One Day the Wind Changed (15 page)

Now I move across dry earth, in the early morning or at dusk. My thoughts spin into fragments.

Mama wouldn't put up with me. Not like this. She was a teacher. Words were her job. “Listen, Richard, a good metaphor can dissolve any knot,” she'd tell me. Honest to God. That's how she talked. She'd say, “With words, Richard, you can make sense of the most perplexing things.”

With scattered words now I try to call her back … as well as my brother and me. A sweltering afternoon. Bo and I sitting in the backseat of my parents' car, riding through the plains of Oklahoma. Where were we going? To a job interview, probably, another meeting for Papa with an oil man or a rancher. Papa driving. Silent as ever, except to demand from Mama the Jameson's from his flask in the glove compartment, or to curse the “wetbacks” for destroying the nation, crossing the Rio Grande to take jobs from hardworking Americans. “I mean, look around you, June. They've turned this country into a tidy little hell,” he'd say.

Bo and I dripped sweat. The palms of our hands stuck to the plastic seat covering. These trips, with our father fuming or quiet, always frightened us a little.

Mama wrapped ice chips from a thermos in our daddy's handkerchief, leaned over the back of the front seat, and held the handkerchief against each of our foreheads. First Bo, then me. I stuck out my tongue to catch the leaking icemelt. The drops watered the words inside me, bringing them to life: a good metaphor. Mama would like it, I thought (after all, it was a variation of things she often said). I'd open my mouth and speak.

I've always thought Bo married her, years later. He wanted Mama in a woman. So did I, but I figured no woman would have me. Too much Papa in my bones.

At Bo's wedding reception, six years ago in Oklahoma City, my brother stared at his bright new bride across the room and assured me, as we lifted our glasses to toast the years ahead, “This, little brother, is a joy beyond words.”

Say nothing? Or say it all?

To whom can my words matter now?

Well, here they are, the whole damn story: one miscarriage, our mother's death from leukemia, a couple of lost jobs, and Bo's joy had blown away. It seemed to me, watching him, that getting older, walking out of the house and into the world, was like climbing a staircase in the dark, in the open air-which step would be your last?

He was four years my senior. Whatever claimed him now would come my way soon enough. I kept my finger to the wind.

Nothing we said could ease our pain after Mama left us-which didn't keep Papa from talking. “Pay and pay,” he slurred between liquored bouts of silence. “Believe me, all your lousy lives.

“You old boot. What the hell are you chattering about?” I challenged him one night on the front lawn, while the sky threatened rain and Mama's garden, neglected since her death, hung in brittle ribbons all around us. Twigs. Yellow leaves. “Pay for what?”

He laughed at me and went inside to pour another whiskey.

“What the hell are you laughing at?” I shouted at the slamming screen door.

Soon after that, Bo and his wife, Jenny, fled the city-to escape their “misfortunes,” Jenny said (Bo liked it that she spoke so much like Mama). I had no one to talk to until I went to work at the bank.

Then one day the wind changed. Timothy McVeigh slipped into the city in his dirty yellow Ryder truck.

Out here in the evenings, miles from town, you can't hear anyone. But you can smell people. It's the wind. It brings them close. Even though you're alone, you think someone might start talking to you. No one ever does. So you try to say something, just to keep yourself company, but your parched throat sticks to itself and the words won't come. You stand planted, longing for a thunderstorm, just a brief one, to cool things down, to loosen all the talk trapped inside you.

“You like that, huh?” My father weaving above me, his puny fists in my face. “Talk to me, boy. You want me to hit you again?”

Ever since I could remember, he'd threatened to smack Bo and me, to make us pay for our mistakes, our immaturity, our laziness. “Lazy boys like you, wasting all your time … you'll be the ruination of this nation,” he'd say. “It's ‘cause of
you
the goddamn wetbacks think they can sneak in here and soak up all our jobs.” He'd never actually raised a hand to me until the day we buried Mama. I was twenty-two. He was frail. The funeral had ended early in the afternoon. Afterward, neighbors brought food to the house. Mostly, that day, Papa behaved. He didn't really know these people, and they didn't like him-they were Mama's friends. They looked after him on
her
account.

