Red Earth White Earth

by Will Weaver

  In Martin’s house, Martin sat the banker in a chair and laid the gun across the table. “Now,” Martin began, “you came barging into the barn and said something about transferring title of our farm to the State Bank?”

  The banker’s jaws dry-pumped several times, then produced words.

  “You’re aware, certainly, of your loan balance with us—though you’re by no means the only farmer in difficulty,” he added quickly. “I personally don’t care anything about loans or money of any kind. I mean . . . when I’m not working. Weekends, that is. Weekends I’m just like any other poor slob trying to make ends—I mean—not that your family are slobs by any stretch of the imagination,” he said quickly. He tried a grin but it only made his face look like an undertaker’s overenthusiastic stitch work.

  Guy began to make coffee. The banker continued his paralytic smile.

  “So how much money would make you happy today?” Guy said, plugging in the percolator.

  “Heh—heh,” the banker said. “Why, just about anything, any type of movement on your account—”

  “How about a goddamn dollar?” Martin said. He fished in his wallet and slammed a green dollar bill on the table.

  “Well . . . ,” the banker said, his eyes on the money. He did not reach for it.

  “How about ten thousand?” Guy said, pouring in the dry brown coffee.

  Both Martin and the banker looked up at Guy.

  “Ten thousand dollars, right now, to give us some time to work through a few problems here,” Guy said, setting two cups on the table.

  “Ten thousand dollars would make my day,” the banker said. “And Mr. Price’s day also. We’d be very happy to start with ten thousand.”

  Martin squinted at Guy. Guy picked up the phone and dialed California. His accountant answered. Guy spoke briefly with him, then hung up. “Wait here,” he said. He went to the Mercedes for his briefcase and checkbook. Back inside, he wrote out the check.

  “What the fuck is this, some kind of joke?” Martin said.

  The banker’s grin faded.

  “No joke,” Guy said. “Your full name,” he said to the banker as he prepared to write out a second check.

  The banker told him.

  Guy handed over the first check. “This one is made out for ten thousand dollars to your bank,” Guy said. He held up the second one. “This one is made out to you. It should be plenty to buy you a new suit, new shoes, new breakfast.”

  The banker reached for the second check. His eyes widened as he read its numbers.

  “And if there’s any future unpleasantness for my father as a result of your visit here this morning—your ass won’t be worth canner and cutter price on any market anybody’s ever heard of,” Guy said.

  The banker nodded, wide-eyed.

  “Right now you’re stinking up our kitchen. You’ve got three minutes to be out of sight down the road.”

  The banker scrambled through the door.

  Martin stared up at Guy.

  The percolator chugged. In the yard the banker’s car door slammed, his engine raced, gravel spun inside wheel wells.

  “Just who the fuck do you think you are?” Martin began.

  Ten minutes later Guy and his father staggered around the house in a boxer’s clinch. Martin had accused Guy of wanting to take over the farm and, once and for all, get rid of him.

  Guy tried to tell his father he didn’t want the farm, tried to tell him about his life in California, about his company.

  “Dirty money, that’s what it must be,” Martin shouted.

  Guy told him how he worked hard, had been in the right place at the right time.

  Dirty money.

  About the Silicon Valley.

  Dirty money.

  About printed circuit boards.

  Dirty money, dirty money.

  Guy looked once about the house, saw the TV, took it outside and smashed it on the steps, then ripped out the circuit board and threw it across the table to his father. Fiberglass, .052 inches thick. Copper, .009. Solder-plated circuitry after the silk-screen image. A green solder mask. Then capacitors, resistors. He shouted the whole litany at his father.

  Martin stared at the board. Then he looked up to Guy’s face for a long moment—seemed, briefly, to see him fully for the first time. Then Martin’s eyes traveled to Guy’s swollen lip, the scraped eyebrow from last night’s fighting.

  “So you got money, but you still get beat up just like the rest of us.”

