The Year We Left Home (41 page)

After all, your head only had so much room in it. No surprise if it overflowed once in a while with little bits of sparkle and electrical fizz. He’d finally quit smoking—had to, the lungs were shot—and sometimes he wondered if that was part of the problem, his brain having to adjust to a nicotine-free state, no soothing pillow of smoke to cushion it.

He’d got a map of Des Moines and spent time studying it, so once he reached town he had it knocked. Without so much wind the snow was back to acting like normal snow, the kind you could reasonably trust to fall from up to down without any weird stuff, so he could keep his head balanced right where it was supposed to be and didn’t have to worry about its sliding off one or another shoulder. Ha ha.

And here was the college, showing up just where it ought to. It took
him some driving around to find the building he needed, but he’d left himself all kinds of time, a couple of hours. Fine with him. He could look the place over, figure out if this was any kind of a good idea.

He parked and entered through the big double doors. Cool, echoing tile floors, white walls, one of them glass. The snow outside mounding up, another layer of white. Students coming and going, the artsy sort, with big portfolio cases and scuffed boots and funky knit hats, and they looked at him kind of strangely because after all he didn’t belong here and it showed and it was funny that these kids who were all about looking peculiar and different seemed to draw the line when it came to his peculiar self.

He could have ended up as one of them. It wasn’t so hard to imagine. He’d always had a knack for drawing. Just not much of a knack for school, for sitting still and paying attention and giving a shit.

Here was the gallery, a hallway branching off into a couple of different rooms. Nobody was standing guard or charging admission, so he walked on in and found himself face-to-face with a poster, a black-and-white photograph of a long, dark hillside, a slice of sky above it, and a single tree silhouetted against the sky. Only when you looked closely at the tree did you see it was really part of a painted backdrop, a billboard maybe.

On the poster:

NATIVE LAND:
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELTON POTTER

December 2–January 31     Allen B. Drinkwater Gallery

Chip made a circuit of the room, stopping in front of each picture. All black and whites. Some of them were landscapes, out west by the look of them, canyons, highways edged with scrub, mountains reflected upside down in a long trough of rainwater. All of it with a sense of being borderless, stretching out to empty space. Other pictures were cityscapes: windows, wires, traffic, signs, a solitary man crossing
a street. A shot of a kid who reminded Chip of a young Elton, waiting at a bus stop, his round face sullen with loneliness.

On a table near the gallery entrance was a stack of flyers, and he picked one up. They went along with the show. There was a list of different exhibitions and talks and other art stuff that Elton had been up to. It looked like he’d kept busy. There was a picture of him and Chip studied it for a time.

Then there was something called Artist Statement:

When people learn that I’m a Native American, they often have certain expectations of me and of my work and life. I find it necessary to explain to them that I don’t know how to track a wolf or catch a salmon with my bare hands. I don’t have a totem animal or a medicine pouch. I grew up with bits and pieces of my own history coming at me sideways, filtered through television and movies and cartoons, Chapter One in American Studies, a story that was supposed to be over by now. I never felt like a “real” Indian, even though I could trace my lineage back through three Northwest tribes who had lived on the same land a thousand years before Columbus.

Tribes. It all came back to that, one way or another. He read on.

I think I started taking pictures because I didn’t (and still don’t) have the right words to express the unease of a life lived outside of categories, boundaries, and ready-made narratives. My photographs are informed by a sense of loss, myself made strange to myself, and a country that too often has seemed to belong to everybody except me.

Jesus. Whine much, guy?

He still had time to kill, so he walked outside again, pushing up the hood of his coat against the snow. In the building next door he found a snack bar, and a lounge where students were absorbed in tapping at
computers. Or they were plugged into headphones, eyes closed. Everybody communing with their private machine. Chip bought a cup of coffee and a hot dog and some nachos and ate slowly, thinking about nothing in particular.

When he got back to the gallery, waiters in white shirts and black pants were setting up tables of wineglasses. He picked a spot in the lobby to wait. Trying not to look like a guy who was there just for the free drinks.

