"This was a man," Norm told Earl, "seriously out of touch."
Norm towed the motor home back to Monk's Service, while the man talked of his hopes of at least seeing Mount Rushmore. For a half hour, between the candy bars and the aspirin in the service station store, he talked in whispers with his wife. Then he bought a plastic model of Mount Rushmore for $7.95. Norm thought anyone was better off not seeing Mount Rushmore, but he couldn't watch as the man accepted his nickel in change from Brad. Holding the model against his chest, he walked out to the motor home while his wife stayed in the air-conditioned store. He patted the motor home's windshield. His wife watched him for a second or two, then turned and glared around the store at Norm and Brad, who, under her stare, remembered they had work to do. When the man returned to the store, he bargained listlessly with Brad for the sale of the motor home, the plastic presidents presiding over the transaction. Then Norm drove the couple down to Jim Reed's Chevrolet where, he heard later, they bought a used Celebrity.
But Brad never got around to fixing the motor home. Its dereliction made the entire station seem derelict. Weeds grew around it. The pavement underneath it cracked. Paint faded. The windshield grew so dusty it looked like a fallow field. Bird manure ran in dirty white streaks down its panels, obscuring the painting of mountains and a lake. Two of the tires lost air while the other two retained it, so that it listed to one side, making the station appear to list the other way. Brad began to hate the thing. It squatted there in silent accusation, a piece of junk out of which he'd hoped to profit, for which he'd taken advantage of another human being's small, shattered dream. Every morning when he arrived at the station, he cursed the motor home's ugliness. When he began taking breaks from working on engines to stand in the door of the station, wiping his hands on a greasy red towel and staring at the thing, Norm, seeing how the motor home's soul was beginning to possess him, suggested he take it off Brad's hands. Brad agreed, relieved. Norm borrowed the tow truck, pumped the bad tires up, hauled the motor home down to the reservation, returned the truck, and, having thus become the owner of a paid-for house, quit his job.
"My dpi," he said to Earl. "Some day I'm gonna dig a basement, hanh? I'll be the only Indian on the rez who has a tipi with a basement. Only Indian in history."
"You could make The
Guiness Book of World Records.
"
They laughed together. Then Norm grew quiet. The fire was dying down, but he didn't rise to add wood.
"Your mother and me," he said, having not forgotten what Earl had said earlier. "It's true. She is not friendly toward me. But there are things you must understand, nephew. I came back from Vietnam screwed up. I volunteered for Nam. The warrior tradition. The Indians in Nam, we were all in some kind of special unit. Tougher than tough. Being a warrior is something to be proud of, and I was. But to be a warrior you have to know who your enemies are. That's real important. And Vietnam."
He stopped talking. The sun touched the top of the cottonwood west of the motor home.
"Vietnam," Norm repeated. He nodded at the washtub. "Tanning hides is an odd thing for a warrior to do, hanh? It is a slow and quiet thing. That is why I do it. The US government says to our grandfathers: 'We got a deal for you. You can give us your land and go on the rez, or we can shoot you. Take your pick.' Then, with Vietnam, the government comes back and says: 'We got another hot deal. How'd you like to go across the ocean and do the same thing to some other people who think they should rule themselves and live on their own land?' And a whole bunch of us on the rez perk right up. 'Now we can go be warriors like our grandfathers,' we say. And we were some warriors, nephew. But the best warrior isn't the one who fights the best. It's the one who knows the best who his real enemy is. With our grandfathers, that was pretty clear. In Vietnam, it wasn't.
"When I volunteered, I was young. I thought I was gonna be Crazy Horse swooping down on Custer. Hanh. But there wasn't any swooping in Vietnam. There was just leaves. You couldn't generally see ten feet over there, not where I was fighting. And it's still the same. Even now nobody can see what happened over there. You try to form a picture of it, you can't. You think of The Battle of the Greasy Grass, you can picture the river and the hills and the horses, even if you've never been to Montana. You can see Custer looking up and saying to his lieutenant, 'I wonder if this is going to affect my chances of becoming President.'
