“I’m trying to decide whether I understand what you’re talking about.”
She made her low slide-whistle noise that meant she would wait.
* * *
• • •
THE OIL WELLS didn’t pay out, and all the men were sacked. After they had hauled the last of the drilling equipment back to the rail yard in Deming, they went to a bar for green chile stew and posole. The chile was like battery acid and came with a glass of milk to cool the mouth. They toasted each other’s hometowns one by one. Indian Springs, Georgia; Waldo, Arkansas; Bishop, California; Windom, Texas; Chillicothe, Ohio; Wartrace, Tennessee; Davenport, Iowa; Egbert, Wyoming; Comayagua, Honduras; Buffalo, Missouri; Mobridge, South Dakota; and Glendevey, Colorado. At length Missouri toasted the plum cakes of Wyoming’s daughter, Sophie. They all roared and laughed but South Dakota, who shot across the broad table a tortilla plate Frisbee-wise that cracked Missouri on the mouth. Tennessee nearly fell from his chair hooting and then Wyoming, the until-now unsuspecting father, palmed a shot glass and whacked it into the skull of Tennessee. There was blood and wrestling. In the melee, bystanders were knocked to the floor. Even while they were still fighting it seemed better that the men should fall out with each other than go away from Deming still possessed by the spirit of friendship. Later, they all got in their several pickups. They signed on to other outfits in Saudi, Venezuela, Louisiana, Canada, Indonesia, Alaska, Bahrain. Only Tilly stayed in New Mexico, with Louisa and the boy.
While he looked for work they had to dip into the money that they had never said aloud was intended for the Rincon house.
Louisa tried to enroll Elroy in school. He was five by then and wondered what it was all about. The secretary at the school wouldn’t let Louisa enroll him unless she was his legal parent or custodian. And the clerk at the district court wouldn’t let her take out papers to become his custodian unless she was married. So Louisa and Tilly came back the next day, and a magistrate married them, and they filed the initial papers to become Elroy’s guardians, and after three months of zero official inquiry whatsoever, not even an interview with a human being at all, they got a letter saying the application was approved and they should come back to the court and they did and signed the documents in front of a notary, and the boy was theirs, and they left. They bought root beers at a gas station to celebrate. Tilly dropped Louisa and Elroy at home and then drove as far north as Elephant Butte hoping to rent himself out as a mechanic on one of the big cotton and alfalfa spreads in the Rio Grande valley. He could also weld, he said. He would have tied hay bales by hand if it had come to that, but nobody was hiring. By then rent and groceries had eaten all the money for the house.
At night in the trailer in Las Cruces he asked her, “You think we’ll be all right?”
“I know it,” she said.
Lean years. Love years. He knew the three of them would break. No telling when, or who would do the breaking. He hoped it would not be him, but then it would have to be her. Let’s do this until we break.
13
The people on the Heflin place had told Elroy he came from everyone. No one held more claim to him than anyone else. No one had to feed or watch him, they all did. Just like the mesquite trees, he belonged on this place here, where he was made.
It was only after he had lived in the world a couple of years, among certain people or others, in this or that place, that he figured out how completely those first people had lied. It took exactly two people to make one person; the two people who had made him had left him behind; and no one belonged anywhere.
Only Tilly seemed to tell the truth. Tilly had chosen them, Elroy and his ma, forsaking others, and didn’t hide it. Between himself and Tilly, Elroy knew there was a unique solidarity that seemed to become firmer with time.
Nevertheless, Elroy never fully lost his first understanding: that he had come from everyone and that there was a place—somehow smelling of the ranch—where everyone living and dead had their home. Everyone rightly abiding together now and across the centuries past and future. To dwell in it was to be in heaven, to be kept out was to be in hell.
* * *
• • •
AFTER NONE OF TILLY’S EFFORTS to find work around Las Cruces availed, he finally got hired as a technician with the Bureau of Land Management maintaining barbed wire in remote country and testing the soil and groundwater for radioactive isotopes. Pay was chickenfeed but the job came with an RV, in which they all three lived, along with a weekly tank of gas.
In the mornings, Louisa drove the boy in the Electra—still sound in engine but falling apart in its rattletrap body—across the sun-cracked beds of lost seas and dropped him at school and went off to iron other people’s napkins and sheets. Kind, foolish people drunk with hope, planting pecan trees in their yards for a future that wasn’t coming. And yet—and yet sometimes the temptation to pretend the future was coming bit her like the will to do harm.
They put the boy to bed in the jackknife sofa of the RV. Outside, Tilly unlatched the aluminum card table under the RV’s rear window and planted the two legs in the dirt, and they played the version of bridge called Back Alley that Tilly had learned in survival school. You were allowed to off-suit even if you had a card of the suit that had been led, so long as no one caught you. If you got caught reneging like this you automatically went set: you lost your whole bid and your opponent gained his. Catching the cheater out went by many names. A lot of marines called it “putting you in the hole.” When eagle-eyed Louisa caught him, she called it “shafting.”
