They lifted her up gently, but even so, I could tell it hurt. Her face was pinched in pain or weariness. She was smooth and heavy, and her wet hair stuck lifelessly to her back. Someone had brought a robe for her. It was winter and the cold of the dorm penetrated with a needle-like precision. You wouldn’t believe how white a Navajo can turn, standing in that cold, bleeding.
They led her down the hallway, and I guess to Gloria’s car, then on to the hospital. I really didn’t know this girl, but when she stepped from the tub she did a curious thing that has made me think of her again and again. She closed her eyes, deliberately closed her eyes. She kept them closed down the hallway and perhaps even in Gloria’s 72 Valiant as it reduced Flagstaff Highway to nothing but a cold, black line. I don’t know why she closed her eyes and kept them closed, Gloria urging her to take step after step. It was like the blind leading the blind: the Navajo girl who had just miscarried and Gloria, our dorm manager, lonely and confused.
“This is what happens when you’re fifty, sweeties,” and Gloria would pull the elastic belt on her robe and let it snap back. We were never quite sure what this demonstration was supposed to divulge, but she would follow it up by pointing at her face and remarking on the disgusting enlargement of her pores. “Don’t let anyone kid you,” she’d tell us. “Life only gets uglier, meaner.” She lived at the far end of the hall in a special apartment. She had a patchwork rug she had made herself, and a small TV with large rabbit ears. She continually complained about the reception, and raised hell if the stairwells weren’t kept clean. Though she often mixed up our names and got the dates for our fire drills confused, Gloria did well that night, letting the Navajo girl lean against her in the darkness cut only by stars and pine tops.
I don’t know why I have to see these things: the Navajo in the bathtub, the miserable way we reconcile ourselves to our lives. I was going to take a shower. I had shaved my legs and washed my hair. I could hear them beating on the door nearby, calling for her to come out. The water on my back was hot and furious, yet the commotion called me, too. When they broke the lock and opened the door, the milky steam rolled out upon the cold hall air.
Sometimes it takes years to fully see things. I think back upon this scene and see the small things: the soap, the toenails painted red, Gloria’s hands as they attempted to comfort.
We went back to our rooms and talked about it, how they have to stop the bleeding, sometimes with drugs, sometimes surgically. “It’s nature’s way,” Dawn Kramer added, though we all ignored her, for what this prima donna from Chicago knew about nature wouldn’t have filled a single page. For weeks after, I thought about the Navajo girl and the way she closed her eyes, what she was shutting in or shutting out.
Like I said, none of us ever used that bathtub again, which was an unfortunate thing, for baths are healthy and soothing. They enfold us, they bring light to the mind, and they emulate the water from which life so warily crept millions of years ago.
Gloria returned in her Valiant the next morning, hushing us, telling us to mind our own business. The Navajo girl, she finally said, was fine, though she left school permanently for her home in Window Rock. I’ve never been there, but I like that name. I like the idea of a window in a rock—an opening in a black, hard space—a sliver’s passage into the soul.
Dixon
First, it is not true that my brother Dixon went crazy in Vietnam—chewed his fingernails completely off and gutted a Huey helicopter in a rage when his R and R was suddenly bagged. Hell, Dixon never was in Vietnam. His three years in the Air Force were mostly spent in Biloxi where he was assigned to the motor pool and stayed long weekends in Gulfport on windy beaches with sand in his eyes and his shoulders constantly sunburned. He’s buried now in a small cemetery called Dutchman’s Acre, a place so quiet and green that it doesn’t rightfully belong to this earth. Yeah, sure, he was big enough to gut a helicopter, but Dixon was slow and calm, and he always respected what wasn’t his.
That’s why the story about Dixon and Misty Waters doesn’t make any sense either, because Misty was somebody else’s wife, and Dixon may have liked to tease her—he might have even thought she was pretty—but as he used to say to me, his oldest sister, “It’s clear as day on the insurance form. She’s somebody else’s beneficiary.”
