by W. S. Penn
But already I could see in her what I had never seen before, vanity, that dreamy vision of self which is caused not by a willing suspension of disbelief but a suspension of will in order to believe. Sanchez had touched a nerve. Rachel was envisioning herself as a poster girl. It would take time and the vision of my own vanity to cease thinking of Rachel as weakening at that moment. That wouldn’t happen until I realized that what Sanchez had touched in her was not peculiar to her but thoroughly human; despite our bitter arguments with mirrors and bathroom scales, we can all envision ourselves as poster boys and girls.
“I would,” I said. “Even without your clothes on,” I added, joking, ready to duck if Rachel wasn’t up to laughing.
“As Bert says,” Sanchez said, “it would sell.”
“Anything sells,” Rachel replied. Her voice was as crisp as the leather of the moccasin she pulled from under the table and tossed in my face. I picked at the glass beads on the toe. They were sewn into a red, white, and blue star with seven rays.
“That,” Rachel told me, “is one of the items your friend here sold to Johnny Three Feet. Moccasins. Pah! And these.” She bent and pulled something else out. “Cute little numbers, aren’t they?” It was a cottonwood tomahawk, a stick drilled at the top with the heel of an axe-head pushed through the hole and laced into position with imitation leather thong. What looked to be canary feathers were stapled to the top of the handle.
“The tomahawks go for $2.50. The moccasins for nine bucks.”
“So?” I shrugged. Inside the heel of the moccasin was a gold sticker that said “Genuine Handsewn Leather,” and I couldn’t help but choke back a laugh, recognizing Sanchez’s careful implication that Indians had made the moccasins.
Rachel almost laughed herself when Sanchez presented her with the image of suburban men shuffling about their split-level homes in the moccasins, or their kids trying to hack the tails off salamanders with the tiny tomahawks.
She managed to contain her smile by giving me the bilious beady look of a snake about to strike. “‘So,’ he says. I should have known. You fool. I should have let you pick up that Gila monster. If I had, you wouldn’t have brought that man here. He wouldn’t have talked poor numbskulled Johnny into selling this shit as souvenirs. You haven’t even considered the results, have you? It’s going to be your fault, whatever happens.”
“Now wait a minute,” Sanchez interrupted. “Bert didn’t bring me here. I happened to be on the same bus with him, that’s all. You can’t lay some guilt trip on him.”
“He showed you around, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, but …,” I said, discomfited by the way Rachel was looking at Sanchez.
“He made you feel welcome.”
“True blue,” Sanchez said. “But remember one thing. Bert made me feel welcome. You made me determined to stay.”
“What does that mean?” Rachel said.
“You’ll figure it out,” Sanchez said. “Think about it. I’m sure you’re smart enough to figure it out.” He gave her a wicked smile and then said to me, “Listen, I’ll be inside the post. See ya,” he said to Rachel. “Soon.”
“You like him?” she asked.
I confessed that I did.
“Why?”
“He makes me laugh. Really laugh. After all that’s happened, I need laughter,” I said.
“Your friend Sanchez laughs at anything,” Rachel said.
“And everything. He can make even the audiences at a French film laugh.” It was true. While the hero and heroine drove endlessly through the steady French rain, Sanchez would laugh and the rest of the audience would begin to wait for his laughter. Waiting created anticipation, anticipation possibility—and if your sister had bled to death in front of your eyes, you would think possibility was a laugh in itself.
“But everything is not funny,” Rachel protested.
“Yeah, but once anything isn’t even possibly funny, it’s dead or boring. Besides, Sanchez doesn’t laugh at things as much as for them.” I could see she was thinking about that. “You might like him, too,” I said. “If you would lighten your load long enough to get to know him.”
“I don’t want to know him,” Rachel hissed, and stomped off toward the mission.
I stood there in the dust spit up by Rachel’s leaving, feeling helpless and somewhat lonely, trying to remember a time I had seen her laugh and wondering what good laughter would do her. Maybe it wasn’t laughter, alone, that I was talking about. Maybe it was joy, that willingness to enjoy that hung about Sanchez’s laughter like branches on a spruce tree.
