“Just let me finish this game,” Pearl said. “I’m winning. The old boys can’t play for shit this morning—too much whiskey last night.”
There was a bottle of whiskey on the table now. “Hair of the dog,” Eddie said to Iona. “They think it will straighten them out, but Mama Pearl whips them every time.”
Eddie leaned against the wall, and Iona sat on the couch. She watched the Johnston brothers, Bud and Moose. They were blond with red cheeks and red hands, barrel chests and big bellies, almost identical except Moose was bigger.
Joey said, “Did Mama tell you she won half a jeep?”
Eddie shook his head.
“Two weeks ago,” Pearl said. “My buddy Bud brought one of his pals to a game. Fish and Game Warden, full of himself.”
“Talk or play,” Bud said.
“See you and raise you ten.” She meant cents.
“Mama lets the warden get confident,” Joey said, “throws him a few hands, not all in a row, but enough to make him think he’s hit a streak.”
“We start talkin’ real money,” Pearl said. “We tell him we just got our government checks. He’s so stupid he thinks that means we’ve got something. I want to ask him, ‘How much you think they pay us for living on the reservation?’ but I keep quiet, wear the mask. Crazy old Indian woman, that’s what he sees. I catch him lookin’ at my eyes, thinking I’m half blind besides. I let my hands shake. I drink too much.”
“I’m out of this,” Moose said. Bud called, and Pearl scooped up another pile of coins.
“I lose fifteen dollars in fifteen minutes,” Pearl said. “The warden’s flying, wants to go higher. He starts betting parts of his jeep—the radio, the CB. I put my check on the table and so does Joey. He looks at them, laughs, says: ‘Is that all?’ No matter. He’s already bet the radiator and the battery.”
Blue dealt the next hand. Iona realized he hadn’t said a word since they’d arrived.
“You should have seen him when I spread my hand—full house—kings and tens. So mad he wouldn’t even show us what he had. Ready to play all night, win back his car. I took two tires, the rearview mirror, the steering wheel. I let him have a hand in between, gave him back the radio. I start makin’ noises like I’m tired. It’s getting light. I’m not the only one. Joey opens the shade, looks at the jeep, says, ‘Looks like we got half of that, Mama.’ Well, the warden snaps, sees he’s been taken. ‘Goddamn Indian bitch,’ he says. Funny how it always comes to that. He doesn’t believe we’re really gonna take our half. He’s pleading with the Johnston boys, saying they should’ve warned him.”
“And we should have,” Moose said. He laid his cards on the table, face down.
Blue threw a quarter on the pile.
“So he starts tossing credit cards at me,” Pearl said. “I take one, bite it, throw it back at him, say: ‘What am I gonna do with this? Whoever heard of an Indian bitch with credit?’ We laugh. Me and Joey. Joey gets the wrench, the tire iron, a screwdriver, heads out to the jeep, starts takin’ what’s ours. The warden’s almost crying, I swear, saying we can’t, we can’t. But we do.”
“Where is it, Mama?” Eddie said.
“Sold it back to him two days later. Five hundred for parts, two hundred for labor.”
“Labor?”
“You think I’d put all that stuff back in for free?” Joey said.
Pearl won two more hands before the Johnston brothers left. She counted her coins—$18.25, a decent day. She said she liked taking money from white boys, especially those two. “Bud and Moose run the bar,” she told Iona, “take our money all the time. But they don’t own the land,” she said. “Lease it from the tribe.”
The mute man spoke at last. “White folks don’t own nothing here,” he said.
“Except our souls,” Eddie muttered.
Joey opened the accordion door to get a beer, and Iona saw the sink heaped with blackened pots and smudged glasses, plates crusted with dried food.
Pearl asked if they wanted breakfast. “What kind of offer is that?” Joey said. “All we have is beer and refried beans.”
“We ate,” Eddie said.
“Why do you always eat before you get here?” Pearl said.
Joey guzzled his beer. “He comes with a full stomach because you never have any food, Mama.”
“I’d keep food in the cupboard if he’d stay.”
“See, Eddie, it’s your fault.” Joey patted his swollen gut.
“Might end up like you if I hung around here,” Eddie said.
