Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  It’s coming along, he says.

  He drops the pouch. The hammer thuds on the roof—a ham-merthud on the roof, a hammer thudontheroof. A hammer, the dawn, the roof. Or, with the second syllable accented and the th’s softened, a kind of dinosaur. A wet world, full of ferns, the Hammer Thudontheroof’s knobbed head swinging stiffly on a long, thin neck. A scientist finding its bones in the Badlands is filled with wonder and elation.

  Sophie! Sophie!

  My name, faint then growing stronger, a reverse echo. They’re staring at me—the nephews looking down, Marge’s fat face quivering. For a swimming moment the past almost takes me. He used to stand like that, looking down at me, when my mother forced me to go with her when she visited his work sites.

  Yes?

  Did you hear? In the news this morning. They found another body. Near Bozeman.

  I clear my mind. The Zimmerman girl.

  I don’t watch the news, I say.

  They think she was dead a long time. One of the first ones. But they just found her body now. Death isn’t good enough for that man.

  Someday, I say, we’ll learn to resurrect people. Then we can execute the deserving ones three or four times.

  Marge doesn’t know what to make of this.

  They could have a smorgasbord, I say. Like a church dinner. First the needle, then the firing squad, then hanging, the electric chair. Maybe even the guillotine. Juries could pick and choose, various combinations.

  Well, she says. Even that wouldn’t be enough.

  There’s stoning, too. And crucifixion. They’re traditional. And if we wanted exotic, in India they used to have elephants step on criminals’ heads.

  She should never have gone to Rapid.

  What’s going to Rapid got to do with it? Eddie Little Feather was killed right here.

  The poor man who killed Eddie wasn’t trying to. It was Eddie’s own fault.

  Her sincerity defeats me.

  I’ve got to buy groceries, I say, and jerk the handles of the wheelchair, spinning it. His head flops to the side, as if it could flop right off and tumble to the street. He gains control and sits upright again. I let him call back to the nephews.

  That roof’s coming along nicely. I’d help you with it if I could.

  I knew her.

  It’s the older nephew. His words stop me. I turn back around and squint into the sun at where he stands, almost invisible in the brightness.

  Hayley Jo, he says. We went out. When we were younger. For just a little while.

  His voice breaks. He doesn’t look old enough to have a younger. He walks slowly down the roof, descending into its shadow, and stops with his boots almost in the rain gutter. Then he squats down and when he drops completely into the roof’s shadow, I remember: he was the pickup driver with the girl’s hair in his face. That was her, then: the one I let him call a—

  I push us away. The wheels are whooshing over the sidewalk with their sticky, tapey sound, when the nephew’s voice comes down to me again:

  She was real nice.

  I’m sorry, I say. I’m sorry.

  I don’t want to say it twice, but it’s out before I can stop myself. But maybe no one hears. I’m out of breath, and it comes out quiet, and maybe no one hears.

  I slow down, collect myself, try to recall whether I was running. I don’t think so. If people saw, they would call it walking fast. Exercise—because I spend so much time indoors. I wipe the sweat from my forehead with a Kleenex. I park him outside the grocery store in the sun.

  There you are, I say. I’ll get a few things and be back.

  He stares into the empty street.

  Bitch, he says. You could at least park my sorry ass inside where it’s air-conditioned.

  He uses the word even on me. So there.

  Now, now, I say. The fresh air will do you good.

  I get the things I need: groceries, a new notebook, some pens, a box of tea. I need less and less of it. I can taste the flavor in a bag dipped half-a-dozen times. The other day I was sure I tasted it after the eighth cup—a few molecules passing across my tongue, Marco Polo and spice and yellow dust, the Great Wall mortared by bones.

  I’m putting the tea on the belt when I think: raped her, stabbed her, broke her bones. That’s what they say the murderer did. It’s always put in that order. But why? Do they know? Or do they know only what happened, but not the order? The grammar, the inflections. Even with the ugliest things we hope for the right order. We need it to be correct. Because any other order would. Anyotherwould.

  Are you all right?