“I shaft you,” she said, slapping Tilly’s pile of tricks and turning it over. “I led the king of spades before, and you off-suited. There. See? You go set.”
“Aw, fuck,” Tilly said.
“Hush, he’ll hear you.” She took the pencil from her hair and tallied the new score on a scrap of shopping bag under the Coleman lamp within the queerly windless desert night. “You go back three, six, nine, twelve. I go up nine.”
He looked at her; she looked at him, differently.
They couldn’t afford beer or cigarettes. The piñon smoke from the campfire was intoxicant enough. She riffled the cards in her long fingers then pressed down on the overlap and bent the far edges to make the bridge, and the cards interleaved in her hands, and she riffled again and finished with the bridge and offered him the cut. He tapped the top card, and she dealt and turned the last card faceup, which showed the trump suit was diamonds. He had the big joker and three diamonds besides in a hand of seven and he told her his bid was six.
“Ain’t you got brass. I bid one,” she said and wrote it down.
“We’ll see. I got a hole to dig out of now.” He led the spade queen, and she followed suit with a four, and he took the trick.
She said, “You never asked how we come a cropper on the Heflin place.”
“You want to tell me?”
“Just—you never asked. Why did you never ask?”
He played another spade, and she off-suited, and he stacked the second trick crosswise on the first.
“Did you think we all got mad at each other after our money run out? That wasn’t it.”
He led with the jack of clubs, and she sat up vexed and off-suited again.
He looked at his cards. He said, “Sweetheart, now I’m going to make you pay for putting me in the hole.”
“Does it make you mad to think about you might’ve come before, and you could’ve been a part of us?”
She was more than competitive at cards. She would push any advantage to the hilt. She seemed to have no idea the lengths she would go to, to win.
He led with the big joker which compelled her to surrender her highest trump, and she said, “Damn it,” and showed the king of diamonds and flung it across the table and looked up at the stars and looked at him squarely and said, “Even if you’d come earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered.”
&
nbsp; Tilly gathered the trick. His trustful mind didn’t detect the knife coming. She said, “You couldn’t ever have been one of us. You ain’t our kind, Sergeant.”
He cast about in the surrounding dark of the desert flats where the RV was camped for some impending tidal wave or person he knew to be dead, any telltale impossibility to tip him off that he was having a nightmare.
“The way it happened was one night we all took off our clothes.”
“Why are you doing this? Are you trying to make me mad enough I’ll hit you so you can be right about my temper?”
“Luther and Katerina were going to Oregon together in his van next day by themselves. And Sally and Lucy were going back to Nevada where they come from. And Bobby and Conrad were going to see about getting to Thailand. And we were all naked and we were all crying. And we were outside like this around the fire. And Elroy was inside asleep like now.”
Tilly put his cards down.
“Bobby come up behind me and kissed my neck. Skinny boy. The others had beards, but he couldn’t grow one. And I could feel his cock stand up against my leg from behind.”
Tilly put his hands on the armrests of the folding chair. He got up. He went into the RV and got a quilt. He took it to the Electra. Louisa was still sitting at the card table. He turned the key in the ignition and he sped off across the trackless desert undisturbed by brush or washout, the fenders trembling. After he had driven about five miles he parked and lay down and tried to sleep under the quilt. But he couldn’t get himself to lie still. He sat up behind the wheel alone in the dark asking the instrument panel what to do. Asking his silverhead father what to do. He could see the campfire in its solitary distance. He knew better than to drive back with his blood roiling.
His father would have said, Do nothing fast if you mean to do it right. But his father was not here, and his hands and feet as if automatically turned on the car and drove it back to the RV. He was afraid he would get out and hit her, and he was afraid it would feel good and right.
When he got out of the car, Louisa was feeding the fire, wrapped in his flannel jacket that had belonged to the one called Conrad.
Louisa was crying. She said, “You won’t never understand how I miss them. You can’t help me. You think we just run out of money. So, we run out of money, so what? If we still had love, the money wouldn’t have counted. We would’ve found a way. We must have gave up on loving. That’s the only way to explain it. What was the matter with us? It wasn’t anyone’s fault but ours.” She wiped her eyes on a sleeve of the jacket and said, “Let’s you and me finish the game now, please.”
Tilly sat down. He said through his teeth, “I forget whose lead it is.”
“You don’t either forget. You were winning.”
But he had in fact forgotten, and when he looked at the three trump cards in his hand a rush came over him in spite of everything, and he saw the four tricks he’d already taken from her, and the sequence of the game repaired itself in his mind, and he remembered the score, that he had gone set in the previous round but was winning the present one and charging now with a hand full of trump.
Louisa studied the score and her cards. She had the damnedest way of crying and letting the grief out, and finishing, and coming back to business.
Tilly played the queen of trump.
Louisa said, “Asshole.”
He said, “Remember when you said I think the world is right and finished except that I’m in it?”
“Yes.”
“And I wanted out and I was like to disappear?”
“Yes. Case in point you run off just now, didn’t you?”
