by W. S. Penn
Sanchez plugged himself into the world of Chosposi successfully. Authenticity for him was only a matter of re-entry. “What goes up must come down,” he’d say, “and where I come down I figure I belong.”
Nice. Some of the Indians even seemed willing to think of Sanchez as Pahana, the lost white brother whose coming was ordained. But for me, authenticity was becoming a problem as I ferried unpainted softwood Kachinas from San Francisco or trucked in tortilla presses cast with Indian designs from Nogales. The region I called the Absence of Angels was settling like swamp fog around me, and each time I went aloft in a plane I brought another Glad Bag of it down with me. Everything seemed to become long-distance and I was becoming obsessed with the need to reach out and touch someone. That, at least, will explain how I began to teach Johnny Three Feet to play a rudimentary basketball to the best of his physically challenged abilities. Whenever I became impatient with Johnny, I told myself that people like Johnny aren’t around long and they deserve every break they can get.
“It happens that way sometimes,” Grandfather said, muscles contracting involuntarily like someone suddenly sad or angry, skidding to a halt on his three-wheeler. “By accident.”
Certainly, it was by accident that Grandfather had had enough liquid cash to purchase the three-wheeled Raleigh, the one I would come to call the “killer bike,” from a purveyor of health who passed through Chosposi selling faith in vitamins, hope in exercise, and the charity of whole grains which, closing his drugged-out Californian eyes, he consecrated as “roughage.”
Grandfather took to riding the bike to and from the trading post at a speed that forced me to hop every third step in order to keep up with him. At 88, he had, with his own obscure belief in ends and means, determined that he would live to ninety, and whatever he lacked in speed he made up for in heart.
“No sense rushing it,” he would say. Reaching ninety was a lot like driving three miles per hour faster. It wasn’t much of a change and either way you were going to get where you were going. “Point A to point B,” he would add.
He would very nearly reach B, too, two years later. Ironically, it would be the bike which allowed his heart to remain strong, and it would be the bike which, in his stubbornness, he deliberately rode over a curb, putting him into the hospital. Even then, he would live on, falling short of his birthday by a matter of hours—a minor and forgivable failure of concentration, a miscalculation of the will and not of the heart.
That summer, uncle would fly into Chosposi in a borrowed plane and cease singing “We’ve Only Just Begun” long enough to comment on how Grandfather looked closer to eighty than ninety, and Grandfather would be unimpressed. Consumed with the novelty of joy over Karen Manowitz, having escaped from the Vegomatic by putting out of his mind the memories she had helped him slice, dice, and parboil, uncle exclaimed, “You’re going to live forever!”
Grandfather merely looked sad. I was touched by that sadness and by my uncle’s failure to understand that Death, when He came for Grandfather, would approach head-on like a slow but inevitable freight train. Grandfather would never want it otherwise.
The novelty of my uncle’s joy, along with his denial of Death, caused his mistaken ebullience. Having known the Vegomatic, whose face looked hard and cold like the faces of women at Republican conventions, and having met Karen Manowitz, I was as unwilling to deny that temporary joy as I was to deny Johnny Three Feet’s gurgling happiness when he made a layup, even though it made Grandfather look sad.
Like Grandfather, I felt pretty sad as I watched my uncle climb into the cockpit of his borrowed plane, the half-life of his joy revealed in the look on his face which was akin to the quick mnemonic look of the three-legged cat whose only thrill in life had been to hunt birds.
“See you later, alligator,” uncle said.
“In a while, crocodile,” I said, trying to grin.
He looked at me, holding the ends of his seat belt in either hand. “You know, Alley,” he said. “We haven’t known each other very well. But somehow I’ve always thought you understood, ever since you and … and my … son … ever since that Christmas when you and he tried to do what the Japanese couldn’t manage.” He looked as far away as Laura P. when he said, “They’re still out there, somewhere. Aren’t they?”
“Sure,” I said. “Sure they are.” He stopped staring up at the sky and fastened his belts. “Give Karen my love,” I said.
