They will be riding the Red Line to a traditional Indian wedding.
___ will be unsure of what he will mean. Embarrassed, he will say: Americans?
Susan will turn to the window and tap at it, saying, Do you know what some immigrants will do to get here?
Good things, bad things.
To stay here?
I’ve heard.
Hearing isn’t doing.
___ will move to hug her. It won’t feel right.
Susan will pack up for a new neighborhood and stay there, and Bolesław will open a different community center and stay there, and Bea will ignore the pressure to retire early and stay there, and Hasan will attend college in New York City and stay there, and Marija will fly home to care for her aging family and stay there, and Lupe will be promoted to administration and stay there.
___ will look at world maps in bed. He will be seesawed by a homesickness for the places he will not be born into knowing. He will feel, again, like a somebody else.
He will trudge downstairs and say to us, How can I be expected to stay?
We will pour him tea or coffee or homemade liqueur. We will say that this is the kind of question that one can grow up around.
___ will travel to Hong Kong to meet his mother’s people, and he will travel to Lagos and Abuja to meet his father’s parents’ people, and he will return to Chicago, feeling, he will say, that he has learned just enough about the what and the how of where his people come from to seal him off from them more completely.
He will trudge in through the front door and sit at our table to think.
We will serve him the food that he will have missed the most. We will say that these are the kinds of questions that one can live through, or around, or on top of.
Or under, we will admit.
___ will say: I can wait to find out. But then I will go.
We will watch him eat what we have made. We will hope: that he can wait, that he can go. That when he wants to, he can come back.
Small Boy
The small boy says to his big sister, “Why did we kill all the Indians?”
They’re in the basement playing a video game. Both of them are white.
“We didn’t kill them,” says his big sister, “our ancestors did.”
“Why did our ancestors kill all the Indians?”
“Okay, not really our ancestors because Dad’s family came in the twenties and Mom’s in the sixties and the Indians were already totally dead by then, mostly.”
“Why did ancestors kill all the Indians?”
“But I guess you could say it was us, pretty much, because today we’re basically the same culture as the culture of the people who killed the Indians back then. And it’s ‘Native Americans,’ not ‘Indians.’ ‘Indians’ is ignorant.”
The small boy says to his angry stepmom, “Why did we kill all the Native Americans?”
They’re returning from the grocery store in hardly any traffic. Plastic bags stuffed with food rustle in the backseat.
“We didn’t kill all of them,” says his angry stepmom. “The ones that are still around have problems and are in poverty. Like the minorities.”
“Why did we kill most of the Native Americans?” says the small boy to his principal. His principal is black. They’re at recess on the playground. Other small boys and girls of many colors shout and run, arguing the rules of the games they make up.
“We didn’t just kill them,” says his principal, taking off her glasses to rub her eyebrows, which she does when she’s about to say something she expects her students to remember, “we erased them. We erased their histories and traditions and languages, their cultures. Did you know that there are tribes not around anymore that we don’t even know one thing about? We know more about some dinosaurs than we do about some tribes.”
“Why did we erase most of the Native Americans?” says the small boy to the tall girl he likes. The tall girl he likes is white. They’re at a birthday party in the park. Both have bright balloons tied to their wrists.
“We didn’t,” says the tall girl he likes, “they did it to themselves by not being advanced enough in their civilization, if they were advanced enough in their civilization they wouldn’t have been erased.”
The small boy tugs at his balloon-string. He doesn’t want to disagree with the tall girl he likes, but he feels disagreement sticking together inside him. It’s heavy. He thinks he might be sick. He says, “If they were more advanced in their civilization, would they have erased us?”
The tall girl bops him on the top of the head with her balloon.
He waves his hands to defend himself. “What if it was a tie, would we have erased each other?”
The tall girl bops him in the face with her balloon. It hurts his nose. Smirking, she skips away to join a group of other tall girls who are laughing at a group of other small boys. The small boys squeeze each other’s balloons, trying to get as close as possible to popping them without actually popping them.
