by W. S. Penn
“Oh, Sara,” I said, trying not to laugh, “this has nothing to do with you. With us.”
She wanted to know why not. “After all, I’m white, as well as the daughter of an unwise man.”
“True,” I said laying my hand on her shoulder. “But you have a good heart.”
The way she looked at me out of the corners of her eyes as though suspicious of whether or not to take me at my word, wanting to believe that I believed that a good heart outweighed silly computations of blood, made me shake my head and laugh at her.
“My unfeathered friend,” I said. “You are wise. Don’t you see that that makes you Real People? Don’t you know already that I’d rather be a Real People with you than anything else?” I tucked her into my arms and hugged her, feeling her suspicious body relax, disbelief draining away like untapped electricity. “Being human is hard enough,” I said softly. “Besides, you can’t help it if you’re a honky.”
“You …!” she cried, pushing me away—and then we laughed together for a long time before returning to her father’s party.
The summer passed quietly. Sara and I kept pretty much to ourselves, content to work and save for the fall term when we’d return to school, spending our evenings with each other or the Tompsons for the most part, during which time everything became subject to humor.
Late at night I would often awaken as from a dream that was actually no dream but a memory, sneak out of bed without disturbing Sara, and write. I managed in this way to fill up the front sides of five hundred pages, and I turned the half-blank book over and began filling up the verso pages. I was increasingly obsessed by the need to write that dream-vision down, but each time I tried, conventions like naturalism got in my way, hanging around the edges of the manuscript like doodles. Worse, if I did write a good paragraph I was susceptible to tin-plated delusions of someone reading it and even taking it seriously. At first light, I would sneak back to bed, lying awake, concentrating on ways to hide my growing obsession from Sara.
Father married his lady friend, and I managed to meet her when I flew north to have the bandages removed for the last time by Dr. Weinstein.
Weinstein was pleased with his work and even more pleased that the nerves he had feared were irreparably damaged seemed to be regaining a good bit of function, and he took me to a quick lunch at the Stanford Student Union, where we sat and ate out on a broad circular deck. At one point a wild-looking man of about sixty in a tweed jacket with ragged suede patches on the elbows wandered past us on the asphalt path below. He carried a placard that read “REPENT!” and towed a small red wagon filled with pamphlets behind him on a leash. Students and faculty alike passed him by as though he were nothing more unusual than an unmowed lawn or covert action by the CIA.
“Is the world ending?” I asked Weinstein.
“I wish I could remember the joke my mother used to tell about the world coming to an end,” he said, gazing pityingly at the man. “He used to administer intelligence tests. The story goes that he began to frazzle 15 or 20 years ago. He doesn’t teach anymore, for obvious reasons. He went mad when they decided that his I.Q. test measured nothing more than the middle-class upbringing of white kids. The university gives him a stipend, ostensibly for research but really because the university hasn’t figured out what to do with him yet. He’s harmless enough.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” was all I could say.
After lunch I went by father’s new house to meet his new wife. The way she treated me pleased me so much that when Sara asked me what she was like after I got home, I said, “She’s as nice as her voice.”
“Did you see your mother?”
“No,” I said in such a way as to let her know I didn’t want to talk about it. I had planned on stopping by, but I’d dropped by William the Black’s fraternity house and had been so discouraged by the way he kept me outside on the stoop, the way in which he and I had moved down forking paths away from each other, that I’d driven straight to the airport and returned the rental car and then sat facing east-southeast watching planes land and take off.
About the time Sara and I were married with only the Tompsons and her father to witness, Sanchez mailed me a set of snapshots. I was amazed at the size of the Trading Post. It seemed to stand like an oasis of commerce beside an enlarged road. An entirely new building from what I could tell, it was simple and plain, flat stone and adobe with a broad wooden porch in front, the roof of which was supported by stripped logs. Gone were the American flag and the wooden Indian and instead there was a simple sign above the porch: “Ayawamat Trading Post.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
“What does that mean?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. Grandfather had taught me a little of his language; Laura P. none of hers. We had to resort to the library to find out it meant “Man who follows orders.”
