Julia stepped into a profusion of snapdragons, tiger lilies, gladiolus, trillium, red poppies, crocus, plants she hadn’t seen growing in the Southwest. Rustling trees filtered the sunlight. Cool, broad leaves slapped her thighs as each tread crunched, releasing a musky vegetable smell.
“I haven’t trimmed the fruit trees. They’re looking shaggy,” Philip said. “I’ve wanted to introduce dogwood—those starburst blossoms are a vivid growing-up memory—but I suspect the climate would be too much of a shock.” He lowered himself, knees swaying, to pull a weed. “Planting the rose bushes was hell on my hands. My gloves weren’t thick enough. Beyond punctures. Lacerations.”
He looked up at Julia. “I retreated here from our love affair. This suits me. Vera and I scarcely meet. She’s content to know I’m puttering nearby.”
Julia saw the scene as a paperweight, an exquisitely-wrought foliation of colors, encased in glass. In the midst stood Philip, feet transfixed by long pins topped with red hair. Placidly he stooped with the watering can. It was set in Julia’s mind, the vision of what he’d chosen over her.
Although lying still in bed, curled on one side, Julia felt as if she were bounding. Flinging out her limbs brought no relief. She wrenched from side to side.
She dreamed she was floating on a sea of burning oil, the ship’s prow silhouetted, sinking. Fire crawled over her skin. Thirst cracked her mouth. Flaming vapor wriggled skyward, sucking oxygen, as the hot air collapsed, closed like a fist. Inhaling, her lungs seared. Gasping, the sheets drenched, she yanked the chain to the bedside lamp. The room’s white and greens harmonized tranquilly to the point of eeriness; the scene looked stilted. Julia read.
A canopy of flame crinkled overhead, following her. Julia would sit, hand to her chest, laboring for air. After a few yards’ walk her knees buckled.
Without loving Philip, Julia thought, she had sickened. Loving him, she had sickened worse, more quickly. How could it have become so simple?
Rising from the typewriter, the newsletter complete, she lost her balance. She could not control her legs, which skidded from under her. The second fall she waited until sensation returned, rubbing her calves. Crawling, she backed downstairs to the phone.
Within minutes Tim was carrying her to the car. “Oh, no,” he said, shutting the door, but the sound, broken as the latch clicked, had no origin. It could have been spoken by the dashboard.
Tim whizzed through red lights, emergency flashers blinking, horn beeping. His face was serene with purpose. Traffic in the left-turn lane slowed them. Alongside, in the center median, a cloud of butterflies bobbed across shrubs, an entity not quite whole, not quite dispersed. They reminded Julia of a meadow she’d once hiked years before, as a teenager. Breaking from the woods, she’d happened on a field strewn with deliriously yellow flowers. The air was so clear she’d felt no barrier between herself and the sky, earth, the fluttering petals. Running, with cleansing, full-chested pants, she leaped into their midst.
HUALAPAI DREAD
I
The Hualapai village of Alav lies at my back. The rocky path is steep. As I mount the ridge crest, a bicyclist is laboring toward me, up the other side. Though exertion makes holes of her eyes and mouth, she’s beautiful, black hair tossing, skin buttery with sweat. Her bare midriff is taut over skimpy purple shorts. In the town of Hualapais, not exactly fat but rounded, dressed in modest anonymity up to the neck, she’s a cover girl, a star. Her tires hiss. Pebbles crunch. She passes, and I look over my shoulder at her thinclad rear squunching on the bicycle seat.
Grasses are flared white in the sunset. Beyond the cliff shearing off the ground to my right, a line of hills runs toward the Grand Canyon, a gash on the horizon, veiled in orange light. I’m walking to acclimate, get the lay of the land. As new district manager for Associated Investment Services, out of Flagstaff, I’ve inherited one client in Alav, my last stop on a swing through rural Arizona. Damaged in last year’s stock market crash, the goods—IRA’s, cash management funds, limited partnerships, flexible annuities—aren’t moving well.
Earlier today, when I first arrived in Alav, two horsemen rode straight down the middle of the street, broad copper faces unreadable, hooves scooping explosions of dust. To these people I must seem the human incarnation of a cash management fund, animated like a zombie: moussed forelock, suavely creased gray suit, red tie emblazoned on my chest. The thought brings up a capering chuckle in my throat, startling me. I would rather not have laughed that way.
