Blue Rodeo

by Jo-Ann Mapson

  It was one of the goals he shared with no one, not even Dr. I’m-Your-Pal Kennedy. He had to piece it back together alone. But trying to remember what happened right before he got sick felt like trying to make sense of a bad dream. Certain memories were still whole, and those he could pull out and look over to figure out what the differences were between deaf Peter and the old Peter, who was a fuckup, but a hearing fuckup—someone who used to go to the movies with friends and trade Seattle grunge CDs, someone who hung out at the Alta coffeehouse just for something to do, got jittery drinking espresso, and made fun of the overly serious poets. But Mexico only came to him in jagged pieces that wouldn’t fit together.

  He remembered cutting school—try and tell me that my fucking dad didn’t engage in such heinous activity once in awhile—and that it seemed like a brilliant idea when he heard Travis lay out the plan. School was glorified day care for adolescents. Mrs. Dornan, his English teacher, was always on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She’d sit at the desk with her head in her hands and tell them to just read a chapter out of Lord of the Flies, quietly at their desks, please, Talk among yourselves if you must, but quietly. Quietly being the operative word. That’s what happened to you if you tried to make a career out of teaching teenagers literature, even if you approached the task ultraquietly. But Peter had a soft spot for the old lady. She was an ardent reader of mysteries—twice he’d seen her on the bench at lunch with a James Lee Burke paperback. Too bad they couldn’t have read that in class—Lord of the Flies you could finish in two hours, and they were supposed to drag it out over a month. Consecutive attendance was hard to pull off unless you broke it up with rewards—cutting classes, taking days off, going places—like Mexico.

  Travis, who had been held back twice, was permanently up for adventure. And Brian. Brian had broken his arm body-surfing at the Wedge once, stood up holding the weirdly bent thing out to show them the radical new way his elbow worked, and gotten back in the water for three more waves before they made him quit, laughing his ass off even as they drove him to the emergency room. Brian would smoke notebook paper if he thought it might get him high. Peter didn’t know why he had been nervous at first about the idea of TJ—something about it just sat wrong in his stomach. It would mean they’d have to drive up and back in one day—a long way to go, especially in a heap like Travis’s Cabriolet, which he’d already rolled once. Peter was going to call and tell him no, catch you next time. Then he’d picked up the extension and heard his father on the telephone in the guest room, murmuring, Sure, baby, you know I want you, too, while some starlet gave him verbal head via AT&T. How weird that when you went deaf there were some things you could never stop hearing.

  He couldn’t remember them drinking either, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t done that before. He didn’t really like mescal. Travis claimed the worms in the bottom of the bottle were hard-on material, big johnson medicine, and he’d eat them up, smacking his lips. Peter didn’t want to eat anything that moved ever again after seeing the “60 Minutes” thing on slaughterhouses. Panic-eyed cows screaming while some no-brainer humanely clubbed them to death. Two guys holding a pig down while another one cut its throat until it bled itself silent. How could they do that, then go home, eat a bloody steak, screw their wives, tell their kids right from wrong, get up and do it again the next day? He’d heard the animal screams on that show. He made himself stop eating meat that very night of the TV program, not so much as one slice of bologna or even beef-fucking-jerky crossed his lips.

  Which he guessed was why he’d been stuck pulling off bits of tortilla while the rest of them chowed down on fish tacos. So of course the mescal would hit him twice as hard on an empty stomach. But the rest of it—sneaking into the closed hotel’s pool and swimming in the murky water—he had to depend on Travis’s recollection for that part.

  Dude, Trav’d written on a pad of paper when he came to visit him in the hospital, you don’t remember the awesome cannonball contest? The algae in there thicker than kelp? Peter Sweetwater, alias moss man, wearing that shit on your head all the way home?

  No, Peter didn’t.

  Not even the lovely señoritas who climbed over the fence with us?

  There were girls?

  Dude, you must of like erased your memory or something while you were copping the major Z’s. Brian got lucky. But you and me, we got stuck with this one fat chick and her ten-year-old sister.

