Hungry Heart (Draft)

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.

A Few Simple Things (1st Draft)

A Few Simple Things

Noah had finally realized their days of running the hotel together were finished. Things hadn’t been right for a long time, years maybe. That much he knew. But the nerve to call Dawn had only come to him a few mornings earlier. He’d sat in his bathrobe drinking a can of Schlitz and staring out his trailer’s window at the red mass of Rain God Mesa. He watched it for long time and saw the summer monsoon clouds develop and cast shadows over the valley, over the snaking line of the highway, over the small clumps of sheep and the horses and the people on them. He dialed his wife’s mother’s house and was surprised to find out Dawn was still staying there. He asked her to meet him at the hotel. She’d sounded sober, but he could never tell anymore. In any case, she said she’d be there. He called the lawyer next and asked him to mail the papers.

After that, there was little else to do. He’d brewed a pot of coffee and then traded his bathrobe for sweats and went outside. He picked up a basketball on Gabby’s porch and started shooting buckets on Lelen’s hoop. He thought about his wife. He’d told her he missed her. He wished he hadn’t, but it was true. Maybe they’d just talk, he thought. Maybe another shot in rehab was still in the cards. Why else had he kept the bar open? Why else was he continuing to meet the Yazzie brothers? For a long time, these thoughts repeated as he rained in shots from all over the uneven slab of concrete he’d poured between their trailers. He’d gotten to know them well these last few months. They were propping him up in a way like s sort of surrogate family, though neither of them needed him. They were both tough and used to making it on their own, but pouring the makeshift court had made him feel useful. Noah spun on the concrete, bounced the ball and drained another shot. He envisioned finally beating Lelen in a game of one on one that afternoon. The kid was talented and tall and lanky for his age. Leading scorer on his middle school team. Noah smiled. It was a good, simple thing to think about something other than Dawn.

Noah drove in to Mexican Hat two days later. There were weeds in the courtyard of the San Juan Inn and it sat empty, languishing in what should have been the prime summer months of tourist season. The bar he owned was across the parking lot from the hotel. The bartender, Jim, had run the place for him since he’d moved, and he was thinking about selling it to him once he got his debts paid off.

Dawn was nowhere to be found, and Noah busied himself with chores while he waited. He pulled the weeds and checked the mail. There was an envelope with a note from Jim and a few hundred dollars. The package from the lawyer was there too, but he was still unsure what he’d do with it.

Noah set about hammering a “For Sale” sign into the hotel’s courtyard. It had been closed since he moved to the reservation six months ago, but the sign would make it official. He didn’t expect anyone to buy it. In fact, he didn’t care if anyone did. It was just a thing he’d decided needed to be done.

With each blow of the hammer, Noah could feel the ring in his pocket rubbing against his thigh. The damn ring. Another decision that had to be made. Noah finished pounding the sign into the clay and walked to his truck where he placed the hammer on the passenger’s seat. He closed the door and stared at the Chevy. The paint job looked like a relief map, and part of the frame near the front, passenger’s side wheel well was being eaten away like some feral desert creature had been gnawing at it. It resembled the valley itself, a by-product of weather and age and all brown and red and orange.

He’d been upset when he sold the F-150, but now he preferred the anonymity of a junkyard truck. And anyway, it suited his new career well. It made more sense to drive a beater to meet-ups on back county roads, and the bigger bed made for big deliveries to his runners. Thanks to the Chevy the Yazzie brothers were counting hundred dollar bills as they flew like a murder of crows from Apache County all the way to Coconino.

Bootlegger. Bootlegger, that was it. That was what he’d become. He was a bootlegger who lived alone in a reservation trailer. It was a hell of realization to make, but it was true. Yeah, the Chevy was a fine truck he thought, and there was no point in trying to lie about what had happened to him, to try keeping up appearances.

Noah walked back up toward the hotel and entered the lobby through the double, oaken doors. He passed behind the front desk and entered a small office. He flicked on the light and then read the note from the bartender: We need two kegs of Bud and napkins. The delivery went fine last night. They want you to drive the next one out to them on Tuesday. There were a dozen cases of Mickey’s handgrendaes stacked next to the door topped by a case of Old Crow bourbon. The tower rose well over his head, and there was a deep, rectangular indentation in the carpet next to it where a similar stack had been. The walls were bare except for a calendar and a liquor license, the latter of which he took down from the wall to reveal the safe behind it. Noah entered the sequence on the combination lock, and then pulled the small fold of bills from his pocket. They were crisp, as if never handled, and he unfolded the money and peeled away a handful of twenties. He placed the rest of the bills back in the envelope and put it on top of the packaged from the lawyer and put both in the safe.

Noah reached in his front pocket and pulled out the ring. He was ready to place it in the safe when he stopped to inspect it further. This time he’d found it in a pawnshop in Monticello. It was between a boning knife and a crossbow, as if that was a perfectly natural place to find a Tiffany’s engagement ring. There was a tag with a handwritten price on it: $300. He swore this would be the last time and then pulled his wallet from his pocket and put $300 on the counter. It was the cheapest price he’d paid for the ring yet.

In the office, the thought caused a great emptiness to seize him. Was this the third or fourth time he’d bought back the ring? He held it up to the fluorescent lighting in the office and studied the mount and cut of the diamond. His mother helped him pick it out when she was still alive. They drove all the way to Phoenix and visited half the metro area before finding the right one. Noah pulled the ring back from the light and put it in his pocket. He was angry. She wasn’t even going to show up anyway. What was the point of any of it? He knew if he kept it the only thing to do would be to give it back again, and the thought made him feel pathetic. Worse than pathetic, he felt invisible and stung all over like he was naked inside a giant dust devil. All he wanted was to make it disappear. He shut the safe and turned off the lights.

A signature on some papers and 30 miles of highway. Was that all that could separate one life from another? It didn’t seem right after ten years of marriage. How could that much time just come to nothing? But he felt now that Dawn wasn’t coming. And maybe this meant it was truly over.