By the time I rejoin Alav’s main road, twilight has knitted the overhanging cottonwoods together and pulled them low. The cyclist is poised beside my car, one leg braced against the ground, the other foot on the pedal.
“Dooley,” she introduces herself, and tells me she’s a metallurgy student at the University of Arizona, on leave because her mother is ill. Meanwhile she’s fighting fires, working construction—laid block on the new kindergarten wing.
“I don’t know how I’m talking to you,” Dooley says. “I look so atrocious. At the university I maintain myself, but here I don’t even bother with makeup. At least I’ve had the morale to keep biking, so I don’t swell up like a pig.” Unconsciously—I think—she skims her belly. “I’ve done two hundred miles in a day.”
“You must get hungry,” I say. We settle on Chinese food in Worthington (home of six AIS clients), forty-five miles away. I feel dwarfed by my good luck. This admirable person.
In Dooley’s triplex I wait and wait while the shower gushes, followed by an even longer silence. Mottled zigzags break up the TV screen. Dooley’s mother is blind. A calico dress envelopes not only her shrunken body but the chair, stretching over its frame. The old woman seems to be resting in the embrace of a larger skeleton. She mutters to herself, not English. I can enjoy situations like this, if I have to.
With her Ph.D., knocking down fifty-sixty grand, she’d be able to afford decent medical care for her mother, Dooley had told me. “Indian Health Service”—she’d grimaced.
An hour after she started, she is beside me in a filmy black pajama suit, lavender sash matching her lip gloss. The black hair is a teased mane, heavy-lidded eyes shadowed blue. Her stalking prance ripples the black gauze and makes her silver earrings fly.
She drapes a blanket around her mother, leaves steaming tea beside. Her hand falls into mine.
Rolling onto the highway, I pull out the Stolichnaya 750 from under the front seat. The liquid filling my throat, it’s as if an I.V. has hooked Dooley to me, and common fluids are circulating between us. I know we will be easy together.
She slides beside me and gently pushes the bottle down. “I don’t think of alcohol as a pleasure,” she says.
“You haven’t drunk with the right people.”
“I don’t drink at all.”
“Sure, no one says you have to. I can respect that. Just two more.” I knock back the first.
Dooley sinks lower in the seat, the settling of her weight spreading her thigh against mine.
Through dinner I order tropical cocktails.
“You don’t get drunk,” she says.
It’s true. Drinking is an eyepiece screwed into my head, that shows a woman standing forth as she should be, freed of all the crap that obscures our best selves. Dooley, model-gorgeous, on the cutting edge of space metallurgy, studying zero-gravity alloys, junks all to tend her sick mother. She’ll get down and grunt to build a school for kids. She throws her body on the line, fighting fires. When Dooley excuses herself to the ladies’ room, her turbulent walk concentrates the energy around her, releases it slowly, like a sky filling the restaurant. I lean back, floating in it.
Dooley’s gone so long I worry that she’s ducked out a back door. I enlist my neighbor, a ruddy, wind-whipped girl with taut braids—tough, understated, and hardworking, I can tell, the best qualities the Southwest offers, and she knows it, by the way she returns my look—to check on her.
“Just brushing her teeth,” the girl reports, with a teasing poke to
my shoulder. “Flossing now.”
“Food catches in the spacings between my molars,” Dooley explains. “Pop is a dentist.”
Flying along the thread of road in the cool dark, I do the rest of the Stoly.
“You have to understand,” Dooley says. “Everyone around here is a drunk. My father subjected my mother, my sister, and myself to abuse.”
That’s sickening. I can’t bring myself to ask how. Instead, a tangent speaks. “A drunken dentist. What balls.”
“No, no, that’s Pop,” she laughs. “He’s Mormon. He’s white.” Through the LDS-sponsored Placement Program, Dooley had grown up with a Mormon foster family for seven years. Summers she’d return to the rez. The dentist still helped with college expenses. “Dad was the drunk. He’s deceased. He was half Chinese. See? I eat Chinese and then brush my teeth.”
