American Masculine (22 page)

He landed an internship with Montana Feed and Co., a ranch supply operation in Missoula, and when they hired him on it took him nearly no time to increase the company’s market range from Montana to Wyoming and North and South Dakota. At age twenty-five, a headhunter tagged him for a lead manager position at Northwest Farm and Implement in Seattle. He’d always thought of his wife as a better person than he, more alive, more ready to give and forgive. He’d go where she called. A light, he thought, to lead him. A fire that made him burn like he was fuel. She’d been with him all the way from Wolf Point to Fort Peck and on to Bozeman. She didn’t know quite everything of his past, and he too was blind to much of hers. From age eleven to fifteen an aunt named Juniper molested him, and for her part she’d suffered indignities she kept silent.

She hadn’t wanted to go to Seattle.

They’d gone to Seattle anyway.

SEAN BADEN, THE CHRISTIAN worker, was a poor student. When he was young he borrowed his sister’s class notes and proceeded to fail his freshman year in high school twice. He might have had a learning disability, but his father said God is in control and refused his daughter’s wish to get Sean professional help. The school, being fundamentalist, Christian, and private, said the same, and Sean, having suffered the loss of his mother at age eight, did not go against his father’s wishes. At sixteen he flunked out of school, never having passed ninth grade. At eighteen he discovered massage parlors and hand jobs. At twenty he was a delivery man for a food services company that shipped candy throughout the Northwest. On his third overnight trip, on a stop just outside Boise, he lost his virginity with a small-town prostitute. Her skin was cold and she didn’t speak. She kept her face to the wall. He hated himself. At twenty-three he got his GED, moved to Portland and began work in construction. He met Sarah at a nice church, nondenominational with good worship, and fell in love. By now he’d received more than one hundred hand jobs and had sex with twenty-seven prostitutes. He vowed to stop. He was successful until the night after he and Sarah were engaged, when he left his apartment, walked ten blocks to Sal’s Therapeutic Massage, and was masturbated by a short sixteen-year-old Asian girl named Louise.

MEN BORROWED compulsion, fear, disaster, desire.

THE NEXT DAY Sean told Sarah everything, and she left him.

Three days later she called and said she’d still marry him but he had to go to counseling. He agreed and for three months they went twice weekly to see their pastor. On their wedding day Sean sang a song and Sarah cried. On their wedding night Sean cried. He felt like a virgin again. It took him six years to get a four-year Bible degree from Western Christian, a small private college in Vancouver, Washington. Sarah read his textbooks aloud and every night he taped her voice, stream of mercy, and listened and relistened until he knew the material. He was accepted for a position with Campus Crusade and successfully raised the required ninety percent of his support goal (a salary of twenty-five thousand per year from family, friends, and strangers giving monthly or one-time gifts). He reported to headquarters in San Bernardino, California, with Sarah for eight weeks of training after which he was assigned to the University of Washington to lead worship—he had a strong tenor voice—and be in charge of evangelism for the Crusade ministry there. Clean, nearly debtless, two used cars bought with cash—a loan with no points was easy and way back, when they had walked away from John Sender’s office holding hands, they’d walked away happy, their faces lit like lanterns.

THE MEN OF THE NATION, by and large, if they were married more than seven years, wore a tough face, a grimace at how it had happened to them as it seemed to happen to everyone—sex no longer easy, their wives despised them, the grace of a smile false or forgotten.

Men borrowed the will to forget their wives.

Men wandered and fantasized, they glazed their eyes with found porn.

They spoke to other women, they slept with them.

SEATTLE, THE SUN hidden. John hadn’t slept much.

He was in his office at 7:40 a.m. when he raised the receiver.

“Can we meet?”

“Sure.”

When he greeted her he kissed her cheek and she smiled. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, tapestry skirt, light lavender blouse, her trim upper body forward some, her hands in her lap.

He looked out the window and breathed and tried to calm himself. He thought of pearl button shirts, three of them in a plastic container among the battlewares he’d carried on the road, the big canvas bag, the halter and halter strap, flank strap, buck rein, dulled spurs with rolling rowels, padded leather riding vest, bronc saddle in the floor space of the passenger side (lightweight, no horn), immaculate Stetson (black, felt) atop his head and beside him on the bench a simple straw cowboy hat, black-banded, twelve bucks at Kmart, no helmet, never liked helmets.

