by W. S. Penn
What did bother me was her talking. Gerri popped bennies and sucked on a new bottle of gin, chattering away like a child up beyond her bedtime who hopes the heavy hand of fate won’t fall if she can keep the company distracted or like a person who eats alone and develops a non-philosophical dialogue with the self as a defense against solitude. The only time she was silent was when she had the bottle in her mouth or the one time she slid her lips around me, sucking on me until I came. Her constant patter nearly made her dissolve, without any concentration from me.
When Brad found the motel and began banging down the door, I crawled out the bathroom window to sleep in the back seat of the car. Falling asleep, I dreamed I was a sea lion. I didn’t like being in the water; I feared some animal or thing might touch me below the surface. Yet I didn’t want to beach myself among the other mammals. Fear overcame desire and, as a ship looking a lot like the one in Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus” headed towards me, I slithered up beside a large lion who had the visage of Bernie Schneider. As the ship passed below, Bernie and I tied up white garbage bags and handed them to the crew of the ship.
I awoke with a pang to the sounds of Dempsy Dumpsters being lifted hydraulically and tipped into the back of a garbage truck.
I was smart enough, when Gerri and Brad found me in the car, not to let on that Gerri and I knew each other. When Brad tried to force Gerri to give him a blow job as the car cruised down the Arizona dawn, I kept my emotions disguised behind the veneer of impassive cheekbones, sensing the jealousy that had sprung up between us, like two crows strutting over the same carcass in the road.
Brad was dangerous, the fuse inside of him running just above peak load. Running drugs with Gerri put him in the company of nice people like Hell’s Angels or Gypsy Jokers. Loving people who had godfathers instead of Grandfathers. Having to talk like them had dissolved the distinction between what Brad dreamed he was and what he believed they were. When they dumped me in Chosposi, I was relieved.
Walking along beside Grandfather on the way to Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post, I thought about Bernie’s drowning, Tammy’s impossibility, of Gerri. With the slow disgust of youth, I said, “There’s not much to be said for experience, is there?”
Louis Applegate joined us, creeping tip-toed along the highway. Laura P. had the uncanny ability to hear soft sounds the farther away they were, and her fury would have been uncontained if she had heard Louis anywhere near her pots, his double thoughts modifying the symbols she had fired into the clay. Grandfather knew this, but he took a chance.
“Love is an acquired taste, Alley, like mayonnaise,” Grandfather said. “There will be few women in your life you can sleep with and not catch cold.”
Louis grinned noisily.
“Just you wait,” Grandfather said.
Laura P. had been listening when Louis grinned, as I discovered when we got home. Once she’d overcome her anger, standing before her Kachinas and softly singing longer than usual, she added to what Grandfather had told me.
“My mother,” she said, beginning to paint the endless mazes and spirals on her pots before firing, “was a beautiful woman. They say that even as a young girl everyone knew she would be the most beautiful of women, and before she was fourteen she already had several men who wished to marry her. When she was old enough for marriage, every boy who thought he wanted to marry her was given a chance to talk with her and convince her. She sat in a room of her parents’ house each day grinding corn. The boys would come one by one to the window of the room and talk with her and try to make her laugh or cry or converse with them—anything to hold her interest and keep her from beginning to grind her corn again. When a boy failed, she would ask him not to return, until there was only one boy left and to his house she sent all the corn she had ground and she and my father were engaged to be married.”
Finishing a large jar, she said, “I think you may be like my mother.” Laura P. climbed onto a low stool and took down a small multicolored pot with the faded design of Water Coyote. “Here,” she said, signing her name on the bottom with a paintbrush. “This one is yours. It can protect you from wasted conversations and keep you from dying of sleepiness.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You will, in time. Now leave me alone so I can finish these pots.”
8.