They offered condolences. He'd bristle: “Hell, she was
happy
! Would have been happier if it wasn't for the damn illegals, keeping men like me off the payrolls. Up to me, I'da gotten her
out
of that school, away from teaching.”

Now the house was empty. Just Bo and me and Dad. On the dining room table, platters of half-eaten chicken, casseroles, salads. Papa was drunk. He was hurting, he was angry, and someone had to pay, so he hauled off and hit me. “You think she wasn't happy? Is that what you think?” he said. “I see it! Right there on your face!” Physically, I didn't feel a thing, but I fell back into Mama's old rocker as Papa loomed over me. I couldn't defend myself or attack him in turn: he'd be dead too, within a month or so. That was pretty clear. Without Mama to steady him, booze and lack of character were going to finish him. So I sat in the chair, trying not to laugh at him, trying not to cry. “You like that, huh?” he said. “Want some more?”

Bo moved through the dining room with a white plastic spoon, scooping leftover potato salad into Mama's Tupperware containers.

Then, a few months after Papa died, along comes another son of a bitch. Timothy fucking McVeigh. Someone owes me the good life. Someone's got to pay.

“Just say it,” Mama said.

I stammered, “I don't … I'm …”

“Richard, just say it!” she urged me. Pushing, always gently. “Whatever's on your mind. Don't fret about mistakes.”

She taught high school English: what choice did I have but to honor words? Or at least to pay attention. “Isn't it amazing?” she'd ask whenever she wanted to boost my confidence or get me to assert myself. In those moments, usually on the porch swing, sitting in the shade of the house overlooking the front lawn and her garden, I knew she was about to launch into one of her school lectures. Her airy talk, far removed-as far as I could see-from things as they were. But her speech was always pretty to hear. “Your body's at the mercy of time,” she said. “Yet your body carries language
within
it: a timeless seed of meaning. Richard! Language,” Mama would say, tapping the top of my head. “It's the outward manifestation of your innermost being.”

(All around us-east, west-the plains of Oklahoma. Filthy. Obscure. But the lawn and Mama's garden were straight out of the movies: perfect, unchanging, small-town America. Nothing can hurt me here, I thought.)

I'd stare at her, flummoxed, more wordless than ever. Wind. Open space. A vast, flat mistake. Somewhere out there, my old man stumbled around, wasting his days. Often, he'd stay gone a week or more. Then he'd come home without an explanation.

“Richard,” Mama said. “Language is how the soul gets known.”

When he
did
talk … why did he talk to us at all? “Punish” was Daddy's favorite word. “Pay and pay,” he'd say.

Oh yes.

Then: “Why don't you?” Bo, last month on the phone. “Get your ass down here and house-sit for Jenny and me while we're gone.”

“I don't know. I'm …

“Something to do,” Bo said. “Time to think. You could use it, little brother. We've fixed the place up since you saw it last. It'll be quiet. Peaceful.”

He'd worried about me ever since Murrah, he said. He knew what it was like to need a new start.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me a day or two.”

Six years, he's lived in Marfa, in far West Texas. He works for a tax firm. In the last half decade he's risen in the hierarchy. Senior VP. This summer, his initiative has earned Jenny and him a ten-day, all-expenses-paid vacation in Europe. Who ever thought he'd get a chance to ride the clouds?

After his phone call, I closed up my apartment in Dallas, where I'd moved to tackle temp work in a mortgage firm, and drove on down to the desert. I helped Bo pack, then he and Jenny fastened little Canadian flag pins to their shirts so the bad guys won't take them for Uncle Sam's children. They waved good-bye. My brother is always waving good-bye.

This morning I get up late, shower, put on a T-shirt and my jeans. I switch on the bedside radio. My sister-in-law (“I swear, Bo, look at you-I'll be damned if you didn't marry Mama!”) is also a high school English teacher. The bedroom is full of books. I pull a crack-spined Dante off the shelf. Some of the pages flake. A note in the back of the book, in Jenny's delicate hand, says that Dante was a fierce old bird, fighting to get into paradise.

