All My Relations (9 page)

All has converged to form the person beside me. Buoyant with renewed desire, I let her scent merge with the dry heat of rock. She's larger than myth. I could reach over and squeeze her breast, and she'd smile at me.

The washboard road drums steadily. Space opens and closes as canyons engulf us in shadow, recede.

The road is now a streambed, our tires splashing through puddles, grinding over boulders. Vivid greenery and driftwood stacks line the banks, the riparian dankness thickening. A presence in my ears has evolved into continuous booming.

There's the gorge. Blackened, twisted at the base, the wall rises through slates and browns to the red of viscera. At first it's hard to credit this muddy, churning little river with all the special effects. But it's very swift. Tracking its flow past a rock spur spins me dizzily.

Four yellow rafts have beached on the bank, a hub for scurrying
white people, men and women bare to the waist, wiry, sand-caked, with dried-bush hair. Incredibly, I recognize college classmates, a racquetball partner, my insurance agent and her husband; it's a Flagstaff expedition. I introduce Dooley, who nods absently, wandering off among piles of gear and Hefty bags swollen with beer cans.

Making small talk with my topless State Farm rep is a heady experience. The bubbling gin and tonic leaves an herbal wake. Where a channel loop has stalled into a backwater, rafters are skinnydipping. Dooley looks neither left nor right, white vinyl ledges of her shoulders tipping as her high-heeled boots pick deliberately through loose stones. Unbooting, she stands in the shallows, arms straight at her sides, eyes closed. I imagine her striding into the river, body russet like the canyon reflected on the water, a piece of that reflection upright and walking. I anticipate the lull in activity, hush, as we immerse ourselves together.

The beauty of that moment will redeem what has gone on between us.

“Come on.” Beside her, I drop my cutoffs.

Her face gapes. “I share myself only with you.”

“The river will cover us.” My whole self is forced into the narrow crooning of my voice, so convinced I am, the water around us like a skin.

“The tribe strictly prohibits—”

Though I intend the tug on her buckle to coax, the belt jumps free with an audible crack.

Folding her clothing, Dooley wades naked through the eddies, launches herself in a slow stroke. Her face has gone inward, she looks asleep, hair fanning on the murky water, her form undulating beneath the surface. Revolving with the current, she circles the swimmers. I try to intercept her hand, but she springs onto the bank, shimmering, goosefleshed. A group is drip-drying, whipping their hair and stamping their feet. Dooley
accepts a beer! Gesturing airily, she chats, scratches her leg. Her pebbly nipples are stiff. The boatman jokes and she rocks back, laughing, fingertips at her breastbone, then lightly pushes his arm.

“So why didn't you just shake your pussy in his face?” I say. We're jouncing over the streambed, steering wheel fighting my hands. The image of my Dooley—since when did she become my Dooley?—stripped and at ease, body playing to the boatman's voice, reruns and reruns.

“I was clothed,” she says. “In my mind I dressed myself in your beautiful suit.” Her hands grasp my arm. “I was hidden from my neck to my feet.” She knots an imaginary tie. “I was so confident. I stood erect, moved my hands decisively, and I looked everyone in the eye like a white person.”

I have a brainstorm: I will attend the wake and pay my respects to the dead elder. The opportunity for visibility in the community, networking, is not to be missed. And there's spite—the exclusion of Dooley, who I'm sure won't take part in the ritual.

“You don't belong there,” she says. “I don't either. But you don't.”

“So by logic we should go together.”

Dooley shakes her head. Maybe at dawn, she says, for goodbye. That's when the spirit leaves the body.

Night is falling as we reach Alav. I peck Dooley's cheek and go to change.

The gymnasium is a looming old hulk. Inside, light, concentrated on the casket heaped with flowers, dissipates into a gloom of struts and the invisible ceiling. Rows of mourners in straight-backed metal folding chairs recede into darkness. A woman, gray hair wildly flying, rigid arms ending in fists, upbraids the gathering in a raw, tearful singsong.

The principal, balancing a paper plate, is eating solemnly. She
glances up sharply, eyes reddened and blurry. “No briefcase?” she says. “I thought you came to sell her an IRA.” Her head nods toward the bier.

“What's the woman saying?” I ask.

“It's the oldest daughter. ‘You never heard my mother in your hearts when she was alive.'”

