If it was unbearably hot, which it tended to be in the Fort Pierre summertime, they’d use Emma’s “old-time air-conditioning”—soaking their nightgowns in cold water, wringing them out, putting them back on, and running for bed, howling. It was stunning and delicious and “So good for your blood!” Emma would shout, smacking herself all over to get her temperature refigured.
By the time Emma reached to turn out the light, René would be snuggled in close, silently watching the colored stars that flickered and fell behind her closed eyelids as she drifted off to sleep.
They were inseparable.
While Leon played alone in his room or went with Eve and Jayne down to the house by the Bad River to visit Eve’s folks, René would wander with Emma out to the far end of the back garden. If they happened into the field beyond the gate and René spied Leon in the road with the older cousins from the other side, digging holes in the dirt with sticks or throwing rocks at a tree or eating gritty, gummy marshmallows, she’d call out and wave.
“Now, what do you want to do that for?” Emma would ask, tsking and taking her hand. “We’re having a fine time, aren’t we? Here,” she’d say, “just taste.” She’d pick a strawberry for René and one for herself from the wild vines, piping hot from the sun, and the two would eat where they stood, wide-eyed and mute.
Then they’d gather lettuces—curly, straight, striped—sampling as they went. “Just like a couple of rabbits getting into the garden,” Emma would laugh. “Come on now, we’ve got enough.”
Inside, she’d rinse the greens, then heat up bacon fat, vinegar, condensed milk, and sugar for dressing. She’d slice in a red onion, pour the hot dressing over the lettuces, and they’d have wilted lettuce salad with crackers on pastel, etched-glass tea plates, talking about how delicious it was and what a nice day it was and what they might want to do next.
“Maybe you’d like to lie down in the hammock,” Emma would say. “We can find something good to read, and I’ll bring us some iced tea.”
So they’d spend the afternoon in the shade of Emma’s big yard, characters in a homespun nineteenth-century idyll. Emma would sit in her metal rocker, drinking tea, while René stretched out in the hammock, suspended between two enormous oaks, swaying over a cool, wide bed of creeping ivy. From time to time, Emma would grab the mesh to give René a swing, or simply reach out and take hold of her hand, and they’d look up together, past the tops of the two big trees, to the endless sweep of sky. And if it was terribly hot, Emma would bring out her Oriental-print fan to keep cool. She’d fan herself, then René, then herself, then René, as René swung close and away, close and away, and they’d both get to giggling, tickled by Emma’s complicated gymnastics and just how hard she was working—and for nothing. It was too hot to do anything about it. Anyone could see that.
* * *
—
The problem, which had started earlier—maybe even back before time itself—was that, as Emma was every day bringing René into her heart and holding her as the beloved, she was, in the same motion, handily evicting Leon. With every hug and laugh, every smile and bending together of their heads, every scissor project and bedtime story, with every wave of happiness that seemed to lift them both, Leon was being shoved down and out and further away. And the more exiled Leon became, the more Eve looked askance at René.
“Entitled is a word that comes to mind,” Eve would say to her whenever they were alone, which came to sound to René like the tinkling of a shiny silver bell. Entitled. Even when no one was saying it, it was right there, just waiting for someone to pick it up and ring it.
But Leon didn’t make a fuss.
“He’s sad,” Eve would whisper to René whenever she got the chance. “He’s hurt.”
According to Eve, Leon would lie alone in his bed when they visited Emma, listening to the laughter from the other side of the adjoining wall. Because of René, the nights he’d played Emma’s “hired hand”—letting her draw a mustache on him with her eyebrow pencil, then trying on Grandpa’s old cowboy hats—were gone. Now he was reduced to running with the cousins who lived in the beat-up trailer down by the Bad River. And seeming to instantly, quietly grasp that there was no longer any room for him, Leon resigned himself to his place, alone in his bed at night, as Emma and René giggled and romped and had “a grand old time.”