I’ll tell you—crudeness does not know when to stop. There are versions of the Dixon-Misty story that put those two in the Texaco and Mobil gas station rest rooms going at it, full tilt, right up on those dirty counters next to where the rusted sinks are always dripping. Never any toilet paper or hand towels in those places. The mirrors cracked and filthy. Mind you—all of this on Misty’s half-hour lunches from the bank. If Dixon were alive, he’d die at the thought of himself banging away to the tune of impact wrenches, some big Buick getting its tires rotated nearby.
But it was the dead twin story that brought my mother to her breaking point. She marched into my kitchen one morning not so long ago, and she said that my father was too old, so it was up to me to stop all this horse trash about Dixon. Her hands were shaking and there were big tears in her eyes. My mother is barely five feet tall, Dixon’s death has been a real setback for her, and standing there dressed in one of her bright golf outfits—though she’s never played a day of golf in her life—she presented a petite but imposing argument.
“Mom,” I told her, sitting at the table, still in my robe, “I love to see you, but I wish you’d call before you drop in.” I was eating a bowl of Cheerios and, like a kid, reading the back of the box, trying to get my energy up. Mornings are hard on me. The good, deep sleep I used to have has become a rare commodity; I toss and turn, drift in and out of a dark fitfulness. I think rather than dream.
“What? You think your seventy-year-old father should go defend Dixon’s name? Wake up, Hillary,” she said, her hands on her boxy hips, a pose she assumes for the most serious subjects that intrude on her life. “Being part of a family isn’t a free ride, you know. There’s responsibility and it’s looking you square in the face. I’ll admit that Dixon had his hard times and did not always think in a straight line, but what I’m hearing about him is absurd and downright mean. Wherever he is,” she said, looking awkwardly up and then left and right, “he doesn’t deserve this.”
For the most part, my family believes in good citizenship, not religion, so it was difficult when Dixon died. We had no place to send him—no beautiful, light-filled landscape to imagine him in. Yet, even without a heaven, we found ourselves still thinking of Dixon as being somewhere, though when we spoke of him we never knew in which direction to refer. We craned our heads upward, or, then embarrassed, we peered far out beyond the freeway to the muted horizon.
I have never liked being trapped in a corner where suddenly all the alternatives are savagely reduced, but that’s just where my mom had me. I turned forty-one last December and that’s old enough to talk and think for yourself, though age has no meaning when your mother tells you she’s hit rock bottom and needs your help. Dixon was her only son, her first and probably last mystery, the one she made cherry pie for, the one who would send her to a chair laughing at his knock-knock jokes or his imitations of the latest dances. Once, demonstrating the moon walk for us, he backed right off the front porch and corkscrewed his elbow hard into the ground. Had to wear a sling for two weeks, and if you asked him about it, Dixon just laughed and said he’d do anything to get a two-week prescription of codeine.
Everything else you’ve heard about Dixon, all the little pieces of gossip that have floated your way, they hold about as much truth as a wet sock. I know that most nights Gordon Jenner can be found in a local bar yakking away about somebody, and more often than not, it’s Dixon. Jenner puts his feet up on the table, and he tries to make a living off my brother—stories of Dixon in camouflage and war paint, of Dixon wrecking cars and just walking away from them, the smoke spiraling up and the gas tanks about to blow. But Jenner has silt for brains. He’s lived too long down in Hillam raising those blue-ribbo
n Charolais and married to a woman who, after ten years in this country, still speaks only Japanese. Oh, I’m not saying it isn’t pretty to hear her bent over the flowers in their garden, sing-songing her language under a blue sky, but what the hell is she saying? She could be complimenting your clothes or telling you to go diddle yourself, and you’d stand there, just like I have plenty of times, with a big dumb well-digger’s grin plastered on your face.
Jenner has always played stupid, said he doesn’t know what I’m talking about. “Look,” I told him, my hands deep in my pockets, “I’m not accusing anybody, but there are some crazy things being said about Dixon, and I just want them to stop.”
He stood there leaning against his truck, his arms folded across his barrel chest, his tanned face like an old sunbaked apple. “Now what interest would I have in talking about the dead?” he asked me. I didn’t have an answer for that because I truthfully don’t know what’s in Jenner’s head, though with a man like him a hatchet and a pair of tweezers would be the easiest way to find out.
