by Shann Ray
“No,” said Zeb.
“Too bad,” said Benjamin, and he laughed and put his hand on Zeb’s shoulder. “White money is always the best, enit. How ‘bout we get some fry bread?” Benjamin motioned with his lips down toward the kitchen. The smell of the hot bread made Zeb’s mouth water.
“I’ll follow you,” Zeb said.
“You done that all night, enit,” said Benjamin, chuckling as he walked downstairs.
Zeb nodded and laughed. He was good and drunk and it felt good to laugh, to see Benjamin with his son and be given a second chance. He reached and touched Benjamin’s shoulder, and they paused on the stairs.
“I’m sorry for how I was at the wedding,” Zeb said.
“It’s nothing, Z,” said Benjamin, looking him in the face. He play-punched Zeb on the chest. Then he laughed again, shook his head, and said “Dirty White Boy, enit.”
TOPPING EIGHTY ON I-5 Zeb cut a line between two semis to the outside lane. He looked at Sara, still upright, head back, eyes closed. He watched the road. He wasn’t sure she was real. Reaching for her arm he touched a sheen of sweat that made him shudder. I don’t know her middle name, or why she parts her hair down the middle, why she slips her braids in front as she does, tied at the end in two-colored cloth—turquoise and black yesterday, orange and red the day before. Nothing today. Why that face, and why above her forehead the high abandon of her hair? Luminous like a woman made of filament, or fine glass. Backlit from the light of day, her body a fluted vase, her hair like fire, jet-black on her head, the shape of it plumed, not flat with the usual ravenlike texture, not parted, not braided. She’d pulled at it, making the root line at the temples pink and raw. The bones shone in her face: her jawline and cheekbones, the orbital bones around her eyes.
He liked her face, and it came to him now in the dream of Seattle, he knew her less, or not as purely as it seemed he had, but he found her more beautiful. He blamed it on the mescaline. She needs me, he told himself. The second miscarriage came a year ago. She’s too thin, he thought, her head tipped back on the seat, arms slack, her skin grayish and pale. He imagined her eyes behind the closed eyelids, the black minute disks of her irises, the darker black of the pupil at the center. He was struck by a sense that a song, or a prayer, or something sacred should be done, but he had nothing. And she had nothing. Or at least he’d never heard of what she had, or never asked. The sweat on her had started to dull and with the noise of the engine he couldn’t hear her next to him. She was no longer crying. He reached and touched her arm again. The skin was cool. He took his hand away. She looked straight ahead. “She’s dead,” she said.
Her voice, disembodied, too loud between him and the glass of the windshield, shocked him. It’s the way I’ve angled myself, he thought, and he moved some and leaned forward more, shifting his weight so that he glared over the wheel, out at the dividing lines. It scared him, the power she held. He lost something of himself. He saw his mother’s face. He pictured Sara next to him on the bank of the Powder River the day they were married. They wore the ribbon shirts her mother made, purple shirts with long pink and gold ribbons sewn to the shoulders and chest. In the wind the ribbons trailed behind them.
“The colors of earth and sunset,” Sara had said.
“Yes,” he’d answered.
“The baby’s dead,” she said now.
He said nothing. He stared at the road.
The hunger came, feral, like a disease.
With his left hand he drove. With his right he rifled the glove compartment, the crease of dash and windshield, under the seat. He wanted to leave and come back from somewhere else. He’d emerge from a place of dirt streets, from the hot space behind the middle-class houses back in Colstrip on post-Independence Day, where the food from the alley barrels could be had for the taking. From there he would succeed in rising back to where he needed to be, back to the driver’s seat for the April 4 drive on I-5 where the words remained like two loud claps, the twice-formed flowering of blue-yellow flames from the barrel of a gun alive in the dark.
It was what she said. He disliked words. He hated them. He wished he could be deaf. Everything is confusion, he thought, everything a dream. He felt the reach, the pulling upward. He considered his own death.
“She’s dead,” she said again.
“How do you know?” he said.
“She doesn’t move,” she whispered.
