American Masculine (2 page)

It took three years to celebrate his first full year of sobriety, and when it happened he called his brother, Titus, back in Lame Deer to tell him. Benjamin had gotten a monkey fist from his sponsor that night, a leather necklace with a small leather knot signifying a year free. Sadie wasn’t into it. “Parched, enit,” Titus said, laughing, then he said, “I got a daughter now.” He said it so quiet Benjamin wasn’t sure he heard.

“A daughter?” Benjamin said, rolling the monkey fist between thumb and forefinger.

“Yeah,” Titus answered. “Her name is Elsie.”

A daughter, thought Benjamin, I’m her uncle, and when he hung up the phone he opened his front door. He wanted to whoop at the top of his lungs. Instead he clenched his fists to his chest and said under his breath, “Yes!”

IN WINTER of that year Benjamin caught Sadie sleeping with his best friend from high school, Jack Plenty Buffalo, who was visiting from Lame Deer. Benjamin threw Jack naked out the back door, beat him unconscious, and broke out three of his teeth. Sadie revived Jack and that night Benjamin forgave all like a good rez boy and relapsed, sucking beer and Canadian whiskey from a plastic bottle with Sadie and Jack until past two, sometimes laughing and hacking so hard he cried. In the morning Jack left and two nights later Benjamin drove Montana Avenue and cut down across the river and out into the river valley to attend the AA meeting in a back room at the Christian Missionary Alliance Church, set like a small barn in the fields. His wife, head high, face like a flint, accompanied him.

He worked on small hopes, and limited understanding. When he walked, the details came to his brain cleaner and less muddied, the outline of an aspen on the rise below the rim rock, the way the river met the riverbed and banked away south.

A month into his second real sobriety he found Sadie naked and passed out on the couch with a recent AA group member named Richard. Benjamin was more prepared this time. He left a note in the bathroom saying,
I love you, Sadie. I want to stay married to you. Are you willing to give up drinking?
He left the house and ate dinner with his sponsor, a man with thirty years’ sobriety who was a member of the Spokane Tribe. Afterward they stood outside his sponsor’s van and lit sweetgrass and prayed together and when Benjamin came home at 11:00 p.m. Sadie was gone. Her own message, placed on his pillow, written in clean blue cursive on a yellow pastel sticky note, said
I’m sorry.

FOR HER PART, Sadie took the small stash of money they had and bought a bus ticket to Seattle. When she arrived she went to Pike Place Market and panhandled enough change to buy three bottles of cheap wine, drinking each one quickly until she passed out on the grass in a public square overlooking the Sound. Unconscious, she was arrested and carried to jail.

She woke on a hard metal bench inside a holding cell and stared at the wall and whispered, “He was nothing to me.” She bit at her cuticles, making them bleed. Her face felt swollen. We hide behind our faces, she thought, we make our faces like armor. She went from jail to a homeless shelter for women where the state let her work off her fine and when she’d paid her debt she wandered out into the night where in a dark low-ceilinged bar she found a job as a cocktail waitress. She passed like a day-ghost between the shelter and the bar until she’d made enough money for a one-room apartment in the flats south of downtown. She worked, kept the apartment clean, and drank at least two pints a day.

After nearly a year, and a string of men, she was kicked out for not paying rent. She kept working and drinking and went back to living at the shelter, where she slept during the day and rose at night, and it was on one of these nights that a man approached her in the dark hull of the bar and said, I’ve been watching you, and she said, Thanks, and when the night ended she went with him to his single-wide trailer in the slipshod housing, disjointed, largely colorless, south of the industrial zone. The place seemed smaller inside, single dim light from the kitchen. It felt good to forget, though she knew it amounted only to emptiness. Lying together, drunk and high, his question barely registered…“You said you were married. Tell me about your husband?”

“He is nothing to me,” she repeated.

In the early morning she touched a thin sheen of water in the bottom of the kitchen sink. She moved her index finger in a cursive pattern and wrote Benjamin’s full name, then erased it, then wrote her own name. The nature of the lines and their slow evaporation worked at her like a thing that gnawed bone. Life is no solace, she told herself, and went back to bed.

