Peter smiled sleepily, tucking his jacket up under his head for a pillow. Not in the least interested in abandoning his nap to follow her conversation or her crude signing, he was going to be little company on the drive to Shiprock. She turned her attention back to Joe. “So, any little underwear detectives running around Blue Dog, scouting the elementary-school-crowd females?”
“Ain’t heard of any so far. Every day, though, I’m looking hard for the right woman to bear me a mess of daughters.”
“I thought all men wanted sons.”
“Few sons would be okay. Teach ’em to team-rope. But daughters, now, they take care of you, cook up pots of good-smelling eats, listen to your advice. You take care your own daddy?”
“I used to. He’s dead.”
“That’s too bad. Old people can tell you stuff, help you live your life in real smart ways. You like horses?”
She uncrossed her long legs and rubbed her calves, which beneath the Lycra-and-cotton fabric, felt about the temperature of the hamburger section in the market. “Set me on a halfway decent quarter horse, I can whip the sissy boys at polo or leave them all behind, jumping fences.”
“Hmm.” Joe looked impressed. “You prejudice against the mule?”
“The mule?” Nori studied this good-looking Navajo driving the borrowed truck. He wasn’t like the Indians she came across in the bars she frequented in Cave Creek, north of Phoenix. They sat in dark corners nursing the same beer all night or betting on each others’ games for quarters and pitchers, shooting pool with serious intensity, silver bracelets glinting off their dark arms sexily, in a way white men could never pull off. She tried to imagine Joe in Little Winston’s, her favorite haunt. He’d be asking all the pretty girls to slow dance, not taking no for an answer, trying to talk them into taking him home, and getting the crap beat out of him by rednecks who didn’t like Navs moving in on their territory. She could see Joe in the alley behind Winston’s, cactus studding the butt of his jeans, that silver tooth poking through his lip courtesy of their fists, still grinning, certain whatever few lumps he garnered were worth time with a pretty girl. “Mules. Come on, what’s the punch line, Joe?”
“There ain’t one. Mules’re no good for roping, but you can’t beat ’em for going places. I got one. You can meet him tonight. He’s living over with Verbena’s Minnie until it gets warm again.”
Nori sighed. “Maybe I should have stayed back with the two lovebirds by the woodstove. I’m starting to find it hard to believe it will ever get warm again.”
“Oh, you ditch the poor-sister routine, it might get tropical warm tonight.”
“Poor sister?” She pointed a magenta porcelain nail at him “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can read a very complicated situation by sharing Christmas dinner with me.”
“Before this night’s over, we’ll share more than dinner, something tells me.”
“Well, don’t go betting your mule on it. How long till we arrive at this mythical party?”
“Relax. You’re on Indian time now. Sing your favorite song. Dream some good summer dreams to warm you up. We got plenty of time for talking. By time we get to Youngcloud’s, you and me’ll be friends for life.”
Lacking even the energy to say she doubted him, Nori opted out of the conversation entirely and looked out her window. Dirtied by tire tracks and irregularly shaped stains of dog pee, the snowfall along the highway possessed little of the prettiness common to Blue Dog’s snow-dusted Victorian houses off Main Street. She’d walked by them after having breakfast downtown two days in a row before gathering the nerve to come to her sister’s. They reminded her of their old family home in Deerfield, the three-story house nowhere near as charming, but with wonderful nooks and attic rooms for creating your own personal hideouts Mag filled hers with painting stuff, stuck those plastic hippie daisy decals on the painted wood floor, put up posters of Janis Joplin and spun 45s on her record player. Nori’s rooms were more about caging up squirrels she’d managed to coerce into trading their freedom for peanuts. Or her tropical fish tank, which ended in disaster when the power went out and their water turned frigid. Mag told her that would happen, and that she’d neglect the squirrels, too. Mag always knew the grim future. She took the responsible, long view of things, making Nori, no matter how many A’s she got on her report card, emerge looking like a flake. But for all their years together, the squabbles, the silences, Mag had never once turned her away as coldly as she had on Thanksgiving. She knew her sister was pissed off—that one night she slept with Deeter had really punched her buttons. But she had that cowpoke now, so why wouldn’t she forgive her? The lobby of the Farmington Holiday Inn—two stars were better than none—with its rattling Coke machine and ever-present stench of Carpet Fresh, made Nori feel more at home than eating Christmas dinner in the farmhouse. Damn, she hated it when her mind started going off like this. Would this road leading to Shiprock ever end?
