“Lawrence? Fights?”
A pause as Earnest folded his second sandwich in half and took it in with two bites. I went to make another.
“Exactly. Not an imposing physical specimen, is he? That was the problem. His build, the fact he’d never seen combat. That meant he was queer, which meant he took a lot of shit off the other guys, which meant he took offense and then needed to be rescued. I looked out for him.”
“You’d think the other guys on the base would’ve gotten the message. After you stepped in a couple of times.” I could picture Earnest piling into a group of men and scattering them like bowling pins.
“Oh, they did. It wasn’t a problem after a while. They were all good guys, really, just needed a broader perspective.”
I smiled inwardly at that. We ate. Earnest checked his watch, I checked mine. Again I waited him out.
“His son,” Earnest said. “For Navajos, an uncle is the same as a father. When Earnie was born, Larry asked me to be his uncle and I said yes. In their tradition, that’s a great honor and a serious responsibility. Kid and I got to be pretty close after I’d visited a couple of times. Last time was back when he was maybe fourteen. He was having a tough time and badly needed an uncle-type at that juncture. We’ve always hit it off. Smart, sweet kid. Like his father.”
I got up to clear our dishes.
“Some of those modern American problems Larry mentioned—meth and oxy have come in, it’s not just booze anymore. There are Navajo and Mexican gangs making it and selling it and killing each other over it. My godson-slash-nephew has a problem with drugs and with the Navajo police. Arizona State Police, too, but the Navajos are touchy about jurisdiction, they’ve got a lot of sovereign rights, and they won’t extradite him to the US. So for now Earnie’s still on the rez, but he’s not doing well. Larry wouldn’t like me to tell anyone more than that. He asked me to help out.”
“What—you’d go out there?”
“Got to.” Earnest stared at the floor. “There are two other uncles, but one of them was the guy who sold the kid drugs in the first place, started him off. The other is the opposite, so pissed off and ashamed that he refuses to help. Larry wouldn’t ask me if it wasn’t urgent, if he had other choices.”
“What will you do? That his father can’t?”
“I don’t know yet. Sometimes being the father makes it harder, though. Sometimes a young guy needs an outside voice he trusts, somebody without all the knots and baggage. Apparently I was of some help to the kid last time.”
I nodded. Selfishly, I was thinking not about Earnie or Larry but about the farm, in winter, without Earnest. “When was that?”
“Ten years ago.” He rubbed his forehead as if working out tension there. I could tell he was already thinking ahead to his trip west. “When I went out for Larry’s wife’s funeral.”
I took that in, and we sat there, saying nothing, for a moment.
“You have my cell number, right?” he asked. He knew I did. I took it as an invitation and felt a little better.
“I think I might have it around here somewhere,” I told him.
Chapter 44
Earnest’s departure, after only two weeks at home, began what would be a lonely and difficult winter at the farm. Part of it was the absence of Diz, of course—her continuous activity had made the commotion of at least two people. But Will was also gone a lot on an assignment that took him to Massachusetts for many days in a row; Erik was off seeking love somewhere within a radius of fifty or who knew how many miles and often coming home only once a week, if that. When he did, he seemed in good spirits but revealed nothing of his time away from the farm, not even in contented grins of conquest or pouts of frustration. I didn’t grill him, figuring he’d tell me what I needed to know when I needed to know it.
The hardest part was a second long and unexpected stretch without Earnest, in January. He had barely gotten back from Arizona when his sister in Milwaukee called with another urgent errand for him. She had to move out of her duplex because of a rent increase, and the guy she’d married had become nowhere to be found for the past year or so. Two kids, working full time, she needed help. Earnest drove out in his pickup to move her belongings, do some repairs on the new place—“a dump”—and help her get her household set up. We hadn’t even had enough time to catch up on what happened in Arizona with young Earnie and Lawrence, and the troubles of modern America hitting the Navajo Nation.
At intervals, I called Earnest on his cell from Brassard’s landline after dinner, just to check in with him. He always seemed glad to hear from home, but preoccupied and remote. Within a few days of his arrival, he had helped his sister pack up and they’d taken ten trips back and forth in his truck. His next job was to help set up her new place, which would require some rewiring and wall patching that the new landlord wouldn’t have paid for and didn’t need to know about. His niece and nephew were great kids, talkative and helpful, but his sister said their pleasant disposition was an illusion; they had put their stubborn, sullen teenage ways on temporary hold only because he was there. Earnest’s voice seemed too small coming over the wire when one was accustomed to the bigness of him. And our conversations were always too short, Earnest giving indications of wanting to get off long before I’d let him. In that, he was like my father, Matt, Erik, every man