He gathered the trick. He said, “I don’t want out. I want in.”
She made the dove sound of commiseration. It meant, Poor thing, too bad.
“I want in,” he repeated.
“You can’t. It’s over.”
“No, I want in with you.”
“How much more do you got to own? We’re married. Law says so.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You could chop me up and eat me like a heifer for all the law cares.”
“That letter Bobby wrote me said, ‘Love all men. Love everything.’ All right. Can’t I be part of that?”
“No.”
“I can’t be part of all men?”
“No, you don’t understand. So no.”
“Why do I have to understand?”
“I said no,” she said.
* * *
• • •
ACCORDING TO THE NEW RULE, Elroy had to come up with at least one new thing for which to give thanks at grace every evening before supper could commence. He sat looking at the steaming T-bone steaks in their puddle of red fatty juice on the dish in the middle of the table. The potatoes and luscious sour cream. His brow was drawn in thought. Outside, snow fell on the empty mountains. Then he remembered a plan he had made and he asked to be excused.
“Just say something before our steaks get cold,” Tilly said.
But the boy promised he would only need a second, and Louisa excused him from the table, and he went to his book bag on the jackknife sofa and took out the list he’d made at school when he’d had a pencil and paper and could think and had anticipated the present challenge and had prepared a list of items for which he would give thanks in the days ahead. He looked at the list and stuffed it back in the bag and returned to the table and climbed onto his chair.
Louisa said, “For?”
“Okay,” Elroy said. “For the bear.”
Tilly said, “Elroy.”
“Let him explain. What bear?”
“The bear in my dream.”
“Elroy, we’re hungry. Cut this out. Pick something real.”
“What color was the bear?” Louisa asked.
“It was brown. It was a grizzly bear.”
“What did it do? Why are you thankful for it?”
Elroy said, “When the wolves come at me, the bear killed all of them.”
* * *
• • •
THE BLM REORGANIZED Tilly’s Resource Area and closed his operation. The field manager offered to get him trained to inspect and enforce oil and gas leases, but Tilly would have to work in East Texas. Louisa had come from there and sworn never to go back, which he respected. So they moved all the way up to McKinley County, by the Navaho country, where Tilly got work running the crusher at a mill that processed uranium ore.
McKinley County was so distant Elroy had never heard of it. They might as well have gone to another state. The country hereabout was red. The Navaho kids at school didn’t mix with him. Neither did the Hispanics, of centuries-old families and ties here. Nor the more recent Mexicans, who were the smallest in their bodies and the most likely to share food at lunchtime and the most likely to fight. The only other Anglos were two girls; and while in his youth in Las Cruces Elroy had mixed with girls, he didn’t want to do it in this new country that was a fresh start offered to him at age seven. Instead he rode his bike alone in the vast arroyos or watched TV or studied the secret world that inhered in the cedar-smelling old closets and defunct appliances of the house they were renting. The hidden history inside of things. The hand that had driven the nail from which he hung the jacket in his room. The man attached to this hand. The wagon trail that had brought the man here. The people to the east or south who had made the man. The trails that brought those people to the place where they had made him. The way each of them came from two other people and they each from two more people, and the trails diverged the further back you went. The infinity of people in the unbounded past it took to make just one person who drove a nail and died.
A previous inhabitant of this rented house had left installed in the pantry wall an old black Western Electric telephone of the kind with a hanging earpiece and a separate cone for speaking that was fixed in the box
itself so that you spoke facing the wall. The phone didn’t work because they didn’t have the money to turn it on.
Elroy closed himself inside the absolute dark of the pantry and sat atop the stool he kept in there. He thought of a sequence of numbers and repeated it to commit it to memory and spun the dial accordingly.
He put the cold zinc receiver to his ear and concentrated but didn’t hear anything, not in the normal way, not even the ocean as in a shell.
Nonetheless, after a few minutes, he faced the mouthpiece and said, “Right.” He waited again, longer this time. Then he said into the mouthpiece, “I know it.” He sat perfectly still in the solemn cave of the pantry, the peace of the dark, pressing to his ear the receiver that had touched the ears of the people who had lived here, the people invisible but present. Those who watched and listened from the other side. After several minutes he said, “Flush that joker out of the jungle, like you said.”
The pantry door opened in a burst of light and Tilly leaned inside and took a bag of beans from the shelf. He said, “Sorry, I thought this phone booth was free.”
“It ain’t either a phone booth,” Elroy said.
“Oh no?”
“It’s a pantry.”
“Who are you talking to?”
“Command, sometimes. Sometimes my lieutenant.”
“You don’t tell them much.”
“I’m supposed to listen five minutes for every minute I talk, like you said.”
“All right, what do they tell you?”
“Reports from the front, you know.” He wagged his head wearily.
Tilly looked at him. He said, “How’s the battle going?”
“There ain’t any battle.”
“What’s the operation?”
“They’re looking for somebody.”
“Just one person? They send the whole army, or—what is it?”
“A division.”
“Okay, a division—after one man?”
The Volunteer Page 28