The few houses they passed on the highway were just a notch above hovels, deteriorating right through their patched roofs and dented siding. Those strung with lights blinked feebly where the bulbs weren’t burned out altogether. When you began to feel sorry for yourself, all you needed to do was look around—someone else always had it worse than you did. Or you could open the Lew Magram catalog, order a silk blazer, anticipate its arrival. That worked until the bill arrived.
Nori braced herself as Joe drove them slowly down the rutted road leading onto reservation land. But for the snow, any one of these paint-peeling prefab boxes could be a hard part of Phoenix, somewhere she avoided driving through even with her doors and windows locked. She’d traveled all over the world with her job—in Munich, watched Germans celebrate with flowing beer and mass craziness. In Portugal lavish religious holiday custom disguised the poverty until everything looked so quaint she wanted it on a postcard, a picturesque self-contained memory, hers to keep forever. Deep down, though, she believed all towns were the same, halfheartedly making a stab at holidays they couldn’t afford, fooling only the foolish, and running the MasterCard up to alarming heights in the process.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch—farmhouse—whatever-the-hell you wanted to call it, her sister Mag was no doubt in the process of giving Owen the shepherd his hour of Christmas cheer—and wasn’t that a little crèche scene in itself? She laughed aloud, imagining the two of them—Owen, his cowboy witticisms and dinner prayers, and her sister, all that caged-up desire cut loose.
“You got a nice laugh there.” Joe took off his hat and cocked it over Peter’s head, who was sleeping between them. “Glad you decided to ride along.”
“What was I supposed to do, stay at the house and listen to them pant and moan upstairs?”
“Sounds like you might be wishing you was back there instead of your sister.”
She made a disgusted sound in her throat. “Trust me. The last thing I need is a cowboy draining my bank account. I can do that fast enough by myself.”
“Maggie says you got a big fancy job in the whiteman medical world. I myself have an interest in medicine. You one of them paramedicals?”
“No, I’m in sales. I sell saline and silicone implants to physicians.”
“Saline and silly what?”
“Silicone implants. Don’t pretend you haven’t heard of them.”
“Well, maybe I heard of them. Explain ’em to me, I’ll stop you if it sounds familiar.”
She sighed, automatically going into her simplest sales pitch. “Beneath a thin pocket of plastic, a medical-grade silicone or saline gets deposited, and then shaped like human tissue to form a prosthesis. What’s nifty is the material approximates the same weight as normal body tissue, and it feels similar inside the body. They were calling it a major breakthrough until the FDA started blaming it for everything from nosebleeds to cancer.”
“What do people need them for?”
“To augment areas of the body where they believe tissue deficiencies exist. Body builders after larger muscle mass, men
who’ve lost their precious testicles for one reason or another, but most commonly women seeking larger breasts.”
“Don’t sound like medicine to me. Sounds more like too much looking in the mirror.”
“Plastic surgery’s not always about looking beautiful. Women who lose a breast to the big C have a right to look normal again. Or if they didn’t get that much to begin with, and it’s making them obsess, why not have implants put in? La-la, instant D cups, the doctor gets rich, woman gets her underwire bra, husband has two new toys to play with, and I get a fat commission.”
Joe grinned, and she realized he’d been playing her for a fool. Just another nutwood making her yammer on about tits for a cheap thrill.
“Now tell me why a woman want something fake like that inside her body?”
She’d had enough of this game. “Joe, cut the shit. It’s Christmas, my sister is back there getting laid, I’m sure as hell not, and unless you or Pete have fevers, all three of our asses are freezing to death on this less-than-comfortable seat.”
