Sign Languages

by James Hannah

  Paddy’s blind drunkenness was unexpected. St. Pauli’s was one thing. How the hell had he managed to hide such a supply of hard liquor? He wondered if Paddy’d been drinking on the sly all along. Chris sat that day and the next morning in his room or in the front room downstairs. The two Chans staring in at the door, the strong light behind them. He wanted to rest here too. For a couple of days. Or for a week. Walliston would sputter and pace but that would pass quickly enough. The Deutschmarks flooded in whether he had his eye to the Gurley or down the throat of a beer bottle.

  But on Friday he rose early, the chill of the night on his watch face and the useless keys to the Suburban. Without thinking, he sent Chan #1 home and kept the other, who babbled in patois and ran to the truck to jerk out everything until Chris said no, no, and swore and pushed the too-anxious fellow aside.

  There were no mirages in the chill as the two walked the loop out from the tarnished cap. Backsight. Foresight. Break down the light metal tripod. Then level it out again. 4.6. 4.8. The level bubble shifting in the sand. His legs splayed away from the tripod. Chan #2 distorted in the first undulations of heat. He looked, waved, copied his own thoughts. Thoughts in numbers only. He believed that was why he had gotten up in the dark and dressed. The desert had almost sucked him clean by now. Besides the numbers and the blue room at night little remained except the expectations of scenery and images of Deutschmarks falling through blank space. He wondered again, at noon, as they lay behind a desiccated bush, where Paddy’d kept the gin until now. He shrugged and folded his paper lunch bag. The swig of red water still on his tongue.

  “So, you married?”

  He turned on his side away from Chan #2 and put his arm across his face. He shook his head. But the stocky Chan talked on, more than he ever had before though Walliston liked to rib them, make them say foolish things, and turn to Paddy and him and arch his eyebrows.

  “Here, you see this?” There was the crinkle of unrolled paper and Chan #2 held over Chris’s shoulder the poster Chris had pulled down a few days ago. The blue fingernails and shaved pussy a strange sight behind the low brown bush, its leaves almost completely withdrawn, minuscule and waxy.

  “I found it, you see. Behind Xiang’s, in rubbish.” Chan #2 laughed and he heard him sit up. The sound of fine falling sand.

  Chris turned onto his back, sat up on his elbows. “It’s a picture, that’s all it is. You can have it.”

  Chan #2 shook his grinning round face; his teeth were yellow stumps. He smelled of smoke and cheese. His face, his hands on the opened poster motionless. His deferential smile glowed.

  To the west they watched a long row of date palms. Underneath them men and camels moved. There were tents billowing in the wind. The whole looming mirage three feet off the ground.

  “You know about women I bet. Anyone can see you do. With such pictures.”

  “Sure, if you say so. But you can have that… here,” and he sat up and took the woman and folded her carefully, leaving half her face, one terribly lewd eye staring, and put it on Chan #2’s lap. He noticed Chan was missing the top of his left thumb above the knuckle. It ended in a loose tuck of skin that wiggled as he took the poster and looked down into the woman’s face.

  They worked on. The heat forcing several rests, spoiling a regular day’s routine. But he said fuck them; fuck Walliston and Paddy. They worked their way back to the brass cap. He looked, read numbers. Recorded them. 4.4. 5.2. 4.9. His eye now seeing the maimed thumb on the side of the rod. The grinning face seen in silence through the heat devils rising up to dance with and tease distances.

  They locked the cases in the Suburban. He walked up the street toward the hotel, but Chan #2 pulled at his sleeve. He turned and rubbed his aching eyes. His mind only on beer and the thick stew and sweetened, reconstituted dried fruit.

  The broad face too close to him in actuality. “I please ask question?” Chan #2 closed his eyes for a moment. “Mr. Chris… if can?” His smile faltered.

  Chris breathed in the town smells. Beyond the last mud brick house and across a tremendous distance he made out the mountains that surrounded the plain.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  “You know about women; you married.”

  “No, I told you no.”

  “I like to ask question.”

  Two small boys herded emaciated sheep around them toward the water trough at the lip of the well. The wind picked up and sent the prayer wheels clattering.

  “What is it?”

