He bit his lip. “Maybe not. Maybe it’s something about me.”
A cold shiver ran through her, past the silk long underwear and the down parka, settling in her skeleton. “Owen?”
He looked up from staring at the cars to meet her eyes. “I don’t know what to do, Maggie. Part of me wants to cut rope and run. The other part wants to stay with you, no matter what happens.”
She took his hand. “Whatever it is, we’ll see it through together.”
His hand in hers was gloved, distant, but she kept her grip strong. He let go to open her door, and she could feel coolness replace the warmth where his fingers had been interlaced with her own. She started to pocket her keys, then dropped them. There sitting at the round pine table in the kitchen was Nori, drinking red wine from a long-stemmed glass. Sitting next to her was the handsomest policeman Maggie had ever seen. He was having coffee, her coffee, and from the look on his face, Margaret could tell, he was hoping later he’d be having Nori, too.
“Owen, this is my sister, Noreen Yearwood.”
He shook her hand politely and nodded to the cop. “Sir.”
“She got a little lost, folks. Just helping her find the way and getting a warm-up cup of coffee for my time. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No problem.”
“Be on my way, then.”
Nori didn’t get up. She set her glass down and stared hard at her sister. “You should have known I would track you down one way or the other, Mag. It was stupid to run away. Did you think you could just cut me off along with everyone else? I’m your sister. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Where will you run to this time? Antarctica?”
Owen tipped his hat and mumbled about sheep and horses needing tending. He was out the door and gone before Maggie could process her sister’s words. The cop’s radio crackled, but it said nothing understandable. Why, Maggie wondered, for all the technology of the nineties, did those things still spit whirling static?
“Go home,” she told Nori. “Whoever’s bed that is these days. Steer somebody else’s children away from them. It’s Thanksgiving, this is my house, and I want you the hell out. Now.”
She shoved the cork back into the wine bottle and put it away where it belonged, in the cupboard where she kept the cleaning things, right next to the lye for clearing stubborn drains.
Riverwall
I came in and found the moonlight lying in the room.
Outside, it covers the trees like pure sound, the sound of tower bells, or water moving under the ice, the sound of the deaf hearing through the bones of their heads.
ROBERT BLY, “AFTER WORKING”
10
AFTER THREE MONTHS AT RIVERWALL, PETER DIDN’T NEED ONE of Dr. Kennedy’s twice-weekly, professionally understanding, this-is-part-of-the-agreement counseling sessions to tell them what he already knew: They hated him here.
He hadn’t lost his sight. His roommate, Berto, barely made an effort to sign with him, and after their first week together he had put in for a transfer as soon as was possible, following Christmas vacation. Most of them didn’t even bother to wait until his back was turned. They made fun of him at every opportunity, signing “green” or “asshole” whenever he tried to use his hands to communicate. The only thing worse than his trying to sign was if he forgot the rules and committed the unpardonable sin of speaking to help get his point across. It was reflex. Sometimes he couldn’t help using his voice. Was that a crime? Sure, the teachers, who all had some level of hearing, appreciated it when he spoke, and nobody dared rag in front of them when Peter signed and spoke simultaneously. But when the teachers weren’t looking, the students turned away from him and acted as if he wasn’t there at all.