Between them Peter began to snore. Nori shook her head. “Will you listen to him!”
“All tired out from feeding sheep. That boy gets up too early.”
The cowboy hat began to tip, and Nori removed it, set it in her lap, smoothed Peter’s ragged hair back away from his face. At her touch Peter sighed and the snoring ceased. Though she knew he had no way of ever hearing her again, she couldn’t make herself stop speaking to her nephew as if he always would. His face, not yet bristled with whiskers, was innocent, untempered by testosterone and male posturing. She wished she could freeze time, believe in her heart he would always respect her, keep Pete fifteen forever. “You’re going to get your mom’s hopes up, Pete. She’ll want you here for the whole summer.”
Joe said, “All summer be so bad? He could get job working in town. Lots of kids do.”
“He’s deaf, Joe. What’s he going to do? Intuit what people want on their burgers?”
“You must feel worse about his broke ears than he does, if you’re worrying on it that hard. Lots of jobs it’s better if you don’t hear nothing. Don’t need twenty-twenty ears to saw boards or feed animals. Or throw newspapers at a mailbox.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Nori rested one of her pricey boots on the dashboard.
“Them boots of yours look wicked soft, but I sure bet you can’t do much work in them.”
“I had them handmade down at Paul Bond’s in Nogales, by this old rodeo cowboy. He makes separate molds of your feet. You sit in this chair and he measures each foot, lets you choose the skins and how you want the designs to go. Made me feel like a princess when he did it. And they fit like a goddamn glove. They’re pretty, but I think I hate them.”
“Nothing in life worth hating. Boots are boots. I always got to stick cardboard in bottom of mine. Got bad feet after the war.”
“Which war?”
“One everyone tries to forget. Nam.”
“Imagine. I was about ten when you were off killing the enemy.”
He kept his eyes on the road, and his mouth tightened into a thin line. “You was lucky to get born when you did, and a woman.”
“Because I couldn’t get drafted?”
He nodded. “Plus you possess powers to make babies, that’s real medicine.”
“I don’t know about that. I think my sister’s generation was the last one that could ever hope to relax a little, take time off to have a real life, reproduce. This time I’m taking off now I had to steal.”
“Busy job like that must make you lot of money.”
“Hell, I’ll be out there waitressing if this bullshit with the FDA and the implants doesn’t die down.”
“Man! All you working girls got trash mouths. How come you swear so much?”
She unscrewed a tube of lipstick that matched her nails and redid her mouth. “Because we can get away with it.”
“It scares men.”
“Another good reason to do it.”
“I’d sure love to see you in a waitress uniform.”
“I’ll bet you would. But I intend to go down fighting with the FDA. I’ve got thirty claims to discount every one of theirs. It’s totally ridiculous. As if silicone is some new invention. Christ! Every time you get a needle inserted for an IV, a shot, blood drawn, the damn thing’s coated with silicone. Goes right into your bloodstream. Nobody’s died of that yet that I’ve heard of.”
“Sounds like you’re trying hard to convince yourself. If you hate that job, why you don’t quit and find another one?”
“When did I say I hated it?”
Joe slowed to make a left turn onto a slick driveway where pickup trucks were parked three and four deep in front of a well-lit house, twin to every one of its neighbors. “Honey, you didn’t have to.”
Peter, fully awake now and smoothing down his corners, was itchy, anxious to get going. “Hurry up!” he signed.
“Keep your pants on, sport,” Nori said. “And I mean that literally.”
Unfolding his handkerchief outside the truck, Joe revealed a dozen worse-for-wear sugar cubes. “Been carrying these three days now. They give ’em away free at coffee shop in town. For my mule. Brought Lightning this sugar on account of he’s a Christian mule, this here being one of his most holy days.”
Standing there ankle deep in the grimy snow, the snow and cold no more bothersome to him than a buzzing housefly, Joe could have been one of the wise men who never made it into the catechism stories. Nori hugged herself against the cold. “Joe Yazzi, you’re like one massive concentrate of every greasy pickup line I’ve ever heard.”