  Chan #2 grinned and pulled him across to a low stone wall. Chris sat; the little man sat on his left hip, hunkered close, his head shoulder high.

  “I do wrong, you think? What, then, I do? She say no, no, not now, it too late for that, but…” Chan stopped and looked at him, brought his head up, straightened his back. There was no trace of a grin now. He leaned back and began again, slowly, telling how his wife had been eight months pregnant with their first child and how he couldn’t help himself after he’d had too much fun and drink at some sort of card game. He had come home near dawn and the sight of her huge tight belly had driven him wild. He’d pulled her to him. It was awkward, but he hadn’t stopped.

  Chris listened and then he stopped Chan #2 with a pat on his shoulder.

  “But it the child, too, you see. Little girl already shamed she no boy. But born funny, arms cross chest,” and Chan folded his own. “We massage with oil and say prayers, but them not unfold. Not once in a year.”

  “Those things happen.” And he stood and looked down at Chan #2. It was twilight and windy and growing cool. Chris couldn’t imagine any of the women he’d known with bellies full of anything but food and drink. Inside them there was pleasure and noise. They plunged together. Besides, she’d been too old and he’d never wanted anything but the path of least resistance. Exactly what this place offered. With everything cooked off, only the residue remains. And that, in time, would vanish. A path with no resistance.

  Chan followed behind him to the hotel. They talked at the door about tomorrow and Chan smiled and nodded. But then he spoke low and quick. “She and baby go to parents, you see, Mr. Chris. What I say to her, you think? You know; such a man as you know.”

  He went inside. Paddy was at the table finishing his meal. He never said anything and barely looked up. Instead he exaggerated his actions. Poured the Boodles in high arcs into the coffee mug. The two of them ate goat stew off the Nazi insignias.

  In his blue room he heard the wind against the closed balcony doors and he hoped for a storm that would fall over everything. Sand in gin and transmissions. He felt how the howl increased the cold and how the cold demanded thoughts and movements for warmth. He arched his body under the covers, his mind’s eye in the Gurley seeing Chan’s thumb. He crossed his hands over his chest. He put them down at his side. He wanted absolutely nothing for himself. He demanded it.

  Early the next morning he sent Chan #2 home and had Chan #1 wakened. He took him first to the brass cap and then into the desert. But after ten, and at a distance of a hundred meters, the work didn’t matter. This day proved the hottest of the summer and the intense heat fractured the air between them, twisting the distant rod and maiming numbers and hands. They packed up and turned back toward the village.

  At noon he left Chan at the Suburban to square things away, but he took the Gurley to the hotel. At almost one o’clock in the morning, when the bright scimitar moon rose from behind the mountains, the level brought its razor edge down close to his eye. This was something he hadn’t done in years. And the reaction now was the same as then, and he didn’t know why this was. Come see this, he wanted to say. You should come see this.

  Half the street below was in darkness; his only companion was the same tethered, restless goat.

  HISTOIRE DE MON TEMPS

  “Voiture,” I say, listening to the whine of the pickup’s mud tires on asphalt. Know it’s on the ridge behind me, a mile away. I turn my back to the road. Imagine that my weak vision goes far
beyond the four-strand barbed-wire fence to the cows I can smell pissing. To the newest calves I hear now in this new early March grass. Up to the hills covered with some oaks but mostly pines Mothermae called “evergreens.”

  “Voiture,” I say when the sound changes. Passing over the bridge where the grate opens. I almost piss on myself, my hand cupped in my open overalls. I feel then smell a trickle. Mothermae pulling the chocolate skin back, the head a pink like here, these phlox at my feet. Flocks of sheep, I used to think. I almost turn to look at the coming truck. Voiture I picked up right here against this post. The one I watched them replace the year we spent most of the summer outside when they brought in the hay.

  “Hey, look at this. Rudy, look at all this.”

  Mothermae and I listened to them from the dry creek that crosses the open fields, the biggest under a cloud of dust from their haying. She held onto my neck, our breaths struggling in both our throats.