The speaker's lamentation cuts the air thrillingly. Flowing, colorful dresses are tacked across the front wall. The one in the center, behind the casket, is most noticeably empty.

“‘She looked at us, the Hualapai, and saw what we have been. Who will see that now?'” the principal translates. Thumbing toward a window in the back wall, the principal says, “Eat.”

The square of light is so radiant I can scarcely discern the kitchen help, whose bustling shapes are shifting densities of brilliance. I'm glimpsing the sphere of the blessed, long-departed ancestors, industrious, bountiful. Hands emerge from the glare, a floating face, offering a flat cake like a thick tortilla, beans.

I've stepped through a slot in the earth, into the underworld. The speaker's keening washes over me, like the river's echoes splintering off the gorge hours ago. Mourning. Suddenly the word catches my chest, fills my throat. It becomes Dooley standing shocked, beltless, in the water. It is our bodies exchanging stiff caresses in a dim motel.

I'm in a town at the edge of the world, whose inhabitants speak another language, trying to sell them devalued paper, which they reject. I'm sneaking handjobs and humiliating the girl who gives them to me—but she disappointed me! she didn't measure up!—but these thoughts are wrong, they are part of my grief.

This is all I know to do. I'm thirty-three and have no memories of anything. When I try to think of home, Flagstaff is no more than those companions of today, magnificently healthy animals scudding across rapids in yellow balloon-boats.

Nothing is the way I want it. I can't imagine how I would
want it. The sobs around me are too powerful to resist. My own throat is jumping. I concentrate on the paper plate of food.

A bald priest, the only other white, leads a women's chorus in a tremulous hymn. Another eulogist takes the floor. As new arrivals cluster, a group rises and, single file, shakes hands across the front row of mourners, then exits. With each departure, singly, in pairs or threes, entire rows, the handshaking is repeated. The openings and closings of doors stir the empty dresses.

The bereaved family, the principal explains. “When you leave, you do the same.”

“But they don't know me from Adam.”

“You don't ignore the family. That's a bad mistake. They've noticed you. You've got yourself in a spot, coming here. Go on over, give them your Midas touch. It'll be interesting to see what happens.”

I'm honored to commiserate with them. As I approach from the aisle, the row of bowed heads is interminable, men, women, elders, children, crew cuts, braids, long bangs. Nearer, the heads are lustrous, redolent of shampooing. Holding out my hand, I see a startled upturned face. The handclasp is inert, one hand laid within the other, without the vigorous pumping I'm used to, strangely intimate. Though a few faces look frankly into mine, most remain lowered. Some hands, then more and more, are reluctant to take mine. By the end, the hands stay in their laps. Flushing, extended palm sweating, I pass blank faces.

Thud of the door behind me, out in the cool air I'm aware something irrevocable has happened. I'm in the car, kicking the gas, headlights cleaning the highway, when it hits me. This gig is over, I'm through.

I must have driven an hour or more when I pull off at a saloon full of Hualapais, whom I avoid, opting for the cowboys at the bar. ESPN is rehashing World Series game #4, the Dodgers going up 3 to 1 over the A's.

A Hualapai approaches, compact, slick-haired, unsteady on his boots. “Father, I need to talk to you,” he says.

He's not focusing, hands outstretched in front of his chest, holding an emptiness the size of a beachball. I give Canseco's slow-motion strikeout my undivided attention.

The man has my forearm.

“Do I look like your father?”

“Don't jack me around, Father. Shit.”

Shaking loose, I vault from the barstool.

“Father, I need to confess,” he says. “I've done something terrible.”

Down the street, the motel bar is bright and empty, upholstered in vinyl pastels, like a mausoleum by Denny's. I drink 'til closing.

Driving to Alav I take it easy. I don't want to hurt myself, I don't want to hurt anyone else. On the creaky porch chair by my motel room is a plate. Unwrapping the tinfoil, I see chocolate chip cookies, with a note, “Sorry I was so flippy today.” I eat every delicious cookie, must contain two packs of chips. I lie down on the bed with those cookies in my stomach, but Dooley is in my head, circling in the Colorado, body glistening as it breaks the surface.

