American Masculine (6 page)

The conductor arrives and Middie exhales and feels his body go slack; he stares outside. The gray-black of the storm leaks moisture on the windows. The moisture gathers and pulls lines sideways along the windows, minuscule lines in narrow groupings of hundreds and wide bars of thousands, rivulets and the brothers of rivulets, and within them the broad hordes of their children, their offspring, all pulled back along the glass to the end of the train, to the end of seeing.

You will have him hand over that money belt directly, says Prifflach, his nose leading, his face pinched, set like clay. Pressure builds in the bodycage of Middie, a pressure that pushes out against his skin. Middie reaches and grabs the accused man’s wrist, gripping the flesh with frozen fingers, red-white fingers latching on.

To Middie’s relief the man responds. With one arm in Middie’s grip, the man uses his free hand to untuck the front of his shirt. He slides the money belt to a point above his waist, and undoes the small metal clasps that hold the belt in place. His fingers so meticulous, thinks Middie, so dexterous and sure. Eyes as clear as the sky before they reached Glacier, cold and steely-black. Middie looks again to the window. His own reflection is not unlike the gray outside, and behind it the unpeopled weight of land, the emptiness. He notes he has left his billy club in the last compartment, on the floor near a seat where he’d checked a man’s ankles, his socks. Middie’s fists feel big, hard as stones. He doesn’t need it, he tells himself.

Give up the belt, Prifflach says, though already the man is pulling the belt free.

He holds it out to the conductor. Nothing out of the ordinary, he says. I’m simply a man carrying my own money. His hair is still bent, his shirt poorly tucked. He does not look away from his accusers.

At once, the fat man and his wife shout something unintelligible.

We’ll see, says the conductor, interpreting their words. We’ll see if it’s his money. At the corners of Prifflach’s mouth the skin twitches. Prifflach takes the money belt and hands it to the slick man. Count it up, he says, watching the Indian’s face.

The slick man thumbs the money once, finding an unfortunate combination of bigger and smaller bills. How much is there? asks the conductor. The slick man counts again, slowly. Five hundred ten dollars, he says. Exactly one hundred more than the amount stolen. Middie knows a desire has gripped them, and that they all, silently, hastily, have calculated the old dead man’s loss at a clean one hundred. Middie has done the same.

I could have told you that, says the accused.

Prifflach tells the man to shut up, then says, A hundred dollars more than the total. He folds the money belt in half, and half again; I’ll take that, he says, placing it in the chest pocket of his coat.

It comes clear to Middie now, the look of the onlookers, the way of their eyes and their bodies, how they’ve all torn loose inside, all come unspun. He remembers what he’d read in a pamphlet at the West Glacier station a month ago. Something of a hidden passage west, close to the headwaters of the Marias, a high mountain pass that according to Indian belief was steeped in the spirit world, inhabited by a dark presence. Decades back, when the line first wanted to chart its track through here, no Indian would take a white man through. Death inhabited the place.

Middie sees the demeanor of the Blackfeet man change. The man’s face loses expression, his body pulls inward. In the space between them Middie senses the man gathering himself. A surge is felt, up through the flesh of the Indian’s forearm. Middie tightens his grip.

The crowd moves. Suspected him back in Glasgow, a stout man pipes up. I should have known, says another, and from the slick man, He ain’t gettin’ outta here. Low again, deep back in the crowd, a voice says, Slit his throat.

The movement begins in words and rustling, then leaps upward like a mighty wave that breaks upon the people and the man all at once. The Blackfeet man jerks free and jumps the chair back next to him, seeking to flank the men and escape from the rear of the compartment. The men scramble after him, Prifflach leading, the others following, all of them livid with hate.

