A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (10 page)

As my father was trying to drive with one hand, trying to sneak quick views of the road ahead, I told him, in the only way that I could—with grunts and aaahs and jibberish—that I loved him, whatever he was going to be.

In the months and years that followed after we safely arrived home, Telsa was exploded, Priscilla, Diablo, and Hood. There were others we didn't learn the names of. They drifted overhead, engraving a darkness in the sky, but they only appeared to pass and move into the shimmering distance.

C
lose to midnight, they finally broke the lock and convinced her to get out of the bathtub, that she needed to see a doctor. She was Navajo and had been sitting in the steaming water for hours. She'd miscarried and all that stuff was floating in the water, too. After that, nobody in the dorm would use the bathtub. It was like voodoo or filth, something that could be picked up, or simply something that reminded us how death bloomed from our own clear bodies, too.

They lifted her up gently, but even so, I could tell it hurt. Her face was pinched in pain or weariness. She was smooth and heavy, and her wet hair stuck lifelessly to her back. Someone had brought a robe for her. It was winter and the cold of the dorm penetrated with a needle-like precision. You wouldn't believe how white a Navajo can turn, standing in that cold, bleeding.

They led her down the hallway, and I guess to Gloria's car, then on to the hospital. I really didn't know this girl, but when she stepped
from the tub she did a curious thing that has made me think of her again and again. She closed her eyes, deliberately closed her eyes. She kept them closed down the hallway and perhaps even in Gloria's 72 Valiant as it reduced Flagstaff Highway to nothing but a cold, black line. I don't know why she closed her eyes and kept them closed, Gloria urging her to take step after step. It was like the blind leading the blind: the Navajo girl who had just miscarried and Gloria, our dorm manager, lonely and confused.

“This is what happens when you're fifty, sweeties,” and Gloria would pull the elastic belt on her robe and let it snap back. We were never quite sure what this demonstration was supposed to divulge, but she would follow it up by pointing at her face and remarking on the disgusting enlargement of her pores. “Don't let anyone kid you,” she'd tell us. “Life only gets uglier, meaner.” She lived at the far end of the hall in a special apartment. She had a patchwork rug she had made herself, and a small TV with large rabbit ears. She continually complained about the reception, and raised hell if the stairwells weren't kept clean. Though she often mixed up our names and got the dates for our fire drills confused, Gloria did well that night, letting the Navajo girl lean against her in the darkness cut only by stars and pine tops.

I don't know why I have to see these things: the Navajo in the bathtub, the miserable way we reconcile ourselves to our lives. I was going to take a shower. I had shaved my legs and washed my hair. I could hear them beating on the door nearby, calling for her to come out. The water on my back was hot and furious, yet the commotion called me, too. When they broke the lock and opened the door, the milky steam rolled out upon the cold hall air.

Sometimes it takes years to fully see things. I think back upon this scene and see the small things: the soap, the toenails painted red, Gloria's hands as they attempted to comfort.

We went back to our rooms and talked about it, how they have to stop the bleeding, sometimes with drugs, sometimes surgically. “It's
nature's way,” Dawn Kramer added, though we all ignored her, for what this prima donna from Chicago knew about nature wouldn't have filled a single page. For weeks after, I thought about the Navajo girl and the way she closed her eyes, what she was shutting in or shutting out.

Like I said, none of us ever used that bathtub again, which was an unfortunate thing, for baths are healthy and soothing. They enfold us, they bring light to the mind, and they emulate the water from which life so warily crept millions of years ago.

Gloria returned in her Valiant the next morning, hushing us, telling us to mind our own business. The Navajo girl, she finally said, was fine, though she left school permanently for her home in Window Rock. I've never been there, but I like that name. I like the idea of a window in a rock—an opening in a black, hard space—a sliver's passage into the soul.

F
irst, it is not true that my brother Dixon went crazy in Vietnam—chewed his fingernails completely off and gutted a Huey helicopter in a rage when his R and R was suddenly bagged. Hell, Dixon never was in Vietnam. His three years in the Air Force were mostly spent in Biloxi where he was assigned to the motor pool and stayed long weekends in Gulfport on windy beaches with sand in his eyes and his shoulders constantly sunburned. He's buried now in a small cemetery called Dutchman's Acre, a place so quiet and green that it doesn't rightfully belong to this earth. Yeah, sure, he was big enough to gut a helicopter, but Dixon was slow and calm, and he always respected what wasn't his.

That's why the story about Dixon and Misty Waters doesn't make any sense either, because Misty was somebody else's wife, and Dixon may have liked to tease her—he might have even thought she was pretty—but as he used to say to me, his oldest sister, “It's clear as day on the insurance form. She's somebody else's beneficiary.”

I'll tell you—crudeness does not know when to stop. There are versions of the Dixon-Misty story that put those two in the Texaco and Mobil gas station rest rooms going at it, full tilt, right up on those dirty counters next to where the rusted sinks are always dripping. Never any toilet paper or hand towels in those places. The mirrors cracked and filthy. Mind you—all of this on Misty's half-hour lunches from the bank. If Dixon were alive, he'd die at the thought of himself banging away to the tune of impact wrenches, some big Buick getting its tires rotated nearby.

But it was the dead twin story that brought my mother to her breaking point. She marched into my kitchen one morning not so long ago, and she said that my father was too old, so it was up to me to stop all this horse trash about Dixon. Her hands were shaking and there were big tears in her eyes. My mother is barely five feet tall, Dixon's death has been a real setback for her, and standing there dressed in one of her bright golf outfits—though she's never played a day of golf in her life—she presented a petite but imposing argument.

