First, Body Read online

  I meant to say this as well.

  But my father stayed in the orchard all day. At four, I put on dark glasses and went to the doctor’s house. I polished gold faucets and the copper bottoms of pots; I got down on my hands and knees to scrub each tile of the bathroom floor. The doctor’s wife stood in the doorway, watching me from behind.

  She said, That’s nice, Ada.

  She said, Don’t forget the tub.

  When I came back to the cottage, I saw the paper stuffed in the trash, the mug washed. My father asked what I wanted for dinner, and I told him I was going to town. He said I could use the truck, and I said, I know.

  I meant I knew there was nothing he’d refuse.

  He saw me held tight in the dead Indian’s arms. He was afraid of me, the truth I could tell.

  Sometimes when I dream, the night I met Vincent Blew is just a movie I’m watching. Every body is huge. Yellow Dog’s brilliant face fills the screen. He grins. He hangs on to that torch too long. I try to close my eyes, but the lids won’t come down. His body bursts, shards of light; his body tears the sky apart. Then everything’s on fire: pond, grass, hair — boy’s breath, red shirt.

  But later he’s alive. He’s an angel rising above me. He’s Vincent Blew hovering over the road. The truck passes through him, no resistance, no jolt — no girl with black eyes, no body in the grass, no bloody nose. There’s a whisper instead, a ragged voice full of static coming up from the ground. It’s Vincent murmuring just to me: You’re drunk, little girl. Close your eyes. I’ll steer. I’ll get us home.

  And these nights, when he takes the wheel, when he saves us, these nights are the worst of all.

  Three days before the man was known. His cousin claimed him. She said she danced with him the night he died. In Ronan, at the Wild Horse Bar. Then he was Vincent Blew, and she was Simone Falling Bear. It amazed me to think of it, the dead man dancing, the dead man in another woman’s arms.

  She said he died just a mile from her house. I knew then that her cousin Vincent was her lover too, that her house was a tarpaper shack at the end of a dirt road, that her refrigerator was a box of ice, her heater a woodstove. She’d have a bag of potatoes in a pail under the sink, a stack of cans with no labels on the shelf.

  I saw that even in his stupor Vincent Blew knew the way home.

  She said he’d been an altar boy, that he knew the words of the Latin mass by heart. She said he’d saved two men at la Drang and maybe more. She had his Medal of Honor as proof. She said he wanted to open a school on the reservation where the children would learn to speak in their own tongue.

  But that was before the war, before he started to drink so much.

  He had these dreams. He had a Purple Heart. Look at his chest. They had to staple his bones shut.

  I don’t know what lies the reporter told to make Simone Falling Bear talk. Perhaps he said, We want people to understand your loss.

  That reporter found Vincent’s wife in Yakima, living with another man. He asked her about Vietnam, and she said she never saw any medals. She said Vincent’s school was just some crazy talk, and that boy was drinking beer from his mama’s bottle when he was three years old. When the reporter asked if Vincent Blew was ever a Catholic, she laughed. She said, Everybody was.

  In a dream I climb a hill to find Vincent’s mother. She lives in a cave, behind rocks. I have to move a stone to get her out. She points to three sticks stuck in the dirt. She says, This is my daughter; these are my sons.

  September, and Vincent Blew was two months dead. I was supposed to go to school, ride the bus, drink milk. But I couldn’t be with those children. Couldn’t raise my hand or sit in the cafeteria and eat my lunch. I went to the lake instead, swam in the cold water till my chest hurt and my arms went numb. Fallen trees lay just below the surface; rocks lay deeper still. I knew what they were. I wasn’t afraid. Only my own shadow moved.

  I came home at the usual time to make dinner for my father. Fried chicken, green beans. I remember snapping each one. He didn’t ask, How was school? I thought he knew, again, and didn’t want to know, didn’t want to risk the question, any question — my weeping, the truth sputtered out at last, those words so close: Daddy, I can’t.

  The next day I lay on the beach for hours. I burned. My clothes hurt my skin. I thought, He’ll see this.

  But again we ate our dinner in silence, only the clink of silverware, the strain of swallowing, his muttered Thank you when I cleared his plate. He sat on the porch while I washed the dishes, didn’t come back inside till he heard the safe click, my bedroom door closed.

  I saw how it was between us now. He hated each sound: the match striking, my breath sucked back, the weight of me on the floor. He knew exactly where I was — every moment — by the creak of loose boards. I learned how words stung, even the most harmless ones: Rice tonight, or potatoes? He had to look away to answer. Rice, please.

