Scarface was obnoxious, but he had charisma. The first time I met him, he showed me a coffee can with dead tadpoles in the bottom. He offered to sell them—with the coffee can—for ten dollars. I drove him home from Madrigal to the rez. He asked if, when I bought my car, it came with the engine. I said the car came with the engine. Then he asked whether it came with the key.
I admired his directness. “Listen, you’re a hippie,” he said. “Can you get me some weed?”
“You want me to get you some weed.”
“If you get me some weed, I can get you commodities. Peanut butter, apple juice, powdered eggs—whatever you want.”
“Dream on,” I said.
“If you get me weed, I’ll make you breakfast, you know what I mean?” Scarface smiled benignly.
I didn’t answer. How could I? He was only twelve. Just outside town, I turned up a stretch of road that ran through hills and gullies that bloomed with wild mustard and fennel and cow parsnip and the carcasses of American-made cars named after wild horses. One end of this road opened at the rez, with its HUD houses and rosebushes, where Scarface lived. On the other end stood the Assembly of God. In between, we passed a ranch where a wealthy couple from Los Angeles had brought hundreds of rare wild birds. Immediately the turkey farm across the road sued them for bringing in exotic bird diseases, and someone shot their dogs.
“You saying I’m ugly?” Scarface shouted suddenly. “Huh? ’Cause I’m packing heat!” He pointed to his penis.
This was a test. Sure, Scarface was ugly, as enormous and threatening as possible for a person his age, not yet full-grown. His face looked like a knife wound. But beautiful, too.
“I have to keep my eyes on the road,” I lied.
“If you get me some weed, I’ll forgive white people for all the injustices done to Indians,” he said.
“Scarface,” I said, “how can you forgive white people?”
He looked out the window at the dusty plain of the turkey farm and said, “If I didn’t know how to forgive people, I wouldn’t have no family or friends.”
It was true. Scarface’s own father had shot and killed two men in a state of such profound drunkenness that at the trial he could not recall the crime, the men or his reasons. He lived in prison—the worst one. Scarface’s mother did odd jobs with men.
Scarface couldn’t really read—he spelled his own name “Scrafac” on a piece of paper he gave me with his telephone number on it. I don’t know what they did with him in fifth grade; he still held the pencil in his fist. I would have liked to take Scarface away and make him mine—but you can’t do that. Whatever my reasons were for wanting Scarface, they were the wrong reasons. I bought him pickles and jerky and doughnut holes at the gas station, and loved him the way you might love someone for his money or his beauty.
AROUND THE TIME I started my gig with Artists in the Schools and got to know Scarface—the year of my messy and depressing separation—my sister, Carrie, called from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she’d been teaching in a private school. Her life, she said, had become worthwhile and exciting. She’d forgiven me for being one of the neglectful figures from her childhood. In fact, she invited me to come and visit. She spoke of the political situation; after the most recent eruptions, the State Department began to worry about all her “kids”—diplomats’ children and children of the ruling families—being sitting ducks, but all they did, at the school, was to postpone a field trip to the capital, where rape and machetes were “of concern.”
“That sounds dangerous,” I said.
“We went to see the bonobos instead,” said Carrie.
A few weeks later, Carrie called again to say she’d been evacuated and had moved to another country in Africa, where she was doing important work with Doctors Without Borders, treating girls and women with fistulas, ruptures and internal damage from rape, long labors in childbirth, or babies too big for the child-size birth canals of the youngest or most malnourished girls. This damage had rendered many incontinent; they’d lost the wall between vagina and anus, and lived in shame.
“You should come,” Carrie said. “Then you’d see.”
SCARFACE KNEW about bonobos from watching the Discovery Channel. Bonobos were his favorite kind of ape. They could pick up a teacup with their toes and drink from it. They didn’t force the females to have sex with them—they fucked equally and by agreement. Scarface put a bonobo in the mural even though we’d agreed not to deviate too much from the sketches we’d made, or from our local history theme. We’d agreed to depict salmon and kelp, redwoods and round houses, Pomo women weaving baskets from redbud and willow and men dressed for dancing in flicker headbands and feather skirts. Painting the mural was supposed to help kids like Scarface reclaim their own narratives. (I’d written these words myself in several successful grant proposals.) The city had agreed that we could use the wall of the Lions Club for the mural, but then it immediately granted a permit for the medical center next door to expand into the parking lot.
