My Good Man, page 24
“Figured. I wanted you to know, anyway. It’s a sincere offer. And maybe the next time you speak my daughter’s name, you’ll call her Christine?” It was a plea.
“Yeah,” I said. “You taking her out New-Yahhing? Just her again?”
“Thought so. Your ma still make magic cookies? Maybe put a spell on me? Make me not so lonesome?” After midnight, the radio marathon had continued, but it was Beatles Life after the breakup. They played only solo work: “Isn’t It a Pity,” “Imagine,” “Photograph,” “Silly Love Songs.” “Your mom’s gonna be surprised you’re coming home tonight. She’s probably figured she’s lost you to that other world, where Little Eva and the rest of us live.”
“The New Year’s good for surprises. Keeps you sharp.” I got out, and Tim Sampson drove on, back to the crime scene disguised as a party.
At my house, I looked in the windows where my ma and members of our extended family welcomed the New Year. They laughed, smoked, traded jokes and quarters, waiting for their kids to come home safely, but not daring to speak that fear. The whole group only got together like this a few times a year, but New Year’s was a standing date.
The cold air was sharp in my shirt sleeves, but I walked back out to the lawn and looked up at the stars anyway, watched the Big Dipper become the Giant Bear that the three hunters had chased into the heavens, listening to those people still firing distant shots into the dark.
In the morning, I’d stay home, instead of shouting welcome across the Rez. I’d greet people coming to our door, sharing possibilities, giving out my ma’s dangerous death-wish cookies to the bold. If Tim and Christine came, I’d make sure there was one for the driver.
For now, though, I stepped back through the threshold, to see if my cousins had felt Poseidon’s seaquake yet, the deep ocean tectonic shift that would turn their lives upside down. Tim was probably reentering that other party, trying to find his daughter, and love her the best way he could as a new year awakened. My own tidal wave had struck me head on, out of nowhere. He’d left me capsized, sinking in an emotional state I’d never even known I’d wanted, until the moment it happened. I couldn’t decide which was worse, not knowing what it felt like to be held, or knowing, with no one there afterward, to open their arms and welcome you in when you needed it again. How could you learn to love feeling vulnerable, your hull shattered and taking on water?
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Different Sun
(1983)
On New Year’s morning, Christine Sampson hopped out of her father’s truck and carried three things up the driveway. I opened the door before she could yell, but she did, anyway.
“Um, brought you this,” she said, holding out my old jacket, with some mud stains. I thanked her. “Grabbed it when you disappeared. You go with Randy? That’s what everyone thought.” Apparently, Tim had decided not to cover our evening together with her.
“I got sick,” I said. “And someone gave me a ride home. I was too embarrassed to go in.”
“I get that. I’ve embarrassed myself. Every once in a while.” We both nodded subtly. “Brought you this, too. I saw it shopping and thought, there’s only one person in the world who should have this!” She handed over the box that now had an awkward lie tied to it.
“Feels heavy,” I said, weighing it as if I’d never held it before. “Expensive. Is that right?”
“You don’t get to ask those questions with a gift, Brian,” she said. “Just say Nyah-wheh.”
“I’m sorry, of course. Here, step in.” My ma was monitoring the intrusion.
“Chilly in here.” She could see her breath in this room of our house.
“Yeah, just the way it is in here,” I said, trying to dismiss. “But I didn’t know we were doing this. This isn’t part of—”
“Yes it is. Don’t you remember the apron you made me? I use it all the time.” I loosened the tape and opened each flap. “Don’t be such a gramma!” she said, tearing the rest off. “My dad’s gonna wonder what’s taking me so long.”
No, he’s not, I thought. He knows exactly what’s happening, and he’s happy to be sitting in his warm and toasty truck cab.
“Wow!” I said, as she helped lift the box top off. “It’s great! But really, too fancy. Too expensive.” I held off the inevitable as long as I could. “I mean, I have a jacket, here.”
“This one’s different,” she said. You could wear this in the winter, without layers, because it was thick with an insulated lining. The leather was designed to protect your hide in a motorcycle accident.
“I can see.”
