by W. S. Penn
I said that I’d like that.
Since father rarely went to the hardware store to buy a new garden hose—an item he seemed to purchase more than any other due to the times I ran the hose over with the lawnmower—without a list, a pad of paper on which was written “hose,” the conception of a fishing trip would take as long to shape up as the birth of an unwanted baby.
We planned. We shopped for fishing rods, settling on the cheapest fiberglass rod Sears and Roebuck sold. On a wild impulse, father bought a plain billed cap, a webbed adjustable canvas belt, and a canteen. At moments I wondered why we hadn’t purchased a tent, or backpacks, or powdered foodstuffs, but I decided to trust that father had taken care of that himself.
Locking Running Dog in the house, I practiced daily casting into the center of an old tire I dragged home, concentrating on ignoring mother as she sneaked in and out of the house, cleaning. When the trip shrank before the onslaught of business into a day trip, I was forced to give up my Hemingway dreams of packing through the Tetons. Nonetheless, I remained undaunted. There were plenty of places father and I could drive to—the Yosemite Valley wasn’t more than four hours away, and if we started early, we’d get in several hours of fishing before darkness pushed us out of the state park.
When the day to leave came and we were packing the car with the bag lunches I had made to prevent mother from making them for us, father commented on how much fun this was going to be, just him and me, the boys, on a trip together.
On the way, father said, “I’ve never been here before. I hope it’s good fishing,” and though we were driving west into the Santa Cruz mountains, and not east towards Yosemite, I replied, “Whatever.” Whatever was going to become a refrain for the day.
As I stood on the packed dirt ridging the pond and watched the dump truck back up to it and pour thousands of finger-sized trout into the water that bubbled with the confused darting of fish, I could only say to myself, “Whatever.” It was, for all I could do to describe it, a psychedelic experience, focusing on the way I was out of place because of my size, my heart pounding with the strychnine of disproportionate feelings. Beside the cement pond, vaguely shaped to look like a teeny lake, the chatter of happy eight-year-old voices rose to my ears, surrounding my taller head like a mist.
Father stood beside me in his cap, arms akimbo, fists on his hips, and from time to time pointed to a spot in the pond which was saturated with the lines of children and said, “Try over there.” When I reeled in a trout no bigger than a test tube, father stopped me from throwing it back, saying, “We’ll want to get our money’s worth.”
All I could do was smile and say, “Whatever.”
When father and I got home from our day at the pond, he flopped his cap onto my head and said, “Well, that was fun. We’ll have to do it again, sometime,” and I nodded vaguely, thinking that whatever happened, this wouldn’t. Years later, I would look back and realize that the trip was doomed to failure because of the way in which it came about. The difference was that I would not regret its failure as I had at the time. I would see that the seductions of a fishing trip were the same as the seductions of love and sex and that what people called reality was actually unreality, involving a process of making plans which could never be realized. Besides, boys would always be seduced by promises from fathers which, when broken, make boys begin to see their dads as something more and something less than fathers.
Other weekends, when father wasn’t travelling as a petrochemical consultant or changing jobs and trying to start up his own company again, when mother wasn’t talking to any inanimate object that would listen, if the new Dodge wasn’t in the shop, we packed ourselves together into the car and drove to my uncle’s house. Two hours of togetherness on a journey which father demanded, mother hated, and my sisters and I feared. Mother spent the entire trip talking to the windshield, telling it the things she couldn’t tell father, and her words rolled around the inside of the car like marbles seeking the limits of randomness. If we passed a car or truck in which the driver had forgotten to turn off his turn signals, mother rolled down the window and flapped her thumb and flat fingers together like a magician making a strange bird talk. The direction her hand pointed, she explained, told the driver which turn indicator was blinking, left or right. Despite the odd looks other drivers cast back at our passing car, I was convinced that mother understood a secret driver’s code which only the best of drivers knew. After I was bar mitzvahed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, given my license as a sign of California adulthood, I was—and have always been—conscious of my turn indicators, never leaving them on accidentally, for fear that some woman will stick her arm out her window and blink her hands at me.
Often, on these trips, mother and father talked in low tones until father banged both hands on the dash and started yelling. My sisters cried, first one, then the other joining in, forcing me to break my vow of silence and expose myself to danger by whispering to them that “It” would be “all right.” What surprised me most, having never thought of putting my arms around Bernie Schneider and telling him that everything would be all right, was that it worked. Before we arrived to the placid greeting of my uncle and the sometime appearance of his sharp wife whom I called the Vegomatic, both of my sisters would be laughing at the jokes I told them.
Oh, those jokes. I can remember them all in spirit and none of them in practice. For years, my sisters had liked to have friends over and then summon me into the living room and ask me to tell their friends one of my jokes.
“Alley tells the funniest jokes,” Elanna would say.
“Tell the one about the man and his dog,” Pamela would say. Their friends would grimace, trying to hold back their laughter, which would abort any joke I might tell. I would begin.
