“Uh, okay. Annie?” he said, puzzled.
“I’ll call you when we need to get going,” I said.
“Ma, let’s go in your room,” I said inside, my eyes adjusting to the shadowy midday light.
“No one else is here,” she said. “He can’t hear.” She kept the blinds drawn and the curtains half-drawn, as she always had when we lived in the city. There, it had been for privacy. If you left any blind open in our old place, you were bound to catch some old pervert sitting at his window in the next building over, waiting to catch a glimpse of anything we might be up to. It didn’t matter if it were washing dishes or vacuuming. You could see the fantasies they were cooking up, even as they watched you sweat across the alley. Back here on the rez, my mother no longer needed the privacy. Her nearest neighbors would need to have Superman’s eyes or a really decent set of binoculars to catch her at her quilt-making but she was taking no chances or merely had grown accustomed to her darker life. T.J.’s shadow floated by us, just beyond the living room window.
“Come on,” I said, sitting in the plush chair near her bed. She turned on the television, sat on the bed, and skipped though the few channels her antenna received.
“See, it works fine. Those are all the channels you get without cable or one of those dishes like they have the next trailer over. How much does the dish cost?” On the screen, images phased in and out like the badly spliced educational films they showed in high school, the sixteen-millimeter projector whirring and clacking from the back of the room, all but obscuring anything the people on the screen said.
“Ma, today, Martha left this morning’s paper in my mailbox at work,” I said. My mother would not make eye contact with me, staring instead at the people arguing on her television, ghosts of them crossing one another in T.J.’s adjustments.
“ Well, that was nice of her, wasn’t it? She probably had to hire one of her kids to drive her all the way out to the college, to get you that newspaper. What are you complaining about?” she said, finally, pretending she had no idea what I was talking about, or perhaps just hoping that I had no idea what was really in the morning paper. Surely she must have known what would cause her best friend and my ex-mother-in-law to make that special trip, but my mother would never resent Martha for anything, always looking the other way. What kept those two together was the meanness they inflicted on one another over sixty years, keeping each other going, pushing every day forward with new bitterness.
“She left a note with the paper, too. That was how I knew it was from her. I recognized her handwriting. Have you seen it?”
“The paper? Early this morning, probably before you were even up,” she said. I tossed the entertainment section across the room to her. It fell about a foot short. She didn’t bother to pick it up.
“The note was clipped to an article about that show Prime Hours tonight. Did you see it?”
“I don’t watch that show, or that channel even,” she said, waving her hand as if she were being bothered by a fly. “I never went in for the The Twilight Zone or the The Outer Limits or In Search of . . . like you kids did. And that show? What they do to people is just pitiful. If I want to see people behaving badly, I’ll just walk down to Moon Road. I don’t need to see it on my TV.”
“You wanna know what the note said?” I took it out of my purse and read it aloud in my best Martha Boans snippy fashion: “‘You might want to watch this show tonight, if you want to see your real father.’” I flashed the note in front of my mother so she could also see that, indeed, it was Martha’s handwriting, and then folded it back into my purse. We both knew that the reservation was consistently very closed-mouth about suspicious parentage, but only to the child in question. Otherwise, everyone was gossipy as hell with each other. I’ve known of other people who reached adulthood confident in their parents’ marriage, only to discover at the age of thirty or so that they are not exactly who they thought they were. I just never suspected I might be one of those people, but I don’t imagine any of those who’d been zapped before me did, either.
“You know, I had always heard people talking, making vague suggestions just within earshot, at Community Fair, the Feast, Culture Night, National Picnic, all those places, but you know how people gossip, and they never offered anything other than innuendo.” People on the reservation have also talked nonsense and believed it as truth forever—aspects of the culture that outside scholars tag as cute or charming or quaint. Those scholars have never had to convince an adult that a Tin Man, like that character in The Wizard of Oz, did not live below the hill, lurking around the picnic grove at night. When I became the subject of gossip, myself, I should have been thankful for the Tin Man, but he must have moved on, replaced by the smart girl who could not add two and two.
“What’s that, innuendo?” she asked. She was a whiz at cross-words, keeping a dictionary by her bed, but she never remembered the words for longer than it took to box them in to Five Down, or Four Across.
“Vague words, with double meanings, suggesting something without really saying it. So I went to see Royal at the pumps, and I asked him to tell me the truth. I had asked him a long time ago, years ago, in fact, and back then, he said he didn’t know anything, had no idea what I was talking about.” If I had gotten a useful answer, I might not have left out that I had gotten him drunk to do it.
“Oh,” my mother said.
“So when I asked him today, do you know what he said?”
“I don’t know what you asked him.”
“I asked him if Dad thought I had a different father from the rest of the kids. If that was why he left. You know what he said?” The fear in her face, as she grimaced and stared at the TV, told me she had no idea what he said. Maybe he truly didn’t know anything about that hazy period.
“He said, ‘If you need an answer to that question, then you better go ask Ma.’ So, here I am. Am I the reason Dad left for good all those years ago?” There, it was out, the one question I had practiced in front of mirrors, on dark roads, on top of the dike, anytime I was alone, for years. Even the cat I left behind with Doug was tired of hearing that one, usually glancing at me for a second before returning to grooming itself in the sun.