  Travis also told him he hadn’t looked all that great even before the swimming. But hey, Pete, it wasn’t like you ever were in the same league with Johnny Depp. So when are you getting out of here? When will you be, like, you know, regular again?

  Peter read the words on the notepad and took a moment before answering back. “Regular” meant, “When will you be able to hear?” If Travis had to ask, that meant anything but regular was never going to be okay.

  Soon, he told Travis. Everything’ll be regular, we’ll shave some waves, blow the speakers out in your car, cut History for sure.

  The look of relief that came over Travis’s face said it all—he’d never be back when he realized Peter was deaf. None of them would. Funny, neither Trav nor Brian had gotten so much as a cold. The brilliant doctors wouldn’t say for sure what had led to the meningitis. Peter had looked it up in one of Nori’s medical books. It could be as simple as a flulike thing, someone sneezing in your face, but he figured somehow it had to be the dirty water, punishment for what they’d done. Hey, go swimming. People do it every day. Having a good time? Great. Now give up your hearing, because every goddamn thing in life requires a trade.

  He quit typing into the computer and took down one of Nori’s faxes. Joke time, Pete. How many doctors does it take to create the universe? Stumped? Only one, but it has to be a surgeon, because everyone knows they’re gods! The school for the deaf back home would have taken him, and though it was an out-of-county drive for his mother, he knew she would have picked him up every weekend without complaint. That was 90 percent of her problem—she couldn’t say no. Not to shoe salesmen or husbands who slept around. He could have stayed where he was, going back to Harbor in the fall with a state-provided interpreter. He knew how that would go—his mother fretting and driving him to school every day, everyone so damn sorry about his hearing, one or two skanky girls anxious to be his girlfriend just because the whole situation was bizarre enough for them to want to get next to it—but he wouldn’t be playing water polo—you needed sound for that. Actually, he bet if anything would ever get his ugly butt laid it would turn out to be his going deaf. You can’t hear? Oh, Peter, how totally sad. Take your pants off and let me make it feel better….

  Because Nori was in the medical field, selling implants to surgeons, she knew doctors all over the Southwest. She kept after the doctors in the hospital, checking up on them, and she had made the series of calls that led him here. He told her he couldn’t live with his parents and asked if maybe he could live with her in Phoenix for awhile, just until he got used to this whole thing. She was never home, really, not with all her traveling. Then she found out that Riverwall had a foster family program for those “audiologically challenged individuals” who wanted to immerse themselves in the deaf culture. He figured, Why not? At least here he would be in the same boat as everyone else, and no one knew how he was before. There was one catch, the school’s resident policy. But, as Nori insisted, every catch has a built-in loophole, and it turned out she was right. You could enter under another umbrella: You were automatically eligible if you possessed Native American blood. His father did, and therefore so did he. His parting gift at the pathetic birthday party they threw him was spilling the news that he didn’t want to live with either of them. His mom hadn’t even tried to hide her crying. She and Nori had a big fight about it, but of course he hadn’t heard the details.

  Echo was the only one he let himself miss. Deeter—well, maybe he missed Deeter a little. The only cool friend his mother ever had, Deeter hadn’t backed out on the promised birthday sail to C
atalina just because his passenger was no longer of the hearing variety. They’d packed up the cooler and taken off for the island the day after he turned fifteen. Watching Deeter’s hands on the sailboat rigging, just sitting in the sun alongside a guy who wasn’t telling you what to do—their trip to Catalina was not about talking, it was snorkeling through the kelp, checking out fish, catching rays. They’d seen one nurse shark—Bonnie would have been impressed. Deeter let him have a couple of beers if he wanted, didn’t make a big production over handing him a washcloth when he got sick over the side of the boat. And because he knew it would have wigged out Margaret to spring it the night of the party, Deeter had ordered a special birthday cake to take along on the sailing trip. He brought it out the last night, just before they had to sail back. A black cake. A mariachi band of skeletons played atop black icing. The letters on the cake read, WELCOME BACK TO THE LIVING, PETE. That cake raged.

