Red Ant House

by Ann Cummins

  She could tell how close he was to the bank by his breathing. He breathed with his mouth open, a loud rasping, and the steeper the pull, the louder the rasping. When he was two pulls away from the bank, she got up to hold the cage for him.

  All along the river, the cattails were splitting and their guts were trailing out. Willa tried to touch them as they drove along to the next sampling place, sticking her hand out the open window to catch the soft fuzz of the cattail innards. There had been no rain that summer. The ground had dried and split into puzzle pieces, and across the desert, dust devils rose and died. If she half closed her eyes, the river, thick with cotton, looked like snow. She had been waiting this long month for the heat to end.

  She let her head hang out the window and her father’s voice came whining after her. He was talking about the white man’s furniture. He had watched the United van turn on the road between the water treatment plant and the Conoco, drive to the empty house back near the entrance to the drive-in, and unload waterbeds and a piano.

  “He says that house is noisy,” she heard her father say. Dust rolled up from under the tires; she squinted and kept her mouth closed. Her father said something that she couldn’t hear because of the wind in her ears, and then he pushed her arm so she ducked back into the pickup.

  “His kids join any clubs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “His boy play sports?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They in as many clubs as you?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You know anything?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  She sighed. “You do, too.”

  “Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Not me. I am empty space between the ears.” She looked out the window.

  They’d begun to climb the plateau and could see the Ute Mountains in the north. The river had disappeared. The river here was banked by soft pink bluffs, and the same kind of bluffs sat like isolated tables across the desert. Willa stared at the one in the east that looked like a clown’s fat cheek. Here and there chrome gleamed from ruined cars that somebody had driven into the desert and abandoned.

  Her father laughed suddenly, and hit the steering wheel. “He says, ‘What’s the crime rate like?’ That’s what he asked me. He said, ‘Anybody breaking in to your house?’ I guess he comes from Gallup. I guess he was working for the tribe over there.” He poked her shoulder. “Whatsa matter?”

  “Nothing.”

  Her father shook his head and pursed his lips. “He’s a funny one. I guess he worked over there at Gallup and at Window Rock with the water treatment. I guess he’s used to Indians.” He laughed and poked her shoulder again. “Whatsa matter?” he said again.

  “Nothing!”

  He nodded and began moving his shoulders in rhythm with the music on the radio. “Fifteen years. That’s what he said. Been working for the tribe fifteen some odd years.”

  Willa filled her cheeks with air and blew it silently through her lips. Her father put his elbow on the brown case between them and leaned toward her. “Know what else I heard?” She didn’t answer him. “Know what else I heard?”

  “What!”

  “I heard,” he said, “that they’re going to close the drive-in. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Too many teenage kids sneaking in. You sneaking in?”

  “No.”

  “I bet you are.”

  “Nope.”

  “You a little sneak?”

  They would hide in the girls’ bathroom when Ron Pete came with his flashlight. They would wait until dark to crawl under the fence, and then they sat on the bleachers with the walk-ins and listened to all the squeaking voices coming from the car speakers. It was funny sitting on the bleachers where the speakers didn’t work, and watching the actors without voices. If there weren’t many cars, they would sneak to one of the mounds, sit there, and take the speaker down so they could hear, and when they saw Ron Pete’s flashlight bobbing along, they would run to the bathroom and stay in there, laughing, listening to him walking back and forth outside the door, waiting for them.

  “I said, ‘Put ‘em in jail.’ If they’re sneaking in like little wild Indians.”

  She pressed her hand hard against her lips to keep from laughing. She wondered what Ron Pete, the drive-in cop, would think if he saw her painting in the fair. She wondered what he would think of her then. It didn’t seem like she had a painting at the fair, but she did. She said, “Mrs. Penner chose my painting for the fair.”

  Her father played the steering wheel like it was a drum, and nodded his head. He said, “His kids in the band?”

  “I guess.”

  “What they play?”

  “She is. The girl.”

  “What she play?”

  “Piccolo.”

  “Piccolo? Piccolo.” He began saying the word very fast. “Piccolo piccolo piccolo.” He began drumming again. “She play any solos?”

  “Stop asking me! You talk too much!”

  Her father stopped drumming. He looked at her, and Willa ran her tongue over her lips, tasting sand.

  Her father nodded. He turned the radio off but continued nodding, and Willa stared straight ahead. She folded her hands in her lap, barely letting the fingers touch one another. She tried not to look at him, but he was doing something with his hand—he put one finger over his lips, held his chin with his thumb, pointed his finger straight, put the finger back against his lip, pointed it again. Willa looked hard toward where the river would be, toward where the next stop would be, and then she grabbed the armrest because her father had hit the gas.

  They drove fast, sailing over the desert where the road had disappeared, and she held the seat to keep from hitting the roof. The road was just an impression in the dried weeds and grass. She reached over to turn the radio on, but it only coughed and sputtered. She started to turn it off, but they hit a rut, she lost her balance, and her elbow crashed into the sample case. She pressed her feet into the floor, though they came up anyway, and her knees banged together. The bottles were clinking. Maybe they were cracking and the water was spilling out. Her father shifted gears, working the clutch up and down, and she braced herself, hooking her feet under the dashboard and then grabbing the dash as her father braked at the second stop.