Jenner is pigeon-hearted and about a million miles away from knowing Dixon. Even when my brother pinned his last dollar bill to the inside of his flannel shirt and started walking toward Santa Fe, he had fire and smarts, he had years of good looks left in him, and the dashing honesty of a real live prince.
The dead twin story spread in waves through our small Kentucky town, first through the graineries and discount hardware outlets, then through beauty salons and dime stores, and finally settled in the worn linoleumed kitchens that are the heart of this community. It was a lackluster little tale which basically seized on the opportunity to make a monster of the baby Dixon.
“Rolled over and suffocated his own little twin for an extra goddamned bottle of milk. The newspaper sort of covered it up. April 14, 1949, you mark me. They called it a baby sudden death. Huh!” Jenner’s stories started going that far back, reaching crazily into the black side of his make-believe.
Lloyd Ebson’s kid was tending bar that night at Crazy Eights and he told me just how Jenner leaned back in his chair when the talk lulled, and told that little story, and when his listeners were appropriately quiet and stung, he called over to Ebson’s kid to order him up a fried egg sandwich, then dowsed it with ketchup and mustard and Tabasco when it came. It made Ebson’s kid half-sick to see fresh eggs treated that way.
Somewhere between Canasta and her volunteer days at the public library, my mother heard all about Dixon and his twin, and, like I said, it hit her hard as concrete. That’s when she came asking for my help with those big tears in her eyes, her voice high-pitched and breathy—just on the edge of those old-woman sobs that can wrench your gut and turn your will to toothpaste.
“Hey,” I told her that day as she stood uninvited in my kitchen, “I’ve talked to Jenner and he just denies everything. What do you want me to do? Get an attorney?”
“You’re a smart girl,” she said. “You run a business and manage to take a couple of vacations a year. I know you’ll figure something out.”
But it was not that easy. I spent days staking out plans to stop Jenner, then gave them up when they became ridiculous even to me. I wrote three different letters to him, each one becoming surlier, each one falling further away from intelligible correspondence. I didn’t send any of them. Late at night, my patience and creativity mostly used up, I slipped into visions of tire slashing and low-grade arson—you know, garbage cans or at most a toolshed. I tried to envision myself holding a gun—small caliber—something sharp and clean and plenty intimidating, but I remembered what my father had told me: “Unless you’re willing to fire it, a piece of metal is not very persuasive.”
I have always settled the conflicts in my life with the easiest, most accommodating methods I know of—whatever that says about me. When Armand, my ex-husband, and I parted company, he wanted to take the new Ethan Allen living room set with him to Atlanta and I wanted it to stay, so I took a quarter from my purse, flipped it, and told him to call. He paid two neighborhood boys to help him load it into the U-Haul, although Armand was an exercise nut, and as it turned out, he was able to lift the sectional into the van himself. He wore an old pair of cutoffs that day, and when I saw him bend over and haul up that furniture, his legs hard and muscled as a ropewalker’s, everything in me wanted him to stay, and if it hadn’t been for my pride, which disguises itself as indigestion, I would have walked out there, kissed him, and asked him to extend my credit. He drove off that night, even though the second gear of the U-Haul was whining like a sick cat, and then two years later Dixon was dead and it seemed to me that my losses were mounting in a reckless way.
I don’t know how to measure the empty place that those two left in me—meteor crater or the bottomless, black sinkhole my father scared us with when we were kids at bedtime. If it’s true that Armand stole my heart, then Dixon took some other vital organ, because I swear, the world around me just does not feel the same. Nothing smells as good as it once did: the sweet hickory of a summer barbecue, the soap on a man’s skin that used to haunt me for days. It’s all gone, vanished. Just a puff of black smoke, and then the piercing white light of an empty room.
The word karate would have never interested me. It was the telephone number 588-KICK that kept running through my head. I heard it on the radio about fifty times a day—a major ad campaign, I guess, and it worked. When I called, I expected an Oriental voice to answer—a Shing Lu or a Chan Chung—but it was Tony Ramirez—owner, master, fifth-degree black belt—who said, “Tuesday is when you begin.”