“Take it out and you’ll really see.” On cue, Tim honked his horn, continuing to pretend we didn’t know how this was going to unfold. “Oh shoot! Hurry up,” she said, helping.
I had to fake total surprise at the Man in the Star embroidered all over the back. “Oh man! Christine!” I said. “This is—well, it’s frigging amazing! But it’s just too much.” The cassettes fell out of the box with the jacket no longer on top. I hoped I was selling a shocked look. It wasn’t too big a leap—I still was at a loss for words. My mouth hung open.
“Okay, call me later,” she said, taking a cookie from the box I’d set down. “One for the driver?” she asked, smiling and reaching.
“Wait, here,” I said, “give him one of these, instead.” I reached for the large gingerbread men from a separate container on my ma’s piano bench.
“For my dad. He’s the driver,” she said, like I didn’t know. “He don’t get Oo-wee-rheh.”
“Well, he sort of does,” I said. Oo-wee-rheh, the Tuscarora word for doll, was also the word used on this day. You prepared a special treat for members of your father’s clan. It had started out as gingerbread men. Most people now just made pie. My mom stuck to tradition, even though my dad’s relatives didn’t come to our house for this celebration.
“You’re not gonna do that shittay thing,” she asked, hurt flashing across her face.
“No! No, of course not. It’s just for him.” Some old-timers who still made gingerbread men did it to send a harsh message. If a kid’s biological parents weren’t married, or worse, were the same clan, just before they gave the kid the cookie, they’d break off its head and drop it in their bag first. The kids never knew why they got a maimed cookie, but their parents did. “Secret payment for all his smokes I’ve stolen,” I whispered, and she grinned. It was a good enough lie, and she put the cookie in her bag, for the driver. She told me a lie and I told her one back, but I couldn’t kid myself. Both benefited me.
“Call me!” she shouted and ran to the truck. I hoped Tim knew what it meant. I’d spent a lot of the night thinking about how we’d welcomed in the new year, just he and I, alone, talking, making a real connection like almost never happened here, both knowing we had no way to sustain it. It already seemed unreal, less than twelve hours later. The pockets of my old jacket were empty, which killed me a little. The fake Indian Head Nickel Gihh-rhaggs had given me, my lucky coin, had been in the chest pocket. An outdated bar drink token, with no value to anyone else, but someone had snagged it just the same. Still, I had my jacket back.
Back in school a few days later, it was as if Randy and I had never been friends, again, had never fought off werewolves as boys, had never steadied each other, drunk, so we didn’t puke on our own shoes, had never pieced together a previous night from our shared memory pieces. But this time, I didn’t care, and wasn’t even trying to convince myself. I was finally done.
I loved the jacket from Christine, but it wasn’t fair to accept such a gift from someone you didn’t feel the same about. Home alone over break, I’d tried it on in the vanity mirrors Mona had left behind. The shimmering embroidered Rush image almost glowed against the leather. I’d fold it back in the box, sliding it under my bed, wrapped in plastic and another box, to protect it.
At lunch, I still sat at the Indian table, though now at the opposite end from Randy. When you shared a tight community history with twenty to forty kids, you could always find someone to joke with. It didn’t matter if you weren’t close friends. You had the shared history of our little community, the fun times, the embarrassing times. We could even joke about the mean hygienist who used to come to the Rez once a year to give us these deep-pink dye tablets so we could look in the mirror and see how gross our oral hygiene habits were. There might be a couple people you didn’t like so much, but it was easy to stay at different ends of the group, if you kept it light.
Leonard and I both had Smoking Lav passes, so we caught up there. “Why are you smoking anyway?” I asked. “Aren’t you gonna have to do all kinds of endurance shit once you’re in Boot Camp?”
“Toughening myself up,” he said, hotboxing his cig. “Only a few more months. Then it’s adios.” His Marines enlistment date was weeks after his graduation, and he was coasting. I asked him if that was his goal, to be a big guy. “I guess that’s part,” he said, goof flexing his biceps. “But sometimes, I think I signed up to belong to something less fucked up than my family.”
“I can understand that,” I said, thinking of what he was going through, his house transforming into someone else’s while he was still in it.
