Big Picture: Stories

by Percival Everett

  He grew up confused by his father’s belief in simple and precise answers; one answer in particular, that one can move away and live without the world. Now, Lucien understood all too well why his father moved to the high desert. It was a matter of leaving the world and its problems with his race behind. So he left black people and hopefully white people as well, but “of course there was no escaping them.” Lucien resented his father protecting him from the world. He allowed himself to be herded off to college and directed toward his father’s profession until finally he “lost his mind” and joined the army. Lucien could not shake the look on his father’s face when he received the news of Lucien’s enlistment.

  Lucien took the cover off of a box of hackle feathers and pulled out a cape of grizzly. He admired the dark and white pattern and imagined the wings of an Adams sticking straight up. It was a good cape, the feathers stiff, varying greatly in size. He put a size 14 hook into the vise and secured it. He threaded black thread through the tube of a bobbin, and made the first turns around the shank. He already felt the tension leaving him. He chose two small grizzly hackle feathers for the wings and tied them perpendicularly to the shank, the motions feeling easier than he imagined they would. It had been so long. He found some brown hackle in the box, tied in a feather of it and another feather of grizzly. He cut a few barbules of brown and grizzly for the tail and tied them down. With each step of building the fly he felt better and he could hear his father’s voice, the voice that he loved, not the voice that his aching heart had concocted. From a patch of muskrat hide he teased some hairs and rolled them onto the waxed thread, wrapped the hook, and formed the body. He remembered fighting with his fingers as a young boy trying to do this, these motions that now seemed so simple. He remembered his father behind him, watching, laughing, instructing. Finally he had the last hackle feather gripped in the pliers and was turning it round the fly; the feather was fanning out and pointing in every direction. The lure began to breathe. He had sweet memories of doing this through the winter in anticipation of spring fishing. When he did find a place to live he would take the things that had been his father’s and use them, keep them alive.

  “Are you okay?” Eva leaned against the doorjamb.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I straightened up in here.”

  “So I see.” Lucien pushed himself away from the desk and stood up, arching his back to loosen it. “It’s a lot easier to find things now.”

  “Tired?”

  “It was a long drive. That truck’s seat is like a board, too. To tell the truth, I was surprised it even started after sitting for so long.”

  “At least you didn’t have to worry about anybody stealing it.”

  Lucien laughed. “Yes, it’s a sorry-looking critter.”

  “Why don’t you take a nap?”

  Lucien nodded, walked to his mother, and embraced her.

  “I’ll make a trip to the grocery store while you’re asleep.”

  “I’ll go when I get up if you like.”

  In his room, Lucien tossed his bags into the corner. The room was clean, but retained the smell of his childhood: it reminded him of jeans and frogs and board games. He stretched out on the mattress and felt his body give in to its firmness. When he was in high school he sneaked Sarah Begay into his room while his parents were away, but she never surrendered to the comfort of the mattress, nor to Lucien. He remembered her beautiful dark eyes saying no, and he always wanted to thank her because he wasn’t ready then either. He was pretty sure that even then she wasn’t a virgin. He believed that she had said no because she understood something about life. But apparently she didn’t understand enough, because she married out of high school, had three kids before she was nineteen, and looked all of forty at twenty. Still, thinking back, he would have liked to sleep with her.

  He recalled the smell of drying chili peppers and the colors of the corn festival dances and he decided that being home felt good. It felt good even if he didn’t know how he fit into the landscape.

  He remembered the stories his father had told him about finding the side of the pillow that held the good dreams. Even now a bad dream would cause him to turn his pillow over. Once he even exchanged his pillow surreptitiously for another soldier’s.

  He heard either a raccoon or a coyote disturbing the garbage cans in the backyard. Lucien liked coyotes. They were perhaps the most adaptable of mammals, still roaming parts of Los Angeles. Coyotes were cunning and secretive and inquisitive and social. His father had liked coyotes. The old man had once sneaked back to a roadside zoo with him and released several caged coyotes. Lucien remembered asking, “What if they don’t know how to hunt?”

  “Then they’ll die,” his father said as they climbed back into the truck. “But they won’t be caged. That’s why we live here, Lucien.” The weather of early fall was a reminder of how kind the high desert could be. Life up there was simply too easy, he recalled. It made the people lazy. The laziness was represented in the pots of the Indians from Taos Pueblo. Lucien remembered realizing this fact as a child of ten. He was in the Indian museum down in Albuquerque with his father and mother, standing before a glass case, and there were pots from Zuni, from Cochiti, from Acoma, all beautiful, well-formed, and full of power or love or something scary like that, and then there were the pots from Taos. “Loose,” was how his father described the lopsided vessels, but even as a child Lucien could see the disparity. He concluded then, and his growing up there substantiated his thinking, that the things which filled the pots came too easily, and so both, contents and containers, were taken for granted. He watched his friends, white, Mexican, and Indian learn that life was a slow climb up a greased pole with just enough of what you needed at hand to keep you going. The beauty of the place negated the desire to add to the beauty, to give back. Taos was a minefield of galleries, and the so-called artists seemed to be interested in underscoring their names and not in giving back. Canvas after canvas, the same, the same, the same. People came to ski and sun and pay a camera fee at the Pueblo. They came to kick up property values and see their fashionable friends at natural bakeries, came to buy silver and turquoise on the plaza, came to buy art: “Yes, this piece was done by a woman in Arizona. She’s interested in the Indian legends. She has a degree in anthropology.” But then you looked at the mountains, Lucien thought, and all of those people disappeared. It was where he grew up, this country fat with beauty.