“Mom,” I told her, sitting at the table, still in my robe, “I love to see you, but I wish you'd call before you drop in.” I was eating a bowl of Cheerios and, like a kid, reading the back of the box, trying to get my energy up. Mornings are hard on me. The good, deep sleep I used to have has become a rare commodity; I toss and turn, drift in and out of a dark fitfulness. I think rather than dream.

“What? You think your seventy-year-old father should go defend Dixon's name? Wake up, Hillary,” she said, her hands on her boxy hips, a pose she assumes for the most serious subjects that intrude on her life. “Being part of a family isn't a free ride, you know. There's responsibility and it's looking you square in the face. I'll admit that Dixon had his hard times and did not always think in a straight line, but what I'm hearing about him is absurd and downright mean. Wherever he is,” she said, looking awkwardly up and then left and right, “he doesn't deserve this.”

For the most part, my family believes in good citizenship, not religion, so it was difficult when Dixon died. We had no place to send him—no beautiful, light-filled landscape to imagine him in. Yet, even without a heaven, we found ourselves still thinking of Dixon as being somewhere, though when we spoke of him we never knew in which direction to refer. We craned our heads upward, or, then embarrassed, we peered far out beyond the freeway to the muted horizon.

I have never liked being trapped in a corner where suddenly all the alternatives are savagely reduced, but that's just where my mom had me. I turned forty-one last December and that's old enough to talk and think for yourself, though age has no meaning when your mother tells you she's hit rock bottom and needs your help. Dixon was her only son, her first and probably last mystery, the one she made cherry pie for, the one who would send her to a chair laughing at his knock-knock jokes or his imitations of the latest dances. Once, demonstrating the moon walk for us, he backed right off the front porch and corkscrewed his elbow hard into the ground. Had to wear a sling for two weeks, and if you asked him about it, Dixon just laughed and said he'd do anything to get a two-week prescription of codeine.

Everything else you've heard about Dixon, all the little pieces of gossip that have floated your way, they hold about as much truth as a wet sock. I know that most nights Gordon Jenner can be found in a local bar yakking away about somebody, and more often than not, it's Dixon. Jenner puts his feet up on the table, and he tries to make a living off my brother—stories of Dixon in camouflage and war paint, of Dixon wrecking cars and just walking away from them, the smoke spiraling up and the gas tanks about to blow. But Jenner has silt for brains. He's lived too long down in Hillam raising those blue-ribbon Charolais and married to a woman who, after ten years in this country, still speaks only Japanese. Oh, I'm not saying it isn't pretty to hear her bent over the flowers in their garden, sing-songing her language
under a blue sky, but what the hell is she saying? She could be complimenting your clothes or telling you to go diddle yourself, and you'd stand there, just like I have plenty of times, with a big dumb well-digger's grin plastered on your face.

Jenner has always played stupid, said he doesn't know what I'm talking about. “Look,” I told him, my hands deep in my pockets, “I'm not accusing anybody, but there are some crazy things being said about Dixon, and I just want them to stop.”

He stood there leaning against his truck, his arms folded across his barrel chest, his tanned face like an old sunbaked apple. “Now what interest would I have in talking about the dead?” he asked me. I didn't have an answer for that because I truthfully don't know what's in Jenner's head, though with a man like him a hatchet and a pair of tweezers would be the easiest way to find out.

Jenner is pigeon-hearted and about a million miles away from knowing Dixon. Even when my brother pinned his last dollar bill to the inside of his flannel shirt and started walking toward Santa Fe, he had fire and smarts, he had years of good looks left in him, and the dashing honesty of a real live prince.

The dead twin story spread in waves through our small Kentucky town, first through the graineries and discount hardware outlets, then through beauty salons and dime stores, and finally settled in the worn linoleumed kitchens that are the heart of this community. It was a lackluster little tale which basically seized on the opportunity to make a monster of the baby Dixon.

“Rolled over and suffocated his own little twin for an extra goddamned bottle of milk. The newspaper sort of covered it up. April 14, 1949, you mark me. They called it a baby sudden death. Huh!” Jenner's stories started going that far back, reaching crazily into the black side of his make-believe.

Lloyd Ebson's kid was tending bar that night at Crazy Eights and he told me just how Jenner leaned back in his chair when the talk lulled, and told that little story, and when his listeners were appropriately quiet and stung, he called over to Ebson's kid to order him up a fried egg sandwich, then dowsed it with ketchup and mustard and Tabasco when it came. It made Ebson's kid half-sick to see fresh eggs treated that way.

Somewhere between Canasta and her volunteer days at the public library, my mother heard all about Dixon and his twin, and, like I said, it hit her hard as concrete. That's when she came asking for my help with those big tears in her eyes, her voice high-pitched and breathy—just on the edge of those old-woman sobs that can wrench your gut and turn your will to toothpaste.

“Hey,” I told her that day as she stood uninvited in my kitchen, “I've talked to Jenner and he just denies everything. What do you want me to do? Get an attorney?”

“You're a smart girl,” she said. “You run a business and manage to take a couple of vacations a year. I know you'll figure something out.”

But it was not that easy. I spent days staking out plans to stop Jenner, then gave them up when they became ridiculous even to me. I wrote three different letters to him, each one becoming surlier, each one falling further away from intelligible correspondence. I didn't send any of them. Late at night, my patience and creativity mostly used up, I slipped into visions of tire slashing and low-grade arson—you know, garbage cans or at most a toolshed. I tried to envision myself holding a gun—small caliber—something sharp and clean and plenty intimidating, but I remembered what my father had told me: “Unless you're willing to fire it, a piece of metal is not very persuasive.”