Her serene reserve was gone—a nervous horror welled across her face. The bruises had come out and her eyes were darkly rimmed like a raccoon’s. A sick green pulsed around her temples. Her jaw was indigo. Her eyebrows had always been so expressive of irony and love, but now were held tight by anguish. Two vertical lines, black as if drawn by a marker, creased her forehead. Her fingers plucked at the quilt’s edge. Sour!
They have milk now at Whitey’s gas station. I can bike down there, Mom.
They do? She looked at me as though I’d saved her, like a hero.
I brought her purse. She gave me a five-dollar bill.
Get other things, she said. Food you like. Treats. She stumbled over the words and I realized that she’d probably been given some sort of drug to help her sleep.
Our house was built in the 1940s, a sturdy bungalow-style. The BIA superintendent, a pompous, natty, abnormally short bureaucrat who was profoundly hated, had once lived in it. The house had been sold to the tribe in 1969 and used as office space until it was scheduled to be torn down and replaced by actual offices. My father had bought it and moved it onto the little plot of land near town that had belonged to Geraldine’s late uncle, Shamengwa, a handsome man in an old-fashioned framed picture. My mother missed his music, but his violin was buried with him. Whitey had used the rest of the land that Shamengwa had owned to put up his gas station on the other side of town. Mooshum owned the old allotment about four miles away, where Uncle Whitey lived. Whitey had married a younger woman—a tall, blonde, weather-beaten ex-stripper—who now worked the gas station cash register. Whitey pumped the gas, changed oil, inflated tires, did unreliable repair work. His wife did the books, restocked the shelves of the little store with nuts and chips, and told people why they could or could not charge gas. She had recently bought a large dairy cooler. She kept a smaller cooler filled with bottles of orange and grape Crush. Sonja was her name, and I liked her the way a boy likes his aunt, but I felt differently about her breasts—on them I had a hopeless crush.
I took my bicycle and a backpack. I had a battered black five-speed with trail-bike tires, a water-bottle clip, and a silver scrawl on the crossbar, Storm Ryder. I took the cracked side road, crossed the main highway, circled Whitey’s once, and slid sideways to a halt, hoping that Sonja had her eye on me. But no, she was inside counting Slim Jims. She had a great big flashy radiant white smile. She looked up and turned it on me when I walked in. It was like a sunlamp. Her cotton-candy hair was fluffed up in a swirly yellow crown and a glossy two-foot ponytail hung out of it, down her back. As always, she was dramatically outfitted—today a baby blue running suit with sequin piping, the top three-quarters unzipped. I caught my breath at the sight of her T- shirt, a paler fairy-wing-transparent tissue. She wore white unmarred spongy track shoes and crystals in her ears big as thumbtacks. When she wore blue, as she did quite often, her blue eyes zapped with startling electricity.
Honey, she said, putting down the Slim Jims and taking me in her arms. There was nobody at the pump or in the store at that moment. She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.
I was lucky: I was a boy doted on by women. This was not my doing, and in fact it worried my father. He made valiant attempts to counteract feminine coddling by doing manly things with me—we played catch, threw a football, camped out, fished. Fished often. He taught me to drive the car when I was eight. He was afraid all the doting I experienced might soften me, though he’d been doted on himself, I could see that, and my grandma doted plenty on him (and me) in those years before she died. Still, I’d hit a lull in our family’s reproductive history. My cousins Joseph and Evelina were in college when I was born. Whitey’s sons from his first marriage were grown, and Sonja’s relationship with her daughter, London, was so stormy she said she’d never want another. There were no grandchildren in the family (yet, thank god, said Sonja). As I said, I was born late, into the aging tier of the family, and to parents who would often be mistaken for my grandparents. There was that added weight of being a surprise to my mother and father, and the surging hopes that implied. It was all on me—the bad and the good. But one of the chief goods, one I cherished, was the proximity I was allowed to Sonja’s breasts.
I could press against her breasts for as long as she hugged me. I was careful never to push my luck, though my hands itched. Full, delicate, resolute, and round, Sonja’s were breasts to break your heart over. She carried them high in her pastel scoop-neck T-shirts. Her waist was still trim and her hips flared softly in tight stonewashed jeans. Sonja massaged her skin with baby oil, but all her life she had harshly tanned and her cute Swedish nose was scarred by sunburn. She was a horse lover and she and Whitey kept a mean old paint, a fancy quarter horse/Arabian mix, a roan Appaloosa with one ghost eye named Spook, and a pony. So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse. She and Whitey also had three dogs, all female, ferocious, and named in some way after Janis Joplin.
Our dog had died two months ago and we hadn’t got a new one yet. I opened my backpack and Sonja put in the milk and other things I’d picked out. She pushed back my five dollars and gazed at me from under her delicate, pale-brown, plucked eyebrows. Tears flooded her eyes. Shit, she said. Let me at the guy. I’ll waste him.
I did not know what to say. Sonja’s breasts made most thoughts leave my head.
How’s your mom doing? she said, shaking her head, swiping at her cheeks.
I tried to focus now; my mother was not fine so I could not answer
Not good, I said. Jumpy.
Sonja nodded. We’ll bring Pearl.
Pearl was a rangy long-legged mutt with a bull terrier’s broad head and viselike jaws. She had Doberman markings, a shepherd’s heavy coat, and some wolf in her. Pearl didn’t bark much but when she did she became very worked up. She paced and snapped the air whenever someone violated her invisible territorial boundaries. Pearl was not a companion dog and I wasn’t sure I wanted her, but my father did.
She’s too old to teach to fetch and stuff, I complained to him when he got home that night.
We were sitting downstairs, eating heated-up casserole brought once again by Clemence. My father had made his usual pot of weak coffee and he was drinking it like water. My mother was in the bedroom, not hungry. My father put down his fork. From the way he did it (he was a man who liked his food and to stop eating was usually a relinquishment, though these days he wasn’t eating much), I thought he was angry. But although his gestures of recent were abrupt and he often clenched his fists, he did not raise his voice. He spoke very quietly, reasonably, telling me why we needed Pearl.
Joe, we need a protection dog. There is a man we suspect. But he has cleared out. Which means he could be anywhere. Or, he might not have done it but the real attacker could still be in the area.
I asked what I thought was a police TV question.
What evidence do you have that this one guy did it?
My father considered not answering, I could tell. But he finally did. He had trouble saying some of the words.
The perpetrator or the suspect ... the attacker ... dropped a book of matches. The matches were from the golf course. They give them out at the desk.
So they’re starting with the golfers, I said. This meant the attacker could be Indian or white. That golf course fascinated everyone—it was a kind of fad. Golf was for rich people, supposedly, but here we had a course of scraggly grass and natural water pits. With a special introductory rate. People passed their clubs around and everybody seemed to have tried it—except my dad.
Yes, the golf course.
Why’d he drop the matches?
My father rubbed a hand across his eyes and again had trouble speaking.
He wanted to, tried to, he was having trouble lighting a match.
A book match?
Yes.
Oh. Did he get it lit?
No ... the match was wet.
