He sat and listened for a while longer, then started the truck and shifted into drive. He sat idling with his foot on the brake, trying to empty his mind. The windshield was washed a rusty indigo, and it flashed him back momentarily to the deep acidic water of the old mine. He took his foot off the brake. The truck crept forward. He turned the wheel and gave it a little gas so he didn’t block the person turning into the drive behind him. Then he turned onto the highway and slowly, slowly, ran the truck up to speed, feeling the pull of gravity where his bones had once been.
It was cold and damp as he neared home. The reservation road sank into pools of fog so thick he slowed to a milky creep. He rolled up the windows and turned the heater back on, filling the cab with the sharp musty odor of mouse turds. The road swam and the trees ran alongside in a black tunnel. The wipers left concentric arcs of water, blurring everything. He drove hunched forward and squinting like an old man.
Twenty minutes later, he parked near the paddock and turned the engine off. Outside, frogs and crickets sang in a resounding chorus. He stepped out into the racket and walked to the lean-to, where he hung the keys on a nail inside the door. As it had been the night after the fire, everything was wet with dew. Pride was in his stall. The rice tarps had been taken in and the pole-barn doors were closed tight against the mist. The houses on the hill were dark. The yard lamp on the peak of the stolpe låven’s gable was surrounded by a fuzzy halo of water.
JW walked across the gravel road, his shadow running long and jerky before him in the mist. His head throbbed on the sides and behind his eyes as he turned onto the grassy drive that led up to his trailer.
The wooden steps were black and soft with water. He saw a wavy paper note taped to his door. The blue ink was blurred, but he could still make out the lettering in the faint light. Stay away from my family.
He took it down and went in, pulling the thin metal door shut behind him. He turned on the overhead light in the kitchen and saw that he had left the windows open, soaking everything within six inches of them. He went around and closed them. The warmth of early September was disappearing, and for the first time he could feel the deep cold of the coming winter.
The trailer had a propane furnace in a metal-faced cabinet next to the bathroom. It had a pale grill speckled with small spots of rust. He had never tried to use it, but now he lifted the grill off its pegs and set it aside. He held the tiny silver pilot knob down and heard the faint hiss of propane. He bloodied his knuckles in the small sharp spaces and burned his fingertips with match after match, but he couldn’t get it lit. He finally gave up and turned off the pilot. The air was pregnant with gas. He crawled into bed in his damp office clothes, but began to feel like he was smothering. He cracked a window even though it let in the cold and damp, got back into bed, and drew the blankets around him.
If he just lay still, part of him thought, maybe the world would change, and this would have all been an illusion, a bad dream, an alternate reality. If he stayed like this, shivering and still, maybe he could hold off the compulsion of the casino that was again washing over him. He felt the blankets around him, pilled and comforting as a musty childhood teddy bear. He had almost forgotten the craving, the incessant gnawing to avoid the bad feeling, to stave off the depression. His family, his job, his home, his identity—gone.
A shiver came over him and he pulled the blankets tighter. The mattress above his pillow felt cold and wet.
IV
THE PLAY
27
Jacob lay on his bed playing World of Warcraft, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his mom. For a long time after she died it had seemed natural to want to call or text her, or to ask for her advice on the various challenges associated with being an Indi’n kid in mostly white society. The habit of her presence lingered, as if she were just away at a powwow: hard to reach, but due back soon.
It wasn’t so much letting go of her presence as it was the habit of her, the placeholder, that was hardest, because it left a hole where nothing fit, a hole that stayed open and sore and reminded him over and over that she was gone, and that she wasn’t ever coming back. It was this void that drove him to do stupid things. He was sure of that because he hadn’t done them when she was around, at least not as much. She had corralled him, set up the sidewalls to his paddock, and kept him facing his tarps and moving forward. Now there was nothing, and sometimes he forgot.