  His childhood wounds, his sister’s death — those sorrows couldn’t touch his faith. My mother, with all her lies, couldn’t break him. Only his daughter could do that. I was the occasion of sin. I was the road and the truck he was driving. He couldn’t turn back.

  The third day, he said, They called from school.

  I nodded. I’ll go, I said.

  He nodded too, and that was the end of it.

  But I didn’t go. I hitched to Kalispell, went to six restaurants, finally found a job at a truck stop west of town.

  That night I told my father I needed the truck to get to work, eleven to seven, graveyard.

  I knew he wouldn’t speak enough words to argue.

  I married the first trucker who asked. I was eighteen. It didn’t last. He had a wife in Ellensburg already, five kids. After that I rented a room in Kalispell, a safe place with high, tiny windows. Even the most careless girl couldn’t fall.

  Then it was March, the year I was twenty, and my father had his first heart attack. I quit my job and tried to go home. I thought he’d let me take care of him, that I could bear the silence between us.

  Three weeks I slept in my father’s house, my old room, the little bed.

  One morning I slept too long. Light filled the window, flooded across the floor. It terrified me, how bright it was.

  I felt my father gone.

  In his room, I saw the bed neatly made, covers pulled tight, corners tucked.

  I found him outside the doctor’s house. He had his gun in one hand, the hose in the other. He’d flushed three rats from under the porch and shot them all.

  He meant he could take care of himself.

  He meant he wanted me to go.

  I got a day job, south of Ronan this time, the Morning After Café. Seventeen years I’ve stayed. I live in a trailer not so many miles from the dirt road that leads to Simone Falling Bear’s shack.

  Sometimes I see her in the bars — Buffalo Bill’s, Wild Horse, Lucy’s Chance. She recognizes me, a regular, like herself. She tips her beer, masking her face in a flash of green glass.

  When she stares, I think, She sees me for who I really am. But then I realize she’s staring at the air, a place between us, and I think, Yes, if we both stare at the same place at the same time, we’ll see him there. But she looks at the bottle again, her loose change on the bar, her own two hands.

  Tonight I didn’t see Simone. Tonight I danced. Once I was a pretty girl. Like Noelle, shining in her pale skin. It’s not vain to say I was like that. I’m thirty-seven now, already old. Some women go to loose flesh, some to hard bone. I’m all edges from years living on whiskey and smoke.

  But I can still fool men in these dim bars. I can fix myself up, curl my hair, paint my mouth. I have a beautiful blue dress, a bra with wires in the cups. I dance all night. I spin like Noelle; I shine, all sweat and blush and will.

  Hours later, in my trailer, it doesn’t matter, it’s too late. The stranger I’m with doesn’t care how I look: he only wants me to keep moving in the dark.

  Drifters, liars — men who don’t ask questions
, men with tattoos and scars, men just busted out, men on parole; men with guns in their pockets, secrets of their own; men who can’t love me, who don’t pretend, who never want to stay too long: these men leave spaces, nights between that Vincent fills. He opens me. I’m the ground. Dirt and stone. He digs at me with both hands. He wants to lie down.

  Or it’s the other way around. It’s winter. It’s cold. I’m alone in the woods with my father’s gun. I’ll freeze. I’ll starve. I look for rabbits, pray for deer. I try to cut a hole in the frozen earth, but it’s too hard.

  It’s a bear I have to kill, a body I have to open if I want to stay warm. I have to live in him forever, hidden in his fur, down deep in the smell of bear stomach and bear heart. We lumber through the woods like this. I’ve lost my human voice. Nobody but the bear understands me now.

  Last week my lover was a white man with black stripes tattooed across his back. His left arm was withered. Useless, he told me. Shrapnel, Dak To.

  He was a small man, thin, but heavier than you’d expect.

  He had a smooth stone in his pocket, three dollars in his hatband, the queen of spades in his boot. He said, She brings me luck.

  He showed me the jagged purple scar above one kidney, told the story of a knife that couldn’t kill.

  The week before, my lover was bald and pale, his fingers thick. He spoke Latin in his sleep; he touched my mouth.

  It’s always like this. It’s always Vincent coming to me through them.

  This bald one said he loaded wounded men into helicopters, medevacs in Song Be and Dalat. Sometimes he rode with them. One time all of them were dead.

  He was inside me when he told me that.

  He robbed a convenience store in Seattle, a liquor store in Spokane. He did time in Walla Walla. I heard his switchblade spring and click. Felt it at my throat before I saw it flash.

  He said, They say I killed a man.

  He said, But I saved more than that.

