American Masculine

by Shann Ray

  The small man positions himself, mounting the arms of the last two aislechairs so that he stands directly before the mob. He straddles the aisle, the land a blur in the open doorway behind him, around him the live wind a strange unholy combustion. He draws his fists to his sides, billows his chest as he gathers air, and screams, Stop! A wild scream, high and sharp like the bark of a dog.

  The little man’s effort creates a brief moment of quiet in which the people stand gaping at him. Seizing this, he strings his words rapidly. I know him. I spoke with him when he got on in Wolf Point. He has a three-year-old daughter. He has a wife. He has a good mother, a father. He will be dropped off at the stop on the far side of Glacier where they are waiting for him. He will return with them by car to the Mission Range.

  Shut up, says the fat man.

  I won’t, says the small man. He told me precisely.

  He lied, says the slick man.

  Let me speak, the small man pleads. He touches his hand to his face, a gesture both elegant and tremulous.

  We won’t, the mob responds, and in their movement and in the pronounced gather of their voices the prisoner is lifted by the neck and shoved forward toward the door.

  Out of the way! someone yells, and Middie watches as the small man takes a blow to the side of the head, a shot of tremendous force that lifts him light as goosedown, unburdened in flight to where his body hits the wall near the floor of the car and he lies crumpled, his face lolling to one side. Thickly now the small man says, He told me precisely. His words are overrun but he continues. He told me precisely, in Wolf Point. Before all of this, he had five hundred ten dollars of earnings. He meant to do what he and his wife dreamed. Middie’s fists are bound up in the clothing of the Blackfeet man, his forearms are bone to bone with the man’s ribs. The little man is speaking, He meant to buy land, off the reservation. The voice seems small, down between the chairs, He meant to build a home.

  The opening through which they pass is wide, the small man’s body a bit of detritus they have cast aside, the landing now beneath their feet solid and whole, like a long-awaited rest. Middie hears the velocity of wind and steel as he flows with the crowd to the brink. He feels the rush, like the expectancy of power in a bull’s back when the gate springs wide, like the sound of a man’s jaw when it breaks loose.

  Also he feels sorrow; he wants to cry or cry out. He wants to reach for the ivory hair comb but a weight of bodies presses him from behind and his hands are needed to control the captive. He feels the indent of the guardrail firmly on his thigh. He hears the small man’s voice, back behind him. He told me at Wolf Point—precisely five hundred ten dollars. Five hundred ten.

  The landing is narrow, the people many, and they are knotted and pushed forward by a score more, angry men running from other cars, clogging the aisle to get to the man. Those at the front grab the railing, the steel overhead bars, they grab each other, the Indian, the enemy. Noise surrounds them, the train’s cry, the wide burn of descent, the people’s yells high and sharp above everything, shrill as if from the mouths of predatory birds. The Indian’s suitcoat and vest are gone. His slim torso looks clean in his worried shirt, a V-shaped torso, trim and strong. In the press of it Middie is hot. Oxlike, he feels the burden of everyone, borne at once in him, and he bends and grabs the man’s leg. Other men do the same, there are plenty of hands now. He wants to hold the man fast but instead the crowd shoves the man aloft. They tip him upside down and clutch his ankles as they remove his shoes. They tear off his shirt, then his ribbed undershirt. They throw the shoes down among the tracks. The clothing they throw out into the wind where it whisks away and falls, rolling and descending like white leaves deep into the fog of the valley.

  From here the man is lowered between the cars. He becomes silent. Below the captive, Middie sees the silvery gleam of the tracks, parallel lines in the black blur of the ties, the lines bending almost imperceptibly at times, silver but glinting dull like teeth. With his elbows he tries to hold the people back. He feels the oncoming force of the crowd behind him, the jealousy, the desire. A woman’s voice is heard, a voice he knows but does not recognize. He bows his back and groans, trying to draw the man forth. The words are like a song, simple and beautiful in his mind: Put on your garments of splendor. He smells the oil of the train, the heat, the wet rock of the mountain.

  He sets his jaw and strains, he would pull the people and the man and the whole world to the mercy of his will; he gains no ground.