Noah crossed the parking lot and picked his way down a gentle, rocky incline until he was on the flat sandstone near the river. The San Juan flowed by quietly, brown and murky with the color of the earth through which it cut. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. Puffing slowly, he gazed into the southwest where the sun looked like a huge fireball incinerating the stratified buttes in the distance. The high banks of monsoonal clouds were still gathering in the east and he could smell the rain somewhere far off. It reminded him of the day he was married by the river, but when he tried to remember how Dawn looked that day, all he could see was the woman from the Montezuma Motel 6: oozing scabs on her arms and dried, brown blood on her upper lip like some sort of grotesque mustache.

Noah finished the cigarette and walked alongside the San Juan until he was almost under the bridge that spanned the river and connected Mexican Hat with the highway. A truck went by overhead and made a loud clunking noise about halfway across the bridge as if a child or dog had fallen out of the bed. A second truck followed and made the same noise at the same point, and Noah realized that an expansion joint was merely worn out. He felt drawn, purposeless- lonely to the point he would have preferred something fell from the trucks so he could chase down the owners and talk to them. Only the promise of seeing Lelen and Gabby gave any form to the time ahead. He and Lelen would install the radio he bought. Maybe they’d play basketball. They’d drive to Kayenta and drop Lelen off at Gabby’s mom’s house. And then they’d get good and drunk in Flagstaff and he’d forget about things for a time.

Noah climbed up a little to where the underside of the bridge met the upper edge of the bank and studied the array of garbage piled there. A dusty spectrum of beer cans interspersed with a few bits of clothing, condom wrappers and the fire eaten corpses of mesquite tree branches. Many of the cans had no doubt come from his bar, the cycle of waste partially his own. He bent down and picked up one of the beer cans. The dirt was stained underneath as if a man had recently emptied the rest of the can or his bladder on that spot. He took the ring from his pocket and placed it inside the can, shaking it gently and listening for the rattle like a can of spray paint as he walked back towards the river. He negotiated the last two terraces of sandstone near the bank and then slowly bent down onto one knee and placed the can in the river. For a few moments he let the cool water wash over the crevices in his knuckles, and then he let go. The can floated off with the current of the water, and he watched until it went around a bend and into the oblivion of the great ribbon waterway.

Noah walked back to his truck and decided to drive the length of the city before heading back to the reservation. He still had some faint hope of finding Dawn. After running the town’s main strip, he parked at the Shell station just before the bridge that led out of the city and onto Highway 163. There were no other cars in the parking lot except for a semi-truck idled on the east side of the building. Noah entered the store where the owner sat behind the counter. He was a gelatinous, red-faced man who’d had the same buzz cut ever since Noah could remember.

“How are you, Jim?” Noah said.

Jim was reading the newspaper and didn’t look up. The air in the store pulsed with the heat and the hum of the beer cooler’s compresor. Jim shifted in his seat and flipped to the next page of the paper.

“What happened to your other truck?” he said as he continued looking at the paper.

“I sold it,” Noah said.

Jim placed the paper on the counter and stared over Noah’s shoulder at the Chevy. “Yeah…I figured. Some folks said they’d seen you driving around in it. Said they’d seen you lots of places in it.”

“I been doing some fencing out along the county roads. Just helping some new friends.”

“Uh huh.” Jim snorted. “How you like living in the Valley?”

Noah cracked his neck to hide his annoyance and reached for a cigarette from his pocket. What Jim meant was, how do you like living with Indians? “Look,” Noah said, “I was supposed to meet Dawn up at the hotel and she didn’t show. You seen her?”

Jim wiped sweat from his blotchy face and snorted again. “Yeah…a bit ago. She was, uh, you know, acting like Dawn. Speaking a hundred miles an hour and pouring sweat. I could barely stand to look at her. She asked to use the bathroom.”

“What did you do?”

“Well hell, Noah, I gave her the key to get her out of here.”

“She didn’t come back?

Jim raised his hands up to his shoulders and shrugged, and with the gesture Noah could feel his blood spiking.

“You didn’t see her again?” Noah pressed.

The fat man was irritated now. “What the fuck ya think, Noah? Look around. She ain’t in here. And the day’s too god damn hot to go chasing down addicts for bathroom keys.” Noah turned and walked back out the front door. Jim said something else to him, but the engine of the idling semi drowned it out.

Noah walked around the building to the women’s restroom and knocked loudly. No answer. He knocked again, but the bathroom door was locked. He imagined what she might be doing in there. A flood of scenes came before his eyes, and he could feel his heart was racing. Noah thought of breaking down the door, but instead he started taking deep breaths. Whatever she was doing in there, she had to come out eventually.

Noah realized his own bladder was full from a can of Schlitz he had on the drive over from the reservation and so he tried the men’s bathroom. The door was open and he walked over to the urinal farthest from the stall in the corner. After he finished peeing, he shook himself and hustled his balls. He ran his finger along the seam that split them in two and a strange thought came to him. It was like he was sewn together from two different people. Like there was the side of him that felt bad about what he did with the ring, the side that wanted the papers to remain unsigned, and then this other side. The dark part of him that wished Dawn had a different kind of sickness. That wished she had cancer or something. He felt as though he’d lost her to a mental illness, and that this was more cruel than some other kind of disease. His wife was simply not the same person anymore and he didn’t know how to deal with the schizophrenic thing that had taken her place.

Noah walked to the sink and rinsed his hands. He pulled a couple paper towels from the dispenser and read the graffiti that covered it.

CARY BENALLY’S SNATCH IS WIDER

AND DEEPER THAN THE GRAND CANYON

And below:

A MAN COULD GET LOST IN A THING LIKE THAT

Noah laughed and relaxed for the first time since he’d gotten to Mexican Hat. So it was still possible to smile on a day like today. He finished wiping his hands and turned to leave the bathroom when he heard someone snort loudly and at length. He heard another similar snort and then a slight groan came from the stall. Noah turned around and listened. Another louder groan followed.

“Hey, fella. You okay in there?” Noah said.

There was no response at first, but then he heard another deep, syrupy moan.

Noah knocked at the door. “Hey, man. Whatever the hell you’re doing in there, do it somewhere else.”

