Read All My Relations Online

Authors: Christopher McIlroy

Tags: #Fiction, #Fantasy, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Short Stories

All My Relations (10 page)

BOOK: All My Relations
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On our reconciliation date I told the girl what I'd done. She left the bar immediately. The loss was too vast to comprehend. It felt like I'd be swallowed up if I tried to take a step. I switched from vodka collins, our drink, to gimlets.

A woman who always took me would be just getting off the swing shift at the hospital lab. I bulled across the space between me and the lounge door and made the car. The woman was petite, neatly built, whimsical, but self-deprecatory. Her job was scrutinizing slides of infected tissue. The light of her one-room apartment was on. She'd be lying with her feet up in front of the TV. She would be glad to see me.

I sat on the fender. The November night was cold. Knocking on the woman's door seemed an act of utter disrespect. I tried to talk myself out of this attitude. Eventually I lay in the alley and slept until dawn. Waking, I was so grateful to myself that I cried.

Drinking had the coherence of a narrative, each drunk its beginning, middle, and end. Everything now is wisps, traces. I feel drained, as if my oversugared blood has been drawn and is hanging close by but out of reach, a red mist, rain that evaporates before touching ground.

On the computer I composed a basic letter of apology, which I've adapted for the various people I've harmed. This project alone took months. Some responded, which is gratifying. I enclosed a note with Dooley's copy. I sign the letters “love,” but for
Dooley I intended more. “All my love” and “much love” seemed inflated and inadequate. So I just left my name. She hasn't replied.

The principal has assembled the potential AIS investors among faculty, aides, and staff at a Hualapai Dread rehearsal. This translates into an audience of four, myself the fifth.

“As you know,” the principal says, “Hualapai Dread makes its off-rez debut this Thursday, at the Elks Club, Worthington, Arizona.” The teachers whoop. “Be there and accrue district increment credit. Naah,” she laughs. “We're going to do an original now.”

The synthesizer lays down a riff. Flicking the guitar strings, the principal chants,

Come Mandela
They go a fire
South Africa.

After a forty-five-minute set the audience cheers and stomps. The principal announces, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, we have a very special treat for you, a fine entertainment, a financial wizard telling you how to become rich like him.”

The atmosphere not particularly conducive to comprehensive financial planning, my presentation arouses only mild interest. Heads pore over the glossy pages of tables and graphs while I circulate, answering and posing questions. The overall AIS rate of return has stabilized. It won't hurt anybody.

Vernon, the principal's hydrologist husband, is slightly taller than my five-eleven, with an iron gray crew cut and seamed forehead.

“King Midas Mufflers,” he says straight-faced. We work out a few cautious investments as he talks up his wife, who has devised an entire bilingual curriculum through sixth grade. Fifteen years ago, he says, Hualapai had no written language. Now
80 percent of Alav Elementary's students graduate high school, 30 percent attending college.

“Don't tell me,” the principal says, joining us. “Hualapai Dread is Fortune 500 now.”

“Congratulations,” I say. “You're almost breaking even, back to pre-1987. At this pace you'll have your studio in twenty-five years, max.”

“Gives me something to live for.” With Precious Metals clinging to .5 percent South African, she declines moving her funds.

“Dooley around?” I ask. “I went by her place today.”

“Gone all week,” the white keyboardist-kindergarten teacher yells over. “Her cousin is in a volleyball tournament at Tuba City.”

“That is, if they don't lose,” Vernon laughs. “She might be home tomorrow.”

“Vernon, why do you want to make it easy for him?” the keyboardist says. “Sure, let him shack up with his Indian dolly again and then take off without a word until his next godlike visitation. Indian people are patient. Indian people will sit up on their hind legs for his scraps of affection. That woman wandered around like a ghost for weeks after he left.”

Quiet.

“I treated her,” I begin, shaking my head, “… inexcusably … there's no word.” I'm glad to be saying this publicly.

“She makes everyone feel that way,” the principal says. “When I pass her on the street, a little voice inside starts yelling ‘apologize,' and I don't know for what.”

Wanting to confess everything, I check myself in time, considering Dooley's privacy. Apparently she's told no one. Once again—the market crash, two years ago—I, that self I was, is jerked off the hook. I'm ashamed at my relief, helpless with it.

