound, lonely, embittered, at enmity with all; the question for which he’d found no answer; the old sorrow come again to make a home in him.

The mixture of how she loved children, the lack he felt inside, and the visions he carried of her and him, of what they might be as parents, kept him going despite the walls he’d found between them. Three years worth. Two gifts gone. One lost here, one back on the reservation. Two deaths, though he reasoned they were only miscarriages, and early ones. And now she was pregnant again, and nearly full term, five months further than they’d gone before, and carrying the child they called Rachel, the child of their patience, their peace.

HE SAW the doctor’s head, the mouth moving:
I’m sorry, sir, the baby’s dead. We’ll have to deliver it. Wait here. We’ll tell you when the procedure’s over.

Zeb viewed the room through the heightened vision that came with doing speed. But he wasn’t high, or was he? He saw the doctor’s slick black hair in a pointed widow’s peak. The dark main shock swept back from the forehead, the silvery smooth glisten of the sidewalls in a pronounced
C
around the ears. Spit coagulated on the doctor’s lower lip. His teeth were gray, and Zeb thought: I should kill this man.

From the front pocket of his jeans Zeb drew a gun, easily, fluidly, as if his pocket was substantial and made of silk. The gun was obnoxiously large, but Zeb’s hand felt sure. He lifted and held the weapon high and read the print engraved on the stock: .38 Special. He lowered the gun and pointed it at the doctor’s chest and the doctor smiled. The doctor pulled the gun forward and brought it close, compelled before being shot to read the words for himself: .44 Magnum this time. Nice, Zeb thought, and he let his arm come even. He breathed out, pulled his index finger gently and the gun banged and sent his hand to the ceiling, the shot like a small bomb in the hallway. The doctor smiled again. Zeb lay on the floor, a hole the size of a cereal dish in his own left chest, a star of red around the circumference, and people were running.

“She’s gray,” Sara said.

They were running down white tile floors with big-volumed words and the words were unwieldy and Zeb got caught in them while his wife was wheeled, white-sheeted between silver swinging doors. Before she disappeared he saw how hard her face had become, how the lines in it had gone dark and straight and the skin looked tight, almost iridescent.

He wasn’t with her again until it was over. The white coats walked her down the hall and dropped her off with him in the lobby. They assured him the bleeding had stopped, her heart rate had come steady. She stood beside him, vacant, almost weightless. He put his arm around her. Everyone had gone. She leaned her head into his chest. He felt blank and dark.

He looked at his right hand, the gun stuck like an unwanted appendage there. His left hand was full of blood. He walked the hall and no one spoke to him. He had no hands. The tiles came to an end and he walked over the precipice and fell full and far before he rose with his arms in the shape of an eagle’s wings, splendid and precise, his body streamlined and new, the body of a boy in an alley asleep between two dumpsters, a wedge of small stones piled against the windbreak his head makes.

From a hole in the half-world came a reverend—Mr. Reyes, the half-Cheyenne, half-white man he’d seen only once in the green hall of the clinic back in Lame Deer after the first miscarriage. His face, his words. “Son, this from God to your child.” Into the silence. “I have made you. I will not forget you. Sing for joy.” The great expanse of a deep gorge among high mountains, the closeness, the vastness of all things. In the black of morning he finds Sara’s form curved into him, her back to his chest, her legs matched neatly to his. Her hair smelling of dry sweat, and faintly of lilac. How utterly I have failed you, he thinks. He kisses the back of her head and says, “You are my beloved.” She clutches a braid of sweetgrass to her chest and he sees the plains to the straight edge of the alien world with nothing in between, the sun a dull white orb behind the gray sky. Caught in a crease on the horizon, a glow of light is the bright rim of all that lives and moves.

“They took her from me,” she whispers. “She was gray.”

The room is shadow. People never break free, he thinks.

The simple sound of a car on a dirt road eclipses the electric circuitry of the industrial machine and silences the speedwire of technology. Dawn is suddenly framed in the bedroom window. He finds the shape of their bodies under the star quilt, senses the stillness, the proximity of their faces. He is home again. Born to this world. Shine. Early morning, April 4, his wife lies in bed beside him, holding something.

“Wake up, Z,” she says. “You’re here, with me.”

On waking, he hears wheels on gravel as the car fades into the distance.

He is fully alive now and staring at Sara’s face. In the light between them he sees the child. She is on her side, small, elongated, helpless, her form a tiny keepsake they carry like an amulet surrounded by the heart-shaped angles of their bodies, their legs and arms, as they face one another in the soft hope of their bed.

