The Distance Home

by Paula Saunders

  18

  Overlapping Lines Converge

  With the rush of The Nutcracker behind her, Eve started taking in alterations for a men’s store downtown. Combining the income from that with what Mrs. G had started to pay her for teaching the little ones’ Pre-Ballet class, she now had a bit of her own money. She kept it in a cardboard check-box in the kitchen. Al was constantly dipping into it when he wanted to go downtown for coffee, but Eve didn’t mind. If she felt like buying herself a new pair of gloves, or one of the kids needed ballet slippers, or she wanted to get her hair done, she didn’t have to ask him. And not having those conversations was a pleasure and a relief.

  One day when Al was home and the kids were at school, Al asked if Eve would like to ride with him over to the Pine Ridge Reservation, where there were some cattle he’d been meaning to look at. Though there were still patches of snow on the ground, the sun was shining across the prairie and the sky was bright winter blue, end to end, so it was a nice day for a drive. They got in Al’s Buick and off they went, through Scenic, past the boarded-up Longhorn Saloon—where Russell Means had shot a man point-blank in the back of the head in the men’s room, or where he’d been held down on the pool table by a rival faction on the reservation and castrated, Eve had heard both—then on through the Badlands and down to Porcupine, about twenty minutes north of Wounded Knee. Eve had been to Wounded Knee. She’d seen the peeling crosses the Indians had planted willy-nilly in the dirt, as if to deny that there’d ever been any such thing as kidnapping, raping, scalping of the honest, hardworking folks who’d broken their backs to settle this land, as if what had happened in that place had blossomed out of thin air, out of simple meanness. Still, it was a shame things had to be like that.

  Billy Little Horse was waiting as they pulled up to his pastel government shack, standing just next to the two old cars in his front yard, one with its windows busted out and its doors hanging open on broken hinges, the other with all its tires missing—one side up on blocks, the other melting into the earth, drowning in mud and icy slush. Both cars had their hoods up and auto parts strewn nearby, as though someone had been in the middle of repair work, maybe a decade ago, and simply walked away and never come back.

  “Hi there, Billy,” Al said, getting out from behind the wheel.

  “Hey,” Billy said.

  Billy Little Horse wore a plaid shirt, buttons stressed against his paunch, and jeans belted low with a shiny rodeo buckle. He was dark, a full-blood Indian, with a tough, leathered look that came both from his people and from working outdoors in all weather. Al’s dad had known Billy’s father, traded cattle with him off and on, so though Al and Billy weren’t friends, they weren’t strangers. Al had told Eve that Billy wasn’t a drinker but that his son was. And now Eve could hear the TV going inside, could see in her mind three or four half-naked Indians sprawled on a dirty mattress on the floor, drinking Budweisers for breakfast, tossing empties into a corner already piled high.

  “This here’s my wife, Billy,” Al said. “Eve.”

  “Hey,” Billy said. And though Billy barely cracked his lips to speak, Eve could see he didn’t have many of his teeth.

  “Say there, Billy,” Al started again, “I hear you’ve got some cattle you’re looking to sell.”

  “Sure” was all Billy said. Then he silently led them down to the pasture where the cattle were grazing. The three of them walked the fence line.

  “I think I can give you a good price for these, Billy,” Al said after a while. “You’ve got some great-looking cattle there.”

  So Al and Billy came to an agreement, shook hands, and Al said he’d have the trucks at Billy’s place in a day or two, to load them up.

  “Nice doing business with you, Billy,” Al said as they got back in the car.

  Billy nodded and went inside.

  This was going to be a good deal for Al, and he was giving Billy a fair price, about as good as he was going to get. And Eve was happy that it had all gone quickly so she hadn’t had to use the off-angle outhouse she’d noticed in the weeds.

  Al got two truckers from Pardo Transport lined up, and in a few days they were on the road again, in a caravan this time, back to Porcupine to pick up the cattle. When they pulled up to the pasture gate, Billy stepped out of his house. He started over to the fence to meet them as Al got out of his car.

