American Masculine

by Shann Ray

  He grabbed Weston by the shoulders and lifted him from the ground. Weston looked very small now. He lifted him and slammed him into the nearest kitchen chair, an oaken midback with thick out-facing arms, made of sturdy wood that had no bend. He turned Weston out, jerking the chair and spinning it to face the kitchen window and the north where the violet sky was dark. A splintering of stars shone dimly behind the fingerlike limbs of the cottonwoods.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, his face big and hard boned moving at Weston, bending him back. When it had started Weston’s face looked soft and young, grayish-white and claylike in the kitchen light, but it soon began to change. His father gripped Weston’s slender white biceps with both hands and held him to the chair. Weston’s arms seemed awkwardly small in the tight curve of his father’s fists. Weston’s eyes were wet but unwavering. The blood filled Weston’s head and flushed and darkened his skin. His face twitched. He screamed in his father’s face, “No!”

  The slap was hard and a white mark bloomed red, sudden and wide, from the center of the cheek up over the small bright mound of the cheekbone and down to the jawline. “Shut up!” the man yelled. “I’m telling you.”

  “No,” Weston said, his lips trembling, body crimped down i the chair, eyes small and dark. He looked neither left nor right; he stared directly into his father’s face.

  Mom was in the kitchen corner beside the window, beyond them, leaning against the taupe-colored drapes with her hands to her chest. “Please, Edwin,” she said, and reached out.

  He moved his head toward her. “Shut up,” he said. He enunciated the words. Spittle shot from his mouth.

  She went silent and he turned to Weston again. From the kitchen she moved along the far side of the table to a chair across from Shale. From her vantage she saw the brown sheen of the back of Weston’s head, and beyond him the rooster flare of her husband’s face and neck. Tears rolled from her eyes. She gripped the cloth arms of her chair, a wingback like Shale’s. She worked hard to be quiet. She watched.

  Dad beat Weston’s face for fifteen minutes straight. For most of it Weston said no and his father said shut up, taking a full swing, always open handed, but hard as a flatboard, dashing Weston’s head and hair to the side. He said other things too, like, “You won’t treat me with disrespect”; “You’ll obey me, whether you like it or not”; and, “You better shut your mouth.” Finally, it was just closed-mouthed Weston, tears on the puffed, blotched features of his face while his father kept slapping him. Weston’s eyes remained unchanged. In the end it stopped. Then the words, “Go to your room.”

  Weston rose, turned, and walked past Mom and Shale, not looking at them. The way he held his shoulders and his eyes—this image, an agile body burned down to the white hard bone—would stay with Shale, through many wildernesses, for most of his life. The boys’ father followed Weston from the kitchen.

  They were in the back room for over an hour. Mom and Shale sat still in their chairs. If Weston and Dad spoke, Shale heard nothing. Shale wondered if Weston was all right, wondered if he didn’t need hospital care, wished there could be someone for him, Mom, even Dad, but Shale felt only a conviction of hopelessness, that there was no one, only Weston on the island of his bed, stony eyes to the ceiling, and no one for him. When Dad emerged he went back to the kitchen, made himself a sandwich and drank it down with a large plastic glass of water. Weston stayed in his room. The next day they returned to their places: Dad to his post as principal, Weston and Shale to school, Mom to the linear enclosure of the mobile home.

  In a few short years Weston was gone, hurtled into the maw of an ancient canyon. He drove a heavy vehicle whose engine burned wild in the open air as the car leapt the threshold and fell far into the dark. For the rest of their lives Weston spoke to each one, uniquely and in fact, tenderly. And for Shale, his father, and his mother, the voice they heard was immutable and holy.

  —for Hugh Dragswolf, good friend, gone now

  RODIN’S THE HAND OF GOD

  —A TRIPTYCH—

  Woman Saved, Two Children Lost

  AP—Bozeman, Montana. Mary Luzrio, 33, was rescued yesterday by local rancher Sven Hansen when her car flew from an embankment into the Madison River. Ms. Luzrio’s two daughters did not survive the accident. “Hadn’t seen a soul for miles of road,” Hansen said. “Pure luck I was there when it happened.” Hansen jumped in the river, kicked in the window on the driver’s side and drew Ms. Luzrio from the car. She was unconscious. The river brown with spring runoff, Hansen didn’t know there were children inside. The children were 5 and 3.