  He opened the case, took out three sample bottles, opened his door, and started for the next cage. “Come on,” he told her.

  She didn’t move. He stopped and turned, looking at her. “Come on!” he said gruffly. “No.”

  “No?” He grinned. She lowered her head, stared out the front window, and she heard him laugh, low and dirty. After a minute she heard the weeds snapping under his feet and then the soft shush as he slid down the steep bank. She twisted the truck key, turned the radio up until she couldn’t hear him anymore, and then opened her door, put the sample case on the ground, and lay on her back across the seat. Freddy Fender blasted in her ear. She thought of walking down the hall at school, arm in arm with her friends, shouting at the top of their lungs, “Mu-el Train,” and of Mrs. Leitz running out of her classroom, looking like she had seen a ghost. “Clippety-clop over hill and plain, mu-el train”—and of how Mrs. Leitz had a boyfriend. David Lee gave her his ribbons. Gave her his track ribbons. Walked right up in front of everybody, said, “Here,” gave that skinny white lady two blue ones and a white for the shot put, and she had turned red, and she had kept them. Willa turned the radio off. Her stomach hurt, and her throat burned.

  “Hey!” he yelled. She folded her arms over her stomach and stared at the foam crumbling from the tear in the seat back. She grinned, though it wasn’t funny. She put her hand over her lips and felt the wetness of her teeth and her twitching lips, which could not stop grinning. “Hey!” he yelled again. She began to pull the foam from the tear, and she thought how the truck was new last year. He didn’t take care of things. He spoiled everything. He had brought it home just last summer. She listened
for the chain clinking against the cage, and then sat up so she could hear better. She could hear the river slapping softly at the sand, but not the chain, and she craned her neck. She pressed her elbows to her side. A drop of sweat ran down the back of her right arm—there he went. She hadn’t heard the chain, but now she heard the cage squealing along the cable, and she laughed nervously. She stood and took a few steps until she could see the top of the cage arc up toward the opposite bank, then swing back and roll to a stop in the middle of the river. She squatted. The ground below her feet was gray, fuzzy with cotton, and one sock was full of goatheads. She began picking them out. They had completely covered one sock and were sticking to the laces of the shoe. She began making a little pile of burrs.

  “Hey Shik’ is! Hey Stoma!” he yelled.

  She stared straight ahead at the Sleeping Ute Mountain and the rain clouds that had been gathering there all summer but had never come into the desert.

  “Ya’ at’eeh Naat’aanii. Hago!”

  She put her elbows on her knees and held her face. Far to the north, the bluff tapered down, and she could see the brown ribbon of river ahead. Her legs had begun to ache, so she sat back in the dirt. She picked more cattail fluff from the cuff of her shirt, then unfolded the arm that she had been holding out the window and saw that her shirt was covered with cattail guts. It looked like a flurry of moths feeding on her.

  Perhaps her mother had opened her mouth and let the moths come in. They say Willa’s mother went crazy before she died, that the fever went into her head, and they say that her father had gone out and shot the ground. Over and over again, he had shot the ground, trying to wake her mother up, or because he was angry—Willa didn’t know. Willa had not been angry. She had not been anything. She could not remember what she was when her mother died, though now, sometimes she missed her so much that the feeling would swim through her, and then it would be gone, like a dream.

  She began to pull the cattail fluff from her arm. She was so hungry. Her stomach hurt and her head had begun to hurt. She thought of fair food, of the Knights of Columbus tent, of the potatoes frying there.

  She stood and looked at the top of the cage, which had not moved from the middle of the river. She could not see him. She took a few more steps, and the cage grew as she walked. For a minute she thought the cage was empty. She could not see him. She tilted onto her toes, peered over the edge of the bluff, then squatted suddenly because he was lying there in the bottom of the cage, lying there, kicking the water, his hat over his face like a rag. What was he waiting for! For her to come? He was waiting for her to come. He would wait all day. Because he had nothing better to do. Because he was ch ‘iidiil She began to tremble. No. He was not a devil. She did not think that. He was—she did not know what he was.

  She looked behind her at where the sun hung over the ship rock. It was getting late. They still had one more checkpoint, and then they must drive back. She must fill out the forms for him, and then they would go, and he would give her money. He would make her beg for money. He would say, “Two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar,” and toss a quarter—because that was his joke. He would sit in the Knights of Columbus tent and he would shout it like a high school cheerleader, and everybody would laugh because everybody liked to laugh at him, and he would toss the quarter into the air and it would fall in the dirt, and she would lick it up like the little red rat-dog—

  She stood. She walked quickly to the edge of the bluff. “Hey!” he said. His hat hung over one eye only. He had been watching for her. Now, he pushed himself up from the bottom of the cage and sat there cross-legged. “Hey, get that for me,” he said. He motioned with his chin, and Willa looked to where he pointed. All along the bank there, wild asparagus grew. She had picked it before, and cooked the tips. Now they were grown over and flowering. They were inedible, and there among the stalks the black wrench rested like a shadow. She grinned. He had left it on purpose, she knew, and now he wanted her to bring it.

