The Year We Left Home

by Jean Thompson

  “Janine, honey, I put clean towels on your bed, and there are Dixie cups you can use in the bathroom for brushing your teeth. Is there anything else you need?”

  “No, thanks very much. I’ll be fine.” Janine was sitting with her knees up on the couch and her jacket pulled over them. He imagined her sitting like that at a campfire.

  His mother said she’d be turning in, then. Once she’d gone, nobody spoke, except for his father who asked what was on next. Blake said it was Newhart. The show started up with its noise and music. His father sat up in his chair and leaned in to watch. It was pretty clear that his father was going to stay put as long as he had to, rather than leave the two of them here together.

  Janine straightened one of her legs and scratched the ankle with the beaded bracelet, a slow, thorough process.

  After a while, she stood up and said she was going to bed.

  “You get everything you need out of the car?”

  “Yup. Good night.” She stooped and kissed Ryan lightly on the mouth and walked out barefoot, carrying her shoes. They heard her running water in the bathroom, then doors opening and closing, then quiet.

  Halfway through Newhart, his father got up and stretched and said it had been a long day. Ryan moved to the couch and lay down with his feet on the armrest, something you were not allowed to do in his mother’s presence. Blake said, “I bet Mom and Dad have like, burglar alarms on that door.”

  “Shut up.”

  Ryan must have fallen asleep, because when he opened his eyes again, Blake was gone, and the television had been taken over by some cheap-looking kung fu movie, and the lights were too bright for his heavy eyes. He got up and shut everything off and stood for a moment in the darkness at the door of Anita’s old room, listening, hearing nothing. His parents slept in the next room. There was no way he’d be able to keep quiet enough.

  Blake was already asleep. He always laid himself down in one position and stayed that way until morning. Ryan drew back the covers and stretched out on the thin, clean sheets. It took him a while to fall back to sleep. The room, its shapes, its strips of light and of darkness, was both entirely familiar and entirely strange to him. Blake inhaled a snore, breathed out again, silent. He was on the gray deck of a ship and the air was gray or the air was really water and people came and went up and down staircases because they were no longer on the boat but at the sort of fancy party you saw in old black-and-white movies. He was supposed to get back to the boat because it was about to sail although it didn’t have sails but some kind of loud engine.

  He opened his eyes. He was still asleep because the air was gray, but no, it was early early morning and this was the first blurred sign of dawn.

  He got up to use the bathroom, making sure he kept the door closed until the toilet was finished flushing so as not to wake anybody else up. He walked soft-footed out to the den, listened, heard nothing. In the kitchen the refrigerator rattled and hummed, then throttled back down. He ran the tap until the water ran cold, filled a glass with ice cubes, and drank it down. The backyard grass was wet with heavy dew. Birds were racketing and calling and he realized that he’d been hearing them all along.

  He refilled the glass and carried it out to the living room. It was in a deeper shadow, and he pushed the smothering drapes aside to try and see the sun. A layer of cloud was just above the horizon, and a little light leaked around it from below. The light was dull, as if it emitted from some heavy metal, and he puzzled over it, just as the sun pushed the clouds away and shone forth and the last shreds of his dream dispersed and his eyes told his brain that Janine’s red car was gone.

  Seattle

  JULY 1976

  Magic, magic! Alive! Alive!

  You could get so holy high. This air that turned into sky. Magic! Oh blue! Oh white clouds! The comical way they bumped and shoved each other. His own little giggly heaven. Nobody would ever guess. Him one smart guy. Sweet grass underneath his head, cool breeze in his hair. Who needed anything but this? He meant, the alive part. Something like that. It didn’t matter. He knew what he knew. His mind unminded. Unwinded. A windup toy, a monkey in a jaunty little bellboy’s cap, banging on a drum. Slower. Slow. er.

  “Ray! Jesus, Ray, what’re you doing out there?”

  His eyes opened. Grass was in his mouth; he spat and rubbed it away with the back of his hand. Deb was standing at the back door with a look on her face.

  “Fell asleep.”

  “In the dirt? There’s chairs out there. Christ. I thought you were dead or something.”

