A photograph. No bigger than the palm of my hand.
Things and the meaning of things.
Charlie 2 Moons’s head is turned a bit to the side. His hair is in a ponytail, white shirt and tie, black leather jacket, gap-toothed, smiling big, standing on the stairway to an airplane, waving. An Idaho State flag in his hand, a bundle of ocelot skin under his arm.
September 17, 1978. Five years ago.
LOCAL MAN RECEIVES SCHOLARSHIP WAS THE HEADLINE IN THE Idaho State Journal. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM, NEW YORK CITY.
POETRY.
My forearms, the pain always starts in my forearms, up to my shoulders, splashes down through my heart, cattle prod to cock.
Against the tobacco-yellow wall, the photo of Charlie was gray. My index touched the liar’s space in between his two front teeth, moved the line down the back of his head, touched the Idaho flag, the bundled ocelot skin. My index led my eyes off the photo, down to the window-frame, to the open window.
Out on the fire escape, my bare feet against iron rods, my bare skin felt the breeze. I rolled a cigarette, lit the cigarette. Tiny orange illumination in the dark. To the horizon was tarred roofs and TV antennae and wooden water towers. The top of the Con Ed building poked up blue and white.
My hands, white knuckles around the fire-escape railing, I leaned onto the railing. Below, through my feet, grids of iron, empty space all the way down.
My breath in. My breath out.
You could call this a prayer.
Into the big smoggy dark loud Manhattan, I yelled, Charlie! Charlie 2Moons! I’m here! In New York City! I’ve come to find you! Just like we promised!
There was a slight stirring of the wind. Below, between my feet, through the grids of iron, a paper cup rolled across the cement.
Then a voice out of the dark yelled, Shut the fuck up!
A big drag on the cigarette. In the night my shorts and T-shirt, my pink skin, glowing like Catholic statues.
My next words I didn’t yell. I spoke them clearly, out loud but not loud, pointing their intent to the blue and white top of Con Ed.
Please Charlie, I said, Forgive me. You got to forgive me. I didn’t have a fucking clue what to do.
CHAPTER
TWO
August 8, 1961, the day I met Charlie 2Moons, was the day after we moved from Hope, Idaho, to Fort Hall, Idaho—to the reservation.
The reason we moved to the reservation, into the Residency, was because Mother lost a baby, a girl, and when she got home from the hospital, all she did was sit at the kitchen table, her hair sticking up all over, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe, staring at the red tulips on the tablecloth and drinking coffee and smoking Herbert Tareytons.
Then one day, just like that, Mother wasn’t in the kitchen, wasn’t in her bedroom, wasn’t anywhere. None of her clothes or shoes were gone and we didn’t have a car. I thought the Door of the Dead had opened up for sure.
Bobbie said I got all sweaty and feverish and she had to sit on Mother’s bed with me and hold a cold washrag to my forehead.
That night, Father got home late, with his bottle of Crown Royal. Bobbie told him Mother was gone, and Father slammed his fist down on the table.
That woman’s gone looking for her baby girl. She’s going to break! Father said.
Father didn’t go looking for Mother until morning. Then he saddled up his horse and rode out. He found mother, barefoot, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe out in the straw field.
After that, it was a regular thing. Mother kept running out into the field. So Father figured we needed a change, that we’d better move, but Mother said we didn’t have any money, we’d never have any money to move to a respectable brick home with a fireplace and picture window, and she was right because all my father did was work on the rodeo circuit—bronc riding mostly, steer wrestling, rodeo clown.
Father made a deal to be the caretaker for the red-brick building with the fireplace and the picture windows with this one tribal council guy, Lou Racing, who Father drank with. Father caretaking and fifty bucks a month in rent got us the brick house.
The house was brick but there were no picture windows, and the windows that were there had bars on them.
The house had been empty since the war. Nobody wanted to live there. No white people wanted to live in the Residency because it was on the reservation and too far to town and any grocery store. No Indians wanted to live there because of all the Indian kids who had gone to the school and been taught to forget their language and forget they were Indians.