“Once,” I’d say, trying to remember when I had told a joke about a man and his dog, “upon a time, there was a small man with a small dog. It wasn’t any ordinary dog, but then he wasn’t any ordinary man.” I would go on from there, adding, changing, modifying, forgetting the presence of those girls whose breasts jiggled inside the cups of their rocket bras when they laughed, concentrating only on finding an end to the joke.
“Tell us one about a beautiful girl,” one of my sisters’ friends might say, when she had ceased laughing hysterically at the joke about the man and the dog. Avoiding, instinctively, any story about princesses or frog princes and beginning with naturalistic detail like a true American boy, I began a joke about Tammy without revealing Bernie Schneider’s secret obsession with this perfect woman. As instinctively, I selected one detail from each of my sisters’ friends which I then presented as impossibly beautiful—the shape of one’s breasts, the color and texture of one’s hair, the fine but pronounced nose of another, and the legs of Minette, the only friend of my sisters whose name I can still remember. If nothing else, that instinct guaranteed a pause in the laughter as each friend agreed in turn on the beautiful features of my composite woman.
Always, the jokes seemed to have phenomenal success. The girls would be choking with laughter, their faces pumped red with blood by their happy hearts. Of course, I didn’t know that they were laughing at me; laughing not at the joke but at the way I kept embellishing the joke, trying to find something funny in it as well as a way to end it.
In the car, with my arms around them, telling them it would be all right, I was fully aware that they were laughing not at the joke but at me, and still I told the jokes because it made them laugh and not cry, and because I had learned to take pleasure in those seemingly interminable stories. Besides, I couldn’t think of anything else I could do to make them happy.
17.
“Many things begin in the back seats of automobiles,” I say to Rachel the next summer, in Chosposi.
“In my case, I developed the need to make everything all right for every girl I’ll ever come to know in my life. If I can’t, I hate them.”
Rachel stands there, holding a basketball in her palm like an offering.
“That, too, is like a knife,” grandfather says. Like a boy who’s been sent on to the prairie to dream the circumstances that will name him, I know what grandfather means.
“Mystical,” Rachel says. She begins dribbling the basketball, punctuating the low complaints that come from inside the house where Laura P. is throwing pots. Over the years, she has chanted and rechanted her complaints into a metrical litany that functions like the music in a religious service.
“Heavy,” Rachel says. “Old-man-speak-with-wise-tongue bullshit.”
I am caught between Rachel and grandfather, listening to Laura P.’s litany like an agnostic who suspects there is something behind the surface of the universe, but who can’t discern whether what’s there is full or empty. Who won’t discern it until the emptiness on the other side of life fills up with voices other than the dead pilot friends of my uncle.
“May all your days be fact,” grandfather says.
Rachel’s eyes are narrowed. Her body is as hard and thin as father’s temper but she hasn’t heard grandfather. “So,” she says. “You wanna shoot some hoop?”
I glance at grandfather, amazed that he can talk to me alone, even in the presence of someone else.
“Go ahead,” he says. “I don’t need you dogging my heels all day long.” Before he sinks like a sandbag shifting into his chair and closes his eyes and begins to snore, before my amazement recedes entirely, I see the sagging lines of father’s life.
Rachel and I descend the mesa towards the mission school’s gymnasium, passing the basketball back and forth. I feel grandfather’s concentration relax, his love letting me go. “Lay off grandfather, will you?” I say. “Leave him alone.”
It’s a struggle for her. She was never one to hold back what she thought, and she’d become more blunt, direct, since my last flight to Chosposi. She mutters to the basketball, the inflection of her voice changing each time I toss the ball to her. Finally, she manages to say, “Sorry. It’s not Laura P.’s husband.”
“Grandfather,” I say. “You mean.”
She nods, running a fingernail along the fake seams of the rubber ball to the nipple where the seams met. “Phsst,” she says, sucking in her breath and holding it. “It’s that mysterious Oriental crap about ‘it happens, if it happens at all, such and such a way.’ As if you’re just supposed to sit back and accept things the way they are. The way they’re going to be.”
“What else?”
“We may not be able to change things,” she says. “But we sure as hell can try to prevent them from becoming in ways we don’t like.”
Could we? I wondered.
“We can, and we must,” she says, turning on me with a prodigious coolness. “Do you know what that crap does for us? You have any idea what’s happening to us because of that mystical stereotype? How much we’ve got to overcome? We’re losing a way of life.”
“What kind of life is it?”
“What?”
“Father says,” I begin, slipping on the shale of my years, wondering why I’d said ‘father says’ instead of grandfather says. But father had said—hadn’t he?—that the modern Indian had to learn to live in the world the way it was and not the way he wanted it to be. “It’s not a red world,” father liked to say, to which grandfather replied, without father ever seeming to hear, “No, it’s pink. And black and blue. Mostly blue,” grandfather would add in his sadder moments. Years later, after grandfather’s ashes were scattered over his desert, he would whisper, “It never did me any good. Being red. If it can help you, make it.”
I tell Rachel, “Father says that we have to live in the world the way it is and not the way we wish it were.”
“Yeah?” Rachel snorts. “And what does your mother say?”
