American Masculine (4 page)

The boy curls inward, continues to lie on the floor for days. The greeting remains the same, the woman leaves him his space. He pictures the round bulb over the general store, pictures himself beneath it in the dirt street where he stands in the deep night and looks up. He beholds the bloom of light as he might a near star, a sun. Then he sees himself above it, behind it, clenching the roof between his knees as he would a circus horse, his chest upraised, his father’s big sledgehammer lifted overhead. He pulls down sky with arms like wedges. He blasts the light to smithereens. He floats in shards of glass and frozen light, soft, and softer, the wind and the powdery glass like dandelion white parachutes adrift through the opening, through the window and down, angled from the hall mirror and pulled inward to the living room, falling soft, clumsily, full-bodied onto the hardwood floor. He has returned to the space he keeps. It is dark. The light’s reflection shines white in the night of the front window, the outline complete, precise. He sleeps. Outside, he hears the loud confidence of the engine, the steel wheels of the cars at high speed along the rails. In the early morning the old woman puts a hand on his shoulder. The touch awakens him. Yes, he thinks, I will leave this place.

The next day he rises, moves south and west to Bozeman. No jobs, but big, he gets work in a feed store. He passes a placement exam and enrolls in the agricultural college in Bozeman. He rides bulls in every rodeo he can find. Nearly every Saturday night he fights in bars. He doesn’t drink. He seeks only the concave feel of facial structure, the slippery skin of cheekbones, the line of a man’s nose, the loose pendulum of the jawbone and the cool sockets of the eyes. He likes these things, the sound they make as they give way, the sound of cartilage and the way the skin slits open before the blood begins, the white-hard glisten of bone, the sound of the face when it breaks. But he hates himself that he likes it.

Still he returns. In the half-dark of the bar in the basement of the Wellington Hotel outside White Sulphur he opens the curve of a man’s head on the corner of a table. A small mob gathers seeking revenge, the man’s brothers, the man’s friends. He throws them back and puts out the teeth from the mouth of one. He breaks the elbow of another. You’ll leave here dead, he says, and the group recedes, the power in him vital and full and he walks from the open door alone into darkness until he sits off distant, wrapping his knees in his arms, weeping.

He seeks to turn himself and he turns. He fights less. He wanders more, dirt streets of rodeo towns when the day is done, the lit roads of Bozeman in the night after his reading. It is the sound of gravel beneath his boots he seeks, a multitude of small stones forming a silver path under the moon and sky, leading nowhere. He graduates college, barely passing, a first in agribusiness, a second in accounting, Depression on, jobs scarce. He builds roads, digs ditches, dams, gets on at Fort Peck, his home a hillside cutout, tarp angled over woodstove, single three-leg stool, small lamp of oil, he smells the earth, he sleeps on dirt. North still but jobless, he waits overnight in a line of one hundred men. The head man sees his size. He gets on as a workman with the railroad. He’ll earn some money, buy himself some land. Perhaps buy back the land they lost. Plant a hedge of wild rose, he thinks, for his mother. He is six feet nine inches tall and weighs over three hundred pounds. He works the Empire Builder, the interstate rail from east to west. He works with muscle and grit. He shovels coal. He keeps his own peace.

Alone in the late push across the borderlands they ride the Hi-Line of Montana and he stops for a moment and rests his hands on the heel of the shovel, rests his chin on his hands. He feels the locomotive spending its light toward the oncoming darkness, toward the tiny crossings with unknown names, the towns of eight or ten people. He feels the wide wind, sees the stars in their opaque immensity. He hears the long-nosed scream of the train, bent in the night, and he pauses and considers how fully the night falls, how easily the light gives way, then he returns to his work.

Late he lies himself down in his sleeping berth. He stinks of smoke and oil, the sweating film of his body envelops him and he falls toward sleep as one who has come from the earth, who has molded it with his hands, who has returned again. In his place in the dark, always he hears his mother. Mind your schooling, she says. It is after dinner. She lays him down. He is a child sleeping, and in the silence between night and dawn, waking him she speaks her elegant words, presses her cheek to his small cheek, whispers, Awake, awake, O Zion, clothe yourself in strength. Put on your garments of splendor. She smooths his eyebrows with a forefinger. You can get up now, she says. She touches his face with her hand.

