Hungry Heart
Gabby’s dead husband had been born on this day some forty odd years ago. Besides a stomach full of baby boy, the only thing he’d left her was a pearl handled knife, and she’d had to pawn it in the first year after he’d died to pay for formula. The guilt had been immense, and now each year she visited his grave on his birthday and left a gift.
This was the thought Noah woke to Friday morning and rolled over in his mind as he worked up the strength to rise from the saggy, cornflower blue couch. He and Gabby had gotten drunk in his trailer the night before, played poker and made plans to spend the weekend in Flagstaff. She had a friend they could stay with, just outside of town in Gray Mountain, and Noah needed to get out of the desert for a night. It had been six months since he moved out of the hotel he owned in Mexican Hat and went to live on the reservation, and in all that time he’d yet to leave his new Navajo County home.
Somewhere in the blur of the previous night Gabby had told about her husband, Tommy, and Noah ha promised to drive her to her his grave today. It was a hell of an odd thing, the kind of thing you promise while drunk but don’t follow up on, but he felt an obligation to her. She and her son, Lelen, were his neighbors and the first people to talk to him after he moved to the reservation. He had run off this to this new home on the other side of the San Juan River and spent the last few months straddling the seam between drinking to function and just disappearing completely, and now it seemed this Indian family, these friends, were the only thing giving form to his life now that his divorce, and the sour malaise it left in him, had set in
Noah fixed a pot a pot of coffee and poured a half-full forty of malt liquor down the drain. It smelled of urine and beer, and he couldn’t remember if he’d pissed in it or not. The clock on the coffee pot read 1:30, and he was due to pick Lelen up from the bus stop pretty soon.
He left the coffee to brew and walked to the closet-sized bathroom. Noah took the black bandana off his head and stared in the mirror, studying the scratch marks on his right temple. They looked less irritated, less fresh, but still stung. He’d been wearing the bandana since Dawn had scratched him two days ago, and Gabby had noticed but made fun of the bandana instead of asking why he was wearing it. Noah rinsed his face and forehead, cleaned the abrasions and then put the bandana back on.
In the late afternoon they set about prepping Noah’s truck for the weekend trip to Flagstaff. Noah lay on his back under the truck and could hear Lelen shifting on the bench seat above him. He’d been at the radio trying to get it working for the past half-hour. As the oil finished draining, Noah was surprised to hear what sounded like Indian drum playing coming through the floor boards of the Chevy.
“Noah! I got it working. You hear that?”
Noah climbed out from under the truck and rubbed his grease-blackened palms on the side of his Levis. The music switched to Metallica. Shit, sure enough. It was the radio. Only the Tuba City radio would have a playlist like that.
“I hear it.” Noah said. He smiled widely. “Goddamn, that’s gotta be coming all the way from Tuba.”
Noah was still new to the reservation, but he’d already come to find a bunch of these unexpected cultural meeting grounds. Radio stations playing traditional songs and then speed metal. Stands selling mutton stew next to the Safeway. Basketball played so obsessively that if a close game headed past dark people played under moonlight and a car’s high beams rather than quit. A Navajo Code Talkers exhibit in a Burger King off the highway.
A week before he’d bought a tape deck at the flea market while Gabby was working in Monument Valley, and it seemed like Lelen hadn’t gone more than a few hours since then without mentioning it. Noah had taken to driving the kid to school since it had started two weeks ago, and the boy was excited to have a distraction from the strangling and spongy monsoonal heat that hung all about the verdant mesa tops and flooded the cab of the truck each morning. But the truth was Noah wasn’t sure how to wire the thing, and he’d given Lelen the first crack at it while he drained the oil and changed out the air filter.
How the boy knew how to wire it was a mystery. As he stared at Lelen’s brown, smiling face through the truck’s cracked windshield, he felt a sense of pride well up in him as if the boy was his own. He had no right to, but he felt it all the same.
Noah reached for his mug of coffee on the roof of the truck and took two large gulps. He’d bought a twelve back of beer and put it on ice, but he was waiting until Gabby got home to break into it.
The boy stopped fiddling with the knobs on the radio and hopped out of the truck. He stood erectly. Though only thirteen, he came up to Noah’s eye level.
“How ‘bout you let me have a drink before Mama gets home?”
