CHAPTER TWO
The next summer, a thick, brown cloud settled over the City of Angels and people staggered under the weight of the air. At first, I didn’t notice anything other than the glowing orange sunsets—which I treasured until mother told me that the orange was arsenic in the air, a poison a lot like the perfume my cousin had used to drop in jars of tadpoles—and an annoying tightness in my chest as I darted from hiding place to hiding place, playing War once again, now that Bernie Schneider had been included because of Tommy’s frustration. Unable to find and kill me once I refused to wear pigeon feathers, he wanted another enemy and a Jew was as good as an Indian to Tommy.
When I noticed my pet hamster’s loss of speed on his exercise wheel, I took the wheel off and oiled it, believing that hamsters only had one forward speed; still Custer slowed until, like a Ford motor car, he seemed to slip into reverse. One morning, I had to pry his little claws loose from the wire of the wheel, which had ceased to creak with his jogging. With intricate ceremony, I buried him in Wounded Knee, the dirt lot behind our garage that was set off from the rest of the yard by a chain-link fence.
Summers always had been a time to escape helping out around the house; but when I overheard Mrs. Schneider discussing summer camps with mother, I suspected that my life was going to change. I hid out in Wounded Knee munching dog biscuits with the obsequious puppy purchased to replace Custer and waited. When the old lady who lived behind us collapsed and died while collecting mulberry leaves for her silkworms, my parents packed my sisters off and all too soon I found myself being loaded onto a yellow bus headed for Lake Arrowhead with twenty-seven excited, brown-bagging campsters.
Mother had packed me a lunch of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, an apple left over from the drought of ’56, and celery sticks—all of which I donated to the spirits of the road, hoping that those spirits, once they got a taste of one of mother’s fabulous lunches, would turn the bus around. At least send it skidding into a ditch.
I did not want to go to camp.
Neither did Bernie Schneider want to be packed like a shrimp onto a bus and motored off to have healthy fun. Bernie wasn’t into healthy fun.
“After all,” Bernie told me, “Jews aren’t into having healthy fun. We,” he said proudly, “are into suffering and survival. Prunes, not vitamins.”
I have to admit I was grateful for Bernie’s sense of humor. Years later, after I had forgotten what Bernie looked like even as I stared at the pictures of him as a boy in denims with cuffs rolled halfway to his knees standing beside a sway-backed mare inside the camp’s corral, I would remember his joke about the end of the world. It went: There are three religious leaders selected to announce over T.V. that a great flood will end the world in twenty-four hours. One at a time, they face the camera. The priest advises all good Catholics to confess their sins and say their penances. The Protestant minister speaks of hellfire and the day of judgment about to descend on mankind. The Rabbi, coming on the T.V. last, says, “Jews! You have twenty-four hours to learn to live underwater.”
So it was, as the yellow bus sped towards the relocation camp on Lake Arrowhead, Bernie began to teach me how to live underwater. In the twelve hours between the first lesson and our first mustering out by the fit young man who was our cabin counselor, I only learned to hold my breath for long periods of time. Still, that was enough for the time I was to be in camp, and after I taught Bernie how to sneak through the woods downwind from the prey, it was sufficient to allow us to watch our cabin counselor with one of the girls who worked in the kitchens.
To describe her is virtually impossible. Bernie and I only imagined talking to her, and most of that talking was merely of words on the way to something else, like pebbles on the path to the temple. She wore nylon shorts that covered three-quarters of her ass and a cotton T-shirt that somehow managed always to look wet. For two boys, those were enough for us to wish we knew her.
Our counselor didn’t have to wish.
We watched from the brush in the woods one night as Rolf spread a sleeping bag on the ground and then slowly tied each of her arms to small trees. Even in the darkness, we could see the look in his eyes as he slipped those shorts down her legs that seemed, from our angle of vision, endless.
“Legs all the way up to her ass,” Bernie whispered.
“Ssshh!” I said, trying not to choke on the air that burned my lungs. I’d been holding my breath.
Rolf slowly tied her ankles to stakes in the ground before he knelt and rolled her T-shirt up to reveal breasts that were iridescent in the moonlight. She lifted her head to watch him expose his very being, and her eyes! The look in her eyes was like some wild animal’s.
Bernie tossed and turned in his bunk the whole night. Girls’ names rolled off his lips like distant thunder. Even the next morning, he seemed to be shivering as he brushed his teeth. I had to row him out to the raft on the lake and dip him in the cold water every twenty minutes to keep his skin temperature even with the ice-cold of his guts.
I began to worry about Bernie’s ability to survive, to live beneath the water of his dreams, but he insisted on going along to watch. He ate little, playing with his food like a sated cat; he ran miles in his restless sleep in pursuit of an illusion that he would pursue for the rest of his life. The only sign of health was that he settled on one name for this illusion, Tammy, and now the same thunderstorm broke over him night after night as though it were being blown back and forth over the landscape of his heart by alternating winds.
Before Bernie was shipped home, I tried in desperation to teach him how to make people dissolve. Night after night, we watched Rolf and Tammy pumping away at each other, trying to stare past them, past the desire we felt in ourselves. This at great risk to myself because I knew that if I succeeded in making the people dissolve, I might never get rid of the voices. Bernie failed. He failed because every time he reached the point of dissolution, Tammy bit her lip or ground her teeth loudly, or threw her head back and cried out, “Oh god! Rolf!” and Bernie clamped his eyes shut, breaking the magic of the spell.
We tried peeing in Rolf’s Listerine. Tammy only cried out louder.
We put rubber cement in his hair cream. Tammy bit her lip so hard that night that a drop of blood congealed on her lip, glistening before it turned black.
Owls flew and foxes ran through the mid-night. Bernie’s will seemed to fly off with them, speeding through space and time in pursuit of a dream he would never possess. Instead of dissolving the image of Rolf and Tammy, I stared past them at a vision of Bernie, ghostly and wasted, his gray worsted suit like prisoner’s garb, trapped by the things he thought his Tammy wanted.