The stall was silent and then a loud and baritone voice said “FUCK OFF.”

Normally Noah would have left the situation alone, but then he heard a woman’s voice. Faint, but unmistakable. His legs started shaking with anger as he walked to the urinal beside the stall. He climbed on top of it and looked down: a beefy, bearded man in flannel stood with his pants around his ankles. He was bent over and snorting a white line off the top of the metallic toilet paper holder. A woman knelt at his crouch, and her black hair fell over her face as she worked over his thick, gnarled dick. The man’s pubic bristled like a black patch of steel wool and intertwined with the woman’s greasy mange.

Noah stepped down from the urinal and jogged out of the bathroom and back to his truck with his heart pounding in his ears. He took the hammer off the seat of the Chevy and started back to the bathroom without any kind of plan. Was it even her? Had they noticed him? The thoughts rang in his head as his boots beat on the gravel parking lot.

He reached the bathroom and knocked on the stall door with the hammer. When no one responded he got angrier and knocked harder and harder, and then he was kicking it too with the pointed toe of his boots.

“Get the fuck out of the stall!” Noah heard himself yelling as if he were now outside of his own body.

Finally, the door opened. The bearded man was laughing. He had his pants up and the woman was looking away.

“Relax there, cowboy,” he said. “Me and the lady were just having a little break here.”

Noah raised the hammer and the man took pause.

He looked at Noah and the woman. “Look buddy I can see this is between you and her. Here, you can have her back.” He shoved the dark haired woman at Noah, and as she came rushing into him he could finally see her face, could see if was his wife.

Noah tried to put her in a sort of bear hug, and the man skirted them both and left the bathroom.

“Let go of me,” she yelled, and slipped out of his grasp, so he only held her by one arm. He tried to grab the other arm, but she lunged at him and scratched Noah across his right brow with one of her lengthy fingernails. Finally, he managed to lock her arms behind her and dragged her just outside the bathroom.

Before he could say anything to Dawn, Jim came lumbering around the corner. He was gasping. The man from the bathroom had stepped up in to the semi and the diesel engine roared it headed back out on to the highway.

Jim stared at them for a few moments and collected his breath.

“You both got five minutes to leave. Then I call the cops.”

Noah was silent. There was nothing to say.

Noah walked her back to his truck, and shoved her against the passenger’s side door. Her arms were boney, scabbed over and sweaty. The skin over her cheek bones he looked uncomfortably taut and pale.

“I’m taking to your mother’s,” he said.

“Like hell you are. I’m headed to see my sister in Phoenix.” Her sister was into it too and he was pretty sure that’s how Dawn had started.

“You were supposed to be meeting me. Look, you got two options. I take you back up to your mother’s in Blanding, or you stay here and talk to the cops. No fucking way I’m taking you to your sister’s.”

She said nothing for a while and then got in the truck. He started the Chevy and stared over at her. She was breathing heavily and pouring sweat.

“You need anything?” he asked.

She stared straight ahead at the crack in the windshield. “I need the forty bucks that guy owed me.”

He felt himself go numb and just stared at her for a time. Stared at this person he’d once known and loved and been loved by. He pulled a $100 from his wallet and gave it to her. “Here,” he said, “You can take a taxi to Phoenix for all I care. Now get out.” She took the money and opened the door without protest.

Noah got back on the highway and drove towards his trailer. He started to cry. He hadn’t cried in years. He hadn’t cried through it all. But now he cried loudly. He cried for himself and for Dawn and for everything he’d done or failed to do for her. He’d thought it for a while, but now he knew there was a woman out there who was no longer his wife and that he had no family. He’d go back to the trailers and the concrete court and the long afternoon shadows. He’d play ball with Lelen. He’d install the radio. He’d go to Flagstaff with Gabby and get drunk. A few simple things. That was all he all he could do.

my reaction to this season as told through emoticons

It's been a rollercoaster of a season for KSU bball:


When we first started sucking I was all like but then as it got worse I was like and then after the first KU game I was finally like and now I'm totally like

Ever Since Nebraksa (the story)

Summer, 1990.

Lelen,

I thought you were coming back right after graduation. Your aunt and I are getting worried about you. I got a spot waiting running a combine if you’re back by harvest. The Hendersons said they could use an extra hand with their cattle if you want something more permanent. You been gone a long time, son. Come on back to Pine Ridge. Lincoln won’t miss you half as much as we do.

With Love,

Jimmy

Lelen’s uncle didn’t have a phone like a lot of people on the reservation, and he had spent over a week trying to write a reply. It was difficult to find the right way to explain things to Jimmy, but he decided that when he got home after work he would go over it again and mail it out the next day. He hoped Jimmy would understand everything he had to say, but if he didn’t mail it soon he’d beat the letter back to Pine Ridge and it would all be pointless.

Lelen stood up and left the letter on his bed. His long, black hair was still wet from a shower, and he pulled it back into a ponytail. He combed through the last few items of clothing in the dresser and pulled an undershirt onto his thick upper body. He looked in the mirror and studied the lack of definition in his chest, the softening of his jaw line. He'd gained weight in that sort of white slovenly way, and he hated the way it looked.

Had it really been five years since leaving Pine Ridge? He remembered being so excited the day he left that he drove the three hundred miles between Pine Ridge and Lincoln in just over four hours. It was one of the hottest days of that summer. The cab of the U-Haul didn’t have air conditioning, but it hadn’t bothered him a bit. He simply rolled down the windows and floored the truck along I-80 until it shook and felt like it would fly apart. When he finally got to his new apartment in Lincoln, he took off his undershirt and carried the contents of the truck bare chested. After he had finished with everything, he stood looking out his doorway watching a pretty white girl walk up to her apartment a few doors away, her hands full of groceries. She refused to set down the bags and struggled to unlock her front door. Lelen walked up behind her to ask if he could help, and she turned around very surprised to see a shirtless and sweaty Lakota man staring back at her.

She was Suzy from Omaha, and it was obvious the way she looked over his body that she was not afraid of him. He introduced himself, and she asked him if he’d like to come in for a beer. When he went to grab his undershirt, she told him not to put it back on for her account, and he felt his face flush.

