American Masculine (3 page)

At night in his bed he fell asleep and dreamed, and hoped he wouldn’t wake.

HE WOKE in daylight to the sound of a phone ringing, a slight sound he hardly heard from the other room, and he rose and walked down the hall, seven years sober, seven single. On the phone, quiet, came Sadie’s voice. We borrow dignity, Benjamin thought, or we borrow disgrace. She was calling from a phone booth on the corner of First and North Thirtieth down by Montana Avenue. He made himself ready. He wore his best shirt.

They hadn’t spoken since she left. He didn’t know where she’d gone.

He drove to find her and they went together and sat in a booth at Frank’s Diner near the river and she told him she’d moved back with her mother in Minnesota, said she’d been sober three years, seven months, seven days. Her work as a dental hygienist had been consistent and good. She didn’t contact him because she didn’t trust herself.

“And if I said I’m with someone else?” he said.

His eyes burned into her. She looked to the window. “I’d be happy for you,” she said. “And sad for me.” She turned to him again. She didn’t look away.

Her sincerity broke him. His voice failed. She stared at him.

“I’m not with someone else,” he said.

IN MONTANA on the high steppe below the great mountains the birds called raptors fly long and far, and with their translucent predatory eyes they see for miles. The Blackfeet called it the backbone of the world. Once he watched two golden eagles sweeping from the pinnacled heights, the great stone towers. He was three hours from Billings, west past Bozeman. The day was crisp, the sky free of clouds, the sun solitary and white at the zenith. Hunting whitetail he sat on his heels, his rifle slung across his back as he glassed the edge of coulees and the brush that lined the fields. He used the binoculars with focused precision, looking for the crowns of bucks that would be lying down, hiding. But it was up high to his right, along the granite ridge of the nearest mountain, where he’d seen movement.

He recognized the birds and set the glasses on them and saw distinctly their upward arc far above the ridgeline. He followed them as they reached an impossibly high apex where they turned and drew near each other and with a quick strike locked talons and fell. The mystery, he thought, simple as that, the bright majesty of all things. They gripped one another and whirled downward, cumbersome and powerful and elegant. He followed them all the way down and at last the ground came near and they broke and seemed suddenly to open themselves and catch the wind again and lift. Their wings cleaved the air as they climbed steadily until at last they opened wide and caught the warm thermals that sent them with great speed arcing above the mountain. There they dipped for a moment, then rose again on vigorous wingbeats all the way to the top of the sky where they met one another and held each other fiercely and started all over, falling and falling.

—for Charlie Calf Robe, Honey Davis, and James Welch

THE BOY five years old and big, bull child his father calls him, and bulls he rides, starting at six on the gray old man his father owns, then at nine years and ten in the open fields of neighboring ranches. He enters his first real rodeo at thirteen in Glasgow and on from there, three broken fingers, a broken ankle, broken clavicle, and a cracked wrist bone. Otherwise unharmed, he knows the taste of blood, fights men twice his age while going to bars with his father. When he loses, his father grows quiet, cusses him when they get home, beats him. When he wins, his father praises him.

Work, his father says, because you ain’t getting nothing. People are takers. As well shoot you as look at you.

At school he has high marks. He desires to please his mother.

Home, he smells the gun cleaning, the oil, the parts in neat rows on the kitchen table. The table is long and rectangular, of rough-hewn wood she drapes in white cloth. He sees the elongated pipe cleaner, the blackened rags, the sheen of rifle barrel, the worn wood of stock. He hears the word
Winchester
and the way his father speaks it, feels his father’s look downturned, his father’s eyes shadowed, submerged in the bones, the flesh of the face. The family inhabits a one-room ranch house, mother, father, son. There is a plankwood floor, an eating space, a bed space, cook stove. A small slant-roofed barn stands east of the house where the livestock gather in the cold. Mother is in bed saying, Don’t make a mess. The boy’s father, meticulous at the table, says, Quiet woman. Outside, the flat of the high plains arcs toward Canada. To the south the wild wind blows snow from here to a haze at the earth’s end. A rim of sun, westerly, is red as blood.

The boy’s mother reads aloud by lamplight. Looking up, into his eyes, Mind your schooling, she says. She touches his face. The words she reads go out far, they encompass the world, and in the evening quiet the boy and his father curl at her feet on the bed listening. Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, she reads, and before you were born I set you apart.

In town the boy witnesses a drunken Indian pulled from his horse by a group of four men. Hard rain falling, the boy standing on the boardwalk staring out. The man has wandered from the Sioux reservation, Assiniboine, day ride toting liquor, empty, seeking more. They throw his body to the ground, press down his head. Their hands are knotted in his hair and into the wet earth they push his face until it’s gone. They throw loud words from white-red mouths while the Indian’s body lurches and moves beneath them. The man’s lathered voice seeks life and they laugh and champion each other before they rise and spit and walk away. The Indian turns his head to the side and breathes. The boy waits. He lifts the man, positions him on his horse. The boy slaps the round flank and horse and rider continue on. The boy watches, cleans his hands on his pants and when he turns he is violently struck down in the street.

His father stands over him and holds the shovel, the long handle he put to the boy’s head, the father’s countenance as misshapen as the mud that holds the boy, the boy’s blood. Sir? The boy says. You helped the Indian, his father says, and swings the handle again in a fine circular motion that opens a straight clean gash above the boy’s cheekbone. The boy lowers his head. He touches the wound, dirtying it, feeling it fill and flow. His eyes are down. He keeps silent. Next time finish it, his father says. The father leaves him lie. The boy follows him home. Voiceless, they work the land, the boy in his father’s shadow from the dawn, walking. The sound of his mother is what he carries when he goes.