The sight of Bernie as alien frightened me so much that I broke and ran, spending the night on the high rocks overlooking the black and depthless lake. I sat there, staring inwards, dissolving myself, my logic, my will, until I was able to see beyond the perimeters of the lake and my age.
“Dreams,” Grandfather said, maintaining a reserve because of my pain, “can get you.”
Bernie became a haunt, hanging about the kitchens while the other children rode horses or swam. When he lifted his bow and aimed the arrow at the target fifty feet away, I could tell that he was aiming at something far away like love. In the evenings around the campfire, Bernie’s singing was the low moan of a wounded animal. Years afterwards, I would hear the horn of a ship lost in the fog, and I would think of Bernie singing as he steered his life towards his vision of Tammy. Unlike a ship, even if Bernie found his port, he would never be able to unload his cargo.
After Bernie’s mother had driven all the way out to Lake Arrowhead to collect him like a bundle of Third Class mail held at the post office, I looked around at my happy co-campers. To the unsuspecting eye, we all looked the same. I, however, saw them as future stockbrokers who would collect antique cars for fun. Boys who would attend the same colleges their fathers attended, receive identical marks, and after graduation marry their mothers, enduring the same lives. Girls who were learning to shop for boys and that soft toilet paper which is so important to women. Mixed in, because everything is mixed, were the sons and daughters of meter readers and liquor salesmen, a Jew (in absentia), an Indian, and some of the detritus that remains American.
One morning, by the row of outdoor pipes and faucets slung above metal troughs, I noticed a skinny runt of a lad putting toothpaste instead of Brylcream into his hair. Against his cocoa-colored skin, the foaming white looked either ridiculous or stylish, depending on your definition. His name was Buchanan Roy Leland.
“Buchanan?” I asked him, toweling his head dry after washing the toothpaste out of it.
“Named for my daddy’s fav’rite president,” he replied. “Ouch! You’re hurting.”
“Sorry. Buchanan? What did he do?”
“Nothing.” Roy grinned. “That’s why he was daddy’s fav’rite.”
Well, Buchanan Roy had been born in Oklahoma and he did everything. Anything. Like the lion with the thorn in his paw, he became my loyal comrade for the two days before I fled from camp. Roy stole two extra canteens from the kitchen. He procured a map and compass, and with the solemnity of a virgin on his wedding night, he gave me his Bowie knife, which Rolf had taken from him the first day and which he had recovered within minutes of the taking. And he did it all within forty-eight hours of Bernie’s departure.
I treasured that knife the same way I’d treasured Bernie’s friendship before he grew crazy with his visions of Tammy. After I dismounted from the mare I’d ridden out from camp and slapped her on her way back to the stables, I began to forget Roy as I focused on the horizon, stopping to check the compass every half hour until I reached the highway to Palm Springs. Roy no longer mattered once I was free, although as a parting reward I had shown him where to hide at night to observe the spectacle of Tammy’s performances. I didn’t worry that Roy would suffer Bernie’s fate: Roy wasn’t Jewish. Roy definitely lacked Bernie’s imagination. For Roy, sex would always be poking the nearest girl. For Bernie, it would be the embellishments, the, so to speak, temporary lies or pretenses of corsets, cords, the soft cries and whimpers and moans. Bernie might masturbate; Roy would jack off.
As I stuck my thumb out, pointing east, I decided there were two kinds of friends at least. One who is trying to live beneath water, whom you are forced to leave behind if they drown. The other won’t go near the water, and you simply leave him behind like a Burma Shave placard you pass on the road to who knows where.
It will always seem strange that I remember Grandfather’s large pores second only to his high forehead and white hair. Even now, when I close my eyes and speak with him, reaching out and touching him over the long distance of unreality, I remember his pores, especially on his nose.
I don’t need the imaginary telephone anymore. Grandfather has been dead in white people’s terms for over a decade, so the telephone receiver would be nothing more than a cheap trick to illustrate the way the horizons of death have shortened for me. All I do is concentrate, close my eyes, and listen to his voice coming out of the Absence of Angels. That concentration erases time and I can talk to him the way he was before he pedaled his way into the Absence of Angels, before he even owned the killer three-wheel bicycle.
Chosposi lay along the hills beside a small mesa that rose among gorges and dunes to a small flat plain, staring at the sky like the eye of a bird and lost among the other grander mesas in the desert. Behind the dwindling village rose the mesa wall. Before it was a long narrow canyon, leading out to the highway and eventually to the trading post which sat alongside the mission. The mission looked like a facsimile of the Alamo.
A Nez Perce, Grandfather had migrated and settled in Chosposi for reasons of his own. He had married Laura P., he told me, with the hope that the progeny of two half-breeds could inherit the right halves and be full-blooded again. His hope wasn’t some snotty feeling of the superiority of blood. If anything, it was the desire to keep his children and their children from being susceptible to sunburn.
We sat side by side, gazing at the peach colors cast by the sun rising beyond the horizons of the known world. I kept quiet. Each time I turned to speak, all I could imagine saying was, “What large pores you have, Grandfather.”
Behind us in the house I could hear Laura P. beginning her day. I knew her routine. She would stand before the Kachinas on her mantel convincing herself of the differences between people and animals. Then she would slip on an apron and softly complain her way to her potter’s wheel or into the kitchen where she’d heat the vat of oil and begin frying donuts and the thinly rolled corn delicacies called Piki, which Grandfather would later take to Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post for sale.
Disturbed by the low tremors of Laura P.’s carping, a Patchnose snake slithered onto the rocks turned white by years of conflict with the sun, and coiled itself into the mood Grandfather generated. We—Grandfather, the snake, and I—could have spent the whole day like that, suffering ourselves to live in a silent time where nothing changed but the height of the sun and the heat of those rocks. But as I watched the snake with the respect I’d learned to give snakes, dangerous or otherwise, the rocks shimmered and then dissolved. The sun reached higher, turning yellow, and I envisioned father and mother, wondering what had become of me.
