First, Body

by Melanie Rae Thon

In the grass behind my father’s cottage, a green truck sits without tires, sinking into the ground. If I close my eyes and touch its fender, I can feel everything: each shard, the headlight shattering, the stained glass windows bursting at last, the white feet of all the saints splintering, slicing through a man’s clothes.

  Twenty-one years since that night, but if I lie down beside that truck, I can feel every stone of a black road.

  Fourth of July, 1971. This is how the night began, with my small lies, with tepid bathwater and the smell of lilac — with ivory silk under ivory gauze — with the letter opener slipped in my purse. I was thinking of the gully long before, believing I was big enough to protect myself.

  Jean and I knew other boys now. Boys who crashed parties in the borderlands at the edge of every town.

  I asked my father for the truck. I promised: Jean’s house, then up the lake to Bigfork to see the fireworks and nowhere else. I said, Yes, straight home. I twisted my hair around my finger, remembering my mother in a yellow dress, lying to my father and me, standing just like this, all her weight on one foot, leaning against the frame of this door.

  We drove south instead of north. A week before, two boys in a parking lot had offered rum and let us sit in the back seat of their car. They said, Come to the reservation if you want to see real fireworks.

  We scrambled down a gulch to a pond. Dusk already and there were maybe forty kids at the shore.

  We were white girls, the only ones.

  Jean had three six-packs, two to drink and one to share. I had a pint of vodka and a quart of orange juice, a jar to shake them up. But the Indian kids were drinking pink gasoline — Hawaiian Punch and ethanol — chasing it down with bottles of Thunderbird. They had boxes full of firecrackers, home-made rockets and shooting stars. They had crazyhorses that streaked across the sky. Crazy, they said, because they fooled you every time: you never knew where they were going to go.

  The sky sparked. Stars fell into the pond and sizzled out. We looked for the boys, the ones who’d invited us, but there were too many dressed the same, in blue jeans and plaid shirts, too many cowboy hats pulled down.

  One boy hung on to a torch until his whole body glowed. I saw white teeth, slash of red shirt, denim jacket open down the front. I thought, He wants to burn. But he whooped, tossed the flare in time. It spiraled toward the pond, shooting flames back into the boxes up the shore. Firecrackers popped like guns; red comets soared; crazyhorses zigzagged along the beach, across the water, into the crowd.

  The boy was gone.

  In the blasts of light, I saw fragments of bodies, scorched earth, people running up the hill, people falling, arms and legs in the flickering grass, one hand raised, three heads rolling, and then the strangest noise: giggles rippling, a chorus of girls.

  They called to the boy, their voices like their laughter, a thin, fluttery sound. Niles. They sang his name across the water.

  Then I was lying in the grass with that boy. Cold stars swirled in the hole of the sky. In the weird silence, bodies mended; bodies became shape and shadow; pieces were found. Flame became pink gasoline guzzled down. Gunfire turned to curse and moan.

  This boy was the only one I wanted, the brave one, the crazy one, the one who blazed out. He rose up from the water, red shirt soaked, jacket torn off. I said, You were something, and he sat down. Now I was wet too, my clothes and hair dripping, as if he’d taken me into the sky, as if we’d both fallen into the pond.

  I whispered his name, Niles, hummed it like the girls, but soft. He said, Call me Yellow Dog.

  My purse was gone, the letter opener and my keys lost. The boy kept drinking that pink gasoline and I wondered how he’d die, if he’d go blind on ethanol or catch fire and drown. I’d heard stories my whole life. The Indians were always killing themselves: leaping off bridges, inhaling ammonia, stepping in front of trucks. Barefoot girls with bruised faces wandered into the snow and lay down till the snow melted around them, till it froze hard.

  But tonight this boy was strong.

  Tonight this boy could not be killed by gas or flame or gun.

  He had a stone in his pocket, small and smooth, like a bird’s egg and almost blue. He let me touch it. He said it got heavy sometimes. He said, That’s when I watch my back — that’s how I know. I kissed him. I put my tongue deep in his mouth. I said, How much does it weigh now? And he said, Baby, it’s dragging me down.