I took to Nature. Rather, much like a hippie, I took to the idea of Nature, and in the mornings after I’d walked to the trading post with him, I’d leave Grandfather on the path back to the mesa and wander the canyons and ravines. I was astonished by the way a single flower would bloom at the top of a cactus. The way frogs buried themselves in the mud of streambeds, surfacing after a night of rain to lay eggs and die, seemed almost religious. Small owls moved into the tenement holes left by woodpeckers in the Saguaro Cacti, refurbishing them, habitating them, hooting from them—or at noon, peering out from their darkness at the chubby boy who watched them. The desert was miracle and the world was code. All I had to do was to decipher it and to that end, I wanted to know the names of things.
“Gila,” the girl said. She was about my age. She refused to look directly at me.
“You fool,” she said. She wore a rattlesnake skin vest over a white T-shirt with ELVIS stenciled across her breasts in red slashes. On the end of a pole she held up the live Gila I had been reaching towards. I knew that Gilas were deadly poisonous, but I had thought they were slow and had reached for its tail.
Rachel hunted Gilas, out of which she made coin purses to sell at the trading post. She’d nearly broken my wrist with her pole and then knocked me backwards.
“Watch this, you fool,” she’d said, prodding the monster on its tail. Its neck and body had twisted with the speed of its hiss and its jaws had clamped onto the pole, not letting go even when she raised it off the ground. “They never let go. Even after they’re dead you have to pry the jaws loose.”
I imagined the bones of my hand crushed within those jaws while Rachel decapitated the Gila with a small machete, and watched the body cease its slow wriggling as she pried the jaws loose from her staff and then rolled a large stone over the head.
“It can still bite,” she explained, “even after it’s dead.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Thanks.” I felt slightly nauseated as I watched her insert a smaller knife in the belly of the Gila and skin it with the swift skill of a surgeon.
“You didn’t know. Pah! White boys,” she said.
“I’m not white,” I protested.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Nobody is anymore.”
I felt injured. “My name is Hummingbird,” I said. “Alley Hummingbird.”
“Rachel,” she said slowly, looking me over as though she was taking inventory of my blood. “Laura P.’s grandson?” she asked.
“The grandson of Billy Hummingbird.”
“Almost the same thing,” she said.
“Not exactly,” I said. I couldn’t explain how it wasn’t the same. The how seemed to lurk in the telephones Elanna and I were in the habit of using. Were you to dismantle the phone through which Elanna spoke with mother’s mother, you would find that it was not the same phone through which I spoke to Grandfather. This difference existed even in our names for things: Elanna called her “grandmother,” and only she understood that I did not call her “mother’s mother” out of some perverse or mysterious desire to be cute—that is who she was.
“Louis Applegate is my cousin’s father,” Rachel said.
“He’s Grandfather’s best friend. He’s my friend, too,” I said.
“Maybe that’s why you’re Billy’s grandson and not Laura P.’s,” she said, half-stating and half-asking it.
“You have to tell it the way you see it,” I said, wondering if it took telling it for you to know how you’d been seeing it all along.
What I realized as Rachel and I explored the canyons together was that everyone has his sawdust even if not everyone is in search of it the way I was compelled to be.
One afternoon, watching her stalk another Gila monster, I found myself gazing beyond Rachel, beyond the horizons of cactus into the shimmering glaze of desert air, and I could see that I was doomed to have at least one friend who wanted to be an Indian. He would know more about what Indians were, about their myths and the facts of their lives and histories, than I would ever care to know. Not being an Indian would eat at him until all that remained was a nut of wishful sorrow. He would end his life by marrying a little blond kitten from the midwest and live out that end by retelling stories about those years when he was like an Indian. He would know the what of being Indian while the how consumed him. The what of the power saw; the how of the sawdust.
“What are you staring at?” Rachel asked, hanging another Gila skin from her belt.
“Nothing,” I said, startled out of looking into the lives of people I imagined around me.
“You look so sad.”