Noah laughed and flicked the dusty, salt-stained bill of Lelen’s Arizona Diamonbacks hat. Just because you’ve been doing a man’s work doesn’t mean you’re ready to drink like one.”
But it was more than that. This was someone else’s son. This was someone else’s Indian son, and it wasn’t his place to share a beer even if he wanted to. The sun was dipping below the mesa which rose up behind the trailers, the shadow of the ancient red rock fast encroaching on them both.
Lelen laughed. “Alright Noah, but it aint’ my fault if Mom finds out you saw Dawn the other day.”
Noah was surprised and realized the bandana had slipped off his forehead and down around his neck as he worked under the truck.
“Dawn didn’t give this to me. I just bumped my head.” He lied and it sounded lame.
“Yeah, alright. Whatever you say.”
Noah finished his coffee, snorted, and then tossed the dregs into the dirt. “And besides, ain’t you a little young to be in the business of blackmailing?”
The boy smiled. “ I’m just sayin’ if you saw Dawn you could tell us. You know what Mom’s advice was. She said ‘get the hell away from that two-bit sl-’”
Noah cut him off. “Look, she wasn’t around, but your mom and I aren’t dating anyway. What you tell your her is your business.”
“Suit yourself.” Lelen said.
But Noah was unsure of what he’d said. Whether he was just sick of talking about Dawn or whether he didn’t want Gabby to know, he was hiding them.
They stopped talking when they heard the hum of a diesel engine from somewhere far off. Noah squinted to see down along the road where its jagged, muddy ruts met up with Highway 160. A jeep was coming from the north and it slowed as it got towards the end of the road. A woman and a wild, scabrous looking thing of a dog got out. The woman waved goodbye to the driver and started slowly up the red, snaking path.
Even from a great distance he could tell it was her because of the three legged dog desperately hobbling along to keep up. And as she came into clearer focus, Gabby’s style was unmistakable: a creased brown leather jacket, black jeans and black boots caked in dirt and turned pink by the redness of the earth. She wore a pair of headphones held together by duct tape that brought ought the sheer blackness of her hair. Her cavernous army surplus bag hung over her right shoulder stretching down to where it met a large carving knife attached to her belt. The dog wore a harness and there was a cloth pouch sewn into the side where, depending on her mood, he knew she kept a bottle of water or a flask-sized bottle of rum.
When she was close enough to him, he turned to the cooler in the bed of the truck and pulled out two fresh beers. He tossed one at her and she caught it without breaking stride. She continued walking until she reached the front door of her trailer where she put down the bag and removed the leash from her dog. Gabby motioned to the dog to sit, but it didn’t move.
She had a complicated relationship with the mutt. Had found his missing leg sad and endearing when she first spotted him in a pack of dogs chasing a cow in the parking lot of the Kayenta Texaco, and now took him to work every day in Monument Valley where she sold wooden figurines. When he frustrated her by refusing to be house broken and drinking from any open beer, she had decided to name him Reagan, after the president, and though she loved him she was always complaining about his malfeasance: “Reagan’ll hump anything that moves.” “Reagan was gnawing on a fat white lady today.”
“Reagan. Sit!” she said, and the dog squatted down gingerly.
Noah smiled.
“You’re still going with the hair metal look I see.” She pointed at the bandana.
“Yeah, I still can’t find my ball cap, but I got a bunch of these. Used to use them as rags for working on my truck. Guess I just gotta stick it out I get a new hat.”
“Suit yourself, “ she said. “You could at least pick one with a design that makes you look less Bret Michaels and more Bruce Springsteen.”
They’d all loaded into the truck, Lelen, Gabby, Reagan, and a cooler full of beer and driven west towards Tuba City. There were rickety, wooden stands all along the highway with dirt parking lots and banners at each with some variation of the phrase “Genuine Indian Goods.” Further on, where the rocks became banded with reds and grays, there were a few pull offs with handmade signs advertising “Dinosaur Tracks.” Gabby and Lelen had laughed and pointed out into the desert where a handful of signs advertised the “Dino Tracks.”
“We used to do that,” Gabby said.
“What? Work at one of those?” Noah said, pointing out into the desert.
“Yeah, in those days we still lived in Tuba. Mama was helping me get back on my feet, and she had a friend who owned one. We didn’t make bad money at it either. I was selling my carvings, and Lelen was the cutest little runt of a hustler you’ve ever seen.”