The missionaries had built the red-brick house for the Sisters of the Holy Cross to live in next to the red-brick school. There was nothing left of the school, Saint Anthony’s Academy; it burnt down in 1953. All that was left was a big empty graveled yard where Father turned his matching swimming-pool-blue pickup and trailer and horse trailer around.
Out back of the house was a red-brick barn with a gabled roof. At one end of the hayloft were bales of straw—most of them broke open on the floor. Yellow sunlight through the gable doors and sunlight through the cracks in the slates of the roof onto the yellow straw made it a soft place. Even just thinking about it made you want to lie down.
The rusted old swing set and teeter-totter were between the house and the barn on the cement playground. Three swings on chains hanging down, each with a 2-by-6 for a seat. Charlie and Bobbie and I used to almost go all the way over on those swings, and there was many a long afternoon when two of the three of us tried to hit balance on the teeter-totter. Charlie was the biggest, then Bobbie, even though she was oldest, and then me. Charlie and I could hit balance—our feet off the ground, me leaning way out over the edge on my end of the teeter-totter, holding on to the handle, Charlie toward the center on his end. Bobbie and I could hit balance too.
Charlie and Bobbie, though, no matter how long they slid their butts center to end, never did hit balance. Bobbie would start ordering Charlie around, lean-forward lean-back scoot-up scoot-back, and in no time at all those two would be going at it.
The good thing about the Residency was the trees: one half mile, each side of the road, one right after another—silver-leafed, silver-tongued cottonwoods.
Big chandelabra tree limbs touching chandelabra tree limbs across the road. One half mile of whispery shade, the only shade like that in Idaho. And when the cottonwoods got to the Residency, they made a wide arch, taking in about five acres, circled around, and came back into themselves.
Flying over in an airplane, if you looked down you’d see the cottonwoods in the shape of a keyhole, the kind where the bottom’s not flared.
Also there was a big cottonwood right next to the house, branching up high, cottonwood leaves poking into my window in the attic where my room was.
All told, there were one hundred and seventy-six trees. Bobbie counted them.
WE MOVED INTO the Residency, into Mother’s brick home with a fireplace, on one of those big bright windy Idaho days. Took up residency in the Residency.
The day we moved, Bobbie and I got to ride in the back of Father’s old Dodge pickup all the way from Hope, lying next to each other, holding hands so I wouldn’t fall off, on Mother’s blue Montgomery Ward mattress and box spring, hanging our feet over the edge of the mattress so we wouldn’t get the mattress dirty, the wind all around us, people in their cars on the highway looking at us.
That day, lying on Mother’s mattress in the back of the pickup, the wind going by outside us blowing against our bodies, through our hair, in our ears, whipping our clothes like sheets on a line, Bobbie told me one of her secrets.
There never was a person with so many secrets as Bobbie.
Bobbie had her secrets; Charlie, his books; Charlie and Bobbie were what I had.
We were between Chubbuck and Tyhee. Bobbie turned her face to me and rolled over closer on the mattress.
The golden flecks in Bobbie’s eyes, her brown rusty hair cut short like a boy’s. Bobbie wanted to cut her hair so short
it looked like brain surgery, but Father wouldn’t allow it.
I am the happiest, Bobbie said, With the wind going around me. Wind makes things cool and dry, she said, And you always feel like someone else is there with the wind, touching you and blowing your hair and blowing in your ears.
My father’s Dodge pickup the color of swimming pools turned off Highway 30, went over the railroad tracks, and crossed over the cattle guard; then, just like that, hanging over us like guardian angels were the chandelabra branching arms and silver leaves. It was like diving shallow into Spring Creek, the shadows and light and the coolness all around you.
Bobbie and I lay on the blue mattress, hand in hand, me with Bobbie, Bobbie with her secrets, one full half mile of cottonwoods on both sides of us going by going by.
The branching arms of the trees and the sunlight through the leaves was the most beauty and wonder I had known so far.
