Twisted Tree

by Kent Meyers

  I should have told you, she said. She had me believing—

  It took him a moment.

  Good God, Laura, he said. It wasn’t your fault. Of all people.

  Everyone says that.

  Because it’s true.

  I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me what I did wrong. Or what I didn’t do. Maybe that’s it: I didn’t tell you. Is that it?

  He made no move to comfort or hold her, and it seemed right to her that he would stand at this small distance and watch and attempt no wisdom.

  I mean, if I failed, OK, she said. It’d make some sense. But if I didn’t? If I did everything right? Everything I could? Then what good was it? What does all that mean? If you can’t help someone even by doing everything right. So, is that what I did wrong? I didn’t tell you? Is that how it makes some sense?

  Her teeth were chattering.

  I’ve got a blanket in the pickup, he said. It smells like horses, but—

  He turned to get it, but she moved into him, pulling him into her, and he slowly brought his arms up and wrapped her in them. He stroked her hair.

  It’s OK, he said. It’s OK.

  It wasn’t enough, she said.

  He was so solid, she felt her own shivering magnified by it, vibrating against that solidity.

  I’m not sure that’s what it’s about, he said.

  What what’s about?

  Whatever we’re talking about.

  She let herself shiver. He held her. She him. The buffalo grazed.

  EPILOGUE

  Heyoka

  We all ended up keeping vigil, sitting in our lawn chairs roasting hot dogs on sticks, eating Indian tacos and drinking Budweiser and waiting for Wilbur’s wind to blow. It was so cold the lawn chairs squealed, and I said, If it’s too cold for a Kmart lawn chair, what are we doing here?

  Big-K, Gerald White Wolf said, and after a while of thinking on this, Jake Red Heart said, Huh? and Gerald said, They changed their name. It’s Big-K now, not Kmart.

  When’d they do that? Jake asked.

  Oh, some time now.

  Hadn’t noticed.

  Don’t much matter. Write a check to Kmart, they still take it.

  I took the last sip from my Bud and set the can down and was reaching for another when a gust of wind, but not Wilbur’s, came up, and that can and the others, and Tostitos and paper plates and plastic cups, went whirling out over the frozen lake and toward the Continental. Wilbur White Eagle looked at his watch—the only time in his life Wilbur ever cared about time—and then he looked at his Big Chief tablet where he’d written down all the guesses, and he drew a line with a pencil, then looked across the fire at Myrna Walking Elk. She nodded, accepting it, and gazed out at the lake like she was making sure the car was still there and Wilbur wasn’t seeing wrong.

  Mighty cold St. Patrick’s Day, I said.

  Gonna warm up, Wilbur replied.

  The sun was a big orange ball on the horizon, hazy through the ground blizzard.

  Usually does after the sun sets, I said.

  Wilbur just looked into the fire and settled deeper into his Big-K chair.

  You’ll see, he said. Warm wind gonna come up. One a them Chinooks.

  You’re thinking the Black Hills, I said. Chinooks don’t get way out here.

  Big-K, huh? Jake said. They changed the sign and everything?

  I had a bad feeling about that Continental from the start, but Leonard Sends For Him didn’t listen to me.

  Been sitting here for like six months, he said. They got to want to get rid of it, huh?

  He opened his door, and chunks of rust from his Citation fell onto the lot of Miner’s Good Deal Cars. I’d told him when he bought that Citation, Don’t buy no Minnesota car, all that salt on the roads in the winter, humidity in the summer. But Leonard thought cars were better far from home, or maybe he preferred to inherit strangers’ problems instead of someone’s he knew. When that Citation started to rust like I said it would, he just said, Oh, man, Ian, a Citation’s just a lousy car, it ain’t where it’s from—which, if I hadn’t known Leonard, I would have asked why’d he buy it in the first place then.

  I been totally researching this one, he said. Chunks of rust crunched under his feet. I come here on Sundays, you know? When the salesmen aren’t around. This one’s just been sitting here. Losing value, Ian. What you think they’d take for this? What you think?