Sometimes he thought maybe they were right, and he wasn’t anywhere, he was floating somewhere between worlds. But his eyes told him he was in Riverwall, New Mexico, in English class, Mr. Linder’s third period, the one class where he, the outsider, the-not-really-deaf kid, kicked serious ass, while fifteen of the legitimate deaf struggled to put words into a logical sequence. They were way behind everything he’d read in junior high. They hated having to reorder the perplexing grammar of English. Linder had such a hard time getting anyone to crack a book that he gave Peter free rein—let him jerk off by reading Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Christopher Pike, even those cheap choose-your-own-adventure books. Talk about bullshit. But anything was better than looking at the smirking faces around him. He’d made it past the whooshing silence that sometimes drove him so crazy he’d scratch his ears raw. Sometimes, if the story was good enough, and he lost himself inside it, he could sort of “hear” the words in his skull, this tingling, fleeting echo of old voices. It was weird, like the first time he’d smoked marijuana, everything so slow and drifting, a little scary. The harder he tried to make it happen, the less often it did. But when it did happen, it was so trick. He dreamed sound. Heard everyone distinctly, all the way from whispers to screams. Just before waking up he could almost pretend things were like before. That is, until the flashing light of the alarm clock rudely erased all that, or Berto startled him out of a dream by smacking him, signing, Wake up, fag, or he smelled the diesel stink of a truck and had to get up to see it rumbling soundlessly by the school, have his vision confirm that he would never again hear traffic. Bonnie Tsosie, the girl who sat in the front row, liked reading books, too. Sometimes he saw her walking across the campus, her brown face buried in the pages of one of the lame library’s better selections. Today her thick black braid hung like a single rope between her shoulder blades against her black turtleneck sweater. If he circled the width of her hair with one hand—something he imagined doing way too often—he knew in his fingers that heavy hair would feel warm and silky. In one of their first counseling sessions, Kennedy pointed Bonnie out to Peter, held her up like some shining example of what Peter could become, if he put his heart into mastering ASL. Forget the fact that Bonnie had been slowly losing her hearing since she could walk upright, or that she had years of practice under her belt to his five months. She also kept a small amount of hearing, which, when amped by her aid, gave her the best of both worlds—a clear voice to communicate with the hearing, and fluent sign, passage into the world of the deaf.
She’s like you, Peter, Dr. Kennedy insisted. What little hearing she has left she uses, even if it takes technology to get the most from it. Now, can we discuss the cochlear implant again…?
No, we can’t. Maybe that justified Bonnie wearing a hearing aid in her right ear, but it wasn’t any reason for Peter to submit to surgery to put some Terminator crap inside his skull. He’d told the audiologist to fuck off when he saw the array of instruments set out in her office. Ugly flesh-colored plugs, harnesses that “fit unobtrusively” on the earpieces of glasses he didn’t need. And what did all that hardware get you? A series of buzzing noises you could learn to memorize—that’s the doorbell, that other buzzing is your name. Buzzing wasn’t hearing. He was deaf. He had to get used to it. It was just taking more time than he thought it would.
Bonnie’s signing was awesome. It didn’t stop with her hands, knowing all the correct movements. Like dancing, she used her body to give each sign her personal signature. If she was telling about a hike she’d taken over the weekend, she put you right there: the smell of piñon, cold wind stinging your face, hawks circling overhead in a clean blue sky. You watched her hands sign “dusty trail” and smelled the dirt under her boots, felt each loose stone she stopped to turn over, and saw those she chose to pocket. Her face was dark amber, her skin smooth and clear. Her flint-gray eyes reminded him of Echo’s, if that wasn’t a stupid comparison to make—they were always wide open and looked slightly wet. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced, and except for how skinny she was, she looked like a full-blooded Navajo. Kennedy said she wasn’t, she was more like Peter, a mixture of different tribes and races, and that she sometimes felt like she didn’t belong anywhere because of her background. She was signing with her seatmate, Ruth Castro, now. Wat
er…whales…color…fishes…She signed so fast Peter only caught half of what she was saying. Unashamedly her face contributed to the signing in a sensuous way. Her eyes opened wide as she described the whales. Big fish! Mammal, Peter wanted to tell her, warm-blooded like us. Mostly her facial expressions worked because she wasn’t afraid to use them. Peter was. In the mirror it looked completely bogus. He couldn’t even come close to mimicking her expressions without looking like a total idiot. As if to punish him for his thoughts, she turned in her chair, looked right at him.
“Peter,” she signed, “come here.” He had to acknowledge her. He had to go.
She was reading a library book about some ancient hokey sea adventure. Jacques Cousteau—another candidate for Dad of the Year. Jacques always stayed aboard while his sons swam with the barracudas. She opened the book to a photograph of a huge wave combing toward the shore of some unspoiled island. “Waves,” she signed. “You swim waves in California?”
He nodded.
“You…” she frowned, then finger-spelled, “s-u-r-f?”
He nodded his fist for yes. He’d surfed maybe a dozen times; surfboards weren’t his thing. They got in the way of riding the wave.
“Tell me how.”