“Consider it done,” he said. “And you say howdy to my brother for me when you see him. He’s been pretty uptight with me, lately.”
“I will,” I said, tempted to tell him that his brother’s harsh attitude toward his taking up with Karen Manowitz was not moral disapproval but rather the mousse of feelings condensing around his own divorce from mother. I wanted to explain that, like the dicey numbers in a bingo game, father’s feelings had been stirred up; that he was incapable of talking about them and to hear his brother talk about them only caused father unimaginable pain.
“Be well,” I said, shutting the cockpit door and stepping back from the plane.
Uncle slid back the window and poked his head out. “Hey Alley,” he said. “You still have that penny I gave you for luck?”
The expression on his happy face closed like the cockpit window when I said, “No.”
I regretted that and it was this regret I would try to make up for later when my revolting cousin crawled through the window of my dormitory one night in the fall and demanded that I help him escape the country. I didn’t know my cousin from Adam and with his red Afro and bleary eyes he looked like an implosion waiting to happen. His voice was clipped, reminding me of the voice of the Vegomatic; but for that, I might not have recognized him in the Clearmont darkness. His laughter was as old and bitter as one who had invested his life in the American Dream only to discover in his twilight years that social security isn’t worth a sandbag against the flood of inflation. He did not re-engender things with imagination; he destroyed their old uses in favor of the new. He was filled with hatred, calling his father names like “Fascist” and popping pills to achieve what he called the cutting edge. His cloud of easy epithets made me furiously sad, and I defended my uncle with vehemence, reminding my cousin of his incineration of the people of Pillar to Post, of the little frogs he had liked blowing into the glorious afterlife as a child.
“Wow!” he said. “Whew! You aren’t really that dumb, are you? The frogs were training, man. Practice. There’s a difference, don’t you see?”
Maybe it was the way his eyes became gelatinous, swimming beneath the shadows of his copper-colored Afro. Maybe it was the fact that he had called me dumb and I was weary of being called dumb in a dumb world. I thought at the time that it was an attempt to make it up to my uncle when, before he straggled off into the Mexican night, my cousin had demanded even more money and I handed him a penny and said, “Let us not meet again.” This year or any other, I thought, feeling joy as I watched the candle of his hair recede, flicker, and disappear into the permanent realm of rumor.
Then, as I watched the plane wiggle around and taxi for takeoff, its tail wagging like a mechanical puppy on rundown batteries, I wished I could take back my answer. My uncle was only trying to find a place in the world where he could live without people thumping on his delicate dreams like tom-toms. As the plane’s engine roared and strained, lifting into the air toward the San Francisco Peaks, the Absence of Angels turned the bruised color of regret. Within the year, the collective sighs of my family would signal uncle’s leaving Karen Manowitz to return to the security of the Vegomatic and, for me, flying towards San Francisco would be like flying into the vacuum center of a storm, a vast cosmic sucking, pulling the jet over the Bay Bridge down towards the blue lights that lined the runway.
35.
Regret is the daughter of accident and the queer lover of Death, so it was no surprise to me that, with all the regrets in Chosposi, the little blighter Death decided to become my fellow traveler that summer, winding me i
nto a cocoon of solitude like a silkworm. Each time I returned to Chosposi, Rachel seemed less happy to see me, giving me spurious looks of anxiety as though I knew something about her that could and would be used against her in a court of law. Sanchez, conversely, made great efforts to welcome me back, hailing me with a brashness that seemed extreme and insincere. Where his large laughter had once pleased me with the joy he took in the desert and had made me laugh with him, now his laughter sometimes seemed forced, needing booster rockets to escape the gravity of his heart. I felt chagrined when he laughed that way, and in public I wanted to dissociate myself from it.
