Theft (12 page)

Zeb puts on his best performance, commiserating about the missing belts.

“Chet swears the latch on the back door was fiddled with, too.
Proof
, he says. Says ‘I'm going to have to fix that thing now.'” She imitates Chet's gruff voice, and I can see the anger in Zeb's eyes light up. He hates leaving behind any kind of sign. Dolly goes on about the latch, and I see Zeb doubling up his fists.

Right about then, Chet turns the water off and drops the hose. He looks square at Dolly cuddling up to Zeb, then drills those beady blue eyes of his into my brother.

Dolly notices, too. She stops clinging to Zeb. She takes a step back, collects herself by rubbing her hands over her robe as if she is pressing out the wrinkles, then she talks in a too-high voice, changes the subject. “And Chet's put in a new lawn, Zeb, and we hope the kids'll stay off'n it, so it could get a good healthy chance at growing.” She looks sweetly at Chet, but I can see the muscles in his jawbone flexing, and he starts taking these real slow, deliberate steps toward Dolly, me, and Zeb. Dolly keeps up the fakey voice. “Me and Chet don't want to be the neighborhood ogres, Zeb, but you know how it is.”

“I understand, Mrs. Thatcher. I'll keep an eye out, yes.” Zeb follows Dolly's lead, his voice all out of pitch, too. He nods hello to Chet. “Good evening, Mr. Thatcher.”

“Think so, huh?” Chet says. He walks closer, and his waist is just below my eye level. I see the belt he is wearing, and at just about that time I see Zeb's eyes catch on that belt, too, and he goes from doubling his fists to shoving them into his pockets because we did not think of the belt Chet was wearing.

Chet stands right in front of Dolly now.

“The fuck,” Zeb says, underneath his breath, and he pats his chest pocket for the cigarettes he knows aren't there.

“What'd you say, boy?” Chet is not whispering.

The dog sits quiet in his little fenced-in area behind Chet and Dolly, and I pray he doesn't start barking again, not with Chet already this pissed off. Dolly's eyes turn little and wrinkly. She backs away from Chet, squinting and blinking. Zeb watches her. He stares at Chet's belt. Then he looks up, riveting his eyes on Chet, and just when I think he's going to lose his temper, his shoulders relax. He shakes his head, gives Chet this look of outright disgust, then turns his back on him. He takes my hand, and we walk one step away, and I think everything is going to be all right. Dolly has backed off, and Chet has not said
shit
or
fuck
or
bitch
, and everything's fine. But that asshole Chet cannot leave well enough alone. He calls out, “I asked what you said to me, boy!”

Zeb's fingers tighten around my hand.

“Goddamnit, boy!”

Thank God Zeb keeps walking. I close my eyes tight for a second and will him to keep walking, which he does, and so Chet finally shuts up. I can't see Chet, but I can hear his footsteps on the paved sidewalk, the sound fading away, and I feel a relief—until I hear a scream, and my knees buckle. The sound comes from Dolly. Zeb stops and turns. Chet tells Dolly to get in the house, and when she doesn't move fast enough, he grabs a fistful of her short hair, whips her head around with a
crack
. She stumbles forward and falls, skinning her hands and knees on the sidewalk. Right then, the dog starts barking, too, and Chet hollers at it to shut the hell up.

I wish I could say what happens next, but I can't. All I know is that one minute Zeb is standing next to me, and then, all of a sudden, he's like a bug on Chet's big, barrel back, pounding with his fists. There's nothing that makes any sense about it. How Zeb got there, what he thought he was going to do next, or how he thinks he's going to get out alive. I think of running, but my legs won't go. I cannot leave my brother in this bad situation, but no one's around to help us, and then, suddenly, I can't believe what I am seeing. There's no need for anyone to help us because Zeb has somehow made his way from Chet's back around to the front of Chet's face, and skinny Zeb has knocked fat Chet to the ground. Zeb straddles Chet like he straddles me when we're play-wrestling, but this time, Zeb is fighting hard, and I do not mean sucker punching.