  “Say there, Billy,” Al called. “What do you know? Another beautiful day.” He motioned to the bright sun, the clear sky overhead, the jagged juts and drops of the cutaway buttes in the distance. “Looks like it’s about time to settle up.” He bent to get his checkbook from the center console.

  When Al stood up, Billy was right there by the car door, hands in his pockets.

  “No deal, Al,” Billy said.

  “What’d you say there, Billy?” Al thought maybe he’d misheard.

  “No deal,” Billy said again.

  “Now, Billy,” Al said. “I just left here not three days ago, and we’d agreed. We agreed, didn’t we, Billy? We shook on it.”

  “Yeah,” Billy said.

  “So we got a deal, don’t we, Billy. We made a deal. That’s why I hired these big trucks, these two drivers. That didn’t cost me nothing, Billy. That cost me something. But I did it ’cause we agreed, we had an agreement.”

  Billy Little Horse nodded. He wasn’t talking.

  “Now, Billy, I got my checkbook right here, and I’m ready to write you a check for the full amount. Right now.” Billy had to need the money—for food, for beer, for glass to replace the boards and plastic sheeting covering his windows, for running water, an indoor toilet.

  Eve could hear that there was trouble, and she’d just as soon stay in the car anyway. The only real menace on the reservation was Indian on Indian, she figured, with the whole place split into half-bloods versus full-bloods—which came down to nothing more than those for and against working with the whites—and with Dickie Wilson, the mixed-breed, white-appointed headman, and his so-called Guardians of the Oglala Nation goon squad shooting up the place, starting their own people’s homes on fire in the middle of the night. Still, Indians were Indians. They didn’t make any sense. The one thing you could depend on from an Indian was that you’d never know what he was going to do next.

  “I’m going to write this out to you right now, Billy,” Al was saying, opening the checkbook, filling in the date on a blank check.

  “No deal, Al,” Billy said. “No deal.”

  Al stopped writing and looked at Billy Little Horse for a good long time.

  “No cattle. No deal,” Billy repeated, shaking his head. He spit on the ground by his boot. Then he turned around, hands still stuck deep into his pockets, and went back in his house.

  “Well, for crying out loud,” Al said as he fell into the car.

  “What in the world?” Eve said. “What happened?”

  “I have no idea. Maybe somebody offered him more money.”

  “Maybe one of his relatives wanted them,” Eve said.

  Al paused, sick, shaking his lowered head. “Lord knows I’m still going to have to pay these guys.” And he got out to talk to the truckers, to tell them to go ahead and turn their rigs around and head back to town, that he’d meet them at the trucking office.

  So Al was baffled and disappointed.

  “Only an Indian,” he said as they pulled away from Billy Little Horse’s place. “Only a godforsaken Indian.”

  Eve nodded. Only an Indian could change his mind like that and not even bother to let you know, then not feel any obligation to tell you why he’d backed out even when it had cost you time and money. Eve remembered the Indians that had come through her house when she was just a girl. With the Chicago Northwestern Railway in town, there’d been Indians, gypsies, hoboes, the lot. They’d walk right through the front door without even knocking, take whatever they wanted from the kitc
hen, and continue straight out the back without so much as a word. At first, her mother had stood quietly and let them go. But after a while, when the displaced Indians and gypsies and hoboes came through, she’d make them sandwiches. She’d stand in the kitchen and hand them whatever kind of sandwich she could manage—mostly just bread and butter with a sprinkle of sugar—until they’d all disappeared out the back door without a single “Thank you,” as if not a one of them spoke any English. Eve could hear the train whistle from her front porch, but she never knew where the drifters had come from or where they were going. It seemed to her, as a child, that they appeared and vanished with the mist that rose around the river, like hungry ghosts.

  “I feel sorry for them,” Eve’s mother would say, though she herself didn’t have two dimes to rub together. And they all just got used to it, like it was nothing unusual.

