Now Is the Hour

by Tom Spanbauer

  But inside me was some kind of solid. On my own two feet. I wasn’t alone anymore. I had two best friends.

  They’re Baptists, I said.

  Religious people, I said.

  Missionaries, I said.

  They want to talk to the Mexicans about God, I said.

  In the kitchen, everything was clean, clean and scrubbed and swept and shining with light bouncing off because everything was so clean.

  The spotlight behind Mom’s eyes had me, the deer in her headlights.

  I remembered to breathe. Flaco had called me negro. Flaco and Acho had rubbed my shoulders and my back the night before.

  It was a standoff. Me in my blue square tile and my big fat lie, and Mom in her white square tile with her floodlight.

  In a science-fiction movie, this part is where all the test tubes start buzzing and foaming and blowing up.

  All that was in the room was the cleanliness next to godliness, the floodlight, and the breath in, the breath out, of me.

  Who knows how long I stood there. A month of Sundays. Till hell froze over. From here to eternity.

  But in the end, I won. Breathing and a little help from my friends made me win. Mom’s almond-shaped hazel eyes couldn’t see through me to the big fat lie anymore. I’d broken the spell. Something in me loved God so much right then.

  I let out my breath and stepped off my blue tile and walked to the kitchen door.

  Where are you going? Mom said.

  To feed the chickens, I said.

  You stay away from those Baptist girls, Mom said, you hear?

  I will, I said. I’m just going to the barn.

  I closed the kitchen door behind me, not hard, not soft, just regular like this was just a regular day and I was shutting the kitchen door. I touched my shirt pocket and touched a Viceroy. Touched my Levi’s pocket and touched the matches.

  Up on top of the steel granaries, where I’d read all of Steinbeck, I lit the Viceroy. From up there I could see just about everything. I could see the spud cellar, the pigpens, the boxcars, and the grain elevator. There was the lane that connected us with the rest of yellow Bannock County. I could see the light pole. Where the earth rises up and the arc of the reservation begins. I could see the Mexican house. The two girls at the Mexican house and the two boys. I could see as two girls and two boys walked to the straw stack, climbed the straw stack. I saw the two girls and the two boys sit down in the spread straw. Then after a while, I couldn’t see anything, just dark spots in the bright afternoon in the spread straw on top of the straw stacks, fucking.

  The Slit Sisters didn’t come back through the yard until ten o’clock at night. Tramp started barking, and all the lights in the house went on.

  Dad was in his light blue pajamas with the dark blue buttons. Mom was in her pink bathrobe, cold cream on her face, her glasses off.

  I cracked the door to my bedroom. Mom was standing in a white tile, and Dad was standing in a white tile. Both of them were staring out the window.

  Baptists, my ass, Mom said.

  Then Mom went around into the front room and opened the front door. From the front porch, Mom hollered out: You two little bitches stay away from my house! We don’t want your kind on our property!

  Then she slammed the door, came around from the front room, and headed straight for my door. I closed the door quick, ran and jumped in bed, pretended like I was sleeping.

  The light from the kitchen when she opened the door went up against my bedroom wall. Mom’s shadow, hair flying around her head inside the light on the wall.

  Rigby John, she said. Her voice was high and too loud and a little crazy.

  Don’t ever let me catch you coming anywhere near those girls ever again, she said. There’ll be hell to pay if you do.

  Mom slammed the door and where her shadow had been on the wall it was dark. But her shadow was still there on my wall, inside the dark on the wall. All night long, her shadow on the wall, hair flying all around, a shadow inside a shadow, always there on my wall.

  I forget just how long it was before the Slit Sisters came walking back into the yard. Two weeks later, maybe three. I was putting gas into the pickup from the gas pump. It was about four in the afternoon. Dad was combining wheat, Mom was down with one of her migraines, and it was time for me to feed hay to the Herefords up in the feedlot.

  I didn’t see Thindy and Cricket until they were standing right behind me. In fact, I jumped and made a little scream when Cricket spoke. Damn near dropped the gas nozzle. It could have been a real embarrassing disaster.

  Hello there, Rigby John, Thindy said. What ya doing?

