During the second week of October, when Milton and a hired crew had set up shipping pens and begun culling the calves, a rare fall downpour, tail end of a Gulf hurricane, struck. For six hours thunder exploded and snarls of lightning webbed the sky. The deluge turned the ground to slop, sprang leaks in the roof, and washed out the floodgates at the edge of the granite mountains. Cattle stampeded through the openings; one died, entangled in the barbed wire. When the skies cleared, Oldenburg estimated that a quarter of the cash animals, some three hundred dollars apiece, had escaped. The shipping trucks were due in two days.
The next morning a new hired man brought further news: over the weekend a fight had broken out at the Sundowner. The fat end of a pool cue had caught Audrey Lopez across the throat, crushing her windpipe. Her funeral was to be at two in the afternoon.
Milton stood helplessly before Oldenburg. In the aftermath of the storm the sky was piercingly blue and a bracing wind stung his cheeks. Oldenburg’s collar fluttered.
“You have to go,” Oldenburg said. “There’s no question.”
“You’ll lose too much money,” Milton said stubbornly. “The cattle are in the mountains and I know every little canyon where they run.”
“There’s no question,” Oldenburg repeated. “The right way is always plain, though we do our best to obscure it.”
The service took place in a small, white Spanish-style church. At the cemetery the mourners stood bareheaded, the sun glinting off their hair. The cemetery was on a knoll, and in the broad afternoon light the surrounding plains, spotted by occasional cloud shadows, seemed immensely distant, like valleys at the foot of a solitary butte. Milton imagined the people at the tip of a rock spire miles in the clouds. The overcast dimmed them, and shreds of cumulus drifted past their backs and bowed heads.
Afterwards the men adjourned to the Lopez house, where Vigiliano Lopez rushed about the living room, flinging chairs aside to clear a center space. A ring of some twenty men sat on chairs or against the wall. Bosque arrived carrying three cold cases and two quarts of Crown Russe. More bottles appeared. Lopez started one Crown Russe in each direction and stalked back and forth from the kitchen, delivering beer and slapping bags of potato chips at the men’s feet.
At his turn, Milton passed the bottle along.
“Drink, you goddamn Milton Oldenburg,” Lopez said.
Milton said, “I’ll lose my job.”
“So?” Lopez shrugged distractedly. “I haven’t had a job in a year. I don’t need a job.” Lopez had been the only Pima miner at the nearby Loma Linda pit until Anaconda shut it down. He pushed his hair repeatedly off his forehead, as if trying to remember something, then turned up the radio.
Milton sat erect in the chair, hands planted on his knees. He gobbled the potato chips. No one avoided him, nor he anyone else, yet talk was impossible. Grief surged through the party like a wave. Milton felt it in the over-loud conversation, silences, the restlessness—no one able to stay in one place for long. Laughter came in fits. Over the radio, the wailing tremolos of the Mexican ballads were oppressive and nerve-wracking. The power of feeling in the room moved Milton and frightened him, but he was outside it.
Joining the others would be as simple as claiming the vodka bottle on its next round, Milton knew. But he remembered standing tall in the stirrups, as if he could see over the edge of the yellow horizon, the end of Oldenburg’s land, and he kept his hands spread on his knees. At the thought of vodka’s sickly tastelessness, bile rose in his throat. Pretending to drink, tipping the bottle and plugging it with his tongue, would be foolish and shameful. Out of friendship and respect for Lopez, he could not leave. Their wounding each other, Milton realized, had bound him more closely to Lopez.
As night fell the men became drunker and louder. Bosque went out for more liquor. When he returned, he danced with the oil-drum cookstove, blackening his hands and shirt.
“Hey, not with my wife,” Lopez said, grabbing the drum and humping it against the wall. “Need somebody to do you right, baby,” he said. The drum clanged to the floor. The men cheered. Lopez, knees bent and hands outstretched as if waiting for something to fall into them, lurched to the middle of the room. A smile was glazed over his face. He saw Milton.
“Drink with me, you son of a bitch,” he shouted.
