Faraway Places (13 page)

I was still holding the door open, and my father was still holding on to me and crying when I realized my mother was standing there in the doorway. She was a mess. Her hair was sticking up all over the place; her dress was torn. She had let herself go, like the time when the chinook first hit us. It was dark but I could see how her eye was, and my mother looked at me like she knew I was fed up with making things nice when things weren't nice. And I knew she was fed up too.

My mother was holding a large crucifix and Old Glory and a can of gasoline.

My father looked at her, then at me. There we were: one man's family.

My mother handed me and my father shovels, and we dug the nigger's grave right there in the corral. The digging wasn't tough; the ground was soft below the manure. We were all quiet. The sky was everywhere. The sky went deeper and deeper the more we dug. My father started crying and had to stop shoveling twice. Both times he leaned against the shovel and said what a fool he had been. I still didn't say anything, and neither did my mother.

Then my mother went and got the twelve-gauge. She stood close and aimed at the lariat hanging from the winch and pulled the trigger. The crows flew off the nigger in an explosion of black wings. The sound of that shot was like the screen door slamming. The nigger fell down to the ground onto Old Glory with a sound like when you throw a sack of rotten spuds out to pigs. We dragged the Old Glory bundle to the grave and dropped it in, then covered it up with dirt. We threw dirt and manure, one shovelful at a time, on top of Old Glory, on top of the nigger, on top of Geronimo, and when we were done, my mother put the crucifix on the grave.

I WENT TO
the river and sat down by the edge. I took my boots off and my socks off and stuffed my socks in my boots and rolled up my pants legs. I waded across the shallow part to the small island of brambles and scrub elms and went around behind where no one could see me. I took off my shirt and my Levi's and my shorts and stuffed my shorts in my pants. Then I jumped in the river, in the deep part, still only about four feet deep. I swam around naked, my first time swimming naked like that. Before, I'd always worn my shorts. This was my first time standing naked with sky all around. I washed out my Levi's and my shirt and shorts and wrung them out. I put them back on wet and when I came back around from back there where no one could see me, I saw my mother standing in the river, water up to her knees. The skirt of her red housedress floated in a circle around her. She put her face down close to the water and cupped the water up to her face and hair. She splashed herself over and over again, then straightened up and shook her hair out, shaking her head from side to side fast with her eyes closed, water spraying from her hair.

My mother stood there for a while, like she was trying to decide what to do, all the while looking at her hands. Then she made the sign of the cross with her right hand, her left hand pulling her hair back from her face. I knew she did that because she didn't know what else to do. She turned and waded up to the bank and walked without turning to look at my father. He was kneeling there by the river, over by the elm tree by the pig pen. He just knelt there rubbing his hands together in the water and looking at things strange, as if he had never seen the world before.

My mother knelt down by the grave to pray to God and the Virgin Mary, and my father—when he saw that she was kneeling down by the grave—came over and knelt down beside her. My mother's eye told me to kneel down at the grave too.

But I didn't.

Instead, I sang the
heya, heya, Geronimo
song and danced
around and let myself go like a wild animal. I sang the
heya, heya, Sugar Babe
song too. The crows heard my song, and the pigeons in the barn heard, and the hawks. The river heard and so did the trees along the river. I don't know if God heard my song, but the rest of them heard and that was enough.

I danced and sang and I watched my mother and my father. They didn't act like it was unusual that I was dancing. They acted like I was doing something ordinary, which surprised me a little, but then I wasn't dancing for them to see. I didn't care what they thought. I thought of digging up Old Glory, of crawling inside that grave my father and I had dug. I would have liked to have slept and dreamed dreams with Geronimo. But he was already too far away.

What I didn't know then as I danced, watching my mother and watching my father, was how many times, uncountable times, I would live through all of this again: the chinook, the
heya, heya, Geronimo
and
heya, heya, Sugar Babe
songs, yellow stains and red flags, butterflies and dice, Black Velvet and the river, one thing always leading to another forevermore.

MY MOTHER POURED
gasoline onto the spot where the nigger had fallen onto Old Glory. She lit a match and looked at it, both eyes perfectly focused on the flame. Then she tossed the match onto the spot. Flames from that single flame blew up high with a sound, huge and forevermore like hell. The sound the barn made when the flames got to it, after my mother had sprinkled gasoline all around, was like the sound she made shaking her hair out in the river.

The shingles were on fire, the floorboards were, even the strands of light coming down from the holes in the roof in the loft were aflame. The red radio was burning, the bag balm, and so were the milk strainers. The saddle room was on fire.

I managed to get two of those photographs out of the saddle room before the barn blew altogether. It was a close one, but I got the two I wanted. When I walked past the toolshed, the
toolshed burst into flames too. It was like war, like a bomb bursting in air, like God—too bright.