“We wouldn’t,” says the small boy to his big gray dog.
They’re sitting in weedy grass in the backyard. It’s quiet in the dark apartment building, over the rotten fences, and in the alley where the small boy is not supposed to go. He still feels sick. Disagreement hardens inside him.
The big gray dog chews on a broken branch. Knots clunk across its teeth.
The small boy touches the big gray dog’s chest like he’s taking an oath. He again pretends that the big gray dog’s every action contains a hidden message, one he can catch if he focuses hard or loosens up. He focuses hard. He loosens up. Before he can say for sure what he has or hasn’t caught, he falls asleep.
Driving in the Early Dark, Ted Falls Asleep
Ted drives.
Ted tells himself, Ted drives.
Ted tells himself, Too tired to sleep too tired to sleep too tired to.
Ted chokes the wheel and slaps the wheel, hissing, “Don’t! you! forget! this!” His words become hot breath—his hot breath, fingers—the fingers wend into his eyes.
The sun is cracking, struggling behind a headboard of clouds. The sky not brightening so much as leaking night, the only thing worth watching no matter how much they move. No matter how much they move, Oklahoma doesn’t. It is fucking everywhere.
Ted thinks, How about some heat? He clicks the knob: ON.
Some heat presses like a pillow into Ted’s unwashed face, his nose, the skinny brushes of his eyebrows.
Some heat nods Ted’s head toward the wheel he’s slapped and choked.
Ted jolts—he clicks the knob: OFF. The chill returns, banking back like a fog. To his right, Constance sleeps, a Navajo blanket laying skirt-like on her lap. Her face tucked away to the window. In the backseat, their boxes. In their boxes, their things. They are moving, them and their things, for her Chicago job. Celebrate. Say goodbye to Arizona and all their Arizona friends and all their Arizona miseries. Hit the road and drive all day to the bar at the Best Western in Oklahoma City, to two pitchers and stuffed potato skins and taking turns trying not to fall asleep, not to look at anything, any who are we, any what now.
The tab to her credit card. Practice. They weren’t old but they might be.
And now they’re moving in the early dark of their last day on the road and could die if Ted falls asleep but Ted’s too tired to fall asleep, “So don’t!” he whispers, “Don’t forget!” and he grinds his gummy eyes—thumb in one, index in the other, a truck across the turnpike rolling glare along the windshield, painting his hands white.
Think! Talk! Ted!
Thinking talking Ted, to wake, recalls famous times he’s fallen asleep.
Last night: back from the hotel bar, Constance gave out a shuddering sigh and shook her body and looked him down, and despite their lack of whatever it was, wanted to, right then. They peeled off their sitting-sweaty clothes and slammed together on sheets that stank of cleaning agents.
Sex began.
“You’re drooling.”
“No way,
” he said, waking, wiping his chin, “where?” She squirmed off and over, rubbing her face in fury.
Buckets of white glare—two trucks across the turnpike, side by side, one in passing. Ted runs his fingers on the ribbing of the wheel. Constance shifts and twists her blanket. Ted blinks with force: his right eye flutters.
The eyelid spasms. Is spasming.
With each convulsion it feels less and less like flesh, more and more like someone else’s curtain. When it stops jerking, it mashes shut.
Ted’s brother Big Michael used to mash butterflies. Touch this, Ted, it’s sticky.
It’ll turn you on, Ted.
Big Michael moved to Houston to sell homes.
“They trust him with their futures!” says Ted.
Big Michael married Hadiza, the laser scientist.
“Her too!” says Ted.
“Wake up!” says Ted.
Ted attempts to blink his eye open. He needs it working by Chicago to look for jobs, to look for marriage to Constance. He scrunches his cheek and massages the lid. Stars spark behind the heavy blackness, winking into the vision of his other eye, but the lid stays sealed.
Ted tries to click the closed eye to ON. ON, he clicks, ON.
