The Trials of Solomon Parker

by Eric Scott Fischl

  “Did you get more cornmeal like I asked?”

  “Ah, girl, I didn’t.” He tries jiggling the baby a bit, but Owen just bobbles his head along and continues to scream.

  “Damn it, Sol, how am I supposed to cook tonight?”

  “I’m sorry, Lizzie. I’ll go out a little later, OK?” Sol shifts Owen to the other arm, trying on something of a side-to-side shimmy.

  “Later, great.” A pot bangs down over-hard onto the wood stove. “Fine. I didn’t want to get the oven heated up anyway so we’ll just have no bread. None. That all right with you?”

  Sol remembers these fights. Lizzie was ever a stubborn and difficult woman, as much as he loved – loves – her but, after Owen came along, it was like they couldn’t be in a room together for five minutes without getting at each other’s throats like stalking cats. Another reason he spent so much time down at the tavern. Lizzie was always angry, always seemed to be sweaty and flushed, bagged blue bruises under her eyes from the lack of sleep. He tried to do what he could to help out but that just made her madder; best thing he could do, then, was to keep away and out of her hair. Best thing for the both of them. He thought it would get better once Owen got a little older, when he’d sleep longer through the night; the wailing kept Sol up, too, after all. But people had babies all the time, right, they got past it, like you just did. Wasn’t like it was a mystery that babies came with a heap of inconveniences, after all, and it wasn’t as if Owen was an accident: they’d tried hard for years and years, with some sorry disappointments along the way, before this child had come to them. Sol wants to think that they’ll get past it all too, now. He lifts Owen up to his shoulder, cupping the back of the baby’s soft head with one hand, patting at his little back with the other, which serves no purpose aside from adding some staccato to his wailing.

  “Sol, he’s just hungry.” Lizzie strides in and peels Owen from his shoulder with a brusque motion, dropping into the rocker and pulling out her breast with businesslike efficiency. The baby immediately quiets, going to work on his meal, tiny hands rhythmically clenching and releasing. The sight of Lizzie’s breast, swollen and blue-veined and stretched, the brown around the nipple darkened, pebbled, wrinkled tight, sends a jolt through Sol’s belly. He can feel his prick stiffening.

  “What?” Lizzie’s glaring at him.

  “Nothing, just looking is all. Forgot for a minute how pretty you were.”

  She blows out a puff of air. “Maybe go look somewhere else, Sol. Like at the grocery store for what we need for dinner, OK?” She turns her body away from him, a gesture that hurts far more than it should.

  “Sure, honey. Anything else you need?” She shakes her head, not looking his way. “All right,” he says, ignored, picks up his shapeless hat from the table by the door. “I’ll be going, then. Have to stop at the bar, check in on things, but I won’t be too long, OK?”

  “Take your time.”

  At the tavern, which he’d called Potter’s after someone he once admired, Sol stares at his reflection in the yellowed mirror behind the bar, wondering at the man looking back at him. He’s young – well, younger – but not the way he remembers himself being so. His hair is still brown, as is the stubble on his cheeks, mostly, a bit flecked with grey around the sides of his chin is all. Skin smooth, more or less unwrinkled, tending toward the leathery at the corners of his eyes from a boyhood spent outside, squinting into the sun behind the ass end of a plow horse. Those eyes, though, they’re not like what he remembers, not at all. The eyes look his age, his true age, whatever that actually is by now. They look tired, wary. Busted-down some from everything they’ve seen. They’re an old man’s eyes in a younger man’s face. Sol knows that he himself, now, is really something like an old man wearing a younger man’s body, though, so fair enough.

  He raises his glass to the kid he’d hired to help out, Chase or Jace or something along those lines. It’s been years since he’s even thought about him, after all. Pretty much the only thing he remembers now about this boy is that once he’d walked into the back room and caught him with his hands down his trousers, no doubt thinking about some girl or other as he committed an abbreviated version of the solitary sin. The boy’s jaw had dropped but Sol had just said something like hey maybe lock the door first, having been a young man himself once. Full of vinegar and that terrifying feeling of being full up with everything that pretty girls brought with them, once you really started to notice them, everything they could put in your head with a simple glance of their eyes, a toss of the hair, sway of a soft and round buttock under a skirt. Even the homely ones could do it because, really, it didn’t much matter at that age.

