In This Light (22 page)

You left that night.
Issaquah, Butte, Aberdeen, Seattle.
You slept in the woods, in a cardboard box, in a barn with a whiteman’s cow, in a bed of leaves under a freeway. You dove in dumpsters for bruised fruit, half-eaten buffalo wings, cold biscuits and gravy. You snatched three perfect blue eggs from the nest of a robin. The birds woke you for a hundred nights, beaks sharp as barbs in your lungs and liver. You stole corn from pigs and a gnawed bone from an old wolfhound. He rose on his crippled hips to tug his chain, too sick and slow to nip you. A goat gave you her milk, and for this offering you praised her.

North of Spokane, you walked up a dirt road to a weather-wracked farmhouse. You meant to ask for work mucking stalls in exchange for one meal. Nobody answered your knock, but you touched the doorknob and it turned. You breathed, and the door opened. The sweet smell of cherries sucked you inside, pulled you in a dream down a long passage to a sun-dazzled kitchen.

There it was, all for you, a cherry pie with a lattice crust, cooling on the table. In the freezer, a half-gallon tub of vanilla ice cream waited—untouched, perfectly white, unbelievably creamy.

You thought,
Just one piece or maybe a quarter.
The pie vanished. Who could blame you? You tried to stop, but you couldn’t do it. In your swollen stomach, seven scoops of ice cream swirled.

Your head throbbed. You felt hot and cold at the same time, stunned by bliss and suddenly so tired. You staggered to the living room, but the couch was old, too short, too lumpy. Somehow you gathered the strength to climb the stairs. You opened three doors before you found the room you wanted, cool and dark with a wide bed and a down comforter.

You were afraid to sleep, but a voice that was your own voice gone mad and mocking said,
Why stop now? Why resist this last pleasure?
You knew you might die in this bed, victim of your own delight and a farmer’s righteous fury. You woke to a woman’s voice, insistent and gentle.
Mister, you best get up now, go down those stairs, and keep walking.
She was white-haired but not old—thin, but not frail. A farmer’s wife, yes, without the farmer. The widow cradled an unraised rifle. She was kind: she wanted you to go, but she didn’t want to scare you.

That night it rained and you slept in a child’s tree house. You crept out hours before dawn. If the boy came with his BB gun, he’d aim for your right eye and kill you.

Raymond Good Bird, twenty-two years gone. You walked close to death every hour, but somehow you survived, and then one day you came home to rest, and I let you die in your sister’s kitchen.

Yesterday, Thomas said he wouldn’t believe you were home till he touched you with his own hands. But he didn’t touch: seeing was enough, too much in fact—Thomas wouldn’t look you in the eye.
The light
, he said,
I can’t do it.
Late last night, in the shelter of darkness, your delicate, almost pretty cousin Thomas picked you up, lifted you a foot off the ground and held you high to dance you in a circle dance. Your grandmother felt your face and skull, traced your chest and ribs to see you whole with her fingertips. Long after, when the others had fallen asleep on the couch and floor and single bed, your big brother pulled you close and breathed you in. Caleb, like a mother and a father now: wide shoulders, soft breasts. You were twenty-two years lost again. Rocking in his arms, you thought,
I’m him.

Now you lay on the floor, and I heard you say,
Let the dead stay dead.

Your brother and sister rolled you onto a wool blanket. These two, and blind Safiya, and doubting Thomas lifted you by four corners. You swung in their grip, a man in a hammock. Roshelle cradled baby Jeanne to follow behind you.

Marilee’s turquoise Catalina sat on cement blocks in the yard, its rusted engine propped against a stump, its hood torn off, crumpled in some junkyard. Sunflowers and thistle grew high and wild in all its open spaces. Your people slid you, most belovéd one, into the back of my white Falcon. Roshelle gave the baby to Thomas so that she could lie down with you,
Uncle Ray
, close, and hold you tight,
my love
, and keep you from rolling.

I resisted no one. Caleb took my keys and left me to walk seven miles. What did he care? Your people drove you to town, the dead man, the wounded-ten-times, the resurrected-and-returned-home and now dead-for-true Raymond Good Bird. They delivered you to the hospital in Havre, as if some man of faith might call you out of the cave of yourself, punch a hole in your vein or throat, split your chest, and work his miracle—as if some scrubbed nurse might forget her latex gloves, just this once, and lay her naked hands on your heart to close these last wounds, the wounds that saved, the wounds that healed you.

