In the City of Shy Hunters (6 page)

All Dodges sound the same when you start them up. Blue smoke everywhere. True Shot shifted into first.

Adios, amigo!
Ruby said. Don't let the motherfuckers get you down!

It's the Puritan undertow, Ruby said, What we got to look out for.

The van took off, True Shot shifting into second.

Ruby was singing, True Shot was singing:

When we met I felt my life begin
was what I was singing this time, standing on East Fifth Street, somewhere between Second and Third—in the rectangle of dirt where I'd plant the cherry tree, my wallet in my hands, holding on to my wallet.

* * *

ELLEN WAS A
New Yorker and a Jew, a counselor with Outward Bound who came to Jackson Holeewood with kids who'd never been out of the city. I walked into Cowboy Bar and there was Ellen straddling a saddle at the bar. Big bush of black hair with combs and scarves and chopsticks in it. Her heart-shaped butt in designer jeans snug in the saddle.

As soon as Ellen saw my dog, she fell in love. More women fell in love with Crummy Dog than I can tell you. So it wasn't long before Ellen and I were bellied up to the bar, sitting on the saddles, Crummy Dog on the saddle in between, Ellen and I doing what she called Boilermakers and what I called In the Ditch, which was shots of Crown Royal backed by Heineken for her, Coors for me, Coors not for her politically, she said.

Somewhere in there, I took the Bull Durham from my shirt pocket and, with one hand like I can, started rolling a cigarette. Ellen asked me to roll her a cigarette too, so I rolled her a cigarette, then lit the cigarette for her. Ellen inhaled, then spit tobacco.

I suppose if I asked you to wrestle down a steer for me, you could do that too, Ellen said.

Fuckin' A, I said.

What is this shit? Ellen said. I mean, where does this western shit stop?

Ellen's mouth was moving extra for the amount of her words, and a big hank of hair with a chopstick in it was hanging down over her ear.

It all seems so movie, so stereo . . . typical, Ellen said. So fake.

Tourist Town, I said. Robert Goulet right down the road.

Oh, God, I'm in Camelot! Ellen said. Cowboy Camelot!

Jackson Holeewood, I said.

I can't tell you how funny Ellen and I were just then, so funny that man and woman went away between us, and there we were in all the world, just two people laughing.

THAT SEPTEMBER
, 1982, Ellen stayed on an extra week. We went backpacking in the Tetons. Fresh salmon on the grill, Pinot Gris in the wineglasses, her nipples through her halter top, Ellen said love on Jenny's Lake. I said no to sex.

All hat and no cowboy.

My belt buckle the tombstone for my dead dick.

At the Jackson Hole airport, Ellen and I parted friends. Then my dog got run over by a car. I wrote Ellen a letter, told her about Crummy Dog, and proposed a Christmas visit to New York City, thinking as I wrote her, Maybe I should say Chanukah visit. Thinking as I wrote down her address on the envelope—205 East Fifth Street—that I didn't know East Fifth from West Fifth, didn't know the five boroughs from the seven wonders of the world, shit from Shinola. Didn't know what was important, what wasn't.

Chanukah, for Ellen, however, was Monsieur Maurice Clavelle, wedding bells, the Arc de Triomphe, the Tour Eiffel, and Paris, France. Maurice Clavelle was a man she could fuck marry.

Back in Jackson Holeewood, I enrolled in French class and a correspondence course in fine wines called Vin et Vous.

That spring, Ellen wrote a letter back, offering her everlasting friendship, and something else.

Her Manhattan apartment—$650 a month. Ellen's uncle owned the building.

You need to come east, Ellen wrote, To the center of things. Start a new life. Get some sophistication. What are you so fucking afraid of?

IN
205
EAST
Fifth Street,
I
-A, I turned off the unrelenting fluorescence from above and closed and locked the door behind me. My strange footsteps in my damp, wall-stained, cat-spray home. I opened the kitchen window, stripped down to my T-shirt and shorts, rolled a cigarette, leaned out into the hot August Wolf Swamp night.