Joey crushed the can and dropped it on the floor. “Yeah, our bad habits might rub off. You might turn into an Indian after all.”
Eddie didn’t talk to Iona for almost an hour as they drove south. Iona stared out the window. Madrona trees clung to the cliffs, and she wondered how they did it, why the rain didn’t wash the sand from the roots, why they didn’t fall into the ocean. Bark peeled, leaving new flesh exposed, slick, rust-colored. High, tangled limbs were leafless, wiry as an old woman’s hair. Eddie said, “I’ve been running from them my whole life—and look at me.”
Iona did look—at his hands on the wheel, at his red shirt, dark as blood, at his stiff right leg pressed close to the seat.
“My pitiful people,” he whispered.
“Mine are no better,” Iona said.
“Married a white woman and thought she’d save me. Thought I could be Eddie Rogers for the rest of my life. Alice and Eddie, wouldn’t it be sweet? If I dressed right, I could pass. But I have a bird’s heart. It beats too fast. It makes me afraid. I hear voices coming from the telephone. I answer them.”
“There are voices on the phone.”
“But I don’t pick it up,” Eddie said. “I hear other voices. I hear Joey. I hear my sisters, Ruth and Marie. They tell me to come home. They say Mama’s sick. I drive up to Molina. I find her at the table, drinking whiskey, stealing money from the white boys and the old man—just like today. She grins. She’s missing half her teeth. That’s why she eats those damn beans. Do you see, Iona? I’m this close.” He held his hand less than an inch from his face. “This close to falling all the way.
“Every time I think: I won’t go. But I do. I saw her nearly die one time because my father wouldn’t let the healer in his house, and Mama wouldn’t take the white man’s medicine. My sisters came with their beads and their Bibles. Nothing worse than a pair of converted Indian women. They prayed; they said Mama Pearl was being punished for her evil ways, drinking and smoking, playing poker half the night, sleeping till noon. They said me and Joey were being punished too, little heathens. Joey was six. I was ten. The girls were older, from one of Mama Pearl’s other lives.”
Iona wondered how many lives a woman could have, if the joys of one eased the sorrows of another, or if grief piled on grief until you wished to be cut free.
“She burned. Ruth said the fever in her now was nothing compared with the fires of hell. She made me and Joey touch Mama’s body so we’d know how bad it could be.
“My sisters washed us. They said we had to have clean bodies to have clean souls. They ran the water hot as we could stand it—hotter. They scrubbed our heads and our ears, our dirty necks; they scrubbed up the cracks of our behinds. They wiped our penises—hard. They said we were whiter than we thought, once we were clean. Their father was an Indian, their skin dark compared with ours. They told us Mama Pearl might be saved if we asked Jesus into our hearts.”
Iona thought of Hannah, how no one pretended she could be saved, so there were no bargains, no wild hopes, only the days of winter, one following another.
“I wanted her to live, more than I’d wanted anything in my whole life. But I couldn’t think good thoughts. My butt was raw from all that scraping. I hated my sisters. My heart was so full of hate there was no room for Jesus. Joey cried. He was sore. He kept rubbing his penis through his pants. Ruth slapped his palms every time he touched himself. Finally she tied his hands to the chair to make him stop.
“Jesus nev
er came. My father brought a white man from town—doctor, he said. Papa untied Joey’s hands and told my sisters to get out. Best thing he ever did. He and the man smelled of sawdust and beer. No decent doctor would come to a shack in Molina in the middle of the night. But the man had a black bag. He gave Mama a shot. His hands shook; I was afraid. He told me and Joey to keep washing her with a cool rag, and we did. The doctor finished off Pearl’s whiskey. By morning her fever broke. Joey asked me if I’d let Jesus in my heart, and I told him the truth. He slugged me so hard I couldn’t breathe.”
Iona thought of what she and Eddie shared, this knowledge of their mothers’ bodies. But Pearl lived and Hannah died, so Eddie couldn’t know, not really.
He didn’t take her home. He drove out to the edge of the Sound. “My friend has a boat,” he said. “We can go there.” Iona didn’t ask why. The clouds were low; it had started to rain. Ghosts of buildings wavered in the fog, and the arms of orange cranes stretched across the water, disconnected from their trunks.