These days random memories would intrude and he would have to stop the game lest he be killed. He set it aside, lay back on his pillow, and stared at the ceiling. She had worked the early shift at the bank so she could be there the second he got off the bus. He remembered their afternoon snacks together, and how she made sure he did his homework and practiced the piano. Somehow her pushing made the drudgery that accompanied these tasks tolerable, even satisfying.
“You know how much I love you?” she would say.
“A lot,” he would reply.
“No, not that much. Just more than anything else.”
Her laughter had always been an invitation to joy. She had dimples, and her teeth gleamed broad and flat in the sun. He could feel her hands on him, pulling his tight shirt over his head, mussing his hair, smearing it flat with spit, wiping his chin, pulling his ear, sending him out to school, grabbing his biceps tightly when she raised her voice and told him no.
They had a game when he was little. “Are you a red boy or a blue boy?” she’d ask.
“Blue!” he would yell.
“Are you a fast boy or a slow boy?”
“Fast!” he would yell.
The choices defined him: blue, fast, smart, hungry, musical, surprising, jumping.
“Do you want to go to bed before your bath or after?”
“After!”
She took him to his lessons, to his haircuts and his appointments. She made him get braces and then made sure he brushed his teeth around them in order to avoid polka dots in the enamel. She checked his toothbrush to make sure it was freshly wet. She argued with him and made him do chores, and she yelled at him when he sloughed off responsibility.
His afternoons were always busy, and as they drove to piano or did homework over cookies, she would ask him about his day. How did he feel about what had happened? How interesting was the latest assignment? How would he deal with the latest boring worksheet? Then she would tell him about his father. He was going to be a little late, but it was because he was doing great things. Everybody at the bank looked up to him with pride, and Jacob was lucky to have such a great dad.
It had been two years since she died, but it felt like a lifetime to Jacob. His afternoons had become void and gray. Everything was flat and lifeless. Piano no longer held any interest, and doing homework made him feel as if he were banishing her memory with each stroke of the pen. How could anyone simply go on alone, he wondered? Life shouldn’t be normal after something like this. We should go crazy. We should go into the woods and tear off our clothes, and scrub our skin with sticks, never to return.
After the funeral, after grandma and grandpa went back to California, after Papa Mooshum left, he was alone. When the school day was finished, he would spend long hours playing video games, until his dad came home with take-out, or picked him up to go get sushi or Mexican. Then they would sit and his dad would ask, “So, how was your day?”
“Okay,” he’d say.
“You get your homework done?”
“Yeah.”
But he wouldn’t check.
The next spring Papa Mooshum died. Jacob’s grandfather had been sending him weekly cassette tapes since his mom’s funeral, his grainy voice telling stories about her as a little girl, coughing through his emphysema in some echoey room. Jacob initially loved listening to them, but with time his voice grew more and more distant. And then when he died, the last vestiges of her presence in Jacob’s daily life came to an end, leaving a gaping hole where the placeholder had been.
He wound up in detention, where he met other kids who had empty pla
ceholders in their lives. In their shared brokenness, they had a common language, and they found that they could understand one another without talking. He began hanging out with them more often after school, filling the abandonment with spray cans and baseball bats, with baggy shorts and more fighting. And then he started skipping school altogether.
Jacob felt the void even more acutely now. It had weakened in some ways over time, but recently he had been feeling more out of sorts. Uncomfortable. He got up and went down to the lean-to to brush Pride. It was calming. Here and here and here, he ran his hands over the immense creature in the salty dimness. This is where you put your foot, your hand, your butt. He pressed his ear against the horse’s broad neck and felt the warmth of him on his cheek. He wrapped his arms around him, and Pride stood still while he did. You keep your mind inside the animal, he thought. You lose yourself and become one, that’s what JW had said. He stood with his eyes closed and imagined.
The oneness fed him as he went back to brushing, almost as much as the structure and the guidance he’d always found in his lessons. He missed those lessons. It had been three days now since he and his father had had their latest big fight. When his father told him JW was no longer allowed to be around him, he had pushed him, almost knocking him over. He had been grounded ever since, and he had begun to drift. Pride’s skin flicked at the brush.
