Steal the North: A Novel
Page 4
“What’s up, Beth?” Matt asks before we make it halfway to our picnic destination, which is Steamboat Rock State Park. I let him pick the place before we left. He’s been unusually quiet on the drive thus far. I sit close to him in the cab of his truck. Steamboat Rock is a mammoth basalt rock with layers that look like steamboat decks. Whenever I come across the verse “As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land,” I think about Steamboat Rock before Grand Coulee Dam, and how it used to tower over nothing but endless sage. I’ve seen photos. Now it towers over the edge of Banks Lake, an enormous reservoir stocked with fish. The park has a green lawn, picnic and camping areas, a sandy beach, boat docks, a few shade trees, and rows of poplars to help block the wind. It’s a pretty place as long as I don’t think about the rattlesnakes in the sagebrush. I am trying to pretend I didn’t hear Matt’s question.
“I was excited,” he says, “getting the fishing poles ready. Then it dawned on me. The reason for your good mood lately.”
“We’ll talk at the lake. Let’s just enjoy the drive.”
“Damn it, Beth.” He pulls the truck off the road and shuts off the engine. I hate it when he cusses. “How long have you known?”
“I can’t discuss this here.”
“How long?” I don’t reply. He raises his voice. “How far along?”
“Please. I made rosemary chicken.”
He waits minutes, staring first at me, then out the window. His hands are more nicked up than usual from work yesterday. Finally he restarts his truck. I don’t scoot away from him, though he probably wishes I would. I wish he were a little excited. God has been merciful to us yet again. We drive in silence. Despite Matt’s anger and the knot in my throat, I rest my head on his shoulder. He tenses at first, a reaction I’m not used to, but then he relaxes.
Once we’re seated on a blanket under a shade tree—the fishing poles remain in the truck—I tell him how I know this is the last time I’ll conceive. When I tell him about the previous pregnancy and miscarriage, he flinches, and then again as I describe to him the two meetings with Brother Mathias and the proposed faith healing. He stands up, but we haven’t yet eaten. When he turns to wipe his eyes, guilt tugs my conscience. The wind lifts the corner of the blanket where he sat. Clearing his throat, he says, “I’m going for a walk.”
“I’ll come too.”
He shakes his head. “I’m going to climb the rock.”
It’s a four-mile hike, vertical in places, with loose sand and rocks and rattlesnakes. He scales rocky embankments while fishing, but this is different. When I try to protest, he reminds me that he and his brother climbed Steamboat Rock more than once as kids. “I used to be kind of adventurous,” he says. No, he isn’t hungry. I can wait here, he offers, or go home and call his brother to come pick him up. He hands me his truck keys.
“I’ll wait,” I say. “We need to talk more.”
“Go home, Beth.” He’s never told me to leave before.
Years ago he told me that I was his adventure.
Now I watch him walk to the trailhead without me. A younger couple in hiking clothes follows not far behind. I’ll wait right here for Matt. I should’ve packed some calendula oil in the picnic basket, for patience. I look around at the different families in the park: the children with plastic buckets and shovels digging in the sand near the water, probably wishing it was warm enough to swim, the moms filling plates with food, the dads barbecuing or tossing balls. Some of the older kids look bored, and one dad seems angry. But most families appear cheerful. It’s spring. Summer is coming. It was a long winter, with half a dozen storms from Canada. There are plenty of boats on the water, people fishing.
Suddenly I feel very alone.
But I’m not alone. There is a baby inside me. And Jesus is always near. And Matt, he would never leave me for good. As Kate did. I never thought she’d stay away, as all my babies have left me so far. But not this one. I sense something different.