  On the weekends the Hidalgos, Leocadio and Amparo, both deaf, made him sign everything. We’re out of toilet paper. May I have a bowl of Cheerios, please? Good morning. I slept well, thanks for asking. He thought he might come off a little scary to them, with his pierced earring and black wardrobe. But they seemed unimpressed. Their own kids were living in D.C., one doing grad work, the other interpreting at the Smithsonian. Every week when he arrived on the bus, Leocadio signed him the same question: “So, Mr. Serious. What you want to do with your life?”

  In sign all that was abbreviated, of course. And he could tell Mr. Hidalgo found the question amusing by the way he delivered his signs. Off to the side of the body, it was almost like whispering, especially if he didn’t want Amparo to see. Oversize, exaggerated signs meant he was as tired of asking the question as Peter was of “hearing” it. The cut-the-crap grammar of ASL made English seem absurdly wordy and self-centered. Peter didn’t know what he wanted—maybe he’d apprentice himself and learn woodworking from Leocadio. Wood waited under your hands and tools to become what you made of it. Dovetail joints, arms for a chair, even those sucky howling-coyote statues Leo made from time to time, when he needed a quick couple of tourist bucks to tide him over to the next custom job. He was willing to try. Maybe he would end up sitting in the Plaza like the hopeless-faced Indians who barely tried to interest tourists in their silver jewelry. One thing for sure, he knew he was never going to get married, and he’d die before he turned into the Hollywood hustler his father had become. Look at his mother—the only thing she was good at was pretending her husband was faithful and rotating the flowers in her goddamn garden so that something was always “colorfully in bloom.” Like some hopeless shadow, she’d followed him to New Mexico, even when he specifically asked her not to, settling herself in some pinchy little hooterville 150 miles north. Why? Were they low on floral arrangements? Like he’d really want to spend time with her in another unknown town, with more complete and total strangers feeling sorry for her, stuck with this burden for a son. The woman was clueless. Blue Dog—what the hell kind of town could it be—country-and-western bars, drive-through taxidermists?

  She’d had the nerve to come down here, show up for lunch, sit there with her Perigee Visual Dictionary, determined to sign her way through this conversation, a backup pencil and a yellow pad just in case, trying to keep her smile from wobbling right off her face. She’d asked him to come home with her for Thanksgiving. He didn’t need to read her painfully slow signs—he was a natural at lipreading when it came to his mother. He could still “hear” her voice, clearest of everyone. But he’d made a pact with himself not to speak to her until she learned to sign to him. Thanksgiving. Let’s see, what shall we be thankful for this year and in what order should we put it? Your divorce first; second, my going deaf? With great difficulty she managed to sign, “Peter, Blue Dog’s nice. I rented a farmhouse. Your own room. Horses and sheep next door.”

  It had taken her about twenty years to get the signs out. She kept having to look stuff up in the goddamn book. He had no intention of seriously considering her invitation, but he let her finish anyway, just to watch her try. “If I get tired of riding the horses, I can always have sex with the sheep,” he signed back, but his mother was lost halfway through his sentence, and she just smiled at him hopefully.

  She took it hard, his signing no, but she didn’t break down, he had to give her that much. “Maybe another time,” she spoke, forgetting to sign completely, looking away. Didn’t even mention Christmas—just stood up and left, not even trying to kiss him goodbye.

  Whether he answered or not, she wrote him once a week. Today he’d received an envelope with a sketch enclosed, no letter at all. It was a watercolor of his dog, asleep in what he guessed was a pile of just-dried purple towels. Purple—not one of her neutral colors. That fuzzy patch of white on Echo’s cheek where the hair grew in different—she’d managed to paint that so accurately he could remember how it felt under his fingers. Apparently his mother was using pencils and paints to kill time these days. Art therapy. He smoothed the creases from the heavy paper and tacked it up above his computer, next to the bookshelf. Warm towels out of the dryer—Echo’s favorite. He remembered that funny creaky sigh she’d give when she made herself a nest. His dog’s eyes were closed, her lips relaxed and slack as she slept on in canine bliss. He remembered how it felt to have her greet him at the door, her back end in motion, the welcome-home leaps and squeals. He also remembered how when his father went ballistic over something really minor, like the time he brought home that D in Spanish, Echo could squeeze herself flat underneath his bed. The only thing animals offered freely was no-strings-attached love. His dog cuddled with him when he’d mouthed off to his mom, and followed him to the kitchen like he was a god, so grateful when he threw her potato chips he almost felt he was one. Even if his face broke out like Mount Pinatubo, Echo wanted to give him a kiss. She was eternally up for a game of ball. Too bad Amparo Hidalgo was allergic to dogs. Or that Riverwall didn’t allow them. Maybe he’d skip dinner again tonight. Tomorrow he was going to the Hidalgos for Thanksgiving, the universal family day of gluttony. At least this year there’d be no fighting.