Milton motioned for the Crown Russe, a third full. “Half for you, half for me,” he said. Marking a spot on the label with his finger, Milton drank two long swallows and held out the bottle for Lopez. Lopez drank and flipped the empty over his shoulder. Side by side, arms around each other, Milton and Lopez danced the cumbia. Lopez’s weight sagged until Milton practically carried him. The man’s trailing feet hooked an extension cord, sending a lamp and the radio crashing to the floor. Lopez collapsed.
Milton ran outside and retched. Immediately he was refreshed and lucid. The stars burned like drillpoints of light. Patting the horse into an easy walk, he sat back in the saddle, reins loose in his lap, and gave himself to the brilliant stillness. As his eyes adjusted to the night, he could distinguish the black silhouettes of mountains against the lesser dark of the sky. Faint stars emerged over the ranges, bringing the peaks closer. The mountains were calm and friendly, even the jagged line of the Ka kai.
That night Milton dreamed that a chocolate-colored flood swept through Hashan. The O’odham bobbed on the foam; from the shore others dove backward into the torrent, arms raised symmetrically by their heads. Receding, the flood left bodies swollen in the mud—Milton’s brother Lee, their mother, belly down, rising in a mound. Milton, long hair fixed in the mud, stared upward. His hands were so full of fingers they had become agaves, clusters of fleshy, spiny leaves. Peering down at him, C.C. and Allen were black against the sun, arms crooked as if for flight. Milton was glad they had escaped.
Milton woke serene and energetic, the dream forgotten. Over breakfast Oldenburg studied him intently—clear gray eyes, a slight frown—but said nothing. The penned calves were weighed and loaded onto the shipping trucks. Many remained free, and the year would be a loss.
Milton wrote C.C. of Audrey Lopez’s death. “I had a big drink to keep Lopez company,” he added, “but I threw it up. It was the first booze in more than a year. I don’t like it any more.”
Lying beside Milton the following weekend, Helene said, “Poor finger. I’ll give you another one.” She laid her pinky against the stub so a new finger seemed to grow. Her lavender nail looked like the fancy gem of a ring. She lifted, lowered the finger. “And Lopez with the purple spots on his shoulder like the eyes of a potato,” she said. She shifted and her small, hard nipple brushed Milton’s side. “It’s a wonder you two didn’t fight.”
“Shut up,” Milton said. “His wife is dead.”
“I know. It’s terrible.” She had worried for him, Helene said, knowing he would be at the funeral with Lopez. He should have brought her.
“I didn’t want you there,” Milton said. “You don’t have the right feelings.” He left before dawn and hadn’t returned to Helene when C.C. replied.
“I was shocked to hear about Audrey,” C.C. wrote. “I feel sad about it every day. Hashan is such a bad place. But it isn’t any better here. At Allen’s school there are gangs and not just Mexicans but black and white too.”
She wrote again: “I miss you. I’ve been thinking about coming back. Allen says he won’t but he’ll come with me in the end. The money has helped. Thank you.”
Milton threw up his arms and danced on the corral dirt, still moist and reddened from fluke autumn rains. Shouting, he danced on one leg and the other, dipping from side to side as if soaring, his head whirling. Oldenburg’s nagging—where will they live?—worried him little. Over dinner Oldenburg suggested, “They’ll live in your old place, and you can visit them on weekends. We’ll have to move our baking to the middle of the week.”
Milton knew he must be with the O’odham. Announcing a ride into the mountains, he saddled up and galloped toward Hashan. Because he couldn’t see th
e faces of his family, his joy felt weirdly rootless. The past year he had killed them inside. The sudden aches for Allen, the sensation of carrying C.C.’s weight in his arms, had been like the twinges of heat, cold, and pain from his missing finger. As if straining after their elusive faces, Milton rode faster. His straw hat, blown back and held by its cord, flapped at his ear. The horse’s neck was soaked with sweat.
Bosque’s fat wife said he wasn’t home. Milton made a plan for the Sundowner: after one draft for sociability, he would play the shuffleboard game. Tying up at a light pole, he hesitated in the lounge doorway. The familiarity of the raw wood beams crisscrossing the bare Sheetrock walls frightened him. But Bosque, sliding his rear off a barstool, called, “Milton Oldenburg.”
“C.C.’s hauling her little tail home,” Milton announced. “And the boy.”