He thought a minute. With his hands he tried to show her the curl of waves unfolding, spreading his fingers out, then raking them back in. “They rock,” he signed, striking his fists.
She looked at his hands and frowned. “Hard?”
“No,” he said, squeezing his hands, “soft.”
“Oh, you mean rock, like sway,” she finger-spelled, then signed “rock” correctly, smiling gently at his confusion.
He felt his face darken with embarrassment. “Yes. Wet. Salt. Cool. Beautiful,” he signed frantically. “You find currents and ride. Words can’t explain waves. Wish I could show you.”
She nodded, her smile probably just good manners, but around her, he could see the others snickering. Ruth tugged Bonnie’s arm, and together they leaned back into the pages. Bonnie’s braid fell across her arm, and she was lost again in the underwater world she could only imagine, the one he had taken for granted. Back in his seat Peter couldn’t find his place in his book. Stephen King was a geek, determined to freak people out, taking a thousand pages to populate every dark corner with a monster. Major time waste. For really scary, all he had to do was take away a guy’s hearing and then try and have him talk to a girl.
Fifteen minutes until lunch. Linder was busy tutoring two slowpokes. Why couldn’t he have spared everyone and just died in the fucking coma?
At lunch the shitheads mimicked his clumsy sign while he ate, until he couldn’t finish the broccoli and pasta in front of him, so he left to take a walk around the grounds. Even though outside it was cold enough to snow at any moment, it felt peaceful. Tall, thick-trunked trees, soft yellow-colored buildings, and it wasn’t likely anybody from the old cemetery next door would come out to torture him. Someday, when he got the chance, he meant to explore that place, read all the names on the gravestones. Maybe Bonnie might go too. She didn’t seem like the kind of girl who’d get spooked in a graveyard. She’d asked him a question. But for all her retained speech, maybe in defiance of her upbringing as part of the hearing world, she never talked in class. The other kids accepted Bonnie as deaf, but she was a girl, and they were always nicer to girls. Maybe it took longer for them to do that if you were a new guy. Or didn’t look quite as Indian. He knew how white he looked compared to all of them. Was it his fault his color didn’t show? Or did the people at Riverwall think because his dad made movies he’d come from some Hollywood-Disneyland—Tar Pits kind of town, and was scaling down, slumming his shameful deafness here in New Mexico?
Occasionally, when Bonnie gave him a good-morning smile, took the time to correct his lame attempts at signing without managing to go totally aggro over it, he thought she might like him just a little bit. He wondered for the millionth time just what it would be like to touch her, to accidentally brush against her brown hand once.
But here in Riverwall beautiful Indian girls were not interested in flabby seven-eighths-white boys, hearing or otherwise. It had been so long since he’d swum his stomach muscles were gone—nothing there but loose flesh. His hair was growing out a weird shade that looked about the color of burnt-umber shoe polish. He wasn’t even special enough to be ordinary; nothing he was, nothing he did, was so outstanding it would grab her attention. Sometimes she looked at him like it pissed her off if he smiled back at her, or turned to her girlfriends when he signed “hello,” signing away from him when he walked by in the cafeteria or outside the classrooms. He would never fit in here. Might as well give it up.
In California he’d worked being alone to an art, because being a loner elevated you in status. Peter Sweetwater? Oh, he never eats lunch, he stands over by the fence and reads. He’s like, this total philosopher or something. He only did it because it was easier than having to talk to people for an hour. It was an act then, and like some parental threat, his scheme had come back to haunt him. He wanted friends, people who heard the same rushing gray nothing that he did and knew how to walk away from the world of concerts and MTV and find an equivalent in this one. That was why, when Nori told him about Riverwall, he’d wanted to come. It was more about trudging off to where he belonged than slicing himself up between his parents after the divorce, though he didn’t really relish having to pick between them. Okay, so Riverwall hadn’t turned out like he planned, and nobody here wanted anything to do with him. Bottom line—it was easier to be lonely here than choked to death in the land of waves and movie stars, packing your life into a suitcase every other weekend.