She kept on this way for six months, before she left the man and the job the same day and walked among the abandoned storefronts downtown where she shuffled her feet and panhandled and drank until she found an alcove in an alley she thought lent enough shelter to avoid being taken to jail again. She leaned a long slab of soiled cardboard over her body and slept. Night following day she trudged and slept and put down liquor and gathered a little food. She traded clothes once at the House of Charity off Royal Street downtown, continuing this way for near a month undiscovered. At the end of it she walked into the public restroom in the small park above the Alaska Way Viaduct. She stared at her face, pocked and streaked with dirt. Her eyes looked foreign and blown out.

Just outside the bathroom a middle-aged white man in a pin-striped business suit propositioned her, saying he’d pay for favors. She refused and walked back into the bathroom. She took off her coat, a light windbreaker she’d kept since Billings, then removed her shirt and her skirt and used the hand soap to wash her upper body, her face, her hair. She put her head beneath the hand dryer and dried her hair, combing it with her fingers. She took her clothes and worked the larger blemishes by rubbing the soap to a lather, rinsing each stain and repeating the process until the clothing looked respectable. She dried her shirt and skirt and coat under the hand dryer. When it was done she folded the coat neatly, put her clothes back on and tucked the shirt in and looked at herself in the mirror again. The shirt was dark blue, too large, shapeless. The skirt was outdated, but decent. Long-sleeved shirt, long skirt; they covered her bruises well enough. Her face seemed not her own but at least it wasn’t filthy anymore.

She strode outside and walked to the area downtown where the glass and metal glowed and the people came in droves from their high-powered jobs. Happy hour, they’d stop in the bars before going home. She’d have to work fast with the city ordinance that disallowed panhandling … police roaming like predators. There were a good twenty or thirty bars in the business sector. She only needed a little. She approached the kind-faced ones first, but later, indiscriminate, she confronted everyone she encountered. Laying out her hands she said, “Please, can I have some money? I’m trying to get home.” Same lines. Sincerely delivered. Mostly she received nothing, but some gave more than others, and that’s all she’d need, just some. At the end of two hours she had eighty-three dollars and change. She needed more. She saw a woman dressed all in gold, walking with two friends, laughing, smiling. Sadie approached and said “Please,” and the woman barely looked at her and gave her a hundred dollar bill and walked on.

Sadie stared at the bill in her hand, then at the woman advancing up the sidewalk. Already a half a block away the woman walked unconcerned, as if nothing had passed between them. “Thank you,” Sadie whispered, and she turned and walked south and west again.

Among the superstructures that towered over her, Sadie tramped toward the Sound, the last light of day awash in the street, a huge cold light that turned buildings and cars and people pink, as if everyone blushed, she thought. As if everyone was ashamed, and everyone beautiful. She entered the Greyhound depot and took the night bus to Billings on a weekday special for eighty dollars. When she arrived the following night she walked from the depot through the stunted buildings of downtown Billings, below the hospitals, and into the city to the YMCA. She peered in the front window for a moment but kept moving and walked to the Amtrak station just past First. From the phone booth near the door she thought she might call Benjamin but thought better of it. She boarded the North Coast Hiawatha at 10:00 a.m. and rode nineteen hours, arriving in Minneapolis aching and hungry, her cravings awake and ravenous like animals. She sat down near the drinking fountain in the station and wiped the sweat from her forehead and drank as much water as she could. She filled her stomach. She knew she couldn’t arrive drunk. She walked most of the day, panhandled some, and took the last stretch by cab.

Her mother taught accounting at the University of Minnesota, and most of what Sadie remembered of childhood with her was austere and severe, but when Sadie knocked on the door and her mother answered, her mother’s face broke and she put her arms around Sadie’s neck and wept. Sadie stood blank as her mother held her, and said nothing as her mother kissed her face. “Are you okay?” her mother said, gripping Sadie’s shoulders, speaking into her eyes. “I’ve missed you. I thought you were dead.” Sadie stared at her.

“You’re alive!” she said, kissing her forehead. “I’ve missed you so much, Sadie. I love you.”

