Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  I sat down, right there in the middle of that graveyard. I knew that he wouldn’t come in after me. I knew that Manny was too afraid of something in there to come after me. I thought I was safe sitting on those Indian graves.

  He hated to be alone, so the graveyard shifts were a bad idea. I guess he was spoiled in that way. He needed a lot of attention. There was nobody to perform for up there at the mill in the middle of the night, just the ore roasters, usually, and Manny. He got a little crazy when he had to be alone. Like, he came home from work one morning, put both hands on my face, and said, “Brenda, do you think you’re flesh and blood?” I could smell he had been drinking.

  I said, “My dad’ll fire you if he catches you drinking on the job.”

  “What do you think is flesh and blood if not you, Brenda?”

  I told him I thought he should get a day job. That he wasn’t around people enough the way he had to sleep during the days, and he didn’t talk to anybody at night.

  “Oh, I talk,” he said. “You know what uranium is?”

  I knew what uranium was.

  “There’s a thousand little bombs going off in those furnaces every night, and we have us some discussions. We talk about you, sweetheart. You’re the main thing on my mind, you know that?” He hadn’t just been drinking, he was drunk. “Of course, they don’t listen. Here’s how it is.” He pulled out a kitchen chair and straddled it. “This is me,” he said. He pointed at himself. “This is furnace one.” He pointed at his right leg. “Imagine it’s a metal box with uranium inside, and the fire’s going nineteen hundred degrees,” he said. He started stomping his right foot. “This is furnace two.” He pointed at his left leg. “Imagine it’s a metal box.” He started stomping with that foot. He had both feet hammering against the kitchen floor, making a racket. Then he started speaking in Navajo, looking at the ceiling. There was a lot of noise in that kitchen.

  “I listen to you,” I yelled at him. “Who else am I going to listen to? You want all the goddamn attention.”

  He said, “Let’s go to bed.”

  I told him I didn’t want to.

  He told me a man needed sex. But I didn’t want to.

  He got like that. But, too, he was a charmer. You have to love a man like that and mostly not mind his moods. When we were still kids, just married, Manny came home from work one morning with a pink bird under his arm, one of those plastic things you see in people’s yards, and I had seen this particular plastic bird in the high school principal’s yard forever. Manny had stolen it on his way home from work. He put it in the middle of the kitchen table, and the bird had breakfast with us. Manny said, “Baby, I brought you the stork.”

  I said, “Manny, that’s a pelican.”

  He said, “It is? I thought it was a stork.”

  I said, “You better get off this reservation so you can figure out the difference between a pelican and a stork. You better go to a zoo somewhere.”

  He said, “How are we going to have a baby if this is a pelican?”

  I said, “You’re my entertainment committee, you know that?”

  He said, “Brenda, this is a flamingo.” Well, as soon as he said it I knew that’s what it was, and felt a little stupid, and mad at him, how he was always just playing me, and wouldn’t have talked to him all the rest of that morning, but then he came over and squatted in front of me. He put his elbows on his knees and held his face like a little boy. He said that maybe we should pawn that flamingo for a stork so we could have a baby, and I said, “Okay by me.”

  Except when he was drinking, just about anything Manny said was okay by me. Not that I’d let him know this. I’m not just a go-along sort of person. What I believe in is timing. I mean, you keep a guy guessing, but the timing has got to be right. Once, I guess we’d been on the reservation a year or so. I thought Manny was starting to like me, and I decided to test him. I was supposed to meet him in my front yard, and we were going to get up a game of softball. He was late. I knew he’d expect me to be waiting. What I did was just put the ball in the yard, then I ran in the house. This was so I could see his face when he came to meet me. You know you’re getting to a guy depending on how his face looks when he’s expecting to find you someplace but you’re not there. I hid behind the curtains in our front room, and after a while Manny showed up. The ball was in the middle of the front lawn. He stood over that ball, then stooped down, picked it up, started tossing it up, catching it. And he walked off. Like he’d found a prize, like that ball was all he was after in the first place. He never glanced at the house.