  “Just relaxing.” His mouth had gone dry. He didn’t want her to know he’d been smoking up, or at least, he didn’t want her to know it right away. Deb was home from work, meaning it was later than it should have been. The sky was still clear but the sun was low, and the evening’s chill was moving in. Dampness seeped in through his jeans and shirt, a clammy feeling. He stood up, trying to look spry and unstoned. To distract and delay her from asking her questions, he got a cigarette going and said, “Why don’t you grab a couple beers, sit out here with me.”

  She turned and went back into the kitchen, and he waited to see if that was the end of it. But a moment later she pushed the screen door open and stepped out, carrying two Coors in blue foam insulating jackets.

  “So how was work?” he asked, once they were settled. The lawn chairs were made of woven plastic webbing that sagged in places, inviting you to burrow in and then get stuck.

  “It was work.”

  She didn’t offer anything more, which meant she was pissed off about something, him, probably. He finished his cigarette, stabbed it out in the abalone shell they used for an ashtray. He said, “I got some ham steaks for dinner. Tomatoes, green beans, and bakery rolls. Say the word, I’ll get supper on the table in two shakes.” Now that he was awake he was hollowed out with hunger. The beer sloshed inside him.

  “Maybe in a little.”

  “Will Elton be here?” Elton was Deb’s teenage son, who mostly lived with them.

  “I don’t know.”

  She wasn’t going to give him the time of day, just freeze him out. “Hey,” he said. “Big Chief Stone Face.” He laughed, har-de-har. Deb was Indian, and sometimes he could kid her about that. Not now.

  She lifted her beer as if it drink it, then put it down again. “You could have cleaned the place up a little.”

  “Those dishes? They’ll take me thirty seconds. Watch me.” Now he remembered that he’d put a load of clothes in the washer but had forgotten to transfer them to the dryer. With any luck he could sneak down to the basement and get the dryer going before she noticed.

  “So why aren’t they done already? What’d you do all day instead? Are you listening, Ray? I get up at six in the morning, I spend eight solid hours—”

  “All right,” he said, but not fast enough.

  “—getting phone calls from people who have real, actual things wrong with them, I mean they can’t walk, or breathe, or crap, and them I feel sorry for, not somebody who’s, what do you call it? ‘Struggling with a sense of vocation’?”

  “That was a joke.”

  “Yeah, like you’re always so funny.” She looked around her as if seeking the source for her disgust. “Your garden’s not doing shit.”

  “Give it a little more time.” They’d eaten lettuce and radishes early on, but the hot-weather vegetables, tomatoes and peppers and corn, were struggling. It was just too cool and gray here, nothing like summer should be. The corn was especially pitiful, a few scrawny stalks that were never going to produce ears. Anyone from back home would have laughed himself silly over it. Back home they grew hybrids so tough and sturdy, they’d stop a car.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Watch me. There’s a couple things in the newspaper I’m going to check out.”

  “Good plan.”

  It wasn’t like he never worked. He’d put in three weeks on a loading dock, he cleaned carpets for a realtor, he had a builder who called him whenever he had a demo job. But
he wasn’t the career type. Deb knew that by now. She just had to kick up a fuss every so often.

  “How about I get busy with supper,” he said coaxingly. “Kitchen patrol.” He was starving and there was a taste in his mouth like old rags. “Need another beer?”

  She shook her head. He extricated himself from the sagging chair and held out a hand to help her up. Deb was on the squatty side and sometimes she had trouble. “I’m gonna sit out here for a while,” she said.

  “Suit yourself.” She’d get over it. She always did. He thought she sort of liked having that big pile of resentments and disappointments to rev herself up with.

  He got the clothes in the dryer rolling and started in on the dishes. They were only dishes and not that big a deal. The front-door lock rattled. Elton was home.

  Elton went into his bedroom and cranked up his music. Ray didn’t like admitting it because it made him feel about sixty years old, but he hated a lot of the music these days. It was just volume, screaming, without any soul or melody or anything else that scratched you where you itched.

  Elton was in the bathroom now. He stayed there a long time. When he came into the kitchen, Ray said, “What’s up, Big Man?”

