by Will Weaver
“After that, after my make-over, nobody looked at me twice. I went most anywhere I wanted. I even started to attend meetings.” Tom grinned. “Whenever there was a group of men arguing and heading toward the same door, I tagged along. I’d just merge in and glance down at my gold watch as I slid through the door with the rest of them. Once I got into a meeting with Humphrey, who was Senator then, and a bunch of congressmen. Went to a lot of Senate hearings. You name it. It was a game—see how many meetings I could get into.
“Only one problem, it was easy to get in but then I’d be stuck there. So I started to listen. I started to hear what went on. I listened to how a law got on the books. I listened as laws got kicked around and beaten so full of holes they wouldn’t hold roofer’s tar in January,” Tom said, his eyes narrowing. He paused. “That’s when I started to get pissed. Every night when I came back to Fred’s apartment I told about what’d I seen that day, about the shit I saw go down in those meetings. I told him I thought most of those white fuckers should be roofing instead of walking around with briefcases in their hands and real gold watches on their wrists.”
Guy watched Tom’s face as he talked. His jaw was clenched. His eyes, focused somewhere far off through the windshield, blazed obsidian black.
“‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ Fred would say. Over and over he’d say that—‘So what do you want me to do about it?’ The more shit I told him about, the more he’d say that, sitting there grinning and saying, ‘So what do you want me to do about it?’
“I remember once shouting, ‘Something—do something!’ He leaped clear across the room,” Tom said. He smiled briefly. “Fred played basketball for some attorneys’ team. Anyway, he had me up against the wall in a second. ‘I am doing something,’ he said, ‘but what about you, boy, huh boy? Huh, boy?’
“I went back to Minneapolis the next day. Six months later I finished the high school stuff with a general equivalency diploma. I stayed on with Clements and took bus #16A every day to the University of Minnesota and finished the undergrad degree in three years. Right after that I went on to law school there. I had lousy grades but the law school was desperate for a little color in its classrooms.” Tom paused to stare off across the reservation. “Some days I can’t believe I did it. But then again, Fred Clements said he’d send a bunch of big niggers from Washington to work me over if I didn’t finish.” Tom grinned. “I think he was serious too. Whenever I saw a black guy on campus I had this flash that he was some spy sent by Fred Clements. Anyway, when I finished, I came back to White Earth.”
25
Listening to Tom, driving by memory down the reservation roads, Guy had without thinking brought the Mercedes to Tom’s house. Or rather the yard where Tom’s house used to be. Tom looked up. His mouth came open.
“Turd—Jesus, I didn’t mean . . . ,” Guy said. He began to speed up.
“Wait, it’s all right,” Tom said. “I never drive down this road. I should but I never do. Stop.”
Guy braked the Mercedes. He backed up and pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine. Tom stared for a moment, then slowly got out.
Trees formed a three-sided backdrop for the yard. Still whiter green above, dusty brown below, the jack pines were silent, unmoving. Centered in the open space was Tom’s house. All that remained were the low, square walls of the concrete footings. Inside their perimeter was the rusted hump of the oil burner. A mattress burned clear of its stuffing, now a Medusa’s head of wire coils. Charred timbers from the fallen roof.
Tom walked slowly forward. At the opening of the doorway he nudged the sill with his boot. The wood crumbled away. He stepped inside. Guy followed. The floor of the house was now a foot of muddy, wet ashes that smelled like lye. Like the soap Guy’s grandmother had always made, charcoal and tallow and lye.
The neck of a whiskey bottle protruded from the black debris; Tom stooped to pull it free. He stared at the bottle, then flung it against the concrete, where it shattered. A woodpecker flapped from a nearby tree to one deeper in the pines.
A white enamel kitchen range, drooped from the great heat, lay on its side. Tom heaved it upright. Then he stared down at the clean square where the range had lain. Slowly he bent down and brought up in his hand a tiny, rusty aluminum man. The little man was made from a snuff tin.
“Jesus,” Tom whispered. “My Flying Man.” He held up the little doll to Guy. “My mother made this,” he said. “This is mine. She made this.” Tom’s voice broke. His eyes glazed with tears. In the sunlight he looked blind. “Jesus Christ, she made this.” He dropped to his knees in the ashes and began to sift through them with his bare hands.
“Tom—no,” Guy said. He stepped toward Tom, but then stopped. He watched him crawl and dig and cry. When he stopped digging and only cried, Guy pulled him from the soot and held him. Tom buried his face in Guy’s neck. His big chest heaved. Guy held him and rocked back and forth, back and forth.
After a while, Guy got Tom into the car. Tom stared down at the Flying Man doll in his hands. He rubbed at its rust.
“You all right?” Guy asked again.
Tom nodded.
Guy sneezed from the ash in his nose. They were both covered with soot and ash, like coal miners just come up to daylight. He started the engine. “Let’s drive to my mother’s place,” Guy said. “We can clean up there.”
Tom looked up slowly, as if he had not heard.
“My mother’s place. Do you know where she lives?” Guy repeated.
Tom nodded.