Lelen laughed. “Yeah, we had this system set up where I’d stay hidden until Mom had a sale in the bag and then pop out from behind the stand. I’d say, ‘excuse me, sir, but would you like to buy some corpolite? Take a real live part of the dinosaur world back home with you.’ And the man would say, ‘Geez, son. What’s coprolite?’ And I’d holler, ‘Dino poop,’ and you can just imagine the look on the face of this Phoenix type businessman with this ragged five year old Indian boy smiling up at him trying to shove a handful of fossilized dinosaur shit in his face and his wife and kids right behind him.”
Gabby broke in, “He’d give them those big doe eyes, all sweet and innocent like he had just popped out of bed and didn’t spend his whole day hustling tourists by the side of the highway. And they’d either pay him out of surprise or pity or down right admiration for Lelen’s pitch.”
After they’d visited Gabby’s husband’s grave, they’d reached Tuba City and pulled off the main road and towards a small neighborhood of dirt roads, trailers, and HUD homes.
The trailers were within a rectangular chain link fence and a couple of shanties, and other pre-fab houses stood off in the southwestern corner. A ragged looking dog sniffed through garbage while two girls tossed a basketball back and forth over a rusted Chevy. Gabby and Lelen and Reagan walked up to a trailer where an old woman with thick and braided head of gray hair greeted them on the porch. Noah made eye contact with her and lifted his hand in acknowledgement, but she just stared at him from the corner of her eye and continued talking to Gabby.
Later, as he drove them west into the setting sun Noah watched the dusk linger all around. He’d seen thousands of desert sunsets, but on this open stretch of Highway 191, on this Friday night, something caused him to speed up...65, 70, 80, 90 miles per hour. Gabby didn't comment. There was only garbled singing on the radio, and the soughing of the wind through the cab of the truck. All across Noah's line of sight the pale orange merged with the erupting red and violet, the shattering of the azure sky. And he felt a strange feeling came over him like he wanted to chase the sunset forever, to bleed every moment, every element out of its dying colors. He pushed the truck hard until it shook and felt like it would fly apart.
Noah was still running over the visit to the gravesite in his mind. He’d been unsure what to do and had just leaned up against the truck with Lelen and petted Reagan.
Gabby had pulled out her pack of Winstons and lit two, switching between cigarettes on each drag. It was like she had lit one for her husband. Was communing with him in some unspoken way they could never understand. Smoke had curled out her broad nose, and the distant lights of Tuba city fluttered on in the east. She’d finished the cigarette in her right hand and put it out on her left boot and then inverted the process with the other cigarette.
Gabby had laughed to herself and turned around from Tommy’s grave, walking towards the back of the truck. She’d reached in the bed, and pulled out the shovel they’d brought. She had walked back to the grave and worked over some dirt next to it with her boot heel, and then started digging shovelfuls out from the red earth. She’d breathed heavily from the effort, and then went to a knee and placed the book in the hole. When she’d finished putting the dirt on top of the book, and she’d smoothed over the red hump on top of the hole with the underside of her boot.
“What book did you give him?” Noah said. They had remained silent for most of an hour as the buttes closed in on the sides of the highway and walled them off from the day. And now the night was finally winning out, about 30 miles outside Flagstaff, and they were beyond the Painted Desert and the pine forests ghosted their peripheral vision.
“Blue Horses Rush In,” she said.
Noah stared blankly. It did not register.
“Luci Tapahonso,” she explained. “Tommy liked her poetry. I thought it was weird when we first met. This broke Indian cowboy reading poetry in his spare time. But now it makes sense to me now. And sometimes when I read what he used to read, it’s like I can hear his voice talking to me. It’s like a shared and whispered chant of loneliness.”
Noah stared at her for a while. He thought what she’d done seemed a tender and unique gesture, another side of this person he was coming to like more and more.
“You saw Dawn the other day didn’t you?” Gabby said loudly.
It was as if she had read his mind, and he jerked a little at the mention of her name. He took his left hand off the steering wheel and touched the bandana. Just the thought of her and he could immediately see her face buried in the trucker’s crotch, working his privates like a greedy javelina on the underbelly of a scrub oak. He felt sick.