Middie vaults a set of chairs and lands on the Blackfeet man, slamming him bodily against the sidewall of the car. The man rights himself and spits in Middie’s face and Middie, fueled now, lifts him and encircles the Indian’s neck in the crook of his left arm, positioning him. He props him up, left hand on the man’s shoulder as he holds him. Then he levels a blow with the right that bounces the Blackfeet man’s head off the near window, flings his hair like a horsetail, and leaves a grotesque indentation where the cheekbone has caved in. Four other men, along with Middie, jerk the prisoner from the wall, shake him hand over fist to the aisleway. They surround him, and proceed to drag him toward the back of the car. The shoving lurches the Indian forward and makes his neck look thin, snaps his head back, throws his eyes to the ceiling.

What are you doing? he cries out, I’m innocent, and straining from the hands that grasp at his upper body he turns his face to the window, to the gray valley beyond, and says, I have a wife. I have a child.

With shocking swiftness the Indian throws his forearms out and lunges forward with his head in order to strike someone. But now his flailings are as nothing to the weight of the accusers: there are many men now, their arms entangled in his limbs, controlling him easily. They punch him in the back, and in the back of the head. Keep your head down! they say; You’ll lose your teeth in a second. The group is packed in, forming a tight untidy ball in the aisleway and among the spaces between the seats. A thick odor is in the air.

The prisoner’s head is near the floor. Reaching for the Indian’s waist, Middie sees a look of resignation, a look of light among the features of his face. The man stares at Middie and whispers something Middie cannot hear or understand.

Amidst the tumult a smaller voice says, Wait! It comes from behind Middie, up near the front of the car. Turning, looking up and back through the moving heads, back behind the bending, pressing torsos, Middie sees the source of the voice, a small man, adolescent in appearance, thin-boned in a simple two-piece suit. The man has fine, blond hair and oval wire-rimmed glasses.

Wait! the man says, I know him.

A large man at the back of the mob turns to the boyish man and says, You shut up.

The small man’s face goes red, he shrinks back to his seat. Middie sees this and turns back to the mob. The people are grabbing the Blackfeet man’s clothing in their hands and shaking his body like a child’s doll. Men are emerging from their seats, running the aisles like ants, joining the mob. The man’s limbs appear loose in the torque of the crowd. The arms move as if boneless, the elbows seem disconnected from the shoulders.

From his vantage Middie turns and sees the little man with his head down now as the people swirl toward the rear of the car, down to the doors they have already pulled back and the opening tilted like a black mouth from which the wind screams. Middie hears the accused grunting, cursing. The little man rises and walks directly to the rear guard of the mob. Unable to get through he sidesteps the knot of people. He climbs over three or four seats as he repositions women and children. He travels awkwardly but insistent, like a leggy insect, toward the back of the compartment, toward the opening and the landing beyond. He goes unrecognized by all but Middie and when he reaches the far wall of the car, he stops, and stares. The prisoner is held about the neck by the thick hands of Prifflach, clinched about the waist by Middie and on both sides by bold, angry men.

The small man positions himself, mounting the arms of the last two aislechairs so that he stands directly before the mob. He straddles the aisle, the land a blur in the open doorway behind him, around him the live wind a strange unholy combustion. He draws his fists to his sides, billows his chest as he gathers air, and screams, Stop! A wild scream, high and sharp like the bark of a dog.

The little man’s effort creates a brief moment of quiet in which the people stand gaping at him. Seizing this, he strings his words rapidly. I know him. I spoke with him when he got on in Wolf Point. He has a three-year-old daughter. He has a wife. He has a good mother, a father. He will be dropped off at the stop on the far side of Glacier where they are waiting for him. He will return with them by car to the Mission Range.

Shut up, says the fat man.

I won’t, says the small man. He told me precisely.

He lied, says the slick man.

Let me speak, the small man pleads. He touches his hand to his face, a gesture both elegant and tremulous.

We won’t, the mob responds, and in their movement and in the pronounced gather of their voices the prisoner is lifted by the neck and shoved forward toward the door.

Out of the way! someone yells, and Middie watches as the small man takes a blow to the side of the head, a shot of tremendous force that lifts him light as goosedown, unburdened in flight to where his body hits the wall near the floor of the car and he lies crumpled, his face lolling to one side. Thickly now the small man says, He told me precisely. His words are overrun but he continues. He told me precisely, in Wolf Point. Before all of this, he had five hundred ten dollars of earnings. He meant to do what he and his wife dreamed. Middie’s fists are bound up in the clothing of the Blackfeet man, his forearms are bone to bone with the man’s ribs. The little man is speaking, He meant to buy land, off the reservation. The voice seems small, down between the chairs, He meant to build a home.