  Elise Thompson, the checker who asked what I was doing with the boxes, is looking at me. She left town for a while, did some missionary work, returned. Now she stands behind a rubber belt all day, staring at bar codes. She must go home seeing stripes in everything, the horses in the pastures turned to zebras, the streets immense piano keyboards, everyone in town a referee.

  Of course I’m all right.

  She nods. She picks up a can of tomato soup and sets it in the plastic bag hanging between its hooks. She pauses, her hand still in the bag. For a moment I feel this thread of commonality. We both returned.

  But then she says: It’s got to be tough.

  Tough? I ask.

  She tilts her head toward where he’s sitting in the sun. She must know he’s there. Does she peek out the window at people coming in, then scurry to her place behind the checkout?

  Taking care of him, she says. Especially the way—

  I stare at her.

  He’s your stepfather, she says, placing things in the bag just so.

  He raised me. I’m who I am because of him.

  Yes, she says. I suppose you are.

  She looks at me as if I’m supposed to respond to such banality. Then she says: There are nursing homes. No one would think anything if—you could get on with your life.

  This is my life.

  Her face breaks up, startled, the way still water breaks when a gust of wind hits it. As if her face momentarily isn’t there anymore, it’s just reflecting points and waves. Then she collects it again, looks down at her hands resting on the belt.

  My mother thinks you’re a saint, she says.

  She waits—as if she’d just offered me an invitation or a gift. I stare at her until her hands begin to move again. She beeps a box of tea through the scanner, then stops again, looking down at the Lipton Man, his gnomish face, the little S of steam rising from his china cup—his millionth cup, or hundred-millionth.

  She’s clearly thinking of saying something more. I snatch the box from her and reach across the counter. I hide the Lipton Man in the white darkness of the plastic bag, where she can’t read his eyes.

  I don’t believe in saints, I say.

  I’m not sure I do either, she replies.

  I snatch the bag off the wire prongs and leave, feeling her eyes on me, stripes imprinted on my back.

  I hang the bag on the handles of the wheelchair and march him home, waving twice to every driver who waves to us, though he has one good arm and could, if he wanted to, wave for himself.

  I help him into bed as always, pull the covers up around his shoulders.

  Good night, I say. I guess you won’t be getting up till morning.

  He waits a moment before saying, as he always does, Well, if I do, I’ve got a hand to take advantage of it.

  A little joke. I smile, polite.

  I turn out the lights. Usually I sleep when he does, but the house is too noisy tonight, an agitation of lumber, an organ of rooms. I get out of bed. For a while I stand before the picture window in the dark. Marge Germaine’s nephew squats at the edge of the roof in the starlight, a gargoyle of sorrow. A car turns the corner at the end of the block, and the passing lights dissolve him. The houses rumble like elephants, the whole town chorusing. I stand in the hallway outside the door to my old room. I haven’t been in it after dark since I returned. There’s breathing inside it, low music, the sound of weight settling on a mattr
ess.

  No. There’s not. I go to the kitchen to boil water. The first cup I pour down the drain. The second I take with me. I stand outside the doorway, holding it. The tea shakes rhythmically with my furious heart. I listen to the room, then step into it. In the dark the lines of tape on the closets look like seams, as if the house is about to burst or heal.

  I turn the desk lamp on and sit. I have to write the combinations out:

  Rape, kill, break.

  Rape, break, kill.

  Kill, rape, break.

  Kill, break, rape.

  Break, rape, kill.

  Break, kill, rape.

  They’re not the same. Not anything like. I study them, repeat them slowly, imagining each act, how it changes with the order. Meaning changes. Awfulness. Everything.

  But I can’t concentrate. I lose track of the meanings. Then it’s just the words themselves, and me alone with them. Break kill rape is the loveliest to pronounce, almost music: the name of a bright fish in a clear lagoon, or a wind that bends palm trees over a certain kind of surf. You’d speed it up if it were language. I try it out: As he cast his net he heard the breakkillrape sigh through the palms. Or, Underneath the clear water, a tiny breakkillrape darted over the coral.

  The fish, I think, not the wind.