On one shelf, near the bathroom, there's a framed snapshot of Bo and me as kids, in a Western-themed amusement park. We're dressed in dark shorts, black-and-white Oxfords. Laughing like crazy. Typical 1950s geeks. All that's missing are the Davy Crockett coonskin caps. Behind us, a gunslinger (a teenager in a too-big costume) mugs at the camera next to a very pale Indian. The Indian, grinning, grips a rubber tomahawk. Taped to the back of the picture frame, a piece of paper carries the legend “June 14, 1957.” This is crossed out and replaced with “Jan. ‘58??”

Mama's handwriting. She must have taken the picture.

Then her body grew frail.

Then she left us for the wind. My father, the taciturn one, the aimless one, the one without friends, followed her two months later, as though her energy, her interests-her words-were the only things that had tied him to the planet.

For the third time this morning, a radio newswoman repeats that Timothy McVeigh died last week with his eyes open. “Witnesses on-site said he looked stoic, calm, resolute,” the newscaster says. “Many of the bombing survivors and victims watching the closed-circuit feed in Oklahoma City said he looked defiant. Hate-filled. Evil.”

Already this morning, the sun is out of control. Out here, on a day like today, the lightest trace of moisture sprinkles hope along your arms, on the back of your neck: like nothing, not even the passage of time, will matter if the rain comes.

Before I reach town, I smell it: the energy, the
waste
from living bodies.

Anymore, I don't know what to say to anyone.

As I enter the outskirts, a U.S. Border Patrol truck—massive, olive-green—passes through Marfa. The street is quiet, but the truck stops abruptly and two men in bulky camo clothes, wearing steel helmets and wielding big leather sticks, leap out and tear down an alley by a Savings and Loan that appears to have been closed for years. The men shout at someone I don't see.

I walk down the street, find some shade, and sit against a building. I've brought Dante with me: a mild weight to keep me anchored. A pretty young woman walks by and I follow her with my eyes. Even in the shade the light is too bright for reading. The book's pages blaze like desert stones. I get up, dust off my pants, and step into Carmen's Cafe, across the street. This is how I waste my days.

I'm as silent now as my father used to be.

The place is cool and dark inside-metal fan blades whirr beneath the tin-plated ceiling. A woman in a white, diaphanous scarf smiles at me from a wall calendar. The calendar is open to October 1994. Ninety-four: the year Mama died. Above the calendar, a movie poster:
Giant
, featuring Liz Taylor and James Dean. Jerry Jeff Walker growls from the speakers of a squatty jukebox by the ladies' room. Three thin men share a booth whose plastic seats have ripped. Otherwise, the cafe is empty.

I order lemonade, lay Dante aside. The spine cracks further and the pages scatter. A paper placemat on the table says Marfa was named for a minor character in
The Brothers Karamazov
, which a visitor to this part of Texas was reading at the time. The landscape reminded her of Russia, in another century: all the people she had lost and left behind. The jukebox falls silent. The men talk loudly. Gradually, I become aware of their conversation.

Two of them are trying to convince the third that Texas is an independent nation, that a legal technicality in an 1845 annexation document means that Texas never really joined the Union. “We're U.S. prisoners,” one fellow says, “forced to pay taxes against our wills.”

The thing to do, this fellow says, is to form an armed militia in the hills around Marfa. The thing to do is to attack government installations-tax men and the like-until the governor resigns and Texas secedes from the country.

It occurs to me, they're threatening people like my brother.

As the man speaks, he gestures stiffly, waving a sweat-darkened straw cowboy hat.

Defiant. Hate-filled. I recognize these men. Men without friends.

I get up to order another lemonade, but the waitress has vanished into a back room somewhere. I wait by the kitchen door, tapping the bottom of my glass on the glass jukebox top. Jerry Jeff, Waylon, Willie-and two surprising selections, “Satisfaction” and “Eleanor Rigby.” I pull some change from my pocket, punch up the Beatles. The men turn to me.

Rock music. Poetry. Hair touching the tops of my ears.
Definitely
not a citizen of the Republic of Texas.

I take deliberate, slow strides past their table. “Where you from?” says one of the men. He touches my sleeve.

“Don't,” I say.

“What's that?” he says.

“Don't fucking touch me.”

He plucks a toothpick from his mouth.

“Your man McVeigh,” I say. Wrong step? Falling, falling; air beneath my feet? Well, but I've been waiting for this moment, haven't I? “He was a pussy.”