  The sun was beginning its decline as Lucien pulled into the lot of the small market just minutes from his mother’s house. He was glancing at the list as he entered, feeling for a cart, and was startled when he looked up to find his passage toward the produce section blocked by two men. Manny Archuleta and Rick Gillis stood smiling in front of the cart.

  “Soldier boy,” Rick said.

  “Not anymore.” Lucien reached out and shook their hands. “You guys in here for a couple cans of dog food or something?”

  “Home for good?” Manny asked, his big face broken with the lopsided Elvis grin that he had cultivated in high school.

  “Well, out of the army for good.”

  “Shoot anybody?” Rick asked.

  “Not yet.” Lucien pushed the cart past them and toward the produce. “You guys can walk with me, but I’ve got to get this stuff and get home.”

  “Looking forward to some home cooking?” Rick plucked a grape from a bunch on a table, popped it into his mouth, and spat the seeds on the floor. A passing woman with a child stared at him.

  “You’re a real beauty, you know that,” Lucien said.

  “Sorry about your father,” Manny said.

  “Thanks. That’s the way it goes, I guess.” Lucien grabbed a couple of onions.

  “What are you doing tonight?” Rick asked.

  Lucien laughed. “I’m sitting around the house with my mother. What the hell did you think I’d be doing?”

  “After that?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Nah, come on, go out with us,�
�� Manny said. “Like old times.”

  “I’m kinda beat.”

  “We’ll be at the Blue Corn until late if you change your mind,” Rick said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  Lucien watched them leave the store with a handful of grapes each.

  He finished shopping, and listened to the Spanish being spoken in the lanes of packaged food. He looked at the brown faces of big-eyed children wanting cookies, wanting to get into carts, wanting to push carts, wanting. He found the ceiling lights of the market harsh.

  The clouds of late afternoon were fat and flat-bottomed as if resting on a table of glass. Lucien had not enjoyed his trip to the market. It was good to see his old friends, even though he felt no closeness to them, but after his tour through the aisles he waited in the checkout line behind a woman of high fashion.

  He drove the groceries home to his mother, watched her cook for him again, and listened as she told him that his father’s illness had come on quickly and that he had suffered only marginally. That was her word, “marginally,” and he wondered where she had acquired it and just what it meant. She fed him beef brisket, green beans, and posole.

  “I saw Rick and Manny at the market.”

  His mother nodded, said nothing.

  “They look like they’re doing okay.”

  “They work at the lumberyard, both of them.” She said it as if it were a bad thing to work at the lumberyard. She had never liked either of them. “All these years at the lumberyard.”

  “I guess any job around here is a good one.”

  “I suppose.” She drank from her water glass. “That Rick is a strange character, don’t you think?” She paused. “Are you going back to school?”

  “I don’t know, Ma.”

  “You could wind up where they are.”

  “I suppose. Working at the lumberyard wouldn’t be bad work.”

  “I guess no work is bad work, but still …” She stopped.

  They finished eating without saying much of anything. Lucien cleared the table and got ready to wash the dishes.

  “That was really good. And just enough, too. I was a little scared you were going to make a lot of food and I wouldn’t be able to stop eating.”

  “Well, I’m trying to establish healthy habits.”

  “That’s good.” He turned off the water.

  “You know, you’re welcome to go out.”

  “I told them I was spending the evening with my best gal. They asked me to share, but I told them I didn’t think they could handle her.”

  She slapped his rear with the rag she had used to wipe down the table.

  “But maybe after you go to bed.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  Lucien went through his father’s fly boxes while his mother knitted. She told him she was making a sweater for a new baby down the road. She told him three times. The television was on with the sound low. He could see the meaningless motions and facial expressions and just hear the hum of music and canned laughter. He watched his mother’s fingers making their sure movements with yarn and was mesmerized. He turned his eyes to the television screen, but didn’t see anything, didn’t understand anything.

  Lucien sat there and felt angry. He didn’t understand it and felt in no hurry to understand it. He just felt it. It felt good to feel anything. He wasn’t mad at his mother, but as he looked down at the coffee table he knew he could break it in two. His father once told him while they were chopping wood in the backyard that being angry was a part of life. His father had worked up a good sweat and stopped to lean on the axe. “White people don’t understand,” he said. “Your mother’s a good woman, as good a heart as you’ll find, but she can’t know.” Lucien looked at his mother again. He loved her, but she couldn’t know. His father had been right, and he couldn’t explain it because he didn’t know. His father left him with only a vague understanding of his anger, a vague awareness and respect for it. Lucien left the house, but didn’t go to the Blue Corn to join his friends. He drove north toward Questa and then across the mountains to Red River. He just drove.

