by W. S. Penn
I said, “No.” I didn’t mind Rachel sleeping with Sanchez. I rather welcomed it, hoping that Sanchez’s innate irreverence would help Rachel put the flesh of humor on her sharp bones. Their sleeping together was only one of those all-too-explicable events that occurs between two people when one feels intensely about the other. In this case, Rachel had begun by hating Sanchez only to discover with each new instance of his generosity or humorous approach to the world that he wasn’t so bad. As his so-called badness modified, the strength of her feelings hadn’t, and gradually they transformed from hatred to love. If nothing else, it proved that what the feeling was called didn’t matter as much as the feeling’s intensity. When we really and honestly don’t care about people, don’t we settle for saying that they are “nice” or “kind”? It seemed normal enough to me that Rachel, hating Sanchez at the outset, would end by liking him; and so, even though their sleeping together made me feel excluded, I didn’t mind, and I chose not to use up the one favor Death owed me.
Possibly, I might have changed that answer and taken Death up on his offer to passover and alter the way things happened if I had realized that hatred doesn’t simply evaporate like dew after the deserted night. All that changes is hatred’s object. Someone once said that hating Indians was only three letters away from hating Jews; we might add that hating men is only a hop, skip, and a gender away from hating women. In my own slow way, with the naive stupidity of a Johnny Three Feet, I imagined that Rachel’s falling in love with Sanchez would allow her to be my friend again. After all, it was my liking of Sanchez that had made her withdraw from me. Why wouldn’t her liking him allow her to like me again? We could all be friends.
Wrong. Maybe if Johnny Three Feet hadn’t been arrested and dragged weeping from Chosposi, Rachel would have turned on him and not me. Maybes are of little use, though, in cases that are real and not properly imagined. From furtive looks and downcast eyes to questions suggestive in the dulcet tones of their inflection, Rachel began to attack me directly. It was not a slow process. “What do you want?” changed to “What do you want?,” signalling her increasing frustration with me. When the same question became “What do you want?,” I was forced into the corners of my own frustration and loneliness.
Sanchez seemed as embarrassed by all this as I was. One night in Phoenix we were shooting pool in a bar where the waitresses wore clothes instead of uniforms and I mentioned that maybe he’d like me to quit the import business for Nahochass. It had been a slow game, one in which each of us spent more time walking around the table and chalking up our cues than in talking the way we had been used to doing—airing the linen of our feelings. Sanchez kept watch on the door as though Death or Rachel might suddenly walk through it.
“Why would I want you to quit?” Sanchez said, lining up a shot.
“I don’t know. I just get this feeling that things might be better for you if I did.”
“No way, my friend. You were there at the beginning and you’ll be there at the end.”
“You’re sure? You can be straight with me.”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“I figure that even after I go to Clearmont College in the fall I can come out most weekends. Holidays,” I said. “You want another beer?” He nodded.
When I came back, Sanchez said, “It’s your turn,” took the draft beer and moved to the far end of the table. After my first shot, he said, “Of course …”
“Of course what?” I said.
“Of course, I was wondering if it might not be better for you if you waited until next summer. I mean what with school and all, wouldn’t it be better if you concentrated on your studies?”
“That’s up to me, isn’t it?” I was unwilling to let him off the hook he had baited.
“I guess,” he said. “Then there’s Rachel, too.”
Now we were getting somewhere. “What about Rachel?”
“Well, she seems pretty uncomfortable with you. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if there is a reason. But every time you and I go out together, she gets pretty upset. When you’re around, she fidgets a lot.” He bent above his cue and then stood up before taking the shot. “I’m not saying you’ve done anything.”
“I haven’t.”
“But maybe for her sake, it would be better if you stayed out of the business until next summer. I’m sure she’ll calm down by then.”
“If that’s what you want, sure,” I said, thinking, okay, I’ll make it easy on you. Friend.
“It isn’t what I want,” he protested. “Not what I want at all. But you know women.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Women. We’d better get on back to the post, don’t you think.?”
