Authors: Tom Spanbauer
The tractor was driving along just fine when something touched me on the back. George was to the right of me, crouched on the tractor's wheel well, leaning up against the seat. It was his shoulder. His left shoulder against my back. And a familiar smell. The part of the tomato that folds together red into the stem of green.
Both my hands white knuckles on the steering wheel.
George stuck his big hand out.
George Serano! George yelled in the tractor noise and the wind.
His other hand held onto his hat.
George's hand was like when you have a really good tan with smooth black hairs on the back. His white shirt had a western cut and pearl buttons. In his shirt pocket, showing through, a pack of Camels. A white T-shirt under his white shirt.
His dark deep-set eyes. He was smiling.
Full throttle on the tractor. I reached my right hand out, grabbed George's hand too hard.
A big Howdy Doody shake.
Klusener! I yelled back through the tractor noise and the wind at him.
The name's Klusener!
Day in and day out, every day, eight till noon, one till six, every day including Sunday, dry, hot sun and wind, no stopping for a water break, pee break, cigarette break, no breaks at all, eighty acres and two weeks straight, row after row after row, I worked George Serano hard.
If he needed to drink, if he needed to pee, he did it while the hay slip was going. I hardly looked back at him. Once, when I looked back, George was tipping his silver thermos of water up, water spilling dark onto his white shirt, his Adam's apple working. The other times, the cloud of dust so thick, he looked like a yellow dust ghost.
When the baler got to the end of the windrow, I didn't stop the tractor, didn't slow it down, just lifted the baler teeth, shut the power takeoff, and started turning the steering wheel, made the turn, then lined the baler up with the next windrow, dropped the baler teeth, started the power takeoff, and started in on another windrow.
No pause, no slowdown, no rest.
Me, I was getting a suntan.
One time at the end of the field as I was turning, I caught George peeing off the back of the slip. His back to me, the long stream of yellow coming out of him. I turned around quick.
Row after row after row, day after day.
Once in a while, I'd shear a flywheel pin, or I'd run out of twine, and we had to stop. I did just like Dad told me. Let George sit on his ass while I fixed the problem. I left the tractor running for the noise. The hardest part of a breakdown was George's cigarette. Whenever the baler broke down, while I was fixing the baler George sat on his ass on a bale of hay and smoked a cigarette. I would've killed for one of those cigarettes. I had my own cigarettes, but I never smoked in front of George, which means I didn't smoke at all during the day.
I know it's weird. I just didn't want him to know I had human emotions like cigarette smoking.
It wasn't just Dad. Something in me wanted to get even with the man who stole my stuff, and I wanted to punish him for not owning up to it. But even more than that. Punish him for being a drunk, for being a no-account, for being an Indian, for being a queer.
Every day when we quit at six, I unhitched the baler and drove the tractor to the house. George crouched down next to me on the wheel well. He didn't touch me with his arm or his shoulder while I drove.
At the house, we didn't say goodbye or good day or good night or fare thee well, motherfucker. Nothing. I shut the tractor off. He got off the tractor first. Then I got off. He started walking, and where to I didn't know. South. To the reservation.
I went the other way. I got in the pickup and drove up to the feedlot, where I could finally be alone with myself and the radio on and my cigarettes.
Cigarettes those days tasted good. Sitting in the pickup, I smoked two or three, sometimes four cigarettes in a row.
And that other thing that I do: those eighty acres and two weeks of baling with George, I never once whacked off and broke the sixth commandment.
I swear, a new record in modern history.
Sitting in the pickup, the radio on, sometimes even with my favorite song on and my cigarette and my time to feel good just for myself, there was nothing. I looked down at my crotch, and I'd wonder. It felt as if my whole body'd gone dead.
In the mirror in the bathroom before dinner, after washing my hands and arms and sticking my head under the faucet and scrubbing my face and ears and hair and toweling off my hair, the eighty acres and two weeks of baling with George Serano, I stood at the mirror, the water running into the sink. I didn't have my skin fungus this summer because I wasn't in the yellow dust all day. Up close at myself, I looked and looked into my almond-shaped hazel eyes, as if I was somebody I didn't know and I was there looking back at me, trying to find myself.
