“Jesus!” said Owen.
The Indian stood up, clasped his hands behind his neck, yawned, stretched, sucked air, and then, without turning his head, pointed a stiff finger over his shoulder. “Flagstaff, that way,” he said, and ambled out the door. Owen looked around the restaurant. The other Indians were ignoring them. The waitress was leaning over the counter, eating a piece of custard pie. She’d forgotten his change.
“Oh, Lord!” Owen said.
Devra sat impassively, unaffected by the performance. “Don’t notice me,” said Devra, and slumped farther down in her seat.
They drove on a two-lane road that cut across the northern part of the reservation. Really strange. Devra sat in the back reading a book. He would let her be moody today. Tomorrow, right away, he’d put his foot down and make it clear they weren’t having any more of this nonsense…or they were going home. He suspected much of her behavior was because he’d asked her in a roundabout way what she would think of his remarrying. One morning at breakfast he’d hinted, “Would you like to see more of Peg around the house?” He regularly spent two nights a week with Peg, always feeling a little guilty when he dropped Devra off for the evening at her grandmother’s. “Where?” Devra had answered cagily, lifting her eyes toward the bedroom. “Just around the house,” said Owen, unable to bring himself to be more definite. Devra had shrugged, making him feel ashamed and uncomfortable, as if his desires were unfair to her. A therapist he had been seeing, a woman in her sixties, asked him why he felt this way when he brought up the subject later.
“Because I feel guilty?”
“Do you?”
“I wasn’t even there. It was a plane crash. I had no control over it.”
“Control,” the therapist repeated.
“But I didn’t.”
“Then that must not be it.”
“Maybe I want to be sure she likes me.”
“Are you afraid she doesn’t?”
“No, I know she does. I’m her father. She has to like me.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Timmerman. That’s never stopped children before.”
The woman could be brutally observant. “I mean, she doesn’t have a choice.”
“Oh?”
“Choice in a different way.”
“You mean she doesn’t have a mother. You’re her only choice.”
“Right. I have to be both to her.”
“Impossible, Mr. Timmerman. You’re only one person. And if you continue trying to be two, you’ll continue to be disappointed and indecisive, as you are now. You can take responsibility for your own actions, but not for those of someone who isn’t alive.”
Owen had squeezed the rubber ball he’d gotten in the habit of holding during the sessions. “Control, Mr. Timmerman. Control is not your life’s work.”
It was getting dark and they were almost clear of the reservation. He’d pointed out what sights there were to Devra—the octagonal houses of logs and mud that were called hogans, the mesas, the sheep grazing near the road, but she’d kept her nose in a book. He felt invigorated by the open country, the expanse of earth, the hard, red rock and quiet authority of the land, the yucca plants with their white stalks full of blossoms shooting into the clear sky, while everything else seemed to hug the ground—a terrain that favored views from the belly, the hogans popping up occasionally like round loaves of bread.
He glanced in the mirror at her now and thought that things might be all right. He had nothing more to go on than the excitement brought about by the drive—the possibilities in this unwalled land—that he could give her a comfortable life—no, more than that: a hopeful one. He knew he could be a good father and that she loved him and that he would never stop worrying about her. He would always struggle with himself against trying to reach inside and fix in her a view of the world, a view that wheedled against despair, that countered all losses, and that tried to insure an impossible equity. Probably what she needed, even as a ten-year-old, was for him to stop fussing over her, to take a breath free of his inspection, to fail on her own without feeling as though nothing else could go wrong because something too terrible had already happened. He had to admit, though, that if he worried about dying and leaving her alone in the world, his greatest fear was that he had no one else. He had made it through the worst parts of her mother’s death by thinking, with a cold assurance that made him wince now, there’s still Devra left. A day hadn’t passed when he hadn’t bargained that they can take anyone, but not her, a feeling that had started the moment he touched her and held her weight in his arms, her presence a vivid connection for him to a self deeper than any other—not from his mind, but from his heart to her baby heart.
“Are you hungry, Dev?” The calmness in his voice made her speak up unguarded and say yes. He turned around and was about to say they would stop for dinner—no more Navajo tacos—when there was a dull thud and she screamed “You hit him! You hit him!” Her scream continued as Owen, moaning reflexively, pulled the car off the road.
He unfastened his seat belt and told Devra to wait in the car, but she screamed so desperately that he took her in hand and went running down the road, terrified of what he would see, the low moan still rolling in his throat, a sudden shame that his bowels might erupt—his fear was this penetrating. He squeezed her hand.
An old man was sitting up beneath an embankment where he’d evidently tumbled after being hit. “Are you hurt?” Owen asked. The old man was an Indian, his face deeply wrinkled in the dim light of a bar back from the road. He reeked of liquor. “Didn’t you see me?”
“He doesn’t speak English,” said an Indian woman who had come up from the parking lot. Her friend had gone inside to call an ambulance.
“I didn’t even see him coming. Where was he?”
“Over there,” she said, and pointed across the road. “He sits over there when he drinks too much.”
“Did you see him cross?”
The Indian woman hesitated. “No.”