Did Brother Mathias really hear my cry clear across the country? He said a voice can travel far in a dry place. Does the older woman looking at me now think she hears my cry? Is my grief that obvious? It’s become a barrier between the other women at church and me. This woman picnics with a large group, so why does she keep glancing fretfully in my direction? She looks the age Mother would be if she were still alive. I barely remember her. Kate could recall all kinds of things about Mother: her favorite soap, her thick and chewy homemade noodles, how she’d occasionally play western saloon songs on the piano when our father wasn’t home. Kate liked to claim Father ruined Mother. I’m not convinced. When they met, they both worked at a logging camp across the mountains. Her father was in charge. Every morning the men left in trucks to fell trees in remote reaches of forest. They returned each evening. Mother waitressed in the mess hall. Her family had saved money and planned to send her to secretarial school in Tacoma. After my parents ran off and got married, he moved her to eastern Washington, where he was from. Kate alleged that Mother was never the same: that Father, the dust, and the lack of trees almost dried up her spirit. But I think my sister, in her memories, imposed some of her own spunk onto Mother. The ladies at church remember her as quiet. The way this woman now stares unabashedly at me reminds me of the way my neighbor, the Indian lady named Teresa, much younger, watches me. She often has a trailer full of relatives from the reservation, mostly kids whom Matt talks to occasionally. I feel sleepy and lean back against the trunk of the tree to wait for my husband.
I wake up when someone touches my shoulder. “You shouldn’t skip meals, ma’am, in your condition.” It’s Matt. He’s forgiven me, I can tell. I sit up. He’s dusty, and his hair is tousled and his shirt untucked. He looks like a rowdy boy. I smile. We’ve both stayed slim despite having no little ones to chase after. The sun has dropped lower in the sky. The shadow of the rock has nearly reached us. His voice cracks as he says, “How about that potato salad?” It may just be that his throat is parched.
“I’m sorry, Matt.” He sits down, and I dish up our plates. “I should’ve told you first.”
He takes a long drink of water, then says, “You can tell me how he plans to heal you.”
I explain to him in more detail the ceremony Brother Mathias is proposing. “He thinks a virgin should lay her hands on my belly to purify it.”
“Is that a southern thing? Sounds a bit pagan. Or at least Catholic. Isn’t Bro Mathias a virgin?”
“Matthew Miller.” But I have to admit, I wondered the same thing.
He chuckles as he wolfs down the potato salad and chicken. “Who then?” he asks, trying to be a good sport. “A girl from church—the youth group?”
“Emmy,” I say. “That’s who first came to my mind.”
He stops chewing.
“Ridiculous, I know. We’d never find her.”
He swallows hard. “Well, we’ve never looked for her.”
Sometimes I seek so fervently in my dreams for Kate and Emmy that I wake up exhausted in the morning.
Their bus tickets were for California. My sister wouldn’t tell me which city. And whether they even made it to California or not, Matt and I never heard. For years I waited for the phone to ring. I still wait. And I still add their names to the prayer chain each week.
“Do you mean drive to California and search?” I ask.
“No. I mean drive downtown to the forbidden library.” I see a nasty scratch on his arm and get the chamomile oil and cotton balls from the basket, but he won’t let me tend to him. “There are computers at the library,” he explains, “that have the new World Wide Web.” He says he knows the church views the Web as satanic and a sure sign of the apocalypse, but lately at work he’s heard stories on the radio about relatives being reunited through the Web.
“Really, Matt?” He drinks more water. “Do you think?”
“It’s worth a shot. But keep in mind, Emmy’s alm
ost seventeen. She may not be a virgin. You and I were married at her age.”
“Oh, we can worry about that after we find her and Kate.” My heart starts to race, as if I too had climbed that rock. “I just want to find them.” Could my time in the wilderness be almost over? “Will you go to the library with me on Monday? Will you meet me there on your lunch break?” I wonder if I should ask Brother Mathias first or if maybe we should go to an out-of-town library. “Will you?”
He nods. “But you have to promise me, Beth, that this is it. You look ill. My family thinks so.” His family thinks I’m crazy. They always have. They are good people, despite not attending church or even saying grace before meals. “You don’t realize,” he continues. “You’re pale. Your hands shake.” My hands do shake, but so what, and not always. Not when I play the piano or garden. “You’re still a beautiful woman. Don’t get me wrong. That’s why Bro Mathias—never mind.” He stares hard at me. “Do you promise, Beth?”
“I promise.” Oh, to see my sister and niece again.
“Understand that I’m getting that surgery, no matter.”
“Kate and Emmy.” I ignore his comment about surgery. “Do you really think we can find them?” I need to get my garden in order. “Oh, Lord willing.”
“He is willing. We have to be.”