I put my arm around Dooley and she leans close, breathing warmly on my hand. Drunkenness, like a big pat on the back, is sprawling me forward. My fingers play with the powerful features of Dooley’s face, knobs and planes. I want to twist them off and keep them, but leave the face intact.
The motel where I’m staying is ten miles out of town. As I shut the car door, darkness billows around us. Dooley vanishes, replaced by a velvet intimacy. I pull her to me. Her tongue is fat and abandoned in my mouth. I caress her entire body, between her legs. “Go inside,” I’m mouthing.
“I am not prepared for sexual intercourse,” Dooley says.
O.K. Controlling my breath, I nod. Mormon thing?
“I can’t remember when a man touched me as freely as you just did.”
One habit I don’t have is flattering myself. I can sense right away she has no use for the men in this town—no one’s fault, incompatible backgrounds. And then there’s the mumbling old lady with the awful slack eyes. A woman in these circumstances could fall for Son of Sam if he came from somewhere else and was going back there.
Meanwhile, we’re inside. I’m pulling the light cord over the kitchenette, the cupboards that welcoming yellow of stained pine, and it’s as if we’re married, coming in off a long day’s haul on the road, but it’s vacation and every motel is our new home. Dooley and I stand under the light, kissing tenderly.
It seems I must have traveled cross-country with my family, cozying down in cheap, clean motels like this one, with tufted spreads and bars of light that rumbled across the walls with passing trucks. And I’m confused. I don’t know if I’m the child whose shoes are about to be shaken into the wastebasket or if it’s my own children I’m steadying on the bed as I loosen their snaps, roll down their socks.
But my mom cut out when I was five, and my dad ran an office machine repair year-round, so we didn’t take trips, and I’ve never married.
Dooley surprises me, stripping completely for bed. Jackknifing, she whisks off her underpants, lean, muscular body bent like a hunting bow, the only softness her shuddering breasts.
She has these nervous caresses, as if she’s straightening seat covers on her way out of the house. By now I’m on the faded side of the drunk, feeling like a cardboard cutout alone in a gray room. “So why the hell don’t we just fuck?” I say, and she buzzes on about an eleven-month marriage, a white undergrad, sanctity of the marriage bed. “Pop is very strong in the Church,” she says. She tells me, “My husband despised me because I am a nonwhite.” I’m set in cardboard and her hand just rasps.
Morning I’m parched and rank, tremors jiggling my hands and feet. Dooley rubs me down.
We don’t dress for breakfast, or all day. The drawn curtains keep a perpetual twilight. I’m aware that Dooley is offering her nakedness as a gift, her walk studied, experimentally nonchalant, her eyes flitting to the mirror. Opening the refrigerator, she poses prettily, hand on hip. Playing cards she squats on the bed, thighs spread wide.
The presence of her flesh draws my hangover like a salve. We talk, look out the window, deal gin rummy, eat, lie down. It’s a normal day. Politely we maneuver around each other. I stroke Dooley’s body appreciatively in passing, and she smiles.
At 6 P.M. I have an appointment with AIS’s sole client in Alav, the elementary school principal. Chukka-chuk reggae guitar rings through the aluminum walls of her doublewide. Answering the door, the principal could be a softball coach with her long, untended hair and sateen windbreaker, except for the Stratocaster slung across her neck. Motioning me to the couch, she steps behind the mike. Dreadlocked portraits glower from the walls, one in lion headdress, spearpoint at his shoulder, another clay-yellow with a weird fringe of blond hair.
Bass and drums kick off. The principal sings, “I hear the words of the Rasta Man say Babylon you throne gone down, gone down …”
The band is Hualapai Dread, though only the principal is Hualapai, and no one wears dreadlocks. The rhythm section is Havasupai, while the plump white woman crouched over the synthesizer teaches kindergarten. Practice over, the principal joins me on the couch.
A Vegas dealer once told me his cards are a meditation, that while shuffling and distributing them he achieves the tranquility to make life decisions, including his vasectomy and conversion to Judaism. Laying out the AIS prospectuses, I feel solid ground beneath me. AIS is a well-marked path, with a handrail, and nearly drinking away this job a year ago was the worst hurt I’ve done myself.