Owen couldn’t believe this was the same man he’d hit. Sixty miles an hour. He remembered glancing at the speedometer before looking back at Devra. The man should be dead.
“I saw the whole thing,” a truck driver said, running over and out of breath. He had pulled his rig into the parking lot of the bar. He was white. He leaned over and shouted in the old man’s ear. “Your leg hurt, grandpa? Can you stand up?”
“Maybe he shouldn’t—”
“That’s it. Lean on my shoulder.” Once up, the old man wobbled unsteadily, although it could have been from being drunk. The truck driver helped him sit down again, and the old man went back to rubbing his leg.
“His leg?” Owen asked.
“I think he’s all right.”
“I was going so fast. I don’t understand why he’s—”
“These guys are loose as a goose when they’re drunk like this. He rolled with the punch. Must have been like being hit by a big plunger.”
“But anybody would be…should be…”
“Look, don’t argue with luck. You hit the loosest, highest old Indian around.”
Owen bent down and held Devra. Both of them were shivering. The desert air chilled quickly at night, and he was trembling anyway, now that it was starting to sink in, how lucky they’d all been. They stood silently around the old man and waited for the ambulance to arrive. Owen desperately needed a drink from the bar, but he didn’t want alcohol on his breath. Trucks flew by on the highway, sucking them in their draft.
A siren came from the distance, then a police car pulled up. “Listen,” the truck driver said. “Don’t let these guys push you around. They’ve got no authority over white people.”
“Who are they?” Owen asked.
“Navajo police. You’re right on the border here, so it’s still their jurisdiction, sort of.”
The Navajo cop came over. He was a short man with straight black hair that lay flat over his forehead. He said something in Navajo to the old man. They carried on a conversation
for a while, and finally Owen couldn’t stand his own silence and said he’d been driving the car. The cop looked at him, then stated in a voice without accusation, “He says you didn’t have your lights on.”
“Yes, he did,” the truck driver put in before Owen could answer. “I saw the whole thing. Grandpa here walked right in front of him.”
The Navajo cop didn’t say anything. Owen kept silent, too. He actually had no idea what had happened, except he was sure his lights were on. Then he’d looked back at Devra, and thump—not the sound of glass shattering or metal denting or stone crumbling or even rubber bouncing, as the truck driver imagined, but of flesh thumping, an unnatural sound—a simple, muffled, almost polite noise.
An ambulance arrived in tandem with a state police car. The state cop, a young, reedy kid with a Western twang, immediately came over and asked what had happened. Owen explained, and the cop kept nodding in such a way that Owen knew the kid had made up his mind about any accident involving an Indian even before he got here. The truck driver repeated his version of the story, how the old man walked dead drunk right in front of Owen’s car. The Navajo cop listened but didn’t interfere. “Let’s look at your car,” the state cop said. Owen asked the truck driver to watch Devra; he didn’t want her walking down the dark highway unnecessarily. She sat down alongside the old man, who was being examined by the ambulance crew.
The cop shined his flashlight on Owen’s Connecticut license plate, wrote down the numbers, then went around front. He didn’t ask to see Owen’s driver’s license. “There you go,” he said, pointing to a small crack fanning out like a seashell on the passenger’s side of the windshield. “You must have got him when you swerved.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t see how he could crack your windshield here unless you swerved.”
Owen didn’t answer. The other possibility, he knew, was that the old man was already past the car—not stepping in front of it, as the truck driver claimed, but grazed by the car as Owen sped by.
Walking back, the state cop told him these accidents happen all the time. They were on the line, just across the border of the reservation. Liquor wasn’t allowed on the reservation, so bars were built at every entrance and Indians came out here and got drunk and then killed themselves on the way home along the dark highways. This was the third pedestrian-auto accident this month; the other two hadn’t been so lucky. “How fast were you going?” the cop asked. Owen tensed up. “About sixty,” he said. The cop shook his head. “One acrobatic Indian.”
“Do you have to make a report?”
“Not unless you want it for the insurance company.”
“Insurance company?”
“Your windshield.”
“No,” Owen said. He just wanted to get out of here as fast as possible. “Is there a motel nearby?”
“About ten miles ahead.”
He thanked the cop and then said goodbye to the truck driver, thanking him also for stopping. The old man still sat against the embankment, next to Devra. He had been saying something to her as Owen walked up.
The Navajo cop helped the old man into the police car; he would take him home. Not a word had been exchanged between the two police. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” Owen asked. No one answered him. Only Devra and he were left. Everyone else had left as quickly as they had appeared. Owen suddenly regretted not apologizing to the old man, but he’d been too worried about fault and blame to do what seemed decent and natural.
Devra rode up front with him. He was glad to see she understood how he felt. He couldn’t take her acting up now. His back was tense as steel, his legs locked; he forced himself to shift the car into gear, then slowly pull onto the road. Gradually he increased his speed until he was confident enough to do what felt like a reckless forty miles per hour. A truck bore down from behind. He hugged the right side of the road until the double trailer passed.
“I saw that old man say something to you.”
“Yes.”
Owen laughed. “He must have thought you were an Indian.”
Devra was silent.
“He did speak Navajo to you, right?”