  “Come on!” he said, and he scrambled to his feet. “It’s not deep. Bring that to me. I’m stuck. Just take your shoes off.” He fluttered his hands. “I’m stranded,” he said. “Help!” He fluttered his hands like a little bird, took hold of the cage bars, stuck his head through, and his hat fell into the cage. Willa thought of her mother and how she had just opened her mouth and let the moths come in, and then she didn’t have to worry about anything.

  She began to climb down to the wrench. The sand tunneled under her feet, and her shoes slowly filled. She did not look at him. At the bottom of the bank she sat and pulled first one then the other shoe off. She pulled them off slowly, held each so the sand trailed out into little piles. She put them side by side on the riverbank and pulled the socks off, too, leaving each in a little ball behind the shoes. She picked the wrench up and stepped into the water, water so warm with the sun, and mud so soft, soft like a cow’s tongue, though it gave under her feet; she could feel little craters under her feet, and a soft flutter, as if crabs—as if ocean crabs were burrowing under. And she stopped, just feeling the earth as it caved in, and she laughed. Her father laughed back. She held the wrench up to him. “This?” He continued to clown and prance around in the cage, and she laughed again, and then she hurled the wrench into the river away from the cage. She said, “Oops, I dropped it.”

  Her father stepped away from the bars. He stood in the middle of the cage, staring at her, and she stood on the bank, staring back. He was not smiling now. He had lowered his chin like a bull lowered its head. She dug her fingernails into her palms and did not take her eyes from him, and when he began to rock, when he took hold of the bars at the side of the cage, and began, at first gently, to sway back and forth, she did not flinch, and when the cage built up momentum, swinging in a wider arc up and down the river, and the wheel on the pulley began to groan, and the pulley itself stretched with the weight of the cage, when the cage began to nod left and then nod right, she laughed because he looked exactly like one of those helium-filled balloons on the Mormons’ float in today’s parade, the helium-filled balloons bowing to the people. He swung faster, and she laughed harder, though when the cage left the pulley, when the cable snapped and the cage ripped free, when the cable began whipping around like a live wire, and her father got the funny look on his face—for that second that he hung there in the air her father had a surprised and silly grin—then she began to scream.

  The sun was setting when they drove home. They were both covered with mud. Willa was driving. Her father sat on the passenger’s side, holding a wad of Kleenex to the gash in his head. His eyes were closed and he had not spoken since she pulled him from the river.

  The mud coating Willa’s skin made her itch, and the evening breeze coming through the window licked at the patches of skin that were not coated. She swallowed and kept swallowing. She could not get the picture out of her head. She kept seeing his face again—the moment when it disappeared under the water—and feeling his body, the way it trembled afterward.

  The hand that held the Kleenex was caked with mud, and the mud made a web between her father’s fingers. He had not wiped any of the mud from his face, so his skin was a deep brown clay, but there was a rim of white surrounding his lips and she thought that underneath the mud, the whole face must be that color. She concentrated on the road—she had driven the truck only twice before, on back roads like this with her father coaching—and she watched the desert swallows darting through the sky.

  At the edge of the village she saw the fires on the riverbank, and she smelled the meat cooking. She looked at the river for the cage. For a while, the cage had traveled along with them, but now it was hung up in the mud somewhere.

  The water treatment plant was the only building on the edge of the river. Del Rink’s pickup was gone, and the plant was closed. Her father seemed to be asleep. She touched his shoulder but he did not stir. She said, “I guess your boss’ll have to fix that cage.” He did not stir, and he did not smile.

  She would tak
e him to the hospital. They would drive directly to the hospital, and she would park at the emergency room door—Her arms ached. The forearms ached so badly suddenly that she wanted to put them in her lap, to let go of the wheel, and her fingers on the left hand ached, too. She tried to unwrap them from the wheel. She would drive direcdy to the hospital, to the emergency room door.

  They rounded the bend in the river, and Willa saw the lights on the Ferris wheel, a ring of white lights, and she began to hear the tin-can music. The bluffs were covered with cars and pickups whose colors had disappeared with night. High in the air above the dust, the sky was gleaming purple, and in front of her, where the road met the highway, pickups, four or five deep, blocked the road. She braked. To the left of the road was the river, and to the right was the bluff.

  Her father had opened his eyes and was peering at the pickups. She turned the key off, opened her door and said, “Shizhe’e. Stay here.” Her father dropped his hand onto his lap. The Kleenex, brown with dried blood, stuck to his forehead. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and she began to wind her way through the pickups toward the highway. Traffic on the highway was barely moving, and people were walking across the river walkway, and some were riding horses across. She looked at them, trying to see someone she knew. At the highway she looked back to where their truck was parked and saw her father, trailing after her, the Kleenex flowering in the middle of his face.

  “Shizhe’e, go back!” He swayed between the pickups, walking his hands along them. She turned and hurried back.