  They pretty much had on the same getups as they had on the last time. High heels and ankle socks, square dance skirts poking way out with all those petticoats underneath. The wide white marshmallow belts.

  I’m just putting gas in the pickup, I said.

  Duh.

  Right then, I know, my face looked just like a Hereford cow’s.

  Drut.

  Where ya going to drive that pickup when you get done putting gas in it? Cricket said.

  I knew what was coming, but I couldn’t stop it.

  I’m driving up to the feedlot, I said.

  Next to Flaco and Acho’s house? Cricket said.

  Yes, I said.

  Thindy puckered her lips and poked her shoulders up.

  Could you please give us a ride? Thindy said. These rocks hurt our feet in these shoes.

  I looked down at their high-heel shoes with the holes in the toes and the ankle socks. I looked over at the house. I looked over at the barn. I looked all around the yard.

  Pleee-eease! Thindy and Cricket said.

  After all, it was the Christian thing to do.

  Inside the cab of the pickup, Thindy and Cricket smelled good. They didn’t seem at all like the Slit Sisters or Sewage and Slut doing it doggy-style. They smelled good, and they were laughing, and the skin on their necks was smooth.

  I started the pickup. Thindy and Cricket were watching to see how well I could drive. I put the clutch in and shifted into reverse, let the clutch out real smooth.

  Oh! Thindy said.

  Oooh! Cricket said.

  Then I put on the brake, put in the clutch, and shifted into first gear, no problem. I let the clutch out, turned the steering wheel, and there wasn’t even the slightest jerk.

  That’s the way we were, Thindy, Cricket, and I, driving slow, inside the pickup, smelling good, the soft white skin on Thindy’s neck, on Cricket’s. Cricket’s pierced ears looked cool. The round piece of gold just went right into her earlobe, no blood or anything. We hit the bump just down from the gas pump and the bump made the flesh of these girls bounce. Their breasts bounced, and because of the bump and the bouncing, the breasts bouncing, we all laughed, and because we laughed I started to tell them that Flaco and Acho were my best friends ever.

  That’s when the pickup door opened. It was Mom, and she had her glasses on, her eyes, one pitched south, the other east. Mom grabbed me by the hair and pulled my hair, pulled me by the hair out of the moving pickup. She was slapping me in the face and calling me names. The pickup went rolling and smacked right into the side of the machine shop and stalled. Thindy and Cricket were screaming. I think they were screaming. When I look back on that day, I can say they were screaming, but I really don’t know for sure. All I remember is the slaps to my face, on my head, against my ears.

  I think Thindy or Cricket said something to Mom. Said she was a crazy woman. I think Mom yelled at them to leave. Called them sluts, dirty bitches. But I really don’t remember. It’s only looking back that I remember that part, so that part I could be making up.

  What I remember, though, besides the slaps on my face, was what my mother called me that day.

  My mother put her forehead against my forehead, put her almond-shaped hazel eyes straight into my eyes.

  That’s when she said it. Something she said I will never forget.

  You spineless ass, my mother
said.

  Spineless ass. In front of those girls, my mother called me a spine less ass.

  There was a big hullabaloo after that. Lots of doors slamming and cupboards slamming and yelling and righteous indignation. I’d never seen Mom so nuts. Even Dad didn’t understand what was going on with her. I mean, Dad never did understand what was going on with her, but he never let us see that. This time, though, he stared at her like Sis and I stared at her, like she was some wild woman.

  That evening after supper, Mom walked up to the sewing machine, her Singer sewing machine that was a piece of furniture in the front room. She walked right up to that sewing machine, squatted down, and put her hands under the wood box of the sewing machine, and lifted. She lifted and lifted and then just heaved that thing over her head.

  Singer sewing machine a big pile of kindling with a Singer sewing machine stuck up in the middle of it in the middle of the front-room floor in no time.

  Finally, Dad drove up to the Mexican house.

  When Dad came back, he sat at the supper table, under the bright overhead light, in his chair at the end of the table and told Mom, Sis, and me all he’d said to Flaco and Acho and their father and their mother and sisters and brothers.