“I saw her. I don’t know how much she saw me. ” The words came out quietly, and he didn’t know if Gabby had heard them. In any case, she didn’t ask him again, and he was thankful for that. He was embarrassed, but it was more than just embarrassment. He hadn’t wanted Gabby to know that he saw Dawn for the same reason he woudln’t talk about an ex-lover to a new one. But Gabby wasn’t his lover. He wasn’t really sure what they were becoming.
They had dinner on the outskirts of of Flagstaff and had a drink before they went to the bar. Jack Ryan’s sat on the northwest side of town out where old Route 66 and I-40 met up. For a quarter mile on either side broken bottles and cans of beer littered the highway, creating a drunkards walking trail between Coconino County and the reservation. When they pulled into the parking lot, a leather-jacketed fat man was peeing next to a dumpster. He tottered, holding himself with one hand and waving the other out in the air for balance.
They parked and walked past the peeing man towards the entrance where there were three Mexicans standing up against an old truck. They were passing a bottle in a sack and smoking cigarettes. They stared hard at Noah and Gabby and he could feel their eyes following him as he pushed open the heavy, wooden door.
There taxidermied deer and elk, a bevy of birds and even an evil looking wild pig mounted on the walls all about the room and a mirror behind the bar that ran the length of the wall and reflected the crowd. A strange mix of bikers, college kids, Indians, Meixcans, and cowboys. It was not the kind of bar he would have chosen, and he felt unsure there. But Gabby was excited about it. Had told the mythic history of Jack Ryan’s the night before. Word circulated that years ago a man with a beef over gambling debts had followed another into the bathroom and cut his throat from ear to ear while he pissed. That a couple had once owned the bar together and lived upstairs until the wife shotgunned her husband when she caught him after hours with a waitress in the beer cooler. And Gabby swore her friend Maria had been there when a drunk Indian chased an errant pool shot as it bounded over the edge of the table and out into Route 66. The drunk had gotten back the pool ball but been laid open by a station wagon containing a family headed to the Grand Canyon. He was split in two and his skull was crushed causing the brain to pop out and splatter on the asphalt like an eggplant. A crowd had gathered to watch while a country band playing inside. The bartender just called an ambulance and went on serving. Even offering free drinks to the EMTs who scraped the man off the road. And as Noah looked at his face in the mirror, unshaven and deeply darkened from the summer sun, the salt-stained bandana high on his head, he thought maybe he belonged here. That his own misery paled in comparison to this history of violence and made him feel anonymous. He relaxed and was glad to be there with Gabby. He wanted to get drunk, and he didn’t want to see anyone he knew. It felt like that was all he’d ever wanted, really.
Gabby bought the first pitcher of beer even though he insisted against it. “Don’t worry,” she said and smiled, “you’ll get plenty more opportunities to get me back.”
She walked to the jukebox and fed it quarters. A Springsteen song came on. Gabby was always playing Springsteen and Noah thought it was a funny choice for an Indian woman. He recognized the track by the rough and worn texture of Springsteen’s voice but couldn’t name the song. Something about being down on your luck and your girl not loving you anymore, but wasn’t that half of Springsteen’s catalog? Wasn’t that half of all songs?
They picked out a pool table and started playing. Noah had heard Gabby was good, but he was skeptical because his source on this was Gabby. He’d only ever heard her brag about two things: her son and her ability to play pool, and getting drunk tended to magnify her own estimation of both. And she was always telling stories. Wild and dubious stories about everything from the origins of the scar on her cheek (it came from when she used to rodeo) to how she acquired her double-wide (she won it drag racing).
It didn’t take long to convince Noah that Gabby was telling the truth, at least about playing pool. He broke, missed his first shot, and then sat back as she went to work destroying him. They played a couple games but she was never threatened, missing just enough to keep him interested, but not enough to have to give it her full attention.
“Six ball, side pocket.” Gabby hit the ball true and it went in. They were betting in beer instead of dollars, and he already owed her two pitchers.
She moved to the other side of the table and lined up another shot. “Yeah, I saw Bruce at the Coliseum. It was in ’85. Before I married Tommy. Before I had Lelen. Shit, during Reagan. Four, side pocket.” The music was loud and she was practically shouting.