MOTHER’S ROOM WAS on the same side of the house as Bobbie’s, but on the main floor, just off the big green dining hall, the same green as the whole inside of the house, no light at all coming in her windows, the green shades pulled down. We set the bed down and Father put it together, set the vanity next to the bed in the middle of the room. The dresser, night table, and lamp—set them down every which way, not up against the walls, more like five pieces tossed into the room. That bedroom set never moved the whole time we lived there.
Mother didn’t even unpack the picture of Saint Cecilia, or the Sacred Heart of Jesus, or the Immaculate Heart of Mary, or the framed holy card of the Baby Jesus. No more rosaries hanging on the bedpost either. No more giving up things for Lent. No more Easter Sunday outfits. No more Midnight Mass. No cocoa and cinnamon toast in the afternoons, no Lunch at the Waldorf. Just green dark in Mother’s room with the green shades pulled down, the same green dark in Spring Creek when you dived deep and opened your eyes underwater.
When Mother lost her baby girl, we all lost Mother.
BIG ENOUGH TO feed an army, Father said, when he and Mother walked through the dark wood swinging doors into the dining hall. Father said it too loud, the way he said things when they were his, too loud in the place where everything was too loud, too bright, too big, too green, in the summer too hot—relieved only by the fan Mother bought when she was carrying the baby girl—and in the winter too cold. Never been so cold.
Mother smiled a little, the way she smiled at him, not a real smile. She wore her red housedress that day, and white ankle socks, and her Keds. I remember I told her she looked nice, and she said, I’m doing the best I can.
Bobbie got to choose her room before me because she was older and got things first. Bobbie chose the second floor for her room—even though she liked the sloping ceiling of the attic—because a bathroom was next to her room, and because she said she was tired of being always cheek to jowl with me, and also Bobbie wanted that side of the Residency because there was no Highway 30 on that side, no railroad tracks, only the red-brick barn, the arch of cottonwoods, and the foothills sloping up to hills and then to blue mountains and trees and snow in winter.
Bobbie’s room was on the other side of the hallway and one floor down from me. Around the bottom of the room and around the doors, and the doors too, the same dark wood like in my room, like in the whole house. Bobbie’s room was green and completely square, Bobbie said, and she knew because she measured it.
First thing Bobbie did after she chose which one was her room was get out her tape measure.
Bobbie tied the carpenter’s apron around her waist, unscrewed the cap on the plastic bottle where she kept her finish nails, stuck her hammer in the hammer loop. The gold flecks in Bobbie’s eyes shined, and her cropped hair was sticking up all over. Bobbie was wearing her red plaid shirt cut cowboy style with pearl buttons on the pockets. She’d cut the sleeves off and rolled them up so you could see her muscles. Then there was her Levi’s and her Red Wing boots.
On the east wall of her room—I held the end of the tape—Bobbie made a mark with her carpenter’s pencil and put the head of the dark wood single bed exactly half and half on each side of the pencil mark. Then the green rug exactly in the middle, same distance front and back from the ends of the bed.
The last thing we had to do—and this took damn near the whole day—was find the exact middle point side to side and up and down of the west wall of her room so Bobbie could thumbtack her map of the Known Universe with four red thumbtacks exactly in the middle of the wall.
When we finally got the map of the Known Universe exactly right, Bobbie and I made up her bed with the sheets and the two brown army blankets folded down like in the army the way she liked. Bobbie took her leather apron off, put the apron in her tool box, and lay down on the bed exactly straight, her arms along her sides and her legs out straight and Red Wing boots together and Bobbie looked down her body to the map of the Known Universe.
Perfect, Bobbie said.
Bobbie had such a good look on her face that I wanted to do it too—lie down exactly straight—and so she let me.
Perfect, I said.
The map of the Known Universe was the most beautiful thing Bobbie or I had. The map was the only thing allowed on the walls that wasn’t Catholic.
Mostly I loved the map of the Known Universe because of the colors—deep blue background—and then red Mars and orange and red Jupiter and the white white moon and Earth’s brown and green and blue, and purple Pluto and swimming-pool-blue Neptune, rose-colored Venus, red-and-yellow Saturn with orange around, and all the rest of them, planets and stars and moons, all in all colors.