By now they should be aware of my disappearance from camp, and they would be worried. I felt inconsideration mixed with not a little fear: When father got hold of me, I would pay the bus fare for sure. Whatever halves of the blood father had received certainly did not include the pacific instincts of Grandfather. But then age does all sorts of things to a man. How was I to know that Grandfather, too, had been capable of violence when he was father’s age just as I am, although less capable than father because Grandfather taught me to control my dreams, to wield my dreams like a grand eraser.
“If you remember too much,” Grandfather said, “you expect more. Dreaming right, you can erase the memories that wear you down like dripping water.”
In the midst of my worries (I was only beginning to understand what Laura P. liked to say, that it was a miracle I was still in two pieces), I decided to phone my sisters and have them tell our parents where I was. Using my imaginary telephone, I’d try Pamela’s closet. If that didn’t work, I’d wait until late afternoon and try to reach Elanna as she sat in the graveyard talking with mother’s mother. At the very worst, I’d have to give in to realism and go down to the trading post and use the pay phone.
By the time Laura P. disturbed the sunning snake again, giving Grandfather and me the carefully packed goods to carry to the trading post, I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. I had to say something.
“What large pores you have, Grandfather,” I blurted.
Grandfather laughed.
It was miles to the trading post, but we didn’t have a choice except to walk. After his children were finished bearing their own children, Grandfather had decided that the Plymouth deserved a rest and he had put it up on blocks in the garage behind the trading post, storing a case of oil and filters in the rear seat in case of emergencies. As the two of us hiked along beside the ribbon of highway, undisturbed except for the occasional Buick or Oldsmobile with louvered rear windows roaring past, I needed to speak. I began telling him about Bernie and Buchanan Roy.
“Jews are not white people,” he said, when I’d finished. “Many of them are Real People like us. Though,” he added, “some behave like snakes. There are useful snakes. Gopher snakes. This boy who gave you the Bowie knife. Be careful not to step on them.”
I wanted to tell him about the other things that had happened on the way to Chosposi. Not to tell him was a kind of lying. As we trudged along the gravel edge of the highway the Saguaro Cactuses raised their arms to the blanching sun. Cactus owls peeped out and cried “rue” before beating a hasty retreat from me and the revelations of the sun. In the distance, the air shimmered with moisture and the asphalt turned deep black before it disappeared. How could I tell Grandfather about the days I’d left out, recounting my trip? Aren’t Grandfathers asexual? It was even more difficult to imagine Grandfather copulating with Laura P. than it was to imagine father coupled with mother. All of a sudden, I skidded to a halt.
“What else is the matter?” Grandfather asked, looking at me with a slow inquisitiveness that bordered on indifference.
“Father has never had a …,” I said. I caught myself. I’d been about to say “a blow job.” It was a terrifying revelation and it almost made me weep.
“Come along,” Grandfather said.
Forcing my face to go blank, I caught up to him.
“Want to tell about it?”
I shook my head, no, mistrusting my voice. Grandfather was father’s father, the same father who’d said that sex is not everything, even though he was lying when he’d said that. It was sex, the lack of it, that sometimes made my father crazy and taught me to diminish my presence around the house. Besides, where would I begin?
The car had skidded to the shoulder of the highway. A man had climbed out. The driver threw out a backpack as the man stood gesticulating, leaning into the convertible, bending like a rod that was not used to bending. Angry. Not wanting to find myself in the path of an angry man, I was about to high-tail it away from the road when the car skidded to a halt just past me and the door flew open. The man began to run towards the car.
“Hurry up,” she said. “Get in.”
I slipped the bandoliers of my canteens over my head and dropped the canteens into the rear seat. She put the car into gear and sped off. Without looking at the dash, she ran the tachometer up to 6500 and dropped the shift lever down to second, up to third, down to fourth, and then settled the convertible into a comfortable 3000 rpm’s, cruising along at 75 without fluctuating more than one or two miles per hour in speed. I was impressed. I’d never seen a woman drive like that. Till then, I’d ridden only with mother, who hunched forward over the steering wheel, creeping down the highway or braking through city traffic, periodically sucking air in through her clenched teeth with a quickness that always frightened me.
“Where you headed?” she asked.
“Grandfather’s.”
She laughed. “No sweat. Right on my way.” I explained where Grandfather lived. “I can take you there tomorrow,” she said. “If you want to spend the night in Flagstaff.”
“Sure,” I said.
She reached behind the driver’s seat and pulled out a bottle of Beefeater’s. “Want some of this?” she asked. Holding the bottle up, squinting at it, she said, “Brad was sucking on this like it was his momma’s titty.”
Any boy would have lied about his age, faced with a woman who talked like that, not to mention the way she was dressed in a halter top and short shorts that were not made but grown like new skin. She didn’t care about my age any more than she cared that I was a virgin, as she let her head fall back over the edge of the bed that night and whispered a litany of men’s names.
Gerri was a drug runner. “I don’t deal,” she said. “I just move the goods around from one place to another. Like Bekins. Besides, everyone’s got a right to lay back and get away for a while, don’t they?”
Even though I suspected that buying that answer was like buying a used Ford with a flammable gas tank, that didn’t bother me too much.
What did bother me was her talking. Gerri popped bennies and sucked on a new bottle of gin, chattering away like a child up beyond her bedtime who hopes the heavy hand of fate won’t fall if she can keep the company distracted or like a person who eats alone and develops a non-philosophical dialogue with the self as a defense against solitude. The only time she was silent was when she had the bottle in her mouth or the one time she slid her lips around me, sucking on me until I came. Her constant patter nearly made her dissolve, without any concentration from me.
When Brad found the motel and began banging down the door, I crawled out the bathroom window to sleep in the back seat of the car. Falling asleep, I dreamed I was a sea lion. I didn’t like being in the water; I feared some animal or thing might touch me below the surface. Yet I didn’t want to beach myself among the other mammals. Fear overcame desire and, as a ship looking a lot like the one in Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus” headed towards me, I slithered up beside a large lion who had the visage of Bernie Schneider. As the ship passed below, Bernie and I tied up white garbage bags and handed them to the crew of the ship.