  Guy was silent.

  “Maybe you finally found out where your mother lives.”

  “You knew,” Guy said.

  “Sure.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “Some things are best found out alone.”

  Guy walked away, into the bathroom. There he shook out four aspirin, ran a glass of water. Martin followed, stood behind him.

  “So you got nothing to say?”

  “She seems happy enough.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Guy shrugged.

  “Talk to me, you sonofabitch.” He jerked Guy by the arm; the muscles in Guy’s ribs screamed with pain.

  “You don’t think it’s a little strange?” Martin said. His breath was hot and rank. “Your mother living with Tom LittleWolf? I mean, it’s not as if she ran off with a traveling salesman, is it? First—she ran off with a goddamn Indian. Second—the Indian is twenty-five years younger than she is. And third, Tom LittleWolf used to be your best friend—you don’t think that’s strange?”

  Guy stared at this early-morning drunk of a man. A man who was killing himself by degrees. The man who was his father.

  “Nothing to say? Nothing at all? Then what the hell kind of man are you? What the hell did I raise?” Martin shouted.

  Guy turned. “This kind,” he said, suddenly reaching, palms out, for his father. But Martin mistook the gesture for a blow, and swung. Guy took a glancing punch to the face that brought sun sparkles, but then he got inside the fists. He grabbed Martin around his chest and hung on. He took blows on his back, but they didn’t hurt. The two of them reeled into the living room.

  “You want everybody to give up on you—then you can kill yourself—well, it’s not going to work!” Guy grunted, hanging on.

  “Shut up, you sonofabitch.”

  They crashed into the kitchen. The coffee percolator jerked off the table and shattered on the floor.

  “I give up on you—then you kill yourself with whiskey—how am I supposed to feel?” Guy said. From his barn work his father was as hard and strong and lean as a coyote.

  “You don’t feel a thing for me—you never have!”

  “You never let me. You never let anyone,” Guy panted.

  “Go back to California—you didn’t have to come back here!”

  “Go to hell—I’m here and I’m not giving up on you—”

  “Let go of me—”

  “No—that’s what you want—forget it—”

  A chair broke beneath them. They crashed to the floor. Guy was vaguely aware of someone shouting at them, pounding on the screen door.

  “Go the hell back to California and your goddamn rich life!”

  “I’ll go back when you stop killing yourself.”

  “I can do what I want—you can’t tell me what to do!”

  “I’m half you—that gives me the right.” Guy panted, trying for an armlock. “You’re my goddamn father, for chrissakes!”

  Martin stopped struggling. He pulled back from Guy, blinked, stared. His nose was bleeding on Guy. Both their shirts were bloodied.

  “Stop it,” someone was screaming at them, “you’re killing each other!”

  For one long moment, still in their w
restler’s embrace, Guy and Martin did nothing but hold each other.

  But the voice at the door continued to shout at them. They looked up. It was Cassandra Silver, staring down at them, rattling the screen door. “That’s enough—look at yourselves!” she called.

  They stared at her.

  “Go away,” Guy said slowly. “Leave us alone.”

  Martin looked from the woman to Guy to the woman again. “Yeah, hit the road, lady, you heard the man,” Martin added, still in Guy’s arms.

  28

  Guy drove Martin to Flatwater for breakfast. “The Krauts know how to make cars, that’s for sure,” Martin said after several miles. He felt the seat, craned his neck to look under the dash. “You can’t hear anything outside, you don’t feel the road—it’s like you’re in a goddamn submarine.”

  Guy grinned. His face hurt. His whole body hurt. He briefly cataloged his stay thus far. Twice he had looked into the black hole of a gun barrel—Martin’s rifle and Brad Wicks’s pistol. Three times he’d been in fights—twice at Doc’s, once in his own living room. He’d averaged three hours of sleep a night and a day and a half between beatings. His face looked like Muhammad Ali’s after the Thrilla in Manila. His body felt the same way. His Mercedes had taken a blast from somebody’s shotgun. Plus, he’d just placed ten thousand dollars on a very long shot. Betting on Martin was like betting on an aging horse that lived on sour-mash whiskey.