  My clothes dried stiff with mud. I remember grabbing his coarse braid, how it seemed alive, how I wanted it for myself. I thought I’d snip it off when he passed out. His hands were down my cut-off jeans. He knew my thoughts exactly. He whispered, I’ll slit your throat. I let his long hair go. His body on me was heavy now. I thought he must be afraid. I thought it must be the stone. He held me down in the dirt, pressed hard: he wanted to stop my breath; he wanted to squeeze the blood from my heart. I clutched his wrists. I said, Enough.

  I imagined my father pacing the house, that sound in the hall. I heard my own lies spit back at me, felt them twist around bare skin, a burning rope.

  I remember ramming my knee into the boy’s crotch, his yelp and curse, me rolling free. I called to Jean, heard her blurred answer rise out of some distant ground.

  I remember crawling, scraping my knees, feeling for my purse in the grass. Then he was on me, tugging at my unzipped jeans, wrenching my arm. He said, I could break every bone. But he didn’t. He stood up, this Niles, this Yellow Dog. He said, Go home.

  He was the one to find my purse. He took the letter opener, licked the silver blade, slid it under his belt. He dropped my keys beside me. He said, I could have thrown these in the water. He said, I didn’t. You know why? Because I want your white ass gone.

  When I looked up, the stars above him spun.

  I yelled Jean’s name again. I said, Are you okay? And she said, Fuck you — go.

  I staggered up the hill. I saw my father at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. I heard every word of his prayers as if I were some terrible god. I felt that tightness in my chest, his body. I felt my left leg giving out.

  I saw what he saw, my mother’s yellow dress, me standing in the door. I smelled his cigarettes. He said, The cherry trees, they break your heart.

  I drove up that road through the reservation, my mother’s laughter floating through the open windows of the truck. She made me dizzy, all that dancing — I felt myself pulled forward, twirled, pushed back, hard.

  The lights of the steeple still burned. I was Noelle, the same kind of woman, a girl who couldn’t stand up by herself. I wanted to weep for my father. I wanted not to be drunk when I got home, not to smell of boy’s sweat, sulfur and crushed lilacs, mud. I wanted to stop feeling hair between my fingers, to stop feeling hands slipping under my clothes.

  The dogs on the roof growled. All the white plaster deer surged toward the road. Wind on my face blew cold.

  Past the Church of the Good Shepherd, a hundred pairs of eyes watched from the woods, all the living deer hidden between trees along this road. I practiced lies to tell when I got home. I thought, My mother and I, we’re blood and bone. I saw how every lie would be undone. I watched a dark man wrap his arms around my pale mother and spin her into a funnel of smoke.

  Then he was there, that very man, rising up in a swirl of dust at the side of the road — a vision, a ghost, weaving in front of me. Then he was real, a body in dark clothes.

  There was no time for a drunken girl to stop.

  No time to lift my heavy foot from the gas.

  I saw his body fly, then fall.

  I saw the thickness of it, as if for a moment the whole night gathered in one place to become that man, my mother’s lover. A door opened at the back of a bar in Paradise. His body filled that space, so black even the stars went out.

  I am a woman now, remembering. I am a woman drinking whiskey in a cold car, watching the lights in my father’s house. I am a woman who wants to open his door in time, to find her father there and tell.

  Twenty
-one years since I met Vincent Blew on that road, twenty-one years, and I swear, even now, when I touch my bare skin, when I smell lilacs, I can feel him, how warm he was, how his skin became my shadow, how I wear it still.

  He was just another drunken Indian trying to find his way home. After he met me, he hid his body in the tall grass all night and the next day. Almost dusk before he was found. There was time for a smashed headlight to be reassembled. Time for a dented fender to be pounded out and dabbed with fresh green paint. Time for a girl to sober up. Time for lies to be retold. Here, behind my father’s cottage, I can feel the body of the truck, that fender, the edges of the paint, how it chipped and peeled, how the cracks filled with rust.

  I waited for two men in boots and mirrored glasses to come for me, to take me to a room, close the door, to ask me questions in voices too low for my father to hear, to urge and probe, to promise no one would hurt me if I simply told the truth.