“They were so close,” Eve would remind René at intervals, even long after they were all back home in Philip. “Leon was Emma’s precious little gem before you came along. Then she just dropped him in the street like a hot rock. It breaks my heart.”
Eve would purse her lips, creasing her forehead into a deep frown, and shake her head as René looked up, feeling her own face tighten in reflection as her body braced against what felt like a slow-motion fall.
7
J.D.
Eve and Al joined the Philip bowling league. Al won the men’s tournament at the end of the first season, and all the guys patted him on the back. He came home with a trophy, a bowling man atop a golden column. Eve won “Most Strikes,” but their friend Hap took the women’s trophy, so Eve came home with only a “First Place” ribbon. “A misnomer if I ever heard one,” she said.
On the night of the bowling league banquet—free beer and hot dogs at the lanes—J.D., the manager, came over and congratulated Eve, holding her face in his hands and planting a wet kiss just by the corner of her mouth as Eve brightened and stammered, “Thank you, oh, thank you, J.D., no, no, oh. How sweet!,” which was enough to make Al wonder what she did, exactly, on all those nights when he was out of town.
“That J.D.,” Al tried on the way home.
Eve laughed. “Good God.”
“You two seem to have something special going on,” he said, inquiring.
“For Chrissakes, Al. I don’t even know him. What in the world.”
“Looks like you might know him well enough. Wouldn’t want to be knowing a guy much better than that.” Al laughed.
“That’s not funny. It’s not worth talking about. Just be quiet.”
So they drove.
But at the bowling lanes, Al started to notice J.D. watching Eve. And he started to notice that when Eve saw J.D. looking at her, she blushed. So on the long nights when he was on the road in Montana or Nebraska or over in eastern Wyoming, in yet another stinky motel room on the side of the highway, he began to wonder. He wondered and wondered. He wondered so much that by the time he got home, he’d be convinced.
He’d confront her; she’d deny it. So he’d leave town, have more time to think. Then he’d come back. He’d accuse her; she’d fight him. So he’d leave again. Then one night, arriving home earlier than expected, Al found the kids with a sitter and Eve nowhere in sight.
He sent the girl home and sat by himself in the dark, smoking, until Eve finally came through the door, loaded down with fabrics.
“I didn’t know you’d be here, Al,” she said, first thing.
“I imagine that’s right.”
“I’ve been up to Hap’s, helping with some curtains.”
“Is that supposed to mean you weren’t spending the evening with your friend?”
“If I’ve told you once—” Eve was instantly up to speed.
“Don’t lie to me, Eve.”
“You’re one to talk.” She dropped the fabrics onto the kitchen table. “One finger pointing out and three pointing back at yourself. That’s what I say. How do I know what you do on the road all the time? I’m guessing it’s not all on the up-and-up.”
It wasn’t any kind of confession, but it was enough to make Al stand and catch her by the shoulder. “I must be the only one in town that doesn’t know.”
Instead of pulling away, Eve stepped in closer just to scream in his face: “You don’t know because there’s nothing going on, you goddamn dumb son of a bitch!”
Al drew his arm back,
and at the same moment, Leon got out of bed and stepped into the hallway. He saw Al’s hand come down, saw Eve bend and pull away. He stood, rubbing his eyes as if to clear the scene and start again, as Eve went into her room and shut the door. Then he simply continued to stand there, uncertain, in his printed cowboy pajamas.
“Do whatever it is you need,” Al told him roughly, “then get back to bed.”
And though in the future Eve would swear it had never happened, insisting that Leon must have dreamed it, Leon would clearly recall that he hadn’t continued on to the bathroom that night, as he’d needed to do; instead, he’d turned around and gone straight back to bed, playing the scene over and over in his mind, vowing to remember, vowing to grow up and never forget.
* * *
—
To the great disappointment of their teammates, Eve and Al withdrew from the league. Eve wasn’t allowed to go to the bowling alley anymore, not even to meet friends for an afternoon game, which she missed.