  “If he wanted more money, he could have asked me,” Al was saying. “I probably wouldn’t have given him any more, but if that’s what he wanted, he could have said something.”

  “You’d think so,” Eve said.

  “I’m not doing any more business on the reservation, Eve.”

  “Well, maybe if you had him sign a contract instead of just depending on a handshake, you’d have something to hold him to and you wouldn’t have all this trouble,” Eve said, mixing her irritation over Billy Little Horse with the maddening long line of freeloaders crowding her mother’s kitchen. “This isn’t the olden days, Al,” she added. “I’ve told you time and again. A handshake’s just not good enough.”

  “I’m awfully glad to know you’ve got the answers to everything, Eve,” Al snapped, stung.

  Eve didn’t respond. Wasn’t it a shame he had to be like that, giving her a cruel, offhand put-down when she was just trying to help? And after all she’d done for him—like when she and Leon had fed the cattle he was keeping out by Ellsworth Air Base. They couldn’t get out of town until Leon was done with school and dance class, so it would be dark, dead of winter, sometimes fifty below. Leon would freeze his hands chopping through the creek so that the cattle could get to some water. They’d swing and heave hundred-pound feed bags across snow-filled gullies, “One, two, three—!,” then trudge through thigh-high snowdrifts in the dark of night to feed the poor steaming beasts, to try to keep them alive. A few had died, in spite of everything, frozen to death in the bitter cold, but that wasn’t her fault, or Leon’s, either. She’d never asked for so much as an acknowledgment for any of it, but she deserved respect. She’d earned the right to at least that much.

  Still, they’d been getting along so well lately. If she wanted to keep it that way, she’d have to let it slide off this time. Like water off the back of a duck, she thought, turning her head away.

  “You can take my word for it,” Al was going on, “since I do happen to know a thing or two about it. It wouldn’t do any good. Paper or no paper, doesn’t matter. They can do what they like on the reservation. They make their own laws. It’s a Wild West show out there.”

  Eve bit her tongue.

  “Lord knows I can’t make money hiring truckers for nothing,” Al said, half-trying to pull her back to his side of the fence.

  “True,” Eve said, steely.

  “Looks like I’m out nearly five hundred dollars today,” he continued, with a desperation he hardly ever let her hear. “A couple more deals like this and we’ll all be in the poorhouse.” He let a puff of air escape his lips, like he was spitting.

  “God forbid,” Eve said, lighting a cigarette and cracking her window.

  He had a point. Not that there was such a thing as the poorhouse anymore, but there were the possibilities of loans you could never repay, of losing your home, of losing everything. With Al self-employed—no paycheck, no sick days, no pension—there were always those possibilities.

  Al dropped Eve off at the house, and she went in to start dinner, throwing open cupboards and banging pots and pans down onto the stove. The kids would be home from school any minute, and Al would be back from the trucking office soon enough, unhappy and looking for something to eat.

  19

  Spring

  Spring was coming. Crocuses were pushing up through the frozen ground. You’d look down to find one blooming impossibly in a mound of melting snow, a magical circle of green and pale purple or yellow or white.

  Leon was still pulling out his hair, and Eve was talking to him every day, as if to a wounded animal.

  “Don’t pull at it, Leon,” she’d say calmly, gently running her hand over the top of his head. “Look,” she’d say, “it’s growing back. Just keep your hands off it and I’m sure it’ll come back in no time.”

  But nothing was working. So, after nights filled with argument, counterargument, insistence, and refusal—all of which would invariably escalate into name-calling and accusation, door-slamming and tears—Al finally gave in, and the three of them went to see a psychiatrist.

  “Quack, quack,” Al said in protest as they pulled up to Dr. Harris’s office. He laughed, even though neither Eve nor Leon joined him. “Anyone can hang a shingle, Eve,” he pointed out.

  “Be quiet, Al,” Eve said. “Just shut your mouth.” And she got out of the car, already thoroughly disgusted with him.

  Inside, the doctor asked them to sit. After they’d chatted a few minutes, the doctor said, “And what is it you three would like to speak with me about today?”