"It is this way, nephew: Not everyone is going to form the right picture of The Battle of the Greasy Grass. But they will form one. They will make some sense of it, even if it is the wrong sense. Hanh? But when people think about Vietnam, they don't see anything. Everything is still just a bunch of leaves."
Norm paused again, adjusted the stick on his knees. Earl waited. The fire had turned to coals, a flame low down among them, but talk had taken over, had become the thing that mattered in the world, and neither of them thought to build the fire back up or to remove the tub from over it.
"There are many reasons Vietnam is hard to talk about," Norm finally said. "The leaves are one of them. If you try to talk about it, you have no picture you can make people see. It is a blank A nothing. Words fall into that nothing and disappear. I got back here to the rez and found that out. That's when I decided to get drunk. And when I make a decision, nephew, I stick to it. I stayed drunk for ten years."
A grasshopper landed on the arm of Earl's chair: round obsidian eyes and glittering wings. It seemed a mineral animal, made of stone and mica. It crouched, the delicate joints in its legs bending tighter, and then it was gone, a blur of body and air. A prairie falcon flew low overhead in its peculiar striding flight, its long, rectangular tail carving the air behind it.
"Your dad never drank," Norm said. He pushed the stick into the ground and traced some marking there which he then traced out. "And isn't that something, nephew? Me an alcoholic, him not touching it, and we're brothers. And he's the one gets hit by a drunk driver in the wrong lane. I made it through bullets and rockets and grenades and alcohol, and my sweet little brother, who plants trees and stays on his side of the road, comes over a hill one night and sees nothing but lights. And the other guy survives. When they found him, he was a quarter mile away, wandering around, so drunk he didn't even know he'd been in an accident.
"But that guy wasn't the only one drunk on the rez that night, nephew. I was at a party when I heard about my brother. When I finally got it through my head what'd happened, I got in my car—what else would a drunk who's just heard his brother was killed by a drunk driver do, hanh?—and drove to see your mother. Stumbling in her door. Think about that, nephew. She's just found out her husband's been killed by a guy so drunk he can't see the road. And who shows up to comfort her? That guy."
Earl thought of it: his mother weeping, lost, his uncle stinking drunk, offering his arms. The dance of avoidance that must have followed. His mother's horror and anger, and Norm's shambling, stubborn insistence that he could help. The moment when Earl's life had changed, when all its forms had set. He had slept. Two years old. How did his mother ever get Norm out of the house? It hurt—hurt to think of it. Hurt to think of Norm reeking, trying to put his useless arms around Lorna. Trying to pat her. Mumbling drunken condolences or seeking them. Hurt to think of Lorna pushing him away. Tears streaming. Hair tangled. And finally, finally, finally, closing the door against her husband's brother. Finally closing the door.
It hurt too much. Earl was glad when Norm spoke again. "Your mother won't tell you these things," he said. "But you should know. Don't you blame her. She's got good reason not to see me."
"It was a long time ago," Earl said.
"It was and wasn't. Some things take longer to be a long time ago."
"You're family.
Tiospaye.
"
I am.
"You don't drink any more."
"I don't."
"But she still won't see you."
"And I still won't blame her, nephew. You never saw me drunk. She did. And she loved my little brother."
How odd, Earl thought, that he'd come to Norm to speak of the three horses, but instead this conversation had sparked and grown. These things he'd never known, that had lain hidden. Now here they were. Why not before? Why now?
"How did you quit?" he asked.
"That is a story, nephew."
And Norm told of sitting above the cemetery in the dark with a sack of long necks and drinking them while staring down at his brother's new grave. "Or at least where I thought it was," he said. "It was dark, hanh? But, of course, the more I drank, the better my vision got. I got to seeing so well my eyes bored a hole right through the dirt, and I could see my little brother in the grave. And I had a good, clear thought: The only way I was gonna be with him again was to be with him. There, in the grave. Understand, nephew, I wasn't exactly a wise man back then. I didn't have people following me around asking me the meaning of life. But I sat on that hill getting drunker and wiser by the minute, hanh? Until I knew what to do. Of course, I finished the beer first. For a drunk, being certain about ending your life is no good reason to waste Budweiser.
"When I finished the last bottle, I thought,
Now there's not even that to live for.