The eye stays OFF.
Ted turns up the music. One man whistling. Ted tries to whistle with him.
Ted punches off the music. It flickers back on, weakly, then peters out, going until gone. Constance and her Navajo skirt are also gone, blanketed to Ted’s right by the blackness of his jammed lid.
Ted remembers falling asleep on her lap.
Ted remembers falling asleep while she was falling asleep on his lap.
Ted remembers when he used to feel happy waking her to talk.
“Because we’ll be together, Ted,” says Ted, mimicking Constance.
“We’ve come together, Michael,” says Ted, mimicking Hadiza.
Everyone meeting everyone at the majestic wedding.
What do you do?
We’re moving.
Thinking about marriage?
We’re moving.
The last dance. Hadiza, the lady of lasers, hugging Big Michael’s arm, astonished. Big Michael, the masher of butterflies, patting Hadiza’s butt, astonished.
Constance dancing Ted off the dance floor, saying, “When will we love each other like that?”
When we’re together forever.
That’s what I’m asking!
They kiss. The kiss is bad.
Ted touches his closed eye. He tries to remember people he used to know, the ones he liked, and that’s when the middle-aged man he used to work with, the gray-bearded bastard who slept with one eye open, grumbles from the boxes in the back.
The best summer job that Ted has ever had: Public Works, high school.
“Best job job,” Ted says, yawning, driving trucks, chipping trees, watering Hadizas, staying awake. Awake. Burt. Bart?
“Burke,” croaks Ted, blinking with his open eye, clutching a rake in his first week with old man Burke at the noisy helm of a backhoe digging a pit in a park, sweating, the engine howling, Ted watching that dirty yellow bucket scoop and move, scoop and move, like chewing holes in the earth was the only work worth doing—until the bucket froze, mid-air.
Ted hustled over to peek into the cab. Burke, buffeted by the growl of the machine, asleep at the controls. One of his eyes open. Heavy-lidded and drowsy and drugged, but open. Ted crept closer.
“Burke!” he shouted.
The man awoke, his open eye unglazing.
“Look, kid. I’m older than you’ll be when you’re my age.”
What we have, we’re losing?
“Lemme put it this way. How much you hate love.”
I’m moving.
“Not enough, you aren’t.”
Burke sinks into the dance floor, banging the bucket and shouting, “No new job’s gonna do it!”
The breakroom. Burke’s one-eyed catnaps after his meatball sandwich, the shaded windows leaking night. Burke tips back in his chair, hands folded on his Oklahoma, and dozes, wheezing, whistling, one lid jammed open—the eyeball unstatic, it floats and flickers, petering.
Eli—the only other summer kid, the trickster who joined the army at the end of June—who made work not work with jokes—their imitations of everyone, of each other—their pranks on Burke—where will you go on your tour, when will you come back from your tour—we’ll email—don’t forget him—Ted forgot him—together they approach the strangeness of sleeping Burke, Eli waving a permanent marker.
“Let’s draw a dick,” he whispers, dead or wounded.
“With hearts for balls,” whispers Ted, attending college.
“This won’t work,” says Constance, relieved. She tugs up her turnpike: between her legs, her naked back.
Eli pops the marker’s cap. Big Michael smears sold homes. They lean in, smell a car crash, and see their smoking breath.
Burke, one eye drooling, in a voice choked by wheels of sleep, says, “Don’t ask.”
When you sleep with one eye open, what do you see with the eye that’s open?
Burke takes a bite of the road.
Eli says, “I’m going to die.”
Ted is crying. “Don’t.”
Eli dies. Burke dies. Constance dies. Big Michael lives with Hadiza.
Ted dies and wakes to Oklahoma everywhere, the white line waving, headlights hauling blinding paint. The board of night explodes.
I want to live awake?
Ted clicks his open eye to ON.
ON, he clicks.
ON.
ON.