At the mission door, Rachel turned and shouted, “You know what your problem is? You’re all means. You don’t ever think about ends. That’s where you and I part company.”
“I hope not for good,” I said to myself. In a way, she was right, or almost right. It wasn’t that I never thought about ends. It was that there were only the illusions of ends. The only real end was death; means were what I enjoyed, the ways in which we go about moving toward the illusory ends. I couldn’t prove that my way was the right way. Even thinking about it gave me a headache—and I’d been getting more and more of those recently. Little men with jackhammers started tearing up the inside of my head and I bought a Coke from the new machine on the porch of the trading post, removed the tin foil from an Empirin codeine tablet and took it, and waited silently for the calm of codeine the way the land waits, leaning toward the clouds which may or may not carry rain.
It had begun to seem that, given the way even Rachel was acting, every relationship with a woman got confused and entangled in the spidery webs of the unanticipated and unwanted. Perhaps it was the way these relationships began? If I hadn’t acquired Allison DeForest (or her me—I still didn’t know which), or if Rachel hadn’t begun by calling me a fool, placing herself in a superior position and somehow extrapolating that one position to include all positions, would it have been different? If Rachel had been a man, would I have hit her the times she infuriated or hurt me? Probably not, I decided, as the first wash of codeine began to soften the marrow of my bones. Still, for an instant, I imagined slugging her just hard enough to knock the anger out of her and I could not help but grin. Not at the vision of Rachel suddenly domesticated like an animal, but at the realization that I was about as clever with women as Johnny Three Feet, named for his Neanderthal clumsiness, was graceful at basketball. Even Elanna, whose letters from Berkeley I tore open with the voracity of a nutcracker, had often said that she could forgive me only because she was my sister.
Sanchez came out and sat beside me. Johnny, who behaved these days like Sanchez’s pet Malamute, followed him out and stood behind us. None of us said anything, until Rachel came back out of the mission to man her table for the afternoon buses.
“Well, hell,” Sanchez said as he watched her organize her petitions, “I like her, even if she doesn’t like me.” Johnny gurgled with glee; he liked her, too.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “She’s just angry.”
“I won’t,” Sanchez said. “In fact,” he added, leaning toward me so Johnny couldn’t hear, “just between you and me, Kemosabe, I’m going to marry her someday.” His burst of laughter made Johnny conscious of his size sixteen shoes. Even Rachel turned and almost smiled before she became aware of who was laughing.
“Marry Rachel?” I said.
“Here comes a bus,” Sanchez said. “Let’s go, John-boy.”
I had a faint intuition of what bothered Rachel about Sanchez, then. He could refuse to talk about a topic that mattered to you, even about a topic he had brought up, teasing you with it, making you think about it more than was necessary. To Rachel, it was as though he functioned gaily on the surface of things, revealing only the tip of the mesa and rarely delving into the shadowy valleys below.
Had I thought about her saying that, I might have realized that she was, in part, wrong. Sanchez did think about many things, just not out loud in front of other people. And I might have been able t
o foresee that Sanchez was telling the truth—he would eventually marry Rachel—and that her initial protestations against him were not so much moral criticism as a sign of the attraction she, too, felt for his laughter.
“He irritates me,” Rachel told me, trying to explain, “especially when you’re around.”
I should have wondered what he did when I wasn’t around. At the time, I was most often stoned on codeine, and codeine had the power to temporarily erase past and future and leave me dangling in the happy present. I clung to that feeling; I needed it then because what I felt when Sanchez said he would someday marry Rachel was jealousy. I loved Rachel as I loved Elanna; I hated her, at times, because I knew she’d never quite forgive me for what I was. It was hatred which allowed me to see that Rachel never really wanted Sanchez to stop selling those magazines. His selling them gave her a reason to exist as much as she gave him a reason to become momentarily serious. But it would take a few more years and the death of Grandfather, whom I had engendered as the one, true ear, before I would see that.
33.