“He was never at home much,” she said. Royal had mentioned that sometimes our father would live in other cities for a year at a time—Detroit, Cleveland, New York—wherever they needed buildings erected. “Even before you. I don’t know why he would leave. We gave him all the freedom he wanted, and the kids adored him. He just wasn’t a happy person, I suppose. I tried dragging him out of other women’s apartments, at first, but then he would just leave, altogether, for longer periods.”
“He used to come back, every now and then, before I was born. But whenever I saw him anywhere, he always looked through me like I was glass. How come?”
“I don’t know. He just did.”
“When he died, I was the only one who went with Royal, none of the others, to go clean up that little apartment he kept down in Buffalo. I found his address book and calendar. You know all the birthdays and anniversaries, and all that, they were all neatly entered, as recent as Joanie’s kids, and one of them hadn’t had a birthday yet. But one date was missing, Ma. My birthday. Any idea why that was?”
“I bet my birthday wasn’t in there, either, was it?” She stopped me dead, there. I hadn’t looked, had randomly flipped through the pages, and judged it to be otherwise complete. “I went to that apartment before you and Royal went. I saw that book first, and I put it back. I knew you would look for your own birthday. You know what? I considered writing it in there. I knew how to forge his handwriting, had to learn to years before, just so I could get some money to feed you kids out of that account he kept. I figured if you wanted to look in that book for answers, though, you deserved to find them.” She frowned at me, there in the dark, her face nearly disappearing in the shadows for a minute, reappearing when T.J. would move something on the roof, then her features softened.
“It�
��s okay. I knew you wouldn’t look for my birthday,” she repeated, for emphasis. “You weren’t the only one who became invisible to him, and there, you got off lucky. When we were first married, in the winter, I would get up before him, warm his clothes on top of the kerosene heater, and cook him a big breakfast, eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, everything. I’d call him to get up when the table was set and the clothes were warm, and he would come down, already dressed in a different set of clothes, tell me he didn’t want any of that Oo(t)-gweh-rheh, and go out the door, sometimes until after work, sometimes until a week or more had gone by. I didn’t cook breakfast for him long.”
“Why was he that way?”
“I don’t know, I told you. He just was. His ma and dad spoiled him, told him he was better than me, and I guess he believed it, but I don’t know why he wanted to get married in the first place, if he thought that.”
“But he always came back in those days.”
“Yes, eventually. I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night, startled, because he had climbed in and was snoring next to me, and sometimes I just found him in the morning, drinking coffee in front of the stove, like he had just slipped from our bed before I had stirred, to surprise me with a fresh pot.”
“So why did he stop coming back after I was born? Why did he disown me?” We were getting to it, then, the harder questions, the real ones. My siblings always said our dad was never around, but more and more, I was getting the feeling that was only partially true. I had continued to hope that if I had primed my mother, used Socratic teaching method, she would begin freely discussing this forbidden topic, but she was like my students, fighting me all the way with silence and misdirection. I was prepared, though, had trained a very long time, as I had for my orals to complete my dissertation.
“He just did,” she said again.
“Did he think I was someone else’s kid?”
“He was just an unhappy man, I told you. He always thought funny things about people.”
“Did he have reason to believe I might not be his?” Would she confirm here that he really did treat me differently than he did the rest of the kids? I held my breath for a moment, waiting it out, this time, asking it without asking it, that tightrope.
“He was coming around less and less in those days. There was a man, a very nice man, and almost everyone out here liked him,” she said.
“Am I this man’s child?” I asked, finally.
“He was a very nice man,” she repeated, “but also very free. I thought by that time the old man wasn’t coming back, and I figured, since he had been around so much with who knows who all, my keeping company with this man wouldn’t do anyone any harm. The man lived in Texas, anyway, and it wasn’t like he would be back much. He used to joke, said if we ever had kids . . .” She stopped, changed direction, slightly. “We both had red hair, but his was lighter than mine.”
“Am I?” I repeated. It was surprisingly hard to repeat the entire question.
“I don’t know. It’s possible. Dad’s shit-ass sister talked him into forcing me to get a blood test when it was clear I was pregnant. She was always convinced I was trying to get at his money. Hah! What money? I had this man’s dog tags, he had given them to me one of the last times I had seen him, but he and Dad had the same blood type. The same you have. The only ones who knew were the three of us, and Martha. She was the one who took me. Back then, the agencies didn’t chase for support like they do now. I think that’s why your friend T.J.’s mother eventually just handed him over to someone else. The bother for her wasn’t worth it.”
“Am I really yours?” I had to ask. If everything I had ever believed was now up in the air, why not that, too? It seemed like everything was possible, even that Tin Man, lurking just out of sight all these years, hiding in the picnic grove restrooms during rainstorms to avoid rust.
“Of course you’re really mine. When Dad said he wasn’t going to claim you, the last thing I said to him when he went out the door that final time, was, ‘Okay, she’ll always be my baby.’ And the rest of the kids, they didn’t treat you any different, you were everybody’s baby. Especially Royal, he took you everywhere with him.”