He was impressed by her forwardness and her immediate comfort with him. And he found her blond hair and tan skin arousing. He hadn’t known too many Lakota girls who acted like this, and he sure didn’t know any who looked like this. The only time he'd seen a girl like Suzy was in a Playboy.

In the setting red sun of the summer afternoon they drank and talked. Suzy's father was a car salesman and her mother a nurse. She was close to graduating and thinking about taking her long, tan legs into nursing school. Lelen liked that she was sweet and uncomplicated and not at all turned off by the fact that he was Indian and poor. After a few beers, she leaned over and kissed him, and he was so surprised he barely kissed back. He left her apartment a few minutes later shocked by the fact that a white college girl had actually kissed him. If he had a little more experience he probably could have gone further with her, but even so, he spent the rest of the night thinking that if all the girls off the reservation were this horny and nice, he would never want to leave Lincoln.

Even then, Lelen felt guilty. Wanting to have sex with a white girl was something Jimmy would never understand or tolerate. His uncle was a storyteller in the old Indian mold and friends with the medicine men of the tribe. When he had some big problem, his uncle would still use traditional healing ceremonies to cure himself.

Lelen respected this about Jimmy, but he also felt it made his uncle a somewhat limited man. Jimmy treated every embrace of the white world like it was a betrayal of their own people, and now, five years later looking in this mirror Lelen realized how much different he looked from when he first left the reservation for college. He was so lean and muscular then from working farm jobs all the time. No wonder Suzy had found him attractive. He didn’t look old or out of shape now, but all the time he’d spent on school and working to pay off his debts had left him looking like the sort of urban Indian he knew Jimmy hated.

Lelen sighed and looked down at his watch realizing he would be late for his last day of work. Quickly, he went through his clothes and picked out an old, gray t-shirt, a gas station souvenir that Jimmy bought for him. On the front it featured the faces of Geronimo, Sitting Bull, Chief Joseph, and Red Cloud as they floated like ghosts over Mount Rushmore. He put it on trying to convince himself that wearing it on his last day in Lincoln would be an appropriate tribute to his uncle. But when he stepped out the apartment door and sat down in his car, he realized the shirt made him feel nothing. Not pride, not hope, not even comfort. All he could feel was a consuming sense of confusion, and he knew that just like every night of the past week he would spend this one wondering why he was going home. Sometimes when he pictured Pine Ridge is his mind, skeletons of old Fords and empty cans of Colt 45 were all he could see.

***

Madison squatted down in a corner of the kitchen studying a hole in the wall. There were a few cockroaches scurrying in and out. He stood up and tried to crush one with his foot, but when he lifted up his shoe it managed to scramble back into the hole. His face was amusingly distraught, and his curly red hair fell over his scrunched up forehead. “God damn they’re resilient.”

Lelen stopped peeling the skins of the onions and walked over next to Madison. He patted him on the shoulder and laughed. “It’s all right, man. They’re stronger than us. And anyways, they’re everywhere.”

Madison looked alertly at him. “Everywhere? Naw, don’t tell me these things, man.”

“Yeah, ‘fraid so. Last week I’m saucing a pizza, and I see a big clump in the sauce. I thought it was just some unmixed oregano, so I take the spatula to it and try to break it up, and gradually unearth this inch long cockroach. It’s dead, naturally, suffocated by the sauce. Almost popped it right into the oven.”

Madison thought about it for a while putting his finger to his lips and staring off into space. “Not a bad way to go, I suppose.”

They laughed, and then Madison said seriously, “You know we’re really going to miss you, man. I’m really going to miss you. You’ve worked here a long time.”

It was true. They had been friends pretty much since Madison started working at Dave's three years ago, and part of Lelen was very sad to be leaving such a good friend.

“What’s Pine Ridge got anyway that Lincoln doesn’t have?” Madison asked as he moved away from the cockroach infested corner and started scrubbing the metallic counters with a rag.

“My uncle’s farm for one thing,” Lelen said. “Well, actually he doesn’t own it. but he’s worked there a long time and he’s on good terms with the owner. He said he can get me a couple different jobs when I go back.” Madison gave him sort of a funny look, and Lelen wondered if his explanation sounded as unconvincing as it felt.

“Yeah, but I bet you guys don’t have hot, blond co-eds walking all over the prairie, do you? I hope you remember when you’re sitting there in your shit-stained overalls, milking cows or whatever, that you could be here with me enjoying the beautiful breasts and long, tan legs of corn-fed girls.”

Lelen laughed. “We grow wheat out there and rustle cattle, asshole. Won’t be milking a fucking thing. Or don’t you know the difference? I guess it’s all the same to you people. You don’t have a clue what it’s like to be out there on the prairie doing actual work. You don’t have the ability to imagine the dust and the wind and the dirt of the day opening up to a night sky of a million stars. There are a lot of things out there you guys will never understand. Just things you can’t feel when you’re surrounded by college girls and McDonald’s.”

Madison tried to look mock offended, and he paused while searching for a proper response. “You know you’re absolutely right. What I really need is a guide to take me on a great spiritual quest. To fast until I have visions and find myself out there in the fields howling like a coyote and talking to my dead pet goldfish. Maybe you can be my guide. Busy this weekend?”

Lelen laughed. He knew Madision was joking, and they had both agreed long ago that sometimes the only worse fate for an Indian than being hated by white people was being admired by them.

Madison continued on scrubbing old pizza sauce off the counter tops. “You think if you were my spirit guide you could assign me a spirit animal?” His voice became excited and he spoke quickly. “Maybe like a cockroach. Could a cockroach be a spirit animal? I mean nothing kills them and it seems like they must be everywhere. You guys got them on the reservation? Somehow I can’t imagine cockroaches in nature.”

Lelen had finished cutting the onions and stared at his friend. “Yeah, of course we got them. You guys gave them to us back in the Red Moon Treaty of 1864. You told us they were magic bugs that would cure sickness, and we were so stupid back then we believed you and traded them for about three million acres of land.”

Madison pointed at Lelen’s shirt. “Is that how we got the land to build Rushmore?”