  He had two daughters, a wife somewhere. They didn’t want him back.

  The cool knife still pressed my neck. He said, I’m innocent.

  I have nothing to lose. Nothing precious for a lover to steal — no ruby earrings, no silver candlesticks.

  In my refrigerator he’ll find Tabasco sauce and mayonnaise, six eggs, a dozen beers.

  In ray freezer, vodka, a bottle so cold it burns your hands.

  In my cupboard, salted peanuts, crackers shaped like little fish, a jar of sugar, an empty tin.

  In my closet, the blue dress that fooled him.

  If my lover is lucky, maybe I’ll still have yesterday’s tips.

  When he kisses me on the steps, I’ll know that’s my thirty-four dollars bulging in his pocket. I’ll know I won’t see him again.

  He never takes the keys to my car. It’s old, too easily trapped.

  But tonight I have no lover. Tonight I danced in Paradise with a black-haired man. I clutched his coarse braid. All these years and I still wanted it. He pulled me close so I could feel the knife in his pocket. He said, Remember, I have this.

  I don’t know if he said the words out loud or if they were in my head.

  When I closed my eyes I thought he could be that boy, the one who blew himself into the sky, whose body fell down in pieces thin and white as ash and bread, the one who rose up whole and dripping, who slipped his tongue in my mouth, his hands down my pants.

  He could have been that boy grown to a man.

  But when I opened my eyes I thought, No, that boy is dead.

  Later we were laughing, licking salt, shooting tequila. We kissed, our mouths sour with lime. He said we could go out back. He said if I had a dollar he’d pay the man. I gave him five, and he said we could stay the week for that. I kissed him one more time, light and quick. I said I had to use the ladies’ room.

  Lady? he said, and he laughed.

  I decided then. He was that boy, just like him. I said, Sit tight, baby, I’ll be right back. He put his hand on my hip. Don’t make me wait, he said.

  I stepped outside, took my car, drove fast.

  Don’t get me wrong.

  I’m not too good for Niles Yellow Dog or any man. I’m not too clean to spend the night at that hotel. It wouldn’t be the first time I passed out on a back seat somewhere, hot and drunk under someone’s shadow, wrapped tight in a man’s brown skin.

  But tonight I couldn’t do it. Tonight I came here, to my father’s house, instead. Tonight I watch him.

  He’s stopped moving now. He’s in the chair. There’s one light on, above his head. I can’t help myself: I drink the whiskey I keep stashed. It stings my lips and throat, burns inside my chest. But even this can’t last.

  I don’t believe in forgiveness for some crimes. I don’t believe confessions to God can save the soul or raise the dead. Some bodies are never whole again.

  I cannot open the veins of my father’s heart.

  I cannot heal his lungs or mend his bones.

  Tonight I believe only this: we should have gone back. We should have crawled through the grass until we found that man.

  If Vincent Blew had one more breath, I should have lain down beside him — so he wouldn’t be cold, so he wouldn’t be scared.

  If Vincent Blew was dead, we should have dug the hard ground with our bare hands. I should have become the dirt if he asked. Then my father could have walked away, free of my burden, carrying only his own heart and the memory of our bones, a small bag of sticks light enough to lift with one hand.

  LITTLE WHITE SISTER

  MAMA WARNED ME, stay away from white girls. Once I didn’t. So, thirty years too late, I’m minding my mama. That’s how it happened.

  I saw her. Flurries that night and she’s running, barelegged, wearing almost nothing at all, and the snow’s rising up in funnels, like ghosts, spinning across the street till they whip themselves against the bricks, and I’m thinking, Crazy white girl don’t know enough to come in from the cold.

  Crackhead most likely, not feeling the wind. I’d seen the abandoned car at the end of the block, ten days now, shooting gallery on wheels, going nowhere. One of them, I told myself, pissed at her boyfriend or so high she thinks her skin is burning off her. Most times crackheads don’t know where they are. Like last week. Girl comes pounding on my door. White girl. Could’ve been the same one. Says she’s looking for Lenny. Says she was here with him last night. And I say, Lenny ain’t here, and she says, Let me in. I don’t like arguing with a white girl in my hallway, so I let her in. I say, Look around. She says, Shit — this isn’t even the right place. She says, What’re you tryin’ to pull here, buddy? And I back away, I say, Get out of here. I say, I don’t want no trouble, and she says, Damn straight you don’t want no trouble. Then she’s gone but I’m thinking, You can be in it that fast and it’s nothing you did, it’s just something that happens.