People began to gather in ones and twos and threes. Enough to call it a crowd. Even though he’d been watching, he didn’t see Elton come in. But there he was, it couldn’t have been anybody else, having a conversation with a man and a woman, two of the grown-ups.

Chip got up and joined the group in the gallery. He walked past Elton and his fans and pretended to examine a photograph nearby. Elton was still on the chunky side, but he’d grown tall enough to balance it out. Still that round, baby face, now spreading out around the chin. He wore his hair pulled back in a ponytail. Jeans, a black, open-neck shirt, and he’d picked up a pretty nice leather jacket somewhere along the way. Chip guessed the jacket was the artist part.

He dawdled over the picture, trying to catch what the three of them were saying behind him. The woman must have been a teacher, she was talking about a class. The class had so enjoyed blah blah. “I’m really glad I got to meet some of them,” Elton said, and damned if he didn’t sound exactly the same, like this was back in Seattle, in his mom’s old kitchen. The woman said they were looking forward to hearing more from him about blah blah. “Of course, that would be great,” Elton said, and even though Chip had his back to him and hadn’t talked to Elton since 1976, he was just about positive that the guy wasn’t looking forward to it one bit.

Chip moved on to the next picture. He hadn’t yet figured out what he was going to say to Elton, but it would be pretty chickenshit not to say it.

He kept Elton in the corner of his eye. As the guest of honor, he was in demand. Everybody kept wanting him to talk about the fine
points of this or that picture, including a couple of the juicier girls. Elton, my man! The girls couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. And Elton had to be, what, over forty now. Only seven or eight years younger than Chip was. That was part of what had made Seattle such a funky little time.

Elton and his satellites were moving in one direction around the room, Chip in the other. When they intersected, Chip managed to get close enough to come into Elton’s field of vision. Chip nodded. “Good to see you again,” he said, and kept moving.

He was aware of Elton staring after him. Some fuzzy expression on his face. It was another five minutes before Elton detached himself from his groupies and walked over to him. “You’re shittin me,” he said. “Ray?”

“The one and only.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Yup. Same old me, just smarter and better looking.” He had to say, he was tickled at being recognized. It meant he didn’t look as bad as he thought.

“Take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” Elton told him, and then they managed a little bit of back pounding and handshaking. “Goddamn, what are you doing here?”

“I live here. Around here. I read about you in the paper and I thought, ‘These people have no idea what a lame-ass character you are, I better go straighten them out.’”

“Total mind fuck,” said Elton, shaking his head. Close up, Chip could see that his eyes were pouchy, older than the rest of him. “Shouldn’t you be dead or something by now?”

“Were you always such a smartass? I’m trying to remember.”

“So catch me up, you been living here all this time?”

“Nah, not that long. You know what they say. Home’s the place where, when you show up, they have to take you in.” That was pretty much the size of it. “So when did you turn into a big shot?”

Elton ducked his head, a movement that recalled Elton the Kid. “Oh yeah, that’s me. Here in the land of the big shots.”

“No, really, those are pretty righteous pictures. You still in Seattle?”

Elton said thanks, and yeah, he was, mostly, but he worked here and there. Different gigs. Chip thought this was probably already more conversation than they’d ever had way back when. How long had he lived out west, anyway? A couple of years? He should have made a habit of writing things down, so he could remember exactly. And then, since they had to get past this part, he asked, “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good. She got married. He’s a pretty nice guy. They bought a house out in Port Angeles.”

“Yeah? That’s great.” Chip tried to feel one way or the other about Deb’s being married, but he couldn’t, aside from a mild curiosity about whether her husband was a white guy or another Indian. Deb. She must be most of the way to old by now. It gave him another of those floating, cut-loose feelings.

“I was married for a while,” Elton volunteered. “Actually, twice. But the first one didn’t count.”

“There are those kind.”

“The second one lasted longer. But she was mean as a snake. I give her credit for launching my career. I was always wanting to get out of the house, so I started driving around taking pictures.”