  The sunburn line on his forehead. Hat hair. The sideburns next to his ears going gray. His big hands, the black hairs on them, fingers spread out flat on the oilcloth tablecloth.

  By sundown tonight, I told ’em, Dad said. Said they were an abomination to our good Christian values. We’re good Catholics, I said. I said, We can’t have no midnight shenanigans go on around here. I told them, This is our home, Dad said. And you have to show us some respect.

  I want you out of here by sundown’s what I told them, Dad said. Just get your things and load ’em up in your truck and go.

  When Dad finished talking, I didn’t know what to do. I hated him and Mom so much right then I didn’t know what I was going to do. All there was was a roaring in my ears and a big lump in my chest that was going to come out with a big mess of sobs and tears.

  I wished they were dead.

  Nothing else in me, in my head, nothing else in my heart.

  I wished the two sons of bitches were dead.

  I headed straight for the kitchen door. Mom, wild-woman-crazy Mom, jumped in front of me, put her body in front of the kitchen door.

  In all my years, I’d never seen her look like that. I mean, yes, there were all those things I knew so well: Her almond-shaped hazel eyes, one pitched south, the other east. The wrinkles on her forehead. The glasses that always shined in the light. The little wrinkles starting along her lips. The way she gritted her teeth. How her cheeks moved because she was gritting her teeth.

  There were those things and more. Her high, arched eyebrows, her cheekbones. The tanned-smooth quality of her skin.

  And more. Something impenetrable, something hard and mean and stubborn. Something ugly about her, the way she always knew she was right.

  Mom spread her arms out wide across the kitchen door.

  In her eyes a dare to try and pass.

  Spineless ass.

  Rigby John Klusener, Mom said. Get to your room and do not leave your room for the rest of the night.

  For a moment, in my right hand there was a backhanded slap. First to her right cheek, then her left. There was the way I pushed her head through the glass of the door. The breaking glass, the blood.

  Hey! Dad yelled. Your mother told you to do something! Now move!

  So what else was there to do? I went downstairs to my bedroom.

  As I look back on that evening now, I can see I had no other choice. They were my mother and my father, for sixteen years I’d known nothing else. You honor your father and your mother. And it wasn’t even that I had a decision about honoring them or not. I didn’t have a clue how to speak the mess inside me I was feeling. Still don’t really.

  So there I was, the spineless ass, walking down the stairs to my bedroom.

  All’s I had was negro, all’s I had was Flaco’s long fingers, his open palm on my shoulder. All’s I had was Acho’s thick fingers on the top of my head.

  All’s I had was my dark bedroom.

  I didn’t even have a cigarette.

  That night around midnight, Flaco and Acho’s old Ford truck, stacked with mattresses, a table, pots and pans, dishes, cups, an old wardrobe, a mirror that reflected the yard light and the stars, piles of dresses and shoes, pants and shirts, flour to make tortillas, all the stuff it takes to live in a house — seven people in a two-room house — and one guitar, one accordion, drove through the yard, the engine loud because of the bad muffler, the headlights gone dim from bad wiring.

  The time it takes to drive from the wood granary, past the light pole, past the blue spruce, past the pole fence, the time it takes at the wagon wheel and the Austrian Copper rose to yield to oncoming traffic, on Tyhee Road at midnight no traffic, still the old Ford yields, the brakes squeak, the bed of the truck floats a little.

  On the back of the truck, two young boys, men really, I never did ask them how old they were, Flaco in his blue shirt with the really white T-shirt under it, his denim pants, his red Converse tennis shoes untied, Acho in his red shirt and his really white T-shirt under it, his denim pants, his tennis shoes tied up, their legs dangling over the back side of the truck. Their faces, how I knew their faces, the way they smiled, the way the sunlight, the moonlight, lay on their skin. In the hay truck the smell of them, soap, sweat, tortillas, tobacco, instant coffee, cigarettes.

  Chingada tu puta madre.

  Sí, cabrón.

  Oh my heavens pretty woman so far.

  Gringa loca.