  Had he already caught Chase or Jace, or whoever he was, grabbing a quick jerk in the back room during a slow time? Or was that still yet to happen? Sol wonders if that’s what his life is going to be now, a stuttering repetition of all the things he’s already done, over the next years until he catches himself back up. People he’s met, things he’s said, all of it. Lizzie once told him a story, another one of her Greek ones, about some old boy who thought to fool the gods when he’d wished for the gift of seeing his future. He’d been granted it, and the poor bastard went crazy, turned out; Sol hadn’t quite understood it, at the time, until Lizzie had explained that the man in the story had lost the gift of hope, knowing everything that would pass, merely stepping along in the long line of footsteps in front of him, powerless to change his future.

  Maybe that was to be his own fate now, yet another bad debt come home to squat on his chest. But that’s bullshit, though, isn’t it. There are always choices to make: you might not make the right one or get what you want, but you can at least try. Sometimes that’s all you have.

  He watches Chase or Jace fill his glass with another jot of whiskey, the golden-dark fluid shining in the dim light coming through the bar’s dusty windows, which need a wiping. The fuck is he paying this kid for, anyway, except to jerk off in the back room when Sol isn’t around, maybe pour him the odd drink in the middle of an afternoon. But he’s the only one here now, aside from the kid; Potter’s has never been what you’d call a thriving concern, and it’s still early in the day, after all, when most people are doing whatever it is they do for work, not sitting in a dim bar, alone, drinking and bitching in their heads about the state of the windows. The bag of groceries lies neglected on the stool next to him, cornmeal and whatever else caught his eye: little peace offerings, in a small, cheap way, all he can afford, some huckleberries that have come into season, a little jar of apple butter put up last year for those too lazy to make their own.

  Sol swallows half his whiskey in a hot, eye-watering gulp and thinks back – forward – to what’s brought him here, to this failing little bar of his and a wife who’s going crazy in installments and to his son, a boy he’d let die again a few years from now. And now this bag of cornmeal and impulse-bought sweets and cheap, bullshit whiskey that half makes you want to puke it up as soon as it goes down.

  He knows about, remembers it all, now, the fight – the first fight, when Nancy knocked that goddamn idiot Faraday bang the fuck out (accidentally to be sure, it wasn’t Nancy’s fault) – and then the riot, later, at the Neversweat, Sean Harrity taking the shot at him, well deserved because of what Sol had done, probably, treachery and false dealing, after all, which had kicked the whole thing off. Good men dead in the gunfire and smoke and swinging truncheons, all because of Sol’s bad bets and a fuck-up at the end of it. But Sol can also remember, now, though he didn’t at the time, that first bet with Billy’s uncle, throwing those scarred Indian bones; there was Nancy’s fight – again, somehow – and then the riot that had never happened, that time around.

  The second bet with the old Indian, going back to the Penn and still losing his boy, losing Owen, letting the fucking mine burn down around them all, just as it had before.

  Now here he is, wondering what’s going to come, if he has the chance to save Lizzie this time, before her mind finishes its cracking
, before it tears loose of its casing and she burns their house down around her and Owen again. Burned it, just like the Penn, years from now. He’d gotten home to Lizzie before, on a fluke, just in time to pull her and the baby out of the flames, beat out her burning dress and blow fresh air into Owen’s tiny lungs until he could breathe again. Lizzie watching him from the ground, cupping her forearms to her chest and laughing and crying and screaming nonsense at him. He’d saved Owen and then shipped Lizzie off to Ag up at Warm Springs, hoping they could put her back together there. That hadn’t worked out, of course, and soon enough he’d sent Owen off to live with Ag and Sara and the rest of their brood, temporarily at first and then permanently. Telling himself it was for the best. Leaving them to raise his son while he, Sol, wandered around for a few months, trying on work as he could get it, drinking his share to be sure, getting in some fights and some other trouble, stumbling around in the daze of a man who’s had his foundation shaken away from him. Eventually he’d made his way to Butte and found something akin to solidity again in the mine work, losing himself in the dark and wet and dusty tunnels, finding himself once more in the use of his muscles and the satisfaction of hard work done well, the companionship of tired men at the end of a long shift, washing the dust out of their throats with a beer and whiskey follow.