Outside was a courtyard. Four brick walls went up five and six stories, the brick walls at the top, where there's more weather, faced with a layer of mortar. Below the line of mortar, the bricks made a dull red grid, chinked, sagging, settled. The windows were barred, were broken, were cacti and suffocating philodendron-pressed, plastic-flowered, window-fanned, were open, closed, filthy, were clean red-and-white checkered curtains. The fire escapes rusted zigzags, cat perches, meat-frying Hibachi stands, catchalls. A patch of city light a diagonal down the side of a building.

In the kitchen, I slid my fingers through a drawer of leftover stuff. A thumbtack tacked itself to my thumb. The kitchen light was an unrelenting halo of fluorescence when I turned it on. I stood right under
the bright halo, put the thumbtack between my teeth, opened my blue Velcro wallet, found the folded newspaper clipping.

My fingers unfolded the newspaper clipping, the sound, and then the newspaper clipping was in my hand, against my open palm.

On the wall, on the tobacco-yellow kitchen wall, next to the window, I pushed Charlie 2Moons's photo onto the plaster with the thumbtack, blew the plaster powder off with my breath. My fingers smoothing smoothing the newsprint, the photo out flat.

A photograph. No bigger than the palm of my hand.

Things and the meaning of things.

Charlie 2 Moons's head is turned a bit to the side. His hair is in a ponytail, white shirt and tie, black leather jacket, gap-toothed, smiling big, standing on the stairway to an airplane, waving. An Idaho State flag in his hand, a bundle of ocelot skin under his arm.

September 17, 1978. Five years ago.

LOCAL MAN RECEIVES SCHOLARSHIP WAS THE HEADLINE IN THE
Idaho State Journal.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WRITING PROGRAM, NEW YORK CITY
.

POETRY
.

My forearms, the pain always starts in my forearms, up to my shoulders, splashes down through my heart, cattle prod to cock.

Against the tobacco-yellow wall, the photo of Charlie was gray. My index touched the liar's space in between his two front teeth, moved the line down the back of his head, touched the Idaho flag, the bundled ocelot skin. My index led my eyes off the photo, down to the window-frame, to the open window.

Out on the fire escape, my bare feet against iron rods, my bare skin felt the breeze. I rolled a cigarette, lit the cigarette. Tiny orange illumination in the dark. To the horizon was tarred roofs and TV antennae and wooden water towers. The top of the Con Ed building poked up blue and white.

My hands, white knuckles around the fire-escape railing, I leaned onto the railing. Below, through my feet, grids of iron, empty space all the way down.

My breath in. My breath out.

You could call this a prayer.

Into the big smoggy dark loud Manhattan, I yelled, Charlie! Charlie 2Moons! I'm here! In New York City! I've come to find you! Just like we promised!

There was a slight stirring of the wind. Below, between my feet, through the grids of iron, a paper cup rolled across the cement.

Then a voice out of the dark yelled, Shut the
fuck up!

A big drag on the cigarette. In the night my shorts and T-shirt, my pink skin, glowing like Catholic statues.

My next words I didn't yell. I spoke them clearly, out loud but not loud, pointing their intent to the blue and white top of Con Ed.

Please Charlie, I said, Forgive me. You got to forgive me. I didn't have a fucking clue what to do.

CHAPTER
TWO

A
ugust 8, 1961, the day I met Charlie 2Moons, was the day after we moved from Hope, Idaho, to Fort Hall, Idaho—to the reservation.

The reason we moved to the reservation, into the Residency, was because Mother lost a baby, a girl, and when she got home from the hospital, all she did was sit at the kitchen table, her hair sticking up all over, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe, staring at the red tulips on the tablecloth and drinking coffee and smoking Herbert Tareytons.

Then one day, just like that, Mother wasn't in the kitchen, wasn't in her bedroom, wasn't anywhere. None of her clothes or shoes were gone and we didn't have a car. I thought the Door of the Dead had opened up for sure.

Bobbie said I got all sweaty and feverish and she had to sit on Mother's bed with me and hold a cold washrag to my forehead.

That night, Father got home late, with his bottle of Crown Royal. Bobbie told him Mother was gone, and Father slammed his fist down on the table.

That woman's gone looking for her baby girl. She's going to break! Father said.

Father didn't go looking for Mother until morning. Then he saddled up his horse and rode out. He found mother, barefoot, in her yellow terry-cloth bathrobe out in the straw field.