Rapping at Dooley's window, I hear a beeping, tiny, not a burglar alarm. I can't figure it out and almost run, but Dooley's face appears at the glass. In the doorway her flannel nightgown runs to the floor, her head and hands disembodied. TV glow illuminates her mother—World Series highlights at four, five in the morning. Video disturbance leaves the players' limbs suddenly, grotesquely distended, their uniforms' colors detached, smeared above them.

“I was just getting up for Rachel,” Dooley says. Rachel is the dead elder.

Dooley's room is geometrically neat save for the ruffle of turned-down bedsheet. “I didn't think I was going to see you,”
she says, looking away. I guess we talk about the wake—I hear our murmuring. Unlacing the bodice, she draws my face to her breasts, fingers in my hair. My hands at her hips gather folds of nightgown, reeling it in until I touch bare skin. Cupping her buttocks, I kiss her breasts, warm neck. So we can be closer I unfasten my pants, let them fall, prod against her.

She straight-arms me, staggering us both backwards. “No. I can't have sex with you.”

Then I'm lying across her chest, on the bed, hand clamped over her mouth, an irrelevant, intrusive hand, black-haired, knobby bones sticking out at the wrist. My legs sprawl wider, my left hooks her right. I'm trying to align myself over her while she struggles marvelously, legs whipping—the strong, wonderful body that stoops, hoisting block, the muscles bunching and lengthening, a room where decades of children will learn—that same body pitted against fire, feet planted, arm muscles ropy, the hair falling against her blackened cheek.

I have the nightgown around her neck, but there's a strange noise, no, absence of noise. The TV is off. Footsteps clump through the house. I seize the mental picture of a withered, blind old woman lost in calico. But I see an empty dress waving, hear wailing bursts of speech, rags of the Hualapai tongue. It is dawn, when the spirit leaves the body. The dripping, decaying river odor invades the air. Dampness brushes my neck.

A shudder snaps my spine, and I let up. Dooley and I rise to sitting, as if inflated. Footsteps pause at the door. Dooley and her mother exchange words I don't understand. Another door closes.

I look at Dooley in agony. I can't dress quickly enough.

Confirming that the wake fiasco has canceled my presentation, the principal isn't unkind. “By next year we will have many other stupid blunders by white people to talk about, and you can try again. We'll say, ‘Maybe he's the new, improved model now.'”
Her husband, the tribe's hydrologist, who has been in Phoenix testifying before the state Supreme Court, may be a prospect.

I can't see either tossing Dooley's cookie plate in the garbage or leaving it for the motel manager. She's not at the triplex, so I walk my first day's route, encountering her on the exact same ridge, or one identical to it. Braking, she wheels the bike several yards in from the cliff, digging in her feet. Sweat welds my underarms to the suit jacket.

Her entire face contracts into a frown when I offer the plate. “I don't want it. How am I supposed to carry it?”

I lay the plate at her doorstep on my way out of town.

A year later, Alav looks diminished. Where I remember scattered board houses sinking into the hillsides at dusk, while windows of the ridgetop subdivision boiled with reflected suns and shawled old women glided over the land like the shadows of birds, I see a doublewide advertising martial arts videos, burgers, and Dr. Pepper. A pod of satellite dishes is interspersed among the tract homes. Children dash between derelict backyard appliances, their shouts very much of this world.

The scene hasn't changed, of course, but my perceptions, no longer hyperbolic with alcohol.

I quit drinking soon after coming home to Flag. I'd begun seeing a girl, sixteen, very beautiful like Isabella Rossellini in
Blue Velvet
, and an accomplished pianist. But she was erratic returning my calls, and I never knew where I stood.

Failing to connect on a Saturday night, I went to the NAU game with friends. We shared flasks and had drinks after. I found myself outside the girl's house. The porch light was on, the interior dark. I let myself in and padded toward her room, shoes off, the floorboards groaning. I kept seeing a picture of
her: seated at the piano, playing show tunes. The notes sprang from her head as black curls, roping, twining down her white back. Her buttocks rocked. The hair cascaded over her skin.

Her room was empty. I couldn't believe it. The red dial glowed 12:41. She always made her one o'clock curfew.

I went from room to room, the mother, the majestic, big-boned older sister, the little brother, who alone had the girl's black hair and white skin. They were coiled in sleep like Pompeiians. I touched each of their faces.