Kosti and Paula rolled up on their futon in the yellow kerosene light playing hand-spider. ‘Creep, creep, creep,’ whispered Kosti, thinking Paula smelled pretty ripe, burned cheese and skunk, but as soon as she grasped his hoe handle his nose went blank.
‘Hope you don’t turn into a talker when you get old.’ She huffed in his ear.
‘In my family the men die young. You’ll never know what stories I might of made up. Big elk hunts! Mine disasters!’ They laughed, but the thought of the Hat Man’s reeling, loose-mouthed age drove them to a panic of kissing, of slamming each other with their springy pelvic bones.
49
What I See
He’s not sure where he is. So many roads look the same, the repetitive signs, the yellow stripe to the horizon. The same cars and trucks are repeated over and over. But in the early morning when he is not jostled by traffic he finds a way to the back roads where he sees box elder, sumac buds showing green tips.
He comes on a few landmarks, unchanged since he drove along this road a long time earlier. Through the pink rocks, through the stunted oaks the wind roars, the crane shrieks from the swamp. In the morning light the sky comes alive with birds. He remembers the smell of cave-riddled rock. A fox moves over the matted grasses.
He takes the turnoff that runs along the foot of the cliffs. The old rig beats along. The greasy stone is bored with tiny caves the size of stick ends. Travelers have cut their names in the rock in footed capitals and florid ampersands. The dates flood past him July 4, 1838, 1862, 1932, 1876, 1901, 1869, 1937.
The cliffs darken. Words well out of the rock in burning colors, ‘Epiphany H.S. ’67,’ ‘Bobby loves Nita,’ ‘Christ Will Come,’ ‘Fedora.’ ‘Write Belerophon.’ Pheasants fly over the truck trailing stringy tails. On the edge of the fields ruined farms, slatty buildings weak and ready to go. The land heaves, crawls in great, undulating rolls. Tumbleweed banks the fences, LAKE FEDORA. KNIGHT CRAWLERS. FOR A GOOD NIGHT’S REST SLEEP AT THE CUCKLEBURR MOTEL. SEND $60 FOR THE COMPLETE SET.
Now he’s seeing horses, the goddamn beautiful hones he never could ride. Indian singing from the Rosebud reservation, singing like the howling of the wind. The woman announcer’s voice, breathy, quick cadenced, ‘And this for Johnny White-Eyes, died in 1980, he would have been thirty-two today, his mother and all the rest request this, “I’m Proud to Be an American.”’
And when he stops and gets out the silence roars.
He thinks he is going east but does not cross the Missouri. Instead, turns west-northwest on an old man’s reckless hunch. What difference does it make?
Gets to Marcelito, California, stands at the Stars & Moon bar telling them about the real uranium days, about Bullet Wulff who would be a stranger to these times, while in the dark someone uncouples his trailer hitch and makes off with the old round-topped wagon. There go the traps, the Indian’s book, the hat collection, the frying pan and tin dishes, the forever-smiling face of Hoot Gibson.
But he still has the truck, rust starring through the paint. Busted, broke, he drifts to the orchards and fields, into the Stream.
The Stream of migrant labor flows north and east, south again, then west, splitting and doubling back in cranked-out buses and throbbing Cadillacs to the avocados, oranges, peaches and frilly lettuces, beans like alien fingers, potatoes, beets, hairy dirty beets, apples, plums, nectarines, grapes, broccoli, kiwi, tangerines, walnuts, almonds, gooseberries, boysenberries, strawberries. Gritty strawberries, sour and rough in the mouth but as red as fresh blood. It’s easier to get into the Stream than out again.
50
The One Only One
RAY TOOK SO LONG TO DIE, was so unwilling to give up life, that Mernelle thought of plastic bags, sleeping pills, thought of disconnecting his oxygen or crimping the tube until he had to let go. He twisted in death’s gripping hand like a drowning cat in the scruff-clenched fingers of a farmer, yet the hand did not open. The cancer gnawed inside him, sometimes quiescent enough to let him smile, say a few sentences, his guileless eyes fixed on her, his thinness stretched under the sheets. She imagined it in him, a wet maroon mass like a cow’s afterbirth, pulling his life into its own.