  Those years after Lizzie hadn’t been perfect, to be sure; there had been plenty of pain and heartache and trouble and bad choices, but that’s what a life was and his had fit him snug, like a well-worn pair of pants. Even at the end, debt-deep into Harrity, fearing for his safety as those bad decisions came home to nest, Sol had felt solid and secure, in a way, with the messes that he’d made, the natural outgrowth of all that had come before.

  Now, back here, he doesn’t know what the hell to make of any of it.

  Best not to fucking think about it. He doesn’t want to know who or what Billy’s old uncle, Marked Face, is all about. Indian magic or witchcraft or some kind of demon out the Bible or what, Sol doesn’t want to know. Just doesn’t. He’s learning that, when faced with something so far out of the pale of anything else in a life, something so defiant of understanding, it’s best to just shunt it aside, as much as you can, don’t even look at it sidelong, if you can help it. He isn’t much of a religious man but, now, understands a bit more about old Thomas the doubter from the Good Book. Some things are just too big to take in, some thoughts are stronger than the person thinking them, and, in that case, best to just to ignore them and get on with things, much as you can.

  Here it is, Sol thinks now. Another chance, maybe. Even if he’s just here to step through those same, sorry footsteps as before, there’s fuck-all he can do about it, so better to just button up and get to it. He’ll be damned, though, if he isn’t at least going to make a stab at getting things right, this time; even if it means that whatever else happens turns to shit, he isn’t going to just sit on his ass and watch it all happen again.

  In the back of his mind, though, is another thought he’s trying to ignore: he hadn’t saved Owen, last time he’d had a chance, down the Penn.

  The fire had burned him up, same as before.

  3.

  Billy is brought back with a slap, as only seems right.

  Instinctively, from long practice, he curls down into himself like a pill-bug even though, at some level, he’s thinking I’m not a fucking kid any more, and then the next slap tells him that he is, the hard, open hand that cracks his head sideways. He can smell sweat and booze and something faintly smoky and any nascent defiance crumples then because he knows where he is, even with his sight slippery in his head and his body stumbling towards the corner of the shack where at least he’ll maybe have something covering him on a couple of sides. A slap and a slap again, wordless and sharp, sending him backwards; when he gets himself turned away from the hands there’s a swift foot to his asshole, lifting him up tippy-toe as he scampers towards somewhere at least half safe.

  “Where have you been, boy?”

  Marked Face’s voice is low, rough, graveled angry with drink and whatever it is that makes the man himself. Billy feels his belly drawing up tight inside, even as he tries to make his body the smallest possible target. He hides his face in the crook of his forearms, does his best to shrink up his torso so his kidneys aren’t laying out there for a punch or another kicking. The last time, he’d pissed blood for a week, his uncle never even breaking a sweat. It’s not just inside himself, now, that Billy feels small and weak; he can tell where he is from the smell in the air and the skinny press of his wristbones on his forehead, curled fetal as he is.

  He’s back again, up the reservation at his father’s cabin, the scrawny white boy home from the government school. His short hair itches the back of his neck and there’s that familiar tightness at his crotch from the too-short school pants, the collar strangling his throat, clothes rough-woven and overly starched, stinking of lye. He remembers everything: the last thing he’d seen as he walked out the diner’s door a moment ago, years from now, was Marked Face staring across the table at that blind, stupid old man, Sol Parker. Billy doesn’t understand it, any of it, but here he is again, once more getting the shit kicked out of him by a bastard of a relative who’s half a foot taller, fifty pounds heavier, and a thousand times meaner. Home sweet home.

  “I said where you been, boy?”

  Billy turns his head, peers over his shoulder at his uncle, who isn’t his uncle at all, although that isn’t really any good thing. Bad Bird snaps his open hand down again, rings a glancing blow off Billy’s temple, forcing him to tuck tighter down into himself.

  Where have I been?