“When our father was gone again, my sisters came to visit. They said there was still time for Mama Pearl to open her heart to Jesus. I kept picturing a little Jesus curled up in her chest like a bloody rabbit. I saw another one crouched in the cage of Joey’s ribs. I knew my sisters thought they had a Jesus inside of them, and I wondered: How many Jesuses are there?”
Eddie parked at the marina. Hundreds of sailboats rocked on the black waves. The rain was heavier now, and the wind whipped off the water. “Which one is your friend’s?” Iona said.
“The last dock,” Eddie told her. But when they climbed aboard, he used his silver toothpick to release the lock of the cabin.
“I thought you said this was your friend’s boat.”
“I forgot the key.”
The cabin was narrow, a sink and cupboards on one side, a single bed on the other. Rain streamed across the tiny window; the room was dark, damp as a cave.
“Are you tired?” Eddie said.
“Yes.”
“Me too.” It was almost three.
“It’s a small bed,” Iona said.
Eddie nodded. “We’ll have to make ourselves small too.”
“What if your friend finds us?”
“He never comes on rainy days.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not sure of anything,” Eddie said, “except I’m tired, and I want you to lie down with me.” He sat on the bed. “Please,” he said. He held out his hand, but Iona stayed where she was, leaning against the sink, just beyond his reach.
“Won’t your wife wonder where you are?”
“I’ll stop for a few on my way home, come in smelling like whiskey and smoke; I’ll tell her Pearl got me into a game. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Still Iona didn’t move.
“I’m just asking you to sleep beside me. That’s all.”
“I know.”
“And you’re tired.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m tired.”
Eddie grabbed his bad leg with both hands and lifted it onto the bed, pressing himself close to the wall, curving his body so there was a hollow for Iona to fill. “Just for a little while,” he said, and she lay down in the place he’d made.
Eddie slept, but Iona didn’t. She watched him, imagined a boy washing his mother.
My pitiful people. She thought of all her people, how none of them could tell her who she was, so she ran away, like Eddie, but they still touched her eyelids when she slept, whispered in her ear; they still tried to pull her back even though they didn’t want her. She saw her father washing his bloody hands. The calf was born, the weasel dead, the pig slaughtered and skinned. She watched her brothers emerge from the forest, rifles on their shoulders. They dragged a buck and left a red trail across the snow. Hannah’s brothers leaned against the barn the day she died. Their silver flasks caught the afternoon light as they raised them to their mouths. Their hands and heads were bare. When they came inside, their ears burned crimson. Quinte had just told a joke, and Raymond was laughing. Iona thought of the fields, how white they were that day, how the trees looked black, how everybody that had ever walked into the woods seemed to move through the shadows: boys with BB guns and men with axes, lovers and lost children, weeping women. She thought, How will I know my mother except by dreaming? A girl stood on the road, defiant or scared, squinting at the stranger who would be her husband. A woman stood at the window, watching a man dig a small, deep grave. My pitiful people. Iona wanted to wake Eddie and tell him not to be so hard on Joey and Mama Pearl. “Everybody’s pitiful in his own way,” she whispered.
Rain pounded the deck and beat on the glass. The boat rocked on the water, and they rocked too. They were very small, just like Eddie said.
12
Willy Hamilton hadn’t placed any higher than third all summer. His dives were sloppy, his knees weak. Every time Coach Brubaker yelled at him to lock his legs, he thought of Jay slamming his brakes on the River Road.
So far the only good thing that had happened since school let out was the that Iona Moon had left town. Word had gotten around that she’d pulled a train for Darryl and Kevin and Luke, in that order. Willy was glad she wasn’t here to dispute it. He knew the truth, but he kept his mouth shut. You’re an asshole, Willy. That’s what she thought.
Still, he couldn’t get free of her. Horton had to haul Leon Moon in for drunk and disorderly one night in July. Now Iona’s brother was married to Jeweldeen Wilder. Poor bastard. Jack Wilder didn’t exactly hold a shotgun to Leon’s head, but everyone knew their first baby wasn’t going to take nine months. Having a sister like Iona was bad enough, but being forced to marry her best friend was worse.