I awoke with a pang to the sounds of Dempsy Dumpsters being lifted hydraulically and tipped into the back of a garbage truck.
I was smart enough, when Gerri and Brad found me in the car, not to let on that Gerri and I knew each other. When Brad tried to force Gerri to give him a blow job as the car cruised down the Arizona dawn, I kept my emotions disguised behind the veneer of impassive cheekbones, sensing the jealousy that had sprung up between us, like two crows strutting over the same carcass in the road.
Brad was dangerous, the fuse inside of him running just above peak load. Running drugs with Gerri put him in the company of nice people like Hell’s Angels or Gypsy Jokers. Loving people who had godfathers instead of Grandfathers. Having to talk like them had dissolved the distinction between what Brad dreamed he was and what he believed they were. When they dumped me in Chosposi, I was relieved.
Walking along beside Grandfather on the way to Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post, I thought about Bernie’s drowning, Tammy’s impossibility, of Gerri. With the slow disgust of youth, I said, “There’s not much to be said for experience, is there?”
Louis Applegate joined us, creeping tip-toed along the highway. Laura P. had the uncanny ability to hear soft sounds the farther away they were, and her fury would have been uncontained if she had heard Louis anywhere near her pots, his double thoughts modifying the symbols she had fired into the clay. Grandfather knew this, but he took a chance.
“Love is an acquired taste, Alley, like mayonnaise,” Grandfather said. “There will be few women in your life you can sleep with and not catch cold.”
Louis grinned noisily.
“Just you wait,” Grandfather said.
Laura P. had been listening when Louis grinned, as I discovered when we got home. Once she’d overcome her anger, standing before her Kachinas and softly singing longer than usual, she added to what Grandfather had told me.
“My mother,” she said, beginning to paint the endless mazes and spirals on her pots before firing, “was a beautiful woman. They say that even as a young girl everyone knew she would be the most beautiful of women, and before she was fourteen she already had several men who wished to marry her. When she was old enough for marriage, every boy who thought he wanted to marry her was given a chance to talk with her and convince her. She sat in a room of her parents’ house each day grinding corn. The boys would come one by one to the window of the room and talk with her and try to make her laugh or cry or converse with them—anything to hold her interest and keep her from beginning to grind her corn again. When a boy failed, she would ask him not to return, until there was only one boy left and to his house she sent all the corn she had ground and she and my father were engaged to be married.”
Finishing a large jar, she said, “I think you may be like my mother.” Laura P. climbed onto a low stool and took down a small multicolored pot with the faded design of Water Coyote. “Here,” she said, signing her name on the bottom with a paintbrush. “This one is yours. It can protect you from wasted conversations and keep you from dying of sleepiness.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will, in time. Now leave me alone so I can finish these pots.”
I took to Nature. Rather, much like a hippie, I took to the idea of Nature, and in the mornings after I’d walked to the trading post with him, I’d leave Grandfather on the path back to the mesa and wander the canyons and ravines. I was astonished by the way a single flower would bloom at the top of a cactus. The way frogs buried themselves in the mud of streambeds, surfacing after a night of rain to lay eggs and die, seemed almost religious. Small owls moved into the tenement holes left by woodpeckers in the Saguaro Cacti, refurbishing them, habitating them, hooting from them—or at noon, peering out from their darkness at the chubby boy who watched them. The desert was miracle and the world was code. All I had to do was to decipher it and to that end, I wanted to know the names of things.
“Gila,” the girl said. She was about my age. She refused to look directly at me.
“You fool,” she said. She wore a rattlesnake skin vest over a white T-shirt with ELVIS stenciled across her breasts in red slashes. On the end of a pole she held up the live Gila I had been reaching towards. I knew that Gilas were deadly poisonous, but I had thought they were slow and had reached for its tail.
Rachel hunted Gilas, out of which she made coin purses to sell at the trading post. She’d nearly broken my wrist with her pole and then knocked me backwards.
“Watch this, you fool,” she’d said, prodding the monster on its tail. Its neck and body had twisted with the speed of its hiss and its jaws had clamped onto the pole, not letting go even when she raised it off the ground. “They never let go. Even after they’re dead you have to pry the jaws loose.”
I imagined the bones of my hand crushed within those jaws while Rachel decapitated the Gila with a small machete, and watched the body cease its slow wriggling as she pried the jaws loose from her staff and then rolled a large stone over the head.
“It can still bite,” she explained, “even after it’s dead.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Thanks.” I felt slightly nauseated as I watched her insert a smaller knife in the belly of the Gila and skin it with the swift skill of a surgeon.
“You didn’t know. Pah! White boys,” she said.
“I’m not white,” I protested.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Nobody is anymore.”
I felt injured. “My name is Hummingbird,” I said. “Alley Hummingbird.”
“Rachel,” she said slowly, looking me over as though she was taking inventory of my blood. “Laura P.’s grandson?” she asked.
“The grandson of Billy Hummingbird.”
“Almost the same thing,” she said.
“Not exactly,” I said. I couldn’t explain how it wasn’t the same. The how seemed to lurk in the telephones Elanna and I were in the habit of using. Were you to dismantle the phone through which Elanna spoke with mother’s mother, you would find that it was not the same phone through which I spoke to Grandfather. This difference existed even in our names for things: Elanna called her “grandmother,” and only she understood that I did not call her “mother’s mother” out of some perverse or mysterious desire to be cute—that is who she was.
“Louis Applegate is my cousin’s father,” Rachel said.
“He’s Grandfather’s best friend. He’s my friend, too,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why you’re Billy’s grandson and not Laura P.’s,” she said, half-stating and half-asking it.
“You have to tell it the way you see it,” I said, wondering if it took telling it for you to know how you’d been seeing it all along.