“All riiight.” Bosque pumped his hand up and down. Milton’s embarrassment at his missing finger disappeared in the vastness of Bosque’s grip. Friends he hadn’t spoken to in months surrounded him. “When’s she coming? She going to live on the ranch? Oldenburg will have a whole Indian family now.” Warmed by their celebration of his good luck, Milton ordered pitchers. His glass of draft was deep gold and sweeter than he had remembered, though flat. Others treated him in return. Someone told a story of Bosque building a scrap wood raft to sail the shallow lake left by the rains. Halfway across, the raft had broken apart and sunk. “Bosque was all mud up to his eyes,” the storyteller said. “He looked like a bull rolling in cow flop.” Everyone laughed.
Fuzzy after a half dozen beers, Milton felt his heart pound, and his blood. He saw them then—C.C., wings of hair, white teeth, dimpled round cheeks. Allen’s straight bangs and small, unsmiling mouth. Their eyes were black with ripples of light, reflections on a pool. Milton was drawn into that pool, lost. Terror washed over him like a cold liquid, and he ordered a vodka.
“I’m a drunk,” he told the neighbor on his right.
“Could be. Let’s check that out, Milton,” the man said.
“I never worked.”
“No way,” the man said, shaking his head.
“I didn’t make a living for them.”
“Not even a little bitty bit,” the man agreed.
“Not even this much,” Milton said, holding his thumb and forefinger almost closed, momentarily diverted by the game. “I hurt them.”
Holding up his hands, the man yelled, “Not me.”
“I tortured them. They don’t belong to me. I don’t have a family,” Milton mumbled. Quickly he drank three double vodkas. The jukebox streamed colors, and he floated on its garbled music.
Shoving against the men’s room door, Milton splashed into the urinal, wavering against the stall. He groped for the Sundowner’s rear exit. The cold bit through his jacket. He pitched against a stack of bricks.
Waking in the dark, Milton jumped to his feet. C.C. was coming, and his job was in danger. He was foreman of a white man’s ranch. Allen and C.C. would be amazed at his spread. With a bigger bank account than three-quarters of Hashan, he could support them for a year on savings alone. The night before was an ugly blur. But his tongue was bitter, his head thudded, he had the shakes. Cursing, Milton mounted and kicked the horse into a canter. To deceive Oldenburg he must work like a crazy man and sweat out his hangover. The fits of nausea made him moan with frustration. He kicked the horse and struck his own head.
Milton arrived an hour after sunup. Shooing the horse into the corral with a smack to the rump, he stood foggily at the gate, unable to remember his chore from the previous day. A ladder leaning against the barn reminded him: patching. He lugged a roll of asphalt roofing up the ladder. Scrambling over the steep pitch didn’t frighten him, even when he slipped and tore his hands. He smeared tar, pressed the material into place, drove the nails. Every stroke was true, two per nail. Milton had laid half a new roof when Oldenburg called him.
“Come down.” Oldenburg was pointing to the corral. The gate was still ajar. Milton’s horse, head drooping, dozed against the rail, but the other three were gone.
Milton stood before him, wobbly from exertion, blood draining from his head.
“You lied,” Oldenburg said. “You abandoned your job. The week is my time. You’ve been drunk. I’m going to have to let you go, Milton.”
Milton couldn’t speak.
“You understand, don’t you?” Oldenburg said more rapidly. His eyes flicked down, back to Milton. “Do you see what happens?” His arms extended toward the empty corral.
“So I lose a day running them down.”
Smiling slightly, Oldenburg shook his head. “You miss the point. It would be wrong for me to break my word. You’d have no cause to believe me again and our agreement would be meaningless.”
“Once a year I get drunk,” Milton burst out. “We’ll put a name on it, November Something Milton’s Holiday.”
Oldenburg smiled again. “Once a month … once a week … I’m sorry. I’ll give you two weeks’ pay but you can leave any time.” He turned.
“I’ve worked hard for you!” Milton’s throat felt as if it were closing up.
Oldenburg stopped, brow furrowed. “It’s sad,” he said. “You’ve managed the Box-J better than I could. I’m going to miss our baking.” He paused. “But we have to go on, Milton, don’t you see? My family leaves me, Jenkins leaves me, you leave me. But I go on.” He walked away.