Sadie didn’t respond and her mother led her to the kitchen and prepared tea for her and wrapped her in a comforter and sat next to her and held her hand. She made a grilled cheese sandwich for her, and sliced some apples, and afterward she walked her to the bathroom and when Sadie was ready she led her to the guest bed and tucked her in and covered the bed with blankets. Sadie stared out as if from a cave. Her eyes focused on the spare nakedness of the room. No pictures. Blank walls. Blankets of solid color with no pattern. Near her head a square night table, a simple lamp. The burgundy shade looked like a small well-lit house.

Her mother slid in next to her and stroked Sadie’s hair until she fell asleep.

HER MOTHER waited until Sadie started to find her feet again. They were at the kitchen table over tea. Her mother held the picture in her hand, a photo Sadie had managed to keep with her through everything.

“Your husband?” she asked, holding it up, staring. He wore jeans and a T-shirt, arms folded, legs crossed as he leaned against the hood of a Camaro. “Handsome,” she said. “Very handsome.”

“Was he good to you?” her mother asked.

“Yes,” Sadie said. She looked at her mother. “He meant something.” Sadie went quiet. They watched each other. Her mother ran her fingers through Sadie’s hair.

DAYS INTO DAYS. A year, two years, more. Benjamin hadn’t heard a thing.

At night in the subtle glow from the dash lights, he drove alone among the fast-moving cars and his mind returned to Sadie. She’d been too open-handed and easy, and he harsh, too fragile. She was gone a very long time. He hadn’t saved himself. No illusions. They’d lasted some he had to admit, but even at the end of it, sober as he wanted to be, they were poison to each other. He’d grown too rigid and couldn’t stand her running to the bars. He thought of his eyes on alcohol, gray coals in a bricklike face, a vicious mouth that lifted flesh from bone like a man field-dressed a deer. He’d eyed her often with ugliness and misdirection, his lips pursed, his look piercing and cruel—and now on the other side of the divide his only hope despite how he’d been back then was to be different. He’d be tenderhearted this time, ready to change. If he could find a real woman he’d do well by her. The children they had would sleep like bears, and wake powerful in the world.

He’d never find that woman.

Driving, he checked himself. What did he know, really? I don’t know anything, he thought, about anyone. Even knowing himself seemed like a joke. He’d just keep driving to AA like he had for some time, good meeting in the conference room of an old hotel on Twenty-seventh up toward the airport, precise regimen, daily. He’d had other women. He thought of them sometimes. He tried not to think of Sadie. He’d been training his mind to quit doubting, quit tempting darkness. If he tried he could reach past the self-loathing, find a way to hold her and himself in a good light, perhaps the whole world in a good light. His sponsor had him practicing most nights on the drive home. Forget about her, they all said, everyone in the group. He was healthy now. Good job. No drugs. No booze. Still, she unraveled him.

Often, as he drove, his hands went wet as rain and he imagined himself as a young boy entering a strange house in the Heights. As if in a dream, he saw his mother standing before him gripped about the neck by a large white man and forced to watch as an ugly white woman approached her. The white woman will be brutal to her, he thought. She will beat her. Then a name would come to him, it was his mother’s name, or a name given to her, Little Bird, and he couldn’t remember how she received this name, and as soon as he remembered the name the dream changed and it was only him with his mother and he held her head and kissed her cheek and said kind words to her.

When he thought right his hands didn’t sweat. He knew then he’d gotten past the fear because his mind opened up and his face felt more together, not so loose. Driving, he’d picture himself in the last evening of summer, in a modest home outside Lame Deer. He saw a woman, but always, her head was turned. They’d be lying down in a large bed, him watching her sleep, her artistic body and fine lines; a real woman, and he a real man, and there in the waking dream he saw himself clearly. He walked alone in the fields of her loveliness and he beckoned her and she turned and still he could not quite make out her face, but it was not weary, and in her eyes was a promise and he saw that her look was gracious and the touch of her hand was meant for him, and he felt his burdens fall away, the weight of his failings become as nothing.
Nehmehohtahts,
he whispered in Cheyenne, I love you—and in the warmth of their bed in the half-world between sleep and morning he reached to caress the elusive nature of her ways and into her presence she welcomed him, and the words from her lips came softly in the darkness.

I have loved you with an everlasting love, I have drawn you with loving-kindness.