What I realized as Rachel and I explored the canyons together was that everyone has his sawdust even if not everyone is in search of it the way I was compelled to be. One afternoon, watching her stalk another Gila monster, I found myself gazing beyond Rachel, beyond the horizons of cactus into the shimmering glaze of desert air, and I could see that I was doomed to have at least one friend who wanted to be an Indian. He would know more about what Indians were, about their myths and the facts of their lives and histories, than I would ever care to know. Not being an Indian would eat at him until all that remained was a nut of wishful sorrow. He would end his life by marrying a little blond kitten from the midwest and live out that end by retelling stories about those years when he was like an Indian. He would know the what of being Indian while the how consumed him. The what of the power saw; the how of the sawdust.
“What are you staring at?” Rachel asked, hanging another Gila skin from her belt.
“Nothing,” I said, startled out of looking into the lives of people I imagined around me.
“You look so sad.”
“I’m not,” I said, hearing the words echo across the canyon. I wasn’t. I was more perplexed by why I liked this girl who had called me a fool. Her black eyes were set far enough apart to qualify her for membership in the insect kingdom. In fact, she looked a little like an ant on its hind legs. Her hips were large and low, her waist longer than an ant’s but extremely narrow, and her head hinted of a child who’d been born with a weak chin. Her only hope, I thought, was to grow—and then she would resemble more a praying mantis than an ant. Yet I liked her. Even though she looked graceless, her feet never missed a step as we walked down the canyon towards the mission.
I kept asking her questions about the flora and fauna until finally she asked, “Why all the questions?”
“I want to know about Nature,” I said.
“Why?” she said, jumping from one rock to another as we crossed a stream.
“Because Nature is life, it’s hope, it’s …”
“Nature,” she said, making a gesture that was more Italian than Indian. “Nature is Gila monsters and rattlesnakes.” She spat, her spittle foaming on the parched ground before turning into a black blotch. Spotting Johnny on the porch of the trading post, she added, “Nature is Johnny Three Feet.”
Johnny Three Feet stumbled down the wooden steps of the trading post, waving an envelope at me. It was a telegram, and even before I opened it, I knew what the message was. Once I had phoned Elanna and father found out that I was in Chosposi and not the fresh air of Lake Arrowhead, I was doomed to be retrieved.
“Guess I have to go home,” I said to Rachel.
“See ya,” she said.
“You … you’re welcome,” Johnny spluttered, leering at Rachel.
“No thanks for this,” I said, waving the telegram in his face before I walked away. I didn’t like Johnny Three Feet. He had eyes that stared out at the world, defiant in their madness like photos of Charles Manson. It was not simply that he made me uncomfortable. After all, Laura P. had told me about the winter of ’39 when Johnny’s embryonic and slightly retarded self had been delivered from the womb of a woman frozen nearly to death and dying of frostbite. Laura P. had said that the main reason for letting Johnny live was to teach us tolerance. Fine. But I still resented the way Johnny used tolerance to force people to allow him to do things they wouldn’t permit others to do. Such as put his arm around Rachel and sneak his hand up towards ELVIS, all the while drooling on her rattlesnake vest. It was a feeling I would never quite get over, even though I would eventually forge an uneasy peace with Johnny, fooling myself into believing that he was like a gopher snake, helpful at times, biting at others, but never poisonous and not worth stepping on.
Before I could hand Grandfather the telegram, he said, “You’d better get your things together. Your uncle is almost here.”
Sure enough, the rim of the horizon began to withdraw and all too soon revealed my uncle flying more or less towards Chosposi. The path of the plane resembled an FM radio wave as the plane climbed and dipped, climbed and dipped, trying to lock in on the antenna of hardpacked canyon that stretched past the foot of the mesa.
“Ho boy,” Grandfather whistled as the two of us guided the plane down safely with our wishes. “Here.” He revealed a plain round stone hollowed just off-center by erosion. In the center of the hollow was trapped a smaller nut of granite. He hung it around my neck on a leather thong, an amulet against my uncle’s flying.
“Ho boy oh boy,” Grandfather said, when he saw my uncle climb down from the cockpit.
It had been years since Grandfather had last had the shock of seeing uncle, and it was a shock I had trouble getting over even after the plane had lumbered back down the canyon, strained aloft, and turned right for the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff. I knew that what I felt draining out of me as Chosposi was sucked back into unreality behind us was due to something besides my uncle and yet I couldn’t, as uncle might have said, get past him. He had a flattop with the sides greased back in a ducktail. A studded biker’s jacket, red socks and loafers with a penny on the strap, and a kilo of chains around his neck. “See ya later alligator,” he’d said to Grandfather, and those words crowded together in my head with the lyrics of the songs he sang loudly.
Give me Laura P’s singing, I thought.
“Take out those papers and the trash,” uncle sang, “or you don’t get no spending cash.”
Give me Rachel’s cynicism.
“Oh raa-inn drops, it looks like raa-inn drops.”
Don’t give me natural. Let me stay afloat above the desert where there are no landmarks. I tried to focus on the gray line of the horizon, but the line kept shifting so I kept my eyes on the felt dice swinging from the rear view car mirror he’d installed in the cockpit while I sent S.O.S. messages to Grandfather.
“Put your mitts on the wheel and hold her steady,” my uncle said. “Pull back to go up, push forward to go down, turn right or left just like driving a car.”
“I don’t drive,” I said, taking the wheel.
“Used to have automatic pilot,” he said. “I disconnected it after the time I set it for Reno and I ended up in Bakersfield.” He reached behind the seat. “You ever been in Bakersfield? Lot like Lodi. They are square, man, definitely ell-seven in Bakersfield.”
Uncle pulled a six-pack of beer from behind the seat and opened one. “Time for suds that made Milwaukee famous,” he said. He took a long pull from the can. “Ahh. A beer an hour keeps the heart from going sour.”
“That’s Coors,” I said. Along with the fear I was beginning to feel, I was irritated by the way he was talking. This, I decided, is what comes from teaching school too long. I didn’t know enough about uncle’s future to blame anything else.