  “What’ll she do?” Martin said, nodding at the speedometer.

  Guy waited until they reached a straight stretch of highway, then brought the Mercedes up to 115.

  “Goddamn!” Martin shouted. “Pour it to her, son!”

  On the outskirts of Flatwater the highway patrolman clocked them at 117 in a 55 zone. The speeding ticket was $124 with another $100 “reckless disregard” tacked on, $20 court costs, an $8 law-library acquisitions fee, and a possible week in jail.

  From the courthouse Guy sent Martin to find Cassandra Silver. She came immediately. To Guy’s surprise she argued with the traffic judge that Guy was racing to take his father to the clinic—that there’d been a farm accident. She pointed to Martin’s bloody shirt.

  The judge looked from Martin to Guy’s face, then back to Martin, who at that moment leaned aside to the deputy and said in a hoarse whisper that carried across the room, “Hell—we was just trying to see when that Kraut car would bottom out!”

  “Two hundred forty-eight dollars,” the judge said, and rapped the table with his gavel. He looked at Guy’s face again. He thought for a moment. “Incarceration suspended for medical reasons.” He turned to Cassandra. “You’d probably accuse us of beating the prisoner.”

  At the Red Caboose, Guy and Martin dug into their hash browns and sunny-side eggs. Cassandra watched from her side of the booth. She only drank coffee and smoked. She kept looking at her watch.

  “Sure you don’t want some eggs?” Guy said again.

  “Not hungry,” she said.

  “Losing a case ruins the appetite?” Guy said. He grinned. She didn’t.

  “My witnesses usually hold up better. But I kept you out of jail, for chrissakes,” she said. She narrowed her eyes at Martin, who was jolting the catsup bottle with the butt of his palm.

  Martin said to three men at the next table, “Shit, I know she’d have hit a hundred and twenty-five, I could feel her letting loose.”

  “Listen,” Cassandra said to Guy, “I’ve got to see you.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “Alone.”

  “I’m having brunch with my father at the moment,” Guy said. “We’re waiting for the fruit plate and the champagne. After that maybe.”

  “Hey—who found time to rush up to the courthouse and make a fool of herself?”

  “Okay, okay,” Guy said. He finished his eggs, then drained his coffee cup. He handed the Mercedes keys to Martin. “You take the Kraut car, I’ll get a lift home later.”

  Martin stared at the shiny keys, then grinned at Guy and Cassandra. Outside the Caboose, Guy adjusted the seat for Martin’s shorter legs, showed him the ignition lock. He watched as Martin backed with a jerk from the parking place. He waved briefly to Guy, then departed in a shriek of the tires and two little blue thunderheads of smoke.

  In Cassandra’s pink room at the Lumberjack, Guy lay on her bed. She had given him a Valium for his aches, and occasionally the paisley wallpaper swirled like a school of pink minnows. He shivered. She stared briefly, brought him a blanket.

  “Thanks, Florence.”

  “I’m not your goddamn nurse,” she said. “I’m trying to make sure your father doesn’t kill you or you him, that’s all. I’m trying to keep you alive, that’s all.”

  She snapped open her briefcase and drew out some papers. Guy watched. Her hair was combed back on the sides, hung forward at the front. She wore a white silk blouse, blue wool slacks. Sunlight came through the east window and gleamed on the white back of her neck.

  “Oh, nurse,” he said.

  Cassandra looked up from her papers.

  “I’ve lost my pill,” Guy said, looking down to the folds of the blankets.

  She came over to the bed. Guy grabbed her.

  “Damn you, stop it,” she said.

  “You said we had some things to talk about. I’m ready.” Guy held her down atop him and buried his face in her neck.