Ray’s doctor told her to go to a special counseling group. ‘Coping with Death.’ They met in the doctors’ lunchroom. A room with a thin carpet, maple chairs around a long maple table. A nurse handed her a blue plastic folder. Inside she found a photocopied poem, ‘The Fading Light’; a list of seven types of dying people; stapled pages of practical advice on wills, organ donation, undertakers, funeral costs, tombstone cutters, cremation parlors; lists of nursing homes and hospices; telephone numbers to call for home help; a pamphlet, ‘Dying At Home’; a roster of clergymen, rabbis and priests; advice on choosing a cemetery. She read through the seven types, looking for Ray. The Death-Denier, The Death-Submitter, The Death-Defier, The Death-Transcender. That was Ray, The Death-Defier.
Five others at the table. Seven chairs empty. A chubby Irish nurse, black-lined doe eyes. The nurse said she was trained in dying techniques. Her voice was gentle, slow, the voice Mernelle associated with cancer. The name tag read ‘Moira Magoon RN.’ She looked rosy with vitality. The six around the table wore no name tags. They were tired and slack, their fingers repeated senseless little motions. That was usual, said Moira; sitting beside someone you loved, watching them die, was a death itself. It would take a year to get over it, a full rotation of the thirteen moons before … A mined father whose only daughter would die that night bellowed ‘Never!’ then wept in front of them with noisy gobbles and hawks.
They went through the blue folder. Moira Magoon explained, as one giving a recipe, how to help a dying person like Ray who wouldn’t give up. The Death-Defiers were the most difficult. Mernelle listened, nodding. Moira Magoon made death sound sensible, a logical decision one could make. The decision was easier once the living gave permission. She was saying it was Mernelle who would not let Ray die. Just say yes.
That evening Mernelle sat by Ray’s bed. He was sweaty, half unconscious with drugs and opiates. His mouth was crusted white, parched. The dry hospital room. She took the thin hand, ruined now with needle bruises and discolored fingernails, wasted to a tent of skin over stick bones.
‘Ray, Ray,’ she said softly. ‘Ray, it’s o.k. to let go. Ray, you can quit now. You can let go. You don’t have to fight it, Ray. Just let go. It’s all right.’ She said it many times, keeping her voice soft. He breathed. He fought. She wanted to open the window but there were moths. She could not keep up the soft cancer voice. Her own scratchy iron, low and quick.
‘Ray, you quit fighting, now. Let go, Ray. I mean it! It’s time to quit, Ray.’
He roused. His eyes floated in the translucent face. He looked at her, beyond her at some scalding childhood scene, the mind’s machinery jerking, opening forgotten cupboard doors to the color of a candy apple, the fury of the drunk father, spurting neck of chicken, piles of lumber falling, falling, the lonely smell of coming rain. He looked through the screen door mesh at the girl, her slender back to him, her bare arms, the square of sunlight on the door enclosing his own shadow. ‘Too bad we never did,’ he said and died.
51
The Red-Shirt Coyote
THE COTTONWOODS WERE STILL, the leaves hanging as limp as if the roots had been severed. In the windbreak grove beyond the house the crows were at something, short hard stossquarren hammering the air.
‘In some scran or other,’ said the woman, throwing out her words like a handful of grain, scraping and scraping at the scum behind the faucet with the broken blade of the jackknife.
‘How much longer are you goin’ to scratch away there?’
‘Scratch away? I wouldn’t have to scratch away if you’d do somethin’ about this rotten linoleum. It stinks and it’s caked up so’s I can’t get it clean. I give up,’ she said, throwing down the knife and going onto the porch. He heard her out there, sniveling and snorting. She was asking for it. His hands throbbed.
He
might have gone out and given her a clop or two but she came back in after a few minutes.
‘Somebody, some old bum just come in the gate. Looking for work, I bet. Look at that truck. Some old drifter.’
‘Yeah, the employment said they’d send somebody over. What the hell you think I been waiting around here for all day, sight of your blue eyes? He was supposed to come an hour ago.’
‘You ain’t goin’ to take him on, are you?’
‘Why not? He can be the foreman, go pick ’em up. Why the hell not? So’s I don’t have to keep on draggin’ down there.’
‘He looks pretty bent up. He’s an old drifter. Old and skinny.’
‘We’ll see.’