Sanchez paid me and paid me well to fly in and out of San Francisco, and on one of my trips I met the woman for whom my uncle had left the Vegomatic. It was the only time I would meet Karen Manowitz, in the San Francisco airport, where I had been trying to fly a stewardess named June—a hopeless exercise. June was due to take off for Denver, and I was carrying a shipment of softwood Kachinas, mass-made in Chinatown by unemployed garment workers, which Sanchez sold at outrageous prices at Johnny Three Feet’s Trading Post. Yet June’s little outfit pushed her breasts up into a pale, smooth heart that made me breathless with a subtle pain like pneumonia, and it was a way to pass the time. Besides, after hundreds of takeoffs and landings, I was curious about those yellow cups that drop down on plastic tubes, which Juney and her ilk demonstrated on each and every flight.
“Where,” I asked her, “do they keep the oxygen?” June looked quizzical, then confused, and finally bored when I said, “After all, above the masks are coats and carry-on luggage. Not much oxygen, there.”
“I take off in an hour,” June said. “Let’s see … I land in Denver at three o’clock and lay over for two hours before I turn around.”
Sitting on a barstool, trying to work the conversation away from June’s scheduled takeoffs and landings and trying to overcome the crashing boredom June obviously felt at my trying to fly her, I heard a familiar voice sing out, “Hey, Jude,” and I turned in fatal recognition to spot uncle spotting me, on his arm a dark-haired woman whom I could describe only as compact. She wasn’t short and she wasn’t tall. Neither was she voluptuous. But her clothes and the skin that showed beneath or beyond the clothes were filled with comfortable economy, as though every inch of skin and clothing had been designed and engineered for maximum efficiency without excessive show or luxury. Rather than beautiful or sexy, she was well-made, and the comfortable, easy way in which she walked beside uncle made me relax so much that I nearly fell off the stool. Years later, when I thought about her, I would know what I’d come to mean by attractive, that seemingly empty and ineffectual word that I can’t help using. Unlike uncle’s wife who even in house slippers walked as though she were wearing spike heels, her body hard and sharp and her sex clinically hidden, this woman on uncle’s arm was one you could hold without having to suit up in protective pads first.
“Hey, Alley,” uncle called across the bar.
“Who is that?” June said. I did not appreciate the criticism implicit in her voice. The tone was that of a woman who plays Simon Says in bed, unable to relax and simply have an orgasm because her nerves cannot forget all of the close calls, the near misses of all the metered men she’s had to endure in the backseats of taxis. “Oh, Juney,” I said to myself, “Though we are about the same age, I am much too old for you.”
“My uncle,” I said. “On a jag. Excuse me.” I left her sitting there.
“How you been, boy? Haven’t seen you for … how long has it been? This is Karen Manowitz,” uncle said. “Karen, my nephew, Alley.”
“How do you do. Alley, is it?” I nodded. She smiled, and the temperature of the bar went up a few degrees, as though I were sitting by a window and the sun had emerged from behind the threatening clouds, warming me, making my bones stop hurting from the stiffness of June’s ennui. I smiled back. Uncle sat us at an empty table, brought us drinks, gulped his while standing.
“Listen, Alley,” he said, “you and Karen sit and get to know each other, while I go check on our flight. What do you say?” And off he went, singing, “Bee-bop-a-louie, she’s my baby.”
Karen watched him go and then we sat there smiling at each other some more. Just before my flight to Phoenix was announced, Karen said, “You’re probably wondering what it is I’m doing here.”
Long before I said it, I had known I would say it, if I could cease smiling long enough. “No,” I said. “I know the how and why. The what,” I added, “I don’t much care about.”
She nodded her head, tilting it to the right slightly. “Thank you, Alley,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said. As I left the bar, I turned to look at Karen. “Listen,” I said to her. I think now that I was intending to say something to her about sawdust or oxygen. Regardless, all I could do was wave and take up my incessant smiling.
I smiled all the way to Phoenix, watched closely by the stewardesses who suspected that behind that silly grin lurked a madman, even though I tried to explain to one of them that I couldn’t help but smile because my uncle was, after years of carrothood, at long last happy.