“So it is,” he said, looking at the can without surprise. “You want one? Do you some good. You need to lighten up, take a load off your mind.” He belched. “‘Scuse me.”
I thought I was managing to keep my face expressionless, but it made him laugh. “You know you’re just like your daddy. I know what’s going on upstairs with you. You’re thinking, ‘One of us should stay sober.’ Hah. Listen, flying one of these things to me is like a baby crawling.”
All of a sudden, he sat upright in his seat and stared out the window of the cockpit. The expression on his face reminded me of the other faces I would see in my life which suggested that what the person thought he was living for had changed, vanished, died.
I pushed the wheel forward a bit and watched the altimeter begin to unwind. Still, he stared straight ahead. I pushed the wheel more and the needle on the meter began to move faster. Then more. I began to panic, afraid that uncle would just go on staring until it was too late. The engines seemed to increase their rpm’s and the wind began to hum across the ailerons and he still seemed not to care. At last, he pried my hands from the wheel, handed me his can of beer, and when he spoke, it sounded as though his voice came from a speaker, over a radio, as he took the controls and pulled the plane out of the dive I’d put it into.
“My son never crawled. You used to crawl all over the known universe, but when he wanted to get from point A to point B, he rolled. He could roll pretty well. But he never crawled.”
As quick as a blink, his voice resumed its normal tenor and he laughed. “Can you imagine that? Your cousin rolling from room to room. Got himself dirty as a hedgehog in spring. Well,” he said, taking his beer from me, “guess it doesn’t matter as long as you get there.”
“And back,” I said, between gritted teeth. I was furiously frightened. I wanted to hurt him. Someday I’d pay him back for this flight.
Get there we did, nine in-flight cans of beer later. Despite the thick brown cloud that covered Los Angeles, extending as far west as Catalina Island and pressing down on its inhabitants like the heavy paw of a bear, its claws raking the lives of even the whales who had taken to the sea thousands of years ago to escape the invention of progress, I was amazed by the multitude of turquoise swimming pools. They were as numerous as the children of Abraham, winking at us like the Milky Way, reflecting the light of the full moon with the purple tint of the lights outlining the streets.
“Give a hi-dee-hi to my brother, will you?” uncle said, feathering back the engines and turning the plane so my side of the cabin faced the corrugated metal building that served as a terminal for light planes.
“I’ll tell them hello from you,” I said.
“Just my brother,” my uncle said. “My brother’s wife … well … oh, skip it, she’s … your mother.” Inside the door of the terminal, I could see the posture of a man I recognized as my father, waiting.
“Here,” my uncle said. He removed one of the shiny pennies from his loafers and flipped it to me. I was tempted to toss it right back at him. Whether it was because my anger abated with the look on his face or because I was saving my strength for the figure inside the terminal, I don’t know.
“Later, kiddo,” my uncle said, slipping the headphones on, radioing in for clearance, the engines making dirt and leaves swirl as the plane turned and accelerated out to the runway.
I held on to the penny like a token with which to pay the busfare I expected father to exact. It wasn’t that father was a cruel man; he was thorough. For example, if he sent me reeling backwards, heels over head, for spilling milk carelessly at the table, he would whack me a few extra times to be sure I got the point. Even if he was understanding, he would be so understanding that I’d begin to wish he’d beaten me instead. I could never tell where his sense of thoroughness would lead him. Someday, he would come home and find me in bed with a girl. Calmly, he’d send her home. Then he would sit down and explain to me the dangers of impregnating a girl at my age, and start to walk out. Some thought, some sense of incompletion would stop him, and he would come and knock the wind out of me.
In the terminal, father took hold of my left shoulder with his left hand. His hands were as big as Grandfather’s and I watched the right one warily, staying in close to him so he wouldn’t get full extension of his arm if he slugged me. When he put his right hand on my other shoulder, I expected to be lifted like a large Kachina and expelled through the nearest window.
“Hey,” he said. “You must be tired.”
I dropped the penny, let it jingle on the linoleum floor, left it like a hobo might paint “Kilroy was here” on a rock as a sign that I had been there. Like all signs we leave behind us in arriving and departing, the penny would probably be swept away by the broom of a janitor. Yet maybe, just maybe the penny found a corner where the broom didn’t reach easily and it is still there defending the dust that has gathered around it over the years.
On the drive home, father said, “Listen.” He was being quiet the way I have come to understand it is our nature to be quiet. There are so many things to say and so many ways to say them and have them heard that one seduces oneself into never beginning. If, by mistake, whether out of a sense of necessity or desire, one of us began, we ducked out of the sentence as quickly as possible.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he said about five miles later. Even in the dark, in the reflection of the headlights, I could see the brown cast to the fog that was choking the angels of this city indiscriminately.
I waited. Except to lecture me, father had never spoken to me like this before. We had never just talked. I didn’t know then that we never would, although I had begun to suspect it; what I didn’t suspect was that father had noticed and would continue to notice that we never talked. Until he said, “After seventeen years, I still can’t talk to you,” I never imagined the possibilities of the pain it must have caused him.
Unlike father, mother was expansive. Bobby pins in her hair—she was trying to tighten the soft curls of her hair—she was standing like a sentinel on the back door steps waiting for me with her arms crossed. On the heels of her “you should not have run away from camp, you had us worried,” she added with her usual logic, “Your dog took sick, you weren’t here to care for him as you should have been and he got sick. We,” she went on, pausing only long enough to suck air into the top of her lungs, “had to take him to the vet’s and have him put to sleep.”
I refused to believe her. At first.
When I realized that she was telling the truth, sleep sounded good to me, if only because it would allow me to redream this dream or dream a new one. All I could do was stare. Clyde was no Lassie, but then Lassie was a transvestite and Clyde had been mine. I didn’t feel any of those feelings I was supposed to feel like pain or loss, only a tremendous absence as I remembered Clyde gamboling about over Custer’s grave in the backyard. I was still staring, still hoping to sleep, when mother came into my room in her quilted bathrobe and sat on the edge of my bed, her hands clenched in her lap, and tried her best to comfort me. Poor mother.