“I’m exiled enough, Al, with you gone all the time. I have to do something with myself.”
“Then find something useful,” Al said, not even looking at her.
She shook her head and walked away. No use starting it up.
Then one moonless night, when the world was pitch-black across the long stretch of prairie, nothing but stars—after the dishes were done, the laundry folded, the kids in bed, and with Eve not expecting Al for at least another day or two—a car pulled into the driveway.
Eve inched the drapes apart to have a look and made out what appeared to be J.D., climbing out of the driver’s seat and stumbling up the steps.
A knock exploded against the front door. “Evie!”
Eve paused with her hand on the knob. Then she silently turned the bolt and squatted down so he wouldn’t be able to see her through the small glass panels.
“Evie!” J.D. knocked harder. He tried the handle.
All her life Eve had hated the name Evie. No one who knew her called her by that name, not more than once.
“Evie, open the door.” He was whining, pleading, obviously plastered. “I miss you coming downtown. Why don’t you come downtown no more? I don’t get to see you no more.”
J.D. must have been watching and known that Al was out of town.
Eve waited, perfectly still, at the base of the door. She was barely breathing as J.D. pounded and hollered and pounded again. “Oh, God,” she prayed. “Please don’t let the kids wake up. Please, please don’t let the kids wake up.”
“Goddamn it, Evie. Answer the goddamn door!” He was mad now. “I know you’re in there!”
Eve waited, trembling, until he suddenly just stopped, tripped back down the steps, and fell into his running car. He sat there awhile. Eve thought maybe he’d passed out, until she heard the engine rev, heard the car back out of the driveway and start down the road.
* * *
—
Al was coming home early, hoping to find a way to make things up. He’d got off the highway, turned the corner, and seen the taillights in his driveway from the end of the block. He saw the brake lights come on, and he watched as J.D. passed him from the opposite direction on Philip’s one dirt road.
When he stepped into the house, Eve jumped up from where she’d been sitting in the dark, crying, and fell into his arms. He was stiff and icy, ready to fly against her, but the way she went on—clutching him so tight, sobbing, shaking—he couldn’t help but soften and hold her. He kissed the top of her head and sat her down on the couch. “Hush,” he said, rocking her. “I’m right here, Eve. Everything’s all right now. There, now. That’s it. I’m here.”
And so it was decided that they were moving on to Rapid City, another ninety miles west, into the foothills of the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, the sacred land of the Indians, “and for good reason,” Al said to René, holding her on his lap, taking the time to explain why she was going to have to leave her friends, though she immediately protested that since Eve didn’t let her play with the “filthy next-door-neighbor kids,” she didn’t have any friends, only one, a fat little girl in the house across the alley who got everything René ever wanted, including multiple Barbies with all the outfits and the playhouse and jeep, and white marching boots—with tassels!—plus store-bought cupcakes and root beer floats and little bowls full of candy that she could help herself to whenever she wanted!
Compared to this little town of Philip, Al told her, where the wind blew all day long and the earth was so cracked and dry you had to break your back to grow a single blade of grass, where there didn’t seem to be any real friends, and where some people were even willing to try to take what didn’t belong to them—but Al had lost his track, and René was squirming, looking more and more alarmed, like she was getting in trouble.
He let her down.
“It’s going to be a regular Garden of Eden,” he said.
8
Paha Sapa
Al found a house to rent in the foothills above Rapid City, and they drove from Philip in a borrowed, piled-up truck, bouncing along through the Badlands, where the earth fell away into canyons of color-banded, sunbaked rock. They kept going until the prairie grasses started turning green, the highway began to roll, and there they were, rising in the distance—jagged layers of cut-out mountains set off against a perfect Wild West sky.