  In the gusts of wind, the mob squints their eyes. Leaning forward, their hair is blown back, it swirls some, blows back again. The speed of the train and the noise of the tracks, the scent of high sage and jack pine, the fogged void of gray as wide and deep as an ocean, but foremost the wind, rushes up against the mob creating an almost still-life movement into which they carry the man. Then the wind dies. The river of people flowing from the compartment bottlenecks in the doorway. Bodies from the choked opening to the guardrail twist and writhe and a vast shouting commences. Middie says No! This must stop! He grips the Blackfeet man’s belt with both fists and pulls him upward. His big body is a countermovement against the rise of all around him, but angry yells issue from wide red mouths and the mob grows to an impossible mass that pushes and swells, and breaks free in a sudden gush. Middie finds himself with the Indian airborne, cast into the gulf without foot or handhold, he has lost everything, and falling he sees a shaft of blue high in the gray above him and he is surprised at how light he feels, and how time has slowed to nothing. He reaches back, seeking a purchase he will not find, and in the singular sweep of his arm he takes people unaware—Prifflach, the fat man, his wife, the slick man—they all fly from the edge, effortless in the push of the mob, unstrung bodies and tight faces, over the lip of the guardrail and down between the cars, down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.

  —for my grandmother, whom we call the Great One

  THREE FROM MONTANA

  “You ever see a house burning up in the night …”

  —Annie Proulx

  I. THE LAND

  NO HISTORY GOES on unheard, no atrocity—the shootings and the sex crimes, the monstrosities, the mayhems that inhabit the ranch towns and small cities: Cohagen of eight people, Miles City of ten thousand, Plenty Coups more than one hundred, Bozeman tens of thousands. In Montana, skies tilt from a wooden porch all the way to the horizon line, and nothing keeps back the dawn. Cars from the reservations, dirty white trucks, yellow buses packing in hundreds, carting fans to basketball games in midwinter, the sons of trappers and the daughters of sheep shearers, the blood of a child in the trunk of an Eldorado, white crosses in twos or fives at the bends of this two-lane mountain are nearly transparent in the backlight. Everyone who has ever come here, remains. The land and the vault of sky are everything and people so insignificant they are struck by the idea that God doesn’t owe them anything.

  They are together in the deep high country, his father, his brother, himself. Much older than they were. All three grown now, each of them men. Shale and Weston brothers. Edwin their father. They are still together, a lie Shale tells himself, knowing Weston flew from the edge of Beargrass Mountain and died in a car crash at twenty-two. But he carries Weston with him, knows he always will, and yes, knows his father carries him too. A thick layer of cloud surrounds the peak up high to their right, rounded, massive shoulder, forested at the base beneath the cloud cover, treeless and rocky at the top where it breaks free crowned in dawn’s light. Birds fly in the drafts, gold dark eagles. To the south the cloud bank thins and open sky reaches from the slight promontory where they stand, holding their arms, looking out, down the draw of scrub pine and mottled veins of sage, blown timothy grass bent to the ground and everything converging along the silver-blue of the big river. Out from there the sweep of the valley, the four directions, the compass rose, and far to the south a landmass like the broad back of a giant sleeper. The air comes from the north, chill and fast
from the great gap of Canada down the channel from Glacier over the western mid-Montana plains to the mountains again, the line that unites the Beartooths, the Bridgers, the Spanish Peaks, and blind northeast behind them the Crazies. The bold land—cerulean forms of three plateaus, the one high bulk of mountain with gold swept among the blue, and in the shadowed valley the brown and tan of earth and grasses bound to the mercury of river water, boulders like crumbled towers, and sky bigger, flung out more bold than all—the land takes them and holds them. The land delivers them. Shale contemplates what he sees. God didn’t owe us anything, he thinks, but he gave his most beloved.

