American Masculine (21 page)

Yet here he’d found her.

He stared at the ceiling. His hands wouldn’t warm up.

TO WIN WOMEN men put on an attitude of cleanliness, clipped nails, and shaved faces, sideburns like little battle-axes, a soul patch below the lower lip or a thin goatee, lines of facial hair crisp, hard, geometric, glistening. They borrowed colognes like engines of desire: Fahrenheit, Body Heat, Obsession. Beneath the surface of the world and over the surface and above it the mystery moved, granting men the will to find someone, some men by purpose or chance possessing more push than others, men filled or being filled of hope or hopelessness, men satiated, men left wanting.

ELIAS PRETTY HORSE, Assiniboine-Sioux with a fine-boned face and eyes like a storm, borrowed his father’s beaded drum mallet and placed it on the corner of his desk at Northwest Farm and Implement. Slender, he was a runner, holder of high school records in the mile and two-mile. He set the ivory bridal teeth of an elk on either side of the mallet to remind him work, and women, were like singing, like pealing wild riffs from a high vocal front the same way a man cut calves from the herd for branding. The hard beats that sounded from the drum came like blood, the thrumming and singing wholly untame. Brothers. His brothers came from everywhere. The group in Seattle had singers from five nations.

IN AMERICA, if a man was so inclined he borrowed the will to find a woman. He borrowed velocity, projection, and pretense—he borrowed need. The need to be. The need to be seen. He borrowed emotion, physicality, tenacity, trouble. Undoubtedly each one had it, elegant but unrefined, the mystery of manhood undiluted and unbridled—the inner inferno that was his sex. Made equally of darkness and light, they were men. They were brash and frail, and married.

AND JOHN SENDER, alone. On free fall in the apartment, linear, solid, spare. Unable to sleep he moved from the bed to the kitchen, drank a glass of milk, went to the leather reading chair, and stared at the window. Odd reflection: long white body, white T-shirt, white underwear, skin like alabaster. He leaned and took an old issue of
Montana Quarterly
from the rack beside him. He read an article on a wolverine researchers collared that crossed nine mountain ranges in forty-two days. He fell asleep in the chair. He woke, stumbled back to bed. Night sifting the sediment of dreams. Dark animal, solitary, full of speed. Light. Morning. Glass of water. Toast. No TV, no radio. No sound. Driving I-5 to work he lifted from the heart pocket of his suit coat the pen Samantha had given him that first chance meeting. He thought of her holding the pen, a blue ballpoint made of inexpensive metal alloy, pens the bank gave out. He’d seen her in the lobby after work, seated, writing a memo, a note to a friend, or perhaps her mother, left-handed—a note to him, he liked to imagine—her clear nail polish and French manicure, the pale half-spheres at the base of her fingernails like small suns touched to the ocean of her skin. It was sudden: he had desired her more than anything.

Awful, the anxiety he had over his voice being too boyish, his face too pale and hands too hard. He sat down next to her. “Can I borrow your pen?” he said.

“Sure,” she said, handing it to him. “Keep it.” She slipped her fingers into her purse and drew forth an identical pen.

“Handy,” he said. His hands were not only cold but sweating.

She smiled.

He managed a few awkward questions. She grew up in Bellingham. She mentioned her family, her mom, studies, work. She looked right at him, not away.

He lost himself.

“Can I take you to dinner?” he said.

“What?” she replied.

“Sorry,” he said.

He’s country, she thought. She didn’t dislike him.

His hands flushed with sweat again, so he waved at her and turned to go and she smiled, and he was astonished at how much her smile delighted him. Down the hall, when she couldn’t see, he slapped his hands together, covered his mouth, and muffled a slight whoop. She hadn’t even said yes. Still, he thought perhaps the top of his head was on fire.

THE RING felt like a small star in his pocket. Through the elevator doors, passing her floor, the third, going to his, the fifth, he was afraid. The first time on a saddle bronc was no different: exhilaration, and horror. Glad he’d had the buck rein his dad bought for him secondhand, worn in and comfortable, if blackened. Single thick rope, awkward, tricky as a rattlesnake. He’d lost it when the horse went rump high straight out of the chute, launching him head first into the dirt. Still, the buck rein was the only help; tiny saddle and his own fatal balance no good to him at all. Bruised shoulder, and dirt in the nose and teeth for a week. Not a natural by any means, but he could work. It took seven rodeos to complete his first real ride and when it came, it unhooked him good. Digging spurs, arm high, horse a force of nature below, and John a bright dream above. The classic event of rodeo, skill and finesse over straight strength. He’d held the whole eight seconds, bounced and landed on his feet full of spit and fire. Cheer from the small-town crowd. Town called Rosebud, dust bowl, eastern Montana. Fatherless Child was her name, eleven-hundred-pound fighter he never saw again. Still loved that horse.

