“How about Taco Bell drive-thru?” he asked.
“You devil, you’re trying to get into my pants, aren’t you?”
Impulsively, he dropped his head into her lap and pressed his lips against her black-jeaned crotch. She yelped and pushed him away. She wondered if he could smell her, if he could smell the Lummi Indian. Maybe he could, but he seemed to interpret it as something different, as something meant for him, as he pushed his head into her lap again. What was she supposed to do? She decided to laugh, so she did laugh as she pushed his face against her pubic bone. She loved the man for reasons she could not always explain. She closed her eyes, drove in that darkness, and felt dangerous.
Halfway across the bridge, Mary Lynn slammed on the brakes, not because she’d seen anything—her eyes were still closed—but because she’d felt something. The car skidded to a stop just inches from the bumper of a truck that had just missed sliding into the row of cars stopped ahead of it.
“What the hell is going on?” Jeremiah asked as he lifted his head from her lap.
“Traffic jam.”
“Jesus, we’ll never make it home by ten. We better call.”
“The cell phone is in the glove.”
Jeremiah dialed the home number but received only a busy signal.
“Toni must be talking to her boyfriend,” she said.
“I don’t like him.”
“He doesn’t like you.”
“What the hell is going on? Why aren’t we moving?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go check?”
Jeremiah climbed out of the car.
“I was kidding,” she said as he closed the door behind him.
He walked up to the window of the truck ahead of him.
“You know what’s going on?” Jeremiah asked the truck driver.
“Nope.”
Jeremiah walked farther down the bridge. He wondered if there was a disabled car ahead, what the radio liked to call a “blocking accident.” There was also the more serious “injury accident” and the deadly “accident with fatality involved.” He had to drive this bridge ten times a week. The commute. White men had invented the commute, had deepened its meaning, had diversified its complications, and now spent most of the time trying to shorten it, reduce it, lessen it.
In the car, Mary Lynn wondered why Jeremiah always found it necessary to insert himself into every situation. He continually moved from the passive to the active. The man was kinetic. She wondered if it was a white thing. Possibly. But more likely, it was a Jeremiah thing. She remembered Mikey’s third-grade-class’s school play, an edited version of
Hamlet.
Jeremiah had walked onto the stage to help his son drag the unconscious Polonius, who had merely been clubbed over the head rather than stabbed to death, from the stage. Mortally embarrassed, Mikey had cried himself to sleep that night, positive that he was going to be an elementary-school pariah, while Jeremiah vainly tried to explain to the rest of the family why he had acted so impulsively.
I was just trying to be a good father, he had said.
Mary Lynn watched Jeremiah walk farther down the bridge. He was just a shadow, a silhouette. She was slapped by the brief, irrational fear that he would never return.
Husband, come back to me, she thought, and I will confess.
Impatient drivers honked their horns. Mary Lynn joined them. She hoped Jeremiah would recognize the specific sound of their horn and return to the car.
Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me, she thought as she pounded the steering wheel.
Jeremiah heard their car horn, but only as one note in the symphony of noise playing on the bridge. He walked through that noise, through an ever-increasing amount of noise, until he pushed through a sudden crowd of people and found himself witnessing a suicide.
Illuminated by headlights, the jumper was a white woman, pretty, wearing a sundress and good shoes. Jeremiah could see that much as she stood on the bridge railing, forty feet above the cold water.
He could hear sirens approaching from both sides of the bridge, but they would never make it through the traffic in time to save this woman.
The jumper was screaming somebody’s name.
Jeremiah stepped closer, wanting to hear the name, wanting to have that information so that he could use it later. To what use, he didn’t know, but he knew that name had value, importance. That name, the owner of that name, was the reason why the jumper stood on the bridge.
“Aaron,” she said. The jumper screamed, “Aaron.”
In the car, Mary Lynn could not see either Jeremiah or the jumper, but she could see dozens of drivers leaving their cars and running ahead.
She was suddenly and impossibly sure that her husband was the reason for this commotion, this emergency. He’s dying, thought Mary Lynn, he’s dead. This is not what I wanted, she thought, this is not why I cheated on him, this is not what was supposed to happen.
As more drivers left their cars and ran ahead, Mary Lynn dialed 911 on the cell phone and received only a busy signal.
She opened her door and stepped out, placed one foot on the pavement, and stopped.
The jumper did not stop. She turned to look at the crowd watching her. She looked into the anonymous faces, into the maw, and then looked back down at the black water.
Then she jumped.
Jeremiah rushed forward, along with a few others, and peered over the edge of the bridge. One brave man leapt off the bridge in a vain rescue attempt. Jeremiah stopped a redheaded young man from jumping.
“No,” said Jeremiah. “It’s too cold. You’ll die too.”
Jeremiah stared down into the black water, looking for the woman who’d jumped and the man who’d jumped after her.
In the car, or rather with one foot still in the car and one foot placed on the pavement outside of the car, Mary Lynn wept. Oh, God, she loved him, sometimes because he was white and often despite his whiteness. In her fear, she found the one truth Sitting Bull never knew: there was at least one white man who could be trusted.
The black water was silent.
Jeremiah stared down into that silence.
“Jesus, Jesus,” said a lovely woman next to him. “Who was she? Who was she?”
“I’m never leaving,” Jeremiah said.
“What?” asked the lovely woman, quite confused.
“My wife,” said Jeremiah, strangely joyous. “I’m never leaving her.” Ever the scientist and mathematician, Jeremiah knew that his wife was a constant. In his relief, he found the one truth Shakespeare never knew: gravity is overrated.
