American Masculine (9 page)

With her eyes closed she wants to believe him. No ill will. In fact, he had offered to stay with her, an extended stay, but she refused. She’s glad she did; her skin thin as cellophane. Whenever she goes about town, the whole world seems to look at her and want to weep, and she feels forced to take from them the invisible bottles that contain their grief, while she must be silent until she returns home and lays flat on her back on the living room floor, the bottles like illumined glass around her body in the dim light, her own tears like dark rivers running out from her forever.

A YEAR. Two.

Weight like a flock of crows clutching ledges in her room, bedposts, chair backs, black bodies angular at the foot of her bed, some flapping, some still. People see, but can’t speak, propped up, anesthetized. She’ll do as she pleases. She’ll go wherever she damn well pleases. In the bathroom she lies on the floor. Cold tile. Her hand reaches, touches the base of the toilet. Porcelain. Everything is gone.

Morning again. In bed, she sees her father walk through the doorway. Notices him. Here again he has sad eyes. His habit of touching two fingers to his temple. Putting his hands through his hair. He’ll be fine. She wonders what will greet her. Nothingness, or tenderness. She isn’t afraid. He won’t like another funeral but she can’t worry about him. Water and form, existence. She is formless, she is form without burden or breath, her bones translucent, dark color at the center, like stones under ice.

WHEN HE GOES, she walks to the kitchen. Clothed in an ankle-length cotton nightgown, off-white, she takes her keys from the coffee table, walks down the stairs and out through the parking lot to the numbered stall where she parks her truck. From the space behind the seat she lifts a fresh green garden hose, walks to the back of the truck, threads one end into the tailpipe, the other into the thin opening she makes in the passenger side window. She takes the driver’s seat, turns the ignition, reclines, breathes, sleeps.

NORMALLY he drives straight to work. Today, he makes a U-turn on Bridger Road. He’d seen it in her face. Best to check and be sure. Say I love you again.

Far away, he spots her blue Ford. It is broad daylight and the garden hose looks so simple and obvious, he starts to cry. He speeds and halts and whispers to himself as he lifts her body, light, feathery in his arms, light as a sparrow or whip-poor-will, a hummingbird, small corpus made of sunlight or vapor. Mercy, he pleads, and he speeds in his car through traffic lights and signs, her body limp on the black leather of the backseat, her white face whiter than the faces of the silent performers he’d seen in Japan or the bleached buffalo skull he’d found as a boy with his father—like a huge shard of prehistoric bone—white, whiter than the white sun over the Spanish Peaks that shines as it does on him and her, on the Crazies near Big Timber and west to the Sapphires, east to the Beartooths, and north, far north to the Missions, all the way to Glacier.

Places bound by ice and snow. Places he’s never gone.

The drive is too long, the car unwieldy. He angles the rearview mirror, stares at her. Who am I, he whispers, to receive you? None of us is worthy. Not one. In the parking lot he jams the car into park, leaves the door open, lifts her, and runs awkwardly to the entrance. He takes large strides into the electric hum of the emergency room. He holds her body like fine cloth. He makes demands and he is taken with her quickly down a hall to where he lays her down and watches as she is wheeled, white-sheeted, through chrome-plated doors, and he seats himself until he’s given word, late, that she is critical but stable, and he goes to where she sleeps in her clean, well-lit room that overlooks the city and he doesn’t sleep, he prays. He holds her hand, and prays.

—for Lafe Haugen, Russell Tallwhiteman, and Blake Walksnice

“The light shines in the darkness …”
—John 1:5

OUTSIDE, THE SNOW came down slow and soft, the same big flakes they’d seen for the last few hours, everything white and new, the world like a dream. Shale sat with Drake in one of the big red booths at Steer Inn as they waited for food. Shale was forty, Drake thirty-six, both a long way from competitive basketball days, yet in his mind Shale was lining up the seams of the ball to the form of his fingers. He saw the rim, the follow-through, the arm lifted and extended, a pure jump shot with a clean release and good form. He saw the long-range trajectory and the ball on a slow backspin arcing toward the hoop, the net waiting for the swish. A sweet jumper finds the mark, he thought, a feeling of completion and the chance to be face-to-face not with the mundane but with the holy.