Aside, the principal says, “Is it true Dooley has 365 separate outfits?”

“I haven't gone through her wardrobe.”

“You know she doesn't pay a dime on that place of her mother's.”

But her jobs, the construction, firefighting.

“One week each, over a year ago,” the principal says.

And yet she's brilliant, I say, preparing to enter an elite profession in, what, her mid-twenties?

“She'll love you for that. She's thirty-five.” Still an undergrad, with brief stints at Eastern Montana, the University of New Mexico, and Arizona State before the University of Arizona.

My obligation to Dooley is simple: face to face, I ensure that she give up, to me, any blame she might feel for what happened. I do all I can to heal her, whatever she asks, and say good-bye. But leaving the doublewide, I find myself wanting to touch Dooley. It's the first desire of any kind in months. I think of my hand flat on her back, or our fingers linked, and my heart falls open.

She is at home Thursday, after I've killed two days. “So you're here,” she says. I'd written ahead. Her hair shoots over a fluorescent headband, her bare shoulders look hard and smooth.

Arms tight at my sides, I invite her to the Hualapai Dread concert.

Her mouth suddenly twists. “I need a minute with God, to compose myself,” she says. “Please excuse me.”

The sun streams bright around my shadow in the open doorway. It's more like ten minutes.

“If I don't stare down fear,” Dooley says, “it will never go away. God will sustain me.”

When I pick her up, her mouth is orange. A stiff ponytail lies across one shoulder. The acid-washed mini is relatively demure. Opposite her mother, the World Series warm-up replays last year's clinching Dodger victory. Snowed under by the usual video interference, the fielders perform thickly. The camera zooms in for a close-up of Hershiser, baby face smiling seraphically, murderous right arm hidden behind his back. The Dodgers insignia crawls across his chest like a rebellious organ,
or a trivial, visible portion of soul. Dread, the memory of a year ago, flexes in the pit of my stomach. I wait for it to subside.

I'm as jittery as Dooley. Desire blows at me and I duck away. Then it comes back. I want to squeeze Dooley to my chest and just hold her. I actually become dizzy. It's maddening. And still we manage small talk on the drive over. She likes reggae, she says. At the university she goes out dancing a lot, and she's friends with the trumpet player in a blues band. Her mother is “steady,” she says.

On the outskirts of Worthington Dooley begins a morbid roll call at the passing bars. “That's Ronnie Sinyalla's green pickup. Henry Wescogame, Alvin Burt …” The cubicles leak the occasional neon beer emblem. Vehicles are stark under streetlights, or dim shapes like holes in the landscape. Dooley reels off more names. The bars encircle the town, reminding me simultaneously of a bivouacked army and of refugee camps. “Drunks,” Dooley barks, and her fists strike her knees.

The Elks Club is concrete block, windowless. Seated on folding chairs, the crowd of sixty or seventy appears mostly Hualapai, with a few whites, Mexicans, and one black man in a wool cap red, green, and yellow. Though I recognize faces, no one acknowledges us. Dooley and I take the back row. Security guards, flashlights and sticks dangling by their holsters, line one wall.

Somebody has shelled out for new, big speakers. The principal steps up to the mike. “Welcome to the first stop on Hualapai Dread's world tour,” she says. “We're going to do Bob Marley's ‘Exodus.' Remember, our permit doesn't allow dancing.” She wrinkles her face.

“Dance on your butts,” the bass player calls.

The insistent power beat isn't typical of reggae. Dooley juts her shoulders, shimmies. The crowd rocks slowly, introspectively, heads down. Dooley's wrist bangles jingle. Her enjoyment makes me achingly fond of her, the more so because I've seen it
so rarely. Even the fraud of her life becomes dear, an invention she's made, just as an artisan might fashion a vase, pinching the handles like
this
and elongating the neck like
this
.

But I'm straitjacketed. I can't put my arm around her, nudge my shoulder into hers. If our elbows touched, she'd jump.

By the third number, several young men are on the floor. The band disregards them. The principal sings the Mandela song. When the snaking bodies have filled the space between seats and the band, security moves in, surrounding the microphone.