  I figured my timing was off. He didn’t like me well enough yet to miss me. And after he left me for good, I figured my timing had been off the whole time I knew Manny, and maybe there wasn’t such a thing as timing at all.

  Manny came home one morning carrying a foreman’s white hard hat under his arm. I said, “You get a promotion?” He said my dad had been for a three A.M. visit to the roaster room at the mill and forgot his hat when he left. Manny also said that he thought a man should spend a lot of time with his wife and from here on we would be spending a lot of time together. Then he went and hung the hard hat on a peg in the living room.

  Manny stayed home nights after my dad caught him drinking at the mill. He didn’t sleep. He said he couldn’t shake that night-shift habit, but I think it was the liquor, the way it keeps you awake. He’d want me to stay up with him to keep him company. “We’ll sleep during the day,” he’d say. I tried to, but I’m a night sleeper, and anyway, Manny didn’t sleep day or night. He didn’t sleep. I told him I needed to sleep. “Then fucking sleep!” he’d yell, and leave, sometimes for weeks, and then I’d have nightmares of him splattered on some highway, drunk in front of some off-reservation bar.

  One night I woke up and Manny was sitting by the side of my bed. He’d been gone maybe a month, and at first I was glad to see him, but then I noticed he was weird. He was talking to me about the Navajos in World War II, how they used Navajo for a code language, and after a while he wasn’t making any sense. “And Brenda, them Nazis couldn’t break it because it wasn’t written, how about that, we never thought to write it down, and my cousin Suzanne went to Deermont and she said there were no boys, how about that, but she liked it anyway and never came home to the reservation, she went to Paris or Spain drinking tequila, Indians shouldn’t drink, Brenda, like your dad says, because we have type B blood and you have type A. . .”

  I mean, it was weird waking up to his talk, and his eyes were dead—they didn’t see me. I said his name over and over: “Manny, Manny, Manny—Manuelito!”

  “Was a drunk,” he said. He laughed.

  I said, “Manny, why do you drink?”

  He said, “To get drunk.”

  I left the bedroom. He yelled after me, “And I don’t want to be talked out of it.”

  I went to the kitchen to make coffee. In the kitchen I found a puddle on the floor. It was urine. Manny came into the kitchen. He stared at the puddle on the floor, and then at me, foolishly, a little smile. He said, “I don’t think I’m responsible for that.”

  My heart was cold. You don’t ever really know a person, and maybe it’s just those childhood games that make you think you do—you try to remember how he used to look, but all you know is how he looks when he drinks. It’s not like a country song. It’s not the good and then the bad, and how it gives you a reason to sing. It’s that you don’t know a person. He was a goddamn drunk and I was a goddamn drunk’s wife and it was just piss on the floor.

  He left that night for good, and good riddance is what I said to him, but he was in my head. Like a bad dream, but worse, because I was nothing but scared most of the time living with Manny—still after he left I only remembered I was scared but couldn’t remember how it felt. And that’s a bad dream, when you know good and well somebody’s a drunk. I never thought he’d leave me for good. I’d watch for him sometimes—at night when I couldn’t sleep. I’d go sit with that plastic pink stork that I kept in the
living room, just like it was a real thing. Funny, huh? With all the lights off, me and this bird; maybe we were watching for a face in the window. Manny said that if a Navajo witch comes for you, you’ll see a painted white face in the window. Then he said I didn’t have to worry since I wasn’t Navajo. Still, I’d watch that window and think how a Navajo skinwalker could witch a white. How things get in your head, and you can’t get them out. You can’t sleep for thinking about something.

  Then a couple of days ago they called me from a detoxification center in Farmington and said they’d picked up Manny. He had to detoxify for a few days, then he could go, but they wouldn’t let him go on his own recognizance because he was a danger to himself. I said to tell him I wasn’t his wife anymore. Then I said never mind, I would do it myself.

  There is a women’s ward and a men’s ward in the center. The walls of both are painted green. The whole place smells like vomit. In each ward there are rows of cot-size beds lined against the walls, and in most beds lumps that are people sleeping, although some of the people are sitting in bed smoking and others are walking around. There is a young black-haired woman who lies flat on her back and yells to the ceiling, “Put the music on.”