THOUGH HE HADN’T PLAYED actively for years he still kept two well-worn basketballs in the backseat of his car, one his own, the other he’d taken from Weston’s room nineteen years ago after the death. Staring at Drake eating a hamburger Shale was struck by how similar Drake’s features were to Weston’s, just older and more full of lines. In fact, the easy eyes and open face began to work on Shale until he was convinced he needed to go out and shoot tonight, even in this snow, a longing that was rare anymore.

Shale retrieved the basketballs and they got in Drake’s old Jeep Grand Cherokee and drove until they were down in the side streets south of Wellesley, west of Shadle, among the small square houses. Shale was looking for two cheap portable baskets set near to each other in the street, a sight more common in the older parts of the city than the suburbs. Ten minutes later he found them: two baskets only a couple of houses apart, stark in the night quiet, tall angular bodies with thin fan backboards for heads, and heavy nets like thick white beards full of snow. Drake was a graphic artist, Shale an English teacher; they had full lives and real families and their jobs could be stressful. Shale had felt depressed in recent years, lonelier than he was willing to admit, though he had mentioned it to Drake. They were grown men, they’d been friends for ten years, and tonight they were going out in midwinter for basketball.

Drake drove the big Jeep up close and shone the lights on the two hoops. One shot for each of them, one long jumper sent airborne to hit the net just right and send the snow flying. Outside over the hood Shale said, “This is the ritual.” He threw Drake a basketball. “See if you can make it with the pressure on, only one chance to win, everything on the line. If you do, all the snow flies at once. It’s beautiful.”

“I bet it is,” Drake said as he eyed the basket closest to him.

“You only get one, though. One shot to win it all. If you miss, you get nothing.”

“Yeah, okay,” said Drake. “I get it.”

But Shale didn’t think Drake got it. He’s not serious enough, he thought. He’s too happy.

They took their positions, Shale at the far hoop, Drake nearer the Jeep.

“Take a deep one,” Shale called. “Gets the best effect.”

They were both talented ballplayers at one time, but life was life now, thought Shale. Painful how it seemed there were no real games left, or no games allowed. In tandem from twenty-five feet out, from separate places at separate hoops, they let it ride, two dark orbs that glinted high in the air and came down swift and sure.

THERE IS A HIGHWAY, the interstate east through Idaho, where dawn is a light from the border on, from the passes, Fourth of July, and Lookout, a light that illumines and carries far but remains unseen until he closes his eyes and he crests the apex under the blue “Welcome to Montana” sign, riding the downslant to a wilderness more oceanic than earthlike, a manifold vastness of timber, the trees in wide swells and up again in lifts that ascend in swaths of shadow and the shadow of shadows until the woodland stops and the vault of sky becomes morning. Weston, alone and in their father’s car, sped from the edge of that highway in darkness and blew out the metal guardrail and warped the steel so it reached after the car like a strange hand through which the known world passes, the heavy dark Chevelle like a shot star, headlights that put beams in the night until the chassis turned and the car became an untethered creature that fell and broke itself on the valley floor. The moment sticks in Shale’s mind, always has, no one having seen anything but the aftermath and silence, and down inside the wreckage a pale arm from the window, almost translucent, like a thread leading back to what was forsaken.

So common for Montana, driving the passes in winter, and so unnecessary, Shale thought. Even if it was a half-baked offer from the Supersonics, in Seattle, saying they’d take a look at Weston if he’d get himself over there. And did the family think of flying him? No chance. No money, and Shale thought, now we’d give anything.

DRAKE’S SHOT TOOK a flat arc, missed, and rolled to a stop. Shale’s ball clanged too and caromed across the street.