“I’m not,” I said, hearing the words echo across the canyon. I wasn’t. I was more perplexed by why I liked this girl who had called me a fool. Her black eyes were set far enough apart to qualify her for membership in the insect kingdom. In fact, she looked a little like an ant on its hind legs. Her hips were large and low, her waist longer than an ant’s but extremely narrow, and her head hinted of a child who’d been born with a weak chin. Her only hope, I thought, was to grow—and then she would resemble more a praying mantis than an ant. Yet I liked her. Even though she looked graceless, her feet never missed a step as we walked down the canyon towards the mission.
I kept asking her questions about the flora and fauna until finally she asked, “Why all the questions?”
“I want to know about Nature,” I said.
“Why?” she said, jumping from one rock to another as we crossed a stream.
“Because Nature is life, it’s hope, it’s …”
“Nature,” she said, making a gesture that was more Italian than Indian. “Nature is Gila monsters and rattlesnakes.” She spat, her spittle foaming on the parched ground before turning into a black blotch. Spotting Johnny on the porch of the trading post, she added, “Nature is Johnny Three Feet.”
Johnny Three Feet stumbled down the wooden steps of the trading post, waving an envelope at me. It was a telegram, and even before I opened it, I knew what the message was. Once I had phoned Elanna and father found out that I was in Chosposi and not the fresh air of Lake Arrowhead, I was doomed to be retrieved.
“Guess I have to go home,” I said to Rachel.
“See ya,” she said.
“You … you’re welcome,” Johnny spluttered, leering at Rachel.
“No thanks for this,” I said, waving the telegram in his face before I walked away. I didn’t like Johnny Three Feet. He had eyes that stared out at the world, defiant in their madness like photos of Charles Manson. It was not simply that he made me uncomfortable. After all, Laura P. had told me about the winter of ’39 when Johnny’s embryonic and slightly retarded self had been delivered from the womb of a woman frozen nearly to death and dying of frostbite. Laura P. had said that the main reason for letting Johnny live was to teach us tolerance. Fine. But I still resented the way Johnny used tolerance to force people to allow him to do things they wouldn’t permit others to do. Such as put his arm around Rachel and sneak his hand up towards ELVIS, all the while drooling on her rattlesnake vest. It was a feeling I would never quite get over, even though I would eventually forge an uneasy peace with Johnny, fooling myself into believing that he was like a gopher snake, helpful at times, biting at others, but never poisonous and not worth stepping on.
Before I could hand Grandfather the telegram, he said, “You’d better get your things together. Your uncle is almost here.”
9.
Sure enough, the rim of the horizon began to withdraw and all too soon revealed my uncle flying more or less towards Chosposi. The path of the plane resembled an FM radio wave as the plane climbed and dipped, climbed and dipped, trying to lock in on the antenna of hardpacked canyon that stretched past the foot of the mesa.
“Ho boy,” Grandfather whistled as the two of us guided the plane down safely with our wishes. “Here.” He revealed a plain round stone hollowed just off-center by erosion. In the center of the hollow was trapped a smaller nut of granite. He hung it around my neck on a leather thong, an amulet against my uncle’s flying.
“Ho boy oh boy,” Grandfather said, when he saw my uncle climb down from the cockpit.
It had been years since Grandfather had last had the shock of seeing uncle, and it was a shock I had trouble getting over even after the plane had lumbered back down the canyon, strained aloft, and turned right for the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff. I knew that what I felt draining out of me as Chosposi was sucked back into unreality behind us was due to something besides my uncle and yet I couldn’t, as uncle might have said, get past him. He had a flattop with the sides greased back in a ducktail. A studded biker’s jacket, red socks and loafers with a penny on the strap, and a kilo of chains around his neck. “See ya later alligator,” he’d said to Grandfather, and those words crowded together in my head with the lyrics of the songs he sang loudly.
Give me Laura P’s singing, I thought.
“Take out those papers and the trash,” uncle sang, “or you don’t get no spending cash.”
Give me Rachel’s cynicism.
“Oh raa-inn drops, it looks like raa-inn drops.”