  PANEL I

  WHEN SHE TOOK the curve she felt the back end of the Thunderbird slip and from there nothing was logical—the narrowed vision, a sharp yell, her hands and her disequilibrium as the vehicle cleared the embankment and fell twenty feet into the Madison River. Dusk, the night red and gray, black on the edge of the earth. Wheatlands, mountains, sky, and in the backseat, Ella and Shayla like soldiers, like generals in plastic thrones. They’d been singing to Eva Cassidy, practically shouting the words to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” … then a calm, abiding horror, an impact that made her go blank, her head like a hammer on the wheel … and the song now muted under water.

  A MAN ENTERS her room in full-length wool coat and leather gloves. His hair is silver, slicked back, crisp. He is a good lawyer, with international accounts, but in his heart when he sees her on the bed fetal as a child, he admits he has never been a good father. His only child. A girl. He was ashamed then. Now he is ashamed of himself. He wishes he had something, anything for this sort of thing, but he has nothing. He witnessed the two coffins, rectangular, like the old wood cases of fine violins. He leaves work each day to be with her. Closed caskets. A mistake. He had been unable to compose himself. If he’d seen their faces he would’ve been strong, for her and everyone. He would have held her hand, and stood tall, looked straight ahead. Instead he found himself bent over, his hand cupped to her shoulder, his forehead on her neck, his weakness a thing he did not foresee, and another shame to him. He had wanted to be stoic, but not seeing the children shook him, his imaginings were unbearable, and when he glanced at her, himself close to falling, she’d taken his head in her hands and he’d wept aloud. She’d held his face and kissed him on the cheek, kissed his tears.

  With two fingers he touches his temple, drapes his coat over the metal chair at her vanity, sets his gloves on the chair. Removes his suit coat. Folds and places it over his gloves. She has hardly spoken.

  Would you like me to stay with you?

  Eyes closed, she nods her head.

  He lies down on the bed and puts his arm around her, awkward in business tie and wingtip shoes, uncomfortable in her small apartment. He is reminded of how he did not hold her as a child.

  WHEN HE FALLS asleep she wonders at his presence here. She leaves him and goes to the kitchen and opens the drawer next to the sink where she keeps the straight-knife for cutting vegetables. Holding it she considers how small the reflection of her face looks, the black slits of her eyes peering from the side of the blade. She owns this knife, it is something she owns, so she takes it, her own heavy profound object, back to her bedroom. She places his suit coat and gloves on the floor, sits down at the vanity, another something, another heaviness, this furniture, tangible, visible, another thing she has not lost. In the mirror she finds her face, without makeup, like an oil painting of earth and darkness, pale hues underlined in black and gray, off-white, dark brown, like soil, like sky when there is no sky, thick clouds of fog so full even breathing feels foreign, her fingers like mallets hard against her face so the bones ache and weariness takes her and she is allowed to fall to where everything one day must fall. I’m crazy, she thinks, and she walks to the bathroom, runs a hot bath and slides beneath the surface, slides farther down and comes to rest, resting, then rising slowly back to the surface, she reaches, takes the knife and cuts both wrists to the bone.

  WHEN HE WAKES all he sees is water, and he doesn
’t hear her. He runs to the bathroom, gasps. Her limp form. Vacant eyes. He trembles, frozen. Please, he whispers. Sees the wounds on her wrists. Fumbling, he removes his own socks and ties them over the openings, over gashes that look otherworldly and warlike, ravaged, like diseased eyes or mouths, and he is talking out loud now. Stay here, honey! Please stay. But she is unconscious as he throws the bedspread over her, and wraps her like an infant and lifts her as he forces his feet into his shoes. He runs to his car, the interstate, the hospital, to a steel table where medical servants pump blood to her veins and stitch her skin so that her bones subdue and she is asleep, finally, in a bed, him seated in the chair beside her. He holds her hand, his head like an anvil, face down. His tears have run dry. His body empty. Broken. Still.