“What you doing, Thursday night?” he asked. I shook my head. “D and D night at the Brick Spithouse. Five bucks.”
“Dungeons and Dragons?” I asked. It seemed unlikely, but I’d heard of stranger hobbies.
“Ha! No, you weirdo,” he said, laughing and raising his arms, growling in a sad dragon impersonation. “Drink and Drown. Get your hand stamped, then drink all night. They have wings and tiny pizzas that come around every little while. All for five bucks,” he stressed again.
* * *
“So, listen, when I get back from Boot, we’ll get together,” he said that first night at D and D, each of us with a stack of empty plastic cups. “Have a blast!”
“Yeah, sounds good.” I was supposed to act like I didn’t care, but I felt myself already looking forward to it. I really enjoyed Leonard’s company, even with the ticking clock. It was a novelty knowing I wasn’t going to get robbed if I passed out. As long as I bought my share, and didn’t expect much real conversation, I was good. We’d taken to shooting the shit on the phone, too, before he discovered the D and D. On those phone nights, we both just rambled on, mostly about school and our imagined futures, about everything and nothing. We were easy company. I’d forgotten how much I liked talking on the phone when you weren’t constantly disappointing the other person. “We gonna be able to talk once you’re there?”
“Not really. But as soon as I get in, I’ll send you a letter with my address. I need you to write, okay, buddy?” He looked into my face, not wanting to plead. “I can tell it’s gonna be lonely. Any connection to home’ll be super helpful. I mean, my dad’s gonna be busy playing house with his new old lady.” I wondered how many other people he’d asked this same request.
“Of course, man. I’ll write you every week,” I said. “I promise.” I was writing for my own pleasure anyway, so how hard would it be to make another entry, just for Leonard, sort of recreating our phone conversations as best as I could? “Why can’t you use a phone?”
“They want you to think of only the family you enter Parris Island with. Far’s they’re concerned, you don’t have any other friends or family. But we are allowed letters from home.”
Other than Thursdays, which became a regular thing with Leonard, my evenings stayed pretty barren. I knew what it was to dread someone’s phone calls, and I had no intention of becoming that person for him. On nights my ma didn’t go to BINGO, I walked Rez roads, to smoke in peace. I didn’t even miss Randy’s parties that much.
With allegedly longer days, February still felt the worst. Snakey, salt-bleached asphalt traced my walks for the impossibly long “shortest month.” I’d stroll past Margaret and Moose Knuckle’s. At the “Summer Cottage”, where my dad and other drifters passed bottles, I quietly drifted to the other side of the road. I had a sawed-off lacrosse stick looped into my jacket sleeve, in case trouble found my path. On Valentine’s Day, a truck slowed behind me, stretching my shadow. Most days, I ached for company. Any encounter could be better than the long, epic, and brittle silent roads.
“Wanna ride somewhere?” Tim Sampson shouted, straining to roll down his passenger window. I’d drifted beyond my usual limit of making a bearable return in deep cold.
“You’re not exactly pointing my direction,” I said.
“Get in, you goof. I’ll turn around.” He shivered. I was so cold my balls felt like a walnut trying to push deep inside for any warmth. I got in. “Too frigid to be out there.” He could see my old jacket, but he didn’t comment. “For sure for someone who loves heat like you.” He tilted vents my way. “Want one?” he asked, pointing to a six-pack on the bench seat between us.
“Too cold,” I said, blowing warm breath into one cupped hand, holding the other up to the vents pumping joyous heat, as he did a three-point and headed us deep into the reservation.
“Antifreeze,” he said, laughing. “Suit yourself.” Near my house, he took the right onto Dead Man’s. At a dark stretch of fields with no houses, he pulled over, and I gripped the stick in my sleeve. He was possibly just a patient vengeful father. “You know, you shouldn’t promise to call someone if you’re not gonna do it,” he said.
“Did I promise to call you?” I asked.
“You know who I mean. Christine stayed home most nights last month, waiting for you to call.” Among the people I hadn’t seen much of, Christine definitely was up near the top. She spent half her day down the road at vocational school now, and we didn’t share any classes. Sometimes, we’d pass each other in the hall, but that was about it.