He stared at her. Her body had no luster. The muscles looked undefined: oblong shapes rounded downward at the calves; the thin oval of her tricep on the back of her arm, above her elbow, below the line of her armpit. Vague decisions are the slaying of things, he thought, the cutting off of her or me, the end of something, the beginning of what will not be reversed. The car felt brittle, like he might snap the wheel in his fingers or slam a hole in the floor with his foot. He thought of weeping, and wanted big tears on his face like mercury, thick and slow in the pocks and dents below his cheekbones, cresting the jawbone, running down his neck.
He wished she would say something.
She opened her eyes and looked over. He looked away.
He sped down the off-ramp, the route on Third Street among the square tall high-rises with clouds moving among them. Up ahead he saw the circle entrance of Good Samaritan, the rectangular jut of hospital against sky. Through the electric doors he carried her. She seemed smaller to him now, and boneless.
His grandmother’s porcelain-faced doll lay on the bed at the ranch house outside Colstrip, its curled blond locks and blue eyes under the white bonnet. White blouse and fine-flowered dress, white stockings and tiny black shoes. He was five years old. It fascinated him, the play of the arms, the graceful feel of the body and the legs, the face so exquisite and hard as stone. He remembered he had never asked Sara what she played with as a child, or with whom, or what fears she might have had.
The doctors knew. They were as certain as she. He’d scream at them, he decided, throw curse words until his head blew. Say, “How? How do you know?!” He’d say nothing. Stand as a stuffed man with no mouth or ears, his arms and body so elongated that the shoulders narrowed straight to the neck. He’d pack cotton bunting into the back of his own head to fill the space inside his face. No mouth or ears, but eyes. Black buttons from his father’s first suit. In the silence he thought of men who abuse women, men with sisters, wives, children. He thought of himself as one of these men, empty and consumed by greed, given over.
HE DIDN’T KNOW anymore what was real; the car idling a few feet from the front porch at Sara’s mom’s house in Lame Deer; he and Sara leaving for Seattle? It was late September, the sun past the zenith. He sat in the driver’s seat and waited. The house, a two-story tower, set a slight shadow off east of itself. He heard Sara crying, and felt nothing. He was always shut down unless drunk or high, and then he broke wide open. He hated this about himself. She sat upright on her knees in the entryway. She clutched two of her nieces to her chest, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old. They touched her eyes as she cried. The younger one looked confused. The older appeared curious and she kissed Sara’s cheek. “Salty,” she said, and smiled.
Zeb watched the scene, glad to be free of family, not hers so much, but his—his father especially, the way the old man burned every bridge.
Sara took her time, and Zeb thought it brave, how hard people have to work to make something new. He’d left Colstrip at fifteen and hitchhiked to Lame Deer, thinking he would be white and weird, but largely unthreatened, as he had been in the summers when he worked the fireworks booths at Jimtown near the rez line. And people had taken him in, parents or uncles or aunts of friends he’d made at parties or at the odd jobs he held—fireworks in early summer, driving swather or shucking bales through August, pumping gas in the dead months of winter. Most of his host families didn’t seem to care if he came or went, white boy walking from the bright HUD houses. They hardly noticed, and Zeb had preferred it that way. Dirty White Boy, the older crowd called him, after the Foreigner song from
Head Games. He liked that. But being white, and not pretty, he’d had to guard his own back when he was out late and the drink and drug reached full tilt.
Sara kissed her nieces’ hands, sat down cross-legged, and took both children on her lap. She began singing them a song.
Please, he thought. He sighed and settled back in the seat.
He looked up. The sun traveled soft and white and high. Early on, he had thought of her only rarely. He’d heard she and her mom were back from living ten years on the Sioux rez in Wolf Point. He’d seen Sara in town, but she always ran with Clifford Black Eagle, a Crow boy she’d met in school at St. Labre. Then Clifford moved to the Yakama rez in Washington. Zeb’s father had died the same year and Zeb mentioned it to her when they had coffee that first time. Montana Highway Patrol found the old man dead in a ditch on a dirt road five miles south of Colstrip. No one but Zeb’s mom attended the funeral.
“Did you like your dad?” Sara had asked him.
“No,” he’d said.
“Did you care if he died?” “Fine with me,” he said. “Really?” she asked.
