After that things settled down. I was determined to be happy. Alyse was almost a girlfriend, but never quite, despite how much my mother would have liked to see it happen. Bonnie I treated almost as a brother should treat his sister. Soon enough I succeeded so thoroughly in my endeavor to enjoy these last seasons on the Hill that the odd, temporary disturbance in the nature of my bond with Kip faded into oblivion. We were best friends again.
Kip came back to himself, his edge was there once more. I don’t know how it happened, it wasn’t gradual. And yet he wasn’t the young Kip, cocksure and cutting. Yes, he was sharp again, but how to put it? It was as if he had more substance to him, like spiritual girth. His voice heavier, his walk more weighted with each long step. Did anyone see this besides myself? I doubt it. Possibly Emma Inez, but no one else. While he was less callous, he was more intimidating; while less quick to state his opinion about anything, more given to quirks such as prolonged stares, head tilted perhaps to one side and mouth closed into a straight, unrevelatory line.
Our games changed. What we’d loved to do once we loved no more. Peppers was now something, Kip said, for little kids. —Better we go jacklighting bucks, he told me and I disagreed, —That’s not hunting, and he said, —So what is it? and I answered, —Jacklighting’s for bad shots and sissies, it’s like some kind of execution, and he said, —The Indians do it and they’re not sissies and they’re not bad shots, and I thought he was wrong. I mean, what kind of sport is it to shoot some poor deer, mesmerized in the night by the beam of a flashlight? I said nothing more, and was relieved when we never followed through.
We did other things. We fly-fished. We tried to trap a beaver for a couple of months with the idea that we could sell it to a zoo somewhere and have money to spend. We still rode horses, bareback and whipping the hackamore reins, rough-and-tumble down into the canyons and through meadows, over Barranca mesa and over to Pine Springs, almost all the way to Española, spurring them on with the heels of our bare feet and shouting, —Giddyup, until their hides darkened with sweat and the corners of their mouths collected foam. We just wasted time, too, could pass hours together without speaking. We knew what we didn’t want to do. We had no interest in football, for instance. Not street hockey, not even baseball. Nothing that had to do with teams, with balls or bats, nothing to do with keeping score.
—That stuff’s kidjunk, Kip said.
We didn’t consider ourselves outcasts. It was just that the others were flockers.
For a few months after our reconciliation and before we left for school, we lived for movies. By the purple velvet ropes and brass stanchions, along the carpeted path past the great double doors and into the hushed gloom of the auditorium we strode. We favored front row center the first time we saw a given picture, then for later viewings moved back into the body of the hall to cause trouble if necessary. We never saw a movie only once, not even the worst of them. The more action there was, the more we went. Newsreels and cartoons we studied, too—anything to do with Mickey Mouse we hated, Bugs Bunny was our boy, Bugs was more shrewd, knew how to get himself in and out of scrapes. Theater life was anonymous, safe, dark, cool in summer, warm in winter, scented with popcorn and salty butter, hotdogs and mustard. Here was a sanctuary where we could lead other people’s varied lives, witness their adventures, travel the world with them, win the hearts of beautiful women, fight ignoble and ugly men, be spies, cowboys, riverboat captains, gamblers, detectives, heroes. Flyboy movies—about aviators, men who rode blue ponies—were Kip’s favorites beyond all others. The grand silver passenger plane that carried star-crossed lovers far away from each other, crop dusters, Grumman biplanes that buzzed aerodromes upside down and then righted themselves so that goggled stuntmen could walk their wings, these were the subject of awe and cause for joy. Whenever there was an airplane on the screen he leaned forward, absorbed, even entranced. In the darkness of the theater Kip seemed to take on some of his boyishness again, let down his guard. We would fillip kernels of popcorn at unsuspecting couples whenever there was a love scene and the music ascended to violins and the lights dimmed. Most of what little money we made doing small jobs here and there went into the hands of the woman who sat in the glass booth at the entrance to the Centre theater, that winter and on into the early months of summer. We hadn’t the slightest idea that we might be a bit immature for our age. The days went soft as a sumptuous fog during this last season of isolated contentment we would enjoy. It set in upon Kip first, and what came over him readily came over me as if we were one patient suffering a single malaise, one creature bewitched by a single spell.
