Текст книги "First, Body: Stories"

Автор книги: Melanie Rae Thon

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

I drove up that road through the reservation, my mother’s laughter floating through the open windows of the truck. She made me dizzy, all that dancing – I felt myself pulled forward, twirled, pushed back, hard.

The lights of the steeple still burned. I was Noelle, the same kind of woman, a girl who couldn’t stand up by herself. I wanted to weep for my father. I wanted not to be drunk when I got home, not to smell of boy’s sweat, sulfur and crushed lilacs, mud. I wanted to stop feeling hair between my fingers, to stop feeling hands slipping under my clothes.

The dogs on the roof growled. All the white plaster deer surged toward the road. Wind on my face blew cold.

Past the Church of the Good Shepherd, a hundred pairs of eyes watched from the woods, all the living deer hidden between trees along this road. I practiced lies to tell when I got home. I thought, My mother and I, we’re blood and bone. I saw how every lie would be undone. I watched a dark man wrap his arms around my pale mother and spin her into a funnel of smoke.

Then he was there, that very man, rising up in a swirl of dust at the side of the road – a vision, a ghost, weaving in front of me. Then he was real, a body in dark clothes.

There was no time for a drunken girl to stop.

No time to lift my heavy foot from the gas.

I saw his body fly, then fall.

I saw the thickness of it, as if for a moment the whole night gathered in one place to become that man, my mother’s lover. A door opened at the back of a bar in Paradise. His body filled that space, so black even the stars went out.

I am a woman now, remembering. I am a woman drinking whiskey in a cold car, watching the lights in my father’s house. I am a woman who wants to open his door in time, to find her father there and tell.

Twenty-one years since I met Vincent Blew on that road, twenty-one years, and I swear, even now, when I touch my bare skin, when I smell lilacs, I can feel him, how warm he was, how his skin became my shadow, how I wear it still.

He was just another drunken Indian trying to find his way home. After he met me, he hid his body in the tall grass all night and the next day. Almost dusk before he was found. There was time for a smashed headlight to be reassembled. Time for a dented fender to be pounded out and dabbed with fresh green paint. Time for a girl to sober up. Time for lies to be retold. Here, behind my father’s cottage, I can feel the body of the truck, that fender, the edges of the paint, how it chipped and peeled, how the cracks filled with rust.

I waited for two men in boots and mirrored glasses to come for me, to take me to a room, close the door, to ask me questions in voices too low for my father to hear, to urge and probe, to promise no one would hurt me if I simply told the truth.

Imagine: No hurt.

But no one asked.

And no one told.

I wanted them to come. I thought their questions would feel like love, that relentless desire to know.

I waited for them.

I’m waiting now.

I know the man on the road that night was not my mother’s lover. He was Vincent Blew. He was mine alone.

He lies down beside me in my narrow bed. I think it is the bed my father built. The smell of pine breaks my heart. He touches me in my sleep, traces the cage of my ribs. He says, You remind me of somebody. He wets one finger and carves a line down the center of my body, throat to crotch. He says, This is the line only I can cross. He lays his head in the hollow of my pelvis. He says, Yes, I remember you, every bone.

He was behind me now, already lost.

I didn’t decide anything. I just drove. My hands were wet. Blood poured from my nose. I’d struck the steering wheel. I was hurt, but too numb to know. Then I was sobbing in my father’s arms. He was saying, Ada, stop.

Finally I choked it out.

I said, I hit something on the road.

And he said, A deer?

This lie came so easily.

All I had to do was nod.

He wrapped me in a wool blanket. Still I shivered, quick spasms, a coldness I’d never known, like falling through the ice of a pond and lying on the bottom, watching the water close above you, freeze hard. He washed the blood from my face with a warm cloth. His tenderness killed me, the way he was so careful, the way he looked at the bruises and the blood but not at me. Every gesture promised I’d never have to tell. He said, You’ll have black eyes, but I don’t think your nose is broken. These words – he meant to comfort me – precious nose – as if my own face, the way it looked, could matter now.

He said he had to check the truck. He took his flashlight, hobbled out. I couldn’t stand it, the waiting – even those minutes. I thought, My whole future, the rest of my life, like this, impossibly long.

I moved to the window to watch. I tried to light a cigarette, but the match kept hissing out. I saw the beam moving over the fender and grille, my father’s hand touching the truck. I imagined what he felt – a man’s hair and bones. I believed he’d come back inside and sit beside me, both of us so still. If he touched me, I’d break and tell.