A truck brought in three modular buildings in one day, creating an alley between the medical center and the mural. The public would never see our work; on the other hand, we had a county grant and artistic freedom.
I wanted to bring the mural into the present tense, break down some of the old romanticized imagery. There weren’t even any redwoods on the rez; it was a floodplain. Scarface had probably seen more bonobos on the Discovery Channel than salmon in the Rez River. I told the kids, “Paint what you see around you, not what people tell you is there.” One of the kids put in his grandma on kidney dialysis, smoking a pipe. Another contributed a kitchen sink with brown water running out of it. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, we painted in the shadows. At night, kids sold drugs and drank beer around the mural. I think they were drawn by the liminal quality of the space, and by the mural itself, which every day became more complicated, beautiful and hard to read.
Scarface didn’t like to take the late bus—kids teased him about the men who climbed in through his mother’s bedroom window—so after we worked on the mural, I drove him home. One time, we talked about the mural and the bonobos; then Scarface shared some letters he said his girlfriend, Maria, had written to him. I probably shouldn’t have let him go on, but his confidence and expression amazed me. Wasn’t Scarface supposed to be illiterate?
“You read those well,” I said finally, and he said, “Well, I already know what they say.”
I pulled into his driveway. A dog stood on a car’s roof in the yard, barking. A girl also stood in the yard, staring up into a pine tree. She had a round face and a round body and very long black hair that had been oiled for lice and pulled back into a bun. Her eyes were brown and deep. “My cousin,” Scarface explained. “Maria.”
“Scarface,” the girl shouted, “your big brother threw my thong up in that tree.”
“Why don’t you climb up and get it?” he asked.
“You don’t know what’s been in that tree,” Maria said, and grinned.
Scarface flashed me a beautiful smile from his ugly mug and slammed the car door behind him.
THE LAST TIME my sister came to visit, she rode my bicycle into town every day and leaned it up against a tree behind the coffeehouse where she spent her mornings writing e-mail and opening up her heart to the regulars. Carrie has always impressed people with her stories and with her résumé, which she can recite like a villanelle. She suffered damage as a child from having been kissed and fondled by an uncle, which led to her radical identification with the oppressed. She worked at a rape crisis center and a suicide hot line, then put herself through nursing and business school, overcame asthma and anorexia, studied French, and became the crusader she is today. Carrie’s lived and worked in seven countries, four of them in Africa. We’ve had different experiences, different lives, Carrie and I. Carrie says no, we just have different versions of reality.
I asked if she locked it—the bike—and she said, “The trouble with you is that you have no faith in people.” When someone finally stole the bike, she called me for a ride home and refused to go back to my “low-life” town. Carrie’s like that—rigid, unilateral.
Love is a degraded word. I love my coffee in the morning. I love sunsets and those arias from Handel’s operas—Agrippina, Atalanta, Lotario, Samson—sung by Renée Fleming that my ex-husband turned me on to. I feel a complicated mix of ambivalent affections for my sister, but the truth is, I have never loved her, didn’t even when we were children.
Our uncle Gene, a policeman, caused a scandal, statutory, which infected our whole family before my sister and I were born. He lost his job, and even did time in prison. When my sister was coming up, three years behind me, nobody wanted to open old wounds. Uncle Gene wasn’t young or handsome or powerful anymore. Carrie was large and quick enough to defend herself—or, it was felt, she should have been. Even now the words my sister uses to describe her life—molested, abandoned, alone, exposed—sound exaggerated. My sister always seemed dull and literal to me; I loved intrigue and secrets.
Uncle Gene died of a gangrenous leg in Aunt Bea’s living room. Aunt Bea was much older than she had expected to be when he died—but still relieved. Within a month, though, she stopped breathing fluently and had to drag around a small oxygen tank. She said, “I know it sounds pathetic, but all I really want is a cigarette.”
