My Good Man, page 6
The first morning, he’d made coffee as I dressed and fought brushing my teeth. “You wanna keep those teeth as long as you can, junior. You never know when you’re gonna need them.” Then he offered me a sip from his cup and that was enough. “Good thing,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of bad habits to choose from once you get old enough. You’ll like this, better,” he said, pouring hot chocolate from the stove. He must have made it before jumping on the bed. “Your old man ever come around?” he asked. I shook my head. I’d been a later-life baby, a gift, a surprise, or more unkindly, a mistake baby. There were a fair number of us around the Rez. People got busy with each other, and if a pregnancy happened, well, that was the deal.
But my dad hadn’t wanted more kids, said he had a hard enough time feeding those other mouths and still having money left over for his own pleasure, and he was sure my ma had gotten pregnant one last time just to spite him. He’d been looking for an excuse to fly for years, from what I hear, and I was just the one he needed. I hadn’t seen him since before I’d started school, and even then, it had always been at a distance, from some far end of a crowd at different reservation events: community fair, National Picnic, Christmas bazaar.
I got to recognize his legs from afar because if he ever saw me coming, he’d make a quick disappearing act into the crowd. The year before at the National Picnic, I’d gotten within eight feet for several hours and he never caught on. I walked away as Fireball time rolled around. It wasn’t like I could sneak up and capture him and suddenly, he’d want to be my dad again.
Gihh-rhaggs nodded and said it was time for the bus. He walked up the driveway with me and when the bus came up, Miss Betty opened the door, but she didn’t look at me, staring out at Gihh-rhaggs instead. Lots of out-of-work reservation men waited with their kids in the morning to catch a glimpse of Miss Betty in her driving outfits, very different from her Friday afternoon Bible School styles. I didn’t know then what impressed men about tight-fitting tank tops, but some older kids were kind enough to inform me. She had a smile for every one of those unemployed men too. Gihh-rhaggs looked back at her and nodded as she shut the door and got moving again. She watched him in the rearview mirror and he watched her and I watched the two of them until he disappeared around the bend.
He waited with me every morning as it grew warmer and there was less of a worry about me getting cold, or frostbit, or whatever he thought he was preventing by being there. He never waited in the afternoons, when Dave, the other driver, drove us home.
“How long you had that driver?” Gihh-rhaggs asked one morning.
“Dave?” I asked, knowing that was not who he meant. If anything, I got my dodginess from Gihh-rhaggs. He was the world’s worst liar, but he’d convinced himself that if he didn’t have to look someone in the eye, he could pull it off. When we drove around and hit his various stops, he’d offer me advice, what he called The Good Man Secret Handbook. He’d trained me to say we’d just gone for burgers on those Saturday nights we prowled his favorite places in the city. He liked my ma to think we just stayed home, but if she happened to call, we were telling the truth about the burgers, he said, “technically.” He taught me his method was to stare at a point just beyond either ear of the person he was talking to. It’s a decent technique and I use it often.
“The other one.”
“Since I’ve been on the bus, pretty much,” I said. There might have been others at first, but Miss Betty became the regular driver quickly, and any other faces rapidly faded to the point that Miss Betty had forever been our driver. Everyone liked her, not just the employment-challenged. Even the bad kids behaved for her, or at least in front of her. Across the Rez, Lewis Blake had an uncle who lived with his family. I don’t know if his Uncle Albert was always a little off, but he sure was when he came back from Vietnam. Albert had struck up a waving relationship with Miss Betty, and after a while, they’d say hi back and forth, and she gave him cigs sometimes when the mood hit her right. Lewis told me his uncle sometimes suggested that he and Miss Betty were dating, and the neighbor kids found this way too funny. Lewis suspected kids from down the road would call his uncle if they knew he were home alone, and pretend to be Miss Betty. I was glad they lived too far away to want to consider me as a friend. This reservation can be a tough place on love.