The air inside the lean-to was warm and humid and smelled of horse. Outside it had turned cool and crisp after the mist blew away with the dawn, and the leaves were colored brightly beneath the fiercely blue sky. He wanted to get out in them with the horse. And now JW was gone. He had banged on the trailer door, but there was no answer. He had gone around the windows, but the curtains were closed and the heater was not on, and he found that he was angry, in a way that made him even angrier, because there was no name for it.
Jacob put a halter on Pride and clipped on a lead rope. He unhitched the stall gate and led the horse out nickering to the paddock. As Jacob turned back to get him some hay, he heard the rez kids’ car thumping down the hill past his aunt Mona’s. He pulled two flakes of alfalfa from the open bale and heard the music stop. As he walked back out, carrying the hay, he saw Hayhoe getting out from behind the wheel.
“Hey,” he said, walking toward Jacob with his hands in his pockets. He was tall and languid, and wearing a threadbare army jacket.
Jacob threw the hay over the railing to Pride and turned to face him, ready for anything.
“Yeah, what?”
“We heard somebody torched your dad’s bank and the town fire department just watched it burn,” Hayhoe said.
There was no hint of teasing in his voice, which Jacob found surprising. “Yeah,” he said.
Hayhoe held a cigarette between his thumb and fingers and pointed it at Jacob as he talked. “You may be an apple, but we gotta stick together on this.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Okay,” said Hayhoe. He leaned on the rail to watch Pride. “I’m sorry we scared him.”
“It’s all right.”
“You think that’s right, what they did?”
“No.”
“You think anybody’s ever gonna fuckin’ pay?” He looked at Jacob, his elbows still on the rail. He looked upset, as if he had been robbed.
“There’s some law. There wasn’t anything they could do.”
“You believe that? There’s a law that says the fire department can’t put out a fire?”
Jacob shrugged.
Hayhoe took another drag and shook his head. One of the other kids in the car honked the horn, and he turned and yelled, “Fuck you, just give me a minute!”
He stomped his cigarette out and walked over closer to Jacob. “Come on, you’re one of us now, and there’s only so much shit we can take. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“I guess.”
“So let’s do somethin’ back. It’s called standing up for your rights. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Yeah.”
Hayhoe held up a fist to Jacob, and he touched it with his own. Then he followed Hayhoe over to the car and got in the back, next to one of the others. He immediately noticed the smell of pot smoke.
“Gentlemen, meet Jacob. Jacob, this is Jeremy and Cheese Whiz.”
Hayhoe stepped on the gas and the Maverick shot off down the road, scattering a sweep of heart-shaped yellow aspen leaves in its wake.
***
THE SOUND OF the car reached JW in his trailer, where he lay in the same fetal position he had assumed three nights before. Aside from going to the bathroom, drinking water, pulling off his tie, and eating a couple saltine crackers, he hadn’t moved. He’d just lain there, staring at the wall. He wore the same wrinkled suit pants and dress shirt. He was razor-stubbled and mussy-haired, and the blanket was pulled to his chin. He was folded inside himself like the old collapsed barn on the side of the reservation road. Carol was gone. Chris was gone. Julie was a gulf away. He imagined Carol in their bed with Jim, and Jim with his hand on Julie’s shoulder. It tied his intestines in knots.
28
The boys got drunk in the woods with four cans of Pit Bull that Jeremy stole from the back of his aunt Lena’s fridge at the bait shop near the public access to North Lake. Jacob watched him over the pile of old stones they called grandfathers and sipped on his beer, the bubbly bitterness filling his head with cotton batting. Jeremy was lanky and tall, and though it was a brisk day he wore only a jean jacket over his bare chest, which was tattooed with crossed tomahawks. Jeremy had told them about how his uncle Goose sometimes drifted back into town, and when he did, he always had a case of Pit Bull in the back of the fridge so he could deal with Lena’s nagging. But nobody had seen Goose in over two months, and some people were saying that he had gotten himself arrested in Duluth. Jeremy figured that by the time he came back he might have forgotten how many beers he had in there, so he said they should stop by and nab some of them. He distracted Lena by introducing her to Jacob while Hayhoe and Cheese Whiz raided the fridge and stuck the beers in Cheese Whiz’s school backpack. They all looked at the minnows and suckers for a minute, and argued over the best places to catch sturgeon, then piled back out into the car.