ON THE DRIVE WEST, she spent the first five or six hours crying or sleeping. She’d turned herself from him and he couldn’t see her eyes, but he envisioned the dark sockets, the eyes burned
out. Her body leaned into the armrest. She rested her cheek on the bumper of the side window and stared away north. So petite, he thought, so full of sorrows. She sat this way for a great while, looking over the long white bench of the plains, over the rise of the land, the mountains.
Nine hours in, he said, “We can go back.” They had crossed the Great Divide near Butte and were past Missoula, on the upswing of Lolo Pass. Seattle waited, still only a dream. In the dark before Idaho, the high beams of the Impala shone like pale arms. To their left, the span of forest was endless. A low unseen moon opened the sky behind the mountains. He pictured tamaracks among the greater forest; he’d seen them in the light before dark, firing the land with their bright burnt orange. They passed high dark pines at the roadside, lodgepoles, eerily individualized, bands of onlookers peering over, looking in.
“I’m just sad,” she’d said.
But the first day in Seattle she had looked in the paper, made a call, and landed a cheap rental off I-5, close to downtown. He’d brought her here for opportunity, though what they found was hardly better: him at the Vietnamese market up Fifty-first, her taking the bus to Pike’s each morning to sell bracelets she wove from colored thread. They threaded things with television, alcohol, and the drugs they could find, mostly mescaline, speed, and methadone. Easy to be invisible, he thought, so many people in the streets, a thousand vagabonds for every ten miles of city, most of them Anglo and hollow-eyed. People stare, he told himself, but I’m less conspicuous, though he knew he looked polar white and pocked up, his face gray-dented as the moon.
Two years in he found himself in the hull of the trailer at night, in an easy chair a short reach from the television. He liked the chamber dark, the length of his body encased in the bloom of light from the TV. “Too loud,” she’d say from the back, and he’d click the volume down with the remote.
He liked her voice, an edgy voice from down the hall, weary from the day and drifting off. It reminded him of the acidic, hateful way she came at him back in Lame Deer when he walked on her. It didn’t matter if they were in private or public, she’d tell him to shut up and curse him until he backed off. She’d call him Custer, or Evans, or some other white idiot from the past. Scratch his face, grab a fistful of hair. She’d jump on his back if she felt she had to, but mostly only when she was drunk. He would pull her off, and she’d calm if he said he was sorry. It was a mess if he didn’t. Once he had thought he might have to kill her. It hadn’t happened in a long time and he missed her quick anger, her fire.
He’d turn the volume down, and when he heard the sighs of her breathing again he’d push it back up. Broke, but they had cable. Had to have cable, he thought, to stay human. He’d get suspended in the globe of light the TV emitted and the thoughts would get him, images of Lame Deer and her family. He hated it but he’d go back to it, like a woman wearing long sleeves over the wounding she’s done. Draw the sleeve back and make it bleed; hide when others draw near. The memories pierced him like that, opening his skin, making him feel something akin to love, but more the shadow of love; a promise consumed by emptiness; a self to which he felt he had always been bound, lonely, embittered, at enmity with all; the question for which he’d found no answer; the old sorrow come again to make a home in him.
The mixture of how she loved children, the lack he felt inside, and the visions he carried of her and him, of what they might be as parents, kept him going despite the walls he’d found between them. Three years worth. Two gifts gone. One lost here, one back on the reservation. Two deaths, though he reasoned they were only miscarriages, and early ones. And now she was pregnant again, and nearly full term, five months further than they’d gone before, and carrying the child they called Rachel, the child of their patience, their peace.
HE SAW the doctor’s head, the mouth moving: I’m sorry, sir, the baby’s dead. We’ll have to deliver it. Wait here. We’ll tell you when the procedure’s over.
Zeb viewed the room through the heightened vision that came with doing speed. But he wasn’t high, or was he? He saw the doctor’s slick black hair in a pointed widow’s peak. The dark main shock swept back from the forehead, the silvery smooth glisten of the sidewalls in a pronounced C around the ears. Spit coagulated on the doctor’s lower lip. His teeth were gray, and Zeb thought: I should kill this man.