Lelen had forgotten he was wearing the shirt for a second, and he paused. “Well...yeah. You guys traded us magic bugs for sacred rocks and then dynamited the faces of your presidents into them. Still haven’t gotten over that one.”

They were both laughing. Sometimes it really did seem like the only thing most people knew about Natives they learned from watching John Wayne movies. A year ago Lelen had met a drunk girl in a bar who put it in perspective when she refused to believe he was Native. She explained to him, “You can’t be Indian because Indians are all gone.” He spent the rest of the night getting drunk and trying to convince the girl to have sex with the “only Native American left alive.” Part of him could understand why she’d said what she said, and part of him just wanted to blot out her ignorant white face. But in the end, he went home alone, neither her perfect breasts nor his horniness could overcome such frightening stupidity.

The memory depressed Lelen, and he turned away from Madison. “I’m gonna go grab a beer and take a break before we start closing everything down. I’ll be outside if you need me.”

***

Lelen leaned against a car in the parking lot and studied the cracked facade of the building. The streetlights and the half-obscured moon dimly illuminated the restaurant’s sign: DAVE’S PIZZERIA. It made him feel old to look at the weather beaten letters. When he’d started working here, they had been crisp and freshly painted.

There was a light rain falling, and Lelen lifted his face upwards to let it cool his flushed cheeks. Nights like these reminded him of the reservation. By this time next week he would be back in Pine Ridge, and although he wanted to see his aunt and uncle, he also felt a bitter depression. At times, going home felt like nothing more than a senseless obligation, a retreat into a past that no longer seemed usable. It was true that at some point in his childhood there had been something out there in the fields, in working with the cattle, in sitting out under the sheets of fireflies and thunder, but somewhere between Pine Ridge and Lincoln he had changed, and he was no longer his uncle’s kind of Indian. He realized his old identity had been cultivated by Jimmy, by a close-mindedness so steadfast that it could let nothing in from the outside. Only since he’d left Lincoln had Lelen pieced together something for himself, a new perspective where an Indian could sleep with white girls and a get a college degree without feeling like he was betraying anyone.

Lelen sipped from a Styrofoam cup he was holding and licked his lips. The beer inside was cool and bitter. It was starting to warm the inside of his stomach and make his head feel heavy. He took a bigger gulp and spilled a few drops. They dribbled down his chin and mixed with the sweat and grime on his t-shirt. He wished he hadn’t been in such a rush when he left home. Even though the faces of the Indian chiefs were printed on a cheap souvenir, even if he didn’t know what to feel about Jimmy anymore, he wasn't ready to spit in the face of tradition. As bitter as he felt at that moment towards his home, he would not douse his forefathers in Budweiser. In one swift movement, Lelen pulled his shirt off over his shoulders and felt the air hit his sweat covered chest. To Hell with it. He would work in his undershirt. He felt so angry all of a sudden and it only got worse when he realized he had nothing and no one to direct this feeling towards. He looked at the faces on the shirt and thought about saying sorry to them, but he really didn’t know what good that would do.

Lelen sighed and pushed open the side door of the restaurant. It squeaked and then slammed loudly behind him. Inside, the waitresses were busy bussing tables and cleaning glasses. He walked silently over to the beer taps and poured himself another drink. Lelen hoped no one would see him do it, but then he realized it probably didn’t matter since it was his last day. He looked down at his feet and saw one of the drains under the bar had backed up and was flooding water onto the floor. He turned away from the taps and walked swiftly through the murky puddle. Things like this happened all the time at Dave’s, but the smell that followed was something he could never get used to. It was like a mixture of sour milk and decomposing rodents, and it reminded him of the outhouse he had to use as a kid. Lelen smiled when he thought about how proud his Mom was the day they finally got indoor plumbing. She used to tell him to take extra good care to wipe himself while he was in the outhouse because out under the sky and the stars God was watching him. As a child, he imagined having to watch people take shits in outhouses must have been at least one of the many negative aspects of being God. And he wondered why anyone would ever be so interested in a poor boy’s hygiene.

Back into the kitchen, Lelen started cleaning the make line in silence. Madison had disappeared. Lelen looked around at all the stains on the walls and holes in the floorboards, the black sludge under the make line and the old cheese smeared on the metallic tables, and he felt oddly sad. It was disgusting, but he had memories attached to the place. Working in a kitchen reminded him in a lot of ways of the hard work he had to do on the farm, the heat, the tiring manual labor. Plus, all the money he had made working had helped put him through college. In some ways, he had come to relish the atmosphere of dirtiness. He closed his eyes, and took in the various ambient smells of the kitchen. He took a sip of beer and kept his eyes closed. Maybe this smell would remind him of Lincoln when he was back in Pine Ridge. Lelen opened his eyes and sighed. He pulled a couple of dirty metal containers from the make line and walked back towards the dish room.

The new dishwasher was bent over the sink in the tiny, filthy room. He was slowly scrubbing plates with a cloth and muttering to himself. Rainwater from the storm was dripping steadily through a large leak in the ceiling and landing on the back of his neck. The neckline of his shirt was soaked through, but he didn’t seem to notice.

Lelen tapped him on the shoulder. “Can you wash these and bring them back up front for me.” The disher didn’t respond. He was knew and Lelen wasn’t entirely sure of his name.. “Uh…Carlos? can you wash these for me?”

Startled, the disher finally turned around and smiled idiotically. “Hehehe, no problem, boss. Yeah. I wash it.” He continued laughing awkwardly and looking at the space back beyond Lelen’s head.

Lelen set down the containers and walked through the back door of the dish room that led onto the patio. He stared out into the darkness and thought about Carlos. He’d seen this sort of thing before. Old vets or junkies occasionally stumbled by looking for work, and the owner of the place treated them like charity cases. As long as they could sign their names, they could have a job. He felt bad for these guys. He wondered if his Dad had ever come back from the war, if he might have ended up like one of them. He knew a kitchen wasn’t a good place for these guys, but oftentimes it was the only job left for them. Lelen scanned the tables on the patio looking for Madison. They’d closed the porch to customers and turned off the lights because of the rain, but in the back he could see the red glow of a cigarette, and he walked towards it.