  II. THE FIRST DEFINITION OF PRETTY

  Shale was nine years old. Weston eleven. They’d been summoned to the relic zone, their parents’ bedroom, a place the boys walked through quietly so as not to disturb anything. They’d been there so rarely the room fascinated them. A mirror plate trimmed in silver lay flat on the dark wood bureau, set with Mother’s rings and lead crystal vials of perfume. The boys sat on the end of the bed, their feet hanging toward the floor. They sat on a blue flowered bedspread that was military sharp, pillows encased and tucked with a hard feminine hand. It was the femininity of it, the absence of the masculine that surprised and hushed them because they considered the great power he had over her, and they felt deeply the facade of this room, the fear that held her here, her sanctuary in the evenings and into night when he manned the living room watching TV, or when his presence downtown with alcohol and whatever he did when he was gone became a silence in the home that was physical. Her mind ran circles while she lay off to one side in the bed under the tight curve of clean sheets and straight coverlet; she heard the sound of her boys breathing, sleeping down the hall. At night, they’d heard her weep so many times they had no words.

  They sat there, Shale and his older brother, at the edge of the bed, in the elegant feel of that place, in the gold light of the afternoon. They had never met in their mother and father’s bedroom. They met here today. Their father had never cried in their presence.

  He was a big man, six feet four, nearly 250 pounds. He held his hands together, pressed them to his forehead, moved them away. His face was bent, twisting at the mouth and the eyes. The body was bent too, inward with shoulders rounded, chest caved in. His arms surrounded the cavity he created. His hands worked in the middle, folded in the form of a prayer but wrung out, white knuckled.

  “Your mother and I are getting a divorce,” he said.

  He looked away. He pushed at his fingers. He was standing over the boys.

  “We can’t seem to work it out. We’re getting a divorce.” He stared at them. Pink welled below the white curve of his eyes where the tears pooled and spilled. “Well?” he said, still looking the boys.

  Mom looked to them too, into their faces. She was crying. She pressed her fingers to her lips.

  Weston said nothing.

  They didn’t cry, the boys. They had no idea what he was saying.

  “What do you mean?” Shale said finally. It was 1977 in Billings, Montana, he was in fourth grade, and he didn’t know a single friend whose parents were divorced. He didn’t understand the word.

  “I’ll be seeing you guys less,” his father said. “I’ll be moving out.”

  Shale didn’t say anything. Weston had his head down. Mom was quiet. The meeting ended.

  This was the arrangement: Dad came home every other Tuesday night for an hour or two. On one such night when he was ten minutes in the door Shale’s mom kicked him back out, while she screamed at him and threw curses like bombs. His head and hands hung slack and as he walked her fists pounded dents in his green down jacket. She herded him over the front steps, along the front walk, and down the driveway. With their knees on the couch and their bodies leaned up the back of it, Shale and Weston watched from the front window. Shale’s arms were folded tight over his chest. He touched his nose to the glass. He saw his mother’s face red and blown out, white teeth shining. He felt something like a release of bees in his stomach, up under the ribcage. The door was open, the screen door black and gray.

  “Bastard!” she said. “Stay away from my kids.” She followed it with louder, sharper cussing. The words were black, four-lettered words, ugly from her mouth, hard to listen to.

  Weston put his arm around Shale. He grabbed Shale’s hand and took him to the kitchen. Mom returned, gathered Shale and Weston in her arms in the kitchen, and sobbed. Shale had never heard his mother cuss, and she’d never been physical. She’d also never gotten her husband to do what she asked.

  Dad continued to see the boys every other Tuesday night. Mom didn’t attack him anymore. Dad took the boys to basketball games again. He was a teacher and the head coach at Plenty Coups now, thirty-five miles south of Billings on the Crow reservation. He introduced Shale and Weston to his girlfriend, and smiled. She was a lot younger than he was. Shale asked. She was twenty-five, or something. She looks white but maybe she’s mix, Shale thought. She worked with his father. The games were at the Shrine gymnasium, a small hot box in the middle of Billings with the thick smell of people and popcorn, the blond lacquer of hardwood. The kids flew like birds, Shale’s father’s boys—Marty Roundface and Max Spotted Bear, Tim Falls Down and Dana Goes Ahead—and they often won.

  At home around the oval oak table in the kitchen Shale’s mother sat with dead eyes and her hands folded in front of her.

  “Is she prettier than me?” she asked.