  Leonard always brings me along when he’s close to making a deal, just so he can make it no matter what I think. Leonard is a kind of heyoka without knowing it, always doing the opposite. Or maybe I’m his heyoka. Maybe we’re heyokas to each other. Anyway, I tell Leonard what not to do, and he always follows my advice partway—he does the not part of it.

  Them salesmen got no idea I know how long this car’s been here, Ian, he said. No idea how much I know. Knowledge is power. Especially when someone else don’t know you got it.

  I hauled myself out of the Citation, stepping over my own rust puddle, and went over and touched the Continental’s hood. It wasn’t in bad shape, but as soon as I touched it I got a bad vibe. I took my hand away and rubbed it on my pants.

  I wouldn’t buy that car, I said.

  He grinned, happy. It was just what he wanted from me.

  It’s in great shape, he said. Not a scratch. Got—he pushed his face against the driver’s window, leaving the imprint of his hand and cheek in the dust there—only a hundred-fifty thou. Good tires—he kicked the front one hard like he was trying to punt it out from under the car—and it’s dark blue. My lucky color.

  I’ve noticed something. People who got the worst luck got the most lucky things, just like people who got the worst health take the most vitamins. But maybe if they didn’t take all them pills they’d up and die yesterday. Which makes me wonder how much bad luck Leonard’s lucky things were keeping at bay, considering how much still gets through. He’s got so many lucky things he’s lucky to keep track of them. Only person I know’s got a lucky color. I told him once, You could at least make it light blue, like a sunny sky. Dark blue’s storm blue.

  Rain’s a good thing, Ian, he replied. And anyways, lucky things just are. You don’t go choosing them. If you did, they wouldn’t be lucky, would they?

  I couldn’t follow that argument. All I knew was this car was some kind of trouble no matter what color it was, even if I’m not someone who normally has premonitions. But Leonard was convinced it was the steal of the century, and even more convinced by me not being convinced. If I’d said, Leonard, you won’t never find a better deal, we need to go find a salesman in church and pull him away from Communion so we can buy it right now, Leonard woulda found all sortsa things wrong with that car. Mighta even discovered it wasn’t quite the right shade of blue.

  But this way he just grinned at me. Ian, he said, whinnying my name like he does when he’s kidding me, sounding like a donkey. Eee-ahn, Eee-ahn, Eee-ahn, three times like that, so some white guys over in the other line where the newer cars were parked stared at us, and one took off his cowboy hat and looked inside like he thought maybe he’d find the donkey in there.

  Leonard didn’t notice. See, that’s how it is, he said. Every time I find something I like, you think something’s wrong with it. You weren’t my buddy, Ian, I’d think you was jealous. But you know what? I know that ain’t true. So what is true is, you’re just wrong mosta the time.

  I looked at the rust underneath his Citation. Sometimes my self-restraint amazes me. All I said was, I still wouldn’t buy this car. It don’t feel right.

  Feel right? What’s that mean?

  If I knew it’d be more’n just a feeling.

  I’d accidentally stumbled onto Leonard’s kind of reasoning, and he looked at me real serious. I was making a whole lot of sense to him, and if I’d stopped right there a lot of things might’ve stopped with me. But instead I decided to give some real reasons, make myself happy rather than keeping the objective in mind.

  There’s gotta be some
thing wrong with it, I said. A car don’t sell, they don’t keep it on the lot. They ship it somewhere else. So why’s this one been here so long, like you say? Even the car washer guy don’t wanta wash it. That’s telling you something. Only dusty car on the lot.

  We both looked around to check it out. All the hoods were gleaming, all the chrome stabbing the air like a bunch of boxers throwing punches. Almost made me duck. Then we looked back at that Continental, looked like it’d just come off a long drive on a dirt road following a stack mover. The only way you knew it was dark blue was where my hand had touched it—a dark blue, unlucky palm print. I never seen a car so much in need of a wash, and in Twisted Tree kids don’t bother to write wash me in the dust on cars till it gets so thick they got to use a stick, their fingers ain’t enough.