I don’t always understand his comments. And Brother Mathias is attracted to my faith, not my face. I almost tell Matt about Mathias hearing my cries, but it’s not the right time. It may never be.
“Cake?” I offer, ashamed of my deceit. The list of things I keep from my husband is short, but regrettably, there is starting to be a list.
“Let’s save it for at home.” He winks. “In bed.” He doesn’t mean sex. He never wants that when I’m pregnant or when he thinks I look tired. But he likes to hang out in bed with me and do things like eat pie or read me stories from Outdoor Life, which isn’t a Christian magazine, but we read it anyway. When we were younger and I still taught Sunday school, he liked me to tell him biblical stories in bed with my flannel board and felt characters. I agreed to do it in just my slip, but not naked. It seemed too sacrilegious.
“I could see the Cascades from up there,” he says on the drive home. Again I sit close. “Just the outline to the west.” He motions. “But what a spectacular view. I’d forgotten.” He looks flushed with the same earthly joy that I feel at moments in my garden and that he expresses when he lands a fish. Only now his joy, which I don’t think has anything to do with my pregnancy news, seems on such a grand scale that it frightens me: not for his soul, not in the Christian way, but because I can’t partake.
“The Lord is manifest,” I manage to say.
He reaches for my hand, which shakes. “Darling, if only I could’ve shown you the view.”
It is a Christian wife’s most important and rewarding duty to bind her husband to Christ, but for the first time I wonder what Matt’s life, rather than his afterlife, would’ve been like if he’d never met me.
3
Reuben
This is the second time I’ve seen the girl out watering her aunt’s garden by herself. She’s from California. My sister told me. She looks lost. Not confident. I assumed California girls were pretty sure of themselves. Pretty damn full of themselves, actually. But what do I know? Up north on the Colville Reservation, where I’ve lived on and off my whole life, most of the television screens are blurry. I dated a rodeo queen last summer with blonder hair and a better ass than this skinny California girl has. She’s not bad, though, and probably pretty up close. The aunt, now: she’s crazy. My sister disagrees—thinks the aunt is a healer, or could be. The lady wears a prairie dress and has hair longer than the oldest Indian. Her husband sometimes pauses a moment in his truck after work before getting out and going in to her. He’s a nice guy, always nods, waves, or whatever. We’ve shot the shit more than a couple times about fishing and elk hunting, and once, when I was working on my truck all goddamn afternoon, he came over and gave me a hand. He replaced a vacuum hose and got my truck running right in half an hour, which made me feel like a complete dumb-ass. The girl takes twice as long as her aunt to water the garden and shift the pots, which is perfectly fine with me. Next time she’s out by herself, I’ll go over and say hey. I’ve never been shy with girls, even white girls. Right now she sits on the garden bench and looks up at the sky, then over at the row of tall poplar trees that keep the trailer houses in this park from blowing away in the wind. When she looks over at me, I step back from the window. My sister has two sets of chimes hanging on the eaves outside the kitchen window and twice as many kids inside fighting over the remote control and the bag of Doritos I bought for them at the gas station. I hope the girl didn’t see me staring at her. She probably looked over because of the racket. I should’ve waved.
“No fucking way,” my cousin Ray says when I show him the girl the next day. She’s helping her aunt carry groceries from the car. “Get the fuck out of here.” He adjusts his Seattle Mariners ball cap—his prized possession. “And you thought your summer was going to suck.” We’re smoking cigarettes outside. It’s all I smoke, even when Ray offers more. “So, you get down her pants, bro?”
“She’s been here less than a week,” I say. “And shut up.”
“Losing your touch. Me and Benji, man, we’re just glad you’re away from the rez. Gives us a chance with the ladies this summer.”
“Maybe you’ll finally get laid.” He’d get laid if he’d quit stuffing his face all the time. He weighed two hundred pounds by sixth grade. Kids called him Sasquatch because he barely had a neck. He needs to set his sights a few dozen notches lower if he’ll ever get a girlfriend.
“I told you, bro,” he says, “your sister took my virginity years ago.”