The Black Hills are older than the Alps, older than the Himalayas. Paha Sapa, Khe Sapa—black mountains rising to meet the heavens, full with pine, flush with rock, abounding in green meadows—pushed up over seventy million years ago, have been occupied by native people for the past ten thousand years, and are full of ghosts, most of them in mourning: ghosts of the Cheyenne, conquered by the Sioux; ghosts of the Lakota, driven out by the whites when gold was discovered and the railroad came through; ghosts of Custer, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse; ghosts of Calamity Jane, Wild Bill, Jack McCall, Billy the Kid; ghosts of Black Elk, Red Cloud, Kicking Bear, Gall, Rain in the Face, Spotted Tail, Crow King, Hump; ghosts of the Ghost Dancers and Wounded Knee, Standing Rock and Little Bighorn.
The house sat by itself, perched above the twinkling lights of the city, half dug in, with a level drive on the high side to park the car, then three steps down to the back door. In front, where the hill fell sharply to the prairie below and the house looked out over the plains and the city with the Black Hills in the distance, there was a railless rock-and-cement patio with a twenty-foot drop.
Surrounded by the majesty of deep pine forest, ponderosas shooting up on all sides, you could run barefoot across the driveway, up a small, rocky incline, and enter an enchanted world where the soft bed of pine needles cushioned every step, where perfect pine cones, like ornaments, fell around you, and chunks of rose quartz, shining like pink jewels here and there in the sudden rays of sunlight, bloomed at your feet, some larger than you could carry, where green-and-gray-lichened boulders, higher than your head and older than your greatest-great-grandfather, emerged from the ground, ancient striations slanting to the sky.
René was free to gather rocks and pine cones, find and ford a stream, climb up to the tree house left by the previous tenants, hollering down to Leon about whether it seemed safe or rotted. She could mount a giant outcropping of granite to secure a view of beavers at work, or just lie on the hot cement patio in the sunshine, one eye open for snakes, which seemed, unbelievably, able to climb the steep rock wall that dropped off to the front drive. She gathered quartz, piling it in an empty corner of the living room, and hoarded pine cones until they were spilling off her dresser top and Eve made her take them all back outside.
Leon found an ax and got busy chopping trees and building forts. Whenever René heard his call, she’d scramble up the nearest boulder to see him in a far-off valley, standing proudly at the base of a tender sapling, his foot on the poor thing, which was now prone, undone, Leon’s tall, scrawny self looking everything li
ke its simple reflection, its still-upright twin.
When they’d first moved in, the bathtub had been full of dead crickets, three and four deep, and it turned out the house was infested with black widows, so they had to remember to knock their shoes out against a doorframe before putting them on. Al was gone more than ever to keep up with the “big-city rent,” and Eve had not a single neighbor, just the darkness of the night, the kids in bed, and two sets of badly tracked sliding glass doors looking out over Rapid City, the Gateway to the American West.
* * *
—
Since Eve was mostly alone in the silence and dark of her house in the woods, before long Al came home with a German shepherd called Chuck. Chuck had to be on a chain. He’d belonged to a rancher who’d wanted to be rid of him because of his constant snarling and barking, which stirred up the cattle, and Al had to admit that he wasn’t sure what kind of temperament the dog had or how he’d been treated.
He was to be Leon’s dog, Al said. Leon would be responsible for taking care of him, feeding him, training him.
“Not right away,” Eve corrected. “I’ll manage him to start with,” she said to Leon.
Al darkened, did an about-face, and soldiered off to the kitchen.
“And you can take over after we get to know him better. Just in case.”
Leon looked crestfallen.
“Just to start with,” Eve told him.
Chuck came up to Leon’s waist, René’s armpit, and over Jayne’s head. They all kept their distance for a while, Eve feeding and handling him until she got to liking him so much that she started letting him follow her around while she did her outside chores. And soon she simply turned him loose, so that Chuck was just like any ordinary dog, chasing down rabbits and chipmunks, digging holes up by the house. Then Leon took over the feeding, and Chuck was Leon’s dog.
The Distance Home Page 4