“Fudge happiness.” I laugh. At quiet moments, when the pressures of the world were too much with her, mother was developing her soliloquies to the toaster, the bookshelves, and later to the lamp in the living room that snapped on with the martial regularity of the night’s watch. Adages of her own making hung like ghosts about the house, cold spots that my sisters and I would touch, shiver from, and pass by.
“It’s not funny,” Rachel says harshly. I’m taken aback. I hadn’t laughed because I thought it was funny. “Men can’t possibly understand what it’s like to be a woman.”
Rachel and I play basketball in silence, except for her bossing me around the court, telling me to shoot hook shots her way and not mine. It seems that she has a chip riveted on her shoulder. No matter what I say, she’s determined to interpret it wrongly, so I refrain from saying that if men couldn’t possibly understand women, not at all, then there isn’t much hope, even for Real People.
After an hour, Rachel quits. “I’m bored,” she says. “You’re worth shit as an opponent.”
Needless to say, I’m feeling pretty low as I circle alone behind the trading post, on my way back up the mesa. Noticing that the door is open on the garage where grandfather stores the Plymouth, I look in and find grandfather leaning into the engine compartment. Feet that I recognize as Louis Applegate’s jut out from beneath the car.
“How far was he?” grandfather asks Louis.
“East Texas,” Louis replies. “He was on his knees, crawling, like he wasn’t in any rush. But he might’ve spotted me and been faking it. If he gets to his feet, even catches a bus, he could arrive a lot faster. No telling.”
“Best be prepared,” grandfather says. “You got the drain plug back in tight?”
“Almost,” Louis says. “Okay. You can put in the oil now and we’ll start her up.”
Even though I know how the unlikeliest things happen in real life, it still seems unlikely that I didn’t wonder whom grandfather and Louis were talking about or why grandfather was tuning up the Plymouth as though preparing for a trip. That I didn’t know that the shadow crawling on his knees across East Texas was my old familiar, Death.
18.
Except for Laura P.’s having to strain to touch me above the shoulders, I hadn’t noticed that my size had begun to change, the fat stretching like canvas over the ribs of my skeleton, which grew thicker and higher with a will of its own. Pamela, grateful she’d stopped growing at five feet eight, liked to say, “It’s a good thing you weren’t born a girl.” Elanna, an uncertain five feet four which she would always claim was five five and a half, would laugh and ask, “How’s it going, Stretch?” when I came home from school.
Despite the nickname, I had no idea of how tall I was becoming, how imposing I was for people, male and female alike. To a tall person, everyone else is either the same relative height or short. Years later, I would say that tall people endured, if not suffered, just as much as short people. You can never find clothes to fit because your size is not one the Great Designer ever imagined. Stores hang merchadise from rafters at a height calculated to crease your temples; citizens and W.P.A. crews trim trees with the intent of putting out your eyes; chairs are too low, beds too short, doorways for the average, and automobiles designed for drivers without legs. In bars, little men will want to fight with you and Viking women will insist, even beg, that you dance with them. If you’re tall and date a girl who isn’t, you’ll encounter the bitterness of tall girls and short boys who can’t find dates. The only advantages to being tall are the ease of changing light bulbs and being able to reach an item off the top shelves for old ladies in supermarkets.
After he died, grandfather would tell me that size was a matter of spirit, the same way that distance was a matter of concentration. But then, as I drove mother to the store or took my sisters shopping, I didn’t know that, and I acquired a girlfriend who was both short and small in spirit. Or rather, she acquired me. I don’t know. With Allison DeForest, one never knew.
Allison invited me to a party at her house about the time mother’s first toaster moved out and she spent the weekend in the hospital deciding on a new one. I went with William the Black and a supply of breath mints sufficient for everyone who drank the punch,
to which I liberally added vodka. While Mrs. DeForest patrolled the hallway, following William from living room to back yard with intrigue or suspicion, Allison towed me into her bedroom, moving my paws around her body, whining like a well-oiled power saw and whispering, “Yes,” into my ear. When I moved away, briefly, and started to unbuckle my belt, she sat bolt upright and demanded, “What are you doing?”
“I thought.…” I saw myself, ridiculous, neither dressed nor undressed, caught like someone who has sneaked out a quiet fart that not only stinks but clings like plastic wrap.
“Well, you thought wrong,” Allison said. “I’m saving myself.”
I stood there for what seemed all of my wonder years, giving her all of the silence I could muster, before I refastened my belt buckle and sneaked out of the room.
“Ask her if she gets interest,” William said as we walked home side by side. I laughed. “If you ask me, it’s the mother who’s hot to trot. She was following me around all night.”
I didn’t tell William that Mrs. DeForest had followed him because he was black and she was certain he’d steal every ashtray and candlestick in the house. I was thinking about my uncle having said, “Nothing wrong with your mother that a little understanding can’t fix,” as I’d stared at mother who stared back blankly. It dawned on me that maybe Allison only needed a little understanding. Some patience. Maybe Allison’s disease was the same as mother’s.
“What the hell,” I said to William, “maybe I was rushing things. We’ll see.”