The Oldsmobile was parked away from the house, its engine running. My father was standing around like he was drunk again on Black Velvet. He walked to the middle of the yard, watching things the way he had been watching at the river. He watched my mother walk out of the house with two big suitcases I had never seen before. She was wearing her hat, the one she didn't wear that much anymore, the one with the pheasant feather in it. Her hair was still a mess, but she had her high heels on, but no lipstick and no nylons either. She set the suitcases down and closed the screen door tight, snugged it back into home. By the time she got to the Oldsmobile, the house blew too. She didn't even flinch, like one thing had just led to another in a way she knew it would all along. I thought of the things in our house that were burning: the kitchen table, the beds, my father's chair, the coffee table, the doily curtains, the medicine-cabinet mirror, the wallpaper in the hallway, my confirmation diploma, the guardian-angel picture with the kids. My mother put the suitcases in the trunk of the Oldsmobile and got in on the driver's side, closing the door behind her.

My father didn't budge; he just kept standing there in the middle of the yard, fire all around: big, greedy flames going lickety-split, the whole shebang on fire. The color was like a sunset right there in front of you all the time. My father looked young, like he had when he was in the army. He looked scared. I walked over to him and gave him one of the photographs, the one of him kissing my mother at their wedding, but I kept the other one—my favorite. I put that one in my shirt pocket.

My father stared at the photograph for some time, then at the fire; flames everywhere grew higher. My mother had the Oldsmobile running in neutral.

The sun began to rise.

I DIDN'T SAY
good-bye to anything when I left. I didn't cry. The sky was a color I had never seen before and the fire was making me sweat even though I was already way down the road past the last red flag before the house.

I didn't look back. I just walked out of the yard and onto the road and headed west because I didn't want to see the river, or Harold P. Endicott's house, or where his flag used to snap in the sky. I didn't want to see that woman Sugar Babe's lean-to, the one she'd shared with the nigger, or the trees along the river. I didn't want to see the place up there in the stand of twenty-two cottonwood trees where my swing used to be.

I could still feel the heat on my back by the second flag. And as that fire burned, the wind was at my back, blowing from that direction it never blew from, but the once.

The Oldsmobile pulled up next to me on the gravel road. My mother was driving and my father was beside her. I kept on walking and my mother kept driving slow, her eyes on the road, my eyes on the road, her left eye gone that way it gets, not that I looked to see.

My mother turned on the radio, to the rock-and-roll station. It was my favorite song playing: “Walk, Don't Run,” by the Ventures.

I thought about what was lying under that cross, under the manure, wrapped in Old Glory. I wondered if that crucifix was on fire yet, and I wondered if Geronimo was in heaven, or if that, too, was just another illusion. Everything, Mr. Energy had said, everything is an illusion.

I wondered what the davenport looked like burning, what the hallway looked like burning, and the confirmation certificate, and the picture of the guardian angel. I wondered if the butterflies and the dice burned off the wallpaper first.

My father opened the car door and put his hand out to me. I walked ahead for a while before I took it and got in the Oldsmobile with them. My mother drove off with us in the car like that, her looking that way in her hat with the pheasant feather,
hair sticking out all over, my father in the middle, blood still on his face, staring at me like he had never set eyes on me before; my mother driving and trying to light a Viceroy, me by the window, riding shotgun with “Walk, Don't Run” turned up high.

I rolled down the window and rested my arm on the side of the car. I could see myself in the rearview mirror and I watched myself for a while. Then I turned the mirror so I could see what was burning up behind me.

I took a long look back.

Framed that way in the mirror, it looked like the photograph of the Industrial Revolution from that book Mr. Hoffman gave me: all that smoke and fire going up into the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania sky. For a second I wondered if what I could see back there behind the Oldsmobile could be reflected ahead, so that what was happening back there looked like it was happening up front too. I tried to adjust the mirror to see if I could do that—see forward by reflecting what was back—but it didn't quite work. When we got to the red flag on the plateau, I stopped looking into the mirror. I stuck my head out the window and turned around.

The flames were licking up high and wild in the middle of that flat cookie sheet, and in the dawn's early light, you could see the moon hanging up there dim in the blue infinity, and the sun, a much larger flame, rising in the eastern sky.

FINALIST
, 2005 OREGON BOOK AWARD

Core: A Romance

Kassten Alonso

Fiction / 208pp / $12.95 / 0-9716915-7-6

This intense and compact novel crackles with obsession, betrayal, and madness. As the narrator becomes fixated on his best friend's girlfriend, his precarious hold on sanity deteriorates into delusion and violence in this twenty-first-century retelling of the classic myth of Hades and Persephone.

“Jump through this Gothic stained-glass window and you are in for some serious investigation of darkness and all of its deadly sins. But take heart, brave traveler, the adventure will prove thrilling.”