  I taste tea residual on my tongue. The prism catches a moment of light from the lamp, and on the wall a suggestion of color passes. I move my pen on the paper, but it’s dried up and makes no mark.

  Me, I write with it. I touch the invisible word but can’t feel it either.

  Him, I write, pressing harder, feeling again for the word. I think of them together: Mehim.

  Then I think: Himme.

  And suddenly I don’t know. Have I made him me? What if I’ve made me him?

  What if? What if?

  It’s terrifying. The house resounds, the town pounds and stamps and whispers. Himme? Mehim? I write them both, pressing so hard the dried-up pen grinds in the fibers of the wood, but even then I can’t feel the words. I press even harder, and the tip of the pen bends. It feels like it melts away in my hand, into the paper, gone. And then the words, if so they are, just circle in my mind, a chant: Mehim himme mehim himme mehim himme mehim.

  Losing to Win

  THE SMELL OF ASPHALT and the stars rolling. The moon approaching, doubling. Breeding itself. A moonclone. Oh, man. And that rumbling. His ear pressed against the pavement, Eddie Little Feather feels more than hears it. Like it could shake apart his skull.

  Was a time Lowell Bresnan saw mountains where no mountains were. Where no mountains ever been. He tried to tell Lorena about it, sitting on the edge of his bed at the Gold Star Inn in Lone Tree, South Dakota, still shaking, but he knew Lorena would be standing with one elbow on the microwave and her forehead in her hand and the phone in the other, her hair falling over her face, watching Abbie through it and wondering what kind of story he was telling this time, listening beyond his words for other breathing or a muffled giggle, listening so hard she couldn’t hear what he was saying, listening right past his words to what wasn’t there. Still, he tried: how his headlights had gone into the night and plucked mountains from the eastern seaboard, mossy, treegrown mountains. Plucked them from over the horizon and set them down in the middle of the highway. Except they were moving.

  Headlights’ll do that to you, you stare into them long enough. Make you forget distance and perspective. So you can believe for a moment the whole damn continent has sucked itself together, and the Appalachians’ve just slid to the middle of South Dakota, and you’re going to climb up into them, engine grunting like a hog, toward the stars. And then, sweet Jesus Christ, it was buffalo, their humps in his headlights. It was like he’d driven the rig right into the past, or time had leaked through a crack in itself, and the next thing he’d see was Indians on horses, chasing. But Lorena wasn’t hearing any of it, he could see her shaking her head until the microwave cart moved on the vinyl he’d installed the last time he had two weeks without a haul. He finally stopped talking, and when she said, Lowell, I just—and then didn’t say any more, he looked at the dirty motel carpet and his white socks lumpy on his feet and whispered: I damn near died, Lorena. You imagine hitting buffalo at sixty-five? Even in a rig? You imagine?

  But he knows she won’t. Imagine it. Won’t. How mountains came and went. How the past appeared, no mirage or apparition. And there he was, roaring at it. Sixty-five. A hundred yards. Loaded down.

  The earth rumbling: Eddie lifts his ear away from it and gazes at the moons. Stars lie above him like marbles. As if he could reach out, take one of those moons off the horizon, and hold it between his thumb and finger like a steelie and knock the stars beyond the rim of sky. When he was a kid, he was ruler of the dust. Chief of the chalk circle. He squatted so low, taking aim, that the circle stretched into an oval, and the marbles loomed like monuments within it. He could smell the chalk. He smells it now, dusty and alkaline, through the smell of bile.

  He feels like a glove turned inside-out. That’s it. That’s just how he feels—inside-out. He always lost his left-hand gloves, and his grandmother would turn his right-hand ones inside-out. Her fingers pecked like a bird, and the gloves bunched tight inside themselves, the fingers hard, cloth knots that relented and turned soft again. He’d wear the gloves out the door, the seams all frayed and cottony. But he’d take them off before he got to school. They couldn’t afford new gloves, and it was his fault for losing the left-hand ones. He’d take them off to touch things, pick things up—and then forget. So he wore the inside-out gloves without complaint, until he was gone from his grandmother’s sight, then stuffed them into his jacket pocket so no one else would see. The tips of his fingers went numb. He had to press his pencil into the paper just to feel it in his hand. Press so hard he’d rip the paper, and the letters he was struggling to make would be swallowed up, as if by an opening mouth.