Loved all the horses he’d ridden. Metal chute, knees high-rails above the shoulders. The crowd, the gate pullers, the pickup men. Grit in the glove, horse’s back hard as stone; muscle it down ready. Knees up, spurs down, chute gate flung wide and animal and man sprung out clean and tight and wild. Tossed on a string, close to tetherless, horse like white lightning, free hand touching sky, punching, pulling, power in the hand of fear, and fear in the gut, and below fear tenderness, and deeper down, down deep love.

OFF THE ELEVATOR, John walked the hall and saw the men in their cubicles and felt convinced that every man in the fortified world wanted an answer to the loneliness, an answer that might help him set his world aright.

SEAN BADEN in a rancher east of the city. His smiling wife.

ELIAS PRETTY HORSE, generous and strong hearted, a longdistance runner. A hard worker. He cherished his mother despite her hard-lived life. He cherished his Assiniboine wife, Josefine. Her strong legs and bold front-forward posture. A woman made like rivers and boulders.

Townhouse on the outskirts of Auburn.

JOHN LOVED the kindness and complexity, the eccentricity. Because of Samantha it seemed he could love everything, the arc of his thoughts enhanced like blown glass. Now he found everyone beautiful, like works of art, something sacred he should give his life for. He remembered Van Gogh: the words standing as if written in light:
the greatest work of art is to love someone.
He could give Samantha his whole life, he knew he could.

Still, it’s hard to stop thoughts, he thought, especially the will to fail … or how the mind so quickly condemns. He needed courage for what he was about to do. He walked back to his desk and stared at his screensaver, panorama of Glacier’s mountains shouldering the blue of Hidden Lake. He wanted to make a life with her. He felt sick. He sent the first in a collection of small bright e-mails. Then came a phone call, followed by a meeting in the third-floor lounge. A shared lunch at week’s end and a week later the first real date: at Anthony’s Seaport over the water.

She asked of his schooling, his interests, religion, work, his dreams. She scared him, very much. But he felt vital in her presence. Stunning, her chestnut hair and high-boned face. He wasn’t all business, she was glad, and told him so, intrigued with his upbringing, his background in English and philosophy. For his part she reminded him of the great poets: terrifying, exact.

Three months later, she put him on the spot.

“You ready for me?” she said.

He looked at his shoes, his grandfather’s shoes.

“I think so,” he said. But what was the lineup he’d drawn in Reno? It wasn’t the animals with menacing names like Hell’s Fire, or Kitchen-of-the-Damned, or Homicidal Tendencies that got you, it was the playful-named ones like Honey-Do, or Conjunction Junction. Hell’s Fire and HT were nothing. Honey-Do nearly broke his neck.

Even the mean ones he loved, but he wasn’t dumb; you could get kicked in the head by something you loved, and often it took a lot to avoid it. On the circuit you had to be careful, but with abandon. Supervigilant, half-crazed. Everything so large-scale at the big rodeos—Oklahoma City, Cheyenne, Denver, Provo, Sacramento. No more eleven-hundred-pounders, it was thirteen or more, fifteen hundred sometimes, horse blowing snot in the chute, white-eyed, fast, and powerful, and leap like a gymnast. Roads, long black lines gray at the edges, hard driving, hard riding. He’d broken thirty bones, mostly fingers and other hand bones, plus ribs; he’d cracked a collarbone too, fractured his right scapula, and in a rodeo in Miles City broken his jawbone. Had his face wired up. Ate through a straw for months.

He looked at the shoes. The first day he’d tried them on he found a sheen of dried blood on the shell of the left one. He was twenty-three, just weeks after his grandfather’s funeral. Back then it took no energy, his mind didn’t dwell; he had licked his thumb and removed the stain. He wore the shoes for an hour or two, then put them back in Grandma and Grandpa’s closet. But now he thought darkly of his grandpa without wanting to. Tough old man who rarely talked. Real down, John thought, ending it on a Sunday, body laid out behind the barn, head slung back and to the side. He remembered the slender barrel of the .270 flat on the grass. Then Grandma years later, but not violent, dignified, even with Grandpa still a big hole in everything.