  I hear Manny before I see him. When I turn the corner from the women’s ward into the men’s he’s right there in the bunk closest to me, next to the wall. His hair is long, he wears a red bandanna around his forehead, and his pajamas are paisley. He doesn’t sound drunk. I can’t see his face. He’s sitting on his bunk talking to the man next to him. The man is asleep.

  Manny is saying, “So they took me to this center for detoxification, and I told them I’m no ordinary drunk Indian. I’m Todacheene, man. Bitterwater, and that don’t mean whiskey, neither. Manuelito was Bitterwater.

  “So, first thing they took my clothes, gave me pajamas with feet. Like kids wear, pajamas with feet, man. And the next thing, they processed me. That girl said, ‘First thing we had to sober you up, boss.’ Chester, I was twenty-four-hours dead drunk. That girl said I was being processed on the second day because I was dead drunk on the first. And she asked me, ‘How old are you?’ and I said, ‘Old enough to know better.’ What do you think of that, hey, Chester? And she asked me, ‘When did you start to drink?’ I told her, ‘About two days ago.’ I told her I am a social drinker, that I only drink socially. Chester, she’s a smart chick. She said, ‘Quit fooling around.’

  “So I asked her, ‘Who put feet in my pajamas?’ She said, ‘That’s so you won’t run away.’ And I told her, man—’I can run with feet in my pajamas.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, but you’d look a little silly, don’t you think?’ What do you think of that, man?

  “Hey—look here, Chester. It’s my wife.”

  “I’m not your wife anymore, Manny.”

  Manny scoots back on the bed. He says, “That’s okay.” He pats the mattress beside him. He says, “Have a sit-down.”

  From his bunk we can see the glassed-in nurses’ station and two Navajo nurses watching us. There is also a white man. Manny says he drives the drunkmobile.

  Manny introduces me to Chester.

  I say, “Manny, he’s drank. He’s passed out and can’t hear you.”

  Manny stares at his hands in his lap. He says quietly, “I know that.” We both stare at his long fingers, and the skin is peeling around the nails. “I’m just trying to make it interesting for him.” The fingernails are white and look cold. His hands look very cold. He yells so everybody in the room can hear, “I’m just trying to make things interesting for my bedmate here.” The Navajo nurses squint at us.

  I take Manny’s left hand and put it between my hands, but they are too small, so I put it under my thigh to warm it.

  Manny is staring at his feet. He says, “You know, these pajamas didn’t always have feet. Somebody sewed them on there. Who do you think is responsible for that?”

  I don’t know.

  He says, “If you were still my wife, I’d ask you to do something.”

  “What.”

  “To cut the feet out of these pajamas.”

  “You’d just go get drunk again.”

  Manny leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. He says, “Maybe.” He sticks his right hand under his own thigh to warm it. He says, “Maybe not.”

  Starburst

  Barry Deemer watches his wife, Rosy, across the deck. She’s talking to Scott Wentworth while Scott grills ribs. The rhinestone barrette in Rosy’s hair catches the sun and directs an oval ray onto the Wentworths’ redwood siding. The ray seesaws over one chunk of boards. It’s Janet Wentworth’s barrette. A couple of weeks earlier, when Janet first noticed her missing barrette in Rosy Deemer’s hair, she advised Barry to check into it.

  Rosy leans backwards against the deck railing, her elbows propped on the top beam, and seems amused by the barbecue proceedings—there’s that little half-smile. She tells Scott to be a sport. She tells him she’s only asking a half-hour of his time. “Barry won’t do it,” she says loudly, making sure Barry hears. Rosy wants Scott to dress up like a gorilla and deliver balloons to a birthday party at the Top Deck Lounge that night. Rosy has a little balloon-gram business, and the gorilla-grams are popular. They have other grams as well—a leprechaun on St. Patty’s, cupid on Valentine’s Day—but the gorilla is requested the most.

  “You’re out of your gourd,” Scott says. “Isn’t she out of her gourd, Barry?”

  “A little rambunctious,” Barry says.

  The barrette holds Rosy’s gray streak. It’s silver, really—just the one streak on her entire head. She laughs at something Scott says that Barry can’t quite hear. Then they both laugh.