After that, it was a regular thing. Mother kept running out into the field. So Father figured we needed a change, that we'd better move, but Mother said we didn't have any money, we'd never have any money to move to a respectable brick home with a fireplace and picture window, and she was right because all my father did was work on the rodeo circuit—bronc riding mostly, steer wrestling, rodeo clown.

Father made a deal to be the caretaker for the red-brick building with the fireplace and the picture windows with this one tribal council guy,
Lou Racing, who Father drank with. Father caretaking and fifty bucks a month in rent got us the brick house.

The house was brick but there were no picture windows, and the windows that were there had bars on them.

The house had been empty since the war. Nobody wanted to live there. No white people wanted to live in the Residency because it was on the reservation and too far to town and any grocery store. No Indians wanted to live there because of all the Indian kids who had gone to the school and been taught to forget their language and forget they were Indians.

The missionaries had built the red-brick house for the Sisters of the Holy Cross to live in next to the red-brick school. There was nothing left of the school, Saint Anthony's Academy; it burnt down in 1953. All that was left was a big empty graveled yard where Father turned his matching swimming-pool-blue pickup and trailer and horse trailer around.

Out back of the house was a red-brick barn with a gabled roof. At one end of the hayloft were bales of straw—most of them broke open on the floor. Yellow sunlight through the gable doors and sunlight through the cracks in the slates of the roof onto the yellow straw made it a soft place. Even just thinking about it made you want to lie down.

The rusted old swing set and teeter-totter were between the house and the barn on the cement playground. Three swings on chains hanging down, each with a 2-by-6 for a seat. Charlie and Bobbie and I used to almost go all the way over on those swings, and there was many a long afternoon when two of the three of us tried to hit balance on the teeter-totter. Charlie was the biggest, then Bobbie, even though she was oldest, and then me. Charlie and I could hit balance—our feet off the ground, me leaning way out over the edge on my end of the teeter-totter, holding on to the handle, Charlie toward the center on his end. Bobbie and I could hit balance too.

Charlie and Bobbie, though, no matter how long they slid their butts center to end, never did hit balance. Bobbie would start ordering Charlie around, lean-forward lean-back scoot-up scoot-back, and in no time at all those two would be going at it.

The good thing about the Residency was the trees: one half mile, each side of the road, one right after another—silver-leafed, silver-tongued cottonwoods.

Big chandelabra tree limbs touching chandelabra tree limbs across the road. One half mile of whispery shade, the only shade like that in
Idaho. And when the cottonwoods got to the Residency, they made a wide arch, taking in about five acres, circled around, and came back into themselves.

Flying over in an airplane, if you looked down you'd see the cottonwoods in the shape of a keyhole, the kind where the bottom's not flared.

Also there was a big cottonwood right next to the house, branching up high, cottonwood leaves poking into my window in the attic where my room was.

All told, there were one hundred and seventy-six trees. Bobbie counted them.

WE MOVED INTO
the Residency, into Mother's brick home with a fireplace, on one of those big bright windy Idaho days. Took up residency in the Residency.

The day we moved, Bobbie and I got to ride in the back of Father's old Dodge pickup all the way from Hope, lying next to each other, holding hands so I wouldn't fall off, on Mother's blue Montgomery Ward mattress and box spring, hanging our feet over the edge of the mattress so we wouldn't get the mattress dirty, the wind all around us, people in their cars on the highway looking at us.

That day, lying on Mother's mattress in the back of the pickup, the wind going by outside us blowing against our bodies, through our hair, in our ears, whipping our clothes like sheets on a line, Bobbie told me one of her secrets.

There never was a person with so many secrets as Bobbie.

Bobbie had her secrets; Charlie, his books; Charlie and Bobbie were what I had.

We were between Chubbuck and Tyhee. Bobbie turned her face to me and rolled over closer on the mattress.

The golden flecks in Bobbie's eyes, her brown rusty hair cut short like a boy's. Bobbie wanted to cut her hair so short it looked like brain surgery, but Father wouldn't allow it.

I am the happiest, Bobbie said, With the wind going around me. Wind makes things cool and dry, she said, And you always feel like someone else is there with the wind, touching you and blowing your hair and blowing in your ears.