“Didn’t.”
Owen shifted his eyes, not turning his head from the road but trying to see her expression. “Come on, Dev, he couldn’t speak a word of English.”
“He could. If he wanted.”
“All right. What did he tell you?”
“Lots of stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Just stuff.” Devra moved in her seat. “He told me not to tell most of it.”
“That’s fine. You should keep secrets.”
“You don’t believe me.”
Owen considered a moment. “No, I suppose I can’t. Not this time.”
“He said you wouldn’t.”
“Fine,” Owen said, wanting to let the subject drop and not appreciating when she played fancifully with the truth, perhaps having heard the old man say words and then just supplying her own interpretation. He sometimes sensed that she might tease men when she grew older, learn the fine art of deceit—with all its attendant self-mystery.
“I could tell you one thing.”
“If you want.”
“He asked me if I was scared.”
“Did he?”
“He said not to be. I wasn’t supposed to be scared. It was a mistake and I could stop. My being afraid.”
“And what are you afraid of?”
“Everything.”
“There must be something you’re not afraid of.”
“No,” Devra said with certainty.
Owen reached for her hand. “Are you going to listen to this old man then and stop?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m glad for that.”
She fell asleep before they reached the motel. After he registered and put her to bed, he went outside to get ice. But the machine was broken, so he returned to the room and sat on his bed, spreading out the Navajo Times and rubbing his feet through his socks. He watched her sleep with the pillow pulled tight around her ears like a bonnet, a new pose, probably a superstitious one. She’d once spent a week refusing to bathe, wearing a necklace of Puffed Wheat that supposedly belonged to Gulada the Taradiddle Queen. The funny thing was that he could watch her all night. Stare at a sleeping child with a pillow over her head. That’s all it was. A child at rest. Reduced respiration. Accelerated gamma waves. Temperature decline. Held limbs. He wouldn’t do it, though. He wouldn’t watch her. They both needed to rest.
Seeing Miles
Noah stared at Mimi’s picture, taken at his bar mitzvah twenty-five years ago. She was his cousin, a second cousin, and she and her family had come out to Milwaukee from Brooklyn for the occasion. He remembered being smitten at the ceremony. She had dark silky hair and large brown eyes flecked with gold. Slender and tall, her face had an oval shape like a prized portrait, and her hair was tucked behind her small, well-articulated ears—carved as if from soap. Her throat had a long white curve, and she sat very still in the second row of the synagogue as he read from the Torah and led the congregation in blessings. At the end of giving his bar mitzvah speech, he’d thanked his parents for being so supportive and then thanked all his relatives and friends for coming. He looked at Mimi and said, “And thank you.” It was a bizarre and spontaneous moment for him in a life so far of calm, reasoned, and practiced application. Nevertheless, she just continued to stare unwaveringly at him on the bema. But he was a goner. It was his first experience of painful desire, a fervor that threatened to swallow his flesh. Nor did it hurt that he was just entering puberty, and Mimi, fifteen, was obviously there already.
She had hung back at the reception while he danced the box step with skinny and mostly undeveloped girls from his seventh-grade class, and Mimi’s remove and mystery gave her a kind of regal aloofness that only worked him into more of a frenzy. She had declined to dance with him, explaining, “I’m not a good partner. I like to lead.”
&
nbsp; “That would be fine.”
“Thanks, but no.”
At one point, he saw her standing alone by the presents and went over to her. “Pick one,” he said.
“What?”
“You can have one.”
She smiled at him, straight white teeth, free of braces. “You’re silly.”
“I’m serious.” He felt desperate to give her something.
“I can’t take your presents.”
“Just one.”
“You are serious.”
And then her father, Uncle Irv, had come up and congratulated Noah on his excellent reading of his haftorah, and that was the end of the exchange. He’d been ready to give up his newly gotten gains to her, the tower of gifts and gelt for becoming a man. My kingdom for your hand. I’ll marry you someday, he thought.
He’d seen her a couple times afterward, at a wedding and then an anniversary party for her parents where she wore a wool plaid cap, like a cabbie, and baggy corduroy pants, and seemed inappropriately dressed for the occasion. Still, he couldn’t deny that every time he saw her the same feelings flared up, though evidently not on Mimi’s part. Her eyes, almond shaped and impenetrable as to her own thoughts, remained curiously distant. And soon he lost touch with her.
Now he was driving to the Denver Hyatt. Mimi was coming in from New York for a social workers conference. Noah himself was a psychologist with a practice in Denver, which would give them something in common after all these years. All that was good. He had brought with him the picture of her at his bar mitzvah. Of course this was twenty-five years later, and she was now a he. Miles. Mimi had been gone for two years.
Miles told him he would be wearing a blue short-sleeve shirt and yellow tie and Noah had spotted him right away standing beside the fountain. He wouldn’t have thought for a moment Miles stood out from any other man, professionally attired and waiting to meet a lunch partner. With his dark cropped hair, he was shorter than Noah remembered him as Mimi—a taller girl but on the shorter end as a man. Above all he appeared neat. Well groomed, spotless nails, and with a firm handshake in place of a hug.
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