Now they sat in the remnants of a sweat lodge Goose had held with his cousin Cocoa Butter when he was on vacation from his job at the DNR. People called him Cocoa Butter because he was always putting sunscreen on. The two men had said they wanted to initiate the younger guys, so they made Jeremy and Hayhoe and Cheese Whiz dig up and carry grandfathers all day. The boys had to ask each rock if it wanted to come, “and some of those fuckers were heavy,” said Hayhoe. The birch branches from their deer-hide wigwam stood around them like an empty rib cage as they sipped on their twenty-four-ounce gold cans.
“It was a big deal and the grandmas were all smiley about it for like a week,” Hayhoe said. They laughed and pried at the pile of grandfathers with sticks. He threw one of the rocks at Cheese Whiz, who was reading an ACT practice book.
“Hey, Harvard, don’t worry about it so much.”
Cheese Whiz toed the rock back into the pile. “Chill out, dude. If I don’t get into Harvard my uncle said he’s gonna disown me.” Jacob could see that he was writing a lot of math symbols in the margins.
“His uncle’s a big lawyer in Minneapolis, represents the band,” explained Hayhoe. “Lotta pressure for such a little brain.”
“So what’s it like living in the city?” Jeremy asked, turning to Jacob.
“I don’t know. It can be pretty tough, but in different ways.”
“Gangbangers and bullshit,” said Jeremy.
Jacob shrugged, and Hayhoe spoke up again. “I lived there for a while with my dad. It can be tough. That Little Earth.”
“I didn’t go around there too much,” Jacob said.
The sky glowed big and deep azure as the sun began to set, and they made a fire and threw on some sweet grass, which Hayhoe told Jacob was holy. Then they set up the
empty beer cans on a log and Hayhoe showed them how to shoot them with his gun. He had stolen it from a hobo he’d found sleeping in the train yard down by the feedlot in Saint Paul.
“You got to lock your elbow,” Hayhoe said to Jacob, adjusting his arm. The gun was heavy. “It’s all about force and acceleration, right Cheesy? Otherwise the shot’ll go wild. Give it a try.”
Jacob squeezed and the gun recoiled like a throw baler. The can fell to the ground and Hayhoe clapped Jacob on the back, his beer-drenched breath washing over him. “You’re a good shot! Kid’s good!”
They went through half a box of his cousin TV Boy’s ammo, setting the cans up and slowly peppering them with holes. The Indians up here all had nicknames like that, Jacob had learned. TV Boy, Cocoa Butter, Cheese Whiz. Almost no one was referred to by their real name, except when their grandmothers were mad or if somebody wanted to make some kind of point, and it was hard to keep them all straight. They stopped at Jeremy’s grandmother’s house, where they all ate fry bread and listened to her old stories about all the sex people used to have. The powdered sugar made Jacob’s dirty fingers sticky and brown. They raided her garden shed for the gas cans Jeremy said she kept there, then drove in to North Lake.
***
JACOB SAT IN the back seat, his head buzzing from the sugar and the beer. They all laughed most of the way, the headlights coming at them like reverse beacons, and Jacob suddenly realized they were under the yellow glow of the big metal canopy at the Food ’n’ Fuel. They piled out of the car, and the cool air washed him into a clearer attention.
“Is your grandma a sex fiend?” he asked Jeremy.
“She’s always talkin’ like that,” he shrugged.
Sins of Our Fathers (9781571319128) Page 21