Mom and Dad and I at the kitchen table. The sign of the cross, the pot roast, the spuds, the gravy, the canned green peas and carrots. Fucking supper, man. You know all about fucking supper. Except now the questions: Is George doing his work? Is George sober? Is he drinking on the job? Are you keeping your distance?
Sleeping. Forgot how to sleep. No longer sleep and dreams and soft pillows and comfort in my bed. Only hot nights and lying in the dark staring at my bedroom ceiling plaster, no exotic beige paramecia for me, only flat olive green.
Not a breath of wind through my open windows. Outside the crickets and the frogs and nights so dark they festered stars.
Wednesday and Friday nights, those eighty acres and two weeks, I didn't tell Billie who I was working with. I knew there was a truth I wasn't telling her, but to save my life I didn't know what it was.
Plus those days, I didn't know what it was about Billie. Something about her was so beautiful, made it even more difficult to talk. One Friday night in particular parked in Mount Moriah, out the window, right behind Billie, was a huge Austrian Copper rose. The way she was sitting, it looked like tiny bright orange and yellow roses were spraying out her head. Those days, everything about Billie was like
that rosebush. Her dark red hennaed hair shiny with hairspray. The gold loops in her ears. The slope of her neck. Her skin so milky white and beautiful there, you'd think she was a famous statue. Especially in the sunset light. And her lips too, full and soft and pink. That, and her eyes. No tear duct cancer lately. The blue of them the blue of a late afternoon sky.
I swear, that evening across the cab from me, Billie Cody was quite a picture. Looking back on it now, the way I was acting, I can see how Billie thought I was still angry with her. But I wasn't. All I knew was I was tired. Dead tired.
Billie didn't feel like talking much either, though. The more beautiful she got, the farther away she was. I just picked her up at her house, said hi to Mrs. Cody, got Cokes at the Snatch Out, then drove straight to Mount Moriah. One time, Billie and I fell asleep, my head on Billie's shoulder. So safe I felt up against her, her French smell. I woke us up because I was snoring.
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why I was so tired. It was hay season all right, but this year I wasn't doing the hard work. George was doing the hard work. I was just driving the tractor.
Weird how you can't see what's right in front of your eyes.
I was fighting a battle. A battle for my life, really. And I didn't even know it.
Still fighting.
As fate would have it, the day we moved the baler onto the last forty acres was when it happened.
The last forty acres was land Dad was leasing from Filo Hess about two miles from the house.
That morning, at the breakfast table, same as ever, I was staring down two eggs and a bowl of mush.
Dad quit stirring his tea, put his teaspoon down on the oilcloth tablecloth.
I hadn't been screwing up, I'd been doing a good job with the baling, working hard, keeping my distance, making good time, so for a moment Dad let his Roosky eyes land on me.
You can pick up George on your way over to Hess's forty, Dad said. He'll be waiting on the road by his grandma's mailbox.
Two teaspoons of sugar, a splash of milk onto my mush.
His grandma? I said.
Grandma Queep, Dad said. Just beyond the Lattigs' place on Rio Vista.
That run-down old place off the road under the Lombardy poplars? I said.
You've been by there a hundred times, Dad said.
George Serano lives
there
? I said.
With his grandma, Dad said.
The old cabin just on the other side of the swimming hole? I said.
That's the place, Dad said. He'll be waiting.
The mailbox was old, rusted through, holes of buckshot. The red flag was down, and above the red flag in painted-on black letters:
QUEEP ROUTE 1 NORTH BOX 86
. I pulled the tractor and the baler off the road and looped into the entrance of the lane. I didn't pull into the lane because I'd have to back out of the lane, and I never could back the tractor up with the baler attached. Things always went haywire, and the tractor and the baler ended up cramped up together in some hellacious way God couldn't figure out.
On the road, across the road, up the road, down the road, walking down Grandma Queep's lane, under the Lattigs' elm trees, under the whole bright morning sun, no George Serano nowhere.