In the meantime, Alyse wisely found another kid in whom to invest her affection.
My mother. I have to be prepared that she may not know me. She threads in and out of recognition when I telephone her, has for some years. She knows Bonnie Jean but sometimes seems unclear about or uninterested in specifically identifying her, even though my sister—as Bonnie Jean herself has told me—visits Mother most every afternoon. It will be a very different kind of sadness for me to see her as she is now, as she’s become, than it has been to hear her on the phone. When her monologue ranges and extends in illogical ways, I can sit there at my desk and listen in a half-there-half-not way while I study the framed photograph of her and Father I keep with other family photos, and can let my imagination modify things just a little, turn back time toward the moment she and Dad stood smiling triumphantly, having climbed to the summit of Sandia Peak, when youthfulness still was hers. I can read what she wrote on the verso of the photo—it’s framed with a special window in the back so the inscription is visible—for Brice, from his loving mom & dad here at the top of the Tewa world, Turtle Mountain (Sandia Peak), September 1967.
Radiance and exuberance emanated from both their faces, back on that autumn afternoon in the mountains near Albuquerque, flushed from the long hike up and up through the turning aspens. Toasting their successful ascent to the summit, she lifts her flask in the air, and father waves his walking stick. Her figure is, as always, slim, her clothing smart, sensible. In her eyes is the confidence that she will live forever—and when I connect that look with the voice I am hearing, a voice that has been so influential in my life, I don’t feel so awful about where she is now, and who she is. After all, she’s still convinced of her immortality—and she’s got two millennia of belief, ceremony, and tradition with which to back up her assertions. She borders on insanity, I think, at times. But the radiance and exuberance have never abandoned her. It isn’t insanity anyway—it’s something else; but if it were insanity, it would be a savant’s, and a damned cheerful savant at that. The elements I can use to find the cherished old her in the becharmed new her are right there before me, then, as I merge that photograph with her present voice and perspectives.
Seeing her, though. I guess I have avoided it like the plague, without much wanting to admit my cowardice. In the past I defended myself. I have said to Bonnie Jean, —Listen, you live right there, what do you want me to do, I live two thousand miles away, drop everything and come when you want me to come? She wouldn’t know who I was if I did come. I’m carrying my end of the deal.
—Your mother is not a deal, Brice, Bonnie Jean would say.
—All right already, you know what I mean. I’m not being irresponsible, I’ve been holding up my end.
And I have. I pay what bills her savings and small income do not cover. It seems fair enough. She’s not yet in a nursing home—Bonnie and I’ve agreed to forgo that eventuality as long as possible—but when the time comes, no doubt much of the financial responsibility will fall to me.
Still, Bonnie Jean holds that my prolonged absence has made Mother sad. When she says that Mother misses seeing me, there is no escape, it makes me feel rotten and selfish and heartless. And what do I usually do but justify myself, like a fool. I am accountable for my behavior and my distance, of course, I’ll say. I don’t dispute that. But there is little that you could come up with, Bonnie Jean, to substantia
te my inability to “face facts,” as you put it two or three years ago.
—And just what sort of facts are they I’m supposed to face? I asked.
—That you’ve never cared about us here.
—And what am I supposed to do different from what I’m doing?
Bonnie Jean relied on an old chestnut of hers, harvested from her orchard of cliches, —Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.
—Come on, Bonnie Jean, I said. —You chose to stay on the Hill, nobody forced you.
—Well, who was supposed to take care of Mom and Daddy?
—They were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves.
—Not after Daddy died.
I thought to say, Dad didn’t need taking care of after he died, but settled for, —Look, I don’t think by coddling Mother you’re doing either one of you any good. You get upset when she doesn’t acknowledge your presence, she gets upset when you don’t want to talk about her saints and angels. What makes you think, aside from doing the shopping for her and helping with the laundry, that all your ministrations aren’t just a nuisance?