  We have a thing we agree on, Leonard said. This car is a dirty car. But a bad look on a good car is a good thing if you’re buying it, because it makes the car look bad.

  All I said was, It needs a wash.

  Which turned out to be truer than I knew.

  Myrna Walking Elk was the one eventually found out that car’s secret. When David joined the Marines and went to Iraq, she started watching TV news all the time. She had three cheap TVs she picked up from garage sales in Rapid and one junked one she took from the back of a pickup about to make a dump run. Myrna wasn’t a collector of old TVs and computers till David turned fifteen or sixteen. Some of his friends started doing alcohol and meth, and then Eddie Little Feather got run over on the highway. Myrna’d known Eddie since when they were both kids, and she took it kind of hard, he was such a sweet guy, she always said. And the Zimmerman girl, too. It was like Myrna figured there were too many things out there that were waiting to get people, and she needed something to keep David focused. Even the white women understood. Myrna saw that junk TV in the back of Orville Germaine’s pickup, this was when he was alive, and she went to the door and knocked and explained to Marge how, if they were going to throw that TV away anyway, maybe she could find a use for it.

  It for David? Marge asked. Everyone knew about him fixing TVs and computers when he was just a kid. Myrna nodded, and Marge called into the house, Orv, it OK if Myrna Walking Elk, she’s at the door here, takes that old TV we got going to the dump?

  No skin off my nose, Orville called back. Save me the trouble a throwing it off.

  Myrna kept David out of trouble through high school, but the last thing any of us expected was he’d join the Marines. Wasn’t until he re-upped and went into bomb squad training that it made any sense to us. Even if we never thought David was the kind of guy who walked toward things other people ran from, we all agreed if it’s got wires in it, there’s a better chance of things coming out right with David working on it than just about anyone else. That didn’t help Myrna any, though. She’d tried to protect David and then ended up feeling she encouraged him to walk toward things that explode.

  When David got sent to Iraq, Myrna took all four of them TVs and hooked them up in her kitchen. David’d installed a satellite dish—he’d got it out of the dump site, too, and was probably bootlegging signal, who knows?—and Myrna kept all four of them TVs turned to Iraq news, different stations, channel hopping with remotes whenever anything else was on. People got to visiting Myrna just to watch her watch all those TVs at once, flicking those different remotes to the four directions around her kitchen and still cooking and talking to visitors. She knew more about Iraq than the CIA, which isn’t saying much, but still. Maybe she thought like Leonard that knowledge is power and if she just knew enough she could stay ahead of anything happening to David. Leonard himself, though, said Myrna was just worried, and women plain do weird stuff when they’re worried.

  Anyways, it was Myrna’s watching all them TVs that uncovered that car’s history. By the time she figured it out, though, the car had already done some strange things. Right away after Leonard bought it, it took us right into a thunderstorm, which, just having a thunderstorm was pretty strange, we been in a drought for who knows how long. It was one of them nasty, early-summer thunderstorms we could see thirty miles away in the south when we left Rapid, black thunderheads riding way up in the sky and lightning snapping down out of them like cats’ claws. The sky east and north was bright and blue, though, and all we had to do was go east out of Rapid and we’d drive right around that storm, then we could turn south and head home. So I’m kind of enjoying watching that storm from a nice, safe distance when I kind of wake up and realize I’m watching it through the front windshield and those thunderheads have gotten so close I can’t see their tops no more.

  Uh, Leonard, I said. What are you doing?

  He looked at me, and right away I saw it, there were storm clouds in his eyes.

  Driving home, he said.

  It’s what you’re driving into I’m wondering about.

  Right then a lightning bolt slammed into the prairie in front of us. It was daytime, but the air inside the car got brighter, and no waiting for the thunder either, it was more like a bomb; I thought the windows were gonna break. But Leonard didn’t even flinch. He was in a daze.

  Rain is a good thing, Ian, he said.

  I just thought Leonard was being Leonard. But we got in the middle of that storm, rain coming down so hard we couldn’t hardly see the road the way it was—and the wipers quit.

  Guess we’ll have to wait it out, Leonard said.