John looked at Samantha. His eyes were teary.

Be ready, John’s dad had always told him, and John knew she’d make him step up the same way a bronc made a man reach, spur from the shoulder down, drop-swing motion, shoulder to ribwork, untempered, but rhythmic like a drum.

Alone in the high country he’d stop and lay his head on his horse’s neck, Black, or Charlie, the two his dad still kept for him back home, Black an Arabian cross, high in the legs and narrow face, and Charlie an old palomino quarter horse. The sweet grass smell of the coat, breathing in, exhaling—lt brought him back from any distance.

EVERY MAN BORROWED. He borrowed things both common and strange, things cold like cash, or things more ultimate, like charisma and concern, or below these, and more virile—more core—anger, distance, deviance.

A man not only borrowed money, he borrowed the skills of other men. He borrowed, or bought with borrowed money as he was able, talent at carpentry and handiwork, his neighbor’s hammer, his band saw, his understanding of power panels and pilot lights, his wrench, his tool belt, his box of screws, nuts, nails. He borrowed ideas, attitudes, actions. Always, he borrowed more than he knew.

BACK IN Wolf Point Elias Pretty Horse borrowed his grandmother’s beaded coin purse to place on his desk with his father’s drum beater and the elk’s eyeteeth.

SEAN BADEN borrowed time, evenings, to read his father’s Bible. Passages about Christ humbling himself, about the Son of God not considering equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbling himself, taking the form of a man. Sean’s wife, the floor manager for Nordstrom’s in women’s shoes, still liked him.

Not for long, Sean thought.

He felt edgy in the head; he hated himself; he wanted sex; and not from her.

HOUSED IN THE FACE of the men who came to John for money, there was more than their women bargained for. The truth of each man was that he borrowed sexual greed and hunger, emptiness and voracious hunger … thoughts, conversations, chatrooms, disloyalty … night silence, computer time, porn, extreme porn. Men opaque and secretive who borrowed what their fathers borrowed before them, the emotionless vessel of their own habits, the way their wives hated them—the hatred men engendered.

And yet, for all their ugliness, still they borrowed love.

Not merely disillusionment or desperation, they borrowed listening, and quietness, loveliness. They borrowed the urge that sent them in the evening walking with their wives, or brought them to the table, a deck of cards, a conversation, songs the marriage shared, whispers. They borrowed greetings at the door, good-byes. They borrowed dancing. They borrowed the stars their eyes beheld, the hopes that bore them up.

They were beautiful. They were terrible.

They tried everything, but everything was often not enough and before love died they looked fiercely at the future and borrowed the illusion of love’s permanence, and oh how her body had leaned into him, and oh how she had loved his willing heart, and each man remembered in his bitterness how once his kiss was her secret exultation, and how now when he looked he saw he repulsed her, and in the end, no matter a man’s makeup, when love waned he went from her like a dog with his tail between his legs, and trying still, men worked more and borrowed more, borrowed more money, borrowed their fathers’ shovels and backhoes, they dug trenches in new backyards, placed sprinkler systems and fences, some fences higher than others, and deeper the trenches, and each wife, openly or secretly, despised her man for selling her out.

ELIAS PRETTY HORSE witnessed two deaths in his family during his first year in high school at Wolf Point, both cousins, one male, one female. They’d been close to him nearly from birth, children of his uncles’ families. Paulina Pretty Horse took a cocktail of her mother’s prescriptions, muscle relaxants, Thorazine, and Zoloft. She fell asleep and stopped her heart. Griffith Dogchild, drunk, drove his brother’s motorcycle into the concrete wall of a highway overpass at 2:00 a.m. after a kegger in the Missouri Breaks. Land like a wrinkled old blanket. The bike a pillar of flame when it struck.

Elias saw his own father drag his mother down a flight of stairs by her hair, breaking her sternum, dislocating her right shoulder. To counter the undertow he’d run stoic and mostly silent all through high school, then gone to Fort Peck Community College for two years and on to a scholarship at Montana State, where he graduated with honors and a bachelor’s degree in public relations. He vowed he’d escape, get away from the craziness. Live as he was meant to live.