The shot rattled home, and Gabby took her beer and swiveled her hips as she walked to the other end of the table. Noah’s eyes followed the arc of the skin-tight Levis over her butt. She had a good full ass. Healthy and well-proportioned and not at all like the Dawn’s bony backside. He smiled to himself. It was like he’d been so wrapped up in Dawn, he’d forgotten about the simplicity of attraction. And he wondered: Was this a first date of sorts? If someone saw him and her together, would they assume they were a couple? He’d put a lot of effort hiding his forehead from Gabby and Lelen, and now he wasn’t entirely sure why. Gabby might not have fit the model for the kind of woman he was attracted to (if such a thing even existed), but to know her was to know a good time. And more than a good time, there was a passion to her that was infectious and that had been missing for his life for a long time.
She lined up another shot and continued with the story. “Yeah, we rode the bus all day from Kayenta to Holbrook to Phoenix and ended up meeting a bunch of End of Times looking Mexicans at the Phoenix Greyhound station. I turned on the whole ‘I’m not from around here’ charm and before Maria and me knew it they were giving us shrooms, and we’d scammed a ride with one of their friends to the fairgrounds.
“We got down there and snuck in through a gap in the bullshit carny fence they had set up. And you know the Coliseum, that great saddle-shaped roof it’s got? It gets me thinking about going to rodeos as a girl and all the cute young cowboys that used to come through town. I’m thinking about them when Springsteen comes out with his shirt half-unbuttoned, chest gleaming. Me, I’m half out of my mind, licking the sweat off my arm I’m so thirsty, and all I can think about is riding Springsteen. Or, him riding me. The thought’s repeating in my head, and I’m laughing and vibrating cause of the rumble of the first song, the shrooms in my stomach, the whiskey we’ve been drinking. Maria and my new End of Times friends probably think I’m insane by this point, but something happens: I recognize he’s playing ‘Badlands,’ and at that moment it’s meant just for me. I’ve come all the way from the Painted Desert, another kind of badlands, and Bruce knows this. I tear the label off the whiskey bottle and write every song in the set down on the backside of the label. Nineteen, plus a four song encore. Still have the set-list. The handwriting on it looks like I was taking notes while in the bed of a truck that was four wheeling.
“Anyways, we spent the night on the fairgrounds in sleeping bags, and I got dropped off at the Greyhound station the next day, ass broke and hungover. Didn’t get back home until three days later after Mama wired me $40, and I hustled another twenty off some winos playing pool in a pit of a bar downtown.”
She stopped talking and laid the pool cue down. She’d been playing the whole time and knocked in two more shots during the story. He’d lost again.
She walked towards him until she was within a few feet. “Yeah, I always say since Tommy died I’d never re-marry, but it’s a lie. I’d re-marry if Springsteen asked.” She laughed to herself. “You got the next couple rounds?”
“Yeah,” he said. The song on the jukebox changed to the next Springsteen song she’d picked. This one he recognized. It was one where his voice sounded impossibly high and young and hopeful. And the keyboard and backup singers gave it the feeling of Motown, or soul. “Hungry Heart?” He said to Gabby.
“Yup,” she said.
They took a seat in a booth opposite each other and he poured them fresh beers. The bar was a big open rectangle and there was a dance floor in front of the pool tables. Everyone one in the place seemed good and drunk and things were getting rowdy now. There were two men in a shoving match by the jukebox who then locked arms in an awkward kind of dance. A college kid sat at a corner table looking like he might vomit at any moment, and there was a puddle on the bar stool below him like he’d pissed himself. By the bathroom, a man with two dark braids running down his back was pulling something from his oversized coat and handing it to a woman. He seemed to know everyone, but was there with no one, and occasionally disappeared into the bathroom with a stranger only to emerge once again by himself.
“Maria, lives up at Gray Mountain,” Gabby said. “She said she’d let us crash with her tonight.”
Noah nodded. “Right.” He practically shouted it and realized how good and warm and drunk he was feeling from all the beer. He was feeling energized by the crowd and was starting to see Gabby in a way he never had before. Something at the gravesite had changed things. That whispered chant of loneliness.
“You really do that every year?” he said.
“What?”
“Go out there and give your old man a gift.”
“Yeah, of course,” she said.
“You mind if I ask how long he’s been gone.”
“Twelve years.”
“It’s a helluva thing to do. Most people would move on at some point.” Noah grimaced. He regretted saying that.