  Elton didn’t answer right away. It was a teenage thing, and Ray understood that. The music did most of the talking for him, crashing and shrieking from the bedroom, its moron refrain: “High-voltage rock ’n’ roll, high-voltage ROCK ’N’ ROLL!”

  “Dinner in fifteen, twenty minutes.” Ray had the kitchen all polished and wiped down and was getting his pans organized. Elton wasn’t waiting. He made himself a salami-and-mustard sandwich, doubled up so he could get more of it into his mouth. He was a chunky kid, like his mom. Before Ray came out West, he never thought there was such a thing as a fat Indian.

  Once he’d finished the sandwich, Elton said, “I earned twenty bucks helping Craig clear out the back of the shop.”

  “Twenty, that’s good.” He and Elton got along OK, mostly because they stayed out of each other’s shit. He didn’t need a kid, and Elton didn’t need some fake dad telling him what to do all the time. “Couple more days like that, you’ll be pretty close to a camera.” Elton wanted a camera so he could take gritty black-and-white pictures of urban life.

  “It was just the one day.” Elton planted himself with his back against the door to the basement. “Where’s Mom?”

  “Sitting out back.” Ray could see her from the window. She had her feet up on the extra chair and her head back, like she’d been dropped from some great height. It was Friday night and she had a week’s worth of pissed off to get out of her system. “She’s kind of tired.”

  Deb was always tired. He and Elton always heard about it. They carried themselves with the jaunty indifference of men who are supported by women.

  He got the green beans working and set the table, using plates that matched, folding the cotton napkins around the silverware, placing the salt and pepper, butter, salad dressing, everything they needed. He wanted her to notice his making things nice for her.

  Elton had gone back to his bedroom. There were times he left and they didn’t see him for days. Seventeen years old and it was summer, what did you expect? He was a pretty good kid in spite of having what most people would consider a fucked-up start in life. Deb being so young and all when she had him. Sometimes if felt like she was both of their mothers.

  Ray sliced the tomatoes, put a little salt on them to juice them up, arranged the bakery rolls on a plate, and set the ham steaks in the skillet. He cracked another beer and tested the green beans with a fork. People always acted like cooking was this big hard thing.

  The kitchen table was a lot smaller with all three of them there. You had to keep your elbows pulled in. Elton got the mayonnaise out of the fridge, split two of the rolls, and piled them with ham and tomato to make a sandwich. There was nothing the kid wouldn’t eat if he could put bread around it. Deb was on a diet where you were supposed to eat everything slow, so as to give yourself time to fill up. She put her knife and fork down between each bite. He didn’t think her weight was such a big deal. He thought she got close to pretty when she smiled.

  “Those beans turn out OK?” he asked her. “I pass the bean test?”

  “They’re good. It’s all real good.” She’d perked up some since getting home, though not to the point you’d call jolly.

  “Glad you like it, honeybun.” Always in the back of his mind—except sometimes it migrated to the front—was the need to make an extra effort, keep her from thinking she was better off without him. Then where would he be? Right smart nowhere, as his grandma used to say.

  Small, ripping, popping noises reached them from somewhere outside. Firecrackers. Everybody warming up for the big, hairy Bicentennial Fourth. “Hey,” he said. “Who wants to go to the parade tomorrow?” He chuckled, a joke.

  “Big whoop,” said Elton. The ham was gone; he was making a sandwich out of mayonnaise and tomato.

  “What, you don’t like parades?” This was just to give him shit. Elton was into Red Power. Elton made one of his faces, the one expressing loathing.

  “We could build a float. Something historical, like Custer’s Last Stand.”

  Deb said, “I keep telling you, you’re not a naturally funny person.”

  “No, I’ve had to work really hard at it.” Sometimes he could start her laughing, pry her loose from her mood.

  Not tonight. She motioned that he should give her a cigarette. She lit it and turned her head to blow little puffs of smoke to one side. “Bunch of white people celebrating themselves. No thanks.”

  He didn’t think he was celebrating anything. He couldn’t remember ever having much patriotic feeling, even before the war beat it out of his backside. They wouldn’t understand that. They thought anybody with blond hair and blue eyes had no reason for complaints. Not wanting to give up his argument entirely, he said, “Some of that stuff is kind of interesting. The whatsis. Tall ships. Fireworks.”