I got up and started down the hill. Don't know how I made it home, but when I got there I went right to the drawer where I kept my .38, which I'd bought when I got back from Nam. There were many things in my drawer, nephew—wire and paper and pliers and some old bottles of cologne this white girl I once dated thought were perfect gifts and didn't work too bad for starting fires. But I couldn't find my .38. Someone'd stole it.
"You believe that? Hanh? Walked right through that door there"—Norm jerked his head toward the door of his motor home—"and found my .38 and walked right back out with it. And nothing else. Just the pistol. I looked around to be sure. My clock radio that same girl'd give me was still sitting there next to the mattress. The clock part of that radio hadn't worked for two years, and then the radio part quit working when I got mad at the clock part for not working and gave it an uppercut one day. But what thief's gonna notice that? What thief's gonna walk into a house and check to make sure everything works before he stuffs it in his gunny sack?
"This was a question I was seriously thinking about when I remembered the reason I still had that clock radio, and the reason was that when I'd taken it to a pawn shop in Rapid to get money to buy beer, the pawn shop owner plugged it in and fiddled with the knobs and noticed how perfectly silent that radio was and how stubborn it was about insisting that the time was exactly seven oh two.
"I guess there's nothing worse than a clock radio that's both too quiet and too sure of itself. The guy pushed it back across the counter and said, 'Get outta my shop.' Now that is something, nephew. I was kicked out of a pawn shop. Hanh. How many people have accomplished that?"
"That could be on
Ripley's Believe It Or Not.
"
"It could, nephew. You are right. So I was standing in my bedroom remembering it. I still had my hand in that drawer where I thought my .38 should be. And then I remembered that it
had
worked, and I had pawned
it
for beer. So there I was, so low, nephew, I couldn't even kill myself. That's even lower than getting kicked out of a pawn shop!"
Norm laughed. All the grasshoppers silenced. "Funniest thing that'd ever happened to me. I couldn't even kill myself! Where do you go but up from there, hanh?"
Earl stared at his uncle for a moment, then burst out laughing, too, while Norm gave up trying to talk, and his laughter came out of him in great exhalations, and he wiped tears from his face with the palms of his hands.
"Oh, Lord," he wheezed, "when I realized my situation, I just fell on the floor, laughing so hard. There I was, I couldn't even kill myself!"
They were both howling with laughter now. Norm's chair was shaking under his weight. They laughed until they were exhausted and couldn't laugh any more.
"That was it," Norm finally said. "When I finally got off that floor, I figured if I couldn't kill myself I might as well live. I quit drinking right then. I didn't just decide to quit. I quit. Of course I needed help to stay quit. I got into AA, and that helped some, but it was the traditional religion, the sweats and the healing ceremonies and then the Sun Dances that really helped. Kept me on the Red Road. Still, nephew, I know the exact moment I quit drinking. The
exact
moment."
He paused, nodded at the coals of the fire, wiped more tears from his face. "The exact moment," he said again, solemnly. "Seven oh two."
Earl thought how much his mother would like Norm if she knew him now. And how his grandmother, more than liking him, would be delighted by him. She would giggle like a girl just being in his presence. How much they were missing by Lorna's refusal to relent. And it wasn't even Norm who had hurt her. He'd merely been visible. Merely shown himself, while the man who had killed Earl's father remained unseen. The police, when they came to her, offered only loss. They did not show her cause or blame. Then, minutes after they left, Norm in all his drunken heaviness, an imitation of the man who'd killed her husband, appeared. With grief like hers, any substitute would do.
But why so long? Earl thought. Sometimes it tore him apart, this rift between his uncle and his mother. The guilt he had to conquer every time he came to talk to Norm. A year after Cyrus died, Lorna had had a Wiping of the Tears Ceremony, to let him go. But Earl didn't know. Perhaps his father's spirit had been released, but he wasn't sure his mother's heart had been. Why couldn't she honor Cyrus without blaming Norm? Why mix the two things up? Sometimes it left Earl breathless, with a panic in his chest—that nothing would ever change, and he would be trapped forever between his mother and his uncle. Or torn apart completely. Only the thought of leaving, or the cool world of equations, could override that feeling.