Another photo had Grandfather sitting astride his Raleigh outside the mission building, Laura P. at his side, both of them looking like doughy lumps on the landscape.
Then one of Rachel holding what looked to be a small litter—explained by the following picture of the baby inside. Sanchez’s note with the photos told us that the baby was a girl and that they’d named her Rachel Laura, aged four months. She was beautiful. Despite the realities, looking at the small round brown face and the little clenched fists, I couldn’t help but feel hope.
I wrote not Sanchez but Rachel, this time, daring to ignore all that had passed between us and simply tell her how beautiful Rachel Laura really was. A week later, I told Sara that Rachel had gotten my letter.
“How do you know?” she asked.
Not many weeks passed before Sara had proof that I had been right. Sanchez, Rachel, and the baby arrived for a visit. While I would have expected Sanchez to roll up in the tinted luxury of a Mercedes, they appeared one mid-morning in a battered Volkswagen van loaded with Pampers and jars of that vacuum-sealed strained mush people call baby food.
Rachel Laura was a high-tech kid, as Sanchez called her, and she proved it by regaling us with five variations on a theme during their two-day stay: She cried and ate, cried and was changed, cried and burped, gurgled happily, and then performed her piece de resistance by sleeping soundly, bathed in the warm rain of Rachel’s and Sara’s motherly attentions.
Sanchez and I played manly roles during all of this, pretending that all their doting over the baby was silly—and then doted ourselves when Rachel and Sara were not around.
Both Sanchez and Rachel had changed. Rachel was shy and quieter; less aggressive as though some of her rage had become determination. Still angular and bony in body, her grace and calm seemed a contradiction, and it took some getting used to. When she spotted the scarab I wore hanging around my neck, she only smiled and said, “Laura P. told me you had acquired more weight.”
“Elanna brought it to me,” I said by way of explanation.
“Wear it well,” she said.
Sanchez, though still with his former lightness of heart, revealed a seriousness of mind that I’d never have dreamed of. He still sold souvenirs and sodas, but now the souvenirs were authentic Kachinas and jewelry crafted by the Indians of the reservation. His mark-up was still four hundred percent and his profits were as huge as always. But where he had once derived pleasure from inventing gadgets that were useless and pocketing the profits, now the excess money went into the pockets of the reservation and his pleasure was in his dreams of scholarships, a clinic to be built behind the trading post, investments in shopping centers in Phoenix and Tucson.
“How did this happen?” I asked him. “What made you give up the Vegomatic and cookie cutters?”
“It just came to me,” he said.
“Like a vision?”
“Like the stomach flu,” he said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he becomes a chairman,” I said to Sara after they had replenished their store of Pampers and baby food and driven off.
“Are you jealous?” Sara asked.<
br />
“Not in the way you might think.”
“No?”
“No.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
52.
The second week of December, Sara found me lying on the sofa, immobile as an Iguana at high noon, the tears in my eyes less from pain (I’d found an old codeine tablet and popped it) than from the feeling that something had happened, something important. It was there, like a word on the tip of my tongue, playing hide and seek across my cerebral cortex.
“What’s wrong, Alley?” Sara said, setting her history education textbooks on the old maple dining table the Tompsons had donated to our housekeeping. The table tilted on its shorter leg.
“I don’t know. Something has happened.”
She sat on the edge of the sofa.
“Be careful of my hip,” I said. “It hurts.”
Sara frowned, worried. “Do you want me to call the …?”
“Grandfather,” I said. The word slipped out of my mouth and hovered briefly in the air.
“What about him?”
“Damn it. I should’ve known,” I said, pushing her out of the way gently. “Where’s my address book?”
“What?” Sara said. “What is it?”
I limped over to the roll-top desk we shared and began pawing through the cubbyholes, looking for my book with telephone numbers in it.
“He’s dying,” I said. The pain in my hip vanished as quickly as it had come. “I know it.”
She didn’t ask how I knew it, as I thumbed through the book, looking for the number at the Ayawamat Trading Post.
“Oh, Alley,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I said, picking up the telephone, waiting for the dial tone. There wasn’t one. I pressed the buttons on the receiver’s cradle and let them up again. “It’s time,” I said.