But when he came inside, he didn’t sit, didn’t ask what, only where. I could have lied again, named a place between these orchards and Bigfork, that safe road, but I believed my father was offering me a chance, this last one. I thought the truth might save us even now. I described the place exactly, the curve, the line of trees, the funnel of dust. But I did not say one thing, did not tell him, Look for a man in the grass.

He said, You sleep now. He said, Don’t answer the phone.

I had this crazy hope. I’d heard stories of men who slammed into trees, men so drunk their bodies went limp as their cars were crushed. Some walked away. Some sailed off bridges but bobbed to the surface face up. I remembered the man’s grace when we collided, the strange elegance of his limbs as he flew.

I believed in my father, those hands holding blossoms in spring, those fingers touching the fender, my face – those hands wringing the rag, my blood, into the sink. I believed in small miracles, Niles flying into the pond hours ago, Yellow Dog wading out.

I imagined my crippled father helping the dazed man stumble to the truck, driving him to the hospital for x-rays or just taking him home. I thought my father had gone back alone so that he could lift the burden of my crime from me and carry it himself, to teach me suffering and sacrifice, the mercy of his God.

Even if the police came, they’d blame the Indian himself. He’d reel, still drunk, while my father, my good father, stood sober as a nun.

For almost an hour I told myself these lies. Confession would be a private thing, to my father, no one else. He would decide my penance. I would lie down on any floor. I would ask the Holy Mother to show me how I might atone. I would forgive the priest his ignorance when wine turned to blood in my mouth.

I thought of the cherries my father found after the hail, the bowl of them he brought back to the cottage – I thought of this small miracle, that any had been left whole. We ate them without speaking, as if they were the only food. I saw my father on his knees again, the highway. He gathered all the pieces. Glass and stone became the body of a man. My father’s fingers pressed the neck and found the pulse. I knew I couldn’t live through fifteen minutes if what I believed was not so.

Two hours gone. I saw the bowl slipping from my hands, my faith shattered, cherries rolling across the floor. I saw the man more clearly than I had on the road, the impossible angles of his body, how he must have broken when he fell.

I heard my father say, Thou shalt not kill.

But this was not my crime. The Indian himself told me he accepted accidents, my drunkenness as well as his own. Then he whispered, But I don’t understand why you left me here alone.

I knew I should have gone with my father, to show him the way. I imagined him limping up and down that stretch of highway, waving his flashlight, calling out. On this road, wind had shape and leaves spoke. A bobcat’s eyes flashed. A coyote crossed the road. I felt how tired my father must be, that old pain throbbing deep in the bone.

I tried not to count all the minutes till dawn. I tried to live in this minute alone. I wanted to speak to the man, to tell him he had to live like me, like this, one minute to the next. I knew the night was too long to imagine while his blood was spilling out. I promised, He’ll come. I said, Just stay with your body that long. There’s a hospital down the road where they have bags of blood to hang above your bed, blood to flow through tubes and needles into your veins – enough blood to fill your body again and again.

I went to the bathroom, turned on the heater. I needed this, the smallest room, the closed door. I crushed the beads of lilac soap till I was sick with the smell. I heard the last crickets and the first birds, and I thought, No, not yet. I heard the man say, I’m still breathing but not for long. He told me, Once I sold three pints of blood in two days. He said, I could use some of that back now.

Then there were edges of light at the window and the phone was ringing. Jean’s mother, I thought. I saw my friend naked, passed out in the dirt or drowned in the pond. This too my fault.

The phone again. The police at last.

I must have closed my eyes, relieved, imagining questions and handcuffs, a fast car, a safe cell. Soon, so soon, I wouldn’t be alone.

I must have dreamed.

The phone kept ringing.

This time I picked it up.

It was the Indian boy. He said, I’ll slit your throat.

Past noon before my father got home. I understood exactly what he’d done as soon as I saw the truck: the fender was undented, the headlight magically whole. I knew he must have gone all the way to Missoula, to a garage where men with greasy fingers asked no questions, where a man’s cash could buy a girl’s freedom.

I couldn’t believe this was his choice. Couldn’t believe that this small thing, the mockery of metal and glass, my crime erased, was the only miracle he could trust.

He said, Did you sleep? I shook my head. He said, Well, you should.

I thought, How can he speak to me this way if he knows what I’ve done? Then I thought, We, not I – it’s both of us now.