I was unhappy with myself for having said that. I had a way of overstating my case to my sister, and had no clear idea of what weight my words might have with her.
She began to cry. —You’re the same mean person you always were.
—I’m not mean, I said.
—You just don’t get it. You don’t know what it’s like watching her fall apart, piece by piece, day in and day out.
—That doesn’t prove I’m mean.
—You’re ignorant of the situation here, for one. And two, you refuse to help in any way beyond sending out checks every so often. I think that makes you mean, Brice, and frankly I don’t see it as anything new.
The argument invariably came to this impasse. I promised to come out. I apologized as best I could. And after we’d hung up I had to admit Bonnie Jean wasn’t altogether wrong in her accusations. There was inequity, there were imbalances, she did do more to care for our mother, hadn’t shoved off like Kip and I had so long ago. But she was mistaken to think I didn’t comprehend what was happening out there. I knew altogether too well.
After my father passed away, Mother married Jesus. This was how I put it whenever friends asked how she was getting along, and I wonder if such a shoddy and cynical way of viewing her zealousness wasn’t seen by these friends as the wish of a son who would rather have his widowed mother marry him. Was my frustration with her Christianity some form of jealousy? I mean really. No, it was more a sadness as I watched her lose some of her roughed-up edges, watched my born-again mother be smoothed, planed, graded a bit by her new beliefs and hopes. She stayed with the drink and how she went about reconciling that with the faith I couldn’t say, although I think many religious people manage to weave their wants into their search for salvus. In my own perverse way, I approved of this single paradox in her newly forming, but not reforming, character.
Rage is too strong a word, and frustration may not be the most accurate description of what I felt when I found myself on the telephone with her, sometimes letting her go on for half an hour at a time about her quest for transformation and renewal. What must have been tugging at me was that I had such a distinct memory of myself once being, by intuition, so close to the deep comfort that religious sentiment can afford a person—back when Kip and I made our midnight pilgrimage—and now hearing it again from her, well, perhaps what I was feeling was more an agitated wistfulness. But, to be fair to myself, she could, at times, become a bona fide drone. She went through a Rudolf Otto phase, which I thought I might not survive. This was some ten years ago, in the early eighties, when during a birthday call to her I was made to endure an exegesis of what the theologian described as “Das Heilige.”
—The sacred, you see, Brice, the sacred inspires more than awe, it inspires the deepest terror.
—Terror, I said.
—Yes, a feeling of profound terror in the face of the majesty of mystery, here, let me quote from Mircea Eliade—
—Mom? I said.
—“the feeling of terror before the sacred, before the awe-inspiring mystery . . . mysterium tremendum—”
—Mom, how are Bonnie Jean and the kids?
—Listen, “the majesty—majestas—that emanates an overwhelming superiority of power—”
—Mother?
—“religious fear before the fascinating mystery—mysterium fascinans—in which perfect fullness of being flowers” which is so much like the ritual the Hispanics perform with Las Tinieblas, it all has to do with darkness and light, with apocalyptic fear. . . .
And so she might go on. There was to her, still, a kind of cool, an eccentricity that could distress or nettle me but which, when in a tranquil state myself, I was able to see as admirably unique. Who would’ve foreseen it, my mother over the course of a lifetime metamorphosing into a handsome old bird who loved nothing better than to invite you to pull up a chair at the kitchen table and share a tumbler or two of gin while discussing the Bible? Not I, but there it is.
Now here I turn off the radio, having had my fill of “Gotta thank Mama for the cookin’, thank Daddy for the whoopin’, thank the devil for the trouble I’m in.” Enough of “Daddy’s hands were soft and kind when I was crying, Daddy’s hands were hard as steel when I done wrong.” Good god, I think. Enough of fiddles and twang.