Things happen like a home movie when the film breaks and we have to splice it back together. The picture jumps ahead. One second there's no one in the whole neighborhood but me, Zeb, Chet, and Dolly Thatcher, and the next second, kids are everywhere, standing in a circle around Zeb and Chet, streaming in from the field, pouring out of their houses, yelling, “Get him, Zeb, go! Yeah!” They're cheering Zeb on, and Chet is laying on his back swinging up at Zeb. I hear the sound of Chet's fleshy body being hit, see the skin of his face split like a too-ripe plum, and there is blood on Zeb's arms now, splattering all the way up to the hemline of his short-sleeved shirt. He has this wild look in his
eyes, like he can't see anything in the world but Chet, Zeb a fish underwater when he is concentrating, and there is no pulling him out of his bloody pond.

“You sorry, sad fuck,” I hear Zeb saying, “You good for nothing son of a fucking bitch.” It comes out of him in this voice that he can barely squeeze from his lungs. He keeps saying it over and over, “You fuck, you fucker
,”
and the dog starts barking and Zeb hits harder and harder until Dolly comes at Zeb from behind, wraps her arms around him in a bear hug, and tries to pull him off.

She doesn't. She can't. But Zeb feels her arms, and it makes him come to the surface of his pond just before he drowns. He gasps. He stands up. His heart is beating so fast I can see it throbbing in the earthworm-like vein on the side of his neck. He's breathing like he's running, but he's stock still and silent. He looks down at Chet, wipes the corner of his lip, shoves his hands in his pockets, and smiles. It's a pissed-off kind of smile, but it's a smile all the same. Then, real deliberately, he reaches down to his ankle, takes out the gun, crouches low, and presses the snubbed barrel against Chet's temple. I hear him whisper, “I can tell your future, old man.” And I hear myself telling my brother “no,” but nothing comes out of my mouth.

He holds that gun there a long time, ten seconds maybe, a whole lifetime ticking inside each one of those seconds. The field and sky disappear, and it feels like just me and Zeb and Chet in the world right now. The tug between me and my brother aches. I whisper to him, my lips moving without me controlling them, and I think he feels me telling him to stop, but just then, he leans in closer to Chet, and I see his forearm muscles swell, and his bony hand squeezes tight, and the hammer of the gun slams down. The
click
echoes through my head.

And then, nothing. No gunshot. No bullets.

He sits up, still pinning Chet, and looks at me, smiling again. Just then, Chet rolls out of Zeb's pin. Everything's a blur again, and next thing I know, Chet's standing up and pointing Zeb's own gun at Zeb. He's pointing it loosely, dangling it from his skinned hand. “I can tell your future, too, boy,” he says. “You got
none.” Then he laughs softly, tucks Zeb's gun in his pocket, and walks away.

Zeb stands up, wipes the blood from his hands onto his blue jeans. It looks like an oil smear there, like after he's been working on a car.

I CROSSED OVER THE New Mexico-Navajo border about noon, when the sun had shrunk to a white hot dime at the top of the scorching, October sky. Red spires of rock stood sunburned and shadowless on the roadside, the black tar beneath my tires half melted and soft, even in autumn. “You can see this red rock as holy, or you can see it as bloodied.” That's what Brenda's biological father, Raymond Kabotie, said the first time we met. I was in high school by then. Zeb was gone already, and Brenda had run away from home, too. I hadn't seen either one of them in over a year. But Raymond had driven to Colorado from the reservation, looking for Brenda, because once she found him, she ran away from him, too.

I'd always figured Brenda would runaway from her adopted home because she'd never talk about her real family, and if you brought it up to her, anger spilled out of her like lava. It seemed pretty clear that she was going to have to find her family roots if she was ever going to be at peace. So sure enough, when Brenda turned sixteen she ran away from our neighborhood, seeking out her own flesh and blood.

What I didn't predict was that once she found Raymond, she'd run away from him, too. I'll never forget the first time I met him, when I opened our front door that day and he said, “You're Willa Robbins?”

I nodded.

“She talked about you all the time. You're her best friend. Have you seen her? My Brenda?” He had this expression on his face, a smile so hopeful and full of pain at the same time that my
chest almost cracked open just talking to him. I invited him in, and he met Mom. Dad was on the road.