It is not yet dawn. He lies on his side, sees on the hard shelf before his eyes the ivory hair comb bright as bone. He takes the comb in the curve of his hand. He lies still. He puts the comb to his lips in the transparent light. He breathes his deep and holy breath. He remembers the clean smell of her hair. Along the spine of the comb he moves his index finger, then he eyes his finger for a moment, coal and dirt deep set in the whorls. He draws his hand to his mouth and licks the tip of his finger. The sun has broken the far line of the world. His tongue tastes of light.

He works the train and travels to places he has not yet known, where day is buoyant and darkness gone, and when death comes seeking like the hand of an enemy he gives himself over, for it is death he desires, and death he welcomes, and the spirit of his good body is a vessel borne to the eternal.

HE IS BORN INTO THIS WORLD, he is named. He is made of dirt and fighting and the grace of his mother’s words. He is one. He is caught in the mass of many. The earth bends beneath him and he listens to the whistle of the train, the notes like a voice of reason in the early dark that wakens him and returns him, takes him weary back to the loaded pull of the cars, the sound of the push and the steel of the tracks.

He rises. He begins again.

The older men on the line call him Middie because they’ve heard talk of him breaking the back of a bull that wouldn’t carry his weight. It was at a rodeo he entered when he was nineteen, up in Glendive. The bull was old and skinny, put in by a local farmer as a joke. The bull didn’t show enough verve, so the boy bucked the animal himself.

Bent its middle like a bow, the vet said. Sprung its spine.

The bull had to be put down. The boy had both hated and delighted in this, delighted in undoing the farmer’s intention, hated that the animal was hard done by. The railroaders laugh their heads off and Middie has to listen to them nearly every stop. They sit behind their counters at each station chewing the fat with Prifflach the conductor as they tell and retell what they’ve heard. Middie doesn’t like them. When they speak they look through him, just as Prifflach does. He is nothing to them. He lets them think they own him. He has a job, he bides his time. The railroad furthers the chasm between father and mother. Something lower down is revealed, something more sedentary and rooted even than the earth that had opened and closed, closing over him the darker image of his father alongside the subtle light of his mother, the stiff shock of his father’s hair under snow, the gray, grainy look of his mother’s teeth long after the last exhalation, after he’d found her in her bed.

Riding the Hi-Line he is mostly unseen by the passengers as he hauls freight and works coal. But a change in duty comes, a change he doesn’t welcome. He’ll provide muscle for the boss-man, the conductor, Ed Prifflach. Three times tossing drunks to local sheriffs at the next stop, twice tracking rich old lady no-shows still wandering after the all aboard. Then the real trouble begins. Just past Wolf Point, when the first theft is discovered, Middie is put in charge of public calm. He keeps to the plan and follows Prifflach’s words though it is distasteful to him, though he begins to feel in the eyes of others he is becoming the conductor’s efficacy, an outline of Prifflach’s power, a bigger, more mobile expression.

Things aren’t what they seem, Middie thinks. Danger, for reasons a man doesn’t comprehend. On his first trip east a workman at the roundhouse in St. Paul threw himself between the cars of an outgoing train. When Middie got word he went to see. The man was severed in two at the chest. Middie isn’t afraid to die, and when he dies he wants it to be hard and without any hope of return, as physical as rock so he can feel the skin give, the bones in the cavernous weight of his body broken, and blood like a river moving from the center of him, pooling out and away and down into the earth, to the soil that receives him and sets him free.

In the first compartment Prifflach leans toward him, nonchalant in body in order to avoid alarm even as he yells at him to surmount the noise. First seat, worst position, thinks Middie, while Prifflach sets the course with regard to the thief. Get some leads, he says. Prifflach’s face is wolflike, a man with large buttocks, hairy arms and hands. Middie dislikes him, his sunken eyes, the haughty tenor of his voice. Happening nearly every stop now, Prifflach says. Bad for business. Under a long, narrow nose his mouth tightens. The line ain’t gonna like it, guaranteed. Give me the tally.

Five people, says Middie.

Tally his take, says Prifflach.

Middie uses a small piece of paper, a gnawed pencil. Near four hundred dollars, he says, four hundred ten to be precise. His face feels colorless, his body breathes in and out.

Get going, Middie, Prifflach says.