  “Voiture!” I try to yell, keeping my back to it as it screams past. Make my lips move. The scrap of paper over the stove, stuck to the wall with tacks or spit. English-French, French-English, the other, thicker paper says. “Voiture!” I scream as I face the empty road that goes uphill, crosses the bridge, and climbs to the straight green line of pines. “Evergreens.”

  “Hobo camp,” Rudy had said. A big blond man catching the light. His bare chest yellowed even more by pieces of hay. I could see the flecks of dirt muddied at his neck. Mothermae’s face turned away. I saw them through the broken window. They tossed it all out but left our scraps of paper on the walls. Then, later, a day and a night. The evergreen straw a nice bed up on the bank in the sapling thicket. The sky cloudless until late afternoon but no rain. They burned our gleaned mattress and chest of drawers, and the heat from the diesel cracked the mirror. I saw them in it, looking down, turning black, then its weak silvered back broke.

  “Niggers, I’ll bet,” Rudy said. And the other man nodded before they unloaded hay again, stacking it to the ceiling; the old house groaning. They didn’t seem to notice the garden, didn’t say a word about the flowers. “We ought to bring the dozer over sometime,” Rudy’s friend said, “and level it. Put up a decent hay barn.” But Rudy shrugged, the muscles shadowing on his back and that was then. That year.

  Just a few years later they changed the Bridger Creek sign. The fall after Mothermae died they came and took it down—all full of .22 holes. I heard someone that bad winter and only at night shoot and shoot. Fifty or more times. She was sick always by then with the fever, the gas swelling her stomach like the dead on the highway. She’d let it go with a long, soft noise.

  Before it had said Bridgett Creek. But the road crew didn’t seem to mind. I watched all morning. They kept me from the grate I’d just found on up the hill on the other side. Now I walk carefully down the bank and step over the lingering puddle from two days before Sunday, a brief spring shower. I stand at this newer post and slowly find a barb and gently prick my thumb with it. If I squint I can see the nearest cows. Red and white faced. I smell them again and also the flowers on this vine that’s creeping up the newer post. “Elegants,” Mothermae said they were. I said “elephants,” and she laughed and shook her head and wrote it on a piece of scrap we’d gleaned.

  Today is the second day after Sunday; two days since the priests had their hands all over me. On the fifth day I’ll go to the grate and see. Again I feel the trickle of piss before I smell it.

  “Voiture,” I shout, and a calf near my hand bucks off out of my vision. I let the wire draw a prick of blood. Two cars close together. I hear it over Bridgett, the tires striking the metal plates. The boy on the crew falling the year after the water rose almost to this very post. But actually to the sign across from my house back up the closed dirt road through the evergreens, the pines. “Loblolly,” the young priest says. But I don’t say a word back at him, just nod because he crosses the prairie from Delios and lets me out a mile away though there’re no houses there either.

  “Lives up a side road,” I heard him say in town at the mission, the front wall all glass looking out onto the street. The tables buckling under lamps and cracked leaf-green plates for sale. A white woman brings in an armload of folded brown bags. The two little girls with her all eyes and wrinkling noses, the tips turning red.

  “God bless you,” fat Father Stephen says.

  “And you, too,” she smiles to the old priest. The nun behind her silently shooing the girls away from the nearest table. The day’s light caught up in a single blue bowl, its lip unevenly sheared off. Bringing the light up from its base, it burns along the jagged rim.

  “Hey, you old fucker,” they shout from the car. I tense my back, the piss smell stronger, a cow at my bloody thumb, in focus, her eyes unmoving, sightless; she chews her cud.

  Once they never said anything. Then they said nigger, coon, blackass, words spit out windows. A can once struck me on the neck. Like the worst lick I’d ever got from Mothermae. Why, I don’t remember. I remember always minding. We’d “scour the neighborhood,” as she called it. “Oh, look at what this is,” she’d shout at me. “Oh Milton, they’ve lost this for sure. Fell out of the trunk. Child tossed it out the window.”

  Once there were two shoes, the same set. They fit her until I had to rip the toe out. Her feet beginning to fill up with gas. The hay I scattered on the floor—the hay Rudy, his friend, no one ever came back for—to ease the shock of her steps. “Nope, I’ll just stay put here. You go out.” The year I went out alone; the year she was sick but got better for a while.