“Hope you don’t mind me taking a break, too,” Madison said.

Lelen couldn’t see his face very well, and it felt like an invisible person smoking a cigarette was talking to him. “Naw, it’s fine. I’m just about done closing the front. The only other thing I’ve gotta do now is finish the books. You want to stick around and have a beer after we’re done? “

“Sure. I’m always down for free drinks on the Dave’s tab.”

Lelen turned to go back into the kitchen, and then realized he’d come outside to ask Madison something else. “Hey, where’d Dave find this Carlos guy?”

He heard Madison puff on his cigarette and breathe out. “Oh, you mean Robotrip?”

“Who?”

“I guess you haven’t had too many shifts with him, huh? The other guys started calling him Robotrip because he told some of them he drinks Robitussin to get high. I heard he’s pretty much fried himself on acid too, but I don’t know what I believe. Seems like the street vets and bums always have some crazy problem, but there’s no way to know what they’ve done to themselves since they can’t even remember.”

Lelen stared into the darkness. There were a lot of people on the reservation like this. Some of them had pretty good reasons to do what they did, but he was always struck by how many people just ended up gone because they didn’t have the will to do anything else. Still, Lelen was always interested by these people, by their personal histories. Especially when they men of his father’s generation, men who instead of disappearing in Vietnam like his own Dad, had come back to their homes and were now slowly disintegrating. He wanted to know more about Carlos. “Is he a vet, do you think?”

Madison was silent for a few moments before answering. “I’m not sure. I think he’s actually Honduran.”

***

Lelen and Madison stood by the cash register behind the bar talking. They each had a Styrofoam cup full of beer. All the customers had been gone for a while, and the last waitress had just left. Lelen was finishing the books and Madison was done cleaning when Carlos wandered out from the kitchen. His dark skin was beaded with sweat and water. He took off a wet ball cap he was wearing and slicked back his thin black hair.

Carlos picked up the clipboard with all the employee time cards and flipped to the one with his name. He held it out to Lelen, and stared at him. His eyes looked tired, but they also seemed clearer since Lelen had last talked to him.

“Sign me out, boss?” Carlos asked.

Lelen took the clipboard and signed. Carlos had ridden his bicycle to work, and he turned to go get it from the patio.

“Carlos,” Lelen called. He was surprised by the loudness of his own voice. “Were you ever in Vietnam?”

He stopped and turned around. “Huh...Vietnam. No. Why? Were you?”

Lelen laughed out loud when he heard this. It would have been obvious to most people that he was far too young to have been in the war. “No, man. I’m only twenty-three.”

Carlos stared at him wide-eyed. “Oh.” He paused again as if each statement he made took some great summoning of all his mental faculties. “Why do you ask me?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just want to know where you come from and how you ended up here.”

“Where I come from? Oh. I come from a plantation. My father’s dead now, but when he was alive he owned a giant plantation. We lived in Honduras.” He stopped, looking tired from the effort of talking.

“Were you rich?”

“Um...rich? Yes. We lived in a mansion. We had lots of servants. We owned a lot.”

Carlos turned and walked out to the patio where he grabbed his bike and wheeled it out the side door of the restaurant. He didn’t say good night.

“Why did you ask him that?” Madison asked after Carlos had left.

Lelen sipped from his beer and walked over to one of the empty tables in the dining room. “I don’t know. I guess I was just thinking of a story Jimmy told me once.”

Madison followed and sat down. “He knew someone like Carlos?”

“On the rez, everyone knows someone like him. Do you know where White Clay, Nebraska is?”

Madison thought about it for a second. “Can’t say that I do?”

Lelen took a drink from his cup and smiled at his friend. It occurred to him that Madison hadn’t asked him why he took off his Rushmore t-shirt. Maybe he just sensed he shouldn’t say anything about it. Maybe he just didn’t care. “Well, White Clay has about twenty residents. When you go through it you’ll miss it because the sign is all gnarled and twisted from where drunk Indians have plowed their cars into it. You see, because even though it’s got only twenty residents it’s got four stores that sell liquor. About fifteen thousand cans a day of beer, around four million a year. And almost all of what they sell is bought by Lakota fresh from picking up their welfare checks. Hell, they even got a place in White Clay where the old Indian vets can cash their checks from the V.A. and buy their booze all in the same place.”

Madison looked surprised by this. “Even for us white people that’s pretty fucked up.”

Lelen wasn’t sure he agreed. “Yeah, that’s true in a way. But, you know nobody makes us buy all the booze. I mean there are all kinds of things we could do besides buy beer.”

Madison went quiet for a moment, and Lelen decided not to argue. “Anyways, so when my Dad and uncle were boys they went to a two room school house. They were a grade apart, but they used to lump multiple grades together back then because they didn’t have enough funding to pay for more teachers or classrooms. My Uncle Jimmy told me that he and my Dad used to have to walk to school from their little shack along the main road, and everyday they would pass by one of the two gas stations in Pine Ridge. The guy who ran the place was half-Lakota and half-white, and he’d left town and gotten some business degree, and when he came back he managed to save and borrow his way into buying the gas station.”

Lelen paused for a second and drank. He was starting to feel a little drunk from the beer. He sipped again from his beer and went on. “So the parents of the guy who bought the gas station were dead, and he lived with his grandfather who was a real old drunk son of a bitch. The people in town said the old man had been a boy when Wounded Knee happened, and he could remember the look in General Forsyth’s eyes when he shot this little girl in the face. My uncle didn’t exactly know if this was true because the old man was pretty much crazy and blind from drinking. “

“The old man’s grandson, the owner of the gas station, was something of an asshole. People said he resented his Indian side, and he resented having to come back to the reservation to take care of his grandfather. They said he couldn’t stand coming back just to buy a gas station after he spent all this time at college getting a business degree. And the grandson was angry at the old man for being the way he was. He was scared the old man would hurt himself or get lost if he left him at home, but he also hated having this blind, crazy drunk with him all day. He gave him a chair on the porch of the gas station, and when he’d close it down each night, he’d drive the old man over to White Clay and buy him some beer. It was like a treat if he was well-behaved and stayed quiet during the work day, and so the people in Pine Ridge eventually took to calling the old man Sparky, since it seemed like his grandson treated him like a dog.”