  Some cars, the wipers work even when it’s raining, I said.

  Leonard pulled to the shoulder, and we sat there with the rain coming down so hard it sounded like we were inside a powwow drum, and the lightning all around, so we’re looking through this incandescent river, like blue light pouring down the windshield. I got a little stir-crazy, got the urge to open my door and go screaming out into it, and I had to shut my eyes and think of Bonnie, but Leonard just sat there like he sits anywhere, like wherever he’s at is where he’s supposed to be. After a while the sun came out. And the windshield wipers started up.

  See? Leonard said. The wipers work just fine.

  There’s a thing about windshield wipers, I said. They can’t make up for lost time.

  Leonard shrugged. Car’s clean, he said. Saved me the trouble a washing it.

  If that’d been the end of it, OK. But two weeks later Leonard decides to take a road trip to Sioux Falls. Out south of Mitchell there’d been a big hailstorm, killed hundreds of geese—blues and snows out in the fields eating and this storm comes up, but why would geese worry about rain? They just go on eating. But that storm builds up, more rain and then the wind starts blowing, and then it starts to hail. The hail gets larger, the size of golf balls, and then baseballs, some of it, coming down from twenty thousand feet and blown about horizontal by the wind, all of that comes sweeping down on those flocks of geese out there in the open, like that storm is strafing them. When it’s over so much rain’s fallen the fields are turned to brown lakes, and dead geese are floating like big dabs of Reddi-Wip.

  Snow geese are getting to be real pests, there’s so many of them, and hunting’s not enough to control them, so there was people said that hail was nature’s way of keeping the goose population down. I think it’d take a lot of hailstorms pretty strategically placed to have much effect, and I can’t see nature doing that much planning. But what I’m trying to get at here is, Leonard was going to Sioux Falls, and what does he do but detour to go look at them geese? Why would anybody do that? I mean, not even Leonard, on his own, would drive out to see a mess like that.

  But he did. My phone rings, and it’s Leonard, and he says first thing: Oh, man, Ian, you don’t know what stink is.

  Leonard, I say. Where are you?

  Leonard’s no troublemaker, but a comment like that right off the bat, and I’m thinking there’s been some misunderstanding and he’s sitting in some county jail where the plumbing doesn’t work too good.

  There’s a pause, like he’s looking for a name or sign, and then he says: Pat’s Wrecking.

&nbs
p; Pat’s Wrecking where? I ask.

  Eventually I find out he’s twenty miles south of Mitchell, and he’s wondering if maybe I could make it there that afternoon with fifty bucks to pay for the tow so he can get his Continental away from Pat.

  I smelled them geese a long time before I saw them. It was like a Great Wall of China of stink. My eyes were watering so bad when I finally got to where the hail’d actually gone through, I couldn’t hardly see to drive. All over in the fields there was mud and standing water, and clumps of feathers sticking up, feathers piled on feathers in some places where them geese tried to fly and were knocked down on top of each other. It was like the whole world’d died and was rotting, and I was driving through it.

  The first thing I saw when I pulled up to Pat’s Wrecking was that Continental, just dripping mud, so much mud I couldn’t see any of that lucky color Leonard’d bought it for, stalagmites of mud growing up underneath it, and mud globbed on the hood and roof like the earth had decided to manufacture itself a car but couldn’t get the shape quite right and just piled itself up close enough.

  Holy cow, Leonard, I said. What happened?

  I don’t know, Ian.

  What you mean, you don’t know? You fall asleep?

  It was very weird. I was driving along, you know? And the stink was so bad, and maybe I shut my eyes or something. Anyways, there I was, going off the road into one a them big puddles in the ditch. All of the sudden there wasn’t no road in the windshield, nothing but water.

  He was staring at his car like you might stare at a dog that was a good dog but had done something you’d rather it hadn’t a done, like eat a loaf of bread you’d left in a grocery bag on the floor when the phone rang, you can’t blame the dog for that, but you wish you could, and you do, but really you can’t, so it’s a real dilemma—that’s how Leonard was looking at his car.

  Whyn’t you just take the freeway? I asked.