On the way back, we were silent. I wasn’t angry at Sanchez or Rachel. I reminded Rachel of the way they had begun. No one wanted reminders like that around. Just as two alcoholics who love each other can’t stay married after they’ve climbed on the wagon, so friends who remind us of our former enemies are unwelcome. No, my anger was for myself, the way I had this feeling of holding the ball once again, and of having to be left holding it.
36.
With Death, too, there had come mysterious strangers, men with crew cuts dressed in uniforms, enlisting Navaho boys as encoders of military messages. Their glossy brochures attracted me, especially because of what the Army recruiter said, that I could train while in school and after graduation be a part of something larger than myself. It was, after all, a thing I wanted; maybe the Army could provide it. That, at least, was the excuse I used for signing an agreement to enroll in R.O.T.C. when I started Clearmont Men’s College, and even Grandfather seemed to approve, saying, “It’s your country. You fertilize it, maybe it will fertilize you.”
“Like a vegetable?” I said.
“Like red meat,” Grandfather said.
It was this, my agreeing to join R.O.T.C., that served as an excuse for Rachel to excuse herself. Catching up with me from behind as I walked alone toward the reservation mission’s gymnasium, Rachel knocked the basketball from my hand.
“Rotsy!” she said. “How could you?”
“Sanchez told you?” I said. “Could he tell you why?”
“Man,” Rachel said, sneering. “I don’t believe it. What happened to the peace symbols? What would your old friend Yvette say? Pah!” she spat, hitting the tip of my sneaker. “Sexism wasn’t good enough for you? Now …”
“Shut up,” I warned.
“You’ve gotta try fascism, too, now?”
“Shut your fucking mouth,” I said. “You’ve got no right to judge people.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up, fool,” she said.
“I just did. Shut up. See?”
Rachel reached up and slapped me hard across the face. For an instant, I was stunned not by the force of the blow but by the power of absurdity. What was expected? How was one to respond? Should I treat her the way I had been taught to treat women and turn the other cheek? I struck her with the back of my partially closed hand. I cupped my hand so the knuckles would hurt and hit her hard enough to hurt her a good deal. She never would have believed that I could have hit twice as hard. At least twice as hard. None of that bothered me. What upset me was the feeling of calculation. I’d done it coolly and without concern—a calculation alternating with rage and hatred. I was ready to strike anyone for any reason, good or not, before I would regret bruising Rachel’s face.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Sanchez said, the next time he saw me.
“Yeah?” I said. “Yeah? Give me half a chance and I’ll do it again.”
Sanchez walked away.
“There is an order to things,” Grandfather said. “Even carrots are better than snakes.”
I felt backed into a corner, wounded by the fact that Grandfather had no interest in my explanations. Still, I refused to regret hitting Rachel.
“You need to go,” Louis Applegate said. “Like me, you don’t belong here.”
“Yet,” Grandfather added. “Maybe
you should go home until it’s time to leave for college.”
“Now?” Death said.
“Absolutely not,” I replied.
Louis was right, and I knew it. Even as I boarded the bus out of Chosposi, confused as I was over ends and means, I envied Laura P. and Grandfather, Rachel and Sanchez their abilities to act on the basis of their individual visions of how the world ought to have been. My one action of that summer besides teaching Johnny Three Feet to pretend to shoot baskets had been to sock Rachel one. Although it was an end which I refused to have real regrets about, my refusal made me wonder if my imagination wasn’t extremely limited.
Leaning my head back against the soiled doily of the seat’s headrest, I wondered about ends and means. “Who,” I said aloud, “is hurting who?,” drawing frightened stares from Mrs. Joad, who sat across the aisle.
“Ain’t no sense to get riled,” she told her son. “We gone get there when we get there.” True enough, I thought. True enough.