The phone once more. I picked it up before he could say Stop. The police, I hoped. They’ll save me since my father won’t. But it was Jean. Thanks a lot, she said. I’m grounded for a month.

Then she hung up.

Vincent Blew was long dead when he was found. The headline said, UNIDENTIFIED MAN VICTIM OF HIT AND RUN. One paragraph. Enough words to reveal how insignificant his life was. Enough words to lay the proper blame: “elevated blood alcohol level indicates native man was highly intoxicated.”

I thought, Yes, we will each answer for our own deaths.

Then there were these words, meant to comfort the killer, I suppose: “Injuries suggest he died on impact.”

I knew what people would think, reading this. Just one Indian killing another on a reservation road. Let the tribal police figure it out.

Still, the newspaper gave me a kind of hope. I found it folded on the kitchen table, beside my father’s empty mug. I thought, He believed my lie about the deer until today. He is that good. He fixed the truck so the doctor wouldn’t see. He was ashamed of my drunkenness, that’s all.

I was calm.

When he comes home, we’ll sit at this table. He’ll ask nothing. Father of infinite patience. He’ll wait for me to tell it all. When I stop speaking, we’ll drive to town. He’ll stay beside me. But he won’t hang on.

I was so grateful I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling down.

I thought, He loves me this much, to listen, to go with me, to give me up.

All these years I’d been wrong about the hunter. Now I saw the father’s grief, how he suffered with his wounds, how his passion surpassed the dead son’s. I saw the boy’s deception, that deer-colored coat. I understood it was the child’s silent stupidity that made the father turn the gun on himself.

I meant to say this as well.

But my father stayed in the orchard all day. At four, I put on dark glasses and went to the doctor’s house. I polished gold faucets and the copper bottoms of pots; I got down on my hands and knees to scrub each tile of the bathroom floor. The doctor’s wife stood in the doorway, watching me from behind.

She said, That’s nice, Ada.

She said, Don’t forget the tub.

When I came back to the cottage, I saw the paper stuffed in the trash, the mug washed. My father asked what I wanted for dinner, and I told him I was going to town. He said I could use the truck, and I said, I know.

I meant I knew there was nothing he’d refuse.

He saw me held tight in the dead Indian’s arms. He was afraid of me, the truth I could tell.

Sometimes when I dream, the night I met Vincent Blew is just a movie I’m watching. Every body is huge. Yellow Dog’s brilliant face fills the screen. He grins. He hangs on to that torch too long. I try to close my eyes, but the lids won’t come down. His body bursts, shards of light; his body tears the sky apart. Then everything’s on fire: pond, grass, hair – boy’s breath, red shirt.

But later he’s alive. He’s an angel rising above me. He’s Vincent Blew hovering over the road. The truck passes through him, no resistance, no jolt – no girl with black eyes, no body in the grass, no bloody nose. There’s a whisper instead, a ragged voice full of static coming up from the ground. It’s Vincent murmuring just to me: You’re drunk, little girl. Close your eyes. I’ll steer. I’ll get us home.

And these nights, when he takes the wheel, when he saves us, these nights are the worst of all.

Three days before the man was known. His cousin claimed him. She said she danced with him the night he died. In Ronan, at the Wild Horse Bar. Then he was Vincent Blew, and she was Simone Falling Bear. It amazed me to think of it, the dead man dancing, the dead man in another woman’s arms.

She said he died just a mile from her house. I knew then that her cousin Vincent was her lover too, that her house was a tarpaper shack at the end of a dirt road, that her refrigerator was a box of ice, her heater a woodstove. She’d have a bag of potatoes in a pail under the sink, a stack of cans with no labels on the shelf.

I saw that even in his stupor Vincent Blew knew the way home.

She said he’d been an altar boy, that he knew the words of the Latin mass by heart. She said he’d saved two men at la Drang and maybe more. She had his Medal of Honor as proof. She said he wanted to open a school on the reservation where the children would learn to speak in their own tongue.

But that was before the war, before he started to drink so much.

He had these dreams. He had a Purple Heart. Look at his chest. They had to staple his bones shut.

I don’t know what lies the reporter told to make Simone Falling Bear talk. Perhaps he said, We want people to understand your loss.

That reporter found Vincent’s wife in Yakima, living with another man. He asked her about Vietnam, and she said she never saw any medals. She said Vincent’s school was just some crazy talk, and that boy was drinking beer from his mama’s bottle when he was three years old. When the reporter asked if Vincent Blew was ever a Catholic, she laughed. She said, Everybody was.