  See, I’ve already done my time. Walpole, nine years. And I’m not saying Rita’s the only reason I went down, but I’m telling you, the time wouldn’t have been so hard if not for the white girl.

  Cold turkey in a cage and I know Rita’s in a clinic, sipping methadone and orange juice. I’m on the floor, my whole body twisted, trying to strangle itself — bowels wrung like rags, squeezed dry, ribs clamped down on lungs so I can’t breathe, my heart a fist, beating itself. And I think I’m screaming; I must be screaming, and my skin’s on fire, but nobody comes, and nobody brings water, and I want to be dead and out of my skin.

  Then I’m cold, shaking so hard I think my bones will break, and that’s when the rabbitman slips in between the bars. The rabbitman says, Once an axe flew off its handle, split an overseer’s skull, cleaved it clean, and I saw how easily the body opens, how gladly gives itself up; I saw how the coil of a man’s brains spills from his head — even as his mouth opens, even as he tries to speak. Then I saw a blue shadow of a man — people say he ran so fast he ran out of his own skin and they never found him, the rabbitman, but I tell you, they took my skin and I was still alive.
Then the rabbitman whispered, I got news for you, little brother. I been talkin’ to the man and he told me, it ain’t time yet for this nigger to die.

  So no, I don’t go chasing that girl in the street. I know she’ll be cold fast, but I think, Not my business — let one of her friends find her.

  See, since Rita, I don’t have much sympathy for white girls. And I’m remembering what my mama told me, and I’m remembering the picture of that boy they pulled out of the Tallahatchie, sweet smiling boy like I was then, fourteen years old and a white girl’s picture in his wallet, so he don’t think nothing of being friendly with a white woman in a store. Then the other picture — skull crushed, eye gouged out, only the ring on his finger to tell his mama who he was, everything else that was his boy’s life gone: cocky grin, sleepy eyes, felt hat, his skinny-hipped way of walking, all that gone, dragged to the bottom of the river by a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. Mama said she wasn’t trying to turn me mean but she wanted me to see — for my own good, because she loved me, which is why she did everything, because she’d die if anything happened to me — and I thought even then something was bound to happen sooner or later, the fact of living in my black skin a crime I couldn’t possibly escape. I only had to look once for one second to carry him around with me the rest of my life, like a photograph in my back pocket that didn’t crack or fade, that just got sharper instead, clear as glass and just as dangerous till I pulled it out one day and realized I’d been staring at myself all those years.

  I thought about that boy when I met Rita. He breathed on my neck and I laughed to make him stop. I didn’t go after her. It was nothing like that. It was just something that happened, like the white girl pounding at my door — I was watching it, then I was in it.

  We were at Wally’s, me and Leo Stokes, listening to the music, jazz — we liked the music. Mostly I’m listening to the drummer, thinking he don’t got it right. He thinks he’s too important. He don’t know the drums are supposed to be the sound underneath the sound. That’s why I’m good, that’s why I want to play — I got a gift. I hear a sound below horn and piano, the one they need, like I did back in Virginia living in one room — Mama and Daddy, Bernice and Leroy and me, and there were lots of sounds all the time, but I’m always listening for the one sound, like at night when Mama and Daddy are fighting and her voice keeps climbing higher and higher like it’s gonna break, and his is low and hard and slow, and then they’re tangled together and the words don’t make sense, but I’m not scared, no matter how bad it gets, because I’m listening. I hear a whippoorwill or grasshoppers, the wings of cicadas in July, a frenzy of wings rubbing, trying to wear themselves down, and I know what they want — I know what we all want — and it’s like that sound is holding everything else together, so even if Mama starts crying, and even if Daddy leaves and don’t come back till afternoon the next day, and even if they stop arguing and the other sounds start, even if Daddy has to put his hand over Mama’s mouth and say, Hush now, the children, even if they get so quiet I can’t hear their breathing, I know everything’s okay and I’m safe, because the cicadas are out there, and they’ve been there all along, even when I didn’t know I was hearing them — that one sound’s been steady, that one sound’s been holding everything tight. So I’m listening to the music, thinking, This drummer don’t know his place. He thinks he’s got to get on top of things. And I hear Leo say, Luck or trouble, little brother, heading this way, and then she’s there, standing too close, standing above me. She’s saying, Spare a cigarette? She’s whispering, Got a light? And then she’s sitting down with us and she’s got her hand on my hand while I light her cigarette and I’m thinking she’s pretty — in a way, in this light — and she’s older, so I think she knows things — and I ask myself what’s the harm of letting her sit here, and that’s when I laugh to make the boy’s breath and my mama’s voice go away.