The sun a still point in the turning universe.
The problem in both our bedrooms, the biggest problem with the whole house, Bobbie said, was the lights were bright fluorescent tubes from above, unrelenting, and while Bobbie liked how they were exactly in the center of the ceiling, Bobbie never turned those lights on, never.
Unrelenting, Bobbie said, Light from above, Bobbie said, Suicide light.
Good thing she had saved up her S&H Green Stamps for her white glass lamp, set on a wood fruit box spray-painted red.
The stereo hi-fi—which came on a chrome stand with rollers and a place for albums—Bobbie set exactly in the northeast corner at a forty-five-degree angle. In the chrome stand, placed so you could see both album covers, Bobbie’s two albums, Hits from the Movies and Johnny Mathis, Heavenly.
Father bought Bobbie her stereo hi-fi. One day Father just rolled in the yard, after he’d been gone for God knows how long, with a stereo hi-fi for Bobbie but nothing for Mother or me.
The final touch was Bobbie tied one of Mother’s scarves around her lamp. The scarf was the color of Marilyn Monroe’s fuchsia dress when Marilyn sang “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it was a secret because Bobbie didn’t tell Mother she pulled the scarf out of the trash the day Mother threw all her scarves away.
That night—after Father said, too loud, Make us some dinner, Ma!—Mother fixed us Swanson’s Fish Sticks and canned peas and mixed ketchup and mayonnaise together for the sauce.
We ate dinner in the dining hall, our forks hard sounds onto the green walls when the forks hit the plates.
After Father excused us, Bobbie and I ran up to her room and turned on the lamp. Bobbie lay down on the bed exactly straight, her arms along her sides and her legs straight out and feet together.
The Marilyn Monroe scarf made a beautiful light in the room that made the planets of the map of the Known Universe glow.
Perfect, Bobbie, said, Just perfect.
Just perfect, I said.
MY ROOM WAS big with a shiny hardwood floor and around the bottom of the walls and around the door and the closet door was the dark brown wood. The walls were sloping green. Outside my window, thick branches, the sigh and scratch of cottonwood leaves. Past the cottonwood south to the railroad tracks and Highway 30 and, across the highway, was Viv’s Double Wide House of Beauty.
Nothing else in the room, just the
bed and the window. A green rug right along the side of the bed on the hardwood floor to put your feet on when you got up. No pictures on the walls, nothing Catholic.
In the room with the fireplace, we put the couch and the chair and the three-way floor lamp and the end table with the doily, and in front of the fireplace on the hardwood floor the flowered carpet, and the wagon-wheel coffee table on the carpet. We called the room the living room and it looked like dollhouse furniture in there, the green walls way far, the green ceiling way high.
The first winter, above the fireplace, fingers of black reached out of the fireplace and up the green wall, spreading soot like some hand from inside grasping onto the wall.
Chimney needs work! Father said, too loud, I’ll take care of it! he said. But Father never took care.
The best place was the kitchen. Not the whole kitchen, because the whole kitchen was big enough to cook for an army, just the alcove part where the table was by the window. The big stove was right there, and we opened the oven door and turned the oven on full blast, and all the burners, and in the mornings before school we sat—Bobbie with Rice Krispies, me with Cheerios, Charlie 2Moons a disgusting mix of Cheerios and Rice Krispies, each of us with our cups of Nestlé Quik hot chocolate—on dark wood chairs in front of the stove with our feet up toasty on the open oven door, with all our clothes on, even our winter coats, and the army blanket over us.
I liked to be the one who got up first, so I could turn the oven on and all the burners and have the milk hot, not scalded—when we had milk; just hot water if we didn’t—for the hot chocolate, and have the cereal out and the army blanket ready.
If Father wasn’t home, Charlie was always there with us. Mother never said anything about Charlie, one way or the other, except one time when she got drunk. Charlie was like a stick of furniture to Mother. But then, so were Bobbie and I. Mother mostly stayed in her room with the dark green shades pulled down and only came out for coffee and Herbert Tareytons late in the morning and sometimes not at all.
In the City of Shy Hunters Page 5