Middie stares at the double doors with their elongated rectangular glass, two top squares open for the heat. Prifflach said he’d picked him because Middie had thighs like cottonwoods and thick arms.

Look alive, Middie.

He hears the words, notes Prifflach’s face. Wet lines in a wax head. Then he looks at the people.

A weight of soot covers everyone. Their eyes are swollen and bloodshot. They have stiff red necks. On their laps they hold children and bags, gripping them as if to ward off death. Middie peers at the faces, and farther back, through more doors at the end of the car, more elongated squares of glass into the second car where expressions breathe the same contempt, the shadow of a shadow, the same self-preservation, the same undignified desire. They are on the upswing through great carved mountains and though Middie has worked the round trip St. Paul to Spokane five times, he still feels unlanded here, awkward under the long slow ascent of the train, the sheer drop of landscape, of trees and earth, and way down, the thin, flat line of the river.

Side windows remain mostly shut, frozen in place by the interlock of the moisture inside and the frigid temperature of early winter outside. The air in the compartments, especially those closest to the heat of the locomotive, is heavy, thick to the lungs, and lined with body odor.

Middie has succeeded, through a forceful combination of the billy club Prifflach issued him and a jackknife he carries, in slightly opening the casement adjoining his seat. Air slides through the sliver of space he’s created and Middie can feel it, even if the chug of the train taints it all, he feels the clean blade of pine, the rich taste of high mountains, the snicker of winter, windy and subliminal. He feels Bearhat Mountain and Gunsight out there, the draw of Going to the Sun Road lining the opposite side of the valley, spare of people now, the park locked in the grip of September, closed to visitors but for the oil and punch of the train, and the Blackfeet nation in the expanse below the great rocks.

Looking out he feels the calling an eagle might feel in the drafts over the backbone of the continent, that something of light and stone and water, perhaps fire, has created him and breathed life through the opening of his lips, and there is a violence in that, he thinks, and a tenderness, and he sees as if with the eyes of a child the wings of the eagle thrown wide over the body of the beloved, the scream of the bird in the highborne wind.

YET A DARK PALL covers Middie’s eyes; he stares at everyone suspiciously. When Prifflach rises, Middie follows. They walk a few steps and sit down again in another couplet of chairs, aimed back down the corridor, to the next car, and the next. People are seen in a long line, from compartment to compartment, bumped by the small clicks and turns of the train, jilted forward, hitched to the side, bumped back. The people say nothing. They clutch their bags.

The scenario sickens him. Too many people. Too public. If he was alone, or in the dark of barrooms, he’d feel clear, free to do as he wished, but here the fray of his mind annoys him. He brushes the tips of his fingers over his left shirt pocket, the cloth there housing his mother’s comb, he feels the form of it, the tines like a small alien hand. He’s already checked them all three times by order of Prifflach. Once each after the last three stops: Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta. The first time, he apologized, comforting an older woman on her way to see her son in Spokane. Prifflach had sent a wire out at Glasgow, inquiring what to do. The second check more of the same, this time soothing the worry of a young woman off to the state agricultural school in Pullman. Prifflach called it coincidence—two different burglars, two different towns, a little over three hundred dollars missing. But after the third stop, at Malta, when an elderly man was found dead, his head askew, a small well of blood in his right ear, the rumors poisoned every compartment.

He had money, said the help in the dining car. Paid for his meals in crisp new bills. But when Middie checked the body, Prifflach looking over his shoulder, there was nothing, no money, not even any silver. Middie felt the minds of the people beginning to hum and move and he sensed the interior of Prifflach, angry as if cornered, pushing him to take action. Middie hated it, but the line chose him, and he was big.

On the first check no one resisted; everyone simply wanted the thief caught. Even the second check people remained polite, just grimaced some while Middie displaced their bags and Prifflach went through them. Middie had to pat the people down, search their coats, their clothing, have them empty each of their pockets. It took far longer than he wished, but mostly the people smiled and tried to be helpful. On the third round the death had changed things. The women whispered and shrank back from him. The body itself, alone in a sleeping car until the next stop, was like an imprint of the predator among them. Middie felt the tension of it, the people’s thoughts in fearful accord, like a dark vein of cloud swept into the bank of mountains, collecting, preparing.