  Imagine: No hurt.

  But no one asked.

  And no one told.

  I wanted them to come. I thought their questions would feel like love, that relentless desire to know.

  I waited for them.

  I’m waiting now.

  I know the man on the road that night was not my mother’s lover. He was Vincent Blew. He was mine alone.

  He lies down beside me in my narrow bed. I think it is the bed my father built. The smell of pine breaks my heart. He touches me in my sleep, traces the cage of my ribs. He says, You remind me of somebody. He wets one finger and carves a line down the center of my body, throat to crotch. He says, This is the line only I can cross. He lays his head in the hollow of my pelvis. He says, Yes, I remember you, every bone.

  He was behind me now, already lost.

  I didn’t decide anything. I just drove. My hands were wet. Blood poured from my nose. I’d struck the steering wheel. I was hurt, but too numb to know. Then I was sobbing in my father’s arms. He was saying, Ada, stop.

  Finally I choked it out.

  I said, I hit something on the road.

  And he said, A deer?

  This lie came so easily.

  All I had to do was nod.

  He wrapped me in a wool blanket. Still I shivered, quick spasms, a coldness I’d never known, like falling through the ice of a pond and lying on the bottom, watching the water close above you, freeze hard. He washed the blood from my face with a warm cloth. His tenderness killed me, the way he was so careful, the way he looked at the bruises and the blood but not at me. Every gesture promised I’d never have to tell. He said, You’ll have black eyes, but I don’t think your nose is broken. These words — he meant to comfort me — precious nose — as if my own face, the way it looked, could matter now.

  He said he had to check the truck. He took his flashlight, hobbled out. I couldn’t stand it, the waiting — even those minutes. I thought, My whole future, the rest of my life, like this, impossibly long.

  I moved to the window to watch. I tried to light a cigarette, but the match kept hissing out. I saw the beam moving over the fender and grille, my father’s hand touching the truck. I imagined what he felt — a man’s hair and bones. I believed he’d come back inside and sit beside me, both of us so still. If he touched me, I’d break and tell.

  But when he came inside, he didn’t sit, didn’t ask what, only where. I could have lied again, named a place between these orchards and Bigfork, that safe road, but I believed my father was offering me a chance, this last one. I thought the truth might save us even now. I described the place exactly, the curve, the line of trees, the funnel of dust. But I did not say one thing, did not tell him, Look for a man in the grass.

  He said, You sleep now. He said, Don’t answer the phone.

  I had this crazy hope. I’d heard stories of men who slammed into trees, men so drunk their bodies went limp as their cars were crushed. Some walked away. Some sailed off bridges but bobbed to the surface face up. I remembered the man’s grace when we collided, the strange elegance of his limbs as he flew.

  I believed in my father, those hands holding blossoms in spring, those fingers touching the fender, my face — those hands wringing the rag, my blood, into the sink. I believed in small miracles, Niles flying into the pond hours ago, Yellow Dog wading out.

  I imagined my crippled father helping the dazed man stumble to the truck, driving him to the hospital for x-rays or just taking him home. I thought my father had gone back alone so that he could lift the burden of my crime from me and carry it himself, to teach me suffering and sacrifice, the mercy of his God.

  Even if the police came, they’d blame the Indian himself. He’d reel, still drunk, while my father, my good father, stood sober as a nun.

  For almost an hour I told myself these lies. Confession would be a private thing, to my father, no one else. He would decide my penance. I would lie down on any floor. I would ask the Holy Mother to show me how I might atone. I would forgive the priest his ignorance when wine turned to blood in my mouth.

  I thought of the cherries my father found after the hail, the bowl of them he brought back to the cottage — I thought of this small miracle, that any had been left whole. We ate them without speaking, as if they were the only food. I saw my father on his knees again, the highway. He gathered all the pieces. Glass and stone became the body of a man. My father’s fingers pressed the neck and found the pulse. I knew I couldn’t live through fifteen minutes if what I believed was not so.