Willy was glad he didn’t have to worry about that. No girl was ever going to trick him, telling him not to worry, saying: I’m safe, then coming to him a few weeks later to say she was sorry, she’d made a mistake, a slight miscalculation that would cost him his life. Flo had told him to watch out for that. Girls do it all the time, she’d said, when they see a nice boy like you.
Horton said: The only way to stay out of trouble is to keep your pants zipped. They talked this way back in the days when he’d parked by the river with Belinda Beller. He wanted to tell them: Above the neck or below the knee. She kept him in line. He wondered what he’d do with a girl who didn’t say no. Resisting Iona Moon didn’t prove anything. He never did like her, and still, he’d had to think of old Mrs. Griswold when he felt himself getting hard.
Sometimes he was even afraid of his sisters. When they tripped him in the living room and wrestled him to the rug, he felt the surge of blood and prayed they wouldn’t notice. What a hoot they’d have, shrieking and pointing. It wouldn’t last long, he could be sure of that. But he didn’t know what he’d do if some pretty woman touched his face or leaned close enough for him to smell her hair. What if he started kissing her neck and she let him work his way down to the bones of her shoulders? Whose hand would stop him if she said “Touch me”?
Willy lay on his bed, rolled to his stomach and buried his face in the pillow. He hoped the lack of air would make the feeling go away. Just thinking about it scared him. His sisters giggled. What were they doing? He remembered Mariette telling Lorena that Dr. Tyler had cornered her by the filing cabinets after everyone else had gone home. Maybe she had something more to tell; maybe she was showing Lorena exactly how he touched her—here, and here. He wanted to charge down the hall, burst into their room, catch them tossing and laughing, make them stop.
Jay Tyler sat on the edge of his bed and listened to his parents arguing in the kitchen below him. He didn’t need to hear the words. Supper wasn’t ready. Again. There wasn’t even enough food in the house for Jay’s father to make himself a sandwich. What is it you do all day, Delores? Jay used to wonder that himself. Now he knew. His days were exactly the same. The most important thing was to stay in bed as long as possible. So much less of the day to fill if you didn’t wake till noon. You could spend another
hour in the bathroom, standing in the shower, getting dressed. Not that Jay cared how he looked. His hair had grown long, but he shaved every day. Shaving was good. It took time to do it right. He never nicked himself even though the cool razor on his neck gave him ideas. The secret was not to be distracted by your own face. He watched his hand, the blade, his chin, his cheek—but never looked into his own eyes.
At certain hours of the day his mother still cared about her looks. She took her sweet time in the bathroom too, applying lipstick and mascara, a pale foundation so close to the color of her own skin no one noticed the mask. She blended the foundation down her neck. Most women neglected this final step. When they tilted their heads back it looked as if their faces could be peeled off at night.
Usually Delores Tyler went out in the afternoon. She played bridge with her lady friends or met one of the girls for a late lunch. Girls—that’s what they all called one another.
While she was out, Jay sat in his father’s chair and watched television the way his father did, just the picture, no sound. All afternoon women clung to men and wept. Doctors pursued nurses, made silent agreements, and met later in unoccupied hospital rooms. They pulled the curtain around the bed, and Jay saw the shadows of their bodies rising and falling beyond the white veil. Women spit words at other women, hands on hips, lips quivering. Women slapped men, and men grabbed women by the shoulders, shaking them until they fell to their knees and hid their faces in their hands. Hour after hour, men and women embraced. But there were no children in this world, no consequences of desire, no screaming infants, no demanding toddlers, no troublesome teenage sons.
Today, Delores hadn’t come home till four. Jay heard her car in the drive and hobbled upstairs. It was too late for her to plan dinner and go to the store, too late to chop vegetables or trim a roast. But it was early for a drink, not yet five and still so light. Winter was more merciful. You could start at four-fifteen and use the dark as an excuse. She padded from room to room and finally put on a record. Jay imagined her dancing, arms hugging herself, a man’s high voice, crooning in her ear, soft as smoke. At four-twenty she gave up and went to the kitchen. Jay listened for the crack of ice, the splash of vodka. He preferred whiskey and kept it stashed under his bed.
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