Drunk in Texas, Two New Friends Talked Horses
Drunk in Texas, two new friends talked horses. They slouched at an icehouse picnic table in the sweaty black lap of an evening fat with heat. One had ridden twice, the other never.
“Majestic,” they agreed, again, and imagined horses running and rearing and leaping, majestically.
It was when they hit “How come?” that they for the first time disagreed. This friendly friction whipped them back to lively states: their heads broke the surface of the heat.
The one who’d ridden twice—tall and trim-bearded, from Illinois, in this Texas town to teach at its university—tapped with his empty bottle the bench-seat he straddled and put forth that the majesty of the horse, for man and woman alike, could be found in the fact of putting so much other-minded muscle between one’s legs.
“And moving it,” he said, flapping an imaginary hat. “Or with it. Through it.”
The other, who’d ridden never—strong and bald, from Pennsylvania, in this Texas town to coordinate information technologies at its university’s library—stood up to sit on the table’s blistered top, his feet at his new friend’s hip. From there he saw the bobbing heads of other patrons, bros and bright-flanneled hipsters, their bodies bent in conversation, the lot of them looking like one extended family. His aunt, who’d died the day he’d left for Texas, had bought, sold, and shown horses. She’d often boasted that when checking “woman” on state forms, she’d add the prefix “horse-” in crunchy cursive. Remembering her many maxims, the man from Pennsylvania ventured to disagree with his new friend from Illinois, arguing that the horse’s majesty lay not in muscle or movement—though the roles these features played were often mistaken for the starring ones—but in the animal’s hardnosed sensitivity, which greenhorns took for irritability, laziness, or brainlessness, which any rider worth their tack recognized for what it properly was: an emotional intelligence that, when addressed in kind, split the hardest hearts with springs of fondness.
“Horses are dumb as hell at being people,” he concluded. “But they’re goddamn smart at being horses.”
Two tables down, a woman stood. She looked complete in every way.
She slung her heavy purse.
She grinned at something said.
Her laugh opened, an earthy low—a rich brown river in a rich green valley.
The two new friends had sp
oken to her earlier. Both had forgotten her name, but remembered it as musical; both had imagined the warmth of waking with her daily; one had imagined the warmth of waking with her lasting until ending, through what passed for good fortune, in old age, illness, and death. Before they’d talked horses they’d talked women, the women who hadn’t moved with them to Texas. Then the reasons why, and the reasons for those reasons, and whether reasons were women, or women reasons, and before long their talk had ranged so far and wide that where they settled was the future they wished upon one another.
The woman left.
The man from Illinois tooted a note on his empty bottle’s mouth. He brushed the bottle-mouth against his beard, circling his own mouth, and listened to the scritching of his facial hair. For the first time in months he felt close to something fundamental. Since the move, every fundamental something had been too far away to touch. Why had he taken this job? Why had he left the women he’d left? Why was he closer to forty than to thirty?
Why was he always who he was, even when he wasn’t?
With the help of his new friend from Pennsylvania, he hoped he might creep near enough. “What you say may be true,” he said, pressing the issue, “but there’s only one way to know a horse, and it’s through the gateway of your loins.”
The man from Pennsylvania rolled his beer can across his bare head, a worthless attempt at relief from the heat. He said, “Too simple to be true,” and told the story his aunt had told last Thanksgiving, when she’d been spry and well, when they’d lived where gray light and hard wind had made of any trip outside a brisk and bitter drink. Someone she’d called a “lonely lawyer-woman” had shareboarded one of her old horses. She’d taken lessons and was an okay rider, though too timid to be truly skilled. On the nights she came to the barn she’d walk the horse into the round pen, circle once or twice, then lead him out and to a bench, where she sat. From her purse she’d pull a bottle of wine. With one hand loose on the rope she’d describe her divorce, getting louder though not meaner as she drank. She’d bring the horse’s head to hers and nuzzle.
His aunt knew this, having once stayed back to watch from behind a bush.
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