I shut the tractor off, sat there in the quiet on the tractor seat for a while. Figured it was a good time for a smoke, so I lit me a smoke. Half the cigarette gone, and still no George. I could just imagine Dad pulling up in his pickup, squealing brakes, the loud metal-to-metal pop of the door, Dad's dark Roosky Gypsy eyes, his wrist on his hips, hiking up his Levi's, yelling: The hay, the hay, the goddamn hay!
There was only one thing to do. I couldn't risk driving the tractor and the baler down Grandma Queep's lane because there might not be a place to turn around.
So I started walking.
During the past two weeks I hadn't said boo to George, hadn't even looked at him, and here I was walking up to his front door. What was I supposed to say? Good morning? I hope you're feeling well? Nice weather?
It was all too much to figure out, so I just kept walking, and since I was walking, I just said, What the hell, you might as well smell the roses.
Grandma Queep's lane wasn't graveled or paved. It was just two
dirt tire tracks with a line of grass down the middle. Puddles of water in the low spots. The way my boots sounded on that kind of dirt was nice. On either side of the lane, a post every eight feet, and between each post, sagging strands of barbwire. High grass along the fence lines, in some places stands of tansy, clover here and there, differnt places some purple blooms of alfalfa, and yellow blooming chamomile. A couple low-growing Russian olives. Asparagus gone to seed. Bull thistles.
The cigarette was finished by the time I got close to the house. I threw the Viceroy down, stamped it out on the dusty ground.
The post there at the end of the lane had a sign on it. The sign painted on wood in black letters said:
NO TRESPASSING
.
On both sides of me, all around, the barbwire sagged between the posts following the Lombardys through the rectangle.
It's a good thing I didn't take the tractor. I would never have made it out of there. The yard was barely big enough for George's '49 Ford and a blue International pickup.
Inside in the rectangle yard it was dark and cool. Still a lot of shade even though the Lombardys were half-dead. Gusts of high Idaho wind shook the trees and the leaves. The sound was some great high-up sigh. On the ground and on top of things, the sun and the shadows spun around fast. Magic light and dark on everything. Everything covered in hallucination.
Straight ahead was an old gray, wood, slope-roofed barn, and then another shed, looked like a chicken coop. Chickens poking around in the yard. The house, if you could call it a house, was off to the right. There was a smaller tree in front of the house, an apple tree, or a pear tree maybe.
So quiet. Only the wind in the trees.
Grandma Queep's house was bigger than the Mexican house by half. Same old gray wood. When I got up closer, though, I could see the house wasn't a house; it was a log cabin. Stumps of old Lombardy trees for steps.
The screen door was painted dark green. I put my fingers through the door pull and pulled slow. The
Inner Sanctum
squeak. My fist was up, ready to knock. The wood grain of the gray front door in front of my eyes, a swirl of lifelines.
About that time, a dog started barking. A big dog.
Thank God the dog was inside.
Before my fist had a chance to knock on the gray wood swirls of the door, the door opened. Woodsmoke and coffee and frying grease were the smells. Buckskin. And something else, maybe peppermint or some kind of herb.
The woman who opened the door opened it only enough for her body to fit. Behind her the big dog's big, deep bark. Then, through her legs, the dog's nose was gray whiskers.
Shut up, Bonanza! she said.
Then to me: You're the Klusener boy. Come in.
The old yellow dog stopped barking. He turned around and limped over to the woodstove. A Majestic, green enamel. Next to the stove, an old smashed-out pillow covered with a blue and red Pendleton blanket covered in dog hair.
When the screen door slammed behind me is when I realized I was inside the house. Grandma Queep closed the big wood door. My breath. I was having trouble with my breath.
Grandma Queep was no more than four feet tall. Lots of gray-to-white hair braided in a big braid and rolled around in the back of her head in a bun. A red bandanna handkerchief tied around her head, but still strands of hair stuck up like cobwebs all around her face. Her skin was real smooth and leathery, and around her eyes thousands of tiny wrinkles. Two deep wrinkles in her forehead that dipped down between her eyes. Bushy white eyebrows, and underneath the eyebrows her red-rimmed eyes were dark and clear and looked at you the way a child looks at you, direct contact, her eyes and your soul, like there was nothing in between.