I was beginning to think, as Miss Betty and Gihh-rhaggs became more friendly too, waving, saying hi, watching each other in the mirror, that there might be some real phone calls coming to our number. Did that bus stop at my house while we were all out for the day in our respective prisons? Miss Betty grew nicer and nicer to me the more she and Gihh-rhaggs became bolder, sometimes giving me a candy bar the way she passed cigarettes to Lewis’s uncle.
I didn’t know what Gihh-rhaggs did during the day, or if he had a job, but he seemed to never be without money. As soon as my ma and auntie left in their black dresses every Saturday night, he and I were out the door in his junker car. Mona and Chester had made it clear that they were not my caretakers and weren’t wasting their Saturday nights on me. Gihh-rhaggs maintained to my ma that his car sometimes got stuck in second gear, so they usually rode with others whenever they went places together. But his car got the two of us wherever he wanted to be just fine when we headed out past dark.
Our first hit would be the Golden Pheasant, where all the women petted on me, buying me Cokes and potato chips and putting me up high on a bar stool to watch the pool or pinball games without getting in the way, while he went into the back room and rolled some dice. Sometimes, one of the guys would bring my barstool over and teach me how to shoot with the balls remaining, after someone had sunk the eight, and other times, I finished out the extra balls in Gihh-rhaggs’s pinball once his opponents had used up theirs. I liked this the best, since the game, Fireball, featured art that looked vaguely like a superhero, and Fireball had a whole different meaning on the reservation.
We also regularly hit the neighborhood Gihh-rhaggs said he and his brother came from. They were Love Canal boys, growing up in a house filled with contaminants. He’d show it to me on those nights, but by then, Love Canal places had started being haphazardly boarded up. The neighborhood was beginning to look like Night of the Living Dead. Owners hammered up a few boards, enough to show they’d split on purpose, and called it a day. Even homeless crank-heads stayed away, and Love Canal had an almost 0 percent crime rate. The commonest criminals refused to flirt with cancer that epically.
Whenever he talked about it, I’d ask Gihh-rhaggs where his brother was now, and he’d just say “around.” Even at seven, I knew a Mind Your Own Business comment when I heard it. How Gihh-rhaggs made his way out to the Rez in the first place was anyone’s guess. The Rez and Love Canal weren’t even neighbors. Maybe back then, all the Rez kids and Love Canal kids went to the same high school. It was hard to think of my ma in high school, adjusting her clothes in the Girls room when she got to school, to be a little more provocative for boys, dating, Eee-ogging about those dates, sneaking out late at night, whatever, but she did. I’d seen her diploma. Instead of Wheatfield, where I went, she’d gone to LaSalle, in the Love Canal district.
The official contamination news was still a couple years off when we cruised around, but Gihh-rhaggs, and probably most of his neighbors, had known something was wrong. He told my ma that he and his brother had slept in the basement of their home growing up, and during rainy seasons, the ground water leaking into their room often was iridescent, glowing in low corners, like The Blob. Sometimes, I overheard them at night. “You’ll see, when I get up enough money for a lawyer, I’m gonna take the chemical companies to court, maybe the school board, too. I hear they had something to do with this.” Sometimes, even later, he’d confess his greatest fears to her. “I swear, I’m gonna develop some wicked mutation or disease by the time I get old, and then you won’t want me anymore.”
“I’m not like that,” my ma would say, and it was true. She didn’t seem to think anything of our dad missing his big toe. It was just part of the way his body came.
“I swear, I took pictures of that glowing shit oozing down our basement bedroom walls. Those companies take one look at my pics? They’ll settle out of court, and, baby, we will be set for life.” As with so many of Gihh-rhaggs’ plans, that one just disappeared.
His parents had decided to stay, even when he and his brother offered to help them. They said they were too old to move and asked to be left alone in the only home they’d known through their marriage. We’d sail silently by, before hitting the last few city stops of the night. At those, I mostly sat in the car. He’d detour and pick up fast-food burgers to leave with me, and whatever I didn’t eat, he’d finish off as we made our way back to the Rez. Sometimes, he’d laugh a creepy little sound when talking about the people leaving Love Canal, saying, “Moving to much smaller accommodations,” and only years later, when the contamination story broke, did I understand he meant caskets.