The opening through which they pass is wide, the small man’s body a bit of detritus they have cast aside, the landing now beneath their feet solid and whole, like a long-awaited rest. Middie hears the velocity of wind and steel as he flows with the crowd to the brink. He feels the rush, like the expectancy of power in a bull’s back when the gate springs wide, like the sound of a man’s jaw when it breaks loose.

Also he feels sorrow; he wants to cry or cry out. He wants to reach for the ivory hair comb but a weight of bodies presses him from behind and his hands are needed to control the captive. He feels the indent of the guardrail firmly on his thigh. He hears the small man’s voice, back behind him. He told me at Wolf Point—precisely five hundred ten dollars. Five hundred ten.

The landing is narrow, the people many, and they are knotted and pushed forward by a score more, angry men running from other cars, clogging the aisle to get to the man. Those at the front grab the railing, the steel overhead bars, they grab each other, the Indian, the enemy. Noise surrounds them, the train’s cry, the wide burn of descent, the people’s yells high and sharp above everything, shrill as if from the mouths of predatory birds. The Indian’s suitcoat and vest are gone. His slim torso looks clean in his worried shirt, a V-shaped torso, trim and strong. In the press of it Middie is hot. Oxlike, he feels the burden of everyone, borne at once in him, and he bends and grabs the man’s leg. Other men do the same, there are plenty of hands now. He wants to hold the man fast but instead the crowd shoves the man aloft. They tip him upside down and clutch his ankles as they remove his shoes. They tear off his shirt, then his ribbed undershirt. They throw the shoes down among the tracks. The clothing they throw out into the wind where it whisks away and falls, rolling and descending like white leaves deep into the fog of the valley.

From here the man is lowered between the cars. He becomes silent. Below the captive, Middie sees the silvery gleam of the tracks, parallel lines in the black blur of the ties, the lines bending almost imperceptibly at times, silver but glinting dull like teeth. With his elbows he tries to hold the people back. He feels the oncoming force of the crowd behind him, the jealousy, the desire. A woman’s voice is heard, a voice he knows but does not recognize. He bows his back and groans, trying to draw the man forth. The words are like a song, simple and beautiful in his mind: Put on your garments of splendor. He smells the oil of the train, the heat, the wet rock of the mountain.

He sets his jaw and strains, he would pull the people and the man and the whole world to the mercy of his will; he gains no ground.

In the gusts of wind, the mob squints their eyes. Leaning forward, their hair is blown back, it swirls some, blows back again. The speed of the train and the noise of the tracks, the scent of high sage and jack pine, the fogged void of gray as wide and deep as an ocean, but foremost the wind, rushes up against the mob creating an almost still-life movement into which they carry the man. Then the wind dies. The river of people flowing from the compartment bottlenecks in the doorway. Bodies from the choked opening to the guardrail twist and writhe and a vast shouting commences. Middie says No! This must stop! He grips the Blackfeet man’s belt with both fists and pulls him upward. His big body is a countermovement against the rise of all around him, but angry yells issue from wide red mouths and the mob grows to an impossible mass that pushes and swells, and breaks free in a sudden gush. Middie finds himself with the Indian airborne, cast into the gulf without foot or handhold, he has lost everything, and falling he sees a shaft of blue high in the gray above him and he is surprised at how light he feels, and how time has slowed to nothing. He reaches back, seeking a purchase he will not find, and in the singular sweep of his arm he takes people unaware—Prifflach, the fat man, his wife, the slick man—they all fly from the edge, effortless in the push of the mob, unstrung bodies and tight faces, over the lip of the guardrail and down between the cars, down to the tracks, the wheels, the black pump of the smoking engine, the yell of the machine.

—for my grandmother, whom we call the Great One