Sixteen years old, the boy walks the fenceline in a whiteout. He is six foot seven inches tall. He weighs two hundred and fifty pounds. Along a slight game trail on the north fence he is two hours from the house at thirty below zero. He wonders about his father, gone three days. His father had come back from town with a flat look on his face. He’d sat on the bed and wouldn’t eat. At dark he’d made a simple pronouncement. Getting food, he said, then gripped the rifle, opened the door, and strode outside long legged against the bolt of wind and snow. Gone.

Walking, the boy figures what he’s figured before and this time the reckoning is true. He sees the black barrel of the rifle angled on the second line of barbed wire, snow a thin mantle on the barrel’s eastward lie. He sees beneath it the body-shaped mound, brushes the snow away with a hand, finds the frozen head of his father, the open eyes dull as gray stones. A small hole under the chin is burnt around the edges, and at the back of his father’s head, fist-sized, the boy finds the exit wound.

When the boy pulls the gun from his father’s hand two of the fingers snap away and land in the snow. The boy opens his father’s coat, puts the fingers in his father’s front shirt pocket. He shoulders his father, carries the gun, takes his father home. The boy’s face is a tangle of deep-set lines. Where he walks, the land runs to the end of the eye and meets a sky pale as bone.

They lay him on the floor under the kitchen table. At the gray opening of dawn the boy positions old tires off behind the house, soaks them in gasoline and lights them, oily-red pyres and slanted smoke columns stark in the winter quiet. The ground thaws as the boy waits. He spends morning to evening, using his father’s pickax, then the shovel, and still they bury the body shallow. He pushes the earth in over his father, malformed rock fused with ice and soil, and when he’s done the boy pounds the surface with the flat back of the shovel, loud bangs that sound blunt and hard in the cold. The snow is light now, driven by wind on a slant from the north. His mom forms a crude cross of root wood from the cellar and the boy manipulates the rock, positioning the cross at the head of the grave. The boy removes his broken felt cowboy hat, his gloves. His mom reaches, holds the boy’s hand. Their faces turn raw in the cold. Dead now, she says. Your father saw the world darkly, and people darker still. Find the good, boy. She squeezes the boy’s hand, Dust to dust. May the Good Lord make the crooked paths straight, the mountains to be laid low, the valleys to rise, and may the Lord do with the dead as He wills.

Already inside the boy a will is growing, he feels it, abstruse, sullen, a chimera of two persons, the man of violence at odds with the angel of peace. Find the good, the boy thinks.

The next day, sheriff and banker come and say I’m sorry and the four ride in the cab of the Studebaker back to town. Papers and words, the ranch is taken, some little money granted and the two move thirty miles to Sage, farther yet toward the northeast edge of Montana, the town joined to the straight rail track that runs the Hi-Line. Small town, Sage. Post office, two bars, general store. They room with an old woman near dead in a house with floors that shine of maple, neat-lined hardwood in every room.

At night the boy hears a howling wind that blends to the whistle of the long train, the ground rumble of the tracks, the walls like a person afraid, shaking, the bed moving, the bones in him jarred, and listening he is drifting, asleep, lost on a flatboard bunk near the ceiling in a dark compartment, carried far into forested lands. Within the year, the boy’s mom dies. In the morning under cover of cotton sheet and colored quilt he finds her quiet and still. He lays himself down next to her, holds her frail body in his arms and shakes silently as he weeps. In the end he stands and leans over her and kisses her forehead. In her hair, the small ivory comb given by the boy’s father nearly two decades before. The boy places the comb in his breast pocket. In her hand he finds a page torn from scripture, Isaiah in her fingers of bone, the hollow of her hand, the place that was home to the shape of his face. He lifts the page, finds her weary underline,
Arise, shine, for your light has come. And the glory of the Lord has arisen upon you. Behold, darkness covers the earth, and deep darkness its people, but the glory of the Lord has arisen upon you.

The boy waits. He stays where he is, not knowing. Behind the Mint Bar past midnight, he beats a man fresh from the rail line until the man barely breathes. When it started the man had cussed the boy and called him outside. The boy followed, not caring. The man’s face was clean, white as an eggshell, but the boy made it purple, a dark oblong bruise engorged above the man’s neckline. She has been dead one month now.

The boy lies on the hardwood floor at the house in Sage watching the elderly landlady as she enters the front door. She is methodical as she works the lock with gnarled fingers. Welcome, ma’am, he mouths the words. Same to you boy, she answers. Same hour each day she returns from the post office. It is dusk. The boy sees the woman’s face, the boned-out look she wears. They have their greeting, she passes into the kitchen, he notices the light, a white form reflected left-center in the front window of the old woman’s house. The house faces away from the town’s main street. The thing is a quirk, he thinks, a miracle of fluked architecture that pulls the light more than one hundred feet from across the alley and down the street, from the pointed apex of the general store and its hollow globe-shaped street lamp beneath which the night people ebb and flow on the boardwalk. The light comes through the aperture of a window at the top of the back stairs. From there it hits a narrow gold-framed mirror in the hallway and sends its thin icon into the wide living room. The light is morphed as it sits on the front glass, an odd-shaped sphere almost translucent at dusk, then bright white, bony as a death’s head by the time of darkness. The boy hears the woman on the stairs, her languid gate, the creaking ascent to her room. As her body passes, the light disappears then returns. She is never in the front room at night and the boy rarely looks at her during the day, done as he is over his mother, over the loss of all things.

A man will be physical, he thinks, forsake things he should never have forsaken, his kin, himself, the ground that gave him life. Death will be the arms to hold him, the final word to give him rest.