  Later, sitting across the little table from his father, eating white bread with cheap sausage gravy, it doesn’t seem like Bad Bird is even drunk. It’s tough to tell with his father: there’s often a stink of whiskey about him but Billy rarely sees him actually drink. It’s as if, somehow, the smell of liquor is just steeped into his body and leaks out his pores from time to time. Bad Bird is a violent, mercurial man, often giving the appearance of being entirely out of control with liquor but, over the years, Billy has come to wonder if his father’s behavior is simply the natural outgrowth of whatever instability landed him at Warm Springs. Will land him at Warm Springs. Drunk or not, though, the old man had never missed an opportunity to slap the shit out of him, if not do something worse. Billy rubs the scar at his shoulder, remembering, and then realizes that the scar isn’t there. Not yet, maybe.

  “They treat you OK, up at that school?” Bad Bird speaks the old tongue slowly and deliberately, his low, plodding, breathy voice at odds with his quickfire temper, the one that can and will flare up in an instant, like kerosene on an open flame. It’s not even so much that his father is meaner or harder than other men: he’s unpredictable, is what he is. Bad Bird will go from maudlin sappiness to fisted anger to lazy indifference in a space of time where other men will yawn or let go a good fart; it’s this kind of behavior, combined with that vaguely boozy stink, that makes most people think Bad Bird is just another Drunken Injun, instead of merely crazy.

  Billy shrugs, mutters something about how it’s OK, the school, knowing that Bad Bird will expect the courtesy of a verbal response. A shrug alone is disrespectful. Like all these old men, his father and Marked Face and the rest of those goddamn sad chiefs are fixated on respect, a commodity in short supply these days. Any more, they don’t get it from their women and they’ve never gotten it from the whites so they goddamn well better get their due from their pissant children. You show me some respect, boy, or I’ll slap it into you. In the old tongue it sounds a bit more poetical but the message is the same, particularly delivered a beat in front of an open hand.

  “Why are you back, Sagiistoo?” His father reaches out then, taking hold of Billy’s skinny forearm and squeezing it tightly, looking deep into his eyes with an expression of love. There’s no other word for it. Billy knows his father loves him, just the same way he knows the old man is crazy. Despite himself,
despite the slapping and the anger and the piss-pants fear, Billy can’t help but feel an answering twist in his chest. Bad Bird is mean and depressed and crazy and full of hatred but he’s still his father, one of the few ties Billy has to something, anything really. He’s never had a mother, not a living one, hasn’t had a home since being shipped off to the white school, and there they’re taking away what’s left of his race, bleaching the brown from his skin from the inside out. Bad Bird is one of the few things in this world that ties Billy to it, one shabby link to something that’s bigger than himself. It’s – was, will be – the same way with Sol; these men are family, blood or not, good and bad and everything in the middle but family of one sort or another.

  “We’re on a summer break, Father. Go home, hey, see the people, show them how we are, right?” Billy remembers this, just as he knows that this is the last time he’ll be home, that he’ll never go back to the school. Soon after this time he met – will meet – Sol, and life will go the way it did. But does it have to?

  He looks down at his skinny wrists, dirty and scratched with faint scabs from one thing or another. They feel wrong, these arms, so much smaller and weaker than he’s used to, than what he knows in his head to be his body. He feels uncomfortable in this one, a grown man dropped in a teenager’s, a thing too light and fragile for the weight of his years. A strange thing doesn’t begin to describe it, but if anything has changed in him over the course of this last while – those years from now – it’s maybe that he’s becoming a bit more Indian again, the brown beginning to seep back in, and he’s able to see a little through the shallow pale of whatever it is that lives over the real world, the world that the People knew in the old times. The world of the stories which, before, he’d thought to be just that: stories. Bullshit songs to explain the inexplicable, make apologies for the shameful and talk up the noble. Now, though, seeing what he’s seen, what he is seeing, maybe there’s more to the stories than that. Maybe he’s unlearning some of what the whites have taught him to know and is truly seeing the world for the first time, the real one, in the way that Bad Bird and his uncle and the rest of the old fuckers have seen it from the beginning. Seeing it the way that it is, baffling and mysterious and full of contradiction, but real.