More often, I was beginning to sink into the feeling that I didn’t belong there. The more I struggled against it, the more I seemed to sink. I began to take long solitary walks, ostensibly looking for arrowheads on the grassy plains to the east of the mission, oftentimes spending hours developing a seminal skin cancer from the hot sun as I sat and watched Navaho work around their hogans from a distance. My skin turned the color of cut earth, and I could sit unnoticed, looking like a spot of ground lacerated by rain or time or tool.
One day, having overestimated my resistance to the sun and stayed out too long, I was staggering home along the westbound road into the mission, hoping to hitch a ride on any cart or car that might pass. Along the sides of the road were Saguaro cacti, regularly spaced enough for the placards Sanchez had hung from them like Burma Shave signs. Unwise and Unfortunate, they read, the man who tries to pass / Nahochass / Navaho-Hopi Crafts and Historical Assoc. / Genuine Artifacts / The Standard for 99 Years. I had almost reached the second set which read, Cheer Up / Friend / You’re nearly there, when I noticed kangaroo mice hopping past, lizards and snakes slithering toward holes, birds abandoning the satin sky—a general movement of fauna as though something like an earthquake were coming. To the north was a stream of dust, rising from the earth like smoke. There was no road in that direction, so I assumed it had to be the smoke from a hogan drifting on the unfelt wind. I kept walking as a clanking, like rocks in a car’s hubcaps, barely perceptible at first, grew louder. When finally I turned again, there was a modified van bearing down on me, a row of air horns above the cab blasting. I dove behind a mound of earth as the van swerved, screeched, and a tire blew, flipping it onto the passenger’s side with a sound as unnerving as the metallic boring of a dentist’s drill as it plowed to a halt in the dry depression beside the road.
The van was customized with metallic paint, flames stencilled on the front fenders, bubble windows, and a cityscape complete with brown, smoggy air fused into the rear window. The driver, a little man with pale skin flecked with black dust like a coal miner, was still belted rigidly into his seat, both hands riveted to the steering wheel as if he expected the van at any moment to struggle to its feet like a horse and off they’d go.
“You okay?” I asked, climbing onto the van and pulling the driver’s door open.
His dark punk glasses were askew on his nose and his face seemed to refuse to move. It didn’t twitch, grimace, laugh, cry, or show anger or despair. It simply and completely waited for the van to end this siestal interlude and get under way again.
“Hey,” I said, shaking His shoulder. It was then I heard a sound that I have since come to associate with Death as if He were made from scrap metal—a rattling clinking sound like surgical tools falling into a sterilization pan or the jangle of a girl gilded by vanity.
“Hey,” I yelled, “are you okay?”
His beady bilious eyes, like a Gila’s with cataracts, blinked once and His oversized head turned very slowly up toward me. “Ho,” He said. “It’s you.”
Dragging Him from the van, I stood Him on His feet and stepped back to take a look at Him. You could have strip-mined His person. He was encased in jewelry. Turquoise amulets hung from His neck; His arms, all the way up His loose plaid Sears and Roebuck flannel shirt, were mailed with tin and lapis lazuli; and on the heels of His Dingo boots were silver spurs. He staggered for a moment as the weight of the trinkets settled and His tiny feet took hold on the solid earth.
Extracting a screwdriver from one of the several pockets sewn to His khaki pants, He solemnly removed the winged figure of Mercury that ornamented the hood of His van. I watched Him, feeling as though I was watching a ritual the meaning of which had not existed until that moment and wondering why I neither feared nor hated Him—indeed, was almost glad for Him the way you’re glad for an alarm clock even though you would rather be allowed to sleep. A small trickle of gasoline had begun to pool near His feet, and I was in the process of realizing the danger when He reached for the bulge of a cigarette pack in His breast pocket.
“Wait,” I yelled. He raised His other hand flat against my caution as though He were stopping an exaltation of larks. Carefully pacing off ten paces from the puddle of gasoline, He lit a cigarette and puffed on it, musing on what to do with a lame van. When He couched the stub of the cigarette between His thumb and middle finger in a position ready to flick it at the van, I began to run, diving over a rise in the earth just before the explosion. Peering over the hillock, I saw His dwarfish figure emerge from the black billowing smoke and clink-clank off west-southwest, angling away from the road that would take Him straight to Nahochass.