He stuck out his hand to shake Mom's in greeting, but when she couldn't respond, he said, “Parkinson's?” No shyness about it, no turning his head away from Mom's crippledness. It was something no one but a doctor had ever said to Mom before.

For a second I worried it might make her feel bad, but her eyes lit up, and she said, “Yes,” as if it was a relief just to have someone call it what it was.

“Evil disease,” he said. “My own mama had it.”

Mom's voice had shrunk to a mere whisper by then, and it was hard for her to hold her head up. She looked like a baby bird sometimes, her head too big for her bony body. But her spirit was still intact. You could see it leaking out of her, all that life that had no way to express itself in her weakened body. Raymond kept on talking to her about his mother, the days he'd spent helping her. “I learned a lot about it, watching my own mom trying to fight that beast off,” he said. Raymond stood up then and went to Mom's side. “You mind?” he said, taking her hand.

Mom nodded to let him know it was okay. He explained to her that the Parkinson's made her think she was falling forward. “Yes,” Mom whispered, “That's the way it feels,” and Raymond said, “But you're not falling. It's a trick your brain's playing on you. If you can trick it back, pitch your body backward a little, get yourself a pair of old boots like mine,” he looked at the worn down heels that made him walk with his weight pitched back and his body low to the ground, “it might help you walk.” He prompted her to stand up, and she did, and he wrapped his strong arms around her, her face pressed into his leather vest. He looked at me. “And you,” he said, “You can help your mom walk by tapping the top of her toe with your own foot.” He lowered his cowboy boot gently onto Mom's toe, and sure enough, she picked up her feet and began shuffling forward more easily than she had in months.

Raymond smiled. “Sometimes you just gotta remind your brain that your body is bigger and stronger than it is.” He and Mom walked across the room like that, and then pretty soon it
seemed like they were dancing. He wrapped one arm around her shoulder, and they moved almost gracefully together. I fell in love with Raymond right then and there. He led Mom back to her seat in her chair. “Evil disease,” he said, “Downright evil,” and I could see Mom feeling grateful for his blunt understanding.

When he quit paying all the attention to Mom, he turned to me. “So—” He stalled a little. “You haven't seen hide nor hair of Brenda, huh?”

I'd been hoping that he had news for me about her when he first introduced himself, and the emptiness it caused when he told me she'd left his place agitated me to the bone. “She give you a reason for leaving?” I asked.

He looked around the house, cast his eyes upward in that way that tough men do when they're trying to keep their eyes from watering. “She had her reasons,” he said. “I just—I tried to keep her there, with me. But she just turned eighteen. She's got a right.” He stopped again and stared hard at the ceiling, blinking with his huge chest stuttering a little. “She's got a right, but she doesn't have anything else. No skills. No money. No way to make a life for herself. And she doesn't like it when I say it, but she's innocent, so innocent. She doesn't understand that sometimes a man has to do something he doesn't believe in just to make his way in the world.”

I could see Raymond looking out the window toward the field, searching for some way to get himself out of a conversation he'd never planned on having. “That house out there, that's where Mom was born,” I told him.

It gave him a chance to gather himself back up. He looked at me with knowing thanks. “That right?” he said.

“Eminent domain,” Mom said to him.

He laughed a little. “Took it right out from under you, huh?” It was the first time I saw Mom light up when she was talking about the land, another relief because Raymond understood things right along with her.

“We could go walking out there if you want,” I told him.

“I'd like that,” he said.

That afternoon, Raymond and I walked the field, and he showed me how alive the place still was, even though we thought it had been ruined when the house was condemned. “No,” he said, “Look at all these stories, all this sign!” We spent till dusk studying the afterimages of all the animals that had passed through there, animals I'd never seen, even though I spent almost every summer day there: field mice, voles, rabbits, quail, pheasants, foxes, coyotes. He showed me how to find owl pellets with the bones and fur of prey clumped into a tight little ball, and he showed me the remains of the nests of meadowlarks on the ground, when I thought all birds lived in trees. We walked farther than I'd ever walked in the field, and we saw prairie dogs, burrowing owls, and the first rattlesnake I'd ever laid eyes on. Raymond pointed out how its scales tiled themselves along its body like a bird's feathers. It was like seeing a whole new world in a place I thought I knew well already.