  Once, Rosy took an avocado—the first time they went out. They’d stopped at the Safeway for picnic supplies, then headed for the La Platas. Halfway through the meal Rosy pulled from her windbreaker pocket an avocado that hadn’t gone through the checkout. She didn’t crack a smile. She reached in her jeans for her Swiss Army knife, flipped the blade, halved the avocado, then quartered it, then halved the quarters—all with neat incisions, as if she were performing an operation—and peeled the skin back, making eight perfect crescents. She ate the entire avocado. When she was finished, she asked him if he was going to bust her.

  At the time, he had thought it was an isolated incident, but now there’s this barrette. Barry can see the headlines: COP’S WIFE A KLEPTOMANIAC.

  WIFE A KLEPTOMANIAC.

  Rosy tells Scott that he’ll get to dance with the birthday girl. Scott brushes the last coat of sauce over the ribs; some drips on the coals and they hiss. “The band always spotlights the birthday girl. See, they black out first, then the gorilla comes up the stairs, and they have a red light on him and a white light on her. It’s great.”

  “It’s a disease,” Janet whispers in Barry’s ear. She is sitting next to Barry on the picnic bench, stirring sugar into her iced tea. “It’s like alcoholism. They can’t help themselves, and neither can kleptos.”

  Barry thinks Rosy helps herself pretty good. “She’s just trying to be cute,” he says.

  “They don’t even want what they go after. Usually.”

  “She’s just trying to be funny.”

  “They’re capable of anything—the really bad ones are.”

  He knows Rosy is capable of anything.

  “Did you go through her drawers?”

  After Janet told him about the barrette, Barry did a little research. He read in the police dossiers about the case of an army officer’s wife who stockpiled underwear that she’d lifted from other army officers’ wives. At parties she’d slip into their bedrooms and take samples from lingerie drawers: briefs and bikinis—cotton, silk, nylon. Finally, one woman got wise; she began investigating lingerie drawers at parties. In one house she found a bureau full of underwear she recognized and hundreds of pairs she didn’t.

  Rosy’s case is not the same. This is jewelry. Still, Barry went through her drawers just to see. He found more than he expected, but noth
ing he didn’t recognize: pairs and pairs of white cotton briefs folded in little triangles. Barry counted them—nineteen. What did one woman need with nineteen pairs of underpants? He checked the labels: all Jockey. And the T-shirts were L.L. Bean T-shirts, and there were two slips—no frills, a little worn—and pantyhose folded in squares, a tan satin bra, a shiny white one, a couple of pairs of long underwear: a no-nonsense lingerie drawer, exactly what you’d expect from a country girl in a cold climate. And the sock drawer was exactly what you’d expect as well; he had dug through wool socks, mounds of them, grays and whites. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he knew it wouldn’t be gray or white.

  At dinner the talk turns to badgers. Scott says that as far as he is concerned the badger menace is escalating, the population on the bluff exploding, the whole damn prairie teeming with burrowing mammals. “Little sons of bitches, Barry—I see them on the hill.” He squints at the hill that is his backyard. The Wentworth house is halfway up the western bluff, one of the highest human habitats in Farmington. Barry patrols the bluffs when things are slow, driving along one dirt road or another up there, just following where it leads. If you head east along the edge, you’ll see all of Farmington to the south, miles of just nothing north.

  “They’re mean animals,” Scott says.

  “They’ll stand you off,” Barry says.

  “I know it.”

  “Scott’s at his wits’ end,” Janet says.

  “Thing is you get five feet from them, they’ll stand there and spit in your face,” Scott says.

  “Just eyeball them,” Rosy says. She is piling sour cream on her potato. So far she has piled four spoonfuls.

  “This is not a little threat,” Scott informs her. “They won’t just rout garbage.” Scott doesn’t look at Rosy when he says this. Throughout dinner Barry has kept an eye on the barrette; Janet has kept her eye on the barrette; Rosy has kept one hand on the barrette. Scott has not looked at Rosy—he has taken, Barry thinks, extra care not to look at Rosy. Barry wonders why.