“Why you wanna live with us, anyway?” I asked one night as we entered the Rez.
“You don’t want me to live with you?” I think it was the first time an adult had ever asked for my opinion, and meant it.
“I guess it’s all right,” I said. “You don’t spill kerosene. But you’re white,” I added, as if this fact were not obvious. When my ma went for a white man, she went all out. He was about as blond and blue eyed as they make them; even his beard was blond and not that red-brown so many blond guys grow. As summer came on, his skin was burning or peeling, white or red; he never browned. “We have to live here. You don’t. You could go anywhere, maybe live in those houses like the people on TV.” I’d been to some houses my ma cleaned and they lived luxurious lives, with toilets and sinks, and their houses weren’t wired with extension cords from the one set of outlets near the box. “Wouldn’t that be great?”
“You could go anywhere, too. Your mom is the one who won’t leave. I’ve been trying to get her to move for a while. Finally I gave up and came to live with her, since she wouldn’t come live with me.” I didn’t buy this story. I might have been seven, but I’d already learned to add. I knew he’d been living with a woman down on Dog Street. I even knew Margaret, the daughter he had with her. If he wanted my ma to move off the Rez, it wasn’t to give us a different life. It was because our house was a little too close to the last bed he’d been camping out in.
“Well, where would you live? Where’d you want her to move to?”
“Around,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, she wouldn’t come because of you kids. She said she wanted you to grow up on the reservation, learn the language, all that shit. Are you learning it in school?” I nodded. “Does that name everyone calls me really mean lion?” I considered lying, myself, but then confessed that it did. “Hah, I knew it,” he said, running his fingers through his beard. “They all wish they could have this proud mane.”
“Maybe on their belts,” I said. He probably didn’t like that, but it was going to take more than a few hamburgers to win me over, even if I was learning to shoot pool and hit the pinball flippers long before I could ever reach the player position proper. He won major points with me, though, late in August, and I never made scalping jokes after that.
Gihh-rhaggs let me climb all over his car, treat it as if it were mine. He told me I could have it when I got old enough to drive, so I had better be nice to it in preparation. Kids from down the road would come over if his car was parked under the walnut tree. He was like my exotic pet. Some had never seen a white man that close before, not one as white as Gihh-rhaggs.
“Brian?” Randy Night asked one day we were hanging out, voice all wonder and innocence, which meant a bomb was dropping. “Is his pecker as white as the rest of him?” I told him I hadn’t the foggiest. I’m sure they were intimately involved, I guess I knew it even then, but in our house, privacy was a premium. Without a bathroom and with a shortage of bedrooms, the only time you were ever naked was while bathing, and even then, it was either the upper or lower half. The first time I could remember being truly naked was when they started making us take showers after gym in second grade. I liked my privacy and never invaded anyone else’s.
If Gihh-rhaggs came outside while we were playing, Randy would stare into his blue eyes, something he’d never do at his own house when the DogLips dice table was in session. He knew not to interfere with his parents’ dealings. But here, Randy’s chaos-loving side came out to see what kind of reaction he’d get. Gihh-rhaggs in response would smile and ask Randy what he was looking at, and Randy would abruptly retreat back to playing with me.
One day that summer, a group of us discovered we could reach a thick walnut branch by standing on the car’s roof. Grabbing on, we could swing across the hood and down to the ground, just like using a Batrope on TV. We kept this up for a couple hours but then, abruptly, Randy said he didn’t want to swing anymore. I just thought: more turns for me. He knew what I didn’t, and about five trips across the hood later, the thick branch cracked, a loud and painful moan, like the noise a kid’s body makes against the road after going over a bike’s handlebars.