  His prayers are lost like sheep in the wilderness of his dreams.

  Sleep comes, unwanted, all-consuming.

  WHEN SHE WAKES she sees him and thinks now everyone has died, and this again is where they meet, in white rooms made with pillows and wires, and light so bright there is no darkness. Her junior year at Bozeman High she tried to overdose on Tylenol, a feeble attempt. He was barely audible then. Gone to Vienna. Prague. It was a month before he saw her face-to-face. She touches his hair and sees her arms bandaged and bound, and when she touches his face, she feels almost tangible, almost real. Weightless though, she thinks, lighter than air, and she knows now what she wants. Her eyelids descend. She sleeps.

  Two nurses, a male, thick-faced and heavy set, a female, tiny with birdlike bones, stand in the doorway and speak in hushed tones.

  “Shame,” the man whispers. He shakes his head. He’s seen it often but still he finds it strange and overdone, the violence, he thinks, the wilderness of the human mind.

  “Understandable,” the woman says and sees herself walking in her own desires, lonely when she leaves the hospital after dark, life so painfully minute, and death so large, like an ocean, limitless and singular, so precise, but without end, unbound by earth or atmosphere, no more pain, she sees it that way, and the vision comes, as it often does, of gray birds flying the border between this world and the next, the tonal whisper of wings, musical and foreign, welcoming her.

  PANEL II

  WHEN HE WAKES he sees his daughter’s sleeping face, the short breaths she takes. How lovely she is, he admits, and he is shocked at his desperateness, how much he hopes. Seven years ago she married a man he didn’t like, an old banker named Bishop who’d made her sign a prenuptial and left her multiple times before she finally decided to get away from him. He’d seen it long before, and told her so, but being himself he’d been cold, not paying a dime for the wedding, barely aware when she spoke in his ear, viciously, in the receiving line, You are a terrible man. Selfish. Uncaring.

  He wants and doesn’t want to say how right she was, how poor a man he is, has always been, more like Bishop than he wants to admit, like most men, same poverty of mind, same darkness. Hidden, unknowable. I tried, he says aloud as she sleeps. But he knows he didn’t.

  Her mother always did. But she’s dead too, he reasons, fifteen years back, ovarian cancer. A deeply interior disease, probably symbolic of his disloyalty. He’d been incapable of loyalty. Staring at Mary, he sees her chest rise and fall and he is amazed how fiercely loyal she has always been, despite his inadequacies. Even after the wedding, she had apologized, not him. And he rebuffed everything, the same way he blocked her mother, compartmentalizing all, refusing to see, as clearly as others did, the shell of his life. How under the skin—he touches his arm—he is ugly. And terrified. Teary again. Her choices a mystery to him. Her earnestness. He never knew her, or even her daughters. He never knew his own wife.

  Take me, he prays. The words that enter his mind appall even him, so hollow and made of shadow, and he is reminded of how incapable he is. I’m a coward, he thinks, God has never been anything to me. Though, for her part, she seemingly never doubted. But now all had changed.

  He knows she wants to die and knows she is truer to her desires than he has ever been to his. True to true desires. She described herself so at one of his firm’s corporate functions, and she’d told him he was true too, but only to false desires. They were standing in a hallway and he was trying to leave. Money, cars, women, she’d said. Even work, all self-consumption, all lies. But so what? You’re my father, she said. I love you. She was drunk.

  But he’d seen it in her, that love, he has always seen it.

  FROM THE HOSPITAL, back home, ten months on.

  Days in which she exists in seasons of wood or stone, seamless, nearly unconscious, no foresight or even alarm, only numbness and the cold feeling that all is one, all things arranged to capture and keep her, in sleep and wakefulness, dark, day, her thoughts disintegrating and re-collecting, and she is left again only with what has gone before. She is alone in her bedroom. She feels no emotion, no anger, or even apathy at him or anyone, no hatred, no sense of panic or barren expression, no self-annihilation. She stares at the wall beside her head; the wall is grainy, small bumps on the surface like landscapes, like mountains and plateaus, steppes, flatlands, canyons, coulees, each tiny movement irregular and divergent, flawed as the texture of skin.