From Aunt Bea I learned that you could hate your life and still love life.
As far as I know, Uncle Gene never forced anybody to do anything. But he was persuasive. He made girls feel something, and when they were really feeling it, Uncle Gene was there with his avuncular touch. He was, of course, a bad man. But just as great individuals are sometimes scarred by flaws, can’t a bad man be varnished by qualities?
Because of my experiences with Uncle Gene (the playful banter, the pressure and push-back, the tickling, the touching, the lap-sits, the terrible, interesting frankness of his desire), I understand boundaries and enjoy controlling them. Because of him, I’m not afraid of red zones in human relations, just as my sister is drawn to her African hot spots.
In the mural, I gave Uncle Gene a cameo, a little piece of the action, even though he isn’t part of local history. I painted him lying on his back with his arms spread out, very flat and stylized, completely open. I could have emphasized his vulnerability, or punished him in some way, had his liver pecked at by ravens. But what interests me about this uncle is not his amorality—it’s his freedom.
SCARFACE HAD BEEN ASKING since September what I was going to buy him for Christmas. “Jews don’t celebrate Christmas,” I told him.
“But I celebrate Christmas,” Scarface said. “And what I’d really like is a bag of weed.”
Just before winter break, I arranged to take my students to the city for a day—a two-plus hour drive—to see the murals in the library, city hall, and a mosque. It turned out everyone had a grant for a mural; everyone had a narrative they needed to reclaim.
No one showed up except Scarface, so we drove down together. At the library, we walked through a detecting machine. “It’s to make sure you aren’t walking away with a book that isn’t checked out,” I explained.
Scarface looked incredulous. “Who’d jack a book?” he asked.
At city hall, he walked confidently up to the metal detector, and when it went off, he levitated three feet, turned in midair and bolted. I found him out front, sitting on the rear bumper of a black limousine with embassy plates.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“You said they checked you for books.”
“That one’s a metal detector. To check you for guns.”
“Or knives,” Scarface said, brandishing his.
We watched together as a beautiful woman walked down the staircase, wearing a long dress of cream-colored satin and carrying a bouquet of roses.
“Bitch looks like an angel,” Scarface said.
We strolled through alleyways in the Mission, observing the iconography of the murals. Scarface peppered me with questions about urban life. When you bought coffee in a restaurant, did you get all the milk and the sugar you wanted? When you bought a house, did it come with electricity? When you bought life insurance, could you kill yourself? When you bought stocks, like Coke, did you get Coke for free? If one of those johns paid you to lie down, could you get your nut off, too?
I thought, This must be what it is like to have a child. Not that I wanted a child, but it was nice, walking around with a kid asking question after question, expressing curiosity.
In the mosque, we ran into a stampede of empty shoes on the mint green rug. Men prostrated themselves, or leaned up against the walls, or knelt before the Imam, who spoke rapidly in Arabic about moderation, modesty and patience. Scarface and I sat in back with an interpreter, who wore a headset and translated what the Imam said. Men came and went freely, clasping the hands of their brothers as they passed while putting the other hand over their heart—a formal yet intimate gesture.
I joined the women in a separate, closed-off room where we could hear the Imam but not distract or be seen by him. Handwritten flyers pasted to the walls admonished us in English not to whisper during prayers. Nevertheless, the women introduced themselves in whispers. One was an Austrian who had converted; another was Apache from the Southwest. The Apache woman had just converted last Thursday, and she wished everyone in the world the same happiness she had found in Islam. A high school senior said Islam gave her a beautiful privacy. She was not oppressed or forced to choose.
The mural itself was disappointing—the usual romantic imagery: camels. City kids had done it, but everything about the mural spoke to a distant past in the desert.
The mosque served a free lunch—cumin rice and falafel, chopped salad, and baklava. Somebody opened up the soda machine at the front of the mosque and handed out free sodas. Scarface was impressed, and he drank two Cokes.
“I want to be a Muslim,” he said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I like these guys because they scare the white guys.”
“You want to scare people?”
“I already scare people,” Scarface pointed out. “And I know how to pray.”