  Shale and Weston raced to answer first.

  “No, Mom.”

  “Never.”

  “Not even close.”

  III. THE FIRST DEFINITION OF UGLY

  “No, I don’t have to do what you say,” Weston said.

  They’d all thought these words countless times, but Weston was the first of them, ever, to say them aloud.

  It was three years after Dad had returned to the family, left the young woman, remarried Mom. Shale thirteen, Weston fifteen. It might have been a sublimation of sexual greed, or a kind of family death wish in Dad, or perhaps his brand of religion that made him increasingly more rigid, but things got uglier before they got better. He grew unbearable. Now Mom cried in the back bedroom of the mobile home, the kind that arrived in two pieces on the flatbeds of eighteen-wheelers, a step up from the trailer they had when Dad was a teacher in Sitka, Alaska, and the apartment they had when he was in graduate school in Bozeman. The mobile was more modern. The small, square kitchen, one night, became the battleground. Dad had left Plenty Coups and it was Shale’s eighth-grade year, at St. Labre, the school that was a mix of Northern Cheyenne from Ashland, Lame Deer, and Busby, and Crow bused in for the week from Lodge Grass and Crow Agency. Weston was a sophomore.

  One white boy in the whole high school, that was Weston. Shale was the slender middle schooler they called Casper, or Salt. Dad was the principal and prided himself on being in charge. The students called him Ayatollah, or Khomeini. He liked that.

  Shale remembered a night when a black rock, brick-sized, came bashing through the window in his mom and dad’s bedroom and woke them all. Dad yelled to get down. Shale heard the wheels of a car kicking up dirt, getting gone, and from the floor in his open doorway he saw his dad through the angled hall in the shadow of the master bedroom standing in his underwear, pointing a rifle out the window.

  But on the night of the family battle it was late fall, September, maybe October, and dusk, no threat from the outside, no sign of storm. Out the kitchen window open fields of bunchgrass were white where the light waned, and beyond these was a rift in the land where the rakish tops of cottonwoods followed the downward lie of a swale. The trees formed a long, narrow S, naked of leaves, but thick enough to conceal the Powder River, the muddy ribbon that traveled the earth out there, brown even this late in the year. Dad had never hit Shale or Weston but for the tempered, though painful swing of the belt he spanked them with. He ruled primarily, and thoroughly, by the volume of his voice and the clarity of brutal intention. So neither Shale
nor Weston had ever really revolted. Neither had Mom. The sky to the northwest was violet, and southeast, out the living room window, the straight edge of the land framed a black void free of stars.

  Shale had entered the kitchen at the halfway point of the house, where the brown carpet of the living room met the worn linoleum of the dining space, the line that unites the two halves of every mobile home. In the kitchen sat the oak table and wood chairs. Weston and Dad and Mom were in the narrow space near the sink. Attached to the sink was a white Formica countertop, gold-yellow grain in it like small truncated veins. Shale noticed a dark power had begun between Weston and Dad. Shale turned and left the kitchen directly, walked to the gray cloth wingback, and sat down and pressed himself into the corner of it and watched. He curled his feet beneath him and positioned his hands in his armpits. The front door was closed, as were all windows. Because of Mom, the house, the arrangement of things, was crisp and clean. The sweet smell of sweat that accompanied the living room due to having three athletes had grown more pungent suddenly. Shale was cold.

  Weston ran into the fray, straight and hard, and Shale experienced an ascension of fear like he had never known. “I don’t have to do anything you say!” Weston shouted and screamed in his father’s face in response to an order he’d given.

  “You’ll do exactly as I say,” his father said quietly. His father’s eyes were rocks beneath the hard bones of his forehead. Weston and his father approached one another like warships in close waters, large men, both six feet four, their fists slung at their sides, loose and open. “No,” Weston said, and he entered his father’s space with shocking speed, put his hands on his father’s chest, and shoved him back. The rest was something no one imagined, the power of the boys’ father, quick, controlled, enraged but not crazy. Shale pictured his dad throwing punches in bars, intoxicated but intelligent, windmills with precise arcs that landed on the soft skulls of men smaller than he.