“Well, sometimes Sparky would get a little tired of waiting for the booze and he’d want to take matters into his own hands. Sometimes he’d wander off the gas station porch and walk up to the pumps and he’d huff a little gasoline. More than a few times my father and uncle would be walking home from school along the road, and they’d find Sparky wandering in it. They’d usually take him by the hand or call his grandson and take him back over to the gas station. People thought the grandson ignored it when his grandfather huffed from the pumps because he liked it when the old man got too gone and passed out and left him alone. Most people in the town were pretty good about watching out for Sparky when they traveled the road, and they knew that if it was late in the afternoon they were liable to see the old man wander out in front of them. But, one day there was this white guy from out of town hauling some new farm equipment through Pine Ridge up north to one of the farms outside of town. Well, I guess Sparky had huffed a little too much that day, and the white guy didn’t see him and that was pretty much the end of Sparky. My uncle said that he and my Dad were walking home when they came upon a crowd of people surrounding the old man in the middle of the road. My uncle said Sparky’s eyes were open and staring out at them, but his belly was opened up and all manner of him had spilled out on the road. He was dead in a pool of himself.”

Madison stared wide-eyed at Lelen. His face was horrified looking, but he remained silent.

“So, that night at dinner my grandmother asked my uncle and Dad what happened, and they told her that Sparky had died. She said how terrible it was that Sparky got ran over, and how awful his grandson was for letting it happen. And I guess my father just stared at my grandmother like he didn’t understand what she was talking about. My uncle told me that after a long pause my father finally said to my grandmother, ‘Sparky didn’t get run over, Mom. He got split open by his home.’ My uncle said my grandmother was so angry she spanked my Dad until he had great purple welts on his butt. After that, Jimmy said he and my father didn’t talk about it again until they were nearly grown up.”

They were both silent for a long time before Madison spoke. “You took your Rushmore shirt off.”

“Yeah. I spilled beer on Sitting Bull.”

“You wanted to keep him clean?”

“I guess so. Mostly I just didn’t want to shit all over him while he watched me.”

Madison stood up from the table like he was ready to leave. “So, you think the old man, the grandfather, did it to himself?”

Lelen rested his arms on the table and sighed. “I don’t know. It seems like my Dad thought so. What Carlos said just made me think of it. I mean all I know is there’s just a lot of things acting on you, and how you react is what matters most.”

“Is that why you’re not going to stay in Pine Ridge? Because you’re afraid of how you’ll react?”

“Sort of. I mean mostly I’m not staying because I already know what’s out there, and that it won’t make me happy.”

Lelen stood up and walked with Madison to the front door of the restaurant. Outside on the sidewalk they hugged, and Lelen felt sadder than he had at any point during the night.

“I’ll miss you.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll write you once I get settled there.”

“Do you think you could ask around the reservation when you get back and see what people think of the idea of a cockroach as a spirit animal? I’m telling you I think there’s something there.”

Lelen smiled. “I won’t, but I’ll write you soon. Bye.”

“Bye, Lelen.”

***

Back in his apartment Lelen stepped out of the shower and dried off. He walked into his living room and sat down to finish the reply to his uncle. When it was done, he read it back to himself.

Jimmy,

I’m quitting my job and coming back to Pine Ridge. Today (Sunday) was my last day, and the lease on my apartment will be up at the end of the week. I reserved a U-Haul for Friday morning, so I should be home by late afternoon.

I want you to know that I love you guys and appreciate everything you’ve done for me since Mom died. In a lot of ways, you guys are my parents. I feel like I owe you something, but part of the reason I’m writing you is to let you know that I don’t plan to stay on the reservation past the end of the year. I know. I promised. But there are a lot of things I still want to do. Not just in Lincoln and not just in Pine Ridge. I want to make some money on the reservation, so I can apply to grad school and hopefully get in by the spring. I’m thinking of going to school at KU, so I can get into that writing program they’ve got down there in Lawrence. I want to earn my master’s and teach. I want to travel.

Don’t get me wrong. I love home. I can’t replace it with anything else. I know you might think I’m trying to, and maybe after reading this letter you’ll think me derelict. But I’m not. I know exactly where my home is, and I know it’s possible to make a life out of the reservation if you have the will to. But I don’t think I do, and I don’t really want to spend the time finding out. I hope this letter finds you and auntie well and that there’s still a job waiting for me when I get back.

Love,

Lelen

De Facto and Spanish Bombs

Re-done De Facto and hasty cover of Spanish Bombs

http://www.myspace.com/eversincenebraska

Ever Since Nebraska

I decided to create a myspace to host whatever recordings I come up with here in Seattle. Because I just moved to Capitol Hill and am still jobless, there has been ample time to discover some of the nuances of self-recording.

I decided to name the project "Ever Since Nebraska." It was the title of the first E.P. Nick and I recorded as Fireworks, a recording we used to maneuver into the bloated, prosaic world of Tucson music. Fueled by coffee and No Doz it was probably not as mindblowing as we imagined it to be, though a columnist at the Tucson Weekly did write a glowing review that we got a lot of mileage out of. I miss dearly the camaraderie of my former bandmates, and control freak though I may be, their creative input; I am not nearly as talented as any one of them.

With that said, I decided to cover the titular track from Bruce Springsteen's "Nebraska" record. Keeping with the aesthetic of the original, I recorded it live and with plenty of reverb.
Here's the link: http://www.myspace.com/eversincenebraska

Speaking of Springsteen covers, my friend Jack has his own version of "Atlantic City." He's an eminently talented guitarist but still new to the world of singing. His version is here:
http://www.ilike.com/artist/Jack+McKever/track/Atlantic+City

The picture is of me feeding a wild rez dog in Monument Valley, AZ. Not exactly Nebraska, but pastoral all the same

As they drove west into the sunset, the dusk seemed to linger on the horizon for much longer than it should. All across Noah's line of sight a pale orange merged into yellow and then blue and then dark, but it seemed to take forever. He felt a sort of cognitive dissonance because for a brief moment it was as if the sun was unsetting itself. He realized that the dusk lingered, not of its own will, but because in a sense he was chasing it.