When we reached the car, somebody had broken the small rear window. The backseat was covered with glass.
“Why did they go in the back window?” I wondered aloud.
“They didn’t want to make too much noise,” Scarface said.
“They didn’t even take the stereo. They only took my fleece jacket—but it had sixty dollars in the pocket.”
“Sixty bucks would be enough,” he said with a tone that indicated I was a snob.
He swept the broken glass into a piece of the cardboard and dumped it carefully down a sewer grate while I taped up the back window with strips of duct tape left over from my marriage, when I’d been prepared for everything. While Scarface cut tape off the roll with his knife, he noticed a transgender woman in a blue dress and high heels crossing the street. “Jesus, what is that?” he said, grabbing my arm.
“That’s a man who is taking hormones to make him look and feel more like a woman,” I told him.
“I never saw anything like that before,” he said. “I do not approve of that.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Lighten up.”
“You approve of that?” Scarface asked, loudly enough for the transgender woman to hear. I saw, suddenly, what the transperson saw, a big kid, probably with a knife.
“Of course I approve,” I said loudly.
We didn’t speak again until we drove over the bridge and Scarface told me he was carsick. I took a detour to Mount Tam, and we talked and walked up a wide dirt path, higher and higher.
“So can anyone just go to San Francisco?” he asked.
“It’s a free country,” I said.
“Is Los Angeles in America?” Scarface wanted to go there. He wanted to know if it was true that Juvie, where his older brother went, was a town run by Jews.
“No—it stands for juvenile,” I said. “Kids.”
“So where are the Jews?”
“Jews live everywhere. In diaspora.”
“Did somebody take their land?”
“Usually, yeah,” I said.
“That’s exactly what happened to Indians,” said Scarface. “That’s why I could never be racist against Jews like my mom is.”
“There’s Israel, but it’s small, and other people were living there, too.”
“Do the Jews have an army?”
“In Israel, they have a pretty good one.”
“That’s what I mean, man. Motherfuckers can’t mess with their land.”
“Well, and there are all these different tribes of Jews, like Native Americans, and everybody’s mixed up, too, like on the rez. My mother was Jewish; my father wasn’t. My sister isn’t. I am—but I don’t even believe in God.”
“How can you not believe in God? That’s fucked-up! What stops you from doing something bad?”
“You can’t just be a good person because you think God is watching—”
“Sure you can,” Scarface said gently, his voice encouraging.
IF SOMEONE surgically removed my memories and let me keep one, this might be it—this day—though it was probably a mistake to take him on a four-mile round-trip hike. We started in a black blanket of fog and climbed up a steep grade on a gravelly path toward blue sky. Half a mile up, Scarface was sweating. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be out of shape. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I’ve got asthma and bronchitis,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. And I’m obese.”
A couple wearing spandex shorts and shirts rode past us on thousand-dollar bicycles. “This reminds me of the time I climbed Masada,” one of them said.
“Hey, could I have a swig of your water?” Scarface shouted at the bicyclists. The couple pedaled faster.
“I’m just messing witchou!” he yelled after them.
I practically pushed him to the top, but we made it. I wanted this success, I thought, for Scarface. Before he filed for divorce, my ex-husband used to tell me that I always try to extract more from an experience than is there to be withdrawn.
When we reached the top, Scarface wasn’t really able to talk anymore, and by the time we’d hiked two miles back to the car, the sky was dark. I’d planned to get him home at a reasonable hour. His mother wasn’t exactly overprotective, but she was still a mother.
SCARFACE STOPPED WORKING on the mural. He just stopped coming. I drove out to his house. The little dog still stood barking on the roof of the car, but no one answered when I knocked on the door. Finally, I called Mr. Boyle, the county administrator in charge of the mural project, who read Scarface’s accusation: “ ‘I was the only kid on the field trip. It wasn’t even a field trip. It was just me.’ ”
Mr. Boyle said, “I can’t believe you don’t know even commonsense things—don’t drive the kids alone, for example. Didn’t you read the guidelines?”
“Guidelines for what? What guidelines?” I asked.