“He was sick,” Elanna said, scratching my head thoughtfully as I sat with her in the graveyard the next day. “It wasn’t very fair of father not to tell you. Mother always has to do the dirty work. Someday, you’ll understand.”
I confess it was mother who put on her fuzziest sweater, unbuttoned the top button, and, wearing a basic string of pearls, served father meatloaf by candlelight and talked him into letting me accept the gift of another puppy from friends of theirs. I confess it because, though I was not very comforted by Elanna, I was discomforted by Pamela, who, not long after, blurted out in the darkness of her closet, “I hate her.” An echo of what, unsurprisingly, she would say about pets. Pets, she’d decide, were things one should not become too attached to because, like mothers, they would one day have to be put to sleep.
“Though a living bitch is better than a dead lion,” Grandfather said.
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I thought as I re-enacted Custer’s burial ceremony for Clyde and christened my new puppy Running Dog. Using the New Mathematics of plus and minus one, it seemed that I continually reached a sum of zero and even though zero was a cardinal number as well as an argument, it always came to nothing. So it wasn’t that Grandfather might have been wrong about bitches and lions, only that he may not have been right.
Robert Parnell O’Connor always insisted on using his full name because Parnell was somebody to someone, once, or so he’d heard. It was difficult for an Irishman to feel as important in deprivation and suffering as Jews or Mexican immigrants, and the Parnell gave Rob the right to feel a little superior to Tommy A., who was condemned—or so Bernie, Robert and I believed—by his boring WASP blood to insignificance. So when early in the school year Rob disappeared from school with the suddenness of a whisper, we weren’t sure whether or not to be happy for him. Our teacher said he’d had a “tragic experience” with a voice that suggested the experience was his as well, and that made us even more curious about what it was.
Bernie Schneider and I wondered about it at recess and after school. Rather, I wondered aloud to Bernie, since he was unconcerned with events outside of himself. Well launched on his wanderings in search of Tammy, Bernie was interested in little else but keeping his head above water.
Tommy Anderson was the one who, with the hope of impressing Marily, brought the newspaper clipping to school the next day. The photograph showed the rubble of an apartment building, the tail section of a light plane sticking out from it as though the apartment had burst. Robert Parnell O’Connor Senior, newly remarried, had perished with his bride as the plane, under the cover of night, had crashed into their apartment.
The way the newspaper added it up, it was terrible and tragic. The way I added it up, using the New Math, was zero. Robert Parnell O’Connor had a father; he had lost that father. Zero. Robert had a new stepmother; she was dead. Zip, again. I tried a different formula: minus one father, Robert Parnell was plus one experience of suffering, and that still seemed to add up to nothing. True, Robert might put some distance between his sense of deprivation and Tommy’s, and lessen the distance between himself and the Jews and Mexicans around us. But how real would be the gain against Bernie? Robert had suffered a loss, but one can get over loss. One never gets over a want like Bernie’s which can’t ever be satisfied. At best, Robert would be up less than one; and even that bit would be taken away when Thanksgiving rolled around and Tommy revealed a secret that no one knew he had.
Before I got on the horn to Grandfather, I checked with my parents. They proved to be unfamiliar with the formulae of the New Math.
“Married,” mother said. “Serves him right for having his marriage annulled and marrying a doxy like her.” Mother led you to believe that Robert Senior’s death was the result of marriage. “That’s what can happen,” mother said.
Father said, “‘God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.’” Less penetrable than mother’s answer, father’s saying made me realize that father’s gods had become the One God and thus, under the rules of the New Math, the sum of his experience was zero. Forsaking the old gods, he had bought a new one. Maybe mother’s sum was zero, too, since she had something against marriage and yet was married herself. I fled, dialing Grandfather even before I reached the cemetery.
“Chicken Little,” Grandfather said.
How right Grandfather was. I might have imagined the sky was falling, that year. It seemed that the brown sky was rejecting everything that ventured into it. Poor Robert Parnell O’Connor. Not long after he returned to school, prepared to consolidate the suffering he would tell us he had endured, a pilotless Navy fighter crash-landed on our playground.
Fortunately, most of the kids were in, or on their way in from recess, when I heard the incoming whistle. I looked behind me to see the fighter plane in the near distance, nosing out of the opacity of smog. I wasn’t sure it was going to hit the playground as I watched Little Eric what’s-his-name, alone on the playground. His job, given him in exchange for letting him play, was to bring out the equipment to recess and to collect it after the rest of us had run off to class, and he did it with fervor and pride. So there he was, struggling with the large duffel bag full of bats and balls, carrying it from base to base, setting it down and putting the base in it, and then hoisting it to his shoulder again to stagger on to the next base. At two hundred yards, he looked small as he spotted the incoming jet and fell back from it, ducking his head into the crook of his arm. “Exactly the way he’d field a hard-hit, one-hopper,” I thought, as I dropped to my knees.
For years, we had been having daily air raid practice. Ever since the Russians had delivered Sputnik into the infinite and curving regions of the universe, we had been taught to drop below our desks on our knees, making ourselves look more like snails than human beings, covering the exposed skin of our necks with our hands to protect us from flying glass. Watching the films of atomic explosions, Bernie and I felt silly. We knew that flying glass was hardly the problem. The heat rolling out at the base of the explosion like the dust storms of the thirties would cook us like escargot.
At last all that practice paid off for me as I dropped to my knees and the jet lodged itself in the asphalt field of the playground, erasing Eric in a screeching, tearing explosion.
Poor Robert Parnell O’Connor wept tears, brown and gritty from the smog, frustrated tears that eroded the plump curves of his Irish face and left it lined and ancient with grief. Every foot he had gained on the ladder of suffering was lost because of some kid whose last name no one cared to remember. Even the photographs of Eric’s wreckage in the newspapers were larger and placed more prominently than those of his father’s death.