The potential of being challenged to explain to another person like Rachel how I came to enroll in R.O.T.C. bugged me as much as the persistent questions of Joad Junior about when they would get there, wherever that was, so I invented a story. At first, it was merely an idea: I had gotten into trouble, been arrested and tried, and released by the judge on the condition that I enroll in R.O.T.C. I fell asleep.
A high interior voice woke me. “Why,” it asked, “would a judge release an Indian on that condition?”
“I wasn’t guilty,” I said.
“So? You don’t have to be guilty, if he’s seen enough John Wayne movies. A white judge might just throw the book at you.”
“So the judge was Black. He knew. He understood.”
“Fine and dandy, Randy,” the voice said. “But if the Black judge found you not guilty …”
“Contempt of court. Even though I wasn’t guilty, I was found in contempt of court.”
It was only natural to add William the Black, Walter, Allen, Stephen, and Paul to the story. After all, I knew them, had been given to hanging out with them, and if anyone needed more details, I’d be able to describe each of them after his fashion.
“What was the charge for which the six of you were tried?” the voice asked.
Without hesitating I replied, “Assault.” After all, that’s what I’d done to Rachel, assaulted her in response to her assault on me. It was on my mind; it was also something I knew. In the same way I had mixed in my buddies, I added the catalyst of striking a girl with the back of the hand—not my hand, but Walter’s hand—and by the time the bus rolled through Lost Hills, California, the story came out this way:
On a drunken spree with William the Black, Walter, Allen, Stephen, and Paul, at Walter’s new girlfriend’s house. Her parents gone for the weekend, the six of us finished off most of the liquor in the father’s cabinet while Walter and Cynthia (“Cyn-thee-ya,” as she said it, with the slow imitation of the ascendant bourgeois) sprayed and spat at each other like two clawless cats in the upper regions of the split-level house. It was no accident that Walter slapped Cyn-thee-ya with the back of his open hand (it seemed to me more out of sorrow that the level of passion had declined to this cold farewell on the front stoop). It was accidental that Cyn-thee-ya happened to be the daughter of the county sheriff, a girl given to fabricating serious truths out of the flippant disorder of her unexciting life and what had merely been a quarrel produced for a small summer stock audience was transformed by the emptiness of the father’s liquor bottles into an assault charge for which we were arrested. Fortunately, recognizing the inherent dishonesty of the fiction, the Black judge dismissed the charges. Unfortunately, he felt obliged to cite me with silent contempt. It wasn’t that I had refused to speak. My silence was the result of my tongue being drunk with too many words that turned and twisted inside my seething rage until they sorted themselves out at last, just long enough to say when the judge asked each of us if we had any regrets that my only regret was that Walter hadn’t knocked the teeth down the lying bitch’s throat. The words flew out of my mouth like crows, carrying off with them all the other words I might have said to the angry judge, and I had withdrawn into a silence more profound for its helplessness. The result was justice: With the logic of the power saw, the judge decided that the best corrective to my hate and rage was the U.S. Army. And so it was that I found myself imprisoned in the irony of a boy, trained by his sister to resist the draft, agreeing to enroll in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the college of his choice.
Telling and retelling this story to myself silenced the high voice questioning me inside my head. True enough, it was a lie. Yet it might be a convincing lie, especially since each of the functional characters was borrowed from what people called real life. Though William the Black’s father was not a judge, he was a lawyer and thus close enough; Cyn-thee-ya looked comfortably like Allison DeForest and thus would give my voice feeling when I said “the lying bitch’s throat”; strangely, the court-appointed attorney insisted on looking like my uncle; and even the D.A. had his natural model, with an appearance like Death in a motorized wheelchair.
Telling and retelling the lie as the bus rolled through Lost Hills and up the San Joaquin Valley didn’t convince me of its truth. Yet in the darkness of my heart, the lie was the only knife I had. And at the end of the story a truth—not the truth—stood out: I had lost my sense of humor.
Only mother could restore that.
37.