“Yeah, well when you find a good one you start comparing everyone to him, and it’s a hard thing for a man to compete with a ghost. Plus, there aren’t all that great of prospects out there.”
“Not a lot of rock stars on the reservation?” he said and laughed.
“No, just white guys running away from their crazy wives.”
He felt bad and looked at the braided man by the bathroom and thought about what he was doing in there.
She kicked him gently in the shin. “Relax. At least you’re not too ugly, especially when you’re not wearing that dumb bandana.”
He looked at her and she reached across the small table and pushed the bandana off his forehead so it drooped around his neck. The smoky air stung the scratches, and his forehead felt naked and raw like when you remove a band-aid after a couple of days.
“That’s better,” she said, and touched his cheek gently with her thumb as she pulled back.
She smiled at him and didn’t say anything about the scratches. He felt at ease and better than he had in a long time.
“People probably think I’m crazy. Burying books out in the desert for dead men. But you know, you do what you do to try to make it better. Better, even if you can’t ever make it right”
“I guess that’s what I got to figure out.” he said. “A way to at least get forward.”
“Well, there’s no blueprint. I nearly died that first year without Tommy. Sold everything I could because I didn’t have any energy to work. I buried the knife he gave me only to dig it back up and pawn it for formula and whiskey. I remember being there in the pawn shop with the knife, not a fucking cent to my name and my mom with Lelen on her shoulder going on about ‘how are you going to go and give away a dead man’s gift. That makes you just about the biggest Indian giver in the world.’ You’d think I was giving Lelen away. It was a while before I could bring myself to try at life again, but I saw Lelen getting bigger and he started talking and I realized I was checked out. My mom was being his mother. Eventually I got back the knife, started back into carving those wooden figures and got into working the Monument Valley tour.” She smiled and pulled a cigarette from the pack in her shirt pocket. She lit it and blew smoke softly out her nose. In that moment, he thought she was truly beautiful. “Sometimes you just gotta mature. Growing up is really just realizing you can’t have what you had, but at least you ain’t dead.”
“Who said that?”
“Me. Or maybe it’s a Springsteen song, I forget.”
He laughed and they both sipped their beers. It was getting late, on towards last call, and he envisioned the drive back to Gray Mountain and the trailer park and what he’d do the next day. He’d play basketball with Lelen and maybe even drive into Mexican Hat and fix up his old place. He realized it was the first time in a long time he’d thought about anything past the end of the day in front of him.
They were nearly finished with the pitcher when two red-faced and sweaty men approached the booth. They were both Indian with light complexions, maybe even related, but the one on the right was taller and older, dressed in tight denim jeans, boots, and a maroon collared shirt with the top two buttons unfastened. His forehead was full of deep wrinkles and he had pock marks all over his bulbous cheeks. The combined effect was that it made it hard to tell if his was 35 years old or 60.
“What’s a matter, Gabby. You don’t say Hi anymore?” the wrinkly man said. He looked at Noah and grinned. The young one stared blankly and lit a cigarette. He had on a leather bomber jacket over the starched, tanned uniform of a tribal cop, but he was so fresh faced Noah thought it looked like a Halloween costume on him.
“You two friends?” said the wrinkled man.
“Good friends,” Gabby said. “Very good friends.”
“I’m Bert,” the older man said and reached out his hand.
“Wrinkles,” Gabby said. “Everyone on the reservation calls him Wrinkles.”
Noah stood and shook his hand. “Noah.”
“This is Roy.” He pointed to the uniformed kid. “He’s my nehphew. He just graduated from the academy today. Following in his uncle’s legacy. We’re celebrating so drinks are on me. A friend of Gabby’s is a friend of mine. Mind if we sit down?”
“Okay,” Noah said.
But he was sorry to have to share the space. The two cops sat down and ordered drinks for everyone and for a time they sat in a tense sort of quiet.
“We’re headed out in a little,” Noah said. “Just long enough to finish this pitcher.” He looked at Gabby, figuring she’d agree, but the look on her face terrified him. Something dark and distant like she was grappling with an unpleasant memory.
“Yeah, yeah, sure, of course,” Wrinkles said. He sat across from Noah and the nephew, Roy, sat next to Noah, blocking his path from leaving the booth. He stunk of liquor and beer and body odor, and Noah wondered how long they’d been at it. Noah looked across the booth at Gabby and smiled at her and she forced a smile back.