In a dream I climb a hill to find Vincent’s mother. She lives in a cave, behind rocks. I have to move a stone to get her out. She points to three sticks stuck in the dirt. She says, This is my daughter; these are my sons.

September, and Vincent Blew was two months dead. I was supposed to go to school, ride the bus, drink milk. But I couldn’t be with those children. Couldn’t raise my hand or sit in the cafeteria and eat my lunch. I went to the lake instead, swam in the cold water till my chest hurt and my arms went numb. Fallen trees lay just below the surface; rocks lay deeper still. I knew what they were. I wasn’t afraid. Only my own shadow moved.

I came home at the usual time to make dinner for my father. Fried chicken, green beans. I remember snapping each one. He didn’t ask, How was school? I thought he knew, again, and didn’t want to know, didn’t want to risk the question, any question – my weeping, the truth sputtered out at last, those words so close: Daddy, I can’t.

The next day I lay on the beach for hours. I burned. My clothes hurt my skin. I thought, He’ll see this.

But again we ate our dinner in silence, only the clink of silverware, the strain of swallowing, his muttered Thank you when I cleared his plate. He sat on the porch while I washed the dishes, didn’t come back inside till he heard the safe click, my bedroom door closed.

I saw how it was between us now. He hated each sound: the match striking, my breath sucked back, the weight of me on the floor. He knew exactly where I was – every moment – by the creak of loose boards. I learned how words stung, even the most harmless ones: Rice tonight, or potatoes? He had to look away to answer. Rice, please.

His childhood wounds, his sister’s death – those sorrows couldn’t touch his faith. My mother, with all her lies, couldn’t break him. Only his daughter could do that. I was the occasion of sin. I was the road and the truck he was driving. He couldn’t turn back.

The third day, he said, They called from school.

I nodded. I’ll go, I said.

He nodded too, and that was the end of it.

But I didn’t go. I hitched to Kalispell, went to six restaurants, finally found a job at a truck stop west of town.

That night I told my father I needed the truck to get to work, eleven to seven, graveyard.

I knew he wouldn’t speak enough words to argue.

I married the first trucker who asked. I was eighteen. It didn’t last. He had a wife in Ellensburg already, five kids. After that I rented a room in Kalispell, a safe place with high, tiny windows. Even the most careless girl couldn’t fall.

Then it was March, the year I was twenty, and my father had his first heart attack. I quit my job and tried to go home. I thought he’d let me take care of him, that I could bear the silence between us.

Three weeks I slept in my father’s house, my old room, the little bed.

One morning I slept too long. Light filled the window, flooded across the floor. It terrified me, how bright it was.

I felt my father gone.

In his room, I saw the bed neatly made, covers pulled tight, corners tucked.

I found him outside the doctor’s house. He had his gun in one hand, the hose in the other. He’d flushed three rats from under the porch and shot them all.

He meant he could take care of himself.

He meant he wanted me to go.

I got a day job, south of Ronan this time, the Morning After Café. Seventeen years I’ve stayed. I live in a trailer not so many miles from the dirt road that leads to Simone Falling Bear’s shack.

Sometimes I see her in the bars – Buffalo Bill’s, Wild Horse, Lucy’s Chance. She recognizes me, a regular, like herself. She tips her beer, masking her face in a flash of green glass.

When she stares, I think, She sees me for who I really am. But then I realize she’s staring at the air, a place between us, and I think, Yes, if we both stare at the same place at the same time, we’ll see him there. But she looks at the bottle again, her loose change on the bar, her own two hands.

Tonight I didn’t see Simone. Tonight I danced. Once I was a pretty girl. Like Noelle, shining in her pale skin. It’s not vain to say I was like that. I’m thirty-seven now, already old. Some women go to loose flesh, some to hard bone. I’m all edges from years living on whiskey and smoke.

But I can still fool men in these dim bars. I can fix myself up, curl my hair, paint my mouth. I have a beautiful blue dress, a bra with wires in the cups. I dance all night. I spin like Noelle; I shine, all sweat and blush and will.

Hours later, in my trailer, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The stranger I’m with doesn’t care how I look: he only wants me to keep moving in the dark.

Drifters, liars – men who don’t ask questions, men with tattoos and scars, men just busted out, men on parole; men with guns in their pockets, secrets of their own; men who can’t love me, who don’t pretend, who never want to stay too long: these men leave spaces, nights between that Vincent fills. He opens me. I’m the ground. Dirt and stone. He digs at me with both hands. He wants to lie down.