“I know,” he said back, smiling, the silver tooth revealing itself for one brief flash. “But pretty harmless. Just one more thing. Case no one’s ever told you, you don’t need those implants.”
“Will you guys come on?” Peter yelled, stamping his foot, his squeaky voice all adolescent urgency and nervous expectation.
Inside the Youngcloud house, adults and rambunctious children crowded the kitchen and living room, each of them balancing wobbly paper plates of food. His mother’s leftovers were duly distributed and disappeared in ten minutes. He watched Nori accept a serving of corncake from Joe, even though she kept telling him she wasn’t hungry, and Peter knew for a fact that she only ate one meal a day in order to stay so skinny. Joe, on the other hand, bottomless-stomach man, methodically made his way through the crowd and another full meal, gleaning something tasty from every plate he passed. Peter’s stomach was as tense as his jaw muscles.
The reason for his tension sat across the room. Bonnie. Her pink headband was a candy-colored stripe against her long dark hair, hanging loose, the way he liked it best. Seeing her, he couldn’t have gotten both his jaws to cooperate in the act of chewing without biting his cheeks or choking to death. At once every sign he knew seemed to fly out of his head. He watched as she tucked her loose hair behind one ear, her hands in perpetual motion as she signed with the girl who was refilling cups with a pungent-smelling cider. Even her hearing aid, that yellowing clear plastic arc at her hairline, looked somehow attractive. His knee joints would loosen and collapse if he had to get up and walk over there. If he didn’t find the nerve to try, later he’d beat himself up for hairing out. The massive, muscled guys fooling with guitars alongside her must have been her brothers; she’d told him her whole family were musicians, and there was enough family resemblance in the broad faces to back his impression.
They had purple Vox Flying V guitars, cheap copies of the late-fifties originals, chrome whammy bars Peter thought were an insult to the original Bigsby. Back in California Travis’d had one. It spewed too much treble, he remembered, and was prone to serious string buzz. After six months it developed a warped neck, and Trav traded it to some eighth grader for a Baggie of sinsemilla. The brothers were tuning up now. He wondered how much of their music Bonnie could make out, and what it sounded like to her. If it was faint, like somebody’s radio tuned low, o
r if maybe it faded in and out, muffled, like the way he recalled it could if you weren’t listening closely, like if you didn’t think the song was important.
He tried to think of the perfect music to go with this night. On Christmas in California, his mother played unbelievably stupid Christmas CDs: that hallelujah choir bullshit, Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, and this one tolerable disc, Blue Yule, which had some funky R&B stuff. Sometimes he spent whole days reciting songs in his head. Though the melodies were fading into unreliability, and that sometimes panicked him, nobody could take away the lyrics. Peter’d always meant to learn guitar. He was planning on settling down before he’d gotten sick. Get better grades so he could go to college and become something, learn guitar, saxophone, too, because it was a killer horn; maybe he’d even learn to sail Deeter’s sailboat, work his way up to them navigating a trip to Hawaii together. He wanted to see the North Shore, Maui, the Big Island. Instead, he was in a ratty government-issue house on an Indian reservation way out in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico, sitting in a crowded room while all around him strangers who’d endured centuries of poverty happily carried on in voices he would never hear and no amount of money could buy back. It was like being trapped inside some foreign flick, crappily dubbed, where the subtitles never match the actors’ movements.
He thought of his dad’s movie, that pet project he cared about more than his ex-wife or his deaf kid. Back at his mother’s, next to that weird painting she’d given him, the script waited for him to read it. Merry Christmas, son. That was as much of his dad as he was getting this year. As soon as the new squeeze spawned their perfect lovechild, the cards and presents from Dad would dwindle down to once a year—he’d seen that happen to his friends.
Suddenly everyone was finding jackets, making their way to the door—all this way and he hadn’t even spoken to her—now she would go. Joe palmed his shoulder and Nori finger-spelled, “Church,” then threw up her hands, as if she couldn’t quite believe she’d come all this way to get out of having to put on good clothes and feel guilty in the house of God, and Joe, of all people, wouldn’t let them escape.
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