  She struggled free and stood up, angry, by the bed. She straightened her blouse. “This is work, all right? It’s one o’clock in the afternoon, there’s a lot of things—big things—happening between Indians and whites. And they’re going to get a lot worse before they get better.”

  “So I’m listening,” Guy said.

  “I need your help . . . ,” she began. She stood with her back to the sun in the window. The light bloomed in her silk blouse. She wore one of those thin bras that showed not lines but curves.

  “Take off your clothes,” Guy said quietly.

  Her eyes widened.

  He repeated it.

  “Are you . . .”

  “Serious. Take them off and don’t move an inch from where you’re standing.”

  “Why the hell should I?” she said, recovering from surprise. “Because you’re some sort of Marlboro Man who tells women what he wants and then expects them to do it?”

  “Not that,” Guy said.

  “Or maybe you think you’re Clint Eastwood—you expect to get laid after every fight—well, fuck you, buddy!”

  “No Marlboro Man, no Clint Eastwood,” Guy said. “If you undressed now, in the sunlight, I would remember it the rest of my life. That’s all.”

  She stared down at him. Somewhere outside of the hotel an airplane droned overhead.

  She was killing him. His ribs hurt, his hands hurt, his face hurt, his knees and shins hurt. His head ached. But he wouldn’t stop and she wouldn’t either. Before he came he pulled away and rolled them over. He slid her forward over him until his face was centered between her thighs. He held her there, his mouth full on her. He did not let her go until his tongue ached as badly as the rest of his body. By then his face and neck were slick with her wetness, some of which was blood. “I should have told you,” she murmured, slumping over him like a long stick of butter in a warm dish. “Now you look worse than you did this morning.”

  “But I feel better,” Guy lied. They rolled over again and kept moving.

  While she was in the bathroom Guy fell asleep. He dreamed. He dreamed Zhingwaak’s story “The Blood Boy.”

  Once upon a time there lived a hunter and his wife. They lived in a wigwam by a lake. While babies cried in other wigwams, their wigwam was silent.

  At night the woman sang into the smoke of the cooking fire. She sang, “I have no son, I have no son, I have no son.”

  Every night the hunter s
at by the fire and smoked his long pipe while the wife sang. The hunter’s smoke joined the song of his wife. His smoke traveled with the smoke of the cooking fire like willow shoots woven into a basket. Every night the smoke of their fire rose up through the hole in the wigwam’s roof and went into the night sky.

  Spring came early that year. The hunter killed a deer with one arrow. With his knife he cut open the belly of the deer. As he worked a spot of blood fell on his hand. He kept working in the smoke that rose from the belly of the deer.

  He kept cutting away the deer’s guts, reaching up for the lungs and heart. His hand began to itch, but he did not stop to rub it. The hunter’s name was Waits All Day. But soon he could no longer hold the knife. Something was growing in his hand.

  The hunter stood up to look. Something was growing from the spot of blood that had fallen on his hand. At first it looked like a mouse, pink and with no hair. A mouse in his hand. But then it grew more and the hunter could see that it was a boy.

  The boy grew long legs. Then arms. Then a head. Soon the boy was as big as, then bigger than, his father.

  His father could no longer hold the boy in his hand, so with his knife he cut the boy free. Then he lifted him. He carried him in his arms down to the river and washed away the blood. After that he took the boy home to show his wife.

  As they neared the wigwam the hunter could hear his wife singing. She sang, “Now I have a son, now I have a son, now I have a son.”

  The son became a hunter like his father.

  Soon he became a better hunter than his father. The father began to stay home in the wigwam and to let the son bring home the deer and the ducks and the partridge. The son was happy to do this for his father. He was the best hunter in the village.

  But one day the son left his bow and arrows in the wigwam. He did not go hunting. He had decided he must leave the village. “Father,” he said, “I must go away to look for some people.”

  “Who?” the father asked. “What people?”

  “I will know them when I see them,” the boy answered.