At night Bonnie visited without hesitation—in his dreams she was a regular. Oh, she had plenty of company. His dog, Echo, leaping around the perimeter of the pool at Harbor, anxious for his cue that the coach was off in his office and she could join him in the water. Why couldn’t people be easy with each other, the way dogs loved everyone? Did everything get weird once you started having sex? He spent a lot of time thinking about it, though he’d never done it—yet. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure if he wanted to—look what that had done to adults. His father, especially, whose new wife looked like she’d gotten her braces taken off last month. Some people refused to buy into that marriage crap, like Deeter. Deeter was cool. He kept life simple. Sure, he had girlfriends, but he stayed single. He quit working before he turned senile, and lived off his savings account. He hadn’t changed either, just because Peter had gone deaf. He still made jokes and challenged him to swimming races. Deeter and Nori were about the only ones who still acted normal.
Crazy Aunt Nori—she sent him faxes once or twice a week, just notes about what she was up to, nothing vital, but he could tell it made an impression on the other kids. Probably they thought it was more Hollywood tactics, but they didn’t know Nori, who didn’t think it was worth her time to wait for anything, including the time it took the TDD operator to translate her intimate thoughts. She modemed her news instead, and once or twice a week, Peter got called into the office to pick up the faxes from Mrs. Woodward, whose frown as she handed them over had “spoiled brat” written all over it.
But his mother, his father, his father’s wife…those bottomless worries occupied his thinking twenty-four hours a day. He’d learned how to replace them the moment they came into his head by imagining Bonnie Tsosie, looking him in the face, speaking clearly so he could speech-read her dark mouth, acknowledging that they two were more alike than the others, smiling, him smiling back, and then somehow, though this part wasn’t very clear, the fantasy always ended with the two of them kissing.
He was alone in his dorm room, now that Berto had gone home sick. For months Berto had made a career of blaming Peter for how tired he was, having to constantly show around the lame new kid, but it turned out Berto had mono, not some terminal roommate disorder. He might be gone as long as a month, which meant Peter would have the room to himself, and privacy, however lon
ely, sounded good. Down the hall he could feel the throbbing floors, which meant someone had his stereo turned up full bore. You could do that here. No one went off on you until late, when the dorm staffers came back to their quarters. Sometimes he could recognize the beat of certain songs: Tone Loc’s “Funky Cold Medina,” Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit.” Not exactly MTV’s top ten, but stuff with heavy bass was the music of choice because you could feel the vibrations, enter into the rhythm through the baseline. More than anything, he missed music, but not those rank old songs. He’d give anything to hear some Bob Marley, just one cut off the Legend CD. “Is This Love” would be killer. “We’ll share each other on my single bed….” But the song wasn’t much more than a looping rhythm without Marley’s voice, and what came through the dorm walls today was nothing more than pounding, sort of like a bad headache minus the pain.
He got up and took down his Basic text. He needed to spend more time practicing his signs so he wouldn’t screw up again, like he had with Bonnie. But alone in his room he didn’t feel like pushing his aching fingers through the drills again, when there was nobody there to sign “whoops,” when you got it wrong, or “way to go,” when you got it right. He glanced over at Berto’s side of the room. On his bulletin board he’d tacked pictures of his family standing next to a fading red barn with one shabby mule occupant. Berto had two brothers and a sister. He also had a World Wrestling Federation poster, his prized possession, the Hulkster glistening like some oiled blond sausage. Maybe Peter would customize it while Berto was home—give the Hulk a few ballpoint tattoos, an eyepatch.
Peter’s side was empty blue cinder-block wall. He kept Nori’s faxes rolled into a cylinder on his bookshelf, next to his textbooks. On his small, battered desk, he unlocked the Apple system and turned on his Mac, scrolling to his journal files. There were two. One contained stuff he’d written in California, the other was junk he was writing here at Riverwall. His hand hesitated on the mouse as he studied the file icons. Someday he would get the courage to go back and read about his old life. It was like looking into some giant garbage disposal, seeing it all mixed up in there: his friends who were no longer his friends, his mother and father framed in a permanent argument, the waves Bonnie Tsosie dreamed about, the old house with the bay right next to the deck; outside, the sunny weather like a painted backdrop. The new journal entry he’d titled, “Try to Remember Mexico.”
Blue Rodeo Page 16