Her face looked pained.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Nothing,” she replied.

Something’s wrong, he thought.

He tried to look at her without looking away. “Are you okay?” he said.

“Fine,” she said.

She touched his arm.

Her hand light as a swift or mountain swallow.

He took her fingers in his. His hand started sweating. He tried to let go but she held on and looked into his eyes.

“Are you scared?” she said.

“Down to my boots,” he said.

IN NOVEMBER he met her mother at their home on Mercer and by January he set a surprise trip and drove Samantha to Spokane, where they boarded the Amtrak Empire Builder and went by train north deep into Montana along the Hi-Line. He’d been dreaming of rodeo, big horses, sorrels and grays, blacks, massive crossbred pintos, paints, big roughstock from Texas, and him hat in hand and arm flying as he countered the archkicks and cut the leans. When they arrived at the station it was after sundown and cold. His mother and father greeted them, laughing, embracing them both, and they rode together into the fields for miles until they came upon a house, spare, with two outbuildings, and beyond it the long flat that bordered the Rocky Mountain front.

Three months earlier, John had called and asked if he could borrow Grandpa’s two-person open carriage and at that request his father had brushed it up and set it with runners for winter. John’s mother was more direct; she adorned the sleigh with ribbons and bows and small delicate bells, silvery, starlike.

In the dark of morning his father drew the carriage to the front door of the ranch house leading a large gray workhorse named Felicity, a family favorite, utterly gentle. John was in the old twin bed, the night black and formless around his face. Samantha was in the guest room, a room set west toward broad fields of snow and the expanse of range John’s father owned, and farther on, the sheer uplift of mountains. John hadn’t heard his dad go out, it was the familiar sounds that woke him: the tamp of hooves on fresh snow, the easy breath of the horse. He heard the glide of the runners on new wax, a slight shimmer of bells. They had coffee and cinnamon rolls with Mom and Dad in the kitchen. Samantha was effervescent, and unaware. John bundled her himself and she said, “How nice of you,” and, “Thank you.”

To her delight he lifted her in his arms and carried her out the front door to the sleigh. When she saw it she gasped, and looked at John, and buried her face in his coat. Her tears quieted him, and he drove her two miles in the half-dark to Deer Creek, cold air crisp and high in their lungs, snow covering the land to the east on a blue-white arc to the end of it all. From a rise of land they watched the sun emerge and fire the world and John held her hand and asked her to marry him.

WHAT MEN BORROWED varied based on income, based on instant gratification or inflated need, based on how all-consuming their habits might be. In addition to the money to pay for homes, appliances, landscaping, toys like boats, motorcycles, ATVs, they borrowed things they wished they hadn’t. From the dull look in their fathers’ eyes they borrowed the pain that resided there.

IN SEATTLE, for Elias Pretty Horse days became nights, and nights seemed void of light. Past midnight in Bozeman he’d stood on the edge of a canyon in the Spanish Peaks and raised his hands to the sky and shouted with all his gusto—the stars burned like candles, vast, uncountable, a glittering field that whirled overhead and made him feel small and great at once, a fancy dance, he thought. The embers of a lunar fire bright gold in the darkness. He’d won an important race that day. He felt he belonged. So he yelled the only blessing he knew, the Sioux word for thank you: Pee-la-mah-yah-yea! Pee-la-mah-yah-yea! He’d fallen to his knees then and said again, Thank you. It is good. You are very good. He didn’t know if he was speaking of mother or father or spirit. He spoke to the sky. All my relations, he thought. I love you.

But after only two years in Seattle his wife seemed distant and he thought she might have already had three affairs, two with Muckleshoot men they’d met at the casino, the last with a Coeur D’Alene she came across at the farmers’ market in Ballard. For his part Elias had lied to her more times than he cared to count, breaking every promise he’d made in their quiet Catholic wedding. A simple unfortunate progression—(a) lie and tell her you’re going to get some milk, (b) slip into the black overhang of one hip white joint or another, (c) talk sweet and get a white girl drunk, (d) get drunk yourself and follow her home.

MEN WORKED ON borrowed time.

Little in the way of wisdom.

JOHN HOPED the best for people.

He and Samantha spoke tentatively, of life and the future, and likely because they weren’t having any, they avoided talk of sex.