He’s kidding. He’s the only one I let joke about my sister Teresa because he’d do anything for her—if he could, which he can’t without a job. I had two jobs last summer: one with the tribe’s Fish and Wildlife Department, which didn’t pay but was great experience and will look good on a college application, or so the school counselor said, and another shoveling hot asphalt from the bed of a dump truck, which I got paid for, but under the table because of my age. I’d planned to work again this summer, maybe thinning apple trees or picking cherries on one of the ranches near Chief Joe Dam. Mom and I could really use the cash right now—always—but Teresa begged me to come stay here with her in Moses Lake and help out with her kids since her latest man recently split. What could I say? She practically raised me.
“Can I crash here tonight?” Ray asks. He laughs and adds, “In your sister’s bed.”
They aren’t cousins. Teresa and I have different dads.
“Don’t have the gas money to get back to the rez? You fucking loser.”
“I’m meeting a guy later.”
“Fuck, Ray.” He’s dealing again. His stint in tribal jail didn’t work, obviously, and neither did his forced sweats and drummings with the elders.
I give him the couch and take the floor. He tries to protest, but only halfheartedly, which could be one of his Indian names: Halfheart. The fat fucker looks like my old man sleeping on the couch. I remember how safe it made me feel when I was real young to have my dad sleeping on the couch—night or day, sober or drunk. He’d wake up so easily for me. I just had to touch his shoulder. When Mom tried to wake him to take out the trash, or to go to his job at the mill, or later, when things got real bad, to please go hunting or fishing and put some damn food on the table, he’d keep his eyes shut tight until she walked away cursing him and Teresa’s no-good dad in one breath and two languages. Then he’d sit up with a grin and go to work, or not. He’d go hunting, or not. More often he’d go to the casinos, win Mom a couple twenties to get us by, then disappear.
My goal: to not be like my dad. Not dead by the age of thirty-one. Not washed out by the age of twenty-one. People on the rez, even some elders, excuse
too much of my dad’s bad behavior by thinking of him as a troubled trickster, means well, sometimes awesome Coyote type. Dad was funny as hell, sure, like the real Coyote, whom the Creator—way back—charged with readying the earth for humankind. Dad could also do great impersonations, like Coyote, especially of Mom’s boyfriends after my parents split for good. My old man had power, no denying. It came out during stick games and while he was fishing. My best memories are of fishing with my dad, despite his cooler of beer, but there were always root beers floating in the melted ice for me. I loved the stories he’d tell me of things that had happened on the rez before he was born, the pranks he’d pull on the priests at St. Mary’s, his dad’s Vietnam stories. But above all this, my dad was a drunk. His unquenchable thirst didn’t create the Columbia, as Coyote’s did. I don’t drink alcohol. The stuff scares the shit out of me. Nor do I go out with girls who drink. Ray and Benji wouldn’t hang around me, or so they claim, if I weren’t related to Ray.
I go to high school in Omak. The Okanogan River divides the town of Omak in two. The eastern half is on the rez. The high school is on the west side, the nonrez half. At Omak High, I’m in a program for kids whose parents didn’t go to college (95 percent of the student body) but who show promise (50 percent) and ambition (5 percent). The head counselor, who grew up in Seattle, claims no one is too young to set goals, and we Omak kids, Indian and white, need something to reach for beyond the yearly rodeo and the lumber mills that keep the area afloat. I want to go to college. Teresa didn’t finish high school, but now she has her LPN certificate. She’s my inspiration. I want a degree in fish biology. I want to help bring the salmon back to the rivers on the rez, and I want to do more than pray for it. But who knows? The Colville is five hundred miles upstream from the Pacific. Nine dams. White and native fishermen on the lower and mid-Columbia. As I learned working with Tribal Fish and Wildlife last summer, we’re at the end of the food chain so far north. Mom says Dad dreamed of going to college. She always says shit like that. Sometimes I think she wants me to be my dad, even though she hates him. The truth is my old man dropped out of high school as soon as he was old enough to drive. He rodeoed for a bit, even did the Suicide Race a few years. He never won but always made it to the final night. He also traveled around for a time in a drum circle. Benji dropped out of high school. Ray attends school on and off. Sometimes he homeschools, which a lot of rez kids have to do because of distance. I try to encourage Ray and help him with math.