For one reason or another, I started to run after Him as though He were a person I wanted to help, to tell Him that if He followed the road.… I stopped hurrying after Him when He turned, tossed the winged Mercury at my feet, and said, “Okay, already. I owe you one. You get to choose when and I’ll pass over.” Shaking His head, muttering, “You’re going to be the end of me, yet,” He resumed His slow, lugubrious clanking into the setting sun, sounding more like the movement of German tanks in a generic war film than Death on little cat’s feet.
With Death around Chosposi, strange things began to happen. Death himself was strange. One thing I noticed was that most people failed to take notice of Him. Even when I pointed Him out to Rachel or Sanchez as He sat in His twenty-gallon hat on the porch of Nahochass, they refused to believe who it was.
“You fool,” Rachel would say. “Death doesn’t exist the way we do.”
“Besides,” Sanchez would add in agreement, “Death would be bigger, stronger, and smell a lot like a fish market on a hot day.”
The more they ignored Death and pretended it wasn’t He sitting outside Nahochass, the deadlier He seemed to become, and when I made the mistake of introducing Him to some gray-haired lady from Muncie, she fainted out of fear. To Grandfather Death wasn’t frightening; rather, He looked only sad with a border of bitterness to His mouth resembling a retired stockbroker.
“It’s a matter of expectation,” Grandfather would say, spinning the dial on the Sony television Sanchez had bought for him in search of commercials. “He wants to take the series. But this is the only game in town.”
Grandfather didn’t care for the programs and, unless he could watch the 49ers, he spent a good deal of his time with the miniature t.v. plugged into the dash of the Plymouth, switching from channel to channel in search of commercials.
“Look how white people spell ‘Relief,’” he would say, chuckling briefly before he added, “No wonder”—as though that commercial alone explained something profound. When he saw grown men dressed up like fruit in underwear commercials or like raisins in cereal commercials, he’d clap his hands and cry “Progress!” happily.
Laura P. became crablike again and her pots became what Sanchez called experimental and which were really failures of control, with spidery designs fired into them which had little or no meaning even to Laura. These pots were bought at crazy prices by a gallery owner from Phoenix, and she took to sleeping with her eyes wide open and throwing her pots with them closed, with the result that she sold even more pots and became richer. So rich, in fact, that she had to sneak away from the house at night and ritually bury the money in unmarked graves. Sanchez’s idea of firing hundred dollar bills into the sides of random pots offered her momentary relief: She hoped that, b
y doing so, the people who bought her “art” would take it home and destroy it, looking to find the bills. These pots became, overnight, collector’s items.
Even Johnny Three Feet fell under the spell of Death, giving up the gurgling pleasures of basketball in order to dribble around trying to look up little girls’ dresses.
For me, Death was as boring as He had always been. He sat beside me when I wanted to be alone and began conversations bordering on monologues. Over and over, He slipped into telling me how this job was the hardest He’d ever had, and from there go on to tell me about His boss, a man who no longer participated in the company and yet reaped profits from it by remaining chairman of the board. And whenever He had the chance, He’d remind me that He owed me one passover, but just one, asking if I wanted to redeem the debt now. After Johnny Three Feet molested a twelve-year-old girl, Death and I were observing the stiff and hateful behavior of the authorities who dragged Johnny weeping from Nahochass, and Death turned and smiled at me.
“He’ll die in prison,” He said.
I nodded. It was true: Johnny had an innocent stupidity that would make other felons hate him murderously.
“Now?” Death asked.
“No.” Saving Johnny’s life would require going all the way back to the snowstorm in which his mother had died and during which he had come into the world.
When Death sidled up to me after I had walked in on Sanchez and Rachel and surprised them in the act of dressing, He grinned salaciously and asked, “Now?”