John was degrading himself to her image, using fantasy, trying to think only of Samantha. When he felt unable to resist he used porn, in which case he could not think of Samantha, or he could only think of her head on someone else’s body.

WITHOUT FORETHOUGHT men borrowed things that might put them in good stead with women. They borrowed their father’s gait, his manner of walking, the tones he used when he wanted his wife, the readiness. They borrowed his cool facial expression, the way he sat with one leg crossed over the other, forming a triangle between his legs, or kicked back, hands interlocked behind the head, legs crossed at the ankles. They also borrowed his rigid brow and manic intention, the speed at which he could do harm.

IN YEAR THREE the wife of Elias Pretty Horse left him. He was half-awake in the dark of their bed when Josefine kissed his cheek and said, “I’m going back to Wolf Point.”

WHEN MEN GOT HOME from work, all of them borrowed, when supplies were low, against their wives’ patience, their favorite foods, the last of the brownies, the final cookie, the last drink of milk, the remnant of cereal in the box, and each of them, when he was lazy or couldn’t find his own, borrowed his wife’s toothbrush, and when she was in the bathroom vocalizing, criticizing, he took her pillow to spite her, he took her side of the bed. Marriage was made of perception and defense, apathy, absence, contempt.

SEAN BADEN BORROWED money from his father three times in four years to help with hospital costs for the three daughters born to him and Sarah: Ruth, Hagar, Tamar. The Campus Crusade ministry at the University of Washington was filled with Holy Spirit fire. Sean’s voice, throaty and bold, drew in close to one thousand students every Friday night. After one such Friday night he borrowed twenty dollars from his director, thinking he’d use it to take a couple of new converts for a burger and a coke. Except for relieving himself with porn, he’d been clean for some time. When the students said they couldn’t go, Sean drove to the city center, parked his car, and went walking. He turned toward the white light of an open door, entered an adult bookstore, and watched a peep show for five dollars. Outside, a block farther on he spoke to a prostitute, walked with her into an alley, and paid her fifteen dollars to give him a blow job.

TO INCREASE their livelihood, to better their future, men borrowed whatever they could.

At night in the subtle glow from the dashlights, John remembered their faces and quirky mannerisms, their strange ways and enigmatic lives. He was getting better at defining them, not so rose colored. Men too neat, too tidy, or the dirty ones, unkempt, careless. These, and all the variations in between. He remembered their eyes, subsumed in small houses of flesh and bone, men who needed so much, some with hard mouths and slate faces eyeing their wives with menace or loathing, haughtiness, horror, and hate—and on the other side of the divide the ones he hoped to emulate. Considerate, quick to listen. Again he checked himself, he didn’t understand anything about anyone. Even trying to understand himself seemed absurd.

But marriage, he thought. Marriage! He could hardly keep from shouting out loud. The truck wheels humming, he pictured himself walking with her in the high mountains, snowshoeing over an opaque world where trees stood flocked in white and the sky was a window on heaven, robin’s egg blue and cloudless. They’d make their way to his grandfather’s cabin, a well-appointed A-frame, and work together making things ready. John would clear a space on the tin roof to the cellar and put quarters out like his grandfather taught him. They’d build a fire in the woodstove and fill the kettle for tea, and while the house warmed they’d gather the quarters hot from the sun to warm their hands. He’d touch her face then and he would not be afraid.

The house would come alive with heat and they’d stand side by side and look out through the picture window that faced south where the blanketed land became incandescent at dusk and the sky’s velvet was shattered by stars. Their children would sleep soundly, he thought, and wake fearless in the world. In the night he’d find her pressing her face to his, speaking kindness and goodwill, and there on the threshold of sleep he’d say, I believe in you, and from his lips would rise tender words in the darkness: You will be clothed with joy and brought forth with peace.

MEN BORROWED DIGNITY or they borrowed shame.

Sean Baden locked himself in his bathroom for three days after he’d had sex twice in one night with two different prostitutes for forty dollars apiece, cold bodies, slack faces. His wife knew nothing and spent most of that time crying outside the bathroom door as she tried to call him out. She didn’t tell the Crusade director or the director’s wife. She didn’t tell anyone. Their two oldest were with her parents for the week. She had Tamar with her. Sean lay on the bathroom floor on his side of the door, cheekbone to cold tile, wishing he could become that hard, like stone, unknowing, unknowable, unable to hurt or do hurt, unable to harm.