Drinking really heavy, I was in command of the big picture, but details at the edges were eroding. Clients could have had legitimate issues with me. October 17, the market’s Black Monday, obliterated those details, wiping my record clean. Since then, the extra time and effort I’ve devoted to clients—secretly I’ve even paid their custodial fees myself—is probably what got me promoted.
The principal’s accounts are off 25 percent since the crash. She wants to build a recording studio. “Cut our own demo, sure, but for all musicians on the rez. You should hear the Hualapai Elvis.”
Imaging the client in his or her ideal outcome directs me to the proper options. I see the principal in headphones, twirling knobs and slamming levers, torso pumping subtly to the beat. For rapid capital formation, I propose transferring the remains of her NewTech Fund into Precious Metals.
“Two-point-six percent in South African gold,” she says, thumbing through the prospectus.
“Down from five-point-one. AIS is in the process of divestiture.”
“None of that apartheid gold.”
While admiring her principles, I can’t allow her to abandon her goals. “You might consider,” I say, “whether a symbol, with negligible real impact, is worth jeopardizing what you can accomplish here. Precious Metals is the portfolio’s most aggressive performer. Forty-seven percent last year.”
“Take it easy, King Midas.” The band laughs. “Hualapai Dread doesn’t make its music on the bodies of our African brothers and sisters.”
“O.K. Good,” I say.
I leave incredulous. Her investments will fail.
Without a couple of drinks I don’t drop off at night. Dooley and I drive to a bar off the rez, where I wait in line at the package goods window. On the way back we hold hands, Dooley’s fingers slipping in and out between mine, every so often a convulsive squeeze, our palms bellying against each other. I stop and we rub our faces together in just the same way.
Side by side under the covers, in the dark, we bring each other off. Our hands are slow, careful, and we never face each other.
“Friends would do that, for relief,” Dooley says.
Drifting, I remember to ask after her mother.
“I’ve taught mother self-caring skills,” Dooley explains. Through the monotone, stilted phrasing I hear clearly, Mother, release me, somebody get me out of this. Funny. Dooley’s nudity is a mask, but the dense, crunched speech—her “deceased” father “subjecting me to abuse,” “my husband despised me because I am a nonwhite”—is transparent, exposing her completely. I’m embarrassed and touched by these glimpses, as if I’ve peeped through a keyhole to see a woman not undressing, but weeping.
<
br /> Wednesday morning we’re heating water, stirring coffee, bumping, “excuse me.” I slough about, genitals dangling irrelevantly, while Dooley tiptoes, spins, slings her hips, stretches over me to reach a light. Her nakedness chafes me like a shirt worn three days running. No matter how elaborate her excuses, the fact is she won’t take me. I won’t be able to please her.
I feel a horrible dwindling at this. My complicity in our arrangement makes us both a little repulsive to me. I’m in danger of being a freak. I can’t see what more we have to do with each other.
“I’ve got business,” I begin. “Your mother needs company.”
Tears instantly fill Dooley’s eyes. “Anyone would appear unattractive under the scrutiny you’ve given me,” she says. “If you look at anything long enough, it becomes ugly. Try your own finger.” Gripped in her fist, it almost touches my nose. “What is it?” she asks. “An intestine? A bone?”
Stunned at how deeply I’ve wounded her, I hold her tightly. I say, “You’ve got it wrong.” I propose a drive into the Canyon; pick her up at noon. Then, striding hard, I set out for the elementary school, trying to walk off the edgy boredom that’s set into me.
I do need to schedule an AIS presentation for the elementary school faculty and staff. With 65 percent unemployment in Alav, they are virtually the only salaried inhabitants available. I find the principal surveying recess on the playground, arms folded. She greets me by humming “Goldfinger,” resonantly. My Precious Metals defeat apparently has made me her pet.
Allotting me fifteen minutes during an employee picnic, after school tomorrow, the principal warns me that the gathering may be strange. The community is in mourning over the death of a great elder, a woman ninety-three years old. The tribe’s last traditional healer and storyteller, she had found no one to take her place. For the first time in centuries, no living person will carry on this knowledge.
Head outthrust, knees pumping, Dooley bikes past the cyclone fence.
All My Relations Page 6