When uncle divorced his wife, I heard the entire family sigh. Eventually, I would hear the intake of those sighs, a sound like a distant choir of children slurping soup in unison, when uncle remarried his boat and house, his pension.
“The rabbit fights for his life, the coyote eats lunch,” Grandfather would say.
I suppose he was right. Uncle’s remarrying the Vegomatic wouldn’t matter much. His life was over long before and, by the time he eloped with his ex-first-wife, his horizons all distant except for the one brief trip he’d taken with Karen Manowitz. By then, my expatriated cousin had delayed a West German train for more than an hour—a crime the Germans could never tolerate, and for which they are pursuing him still. Sometimes, I wonder whether he is Rabbit or Coyote as my cousin tries to make up for his father in a world that is either too large to care or too small to bother.
34.
Sanchez was off foraging in other parts of the wilderness of civilization when I got back to Chosposi, and Rachel seemed to avoid me. She had given up her petitions and dismantled her card tables, and when finally I caught up to her, it was in one of the small canyons where she still caught the random Gila.
“I see you’re back,” was all she said.
“Johnny said you received a full scholarship to Arizona State.”
“I did?” she said, confirming what I had suspected since Elanna’s letters had begun arriving with the pages out of order, that Johnny steamed open and read the mail he was supposed to deliver. Most of it, anyway. He never touched the unpunctuated streams of mother’s consciousness.
“Congratulations.”
“Save it,” she said, folding her hardened arms across her chest. “I’ll turn it down.”
“Rachel, why?”
“It’s only white folks trying to buy off their own guilt.” She looked meaningfully at me. “I won’t be a statistic like some people I know.” We both knew that Clearmont Men’s College folded minorities into the batter of freshmen in order to allow rich white boys to encounter what they were not and thus begin the primal stages of self-definition. CMC already had a Jew and two Blacks, but I was an especially useful acquisition, as I was only part-Indian. Among the minorities, only I exemplified the mixture of bloods. My mixed-up beliefs would allow the white boys to see the results of miscegenation.
After giving up her protest of porn, Rachel began tinkering with helping the missionary’s
wife organize groups of Indians. What these groups—old and young, men and women, boys and girls, and any permutation of those—were supposed to do, no one seemed to know.
“Meet,” the missionary’s wife said.
“Find their own way to God,” the missionary said.
“They already have a complex model of the universe. Gods like Taiowa and Spider Woman. Spirits and ceremonies,” I said.
“That’s all right, too,” the missionary’s wife said. “Unitarians do their own thing. As long as they meet.”
The Indians who did attend the weekly dry-cleaning of their souls chose to sit on blankets on the floor, rather than perch on the wooden folding chairs left behind by a succession of other ministries. As long as the missionary told stories and told them well, they remained, trying not to laugh as the missionary explained to them that the ocean was a wet desert. None of them had the heart to hurt the missionary’s feelings by telling him what they had known since the days of migration, and the missionary, interpreting their swaying silence as indifference, entered a repetitious search for stories worth the telling—and so it was that he himself came to believe that tides were caused by an angel stepping into or out of the waters of the earth.
Rachel, on the other hand, was less interested in telling stories and more interested in raising Indian consciousness.
“Of what?” I asked her, again and again.
“Of the world outside them.”
“Why? Why do you want them to be conscious of the world outside?” I asked, trying to convince her that Laura P. knew more about how the world worked than if she’d made friends with a quark.
“Because they’re getting taken,” Rachel insisted.
“They may get taken, no matter what,” Sanchez would say. “All we can do is try to help them control how they get taken.”
Whereas Rachel was busily raising Indian consciousness, it was Sanchez’s import/export business that taught them what it meant to be American. Sanchez did away with the person of the maker, turning Kachinas into a collector’s item. It was a process not unlike numismatics or the collecting of art: The maker didn’t matter; who mattered was the coin dealer and the gallery owner, and Sanchez taught the Indians to become dealers in artifacts. In short, Sanchez made them middlemen, and it was the money they made from dealing that gave them something to speak about when Rachel raised their consciousnesses to the level of speaking out.