“Good friends, huh?” Wrinkles said. He was drinking a whiskey on the rocks and placed the glass hard on the table so some of it spilled. “Shit, Gabby and me go way back, back before she was even married back. Back then I had to had out a traffic ticket just to get a woman to talk to me he said. I was so goddamned ugly.”
The nephew laughed too loudly and slurred, “You still are ugly, Unk.” He took a bottle from his jacket pocket and poured some into his drink.
Wrinkles threw back his head and rolled his eyes, but they went far back in his head like he was going to pass out right there, but then quickly his head slammed back down. They were packed tightly into the booth, the table wet and covered with glasses, and Noah felt like he had to piss.
“So you two are good friends?” Wrinkles repeated. “I hope you know what you’re getting into,” he said to Noah. “This one doesn’t go with just anyone he said. You wanna get to know her you practically got to beat it out of her. Some people get to wondering if ol’ Gabby even likes men anymore.”
“Just cause I never liked you doesn’t mean anything like that.” Gabby was back in the conversation now. “I just never like your shriveled ass, but there are other men in the room who still got ones worth sticking, even if you don’t.”
He grinned widely. “Shit, Gabby. You don’t mean that.” He turned to Noah. “She don’t mean that. We go way back. Way back.”
Noah was uneasy and turned to the nephew. “So that’s a helluva thing, you being a cop. Lot of power carrying a gun and everything.”
“Not too much,” the nephew said coolly and in too sober a voice.
Wrinkles focused his attention on Noah. “So we know what her deal is, but what’s yours? Where’s your woman?”
Noah was starting to get annoyed and said nothing.
“What I mean to say is you must have some big, white sweet thing back at home. Maybe even a whole litter of white babies, but yet here you are with someone else.”
“Hey, Unk, ease up,” the nephew said. “Have a drink.” He pulled the bottle back out of his jacket and poured more into his uncle’s glass. It was empty and he left it on the table in front of Noah.
“I had one in Mexican Hat,” Noah said, “but it didn’t work out. Not that it’s any of your damn business.” Noah didn’t know why he told the truth, other than he felt it was the only way to deal with this sort of belligerence.
“Mexican Hat!” Wrinkles practically yelled. “Where we hear about that, Roy?”
“On the scanner in the cruiser,” he said. “Bunch of people off the rez getting strung out and busted up in that shitbox.”
“You from Mexcian Hat then, huh?” Wrinkles said.
Noah said nothing.
“Mexican Hat, huh? Where all those white girls are getting up on Indian guys just to get a fix. Imagine that.”
Noah was furious and rose to leave. Gabby stood too, but Wrinkles grabbed her wrist.
“Relax, Noah, relax. Bet you’re thinking here’s this fucking drunk Indian and what the hell should I do next? Bet you’re thinking you gotta defend ol’ Gabby here? That you’ll kick my reservation ass in, right?”
Noah looked around to see if anyone had noticed them, but everyone was too drunk. “I’m thinking you need to let go of her and get the fuck out of here. That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Whoa, come on guys. We’re just talking here. I’m just fucking around. No one has any reason to leave.” He smiled and Noah could see long, thin patches of hair over his bulging, pock-marked checks. They were grotesque and Noah imagined getting Wrinkles on the ground and stomping him in the face with his boot until his cheeks popped and oozed their bloody seed.
Wrinkles let go of Gabby’s wrist. “Yeah, this is all just talk. Just playing around unless maybe Noah don’t want to take it that way. Unless maybe Noah’s old lady is back in Mexican Hat right now. One of those women we heard about all over the scanner, shooting it between their toes and in their butts, sucking dicks for crank. Unless maybe right now while Noah’s here with this woman who ain’t his wife, while we’re here just getting on great and without a fucking care in the world, Noah’s wife is back up in Utah getting down on someone else’s meat.”
There was nothing else to say. Noah turned to get past the nephew, but he stood and blocked his way from leaving the booth.
“Get the fuck out of my way.”
“Make me,” said the kid.
Noah pushed the kid as hard as he could and he fell back out of the booth into another table. Noah scooted out of the booth and Gabby came out after him. They made it to the parking a few steps from the truck, but then Noah felt a huge weight crash on him from behind and knock the air from his lungs. Wrinkles had tackled him, and now they wrestled in the parking lot and a small crowd gathered.