  He lay on his twin bed, across from Berto’s lying empty, stripped down to the bare mattress. He shut his eyes, trying to will sleep to come to him, working hard to keep the tears from spilling over.

  School was officially out for the holiday following the primary kids’ Thanksgiving program. Dressed in Indian buckskins with a few token Pilgrims thrown in, the grades one-to-three children, who ate their lunches an hour earlier, began signing the Thanksgiving prayer of thanks. Peter had seen them preparing for weeks, painting murals, constructing paper headresses. Now their small hands moved in unison, looking like overturned baby starfish, the pink exposed. They went slowly, had a good time, and only needed a few cues from the teachers.

  “I am making the sacred smoke that all the people may behold it,” they began.

  Peter looked away, across the room to Bonnie. Two tables away, she was standing at her place, signing back to the children, smiling, her soup forgotten, cooling.

  Dr. Kennedy came over to join him. “Vegetable soup,” he signed to Peter. “Your favorite.”

  “It tastes okay,” he signed back.

  “Mind if I sit with you?”

  Peter shrugged. He tried to concentrate on the elementary kids, to immerse himself in their short skit of the first Thanksgiving, delivered Indian-style. He saw the janitor turn on a cassette player and the kindergarten teacher cue the children to begin signing to the music, but the only one he wanted to watch was Bonnie.

  “What song?” he asked Dr. Kennedy.

  “Read the signs.”

  “Just fucking tell me the music, will you?”

  “‘Amazing Grace’,” he signed back. “You know it?”

  Peter set his spoon down and nodded. Of course he did. They weren’t completely without culture in California. “I don’t have amnesia,” he finger-spelled to Kennedy.

  Dr. Kennedy signed, “She’s very attrac
tive.”

  What was he supposed to say—No shit, Sherlock, what was your first clue? If he stayed out of trouble, kept his grades up, Peter didn’t have to attend more than one counseling session per week, and he wasn’t getting suckered into another one over a bowl of kindergarten soup. He knew what Kennedy was really after—why Peter wasn’t going to be with any of his family for the holiday—he didn’t buy the story about how since the divorce, they didn’t make holidays into a big deal. He’d probably had a little chat with Mom when she came down.

  Finished with their song, the children signed in unison, “Thanks.” They joined hands and bowed. The audience’s hands rose in unison, swaying from side to side in deaf applause. Peter’s throat constricted.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” Kennedy signed.

  He couldn’t have swallowed soup to save his life. He left the table on the excuse that he had to pack.

  While he waited outside for Leocadio, it began snowing lightly, small spatters hitting his face. Though it was only early afternoon, it felt much later—the high New Mexico sky foreshortened by snow clouds moving in. Nimbostratus—he’d only seen that kind of cloud in books until now. The Sangre de Cristos were shrouded in heavy-duty weather, and Peter wondered what it might be like right now on the ridge of those mountains. Bonnie’d said she climbed them all the time. Actual snow outside of a ski resort—the reality exhilarated him, and he felt the urge to run charge through him. They weren’t much for sports here at Riverwall, but maybe a snowball fight, when there was enough on the ground. It was holiday weather, and it called for something spirited. Lacking any reasonable options, he stood off to the side of the group of kids waiting for their buses or parents to take them home for the holidays, the desire in his blood beating itself faint.