  The back turn signal of the truck a spastic white flash. The brake pedal released, the clutch disengaged, the gas pedal pushed toward the floor, the old Ford leaned around the corner, the high sound of first gear, then second gear, then on down the road.

  Flaco and Acho.

  I never saw them again.

  Not that night, or the next night, but the third night the eastern sky at night was as bright as day.

  In the straw stack at the feedlot, it took the fire trucks two days to put the fire out. Spontaneous combustion, the fire marshal said. The fire had been smoldering in there for days.

  5 Wild Thing

  BACK IN THE days before Flaco and Acho, when the only things to do on the farm besides work and do chores was to climb up the grain elevator, or sit on top of the boxcars, go into the dark spud cellar, or climb up in the steel granaries, there was a game I used to play out behind the spud cellar under the grain elevator.

  I stacked two straw bales on top of each other, then spread out a couple bales of straw on one side of the stacked bales.

  What I’d do was take a run at the bales, then tuck my head and flip over the bales, using my hands to push off the top bale, and then land in the soft bed of spread straw.

  I usually did the flip after doing the balancing act on the grain elevator.

  One day, out of sheer monotony, I decided to spice up my life by stacking a third bale on the stacked straw. It didn’t seem like much of a risk. After all, I thought, what’s so terrible that could happen?

  I took a run at the bales, tucked my head, pushed off the top bale, went flying ass over teakettle for a while, then landed. I landed on my ass as usual, on the straw, but this time my head kept flipping while the rest of me stopped, and my face had a head-on collision with my knee.

  Who knows how long I lay out on the spread straw totally knocked out, cuckoo, blood streaming out my nose. For three weeks my eyes were black. There was a week there my face was so swoll I could barely see out my eyes.

  When I could see again and the swelling went down, when I wasn’t black and blue anymore, what stayed and what didn’t go away was I no longer could breathe out of my nose. My nostrils were plugged up with busted gristle.

  That’s why I went around with my mouth open all the time, because I couldn’t breathe.

  Monsignor Cody
found something new to say to me. Whenever he saw me, he reached his hand over, put his fingertips on my cheeks, his thumb on my chin, and then closed my mouth with his hand while he said: Halt dein Mund.

  Which is German for “shut your mouth.”

  One way or another, all my life the universe has conspired to shut me up.

  Submucous resection. That’s the name of the operation I had to have to open up the breathing passages in my nose.

  As fate would have it, my stay in the hospital was quite an event. Two birds with one stone. I met Billie Cody and George Serano on the same day, in the same place, Saint Anthony’s Hospital. Although Billie saw a lot more of me than I did of her. George was a differnt story altogether. It probably makes some kind of sense that I ended up fighting him that day. He was a drunk, and an Indian and in the throes of the DTs. Fear had him around the neck. As things go, I was ready to fight him, but not ready for him. It took a long time and a world of hurt before George and I stood eye to eye, that is without wanting to kill each other. You might say we had some issues. The line between our farm and the rez, the differnce between the yellow and the red, plus there I was a self-righteous Catholic boy with an ax to grind, and there was George, another mean man in my life — a no-good ne’er-do-well Indian and a queer to boot.

  Amazing now that I look back on it, I got through all this alive.

  Thank God for Billie Cody. I’d never have made it without her.

  Dr. Verhooven told me and Mom it was a simple operation. Thursday night I’d check in the hospital. I wouldn’t have any dinner, only liquids. Friday morning, Dr. Verhooven would put me under a general anesthetic. I wouldn’t be awake during the operation. The operation consisted of Dr. Verhooven taking a drill and drilling two new holes through the busted gristle in my nose. I’d wake up around lunchtime. I’d be able to have a light lunch. I’d stay in the hospital for the rest of the day, I’d get supper that night, and I’d spend that night in the hospital so they could watch me, and the next morning they’d give me some pills and send me home.

  It sounded simple enough.

  Mom packed an extra pair of shorts, a T-shirt, a pair of white socks, my toothbrush, and my underarm deodorant in her blue square overnight case. Mom drove me to the hospital. Dad couldn’t go because he was still combining wheat. As always, he had something better to do when it came to me.