When the sky wasn’t falling around us, we played Bombs Away in the wash, hauling stones up the railroad trestle and throwing them at the shack the hobos had built with the mission instinct of the Franciscan Friars. We switched to Bombs Away from Cowboys and Indians less because the game had become offensive to me, and more because Tommy A. was changing.
The rest of us had become somewhat obsessed with women (or, rather, obsessed with our own pudenda, we had begun to hope for and seek relief in the vision which hung like an island just beyond the powers of our swimming strokes). Tommy’s worm was turning a different way. Maybe it was Bernie’s wearing a breach cloth that caused Tommy’s worm to turn. To me, Bernie looked slightly ridiculous. As for Bernie, I dare say he only wished to be prepared if his Tammy accidentally manifested on a sunny Saturday afternoon. But Tommy pursued Bernie. When he found him, Tommy refused to shoot at him. Tommy almost broke down into tears when Bernie refused to be his prisoner, insisting that in Cowboys and Indians, the Indian was either dead or not—never was he taken prisoner.
I had refused to acknowledge Tommy’s strange behavior until one rainy afternoon when he and I were watching a Western on T.V. At one point, this large Indian buck bursts through the door of the settler’s cabin, accompanied by the frightened screams of the white women trapped inside, grabs one of the women by the hair and drags her out to his horse.
“Oh,” Tommy said, “I wish I could be like that.”
“Me, too,” I said, thinking it natural for all little boys to dream of being large and strong with caveman dreams of dragging women off to tents and caves and hotels on the coast of Mexico.
“She’s so lucky,” Tommy said. He put his hand on my wrist. “Don’t you think?”
“He’s the lucky one,” I said, looking him straight in the eyes.
Bombs Away was my idea, primarily as a way to divert attention from the closet Tommy was slowly opening. On Saturday or Sunday afternoons we could be found in the dried-up river bed, trying to destroy the hobo shack. Bernie spotted for us, managing to escape his dreams enough to say “two degrees right” or “up six,” the rest of the time indifferent to whether we hit the shack or not. Grown fat on white bread and peanut butter, I arced rocks at the tin roof glowing with the sun’s heat, competing in the size of the rocks. Tommy, having selected delicate, round rocks, lofted them through the air, more concerned with the curve described by the rocks than with any effect on the shack.
All things come to an end.
“Vanity,” father would say over and over. “All is vanity.”
But it wasn’t vanity or the awareness of it that stopped our game of Bombs Away. Possibly, it would have ended anyway, but one day there happened to be a hobo in the shack. The hobo also happened to be ten feet tall and black as mother’s toast. As I ran from him, concentrating not on the gray line of the horizon but on the invisible demarcation of the Nevada State Line, he sounded like a freight train, gaining on me as I flung my fat round body along the tracks. At last I stopped, winded, unable to recall when the sound of his running had ceased, and was vain enough to think I had outrun him. It was that vanity that led me back to the trestle when I realized that Bernie had not run with the rest of us and that he was most likely still sitting there saying “Up six degrees,” spotting for the artillery that had retreated without warning.
The hobo was hulking over Bernie, shaking his shoulders, saying, “Lissen. You tell your buddies they come ‘round here again I’sell cut their little hands off.” When he let go of Bernie and raised his fist, I thought he was going to strike him.
Picking up a rock the size of one of Tommy’s, I threw it at him. “Let him alone you shiftless nigger,” I shouted. As swift as a coiled snake, he was on me, holding me aloft with one huge fist and shaking me like a rattle.
“What’d you call me, boy?”
Fear bred a modicum of defiance. “A lazy Negro,” I said.
He spat on the ground. “No, boy. Nah. You called me a shiftless nigger,” he said. The strange thing was that he didn’t seem angry. More amused. “Didn’t you?”
I started to say I hadn’t meant it.
“Didn’t you?” He shook me hard, his black eyes staring straight through my skull the way Grandfather would have stared if I had used that word around him. “Didn’t you, boy?”
“Yes,” I said.
He dropped me on my feet and I turned to run, but he grabbed my shoulder and my will to run vanished in the largeness of his grip. “Now lissen,” he said. “I want you boys to call some things to mind next time we run into each other. One is,” he looked at Bernie, “you were foreminded ‘bout hanging around here. You tell your mates that, hear? T’other is that nigger ain’t a color but a state of mind. Plenty niggers all colors in this world an’ next time we meet you call to mind that I ain’t one.” He released my shoulder. “Now git.”
“Come on Bernie,” I said, regaining part of my composure. To the hobo I said, “Let us not meet again this year.”
He laughed a laugh full of teeth. I’d never seen so many teeth. “What’d you say?”
“Let us not meet …”
“I heard you.” Laughing, he spat at the ground again.
He hit my shoe. He shouldn’t have done that. That’s what I told myself as I furiously cut a hole in the lid of a mayonnaise jar. A rag, a packet of cigarettes, the jar three quarters full of gasoline from the can father kept for the lawn mower. He should not have spit on Grandfather’s words. Fed with that notion, I managed to keep my fury alive until the night. Spit on Grandfather, will you? I thought as I ran from the empty shack, the cigarette fuse smoldering, not waiting for the explosion but intent on reaching my street, my father’s house, before the explosion and flames alarmed the fire department and the police. Spit on …, I thought, in bed again, my heart outracing the locomotive I could hear in the distance. Had I been able, I would have stopped the fuse. I would have made the night into a bad dream, even before I heard what Grandfather would have said.
“Gibbon,” Grandfather would have scolded. “Bannock scouts.”
It was the second time in my life I had done something I couldn’t tell Grandfather. I would remember it always because it was the first time I heard and knew the words Grandfather would have said, if I had given him the pain of knowing what I had done. Never again would I want to hear the story of Gibbon’s men sneaking up on the Nez Perce encampment and slaughtering women and babies in a surprise dawn raid. I lost twenty pounds of sleepless fat over the next few months, realizing that I was worse than Gibbon’s Bannock scouts.