Loyal had fourteen dollars left from the oranges. Most of the orange money had gone for the clinic bill. He’d slipped coming down with a full bag and the weight swung him against the ladder and broke a rib. Tough luck. And slow to mend. He used to mend up fast, but now he still wasn’t right. Tender and painful to take a deep breath. Every time he coughed it was like spears. So an overseer job sounded all right. He needed the money. Let the Mexicans dig the potatoes. He’d done his share of potatoes and lemons and everything between. California and Idaho, then back again.
But Kortnegger looked like a bad bet, feed cap tugged low over his unseeable eyes. Potato farmers were rough. Baggy pants rolled up at the bottom, pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, pencil stub sticking out. Work shoes. The face just long dirty folds like a bellows of flesh. The woman wasn’t much better. Grubby blouse hanging over a spread of pale green stretch shorts with ribbed front seams to simulate creases, socks around her ankles. But she was the one who asked the questions while Kortnegger hung back and glanced out from under the hat bill. They told him to wait on the porch. He could hear them. She had a voice like a fly in a Coke bottle.
‘I don’t think he’ll work out. He’s half crippled up. Listen at how he coughs. He’ll be down sick most of the time. If he don’t take off he’ll make trouble.’
‘He’d have to be a double-bladed razor to get in front of me. And why the hell don’t you keep your nose out of my business.’
‘Well, you asked me,’ she shouted. ‘Try to give you a civil answer, thanks I get!’
Kortnegger put his face to the screen door.
‘O.k. You’re hired. Put your stuff out in the second bunkhouse, room says FOREMAN on the door. Then come back down here I’ll show you what to do. Tomorrow or the day after I want you to go pick up a bunch of workers, be coming in on the bus with Gerry. Gerry’s my roundup guy. I’ll give you some money, you pay him five dollars a head. Your main job, go pick the stiffs up, keep ’em on their feet. Don’t get no ideas. I know how many’s comin’. You might think number two means second in command, but around here it means shit.’
They were the worst-looking bunch of skags Loyal had seen. Old bindle stiffs, half of them coughing their lungs out and blue with emphysema, the younger ones caved in with malnutrition and liquor and confusion. A couple of them were Mexicans, no English except ‘Hello, I wan’ work,’ probably new to the game or they wouldn’t be on Kortnegger’s farm, red shirt on the one, fancy rag at his neck. Must have been following the farm work route and got mixed in with the end-of-the-road bunch. He’d bet Red Shirt had run the harvests before. He’d brought the other one. Money had changed hands. That was the coyote, the red shirt, the one who knew the ropes. Oh, they’d take the money, all right, they liked the sound of twenty dollars a day cash. And they’d get it, too, for a ten-hour day of more work than any of them had seen in years, looked like.
‘That them? They look like they been dug up.’
‘I guess there wasn’t too big of a choice. Your roundup guy said there’s been a drop in the transients. And there’s very few unattached Mexicans. A lot of farmers get the same guys back every year. Your man says this is all he can get to come up here. This is pretty far up. It’s off the route. I don’t know what the problem is but this is what you’ve got.’
Actually, the man had said he couldn’t get anybody who’d ever heard Kortnegger’s name to sign on. Said he wanted to quit himself. Told Loyal to watch out.
‘Bunch of pukes and patchcocks. I can smell ’em from here. If half of ’em makes it to sundown I’ll be surprised.’
The two Mexicans worked hard and steady. The old bindle stiffs drifted along down the rows, missing half the potatoes. Kortnegger stood for half an hour watching an unsteady pair. When they got to the end of the row he opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. He went back to the house, then called to Loyal, ‘You got to stir them up, there. Know what I mean? You got to stir them up.’
Loyal was tough all afternoon, walking up and down, ‘Come on, come on, pick it up, pick it up,’ whacking the side of his shoe with a piece of lath. In the night one of the old men took off. The next night Kortnegger locked them in the bunkhouse and said nobody would smell pay until all the potatoes were in.
The weather, already dry and hot, baked the rows. The men labored on, potato forks rising and falling, the scooping hands dropping potatoes in the bags. The earth cracked the skin of the men who did not have gloves. Cotton gloves, ‘French-Canadian racing gloves’ said one of the old pickers contemptuously, wore out in a few days. The heat built until the men stripped off their shirts in the row, until they were sunburned and parched and called to Loyal for more water.
The sky darkened, Loyal’s breath drew slow fire lugging the slopping buckets. He’d get coughing and have to stop, doubled over with it. Thunderheads piled up in the west. Maybe a storm would break the heat. Too hot for fieldwork. Lightning, as delicate and rapid as cracking ice, flickered.