From the front pocket of his jeans Zeb drew a gun, easily, fluidly, as if his pocket was substantial and made of silk. The gun was obnoxiously large, but Zeb’s hand felt sure. He lifted and held the weapon high and read the print engraved on the stock: .38 Special. He lowered the gun and pointed it at the doctor’s chest and the doctor smiled. The doctor pulled the gun forward and brought it close, compelled before being shot to read the words for himself: .44 Magnum this time. Nice, Zeb thought, and he let his arm come even. He breathed out, pulled his index finger gently and the gun banged and sent his hand to the ceiling, the shot like a small bomb in the hallway. The doctor smiled again. Zeb lay on the floor, a hole the size of a cereal dish in his own left chest, a star of red around the circumference, and people were running.
“She’s gray,” Sara said.
They were running down white tile floors with big-volumed words and the words were unwieldy and Zeb got caught in them while his wife was wheeled, white-sheeted between silver swinging doors. Before she disappeared he saw how hard her face had become, how the lines in it had gone dark and straight and the skin looked tight, almost iridescent.
He wasn’t with her again until it was over. The white coats walked her down the hall and dropped her off with him in the lobby. They assured him the bleeding had stopped, her heart rate had come steady. She stood beside him, vacant, almost weightless. He put his arm around her. Everyone had gone. She leaned her head into his chest. He felt blank and dark.
He looked at his right hand, the gun stuck like an unwanted appendage there. His left hand was full of blood. He walked the hall and no one spoke to him. He had no hands. The tiles came to an end and he walked over the precipice and fell full and far before he rose with his arms in the shape of an eagle’s wings, splendid and precise, his body streamlined and new, the body of a boy in an alley asleep between two dumpsters, a wedge of small stones piled against the windbreak his head makes.
From a hole in the half-world came a reverend—Mr. Reyes, the half-Cheyenne, half-white man he’d seen only once in the green hall of the clinic back in Lame Deer after the first miscarriage. His face, his words. “Son, this from God to your child.” Into the silence. “I have made you. I will not forget you. Sing for joy.” The great expanse of a deep gorge among high mountains, the closeness, the vastness of all things. In the black of morning he finds Sara’s form curved into him, h
er back to his chest, her legs matched neatly to his. Her hair smelling of dry sweat, and faintly of lilac. How utterly I have failed you, he thinks. He kisses the back of her head and says, “You are my beloved.” She clutches a braid of sweetgrass to her chest and he sees the plains to the straight edge of the alien world with nothing in between, the sun a dull white orb behind the gray sky. Caught in a crease on the horizon, a glow of light is the bright rim of all that lives and moves.
“They took her from me,” she whispers. “She was gray.”
The room is shadow. People never break free, he thinks.
The simple sound of a car on a dirt road eclipses the electric circuitry of the industrial machine and silences the speedwire of technology. Dawn is suddenly framed in the bedroom window. He finds the shape of their bodies under the star quilt, senses the stillness, the proximity of their faces. He is home again. Born to this world. Shine. Early morning, April 4, his wife lies in bed beside him, holding something.
“Wake up, Z,” she says. “You’re here, with me.”
On waking, he hears wheels on gravel as the car fades into the distance.
He is fully alive now and staring at Sara’s face. In the light between them he sees the child. She is on her side, small, elongated, helpless, her form a tiny keepsake they carry like an amulet surrounded by the heart-shaped angles of their bodies, their legs and arms, as they face one another in the soft hope of their bed.
It is Sara’s mouth that speaks the words, it is her body, the alluring movement of her hip beside him, and the way his hand must hold the curve of her ribs to know the breath that resides there, the rise and fall not of her whisper but of the engine from which her whisper moves. Not the pale cross of her collar-bones more reminiscent of Christ than Valentino’s fine lines, but that down below the bones, the beating and drumming of the heart and the certainty from which her confidence lifts and opens the night. He sees the beginnings of her smile, then bright and turned to him, her eyes, pools in the wilderness he calls his own. Finally, he sees the ring, so insignificant, so lovely on the wounded hand. He places his hand under hers, and she turns her hand to hold his, the fingers small and warm in the grooves of his own. The imperfection is a grace to him, a strength he has needed all his life.