“The authorities remind us that dancing is prohibited,” says the principal. The dancers ignore her. A burly security guard snatches the mike. “Return to your seats immediately or this concert will be stopped.” More rise and take the floor.

Abruptly the hall is blacked out, the music silenced except for the bashing drumbeat. Almost instantly the principal's voice penetrates: “Truly there is darkness in Babylon.” But our laughter doesn't restore the power. Footsteps reverberate, flashlights pinpoint an individual face, then vacancy. Chairs crash and the side doors are thrust open. Streetlights reveal a knot of twenty or so in the aisle, swaying, strutting, arms pumping to the drum. Their intensity—eyes closed, mouths grimacing, heads nodding as if to push aside the air—frightens me as much as the security guards converging on them. The cymbals go over with a clang. Thuds, a long, rippling tinkle. Screaming. Grabbing each other by the arm, Dooley and I bolt outside.

The car's passenger window is smashed, so Dooley dives in my side. We fishtail down the alley as a train of police cruisers hops the curb, flashing lights sweeping the parking lot. Though I rig a seat cover over the hole, cold air whistles in. Dooley clasps her arms around her chest, huddling against the heater vent. She accepts my jacket.

“They couldn't arrest her, could they? How do they work around here?” I say.

“You saw how it works.”

“Please come back with me. I never dreamed I'd say this. I never dared think I could say this.”

“To your motel?”

I think that's what I meant, but the wrongness is obvious when the words come out of my mouth, and scrambling, improvising, with confused happiness I hear myself saying, “No, to Flagstaff. I'm not the same person, I swear. Who did what I did. That person is dead.”

“God bless you,” she says. “I'm very happy for you. But I am the same person.”

Downshifting at Alav, my hand repeatedly bumps Dooley's bare thigh, an accident neither of us bothers to acknowledge. I don't linger; she doesn't move.

“How can I maintain an acquaintanceship with such a discourteous person?” Dooley says. “Hunting me down with your plate, then leaving it on my doorstep like a gob of spit.”

It's a moment before I realize what she's talking about. “I didn't mean anything. I just didn't want to drive off like I owned it.”

“You did own it. I gave it to you. A gift is not a decision. It's not a question. Someone gives you something.” Now she's crying. In the darkness her eyebrows have vanished. Her eyes and teeth are pale. The grief-mask cuts deep furrows in her brow. At the triplex I touch her hair. “No, I'm done now,” she says, and she's out.

As I lie in bed, near sleep, what Dooley told me unrolls like the murals you see in Arizona's old territorial banks. An armored man extends a gleaming, empty plate toward a dark woman, nearly nude, on her wheeled contrivance. His look is downcast. She scowls, tears running from her eyes. The bicycle wheels rotate over stony ground at the edge of a glorious abyss, voices echoing down a maze of painted corridors, emptying into the river.

You believe what you say, that you're not the same person. You're starting clean, you've cut free from the drag of the past. Everything is open to you. And then it turns out you're in history all along, yours and everybody else's.

I'd like to think a time will come when this story between Dooley and me seems so remote that I'll look back in disbelief. But I expect I'll always see the sorrowful mask of her face as I do now, floating just out of reach.

T
HE
M
ARCH OF THE
T
OYS

Leah and I met at a refrigerator, a party thudding through the walls. She was flushed and perspiring. I wore a beige dress that screamed, if beige can scream, Don't look at me! I'm not really here!

I'd recently broken up with a man and was living ineptly, at cross-purposes. Why else attend a dance party, single, with no interest in a partner? I stand, I watch, I go home.

There was only one beer in the fridge.

“Go ahead,” said Leah—though I didn't yet know her name. “I'll stick with tequila.”

It shocked me, minutes later, to see her laughing out of control, teeth bared, eyes squinted shut. Ha ha ha ha ha, she laughed, a spooky bird sound. For months after, I disregarded the moment, as if I'd been mistaken. Leah and this person couldn't be the same.

Her boyfriend was arranging stick pretzels in another woman's cleavage. Then they left together, he and the pretzel woman. I looked out the window. A white pickup barged off.

I offered Leah a ride.

“I can't go home,” she said. “What if he never shows up?”

BOOK: All My Relations
9.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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