  “Well you head on down there if you want. It’s a party I’m not invited to.”

  Deb was Yakama and Quinault and Umatilla and some other odds and ends of tribes that didn’t exist anymore and probably a little whitey thrown in there too, though nobody liked to talk about that. She even had a white name, Potter, which was regarded as another injustice. She’d grown up on the rez. Ray had heard enough about it by now. The white devils. How they had—OK we had—grabbed their land, killed off all the salmon, elk, beaver, resettled the tribes on the most crapped-out acreage around, and then told them to be farmers. Ray didn’t feel personally responsible for any of that, but he guessed this was where the notion of tribe came in. How they/we had turned their history into a bunch of stupid movies. Victor Mature all oiled up, wearing a cheap, woolly-looking wig with braids and a feather.

  It was one of Vietnam’s bad jokes, one he didn’t think Deb would appreciate, that hostile territory was called Indian country.

  Sometimes he thought she liked his being white just so she could hold on to her grudges.

  On the rez there was poverty, etc. Alcoholism, diabetes, hypertension, everything that came of eating the white man’s food, following the white man’s ways. The house Deb grew up in had neither running water nor electricity and sure, that was rough, but part of him wondered why it was so much worse than living in tipis or lodges or whatever they’d had a thousand years before there was an America. Of course the problem was more complicated. It was a soul-sickness having to do with shame, scorn, and the humiliation of having lost a war and yes, he knew something about all that.

  When were you a tribe and when weren’t you? Did Norwegian count? His Indian name: Ray White Rat, Junior.

  “Hey,” he said quickly, since the other two were stirring, ready to get up from the table. “I got a little surprise.”

  They looked at him without curiosity. He wasn’t famous for his surprises. Elton said, “I’m going back over to Craig’s.”

  “It won’t take but a minute.
” Ray got up and went into the bedroom, his and Deb’s room, navigating through the landscape of piled-up clothes and burdened chairs, finding his knapsack on the floor of the closet. “OK, outside.”

  They didn’t want to go outside. What was the deal, anyway? They complained and dragged ass. It was barely dark by now. This far north was practically the land of the midnight sun. Not really dark enough but it was going to have to do, since they wouldn’t let him wait and do anything right. Deb and Elton straggled out. “Now don’t look,” he instructed them. They weren’t looking. Big whoop.

  The yard was long and narrow, with unimpressive wire fencing separating them from the neighbors on three sides. Somebody who’d lived here before had constructed a porch on the back end of the house, a homemade thing roofed in corrugated white plastic and supported on a pair of three-by-five posts. Deb and Elton loitered here, bored and ready to go back inside.

  “One second,” he told them, hustling down to the far end of the yard, past the puny garden. Wishing he’d managed to smoke a little marahoochie. Half a joint still in his shirt pocket. Deb not approving of it in general, and especially not around Elton. Like the kid was some drug virgin. Please.

  “One more . . . second,” he called back to them, digging in the knapsack. He wanted to start with something big, wake them up, make them finally pay attention. He’d already carried out a bucket of sand he could use to anchor the loading tube. Now he broke open the cellophane pack, considered his choices. Giant Comet. Mad Dog. Sky Titan Triple Break. Dominator. They all sounded pretty good. The shells were packaged in fancy paper with tiny, gaudy patterns of lightning bolts and planets and whirligigs, funny, somebody going to all that trouble for something destined to be blown to smithereens. He picked the Giant Comet, loaded it so the fuse extended. “OK, watch this . . .”

  It took three tries with his lighter to get it lit, from dampness probably. He had to squat down to get a good look and wouldn’t it be bad form to lose an eye or a hand once he finally got it going but he stepped back in plenty of time. There was a sizzle and then WOOSH it was out of sight, spitting its way up into the sky so high he couldn’t track it, a blue spurt, then a fountain of red above it and higher still a pop, and a green-gold starburst, and Jesus CHRIST it was big, like county fair big. He wasn’t expecting that and his heart flopped inside him. What was left of the shell fell back harmlessly, floating cinders. Deb and Elton yelped and screeched, scared, sure, but then happy at the hugeness, the beautiful spectacle of it.