Walking down my old home block late at night, mother’s house was easy to spot. It was the one that looked like a Christmas tree or an amusement park about to open, lights blinking on and off, inside and out, timed to discourage a burglar—at least to take two years off the finite number of his heart’s beats as he sneaked through the house, deducting a month’s worth each time a new light blinked on and a lit one went black.
The locks had been changed again. I spent two hours trying to find a way inside. Finally, I tapped a small hole out of the window glass on my bedroom, managed to lift the dowel rod blocking the runners, and slid the window back as quietly as possible. Crawling through the opened window, I fell into a web of cords strung with bells; the room’s lights flashed on; and in the seconds it took for her not to Mace me with the can in her hand and scream “Ah!” I recognized mother. Changed, thinner but not skinny by any means, the flab on her right arm holding the Mace become hard with yardwork and the fixing of household machinery.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded.
I confess, hanging there half inverted in the tangle of bell cords, I didn’t have what she would have called a good answer.
“Hi, mom,” I said, trying to smile, staring at the nozzle on the Mace can that looked the size of a sixteen-penny nail. “I’m home,” I tried to say, choking on the word, making it sound like “Imhm.”
“You scared me,” she said, unhooking the cords and watching me plop to the floor and then get up. “Look at yourself. You look like … you look like …,” she said, skipping like a badly scratched record.
I crossed to the wall mirror and looked at myself. I did look frightening. I hadn’t considered it, but in the hot summery months I’d been in Arizona, my skin had become hard and dark, turning beneath the desert sun not red and not bronze but as near to burnt umber as humanly possible. I looked something like one of the young boys on the reservation I’d coached in basketball along with Johnny Three Feet; small, intense boys whose pleasure and understanding of basketball was not in obeying the rules like dribbling or not fouling but in charging down the court, throwing the ball at the hoop, and retreating—as though basketball were a form of counting coup with a ball and not a stick. I was taller, but I resembled them.
“You look like …,” mother said.
My god, I thought, like my father might have looked at my age. My high forehead revealed by the hair stuck back by the grease of bus travel through a hot climate; the high-cheek bones that didn’t move, smiling or not; eyes that were deep and
capable of being startled. Only my nose was different: it was mother’s.
“At least I won’t have large pores,” I said.
“What? What did you say?” mother asked, folding the lapels of the terrycloth bathrobe over, nearly choking herself.
“Nothing.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, right now, young man,” she said. “Your father spent the last twenty years muttering at me. Don’t you start.”
“I wasn’t muttering at you, mother.”
She sighed a sigh heavy with the struggle of rewriting her past, a sigh that told me to shut up. There was no sense in arguing with mother, no more sense than trying to convince an elderly woman who believes in God that there is no God. Besides being impossible, it seems, also, cruel. Why take away from mother the memories she needed to recreate in order to live?
“So,” she said. “How long do you think you are staying?”
“I hadn’t thought about it. Until school starts, I guess.”
“Well,” she said. “You can sleep on the couch. There are blankets in the hall closet. I would appreciate it if you would pick up after yourself every morning, put the blankets back in the closet, and not clutter up the living room. Feel free to have a friend over during the days I’m at work; but don’t interfere with my meetings, and stay out of the study. I’m researching a book, in there.”
“Thanks,” I said, wondering whether the study was Pamela’s old room or Elanna’s.
Capping the can of Mace, mother smiled kindly. “There’ll be toast and half a grapefruit for you in the kitchen, in the morning. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight, mother,” I said.
I stayed two weeks, eleven hours, and seventeen minutes. Some nights, I tried to read in the family room as mother typed away on her book or talked to the television set. At first, I thought she was talking to me, those times, but soon enough I recognized that what she was doing was rewriting the dialogue to simple programs like “Here Come the Brides” and “Gunsmoke.” Miraculously, mother could type and talk at the same time. It was as though there was a silo of words, stored up over years of subsidy and regulation, that she opened each night, pouring out into the ears of Running Dog and myself.