Jeremiah looked up through the crossbeams above him, as he stared at the black sky, at the clouds that he could not see but knew were there, the invisible clouds that covered the stars. He shouted out his wife’s name, shouted it so loud that he could not speak in the morning.
In the car, Mary Lynn pounded the steering wheel. With one foot in the car and one foot out, she honked and honked the horn. She wondered if this was how the world was supposed to end, with everybody trapped on a bridge, with the black water pushing against their foundations.
Out on the bridge, four paramedics arrived far too late. Out of breath, exhausted from running across the bridge with medical gear and stretchers, the paramedics could only join the onlookers at the railing.
A boat, a small boat, a miracle, floated through the black water. They found the man, the would-be rescuer, who had jumped into the water after the young woman, but they could not find her.
Jeremiah turned from the water and walked away from the crowd. He knew that people could want death as much as they wanted anything else. What did Jeremiah want? Did he want his wife? Did she want him? After all these years how much could they still want each other? Mary Lynn waited for him. She could see him walking toward her. She could hear the waves riddling the bridge. She felt the spray of the water. She felt a chill. When Jeremiah returned to her, she was going to hold his face in her hands and ask him, “Who do you think you are?” And she hoped that the answer would surprise her.
OLD GROWTH
In 1989, while hunting on the Spokane Indian Reservation, I saw a quick flash of movement on the ridge above me, spun, aimed high, and fired my rifle. I’d been hunting deer since childhood and had shot and missed twenty-seven times over the years. I was widely recognized as the worst hunter in reservation history. But, on that day, I didn’t miss. At the advanced age of twenty-six, I thought I’d killed my first deer and was extremely excited as I climbed that ridge to claim my kill. But I hadn’t shot a deer. I’d shot and killed a white guy who’d been tending to the field of marijuana he’d planted deep in the reservation woods. White guys did that because the reservation cops never ventured off the paved roads and federal agents didn’t want to deal with the complicated laws surrounding tribal sovereignty and police jurisdiction.
I kneeled beside the man’s body. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. I’d killed a man—by accident, yes, but it was still murder. I’d shot him in the back of the head. The bullet had torn through his brain and exited out his face, exploding it into a bloody maw. He was unrecognizable.
I’d never been a cruel man but I’d often been drunk and stupid. I’d spent two years in jail for robbing a bowling alley with a water pistol that looked like a gun and six months for stealing a go-cart from an amusement park and crashing it into a police car in the parking lot. I wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind and nobody, not even the cop in the police cruiser that I’d slightly dented, would have ever considered me dangerous.
But now, I had killed a man and I knew I would spend real time in a real prison for it. Probably not for murder but certainly for manslaughter. So I did what I thought I should do to save myself. I dragged that man’s body back to his pot field and buried him in the middle of it. If he was ever discovered, I figured the police would think that he was killed by his partners or by a rival pot-growing operation.
After I buried him, I walked the two miles back to my truck and drove the twelve miles back to the house that I shared with my brother.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“One shot,” I said. “And one miss.”
For the next year, I was terrified that the body would be discovered. I scanned the newspapers for news of missing men. Missing criminals. Missing drug dealers. And, sure, a few bad guys disappeared, as they always do, but they also disappeared from the news pretty quickly.
After a few more years, it began to feel like the event had never happened. It felt like a movie that I must have watched at three in the morning in a motel next to a freeway.
Then, twenty-one years after I’d killed the man, I went to the tribal clinic with a bad cough and discovered that I had terminal cancer. My body was a museum of cancer; there was a tumor exhibition in every nook and cranny.
“Three months if you’re unlucky,” the doctor said. “Six months if you bump into a miracle.”
So what does a dying man do about the worst sin of his life? I didn’t confess. I was still too cowardly to do that. And I didn’t want to spend my last days in court or jail.
But I felt the need to atone.
So, in my weakened state, I drove along that familiar logging road, and slowly climbed back to that ridge where I’d shot and killed a man. The pot field had grown wild and huge. How had it survived winter and freezing temperatures? And how fast does pot grow? How many generations of the plants can live and die in a two-decade span? I didn’t know, but I had to crawl through a pot jungle to the spot where I’d buried that white guy.
And, bit by bit, handful by handful, I dug up his body.
His tattered clothes were draped over brown bones. His skull was a collapsed sinkhole. I was surprised that animals hadn’t dug him up and spread the remains far and wide. I stared at him for a long time.
Then I sang a death song for him. And an honor song for the family and friends who never knew what had happened to him.
Then I took his skull, carefully wrapped it in newspaper, slid it into my backpack, crawled out of the pot garden, and walked back to my truck.
It was late when I returned to my house. My brother had long ago married a Lakota woman and moved to South Dakota. I was alone in the world. And I would soon be dead. I stripped naked and carried the dead man’s skull into the shower with me. I cleaned my body and the dead man’s skull.
Then I put on my favorite T-shirt and sweatpants and set the skull on the TV in my bedroom. I lay on the bed and stared at that crushed face.
I wanted to be haunted. But that skull did not speak to me. I wanted that skull to be more than a dead man’s skull. I wanted it to be a hive abandoned by its wasps, or a shell left behind by its insect, or a husk peeled from its vegetable, or a planet knocked free of its orbit, or the universe collapsing around me.
But the skull was only the reminder that I had killed a man. It was proof that I had lived and would die without magnificence. God, I wanted to be forgiven, but an apology offered to a dead man is only a selfish apology to yourself.
EMIGRATION
The hummingbirds swarmed my garden, randomly at first, but then hovered and formed themselves into midair letters. It took seventeen hummingbirds to make an “A” and twenty-eight to make a “W.” In this way, feather by feather, letter by letter, the hummingbirds spelled my mother’s full name.