Don’t give me natural. Let me stay afloat above the desert where there are no landmarks. I tried to focus on the gray line of the horizon, but the line kept shifting so I kept my eyes on the felt dice swinging from the rear view car mirror he’d installed in the cockpit while I sent S.O.S. messages to Grandfather.
“Put your mitts on the wheel and hold her steady,” my uncle said. “Pull back to go up, push forward to go down, turn right or left just like driving a car.”
“I don’t drive,” I said, taking the wheel.
“Used to have automatic pilot,” he said. “I disconnected it after the time I set it for Reno and I ended up in Bakersfield.” He reached behind the seat. “You ever been in Bakersfield? Lot like Lodi. They are square, man, definitely ell-seven in Bakersfield.”
Uncle pulled a six-pack of beer from behind the seat and opened one. “Time for suds that made Milwaukee famous,” he said. He took a long pull from the can. “Ahh. A beer an hour keeps the heart from going sour.”
“That’s Coors,” I said. Along with the fear I was beginning to feel, I was irritated by the way he was talking. This, I decided, is what comes from teaching school too long. I didn’t know enough about uncle’s future to blame anything else.
“So it is,” he said, looking at the can without surprise. “You want one? Do you some good. You need to lighten up, take a load off your mind.” He belched. “‘Scuse me.”
I thought I was managing to keep my face expressionless, but it made him laugh. “You know you’re just like your daddy. I know what’s going on upstairs with you. You’re thinking, ‘One of us should stay sober.’ Hah. Listen, flying one of these things to me is like a baby crawling.”
All of a sudden, he sat upright in his seat and stared out the window of the cockpit. The expression on his face reminded me of the other faces I would see in my life which suggested that what the person thought he was living for had changed, vanished, died.
I pushed the wheel forward a bit and watched the altimeter begin to unwind. Still, he stared straight ahead. I pushed the wheel more and the needle on the meter began to move faster. Then more. I began to panic, afraid that uncle would just go on staring until it was too late. The engines seemed to increase their rpm’s and the wind began to hum across the ailerons and he still seemed not to care. At last, he pried my hands from the wheel, handed me his can of beer, and when he spoke, it sounded as though his voice came from a speaker, over a radio, as he took the controls and pulled the plane out of the dive I’d put it into.
“My son never crawled. You used to crawl a
ll over the known universe, but when he wanted to get from point A to point B, he rolled. He could roll pretty well. But he never crawled.”
As quick as a blink, his voice resumed its normal tenor and he laughed. “Can you imagine that? Your cousin rolling from room to room. Got himself dirty as a hedgehog in spring. Well,” he said, taking his beer from me, “guess it doesn’t matter as long as you get there.”
“And back,” I said, between gritted teeth. I was furiously frightened. I wanted to hurt him. Someday I’d pay him back for this flight.
Get there we did, nine in-flight cans of beer later. Despite the thick brown cloud that covered Los Angeles, extending as far west as Catalina Island and pressing down on its inhabitants like the heavy paw of a bear, its claws raking the lives of even the whales who had taken to the sea thousands of years ago to escape the invention of progress, I was amazed by the multitude of turquoise swimming pools. They were as numerous as the children of Abraham, winking at us like the Milky Way, reflecting the light of the full moon with the purple tint of the lights outlining the streets.
“Give a hi-dee-hi to my brother, will you?” uncle said, feathering back the engines and turning the plane so my side of the cabin faced the corrugated metal building that served as a terminal for light planes.
“I’ll tell them hello from you,” I said.
“Just my brother,” my uncle said. “My brother’s wife … well … oh, skip it, she’s … your mother.” Inside the door of the terminal, I could see the posture of a man I recognized as my father, waiting.
“Here,” my uncle said. He removed one of the shiny pennies from his loafers and flipped it to me. I was tempted to toss it right back at him. Whether it was because my anger abated with the look on his face or because I was saving my strength for the figure inside the terminal, I don’t know.
“Later, kiddo,” my uncle said, slipping the headphones on, radioing in for clearance, the engines making dirt and leaves swirl as the plane turned and accelerated out to the runway.