“I remember,” I said, which was why I had believed if anyone were going to tell me the truth, it would have been him. “Didn’t you think I was ever going to ask?”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t. I was hoping it wouldn’t matter to you, hoping we had loved you enough that it wouldn’t matter.”
“It isn’t a matter of love, Ma.”
“It’s always a matter of love. I thought you would have at least learned that by now.”
“What’s the man’s name?”
“Do I have to tell you?”
“Don’t you think I deserve to know? Is that him in this morning’s paper? Is he the man you used to talk about, sometimes, when we were all little kids?”
“Yes, that’s him. He’s a very nice man. Could make me laugh so hard, was so free, willing to be goofy, but the real man, the one inside the goofy one, well, he was shy, sweet, and had the most beautiful ears. I still don’t know for certain which one is your father, could be either. You’re as dark as the rest of us and that man was very fair-skinned, but you do have such pretty ears, too.” She reached over to touch my ear. I moved away, just an inch. It was enough, and she lowered her hand. “It doesn’t surprise me to know he was trying to save that woman from Japan. That’s how he was.”
“He didn’t seem to help you too much,” I said.
“He doesn’t know. When the tests came back with no clear answer, Dad and your aunt never pushed it. I suppose they could nowadays, but Dad’s dead, and your aunt, thank goodness, is still busy chasing money somewhere else.”
“So he has no idea I even exist? He didn’t bother to find out?”
“He wondered. The last time I saw him. He asked if there was anything in my life he should know about. I told him no. He had married that woman by then, so there was no sense in stirring up things that couldn’t be. He wasn’t going to leave and come up here, and I wasn’t going to leave and go down there, so we decided to love each other one last night, and leave it at that.”
“When was that?”
“The last time we were together. Fred Howkowski’s funeral. When he brought the boy back, your friend out there on the roof. We had that one night, while you and the rest of the kids and that little boy slept in the back bedroom. We took all you kids to the drive-in that night, hoping to tire you out so we could have a few hours together, some awful Bigfoot movie, as I recall. You wouldn’t remember. You were just a baby, then. After we put you all to bed, we tried to get a lifetime’s worth of loving into one night and hoped we could make it last.”
“But you can’t just decide to stop loving someone, suddenly one day. It’s a gradual thing, or it doesn’t happen at all.” For me, it had been a gradual thing with Doug. Perhaps something still lingered there, something I could find when I would run into him at the National Picnic, or even at the grocery store, but it wasn’t much and it faded fast as soon as I pictured Martha still smoking and sewing and spreading and smoothing her criticism like a quilt.
“Don’t you think I know that now?”
“Which part?” I asked.
“You decide,” she said.
“So I’m half white. My whole career has been a lie.”
“Our life together, here, there, in the city, wherever—it’s not a lie. You’re my baby, the baby of all of us. You are who you are.”
“I’m going with T.J. I’m going to meet him.” I had made the decision the second T.J. seemed even remotely interested, but I had to come here first, ask that question before I set out on the road. The idea of that other man, that other possibility, had long lived in my mind, growing, becoming more real, but the face was always a blank, like those fake life-size cutouts you can stick your head through and become Santa Claus, Scarlett O’Hara, or a bathing beauty, but as soon as you step out from behind the plywood, you are y
ourself again, and that body is empty, waiting for the next identity. This man, though, living somewhere in West Texas, trying to save random delusional Japanese women, he was real, made of bones, muscle, hair, teeth, tissue, and deeper—and more importantly—DNA. Blood tests might have been inconclusive back then, but that was no longer the case. I could find a more definitive answer for myself, though it would take more than dog tags to do it.
“Well, you do what you want. Don’t be so sure this place will be the same when you get back. Things change, people eventually fill in those rips that get made in their lives—Dougie, for example. I don’t know what you hope to gain from doing this,” she said, having always had this strange attachment to my husband, perhaps because he treats her better than her own sons do, but who could say with her, what she thinks being treated well and not so well are, where she makes those distinctions?
“Have you filled your rips in?” I turned and walked out of the room. “T.J.? You ready?” I asked out the window, gathering my purse.
“Yeah, just about,” he said, climbing down. “You had a couple frays on the wire, Mrs. Mounter, where it had rubbed up against the aluminum over the years. There are some parts where the roofing’s coming loose too. I covered the bare wires and I taped the whole connector wire in place, so that shouldn’t happen anymore in the future. I hope that’ll work. But that roof, you should get someone to look at it pretty quick. I taped it for now, but that won’t last. Maybe Floyd Page will be willing to do a side job, off the books.” He shrugged his shoulders.
“I’ll be back, eventually, Ma,” I said.
“When?” she asked, never a fan of vague words except when she was the one using them to shroud some information.
“Eventually,” I repeated, and we neared the door. That was when she tried to draw me back in.
“Does he know you’re coming—” was the final thing my mother asked. She’s always been this way. She knows the kind of small phrase to use regardless of the occasion that once it is out of her mouth it grows, and continues on, spreading out from inches to miles across our lives.
Extra Indians Page 5