  “Well,” Al started, seeming to feel it was his duty as head of the household, “we don’t really have much to talk about. Eve here had some bridge buddies who thought you might be able to help Leon with a problem he’s having.”

  The doctor looked to Leon. “Okay,” he said. “And what seems to be the trouble, Leon?”

  Leon shrugged, on the hot seat.

  “He’s pulled out all his eyelashes and eyebrows,” Al continued, “which you can plainly see. And now he’s pulling out the hair on his head. That’s the problem.”

  “I’m sure,” Eve immediately countered, “that’s not the only problem, Dr. Harris. There are a lot of problems.” She looked at Al and left it at that.

  Al shifted uncomfortably and glared back at her. He knew better than to add their dirty laundry into the mix, and the one thing he had not expected when he’d agreed to all this nonsense was an ambush.

  “Would you like to go on with that?” Dr. Harris asked.

  “Well, of course we’re seeking help for our son,” Eve said, “but I’m not convinced that’s the main point. Because, well, there can be a lot of friction at home. His father and I don’t get along all that well, and to tell the truth, there can be a lot of uncalled-for derogatory remarks and put-downs. It could be that Leon’s problem is just a part of all that. Plus, his father’s gone all the time. I don’t know.”

  “Oh, for heaven sakes, Eve, a man’s got to make a living,” Al said, grinning at the doctor, intending to gain a foothold by cementing their agreement on this.

  “And Leon,” the doctor said. “What’s your idea about why you’re here?”

  “I don’t know,” Leon said, sitting on his hands. “Because of my h-hair?”

  “But things may not always be as straightforward as they seem on the surface? Is that right?” the doctor said.

  Leon nodded.

  “So, are there other things you might want to talk about, too? Like what goes on at home? Is that a possibility?”

  Leon gave a circular nod like a bobblehead, as though he couldn’t imagine how he might answer a question like that.

  And as Leon finally looked at the floor and Al once again shifted noisily in his chair, the doctor said, “I’m sure there’s something we can do. We can talk things through, see what comes up. How does that sound? Eve, Al, I’d like to make an appointment with the two of you to start with, if that’s all right. Then I’d like to spend some time one-on-one—”


  “Now, Doc Harris,” Al interrupted, clearing his throat. “That sounds like a terrific good plan, terrific, and I’m sure there’s lots of things Eve would like to talk to you about. I have no doubt she could complain about me from sunup to sundown.” Al chuckled, still leaning on the doctor’s unproven collegiality. “But we can’t be making one appointment after the next. What I mean here is, this is not within our means. It just is not. I’m sorry about that. Besides, we don’t have any problems. Not really. Eve and I have our squabbles, I’ll admit. But that’s to be expected. Right, Doc?”

  “Oh, Al. Stop it,” Eve moaned. “Stop.”

  There was a pause.

  “I’m sure we could come up with some kind of payment plan,” Dr. Harris suggested.

  “No, thank you, Doc,” Al said, recovering himself. “Thanks all the same.” He started to get up. “I think we understand each other. I imagine this hair business is just a bump—”

  “Stop it, Al. Just be quiet!” Eve said finally. “We can afford it,” she said to Dr. Harris. “I’ll pay for it.”

  “You’ll pay for it?” Al sat back down. “Why—!” And sensing the doctor’s attention, he caught himself. “Sure. Why, sure,” he said. “Why not?”

  “Okay,” Dr. Harris said. “Shall we go ahead and make an appointment for next week?”

  “That’ll be fine,” Al said, his body suddenly gone tense and wiry, like a cornered animal’s, his face lit up with humiliation.

  So they set a date. Then Al drove Eve and Leon home in silence, dropped them off, and left town without even coming in for his suitcase. And when the appointed day rolled around, Al was still on the road. He was on the road for a long time after that.

  Eve ended up going to Dr. Harris by herself, blubbering her way through the hour. Then Leon had an appointment the next week and the week after that, and Al still hadn’t returned.