“The guidelines on the Web site,” Mr. Boyle said. “The kid was pretty specific. It would be hard to make up the stuff he was saying—a kid like him, on a learning plan, pretty high special needs. It might be impossible to make up.”
“To make up what?”
“The pornographic imagery.”
“What pornographic imagery?”
“Did you climb up a tree to retrieve your undergarments?”
“No—that was his cousin.”
Mr. Boyle said, “Look, it’s not that I have any reason to believe him. It’s that I don’t have any reason to believe you. I’m old. I don’t believe anybody.”
Scarface remained in the mural, though, digging in a hole in the ground, unearthing relics from the past—an old Coke bottle, an arrowhead, a coffee can, a safety razor. New kids joined the project and helped. “Paint what you see,” I told them. “Don’t just paint stuff people tell you is there.”
I even had new favorites, smart, assertive kids—Javier, Alicia, Salvador, Nick—who basically just needed an adult to say their names and mean it.
THEN AUNT BEA DIED and left me a little money. I took every penny and booked a trip to Africa to visit Carrie over the spring break. At first, I hardly recognized my sister: She looked like a nun. Her face had the planes and angles of a clenched fist, especially under the white hat she wore. The dry air and exposure to injustice had puckered her like a raisin. She despised America—she was full of good and subtle reasons—though she remained hopeful about the beneficial effects of free-market capitalism on the local economy.
Carrie lived, with a few others like her, in a hut made of sticks and grass. Her hut smelled of the powdery body spray she’s used since she was nine. It smelled of my sister—damp, sweet, childish, chemical. I kept a journal of my impressions, as if I might be responsible for making a mural of the visit. Unfortunately, I made only two entries before I got sick.
Noted
date and mangrove trees
early human remains
special volumizing shampoo
erg: sea of sand in the desert
reg: gravel-covered plain
antimalarial drugs, sunscreen
1 bottle Russian vodka
Percocet, Welbutrin
main sources of water: dew and fog
oil reserves
C. surrounded by girls twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old, whose babies ripped apart their child-size organs, or whose organs were ripped apart in other ways. Girls wait for doctor without borders to sew them up. One doctor, seventy girls; doctor travels from village to village. C.’s proj. can be expressed in algorithms of futility. Buttery Dutch doctor emerges from grass house after every fourth or fifth procedure in foul mood. Can’t blame him.
C. wears white lab coat over jeans—perfect sepia handprint on sleeve. Girls crowd around. Most will never get repairs. Doctor will move to next village; girls will return to margins of home, irritating their husbands and parents, who are embarrassed they exist.
Every time C. calls a name, ten girls shuffle forward, dribble pools of fluid. Their calves, under bright batik skirts, shine. Seventy girls came, equal in despair. A few now less desperate than the others. Those chosen do not show that they’re glad.
C. loves this work. Also think she loves the doctor without borders.
In the evening, we sat under Carrie’s mosquito net and drank quinine water mixed with her vodka. Carrie didn’t want to talk about the girls or the doctor. She wanted to talk about childhood things, especially Uncle Gene. “Did he ever ask if he could kiss you?” Again, she wanted to know. An ammonia scent clung to her, bringing back a vivid memory of what my sister was to me as a small child—a pissy smell, a drag.
“What do you want me to say? Uncle Gene was a lech—yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” I said. This line of questioning has always seemed to me beside the point. I hate when people identify their whole lives with their dysfunctional families; I refuse to be defined by mine.
“But you admitted yourself—”
“No, I didn’t. Nothing terrible happened to me.”
“For me, every day is like it just happened,” she said.
“What happened, Carrie?”
“He pressured me. He kissed me and he touched my breast. It went on for years. Nobody wanted to hear it. You know this.”
“What do you want, Carrie? Everyone is dead—Gene, Auntie, our parents.”
“I want you to acknowledge what happened to us.”
“You make it sound like the Holocaust,” I said.
“You minimize it because you liked it,” she said.
We’d said all these words before.
Her face conveyed intense dry rays of heat. “I knew you’d come because you’ve made a mess of your own life,” she said. “But your denial is disgusting and insane.”