“Oh well,” Drake said.

“So much for that,” said Shale.

They retrieved the basketballs and missed three or four more times, banging out holes in the ring of snow around the rim and dislodging some from the net. Finally they each rattled one in, but the effect was gone. This being Drake’s first time, Shale could see it was nothing to him, just something to pass the evening, and Shale wished he could convince Drake how special it is when you hit it on the first try. Either that or be more like Drake himself, less bound by things. Then a person wouldn’t have to feel the emptiness.

IN THE EARLY 80s Weston was a six-foot-four leaper, some said the best in the west, often compared to players from teams famous for high flyers such as UNLV and Jarvis Basnight, and earlier, Louisville with Dr. Dunkenstein (Darrel Griffith), and Houston with Clyde the Glide, Michael Young, and the other names notorious to Phi Slamma Jamma. Weston was a swing-man slasher with a forty-five-inch vertical. He went over three men in a game against University of the Pacific, full speed on a dead run from the left wing to the lane as he launched off one foot, cupped the ball high in the tomahawk, spread his legs wide, and brought it down on top of all of them. His head hit the backboard, sent a gasp through the crowd of six thousand, and messed his hair up some. He walked to the line, brushing it off as he matted his hair back down, nonchalant.

“That was the best dunk I’ve ever seen,” Shale told him in the locker room.

Weston had come from the shower, a white towel around his waist. He turned his back to Shale and pointed to a cut beneath the shoulder blade, a clean red line. “Backboard,” he said, an indication of how high he’d really gone.

That sort of thing made the young players worship him, but Weston was quiet when it came down to it. Always quiet with regard to himself, thought Shale, though he knew Weston’s gift was something most people had never before witnessed and would likely never see again.

Shale and Weston were both stick thin. The family itself was distant, but basketball held the brothers together. As a boy Shale felt they existed in a nearly rootless way, he and Weston like pale windblown trees in a barren land. Their father’s land to be precise, the land of a high school basketball coach. He led the family to Alaska and back, then crisscrossed Montana, moving seven times before Shale was fourteen, in pursuit of the basketball dynasty—the team that would reach the top with Shale’s dad at the helm and make something happen that would be remembered forever. His father had been trying to accomplish that since before Shale was born and it got flint hard at times, the rigidity of how he handled things.

“LET’S TRY AGAIN,” Drake said, and Shale agreed as he stared out the side window.

“Where to?” Drake said.

Shale motioned in a circle. “Should be some close by.” They drove for thirty minutes on a slow pace as they checked up and down the cross streets and found nothing, just singular hoops here and there until they rounded the corner of L Street all the way west by Highland Drive. Here they saw two hoops again, though much farther apart, nearly an entire block between them. “Good enough,” said Shale, and Drake lined up the car lights.

“I’ll take the far one,” Shale said, and he walked until he was positioned where he wanted to be, solitary, in the distance. He had felt down while driving, almost like giving up, but now that he was outside he felt all right. So far from the car it was mostly dark. The net was perfect, filled with white, and atop the rim a thick ring of snow was set like a crown in the naked light.

“Ready?” Drake called.

“Ready,” Shale answered.

From deep back again they lofted their jumpers, Drake’s ball a flash of light caught in the car’s headlights, Shale’s a shadow in the far darkness.

BY THE TIME Shale reached high school, both he and Weston had the dream, Weston already on his way to the top, Shale two years younger and trying to learn everything he could. They’d received the dream first from their father, then from the rez, the Northern Cheyenne rez in southeast Montana—and they’d both lost it late. Both made it to the D-1 level, both had opportunity to play overseas, but neither made the league. Close—Weston had died on his way to Seattle for his shot at the NBA; and Shale two years later, numb but with an anger that was making him great, had developed a deep jumper, a vertical nearly as high as Weston’s, and rez-style moves. He had a slim chance with the Phoenix Suns organization in an L.A. summer league, but nothing came of it.