All I want to hear is the sound of the wind rushing through this funky old tub. My eye stretches out in a way I haven’t felt it stretch in a long time. It is no wonder that the sky is what people most mention when they talk about the Southwest; the earth is just a floor for this blue ceiling and these kaleidoscopic clouds. The sky is higher, and I don’t know why that is, although I’m sure my father could have told me—there must be some meteorological explanation. The clouds are a vast scrim, frothy and mercurial as ever. The mountains blue in the near distances, violet out farther. The road broad and the air stark. A magpie overhead, its long tail black and belly white.
I’d forgotten how much I enjoy driving, out on open highway like this, the Tesuque reservation lands dirty pink bespeckled with scrub, and past Camel Rock, which way back when we used to climb—somewhere in one of Mother’s albums there was a photograph of Kip and me posing as small humps on the camel’s back—and along past the same souvenir shops that have been here for decades selling kachinas and corn dolls, dreamcatchers and cowhide drums, past Arroyo Cuyamungue, past the pueblo bingo hall, past boneyards littered with great piles of cow skulls, elk and deer antlers, past all the tacky bric-a-brac, past porch railings hung with tourist rugs—REAL INDIAN KRAFTS—and past the cut-rate liquor stores that now have drive-through windows so you don’t even have to get out of your car before you kill the old bottle and break the paper seal on the next.
After I turn to head up toward the Jemez, Black Mesa comes into view and reminds me of an enormous dark porkpie hat laid there on puebloland, Oppie’s hat of course, and anxiety begins to hew the sweetness of all these familiarities.
Mother, Mother, I think. Please answer your door and know who I am. And as I think this, Bonnie Jean begins to make sense, come into focus. Well, not so much Bonnie Jean as such—siblings, I believe, are fated never to make sense of one another—but her hostility toward me, her impatience with my distance from her and our mother. I can see it, there’s some reason to it, some value. Or is this the necessary regret felt by any prodigal son? Regret that refuses to acknowledge that though the prodigal has come home, chances are good he will leave again just like he did before, shamelessly strewing the path of his exit with a hundred empty promises of a quick return.
Bonnie I will visit first, I decide, although in my paranoia I begin to worry that she may not know who I am any more than Mother. Strange, all this sudden desire of recognition. Maybe Bonnie Jean’s tones of moral ascendancy about all this are at times defensible. Maybe my right to recognition here is less than I had ever imagined, developed as it’s been from th
e distance of an utterly different way of thinking and style of life. Still, though, I hope my mother will know her son.
It was September 1962, and within a month of our arrival in New York, Kip’s disquietude began to acquire new focus. At first he tried to get with it, gave it what he could manage, tried to settle in to the life of a student, but his patience—never a long suit to begin with—wore thin with magnificent dispatch. He’d adjusted to the quickened rhythms, the babel, the pandemonium of the city with the same relative ease as I. It was not the city but university life that seemed to bother him. Restrictions, as Kip saw them, were here much like they’d been back on the Hill: odds meant to be gambled against, and beaten. He never read his books at a library carrel or in his dorm room, which was down the hall from mine, but preferred during days to linger on stoops in nearby neighborhoods, and at night in some noisy coffeehouse. He was forever wandering off campus and into the streets of the Upper West Side. Harlem, ten blocks to the north, or Morningside Park, where none of the students were ever seen, suited him better than anything on campus. The Greentree, the New Asia where seventy-five cents got you a good lunch, Tom’s Diner, these were where he preferred to eat, rather than the paneled dining hall. John Jay, our dormitory, from whose windows we stared out south and east into the hard, inviting outside world, was to him an unwelcome confinement. He devised myriad ways to avoid honoring the curfew hour of eleven, after which you were supposed to sign your name in a registry book. I forged his signature a couple of times, other times others must have done the same. He was perpetually astir. Indeed, the one or two times in our lives that I saw him asleep, his eyes shivered beneath his lids like nystagmus, and his foot twitched in an involuntary mime of whatever dream he was having, a dream most probably of running.
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