  Lowell stood on the brakes. He felt the load in the back shift, then worse—that first, faint judder that would become a jackknife. At sixty-five. Might as well strap on explosives. He remembered later, after hanging up the phone, as he stared at the cigarette burn in the motel carpet, a burn like a brown, wounded mouth, how he’d had this vision of the entire rig sliding around like a big clock hand and scraping the buffalo right off the face of the earth, and everything exploding, metal and meat and cargo. And he a part of it. Just more chunks. When they came to sort it out, they wouldn’t know him from buffalo, and Lorena would walk through that scene, arms crossed, trying to pick out what was him, and shake her head at the impossibility.

  He’d let off the brakes to prevent the jackknife. The buffalo seemed to be sliding sideways toward him on black, reflective ice, skating in a dream of speed and night, their humps like mountains receding behind each other and their horns a black glisten in the headlights. Wind and doom. Then his hands wrenched the wheel toward a slim redemption.

  The roar is a racket now, shaking Eddie’s head apart. Racketa racketa racketa. Like machine-gun fire. Like he’s a Marine. Oh, man, would that make his grandmother proud. But those double moons. Maybe he’s been abducted by aliens. He laughs. Wouldn’t that be something? The stars lurch in the sky. Asphalt and dust. He’s crouching, his nose almost touching the chalk circle. Glowing cat’s-eyes lie scattered within it. The steelie squirts from his cocked thumb and smashes into two of them. They explode away from each other, and both roll out of the circle. The steelie stops like an obedient dog. Eddie raises his eyes. The cat’s-eyes’ owner scowls. But he picks them up, holds them out. Eddie lifts his palm to receive them.

  At marbles, it didn’t matter that when he tried to read, the letters twisted like black branches in a storm and turned themselves inside-out or that the paper ripped when he wrote. It was all pressed away by the touch of fingers against his palm and the warmed weight of glass there, the bright, encased helixes. He always said Thank you. He always said Good game.

  He’d learned to crouch through life, to slip like a
shy animal, a mink or fox, to where he was told to sit or stand. He kept his head down. Watched his feet. Hid his turned-around gloves in his pocket. But he couldn’t control his grin when he was embarrassed or afraid. Do you think it’s funny to rip your paper? I’ve told you to write with your right hand. Maybe you’ll think it’s funny to stand with your nose against the chalkboard. So he rose from his desk still grinning, feeling all those eyes on him, watching his feet pass over the lines of the wooden floor, dirt packed between the slats. He pressed his nose against the chalkboard. He tried to be invisible.

  One day one of the white kids brought a bag of marbles to school. The game was an instant sensation, white kids and Indian kids crouching together under the sky. Fathers found old marbles and gave them to their sons, who brought them to school in little mesh sacks. Boys held them up, examining the nicks in the glass and the bright purplings and greenings of light. Each scratch was a code, the key to a story of conquest. The marbles made scritching sounds, like contented shore birds in flocks, when pushed against each other in the bags.

  Eddie listened. He had no marbles. No scratches to be felt with a fingernail or angled to the light. He wouldn’t ask his grandmother to spend money on marbles, and without them he couldn’t enter the game or conversation. He watched how his classmates cocked their thumbs, how the shooters careened, how the cat’s-eyes scattered. With his hand under his desk as the teacher droned, he practiced the movement, hunched down—watching his thumb flick from his finger invisibly fast. His thumb would be crooked-then-straight, and nothing in between.

  Then one afternoon, as he meandered home, he spotted an old bearing race in the Canada thistle and leafy spurge outside the DST Machine Shop. He knelt and pried it up. Dirt clung to it. Fingers of grass clutched it. It smelled of rust and old oil and green stain, like his father’s pickup before he’d gone away. Eddie reached through the strands of grass and touched one of the bearings. It wiggled. He pushed it harder, but it wouldn’t come out of the race. He looked at the door of the machine shop.