  Love, she recalls, heals all.

  Deception, she reasons. Her face is slick. She covers her face with her hands, covers her head. She hasn’t seen herself for weeks, won’t look, and would like never to look again.

  He visits each morning and when she hears his step at the door she tries to gather herself to meet him at the kitchen table. There he serves her tea and she says little, but she sees how he looks at her, peering in as if through a veil. Since the hospital she’s drawn her hair down over her eyes, and always she imagines her daughters. She wishes she had died with them. Not instead of them. One or the other. Together. Life or death. Not this. She imagines their lips and small faces, their voices as they pretended and played, their laughter. She would touch them with her fingertips, kiss and caress each face, reassure and speak good words, speak gratitude.

  In the hospital she asked, Where’s the car?

  Sold it, he said. Bought you a truck.

  Upon her release he removed the mirrors from her apartment without a word. His responsiveness seemed silly, so unlike him, and today when he parts her hair to find her face, she barely sees the curve of his chin as he peers in while she stares down at the linoleum, gold flecks scattered in strange patterns from her bare feet to the wall. His daily kindness is ridiculous, she thinks. Grace never his strong suit.

  Each morning near ten he stops by and if she is not yet up, and she is rarely up, he calls to her from the kitchen. And if she is asleep or half-numb he goes to her room and sits at her bedside and touches her shoulder then places his hand on her head. He draws the hair back from her forehead. Runs his fingers through her hair, his own awkward too delicate motion. It is good to see you, he says.

  With her eyes closed she wants to believe him. No ill will. In fact, he had offered to stay with her, an extended stay, but she refused. She’s glad she did; her skin thin as cellophane. Whenever she goes about town, the whole world seems to look at her and want to weep, and she feels forced to take from them the invisible bottles that contain their grief, while she must be silent until she returns home and lays flat on her back on the living room floor, the bottles like illumined glass around her body in the dim light, her own tears like dark rivers running out from her forever.

  PANEL III

  A YEAR. Two.

  Weight like a flock of crows clutching ledges in her room, bedposts, chair backs, black bodies angular at the foot of her bed, some flapping, some still. People see, but can’t speak, propped up, anesthetized. She’ll do as she pleases. She’ll go wherever she damn well pleases. In the bathroom she lies on the floor. Cold tile. Her hand reaches, touches the base of the toilet. Porcelain. Everything is gone.

  Morning again. In bed, she sees her father walk through the doorway. Notices him. Here again he has sad eyes. His habit of touching
two fingers to his temple. Putting his hands through his hair. He’ll be fine. She wonders what will greet her. Nothingness, or tenderness. She isn’t afraid. He won’t like another funeral but she can’t worry about him. Water and form, existence. She is formless, she is form without burden or breath, her bones translucent, dark color at the center, like stones under ice.

  WHEN HE GOES, she walks to the kitchen. Clothed in an ankle-length cotton nightgown, off-white, she takes her keys from the coffee table, walks down the stairs and out through the parking lot to the numbered stall where she parks her truck. From the space behind the seat she lifts a fresh green garden hose, walks to the back of the truck, threads one end into the tailpipe, the other into the thin opening she makes in the passenger side window. She takes the driver’s seat, turns the ignition, reclines, breathes, sleeps.

  NORMALLY he drives straight to work. Today, he makes a U-turn on Bridger Road. He’d seen it in her face. Best to check and be sure. Say I love you again.

  Far away, he spots her blue Ford. It is broad daylight and the garden hose looks so simple and obvious, he starts to cry. He speeds and halts and whispers to himself as he lifts her body, light, feathery in his arms, light as a sparrow or whip-poor-will, a hummingbird, small corpus made of sunlight or vapor. Mercy, he pleads, and he speeds in his car through traffic lights and signs, her body limp on the black leather of the backseat, her white face whiter than the faces of the silent performers he’d seen in Japan or the bleached buffalo skull he’d found as a boy with his father—like a huge shard of prehistoric bone—white, whiter than the white sun over the Spanish Peaks that shines as it does on him and her, on the Crazies near Big Timber and west to the Sapphires, east to the Beartooths, and north, far north to the Missions, all the way to Glacier.