“Hello?” It was Rachel.
“Rachel? Huh. I was just calling you. I must have picked up the receiver before the phone had a chance to ring.”
“Bert,” Rachel said. “I have some bad news.”
“Where is he?”
“You know, then?” Rachel asked. Her voice had relief in it, the relief of someone who’s been steeling herself for an unpleasant task only to have the task supererogated.
“Yes. Where is he?”
“In Our Lady of St. Julian Hospital. In Phoenix. Sanchez took Laura P. down there, today.”
“Good. So, what happened?”
As Rachel told me, I began to shake my head in suspended disbelief. Sara put her arms around my shoulders.
“Are you laughing or crying?” Sara asked, trying to decipher my face, after I hung up.
“The stubborn son of a bitch,” I said. “He broke his hip.”
“How?”
“Only he could be that stubborn. Willful. He rode the Killer Bike over the curb in front of the trading post. Instead of riding around to the ramp, he just up and decided to ride straight over the curb. The Raleigh tipped over and he broke his hip.”
The image of Grandfather lying on his side, the left rear wheel of the bike revolving slowly, inexorably grinding to a halt, his hands still gripping the handlebars and him staring straight ahead with the same concentration he had had the day I was born, intrigued with his newfound perspective on the horizon, made me smile.
“He probably just lay there, not even wondering at the pain in his hip or how he had come to be there,” I said to Sara, describing this image. I chuckled. Sara chuckled, tentatively at first, and then we began to laugh together, the chuckle blossoming like a cactus flower into one exquisite burst of laughter.
“Do me a favor?” I asked. “Phone Hughes Airwest and get me on the next flight to Phoenix, while I pack?”
“Two tickets, coming right up,” Sara said, beginning to look through the Yellow Pages.
“You’ve got exams,” I said.
“So do you.”
“Yeah, but I need you to stay here and arrange for me to make them up.”
“What if they won’t let you?”
“They can fail me. You come out when you’re finished.”
“I want to go with you,” Sara said.
“Uh-uh. Later, not now. I want some time alone with him,” I said.
Sara phoned the airline while I threw some clothes into a suitcase and went into the bathroom to collect my shaving kit. The face reflected in the mirror over the sink was me and not me and for a few minutes I sat on the toilet lid and wept, briefly, my face in my hands—wept not out of sadness but because of that side of me which was incapable of feeling sad, out of a feeling that this was a change and an uncertainty of how great a change it would be.
“You’re on a flight in two hours,” Sara said, coming into the bathroom. “Oh, Alley, go ahead. You can cry in front of me. It must be hard …”
“It’s not hard,” I said, drying my eyes. “It’s just … different.” I began to smile, again. “Now everybody will think I’m nuts when I talk to Grandfather.”
“I won’t,” Sara said. “As long as you don’t mind if I talk to him, too.”
Despite the effects of several in-flight drinks, I was annoyed at the way the brand-spanking-new nurse led me with her gum-shoed display of sorrow to Grandfather’s room. He lay unconscious, a ridge of white sheets and pillows propping him up so that his eyes would have been staring straight at me if they’d been open. They were looking beyond my horizons to the place Grandfather wanted to go. Laura P. slumped in a chair in the darkest corner of the room, apparently asleep, her lips moving in fits and spurts as though she was praying for Grandfather’s journey to be short. At her feet, chained to the metal leg of the bed, dozed my old familiar Death. He looked small and wizened. I felt sorry for Him. “That’s what can happen,” I thought, “when people don’t take you seriously.”
“Mr. Hummingbird?” It was a doctor, clipboard in hand. He glanced about the room’s interior before stepping in and introducing himself. “I’m Doctor Gaines. “You must be … let’s see …,” he said, consulting his clipboard.
“Grandson. Alley.”
“Alley … Alley … Alley …,” he said abstractedly, running his mechanical pencil down the sheet on his clipboard.
“Oxen-free,” I said. The corners of his mustache twitched. “Albert,” I said.
“Bert?”
“Yeah,” I said. It must have been Sanchez who had filled out the list of family likely to show up.