  Two hours gone. I saw the bowl slipping from my hands, my faith shattered, cherries rolling across the floor. I saw the man more clearly than I had on the road, the impossible angles of his body, how he must have broken when he fell.

  I heard my father say, Thou shalt not kill.

  But this was not my crime. The Indian himself told me he accepted accidents, my drunkenness as well as his own. Then he whispered, But I don’t understand why you left me here alone.

  I knew I should have gone with my father, to show him the way. I imagined him limping up and down that stretch of highway, waving his flashlight, calling out. On this road, wind had shape and leaves spoke. A bobcat’s eyes flashed. A coyote crossed the road. I felt how tired my father must be, that old pain throbbing deep in the bone.

  I tried not to count all the minutes till dawn. I tried to live in this minute alone. I wanted to speak to the man, to tell him he had to live like me, like this, one minute to the next. I knew the night was too long to imagine while his blood was spilling out. I promised, He’ll come. I said, Just stay with your body that long. There’s a hospital down the road where they have bags of blood to hang above your bed, blood to flow through tubes and needles into your veins — enough blood to fill your body again and again.

  I went to the bathroom, turned on the heater. I needed this, the smallest room, the closed door. I crushed the beads of lilac soap till I was sick with the smell. I heard the last crickets and the first birds, and I thought, No, not yet. I heard the man say, I’m still breathing but not for long. He told me, Once I sold three pints of blood in two days. He said, I could use some of that back now.

  Then there were edges of light at the window and the phone was ringing. Jean’s mother, I thought. I saw my friend naked, passed out in the dirt or drowned in the pond. This too my fault.

  The phone again. The police at last.

  I must have closed my eyes, relieved, imagining questions and handcuffs, a fast car, a safe cell. Soon, so soon, I wouldn’t be alone.

  I must have dreamed.

  The phone kept ringing.

  This time I picked it up.

  It was the Indian boy. He said, I’ll slit your throat.

  Past noon before my father got home. I understood exactly what he’d done as soon as I saw the truck: the fender was undented, the headlight magically whole. I knew he must have gone all the way to Missoula, to a garage where men with greasy fingers asked no questions, where a man’s cash could buy a girl’s freedom.

  I couldn’t believe this was his ch
oice. Couldn’t believe that this small thing, the mockery of metal and glass, my crime erased, was the only miracle he could trust.

  He said, Did you sleep? I shook my head. He said, Well, you should.

  I thought, How can he speak to me this way if he knows what I’ve done? Then I thought, We, not I — it’s both of us now.

  The phone once more. I picked it up before he could say Stop. The police, I hoped. They’ll save me since my father won’t. But it was Jean. Thanks a lot, she said. I’m grounded for a month.

  Then she hung up.

  Vincent Blew was long dead when he was found. The headline said, UNIDENTIFIED MAN VICTIM OF HIT AND RUN. One paragraph. Enough words to reveal how insignificant his life was. Enough words to lay the proper blame: “elevated blood alcohol level indicates native man was highly intoxicated.”

  I thought, Yes, we will each answer for our own deaths.

  Then there were these words, meant to comfort the killer, I suppose: “Injuries suggest he died on impact.”

  I knew what people would think, reading this. Just one Indian killing another on a reservation road. Let the tribal police figure it out.

  Still, the newspaper gave me a kind of hope. I found it folded on the kitchen table, beside my father’s empty mug. I thought, He believed my lie about the deer until today. He is that good. He fixed the truck so the doctor wouldn’t see. He was ashamed of my drunkenness, that’s all.

  I was calm.

  When he comes home, we’ll sit at this table. He’ll ask nothing. Father of infinite patience. He’ll wait for me to tell it all. When I stop speaking, we’ll drive to town. He’ll stay beside me. But he won’t hang on.

  I was so grateful I had to lean against the wall to keep from falling down.

  I thought, He loves me this much, to listen, to go with me, to give me up.

  All these years I’d been wrong about the hunter. Now I saw the father’s grief, how he suffered with his wounds, how his passion surpassed the dead son’s. I saw the boy’s deception, that deer-colored coat. I understood it was the child’s silent stupidity that made the father turn the gun on himself.