Or it’s the other way around. It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m alone in the woods with my father’s gun. I’ll freeze. I’ll starve. I look for rabbits, pray for deer. I try to cut a hole in the frozen earth, but it’s too hard.

It’s a bear I have to kill, a body I have to open if I want to stay warm. I have to live in him forever, hidden in his fur, down deep in the smell of bear stomach and bear heart. We lumber through the woods like this. I’ve lost my human voice. Nobody but the bear understands me now.

Last week my lover was a white man with black stripes tattooed across his back. His left arm was withered. Useless, he told me. Shrapnel, Dak To.

He was a small man, thin, but heavier than you’d expect.

He had a smooth stone in his pocket, three dollars in his hatband, the queen of spades in his boot. He said, She brings me luck.

He showed me the jagged purple scar above one kidney, told the story of a knife that couldn’t kill.

The week before, my lover was bald and pale, his fingers thick. He spoke Latin in his sleep; he touched my mouth.

It’s always like this. It’s always Vincent coming to me through them.

This bald one said he loaded wounded men into helicopters, medevacs in Song Be and Dalat. Sometimes he rode with them. One time all of them were dead.

He was inside me when he told me that.

He robbed a convenience store in Seattle, a liquor store in Spokane. He did time in Walla Walla. I heard his switchblade spring and click. Felt it at my throat before I saw it flash.

He said, They say I killed a man.

He said, But I saved more than that.

He had two daughters, a wife somewhere. They didn’t want him back.

The cool knife still pressed my neck. He said, I’m innocent.

I have nothing to lose. Nothing precious for a lover to steal – no ruby earrings, no silver candlesticks.

In my refrigerator he’ll find Tabasco sauce and mayonnaise, six eggs, a dozen beers.

In ray freezer, vodka, a bottle so cold it burns your hands.

In my cupboard, salted peanuts, crackers shaped like little fish, a jar of sugar, an empty tin.

In my closet, the blue dress that fooled him.

If my lover is lucky, maybe I’ll still have yesterday’s tips.

When he kisses me on the steps, I’ll know that’s my thirty-four dollars bulging in his pocket. I’ll know I won’t see him again.

He never takes the keys to my car. It’s old, too easily trapped.

But tonight I have no lover. Tonight I danced in Paradise with a black-haired man. I clutched his coarse braid. All these years and I still wanted it. He pulled me close so I could feel the knife in his pocket. He said, Remember, I have this.

I don’t know if he said the words out loud or if they were in my head.

When I closed my eyes I thought he could be that boy, the one who blew himself into the sky, whose body fell down in pieces thin and white as ash and bread, the one who rose up whole and dripping, who slipped his tongue in my mouth, his hands down my pants.

He could have been that boy grown to a man.

But when I opened my eyes I thought, No, that boy is dead.

Later we were laughing, licking salt, shooting tequila. We kissed, our mouths sour with lime. He said we could go out back. He said if I had a dollar he’d pay the man. I gave him five, and he said we could stay the week for that. I kissed him one more time, light and quick. I said I had to use the ladies’ room.

Lady? he said, and he laughed.

I decided then. He was that boy, just like him. I said, Sit tight, baby, I’ll be right back. He put his hand on my hip. Don’t make me wait, he said.

I stepped outside, took my car, drove fast.

Don’t get me wrong.

I’m not too good for Niles Yellow Dog or any man. I’m not too clean to spend the night at that hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time I passed out on a back seat somewhere, hot and drunk under someone’s shadow, wrapped tight in a man’s brown skin.

But tonight I couldn’t do it. Tonight I came here, to my father’s house, instead. Tonight I watch him.

He’s stopped moving now. He’s in the chair. There’s one light on, above his head. I can’t help myself: I drink the whiskey I keep stashed. It stings my lips and throat, burns inside my chest. But even this can’t last.

I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes. I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead. Some bodies are never whole again.

I cannot open the veins of my father’s heart.

I cannot heal his lungs or mend his bones.

Tonight I believe only this: we should have gone back. We should have crawled through the grass until we found that man.

If Vincent Blew had one more breath, I should have lain down beside him – so he wouldn’t be cold, so he wouldn’t be scared.

If Vincent Blew was dead, we should have dug the hard ground with our bare hands. I should have become the dirt if he asked. Then my father could have walked away, free of my burden, carrying only his own heart and the memory of our bones, a small bag of sticks light enough to lift with one hand.