“Haven’t seen her on the bus,” I said. “And for the record, I never said I was gonna call.”
“But I bet you didn’t say you weren’t going to call,” he said, like he’d had a spy microphone on our conversation. “I’ve been dropping her off at school, or she’s been dropping me at work and taking the truck. Thanks for the cookie, by the way. Damn but your mother makes some fine cookies.” I nodded. I guess that explained some things. The couple times I’d seen her, I’d said the jacket was too nice to wear in the winter, that I didn’t want road salt stains on it.
He climbed out and headed toward the tailgate, like a Bizarro reversal of New Year’s Eve. In the rearview mirror, his massive shoulders glowed and shivered in the red taillights and vapor, and when he was done, I pretended not to notice him come up the passenger’s side. I debated a whack to the solar plexus and tried to decide which barren field might offer me a close shot at disappearing in the woods. I was young and might outrun him, but his legs were long.
“Hey,” he yelled, clinking the passenger window with his wedding band, making that circling gesture to roll the window down. “Since you ain’t drinking, you mind driving?” I opened the door to jump out, but he just stood there. “Snow’s too deep here for those sad things you’re calling winter footwear,” he said, looking down at my dress boots. “I know how to dress for winter, so mine are OK. Just slide your skinny ass over. Cold out here,” he said, climbing in.
“I’m not any better a driver now,” I said. “Not like I’ve had practice.”
“Yeah, you’re a stubborn little fuck,” he said, as I picked up the six-pack and slid over to the driver’s spot. “Anyone else your age? Give ’em a chance to drive? An invitation to drive, you can’t get ’em out of the driver’s seat.”
“I told you that night—”
“I know what you told me,” he said. “Just shut up and drive. Don’t oversteer and don’t goose it, or we’re gonna be stuck. Just ease onto the road.” I pulled the shift down and the red tongue landed on the D. The truck heaved a little, and I slowly pressed on the gas.
“You gotta put some energy into it,” he said. “Push down. Just don’t floor it.”
I pushed and got onto Dead Man’s. He readjusted the vent to face me again. “I haven’t really seen Christine,” I said, a weak excuse, but I felt like I had to say something.
“She’s moved on,” he said, matter of fact. “She’s got someone over, so I got time to kill. Valentine’s. Figure I’d give her the house for a while.” I took a left as we reached The Torn Rock. If I’d gone right, we’d leave the Rez. Randy’s recently acquired El Camino wasn’t in his driveway, and I wondered if it was parked at Tim’s.
I didn’t care much, but it still felt as if I’d been yanked from my own life like those TV actors who demanded too many perks from the executives running the show, thinking they were the star. Suddenly, their character just dies—no chance of coming back. My insistence on not being fucked over was too much. I’d been written out of their story.
“Chicken,” Tim said, laughing. “Gonna limit our choices.”
“You’ve got an open beer and I don’t have a license. I’d prefer to acquire one before I get slapped with some violation.” We cruised the northern strip and began a standard Rez Lap.
“Haven’t seen you around Night’s place.” He raised his eyebrows. “Saving money?”
“Something like that.”
“Let’s see who’s on Moon Road tonight?” he said, directing us further from my house.
“It’s too early,” I replied, passing by the turn. “Nobody shows up there until at least ten o’clock, closer to eleven, I’d guess most nights.”
“That’s not true,” he said, cracking another beer. “It’s always Happy Hour somewhere. How about we go to Vera Blake’s?”
“Do you even know Vera Blake?” I couldn’t see Tim at Lewis’s house.
“I hire Juniper to help with stuff if it’s too much for one man. He’s um, what you might say, eccentric … but a hard worker.” Juniper was Lewis’s uncle. I guess eccentric was a word for it. Of the adults I knew who couldn’t drive, Juniper was the only one who simply didn’t know how.
“How about I just get out at my house? Then you can go wherever you want.” Tim was trying to find a house where Valentine’s Day didn’t exist. Lewis’s was a good guess. He had as much luck going out with someone as I did, close to zero, but they were just poor. When the rumor about you is witchcraft, no one takes any chances. Still, my misery was doing fine without company.