Chip was getting a kick out of this new Elton, the talky one. Who would have guessed, way back when, that the guy had any such thing as a sense of humor?

“I have two kids. Boy and girl. Teenagers. They’re good kids. Smarter than I ever was. They live with their mom, but I see them as often as I can. Counteract some of the snake venom.”

“You, a dad,” Chip said. “Now there’s a mind fuck.” He guessed it was his turn to talk, but he didn’t have anything in the way of wives or kids to offer up. From across the room, a little delegation was headed toward them. The lady art teacher and a couple of dressed-up older guys. “Here comes your fan club,” Chip said.

Elton saw them too. “Look, I have to go do the art thing.”

“Understood.”

Elton hesitated, then went for it. “There’s a party later. At some students’ place. Very, very casual. I think I can promise that. Why don’t you come with?”

Chip was all ready to say no. Trying to imagine himself at any kind of a party, especially one with a bunch of college kids being all cool and talking art and then throwing up in the sink. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

“Great. I’ll come get you, give you the high sign.”

Elton went off to glad-hand the fan club and Chip strolled over to get himself a glass of wine and some of the mingy cheese and crackers. He shouldn’t have said he’d go to the party. But he’d be fifty on his next birthday and he didn’t have much to show for it except a bunch of stories he couldn’t always remember because they slid back and forth too fast and maybe Elton could at least make one of them hold still for a little while. Besides, Elton actually seemed happy to see him.

By his third glass of wine, whatever was happening at the gallery was winding down, people heading for the doors. Elton came up to him, accompanied by one of the juicy girls. “Hey Ray, you still good to go?”

“Absolutely.” The girl was tall, every bit as tall as Elton, with short dark hair streaked a fluorescent red. She didn’t look like the smiley type. She wore shiny black knee-high boots, a flippy little skirt, and a jacket made of some patchwork stuff. It was as if everything she had on meant something, but he couldn’t have said what.

“This is Alisa, she can give us a ride. Or if you want, we could go in your car . . .”

“I’ll take a ride.” The inside of the Chevy wasn’t exactly housebroken.

The three of them went out into the snow, a few inches deep by now. Nothing more was coming down but the wind had picked up and turned frigid, which was pretty much the miserable cycle of weather here. The girl, Alisa, led the way to her car, a new-looking Japanese model. She and Elton were having a little conversation, while Chip trudged on behind. He wondered if being an artist meant you got next to a lot of girls, if Elton was such a great photographer that they fell
over backward for him. Because if you were going to be honest about it, he wasn’t the world’s best-looking man.

The Japanese car at least had four doors, so when Chip said he’d sit in the back, he didn’t have to fold himself entirely in half. Elton sat up front, his arm all casually across the seat, just resting on the back of Alisa’s neck. Chip said, “So, you do this kind of thing a lot? Show up places where they have your pictures?”

Elton turned around. “It’s called visiting artist, yeah, I do them from time to time. Come out to a school, visit classes, maybe do a gallery talk. Then they buy me drinks.”

Alisa said, “We had Gabrielle Wyse earlier this fall. She was incredible.”

“That’s great,” Chip said. “I mean, I guess they pay you and all. Great.” He should probably stop talking now. The car’s tires made a soft noise in the unplowed snow. He sat back and watched the streets and houses slide past, little square houses with frosted roofs that could have been anywhere,
Des Moines.

Elton said, “I’m liking the hair. Very intense. Like red feathers, like you’re a tropical bird. So Ray, man, tell me what you’re doing these days. Tell me what you’ve been doing the last twenty-five years.”

“Ah, all kinds a shit.” He rummaged around for a story. “I went to diamond-cutting school. Carson City, Nevada.”

“Yeah? You turn into some international diamond smuggler or something?”

“Oh yeah, ha ha ha. It’s great work, if you can get it.” OK, next story. “I lived in Mexico for a while. Florida. Austin, Texas. Man, times I woke up and had to look at a matchbook to remember where I was. Now I’m back in the old hometown.”