He'd seen thousands of these Arizona sunsets but on this open stretch of Highway 191, on this Friday night, it caused him to speed up...65, 70, 80, 90 miles per hour until it seemed like he drew out the process an hour longer than it should have lasted. Gabby didn't comment on the speeding. In fact, she and Noah remained silent for most of the hour. And when the dark finally won out, about 30 miles outside Flagstaff, only then did they resume conversation.

Indian Killer

I just finished Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer and am stunned by this lackluster effort. I've read two of his short story collections, Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven and Ten Little Indians, and found them both entertaining and innovative in construction. And so it pains me to write negative things about Alexie. He's an easy guy to root for and abundantly talented. But, Indian Killer finds Alexie mired in a permeating hatred that deprives his characters of depth and interest. The point of view oscillates amongst a vast cast of characters, providing snippets of insight into their lives without fully developing any one of them. The white characters are stereotypical to the point of caricature. They are buffoons, violent, stupid, wooden, set pieces in a war against five hundred years of oppression and violence. Certainly Alexie's poor development of white characters provides a greater commentary about the pitiable state of mainstream American culture in general, but in doing so he makes these characters uninteresting to the reader. If you have a novel full of Rush Limbaughs and racist rednecks or bleeding heart Indian wannabes, it might make for entertaining plot twists. It might provide a satisfying piece of genre fiction. It might even make one hell of a movie. But, it does not leave much room for the pleasurable textures of literary fiction.


The book at large is riddled with ultra convenient plot developments that come off as contrived, sloppy, and perhaps worst of all, just plain lazy. The dialogue is another lowlight. Many of the conversations sound awkward and sometimes unbelievable. For such a respected author, a torchbearer for the second wave of the Native American literature renaissance, the lack of effort evident in this novel is, at times, shocking. And speaking as a fan of Alexie's, I find myself disheartened and hurt.

The Double Dream of Spring

I gotta start by saying I miss you. And I love you. And sorry ‘bout last year. I thought it would be nice to give you back your knife as a present. You always did like the detailing on the pearl handle. I thought maybe you could use it wherever you are, but after I buried it things got tough. They only send your pension checks once a month, and they ain’t much. Momma can’t pay a thing with the money she’s got, and me and Lelen needed to eat. You should of heard Momma carrying on while we were in the pawn shop.
She says, ‘Now, Gabby, how you gonna go and give a dead man a birthday present and then pawn it off. That just about makes you the biggest Indian giver in the world.’
And boy was I embarrassed in front of the man at the pawn shop. And maybe she was right, but I bought formula and diapers and a quart of rum with the money I got from it, and you know, I don’t regret it cause I know you woulda been okay with it. And Momma was okay with it too once she got a couple snuffs of the booze in her.
You’re probably looking down on me right now, and you see I got something here with me, so I’ll just go ahead and come out with it. I’ll never be able to replace that knife, but I got you another present, and I promise I ain’t gonna go and dig this one back up. Partly because it doesn’t have any re-sale value, but mostly cause I think you’ll like it more than that knife anyway. It’s a book of poems called the ‘Double Dream of Spring,’ and it’s by Ashbery. I know you always liked him, so before I leave here today, I’m gonna take a shovel and bury it real deep next you, so you don’t have far to reach for it.
I bought it at that place in Flag we went to when you first moved out here. Momma and I took the bus over there a couple days ago, and boy, that store hasn’t changed a bit. I was poking around through the poetry section when this younger guy says from behind the counter, ‘Excuse me, m’am. Do you need any assistance?’ Just like that. In that snooty damn voice they always use when talking to us. And you know how those businessmen are anyways. It’s the same old story, they either act like we’re stealing or they try to rip us off, and this one was no different. He was eyeballing me and Momma and Lelen from the moment when we walked in. One hand on the phone to call the cops and one hand on the cash register. He was wearing this sweater vest and tight little plaid pants, and I swear, he was just about as obviously queer as you can get in this world. And so I says to him. ‘Yes, young man. I’m looking for a book a poetry by this guy, but I can’t remember his name. I’m hoping you can help me out.”
He kind of relaxed and then says real condescendingly, “You’ll have to be more specific than that, m’am. We’ve got hundreds of books of poetry here.”
And I start poring over the books pretending to try and remember Ashbery’s name. I say ‘well, it’s just on the tip of my tongue. It’s Ashley, or Adeli, or Audenberry…” And the clerk just keeps staring at me real annoyed like, and I go ‘Oh, hell I don’t know. He’s a big queer and he’s real into surrealism.”
Boy, did that grab his attention fast. He darted over and says, “We don’t tolerate that kind of language in here.”
I look at him all innocent and said, “Well, hell, I was just trying to be specific.”

Hungry Heart

Noah stood up from underneath the hood and reached for the can of Schlitz that was balanced on the front bumper of his 72 Ford. He wiped the sweat and grease from his brow with his left hand and then, with his right, he put the beer to his mouth and swallowed the contents in a single swig. He squinted down along the road to where its jagged ruts met up with Highway 160, and barely, just barely, he could see Gabby's figure striding towards.

Even from a distance, he could tell who it was by the three legged dog loping along at a desperate pace to keep up with its owner. And as she came into clearer focus, Gabby's style was unmistakable: a creased brown leather jacket, black jeans, and black boots caked in dusty pink by the redness of the earth. She wore a pair of headphones held together by duct tape that clashed with the dark sheen of her ponytailed hair. Her army surplus bag hung over her right shoulder stretching down to where it met a large knife hanging from her belt. She looked ominous, if still familiar. A few years ago a friend managed to score a video tape player and a copy of "The Road Warrior" from the Mexican Hat pawn shop. Noah laughed. The resemblance to the Mel Gibson character was similar, except Gabby was real, and this wasn't the post-apocalyptic future; it was just Arizona.