I felt dehydrated, sunstruck. This must have been the illness coming on. A day later, I was chilled and shaking; then for an indefinite time I was just alive instead of dead. Existence became a dim red point of light; when I put my hand over my heart, the light went out. Carrie stood behind a yellow haze, as remote as a figure projected onto a movie screen. I felt no hope at all. But I did not die.
Time moved backward and forward. I asked Carrie for an egg. She laughed bitterly. The U.S.-owned oil giant had promised to create model chicken farms, so that the community could be self-sustaining. But those in the community did not want to take the chicken coop–building workshop. They wanted the oil giant to build the chicken coops. As a result of the impasse, the chickens grew sick and died. The eggs, my sister told me, still lay in their cradles of hay. Did I want one?
The doctor without borders came. He asked Carrie for a cup of tea. From his tone, I understood that the two of them were sleeping together. In a fever, you see things. The day Uncle Gene died, his face appeared to me in a dream.
Carrie slid a bedpan under my hip. “You’re really sick, you know,” she said. She brought a bottle of pills and left it on the table beside my little bed of straw. “You can have them all,” I think she said.
“I can’t take pills,” I told her.
“Suit yourself,” she said, and set a glass of water down on the table so hard that the glass cracked up the side.
Her ministrations continued while I went in and out. She boiled a chicken—head and feathers and all. We sat in a formal dining room before our mother’s Spode soup plates. My plate contained the whole chicken, the feathers drenched and steaming. Carrie sat at the opposite end of the table, drinking a glass of water.
“You have to choose,” she said. “Eat—or die.”
I picked up my fork and knife and began to eat. Although the chicken was poisonous, it was also delicious, and made me stronger. In this way, my sister saved my life.
THE ACCIDENT HAPPENED on my birthday, a stormy night in January. My friend Georgie gave a small dinner party. We had champagne in flutes, raw ahi on thin slices of cucumber, then chicken pie and mustard greens. We told bawdy stories and listened to Portuguese fado. I wore a black silk camisole under an old wool sweater. Georgie and I both dressed in this absurd but comfortable way after our marriages broke up, and I think it had to do with feeling, as we did, hot and cold at the same time.
When the power went out, someone opened another bottle of wine. Just then, Georgie’s ex-husband, who is a first responder, came in, peeling off his yellow reflective coat. We cried out gaily, “Did anything terrible happen?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said, and we grew sober for a moment, imagining what.
Georgie calls her ex—Carl—a superhero. Carl is a superhero: humble, strong, brave, not too emotional. These qualities, which initially drew her to him, eventually turned into the reasons she left him—though they stayed friends.
Carl washed his hands, drank his wine, and tucked into his chicken pie.
“Two rez kids, probably doing a hundred miles an hour. The driver was just thirteen years old—he’s survived, so far. The other kid was thrown across the river. They can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl.”
MY KIDS WERE WORKING on a new project now—flags for the main street of the town. At first when I heard them talking, I thought Scarface was the one killed in the crash. But the kid who died was his cousin, Maria. Scarface had the wheel.
How could I have forgotten? It had been nine months since I’d seen him. It was toward the end of school; I’d come back from Africa and finished the mural. Somebody had painted over the bonobo and replaced it with some generic ravens circling a roundhouse. The grandma on dialysis was still there, smoking her pipe; so was Uncle Gene, on his back, facing the sky. I went to the district office to pick up my check, and when I came out, the kids were walking to their buses, and there was Scarface, taller and fatter than I remembered. I walked him to his bus, a distance of thirty feet. We didn’t talk. He climbed on the bus and walked to the back row, where the Indian kids sat, stone-faced and silent. I called after him, “Hey, Scarface, have a good summer.” Nothing. I climbed the three steps into the bus and yelled down the aisle, “Hey, Scarface, have a good summer!”
“You were going to get me some weed!” he shouted, his voice full of rage and hope.
I backed up and almost fell out of the bus. The driver unfolded the yellow doors and took him away. My sister would say I have a hardened, ruined heart, and maybe it’s true. I’d blocked him from my mind.