  Before the creek sign business. And long before that boy on the road crew painting the railings fell off the bridge. Head turning to me as he sprawled past the mulberry bushes I sat behind. He opened his mouth and I felt my own open wide. But we didn’t know to speak or scream, and his feet hit the top of the steep bank and pitched him perfect onto the rock that’s always above-water unless it’s way out of banks. “It only has two speeds. Low and flooding,” she’d say. “Dry or wide open.”

  Later I waded out to the rock carefully. Already an old man. And looked up. Then I lay down on it and looked up. There was the railing like a thick fence and the evergreen boughs and the hairy tufts of swallows’ nests. Like warts or moles up underneath the bridge, blotching the pale smooth concrete. Sprouting from the icy shadowy concrete. Rocks are always warmer.

  “Get your mind off a that stuff,” I say. “You silly old man.” I’ll just have to get me more faith. Woke up to spring this morning. Three days after Sunday with the priests. One Sunday a month in town with them. The young one full of chat, picking me up, driving me back to the empty line of loblollies. This morning a blue jay came into the room through the smashed panes. They never came back to feed the hay. The front rooms finally collapsing under the weight. Mice and rats chattering all over, still too cold at night to leave.

  He flies up in the dark above my fogging breath. The Holy Ghost. Mothermae made us kneel around the bed. Me and two sisters and brother Willy. “Baby Jesus,” she always launched out, her voice like a knife in the dark room. I imagined the white baby in Mary’s arms turning his head to hear. His baby’s face blank and not very helpful. “Baby Jesus is many colors,” she told me after my two sisters had left and Willy had been shot to death somewhere so far off we never knew the reasons. Or if it was even the truth.

  Were we precious in his sight?

  All the years of priests—since I first went into Delios to get her a doctor but didn’t; it dawning on me standing in front of the mission that she really did want “to go to her reward,” as she called it. They were always harping about Mary. They only sometimes mentioned Jesus. The older, fat one, Stephen, more than his young helper.

  Yesterday I rose late and got only as far as the newer fence post. Today I’ll push these old bones hard and get on up to the Farm Road 3941 sign. I brought home a hubcap that says Olds-mobile on it. And a mangled tin cup I’ll straighten out with the hammer from the year the boy fell.

&
nbsp; That’ll be fine to do. The jay woke me early enough. And what did I hear yesterday, up ahead? Those were buzzards fighting over something. I’ll take the shovel out by the garden. I remember the onion sets the young priest put in my Sunday box, “the gift box,” Father Stephen called it. “We’ve heard so much about that garden of yours, Willy. Maybe this year you’ll bring us some homegrown vegetables, okay?” I nod and look at the floor at my newest tennis shoes from out of another of their boxes. Fuck you, I think. Fuck your years of boxes. You don’t even know my name. Or where I live, a mile past the loblollies toward Monterrey Prairie 8 miles, the sign says. I nod and reach out and take Father Stephen’s hand. Fuck you white priests. I nod some more and turn, thinking of the grate, that it’s also once a month, five days after this Sunday in Delios with the two priests. “Don’t hurry,” I whisper to myself as we walk to the car. Then there’s Mothermae’s voice as I sit, holding the gifts in my hands. I was waiting for it.

  “Milton,” she’d muttered in my ear that night. She hadn’t taken the time to light the kerosene lamp. And I realize how in my house now there are no light switches or plug-ins because it was built before that. I’ve always smelled wood and kerosene in the air. That is the smell of light to me. There’s a smell to sunlight across the hay that wakes me slower than a loose jay frantic along the warped ceiling.

  “Hurry, Milton, and get dressed.” Hurry up to leave that other house I can’t remember. To walk for miles in the dark to the town and the hospital to see him large, always the color of a deep mud hole. The white sheets flung around him like snow in a Christmas book I could already read back then.

  Next he died. The sawmill gave her some money and we moved soon. In with some relatives. The children outnumbering the adults dozens to one. Then somewhere else; losing, on the way, Willy and my two sisters. We walked up here one summer. We had walked for miles until she just turned off the road and lay down on the grassy ditch bank. “Milton, you find some place. I’m done in. Just done in.”