Certainly I was naive. Definitely I was grasping at straws. I did not have the total scheme laid out in my mind, but I knew that I needed to equip myself in some way to bring Gordon Jenner to the silence that seemed ripe and waiting for him.
And then, too, the stakes had been upped when my mother made a scene in a local Safeway. She spotted Jenner’s wife on the produce aisle, and when Mom could get no response from her as to what her husband had against Dixon, she started chasing the other woman through the store, imploring her to tell what she knew. There they were, each pushing those big unwieldy carts, running up and down the aisles until my mother banked her cart into a canned goods display and had her forehead engraved with a 16-ounce can of green beans.
Tony Ramirez, my karate instructor, would have given Mom this advice: “The goal is not to look where you’re going, but to see.” In the first weeks of class I had no idea what he meant by that, and he never gave any explanations, just told me to repeat the basic forms again and again. I’d stand over at the side of the bare classroom and complete twenty high blocks, then twenty low ones, and then I’d combine them. If I was lucky, he would nod his head at me and tell me to give it another round. There was no sport or art to Ramirez’s way of thinking; it was all discipline. Once he made me stand in a corner of the classroom and practice my karate shout, the kiai. “Listen to yourself,” he said. “Get used to that sound.” At first I was somewhat embarrassed to stand in the corner and yell at myself—the “uts” and “huhs” supposedly coming up from the diaphragm—but finally some layer of self-consciousness fell away and the shouting felt good, invigorating.
Dixon was never embarrassed by anything that I knew of, though maybe he should have been. Standing up in front of the church as best man at his friend’s wedding, Dixon—after too much preceremony champagne—let out a horrendous belch, and then he just looked up at the ceiling, like maybe the rafters were slightly shifting or a thunderstorm was threatening the day.
My brother did not, I repeat, did not moon the bride’s mother later during the reception, and whatever charges were filed for indecent exposure at that celebration had nothing to do with Dixon. All I will say about that incident was that the bride’s mother was a Joan Crawford look-alike who presided like an old witch over the hot hors d’oeuvre table, but quite honestly Dixon was passed out in the coat room by then, peaceful with a couple of big synthetic fur coats wrapped around him.
I would have be
en a lot more comfortable at Dixon’s funeral if someone had laid a couple of those fur coats around him in his coffin, made him look like he was just sleeping through another party. I think everybody we ever knew was at that funeral. Misty Waters was there, poured into a little black dress no bigger than a glove. If she would have had to bend over for anything, I guarantee that no seam in that dress could have possibly survived. Dixon would have enjoyed that kind of spectacle—a flash of surprise and then a lot of bare skin. I asked him once if Misty Waters was her real name, and he said he didn’t know, but he thought it fit her perfectly. Names didn’t mean much to him.
They didn’t mean much to Tony Ramirez either, who walked slowly around the classroom and observed his students with a cold trigger eye. He addressed all individuals as “you,” and though it sounds as if he was distant and intimidating, that impression of him instantly vanished when he demonstrated his tournament style. Ramirez moved with nothing but pure love of each moment: the cat stance, the shoulder grab, a rousing roundhouse kick. Ramirez didn’t fight; he stalked. His balance and speed were hypnotic. He could kick and pivot like a dancer, the only difference being that his kick could and would break your ribs. When he showed us his Heaven and Earth, a series of blocks and punches punctuated by shouts, I knew that I had come to the right place. I could see then that what Gordon Jenner needed more than anything else was to feel Heaven and Earth descending on him.
The one I heard the other night—it came to me in pieces, a little from Pete Myers and some from Dorothy Carter—is how Dixon crawled all the way from Pioneer Park down to Preston High School, baying like a moon-crazed dog and slobbering all down his shirt, dark frothy spit that looked like he’d been eating dirt. That’s a real Jenner touch—the dirt—something to get you gagging.
A Brief History of Male Nudes in America Page 7