Kortnegger came out of the woodshed.
‘It might pass to the north of us. It’s dry here. Two years of drought. I remember the goddamn year when every storm went past. You could see the goddamn rain fallin’ up in Gackle. Two mile north and we never got a drop. Fuckin’ goddamn country. Oughta give it back to the goddamn Indians.’
The rattler trees began to dither. Wind out of the northwest, corkscrewing leaves off the trees, snapping the woman’s dish towels on the Line. The men in the field started to straggle back toward the buildings. They looked like potato bugs.
‘Where the hell do they think they’re going?’ bawled Kortnegger.
‘Storm’s comin’. They can see it as good as you can.’
‘You tell them sons a bitches they want to draw their pay, they keep working. A little rain won’t hurt ’em.’
‘There’s a damn good chance they’ll get hit with lightning. Nobody ever stays in the field through a thunderstorm.’
‘These are goin’ to.’ Kortnegger shouted into the wind. ‘Get back to bloody work you buggers. Any man comes in from that field don’t draw no pay!’
‘They can’t hear you.’
The windbreak trees flung up the white undersides of their leaves like foam on wave crests. The crows cawed in the branches. Strange that they hadn’t gone for shelter. Ravens now, ravens were different from crows, ravens would wheel on the storm currents, mounting the towers of rising air, flying even in the pelting rain, but there were no ravens. The old men stumbled down the field under the pulsing platinum light.
Upstairs the woman pulled down the windows, paint flaked away. The lightning stuttered through the cloud scrim. Kortnegger started the pickup, the engine muttering under the thunder. The woman ran clumsily out to the clothesline to take in the dish towels. They twisted and leapt like gut-shot cats. A hard drop struck Loyal, then another. The pickup was halfway to the men. They faltered; some stopped walking.
Think he’s going to give them a ride, thought Loyal. Kortnegger’s voice cursed and smote them. Through the sheet of rain he saw most of the old men turn back into the field. Three or four of them paid no attention but walked forward, bent against the rain, leaving the field. He could see the sodden red shirt of the feisty Mexican. Where he was, so was the other. The two best workers.
Kortn
egger’s pickup truck cut a muddy arc. It stopped in front of the men for a minute while Kortnegger spoke, then some of them climbed into the back, huddling against the thunderous pour. Lightning stabbed the streaming fields. Kortnegger didn’t stop at the buildings, but kept on going, onto the hardtop road where he turned left, toward town. He’d dump them on the highway, thought Loyal. Good way to get potatoes in for nothing. Fired without pay. Who they going to complain to?
A week, ten days later, another work crew, his rib toughening up, crows in the grove again, blaring caws laid upon each other like loud paint. They woke him at first light. He had to get out of this place no matter how broke. This was bad medicine. He twisted in the blankets trying to block out the staws and haws, but wondered at the crows’ persistence. In the last week they had clamored on and on in the grove of trees. He’d never known crows to keep on that way unless they had a dead beef to fight over, then they’d squabble until it was gone.
He got dressed, half asleep, his grasp of things accelerating until, by the time he leaned over to tie his shoes, he was ready to kill a crow or two. The boards of the porch floor were wet. He heard the passionate barking of a distant fox. A shimmering light coated everything like translucent wax. He went to Kortnegger’s pickup to get the .22 in the window rack, but was not surprised to find the track doors locked. The sour bird was as suspicious as they came. Afraid one of the bums would sneak out and steal his truck. He picked up half a dozen stones from the driveway.
As he came near the grove, the pearly sky showed through openings in the branches, phosphorescent shapes that shifted and closed as the birds jumped about. Venus, rising, bobbed in the leaves. The lookout crow gave the alarm and the flock took off in a screaming cloud. There had to be sixty or seventy of them, he thought. The fox was silent. He walked into the cool trees. Hundreds of twigs and small branches littered the ground, mapped underfoot. A tree was down, a big cottonwood. The trunk was splintered but it had not broken through; the crown was lodged high in two or three mangled saplings. Widow-maker. The weight would bend and press the saplings until their branches gave way and the cottonwood plummeted the final twenty feet. A limb, broken from the trunk, had landed on its branches in a way that resembled a nightmare beast on thin, scurrying legs. The torn wood was as white as a staring face.