“Where, then?”
“With another man,” Tom said. He turned for Guy’s reaction.
Guy shrugged. “Most people live with someone.”
They came to a crossroad. “Right or left?”
“Left,” Tom said. They drove on.
“An Indian man,” Tom said after another mile.
Guy was silent.
“Right again,” Tom said. Guy turned down a narrow road.
“So what’s this guy like?” Guy said.
Tom paused. “Decent most of the time, I guess. Not around much, sometimes. There,” Tom said, pointing ahead to a small, newly painted white house just off the road into the trees. Guy turned into the driveway. The mailbox carried no name.
They got out. Tom stood brushing off his clothes as Guy went to the door.
“What on earth happened to you?” Madeline said. She stared at Guy’s clothes. Then she saw Tom behind. “Oh no,” she said softly.
“Tom’s okay,” Guy said. “We stopped at his folks’ house, looked around, got dirty. Tom said he knew where you lived, so we thought we’d stop.”
“Knew where I lived . . . ,” Madeline said. She looked up to Guy. “You didn’t know? You didn’t get my letters?” she said quickly.
“Got your letters. But I haven’t read them all. When I got to the one about Tom’s parents I stopped reading and went to find him.”
“And now you’re here.”
Guy smiled.
“Well . . . come in.”
They both turned to Tom, who stood bent over brushing his pants.
“Tom . . . ,” Guy called.
“No, go on in,” Tom said. “I’m too dirty.”
“You better come in, too, Tom,” Madeline said.
Inside, Guy could smell bread. Plants hung by the windows. Furry-leaved violets covered a card table. Through a short hallway Guy could see the varnished pine floor of the living room and Madeline’s small claw-footed writing desk. Atop the desk sat her china lamp with its glass, rose-petaled shade. For an instant the house was Guy’s when he was small.
But on a rug by the kitchen door sat a pair of moccasins, men’s, large. Above the moccasins hung a man’s winter parka.
“You both better clean up first,” Madeline said. Guy took the kitchen sink. Tom walke
d down the hallway to the bathroom. Madeline measured spoons of coffee into the basket of the percolator.
Guy returned to the kitchen. They started to speak.
Guy waited. “So how’s your father?” Madeline said again.
“Drinking hard,” Guy said.
She nodded. She turned on the burner and adjusted the blue flame. She remained with her back to Guy. She looked out the window to the bird feeder, the one she’d had on the farm. “I’m expecting robins any day,” she said. “The redpolls are gone. Robins never come until they go.”
Guy waited. He looked about the kitchen again. “Cozy house,” he said.
“Right after the robins come the brown thrushes. I always like the brown thrushes—they’re so—”
Guy walked up behind his mother and put his hands on her shoulders. “Tom told me,” he said. “You’re living with someone. I can handle that. Your boy is thirty years old, you know.”
His mother turned. But she wouldn’t look him in the face or smile. “I hope you can handle it,” she murmured.
Tom came back into the kitchen. His brown face was scrubbed clean. He was wearing a different shirt. Guy stared. Tom crossed the kitchen toward the moccasins on the rug. Suddenly Guy’s vision contracted until he saw only Tom’s feet. In slow motion Tom’s black-stockinged feet passed over the white linoleum squares like dominos falling. His feet lifted, first left, then right, and slid themselves into the moccasins.
That afternoon Madeline explained. Guy and Tom listened.
“You read some of my letters,” Madeline said to Guy. “The early ones make sense. The later ones . . . I was getting a little crazy by then.”
She told of her trips from the farm to Winnipeg, to Fargo, to Duluth, eventually to anywhere but the farm. Sometimes she was gone for days. Since Martin would give her no money, she slept in the seat of the Cutlass at night. Days she walked. She walked through the stores and shopping malls and museums. Usually she was hungry. Once she stole a bag of peaches rather than drive back to the farm, where there was a refrigerator full with half of a Holstein steer.
“But it was fun,” she said, her brown eyes shining. “For the first time in my life I answered to no one for days at a time. I only had myself to think about and look after.”
“I started to go into bars,” she said, “at first only during the middle of the day, mainly for the free popcorn and peanuts. But the daytime bar people were friendly, kind, especially the old men who played cards and dice. They’d buy me a beer just so I’d sit and talk with them. Or listen, rather. They talked and I listened, sometimes for hours.
“So I got to like the bars. The music, the pool tables, the colored lights, the dimness, but especially the sound of people talking. In bars people talked; suddenly that was important to me. People didn’t mind telling you things about themselves, about their lives. They’d tell you the biggest mistakes they’d made, what they’d do different. The old men especially. They’d tell you their whole life story. Sometimes they would cry and I’d cry too. And they’d keep buying me beer as if they were afraid I was going to leave before they’d finished.
“But it got out of hand,” Madeline said abruptly. She rose and poured more coffee. “The bars seemed so homey that I’d end up sitting there drinking beer all afternoon. Sometimes whiskey along with the beer. Just drinking and listening. Then one day I remember suddenly seeing myself—hearing myself—as if I were outside of my body. I was talking. I was the old-timer, the barfly. I was telling some younger guy who sold linen supplies to high schools all about my life.