  It was well after three when Lucien coasted into the driveway. He shut down the engine a hundred yards away so as not to wake his mother. He was tired, but he didn’t want to sleep; he didn’t think he could.

  Inside, he caught sight of the fly boxes he’d left on the coffee table and decided he’d go fishing. He didn’t go to his room for his rod and reel; instead he went to his father’s gear. He felt good about using it, knowing that the man would want it used. He chose the four-piece pack rod and the Battenkill reel with double-tapered line. He wore his father’s vest and loaded the pockets with a box of terrestrials and another with a bunch of different-sized Royal Wulffs. His father would often fish only one pattern; he insisted that if you presented it correctly a trout would take anything. Lucien put on some coffee and made three cheese and olive sandwiches while it brewed. He poured the coffee into a Thermos, wrote a note to his mother, imagining her smiling as she read it, and left the house quietly. He was sorry he had to start the truck, but his mother would get back to sleep.

  It was still dark when Lucien arrived at the parking lot at the head of the trail that led down to the confluence of the Rio Grande and the Red River. It was about a mile hike down the steep path, full of switchbacks, which was easy enough in the light of day, but treacherous in the dark. His light had a good beam though. With it he found the startled eyes of raccoons and other small animals. The trail was still familiar. A couple of deer didn’t hear him until he was very close, and they scared him when they jumped and ran down through the junipers. He thought the animals did well to fear him. First light was appearing when he heard the river. He’d worked up a minor sweat that felt good, although it chilled him slightly. He stopped to take a leak, then slipped out of his pack, sat on a big rock, and drank a little coffee.

  By the time Lucien reached the Rio Grande there was enough light to show him the far bank. He came to a clearing in the middle of which was a heavily used firesite. He and his father had caught trout and cooked them at this spot on many occasions. He pulled on his waders and boots, attached the reel to the rod, fed the line through the guides, connected a braided leader butt, and added a length of 5X tippet material. He stepped out into the current. He was rushing, he knew. He could hear his father telling him to study the river first, to note the possible lies in the pools and riffles, but he wanted to start. He roll cast upstream to some slower water. He almost always roll cast for some reason. The flow of the river was strong and as always a little troublesome at first, but soon he felt at home. It was easy to see then, and after a dozen or so casts, he spotted the rise of a trout just upstream from where he had been fishing earlier. He cast to the far side of where he had seen the fish and let the current bring the fly back to him. He cast again, saw the fly disappear, and gave the line a tug to set the hook. He could never get over the excitement of catching a fish, of tricking a fish. His heart fluttered and he played the trout in. It was a ten-inch rainbow, nothing to get crazy about, but it was a decent fish. He removed the fly from the animal’s lip and let it go, first holding it facing the current until it felt strong.

  He fished for a couple of hours, catching two more trout of about the same size, then stopped for a sandwich and coffee before working his way upstream to the confluence of the two rivers.

  When Lucien got to the place where the rivers met, he was surprised to find another fisherman sitting on the bank. He looked at the man and realized that he knew him. The short, pudgy Indian was Warren Fragua, a deputy sheriff who had been a friend of his father’s.

  “Mr. Fragua?”

  “Hello.” The man tried to place Lucien.

  “Lucien Bradley. Henry Bradley’s son.”

  “Oh yeah. You’re in the army.” He shook Lucien’s hand.

  “Not anymore.” Lucien hated having people define him by his army association. “I just got home.”

&
nbsp; Fragua nodded. “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Yeah.”

  They looked at the river.

  “He was a hell of a fisherman,” Fragua said.

  “Yes sir.” Lucien stretched. “You been doing any good out here?”

  “Doing okay. Nothing to write home about.”

  “I caught three ten-inchers downriver a ways.”

  Fragua yawned. “So you’re home. I know your mother’s happy about that. What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t know yet. Get a job, I guess. Go back to school maybe.”

  “You’re young. You’ve plenty of time.”

  “Are you still with the sheriff’s office?”

  “Yep.”

  “Must be pretty interesting.”

  “Sort of. There’s not much excitement around these parts, as you well know. I think that’s why I keep doing it. It pays the bills and I can fish. What did you do in the army?”

  Lucien smiled. “What does anybody do in the army? Waited to get out.”

  Fragua laughed softly, his eyes on the river.

  “Well,” Lucien said, “I’m going to work my way on up the Red here.”

  “Check you later, Lucien.” Fragua called to Lucien when he was some yards away. “It’s good to see you.”

  Lucien fished his way up the Red River. Most things didn’t make any sense. He’d been home less than twenty-four hours and already he felt deeply unsettled and anxious and ready to call himself a bum or a vagrant or some kind of freeloader. He was afraid he was going to end up living his life one paycheck to the next like his friends from high school.

  He didn’t have any further luck with the trout that morning—even when he floated a Jassid beetle down a riffle, a method he usually considered cheating—but he didn’t care.