Two long steps, a knee in the back, arms around the neck, and he could break the man in half—Milton’s arms dropped. He had lost the urge for violence. Long after Oldenburg had disappeared into the open green range where the horses were, he stood by the corral. Then, arms over his head as if escaping a cloudburst, he ran into the adobe, packed his belongings in a sheet, and that afternoon rode the exhausted horse back to his old home.
To C.C., Milton wrote, “I don’t have my job any more but there’s plenty of money in the bank.” Weeks later she replied, “Milton, I know what’s going on. I can’t come home to this.” But she would continue to write him, she said. Milton saw no one. Pacing the house, he talked to the portraits over the TV—Allen’s eighth-grade class picture, a computer-drawn black-dot composition of C.C. from the O’odham Tash carnival. He disturbed nothing, not even the year-and-a-half-old pile of dishes in the sink.
For several weeks he laid fence for a Highway Maintenance heavy equipment yard. Working with a new type of fence, chain link topped with barbed wire, cheered him. The foreman was lax, married to one of Milton’s cousins, so when Milton requested the leftover spools of barbed wire, he said, “Sure. It’s paid for.”
Milton dug holes around his house and cut posts from the warped, gnarled mesquite growing in the vacant land. As he worked, the blue sky poured through chinks in the posts, reminding him pleasantly of the timeless first days repairing the line on Oldenburg’s range. When he had finished stringing the wire, Milton’s house was enclosed in a neat box—two thorned strands, glinting silver. Sunlight jumped off the metal in zigzag bolts. In Hashan, where fences were unknown and the beige ground was broken only by houses, cactus, and drab shrubs, the effect was as startling as if Milton had wrapped his home in Christmas lights.
Milton sat on the back doorstep, drinking beer. Discouraged by the fence, no one visited at first. But dogs still ran through the yard, as did children, who preferred scaling the fence to slithering under it. Their legs waggled precariously on the stiffly swaying wire; then they hopped down, dashed to the opposite side, and climbed out, awkward as spiders. Milton’s fence became a community joke, which made him popular. Instead of walking through the gap behind the house, friends would crawl between the strands or try to vault them. Or they would lean on the posts, passing a beer back and forth while they chatted.
Keeping her promise, C.C. wrote that Allen had shot up tall. Even running track he wore his Walkman, she said. But he smoked, and she had to yell at him. Last term he’d made nearly all A’s.
Milton grew extremely fat, seldom leaving the hou
se except to shop or work the odd jobs his new skills brought him. Through spring and summer he drowsed on the doorstep. In November, almost a year after he’d left Oldenburg’s, he fell asleep on the concrete slab and spent the night without jacket or blanket. The next day he was very sick, and Bosque and Lopez drove him to the hospital. The doctor said he had pneumonia.
Milton’s first day in ICU, Bosque and Lopez shot craps with him during visiting hours. But as his lungs continued to fill with fluids, his heart, invaded by fatty tissues from his years of drinking, weakened. Four days after entering the hospital, he suffered a heart attack.
In the coronary ward, restricted to ten-minute visits, Milton dreamed, feeling as if the fluids had leaked into his skull and his brain was sodden. In one dream the agaves again sprouted from his wrists, their stalks reaching into the sky. He gave the name ne ha: jun—all my relations—to his agave hands.
The next morning C.C. and Allen appeared in the doorway. Huge, billowing, formless as smoke, they approached the bed in a peculiar rolling motion. Milton was afraid. From the dreams he realized that his deepest love was drawn from a lake far beneath him, and that lake was death. But understanding, he lost his fear. He held out his arms to them.
SIMPLIFYING
Easter morning Julia was dressed for church, watering her plants, when the air left her, as if her chest, while straining to expand, had flattened. From her knees she dialed 911.
The oxygen mask was a fuzzy lump in her field of vision. White-jacketed EMT’s circled her. At Emergency her gurney flew down the corridor.
Her son Tim stood over the bed, hair awry, shirttail untucked. He squeezed her hand.
After visiting hours the busy noises ceased, replaced by the wheezing of therapeutic machinery, the bellows-like breaths of hospital maintenance systems, punctuated by rhythmic groans of a patient across the hall. Uniform gray light left objects distinct but without relation to each other. Certain her breath would stop if she slept, Julia remained vigilant.
All My Relations Page 3