“I remember suddenly leaping off my barstool. I frightened the linen salesman nearly to death. I stood there halfway between the bar and the front door. At that moment my life had only two parts to it—walking out the door or staying in the bar a little longer. I thought about each. I thought how out on the street if you saw someone who looked terribly sad or terribly angry and you walked up to him and asked him what was the matter—or if you yourself were depressed or angry and wanted to talk about it—people would think you were crazy. But if the same thing happened in a bar, people wouldn’t think you were crazy, only drunk. So I chose drunk.”
Guy smiled but Madeline didn’t.
“That’s when I began to see Tom in the bars,” she continued. “I got so I didn’t feel the need to drive a hundred miles to get drunk. It was just as easy in and around Flatwater. But Tom had started this program through the Tribal Center. He called it Firewater Rescue. Weekend nights he drove this van around to all the bars near the reservation. He loaded up drunken Indians and delivered them back to the reservation so they didn’t kill themselves fighting or on the highway. He called the van the Firewater Express. He still drives it on Saturday nights and most nights during ricing season.
“Anyway, I, as they say, had ‘developed a taste.’ So whenever Tom found me drunk he would load me up in the Firewater Express and deliver me back home. This worked fine. But then there was Martin,” she said. She paused and looked out the window to the trees. “I mean, what was he to think? Here comes a vanload of drunken Indians and me with them. Once he went after Tom with a butcher knife. Tom managed to slam the door on Martin’s arm and drive off fast. Then Martin started keeping his .30-.30 by the door. After that, whenever Tom found me I’d fight him so he wouldn’t take me home and get himself shot. So he started to take me to his house to sleep it off.
“Finally Tom made me stay here at his house. He put me through the reservation detox program, got me a part-time job at the Tribal Center in the kids’ reading program—said I was part Canadian-Indian.” Madeline smiled. “That was a year ago. Now I live here, cook, keep house for Tom. Things are okay now, better than they’ve been for years.”
Guy swallowed. He turned to Tom. The Turd. The Turd had saved his mother. There was never any friend like the Turd. The Turd and Madeline living together now all made sense. Security for Madeline. Decent meals for Tom. It was perfect. For long moments when he had seen Tom put on those moccasins he had thought . . . But that was completely crazy. No. Everything made sense.
Then Guy told his story. He talked about California. His first job—how he’d waited in a hot lobby full of Mexicans and bikers for a job that said only “General Labor.” How a man had come out of the front office with a sheaf of applications in hand and called out, “Who’s the one from Minnesota?”
How the job had been scrubbing the insides of empty acid tanks and running plastic pipe and making wooden pallets for water to run through beneath the tanks.
How he worked a hundred hours a week setting up the tanks and stamping machines and drills for the owners, who spoke only German when they were alone.
How soon the sheets of copper came to the loading door and were cut in rough squares. How pony-tailed silk screeners transferred photos of circuitry onto the copper with their ink; then how the acid baths etched away all the bare copper except that covered by ink. And how then the ink was washed off the tiny trails and the circuitry remained.
How the company made and sold the printed circuit boards as fast as it could produce them. How the Germans worked Guy for a month at each station, then made him general manager.
How the wrong papers once came to his office and he saw the company’s profit figures. He made one thousand dollars a month, the Germans ten thousand each.
How he began to buy the Germans’ leftover equipment, old acid baths and etching machines.
How once a bearded, skinny man approached him outside the company and said he had a pinball game that needed circuit boards but he had no money and no credit.
How Guy went to the man’s garage and spent a whole afternoon batting a little gray ball on a TV screen. How the man called the game Pong.
How the Pong circuit boards were nothing special to make, so Guy began to make them at night in the basement of his apartment building.
How within six months Guy had quit the Germans, rented a garage, and hired two Mexicans to help him make the Pong circuit boards. How within a year the skinny Pong man was driving a 280 SL and Guy had a company as big as the Germans’.
How there were lots of Minnesotans in California. How bars were known by their states. How at the Minnesota Bar sandy-haired people drank until last call and talked of home. How most of them eventually returned to the Midwest and then talked about California the rest of their lives.
It was late when Guy finished. Madeline had a meeting at the Humphrey Center. Guy and Tom drove down to Doc’s for some food.
“Back door,” Tom said as Guy turned into the parking lot. “I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity here.”
They took a dim booth and ate a hamburger that was mostly onions, and french fries that were mostly cold. Guy drank a Hamm’s, Tom a 7-Up. They sat with their knees touching and talked more. About California. About Cassandra Silver, about Howard Stanbrook. Midway through their burgers, Guy saw some men in seed-corn caps looking their way. On the bar were some white envelopes and open pages of their contents. Guy remembered the postman and his box full of bad-news letters. “Eat up,” Guy said, nodding toward the bar.
“Shit,” Tom muttered when he saw the men. They finished their burgers, drained their glasses, and headed toward the back door.