By then the rain had started, soft at first and still hot, more like dust than water falling, then hard and cold until the whole sky filled, a wailing, weeping rain of river.

I stood in your sister’s yard,
estúpido
, cut by icy rain, jolted each time a drop hit me. At least you didn’t die alone, foolish as our fathers, mine playing Crazy Horse in the snow, yours failing to jump a freight train east of Fargo. I didn’t want to die today, another frozen Indian. I pictured my wife Delilah at our doorway, face blown open by the storm, long hair loose and dangerous, a tangled net whipping around her. I conjured Lulu, thin and dark, already too wise, strange and silent, old at seven. I heard tinkling Kristabelle, just three, our child of joy who burst into the world laughing.

That laughter fell from the sky, arrows of rain, sharp enough to pierce me. I dreamed myself home and safe, though I knew I didn’t deserve it.

The wind spun, as if it wanted to speak, as if it were trying to become a person. I hoped to make it to Hector Slow Child’s house, prayed that the man who loved my mother might let me sleep in his bed for a few hours, but I was barely a mile up the road, stung by rain, already staggering. I thought I’d fall, die here in a rut, drown in three inches of water.

God roared behind me. In a rush of breath,
his
breath, two angels thundered out of the storm, Luc Falling Bear and Leroy Enneas, my saviors, Luc driving Leroy’s once-shiny-green-now-mostly-gray Torino. They didn’t know yet what I’d failed to do, how I refused to kneel, refused even to try to help you. They didn’t sense I was a ghost, gone like you, a dead man walking. They’d been drinking rum and Mountain Dew all day. To Luc and Leroy, I was still visible.

They were thoughtful drunks: I tried to slip in back, but they cried
no
in unison. They wanted me up front, soaked and shivering between them. They offered rum, straight from the bottle. I don’t remember anything on earth for which I ever felt more grateful.

They ate corn chips with extra salt.
To stay thirsty
, Luc said.
You think drinking all day is easy?

They were polite, the way Indians are polite. They didn’t ask where I’d been or wonder aloud why I was walking. They didn’t make jokes about my ambulance. They didn’t mention my father.

They waited for me to speak or not speak. They lived on reservation time. They had forever.

I couldn’t go home. Lulu and Kristabelle would grab my legs to pull me down on all fours and ride me like a pony. Delilah would say,
Let him go. Your father’s cold and tired.
But somehow I’d find the strength to carry them,
my sweethearts, my darlings.
I’d buck and whinny. I’d be myself again, whole, Jimi Shay Don’t Walk, father, husband, wet mustang. I wasn’t ready for that much love. I thought the weight of it, of them, might crush me.

I must have said,
Drop me at Danny’s
, because suddenly I was there, trembling in my brother’s doorway. Without Luc and Leroy close, my skin hardly held my bones together. There he was, Danny the betrayed who didn’t know it, Danny Boy curled up like a baby, smiling in his sleep, soothed by the sound of rain, back inside his mother’s body.

Danny Kite was his thin self again, and I could smell the stink coming from the toilet, his bowels clean at last, the dam burst wide open. My Danny woke all sweet and groggy. He said,
Sorry, brother
, and,
How did it go?
And I said,
Fine, everything’s fine.
I said,
Everything happened just the way it was supposed to happen.

Let him sleep in peace
, I thought.
Let the story find him.

There are stories I like to tell, things I believe though I can’t prove them. Sometimes I think Hector Slow Child is my real father, that he came to my mother as starlight falling through an open window, a constellation broken on her bed, the Great Bear, the White Buffalo.

My wife tells another story, how her mother died with Delilah inside her. Nona Windy Boy skidded on ice, sideswiped Martin Cendesie’s truck, and rolled fifty feet down a gully.
Brain dead
, the doctor told her husband Joseph.
Fractured ribs—fractured feet, femurs, pelvis. No hope
, he whispered.
Fractured skull, massive hemorrhage.

Somehow Delilah lived. Delilah, unborn, rocked herself to sleep in a windy cradle. The doctor stood amazed, listening to her heart beat. Softly he said,
We should take the baby now while we can save her.