Randy and the others immediately called me “Tree-Killer” in as loud of voices as they could muster. They wanted anyone in hearing range to know I’d been the one to do the damage, before they went home to their own yards full of intact trees.
Our house was nearly in the woods, surrounded by trees, but my ma loved the black walnut growing outside the kitchen window. She collected the nuts every fall and though they stained her fingers black and the shells were tough as rocks, she cracked them and harvested every nut she could find. I tried lifting the branch and leaning it on the others, so she wouldn’t know, but that night I lay in bed and thought about killing that tree.
The last swing had been a serious move that could get me a name for the rest of my life. Gihh-rhaggs was a dreadful enough one for my ma’s old man. I participated in the ritual, and I most certainly did not want to go through life being named Tree-Killer. I’d hoped for a much better Rez name and had been getting to the age where one would come up on me unexpected, some unforeseeable life event changing my name forever. There was a woman named Buffalo Head just because she watched a movie that had buffaloes in it, with people who noticed her head was bigger than it should have been for her body. This move could be bad.
Worse than the name, though, was the idea that I had killed something, and the fact would not leave me no matter what I tried to think about. There were things I’d regretted by the age of seven, but up till then, those lapses in judgment had been retrievable, erased or held at bay by an apology and an expectation that there would be a payback at some point.
I already understood the vengeance of school children was not monumental, but still exact. For this action, though, no one was going to punch me in the nuts when adults weren’t looking, or shove my head in the toilet at school until I couldn’t breathe, then flush it at the last possible moment. No one would pinch my jaws open and spit down my throat and no one would stuff sulfur powder up my nostril over this singular death. None of the kids who’d watched me kill the tree cared about it. They just wanted to distance themselves from the blame.
I knew little of the ways of trees, but even as I lay in bed, leaves were falling, and I’d have to go out and face the corpse every day for the rest of my life, watching it grow gray, wither, eventually fall into decay, depriving my ma of her walnut harvest from that point on.
The next morning, I wasn’t hungry. My ma was already hand-waxing someone’s kitchen floor and Gihh-rhaggs was taking his responsibility of getting my breakfast seriously. He offered a number of things, cereal, eggs, pancakes, most of which we did not actually have in the house, but he was willing to go buy them. I refused even more stridently as he went along. I didn’t want him to go outside and see the tree’s corpse. He’d know my guilt for sure. Soon enough, though, I realized he’d inevitably need to use his car.
“I need to show you something,” I said.
“I knew something was up. What is it? Are you sick? Something happen? Did you shit the bed or something? You can tell me. I promise to take it to the grave, if you want.” I shook my head and took his hand, dragged him outside, and confessed to the murder. He frowned and pulled the branch down. He wasn’t a tall man, but it was low enough for him to reach.
“I killed that tree. It was an accident, but I murdered it, by not thinking about it. Randy said so. He said everyone would remember what I did for the rest of my life.”
“It’s not dead. See? Look here.” He lifted me up on his shoulders and showed me where the break was. I didn’t want to see it, but he grabbed my hand and laid my fingers on the wet pulp. “It’s still alive. This happens to everything. It’ll heal over. You watch. You gotta quit worrying about this shit. This is like your craziness with the tornados this summer.”
“Well, they said on the TV …” I started. I’d become aware of the Emergency Broadcast System a few months before, and anytime they did their tests on the television, I ran into the room and stared at the Civil Defense image on the screen while the warning tone filled my ears. Our house was over a hundred years old, had belonged to my grandparents before my ma, and it had no basement, not even a dirt cellar. Between the cracks in our floor planks, you could see the dark and wet earth beneath. I’d tried to negotiate with friends who had basements, like Randy, to see what I could give them in trade for room, in event of an emergency, among the commodity vegetables and their dads’ porno mags hidden under the stairs. I’d secured reasonable assurances for my ma, Mona, Chester, and me, but no one wanted a white man in their cellars, and for sure not one as white as Gihh-rhaggs, though he’d been with us almost two years by then.