“Right,” he said, ticking the sheet on the clipboard. He crossed to the bed, took up Grandfather’s wrist too quickly as though there were no resistance or weight, and checked his pulse, accidentally stepping on Death’s fingers.
“Ouch! Watch where you put your flat feet you silly S.O.B.,” Death whined, awakening and hunkering farther beneath the bed. He spotted me. “You!” He hissed, His eyes turning yellow with rage.
“Did you say something?” Dr. Gaines asked me.
“No,” I said. I was intrigued by the way the doctor was able to overhear Death and yet not see Him. Death clamped His mouth shut and huddled down into His rage, shaking, waiting for the doctor to finish his cursory examination of Grandfather and explain to me that Grandfather needed an operation to repair his broken hip. They couldn’t perform the operation because his heart was precariously weak.
“Until he’s stronger,” the doctor said, “all we can do is wait and see. I’ll be back. Let the nurses know if you need anything.”
As soon as he was gone, Death poked his head out from beneath the bed and began trying to get me to unlock the chain binding Him to Grandfather’s bed. At first He was obsequious, using the oily, hand-wringing grin of a moneylender (Member F.D.I.C.). To me, He looked like Happy out of Snow White, and I told Him so. Becoming angry, He ran through His entire stock of disguises, growing large and threatening and then shrinking down to the size of a normal human with two heads, their faces staring at each other, one lovingly and the other hatefully. Then He changed into the figure of a martial angel who has flown
into a high-voltage power line and frazzled His feathers. Finally, He resorted to seeming a hissing mean little thing whose scaly eyes burned with the determination of His bite.
“It’s no use,” I said. “I don’t have the key.”
“In your Grandfather’s left hand,” He said.
Sure enough, Grandfather’s left hand was closed tight as though it was gripping something.
“When it’s time,” I said. “When his hand opens.”
He sighed, transforming into a shape I’d never seen before, a stone-faced little man in a three-piece suit, clutching a briefcase like a life ring after a shipwreck.
“I can make you a rich man,” He said. “Just get the key.” He offered me tips on the commodities market to prove to me that He was honest and could be trusted. “Silver,” He whispered. “Soybeans.”
“No,” I said. “Thanks anyway.”
Even when Laura P. awoke and stood up, she didn’t seem to see anyone but Grandfather as she circled crab-like in the corner of the room, her lips still moving constantly. As the hours passed, her shuffling movement seemed to become a loose spiral around her right hip and I could see that as her own hip stiffened the radius of her walk would close like a draughtsman’s compass as though she were trying to drill her way into the underworld.
That night, I telephoned father to give him a status report, and then found myself a hospital’s imitation of an armchair and dragged it into the corner of Grandfather’s room by the curtained window, and slept.
The next day, Grandfather was conscious enough to let my uncle convince himself that his father was going to regain his strength and be able to have his hip repaired. Even the brand new nurse allowed her face to flirt with encouraging expressions when she came in to check Grandfather’s vital signs.
“It will probably cause you some discomfort,” uncle said to Grandfather. “But it’s better than living the rest of your life in a wheel-chair.”
My aunt, the woman I once had called the Vegomatic, knew as well as I did that Grandfather was not going to get better. Watching her face as we both listened to my uncle ramble hopefully on, it dawned on me what had made my uncle a bit mad. It had begun with those pilots, his six wartime friends. All uncle’s adult life he had clung to the belief that people didn’t die but only passed away and they not only could but would reappear as long as he refused to believe that they were simply and finally dead. He had it part right: They first have to die and journey through the Absence of Angels; then they could return. But uncle could do no other than believe that Grandfather was not dying. When I saw that, I saw in the eyes of my aunt that she had always known this, always understood this, and, in her own way, always forgiven it and found a way to live with it. She must have known, then, that for uncle to leave her and live with Karen Manowitz would have meant being fully alive, and in order to be alive, uncle would have had to recognize Death and admit to himself that his six friends had, on his orders, died. Observing the cool facade of her face, I was impressed by the immensity of what must have been her suffering. Especially when I considered how, raised on uncle’s notions about passing away, her only son had been reduced to little more than an agent of Death and without any sense of belonging in his heart or his life had fled the country, forever.