Joseph saw tiny flecks of his wife’s blood spattered on the young man’s glasses. Joseph said,
Let the child stay inside as long as her mother wants her.

Nona’s mother and Auntie Bea chanted thirteen days and thirteen nights without ceasing. I tell you now: on the fourteenth day, Nona Windy Boy breathed again, no respirator. She lived thirty-four more days, and the child came in her own time of her own will, and the mother with her own breath released her.

Delilah says,
I’m my father’s bitter miracle.

Delilah says,
My mother turned herself into a trout and swam down into her own womb and swallowed me and kept me safe for seven weeks until I got too big to hold and then my mother writhed three times and spat me out to live in the world without her.

Nona never opened one eye to see her child. Auntie Bea swore she laughed when the baby howled, but the nurse who witnessed said,
The poor woman was finally choking.

Tonight, when I lie in Delilah’s arms, when we lie entwined, her long arms and long legs wrapped around me, when I tell her our story in the dark, the story of Raymond Good Bird and Jimi Shay Don’t Walk, my wife will say,
Not everybody wants to be saved. Not every body can bear it.

Raymond, three months ago you took a real job, the first you wanted to keep, as a janitor, a custodian at Lewis & Clark Elementary School in Missoula. The urinals set to a child’s height, the little desks, the low mirrors, the windows decorated with butterflies and birds broke your heart, and you let them. You wanted to hurt, and the hurt was love, and love roared back into you. You stole children’s drawings from the walls and took them home to your motel, the River’s Edge, a run-down dive where you paid by the week to live among prostitutes and addicts, where you shared bread and beans with bewildered half-bloods.

A little girl named Tania colored a family of bright angels—mother, father, sister, brother—even the purple dog had a halo. Max and Arturo drew a house on fire and a galaxy exploding. Coral painted a child in a garden where red tulips grew taller than she was. Darnell Lasiloo saw seventeen Appaloosas from the sky, as if he were God, as if he were White Bird in flight over the Bear Paws. The spotted horses lay on their sides, all sixty-eight legs splayed, all sixty-eight legs visible. The ponies seemed to float along a trail of tears beside a winding river. You taped the pictures to your walls and door and mirror. So many children alive to love! The miracle was endless. The dead whispered through the radiators.
Don’t forget us.
They wished you no harm. They were hungry, like the rest of us. You saved six dollars the first week and nineteen the week after. You thought someday soon you’d send all your extra money and a child’s vision home to Roshelle and your sister.

One night in a whiteman’s bar, a half-Kootenai, half-Mexican woman danced you across the room, and you thought this was the end of hope, your last possibility. She asked you to come home with her, to her trailer up a rutted road north of Evaro. She was twenty-seven years older and fifty pounds heavier than you, but still, in your eyes, beautiful. You refused. Refused even to kiss, though her mouth looked soft as a girl’s mouth. Her face was scarred, it’s true, pocked as yours, but her lips bloomed full and ready.
No, please.
You thought if you kissed her once, you’d never stop kissing.

Fear made you unkind, and for this you were sorry.

The heads of elk curving out from the walls, the bighorn sheep, the pronghorn antelopes all watched you drink your beer and crack your nuts and keep your silence. The big Kootenai woman, Magdalena Avalos, drifted away to dance alone, and then to spin with a one-armed man by the jukebox. Three whitemen in the booth behind you bragged about the ducks they’d slaughtered last autumn. The creatures made a terrifying sound, mallards and pintails hissing and chewing. The first three shots cleared a path: dozens lay strewn, wounded and dying. The others rose, a jabbering cloud. The men fired again, three more shots, then another three—that was all it took—the sky opened. They stood stupid in a rain of ducks, stunned by a storm of feathers. A hundred and eight birds dropped dead between them. They laughed now, remembering the crime, ninety-nine ducks past the limit. The men spent all day gutting and plucking.

You tried to be Tonto, one of those two-syllable wooden Indians, but your thoughts roared, and the men must have heard them. You looked into the eyes of the auburn bear whose head and skin hung from the ceiling, and you meant to whisper only to him, but your heart betrayed you.

Father
, you cried.
Father, forgive them.

Then you laughed a wild Indian laugh and you whooped one last wild whoop and the three white hunters lifted you high and danced you out into the alley, not in a tender way, not soft like Magdalena. They pushed you to your knees. They wanted you to be sorry.