The nephew had followed them out and tried to grab Gabby, but she pulled her knife from her belt and slashed at the air in front of her. “Get the fuck away from me,” Noah heard her say. The nephew stood paralyzed and didn’t help his uncle for fear of getting cut.
But Wrinkles was a big guy and had gotten the upper hand and now stood up and kicked Noah in the ribs. He kicked him again, and Noah felt his mouth fill with blood. He felt he would pass out, and that this was it and that he might not get back up from another kick, and with the strength he had left he reached out and caught Wrinkles’s boot and in mid air and twisted his leg. He yanked the leg and the older man fell and hit his head hard on the ground. Noah stood slowly and nearly fell over, but then he gathered himself and kicked Wrinkles in the face. He saw a fist-sized rock in the parking lot and thought of smashing in the man’s face. He wanted to climb onto his chest and put his thumbs into eye sockets. He wanted to see the blood from his own mouth dripping onto Wrinkles. He could see the ugly man’s broken nose bleeding profusely as Noah pressed hard into his eye sockets with his thumbs. All he wanted now was to hurt this person as much as he possibly could. To hurt this person who he was sure had hurt Gabby. As if he could make everything right by inflicting as much pain as possible on this person. He wanted to watch Wrinkles gasping for breath, to push his thumbs deeper and deeper into Wrinkles’s eyes sockets until he screamed and bled from them. He wanted to see them explode like grapes under the head of a hammer, wanted to feel their juices run over the bloodied crevices of his knuckles, but from somewhere far off he could hear Gabby yelling, “Noah, Noah let’s go.”
Noah gradually came out of his fantasy and left the man laying in a fetal position in the parking lot. Gabby had put down her knife and the nephew rushed over to his uncle’s side.
Wrinkles yelled something over the crowd. He yelled, “We’re old friends, we’re old friends! But she wants a white guy with a fat wife!” Noah heard him say it, but then the crowd and the jukebox drowned him out. People started filing back into the bar, and Noah and Gabby kept walking towards the truck. The truck would take them to Maria’s and Gray Mountain. They would eventually get home, together.
They drove north on 89 towards Gray Mountain mostly in silence, until Gabby told him to take a county road to get to her friend’s house. Noah was relieved to get off the highway. He’d kept looking into his rearview mirror every quarter mile to see if someone was following. He didn’t think they would follow but he wasn’t sure. That kind of drunk was dangerous, but he thought they’d come to their senses. They were cops after all.
The county road to Maria’s house was an unfinished road and the Chevy bounded loudly down the path, shooting up gravel. The radio was on but it was just white noise at this time of night. The wind was blowing hard outside and the truck swayed from side to side from the force. There were dust devils off in the desert that looked like mini tornados in the moonlight, and there were high banks of the summer clouds that brought the monsoonal rains. It was getting on toward 4 in the morning and the sky was just starting to lighten.
They were a mile or two onto the county road when something ran out in front of them. It was stocky and pig sized. Noah swerved and nearly ran off the shoulder. He thought he crashed into a grove of mesquite trees for sure before he corrected and got back on the road. He watched the chunky beast in the rearview mirror bound off into the underside of brush beside the road. The adrenaline shocked them out of silence.
“Some fucking night,” Gabby said. She pulled the bottle of rum from under the seat and took a swig. “I thought you would kill Wrinkles from the look on your face.” She passed it to Noah.
Noah took a drink. “I thought you were going to cut up his nephew.” He laughed. “You and Wrinkles go back a ways, huh?” He felt sorry for asking and realized the full answer to his question was something he didn’t want to know.
“Unfortunately,” she said and she started crying.
“What is it he asked?”
She was silent for a while and reached out and took a drink from the bottle. “Just thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Look, don’t get down about what he said back there. Dawn and all that. That’s not your fault. You’re a good man.” She leaned across the bench seat and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
It felt hot and good and he couldn’t remember the last time a woman other than Dawn had kissed him. He watched the cyanine sky rising up behind them in the east and saw the outline of the new day and felt that things would be okay. He reached over and touched Gabby’s hand and squeezed it gently. There was a huge cloud of dust trailing them, whipped up by the truck and the wind, and faintly, just faintly, he thought he saw a car pull onto the road behind them, and then sirens red and blue coming out of the haze.
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