It is Sara’s mouth that speaks the words, it is her body, the alluring movement of her hip beside him, and the way his hand must hold the curve of her ribs to know the breath that resides there, the rise and fall not of her whisper but of the engine from which her whisper moves. Not the pale cross of her collar-bones more reminiscent of Christ than Valentino’s fine lines, but that down below the bones, the beating and drumming of the heart and the certainty from which her confidence lifts and opens the night. He sees the beginnings of her smile, then bright and turned to him, her eyes, pools in the wilderness he calls his own. Finally, he sees the ring, so insignificant, so lovely on the wounded hand. He places his hand under hers, and she turns her hand to hold his, the fingers small and warm in the grooves of his own. The imperfection is a grace to him, a strength he has needed all his life.

“Where are you?” he asks.

“I am with you,” she answers.

In the sunshine he beholds his daughter’s face, the sweet smell of vanilla quiet in her breathing, the sounds she makes as she coos and drifts sleepy in her mother’s arms, and he sees that this then is the song to which every dream is tethered, a light infinite and sure, a divine light that gathers all hope in his hands, and he reaches out to his wife and cradles her head, and traces her lips with the tips of his fingers, and to them both before he sleeps he whispers, My darling. My love.

—for Jonathan Johnson

SOME MILES WEST of Jimtown Bar, Nathan Bellastar traveled hard on a thin gravel road that divided the wheat fields. The wind was loud in the cab, and dust curled and billowed in his wake. Driving, he remembered what his mother said when he had failed again the very week his child was born. He’d been arrested in Colstrip for letting his truck roll through a stop sign and travel the sidewalk for fifty feet. “Admit it,” she’d said when he’d made it home the next morning. “You’re just a cheap drunk like all the rest.” She was sitting in the recliner he’d bought for himself, in the living room of his own trailer, and she’d said it in front of his wife and newborn. She was supposed to be here to help with the child, but he’d counted it against her—the gray weight of her skin, her unwashed hair, the fat coil of her face—he had hated her.

Beneath the openness of sky and moon and stars, the gold of the fields lay dimly illumined. Here, when the day died, the heaviness was always the worst. He pictured a large, oblong stone lodged deep back in his chest cavity beneath his shoulder blades. The slope of his back felt rock hard. His ribcage had become constricted and he disliked the shallow breaths he had to take. Breathing shouldn’t be something a man has to work at, he thought. He reminded himself to forget his friends, the men waiting for him up ahead. He could nearly taste the bite of the alcohol in his mouth, the hot spiral in his throat as the whiskey went down. He tried to remember his daughter, the baby smell of her breath, the way she touched at his eyes with her tiny fingers. But as he sped onward the need in him outgrew his will and rapidly he got to where he could hardly recall his daughter’s face. In the rearview mirror he found his own face bony and thin.

EARLIER, JEDIDIAH had cut into him when they threw the last bales of the evening. Jed was a big man with thick hands and a pocked face, gritty at the hairline. A dirty ring lined the collar of his denim shirt. “You gonna come with us tonight or not?” Jed said. Nathan watched Jed’s manner, the way he jerked each bale from the ground as if he were in a fight. He noted this, but said nothing and kept working.

“I figured as much,” said Jed, and he stood and squinted at Nathan. “You been pretty much cutting out on your friends lately.” Jed spit snuice on the ground.

Nathan kept hoisting bales while Jed stood waiting, staring darkly at him. Nathan felt it and didn’t like it, but he knew Jed wouldn’t understand. Jed would just undercut him like he had before, slapping him on the back, shouting, “Come on! You got time for one. A man deserves something for a day’s work.” And Nathan would give in like a fool, like there was nothing but straw in his spine.

Nathan turned his back to him now.

“Yeah,” said Jed. “Just like I figured,” and he spit again. He muscled bales and said nothing, just grunted and stopped once to spit out his chaw, then stepped in front of Nathan to grab the last few bales and hurl them onto the stack.

Watching Jed drive off in his beat-up Ford sedan, Nathan felt the burden begin in the upper part of his shoulders, then down and inward until it was embedded again, directly under the shoulder blades. The severity of the feeling made him wince. Immediately he desired to cover it over, dull it away with hard drinking. He’d heard others talk of phantom things like this, weird pains that came when you tried to stop. He forced himself to wait until the boys had all gone, Jed and the others, not just follow blindly as he desired. He wished the weight would die out, but it kept on.

Nathan noticed the line at the horizon, dark, distinct. He rubbed the pad of his thumb along the smoothness of his lips, a ritual that always commenced when he started a self-imposed drought. He knew he’d been touching his thumb to his lips all day now, like a kid that couldn’t control himself. Hiding his hand in his pocket, he told himself to stop being such an idiot. He walked aimlessly for a time, half-inspecting the line of the bales, kicking or pushing at a few, but when he had straightened all he could, gassed and parked the machines along the south fence, and checked the northern gate, there was nothing left but to turn his truck to the road home. At first as he drove the dark sky had been clear, while off to the west an arm of sun remained, outstretched low and still on the land.